Frequent flyer points and a bit of health care
How wonderful that Premier David Eby and Health Minister Adrian Dix are solving the B.C. health crisis by using our tax dollars to send residents out of the country to get their health care.
This is a much better use of our tax dollars than bringing health care to our local communities. You think?
Trips to other countries are like holidays and good for our mental health. And yes, mental health is another B.C. system which is in crisis.
May I be your first volunteer? I now have a family doctor and two B.C. medical specialists to assist me in taking care of my aging body.
Please send me to Paris when I need to visit a family doctor. I have always felt an improvement in my mental health while there.
Please send me to French Polynesia to see one medical specialist. While there, time on the beach will improve my health.
Lastly, a short trip to Mexico City would be fun. I love Mexican food. Oh, yes, I will see another medical specialist while there.
I truly will vote NDP, the party for good health and free travel.
Curt Firestone
Salt Spring Island
Get involved with the Saanich community plan
Saanich is updating its Official Community Plan. The updated OCP will set priorities for housing, transportation, climate action, economic development and livability. It will guide planning and development over the next decade and beyond.
The current OCP, adopted in 2008, set in motion forward-looking and innovative initiatives and established policies that are prevalent today. Since it was adopted, Saanich has established robust, district-wide policies that guide our actions on topics ranging from active transportation, parks and recreation, and housing.
It is time to update the document with a new vision that will guide our community for the next 15 years. The draft update builds upon the successes of the current OCP with a vision of a more affordable, inclusive, livable and sustainable community.
This update enhances walkability and access to parks, integrating housing and transportation along corridors, providing more direction for neighbourhood infill, incorporating new strategic priorities, and strengthening plan evaluation and monitoring.
I remember watching Council adopt the OCP in 2008 and feeling really excited about the future described in the OCP vision. I want you to feel that same excitement, and you can, by engaging with us in this process.
Saanich residents can play a role in identifying what the future looks like.
Sharing your feedback – through a webinar, at an open house, or during a workshop – will ensure more diverse perspectives are taken into consideration.
The draft plan is at saanich.ca/ocp, and there will be several public engagement opportunities.
Saanich is at a critical crossroads. This is your chance to be part of moving Saanich forward for the next 15 years.
Dean Murdock
Mayor, Saanich
Saanich, please plan for this century
I finished reading the Saanich draft Official Community Plan with a deep sense of frustration at the lost opportunity.
The overriding basis for the plan is the discredited idea that affordable housing is produced by intense development. Experience from cities around the world shows that this idea is incorrect.
Close at hand we have the example of Vancouver, where housing cost has risen continuously during decades of intense building activity. The same will happen here.
The way to affordable housing is through directed subsidies, not through over-development. Increased supply only reduces cost if the demand is limited, which is clearly not the case in the Capitsal Regional District.
Affordable housing and development are two separate issues and should be considered as such in any planning, rather than using the chimera of affordable housing as the basis for a future plan.
The draft proposes apartment complexes lining the major transit routes, a suggestion which could only be made by people who have never tried to live in one, two metres from the noise and grime of heavy traffic on a 24/7 basis.
Major transit corridors should be insulated by 20 metres or more of dense green space, so that any accompanying apartment complexes, focused away from the highway, can have windows which admit birdsong not traffic noise.
The plan also proposes clusters of high rises, a system which in most cities is being demolished rather than built.
Experience has shown that when people are crammed into this kind of space, particularly if it is sub-standard housing, the end result is a gradual degradation of the accommodation ending in a social issue. There is no need for us to make the same mistakes.
The proposed plan is not a map for a 21st century community, it is re-hash of ideas from the last century which have been rejected by most cities on the result of their experience.
We have a golden chance to make Saanich into something more than an anonymous desolate bedroom for Victoria and we should take it. Scrap the plan and produce one which is written for 2023, not 1950.
Alec Mitchell
Victoria
Careful, cougars have killed many people
People always make a big fuss when cougars are put down. One letter writer recently said to bring on the cougars to help lower the deer population.
Careful what you wish for. Cougars and people don’t mix well.
In the past 100 years there have been 126 attacks in North America, 27 of them fatal. B.C. has a high number of attacks, with 29, including 20 of them on Vancouver Island. There were five fatal attacks in B.C., with four of them on Vancouver Island.
In 1992 when I worked in Kyuquot Sound, a young child was killed at the school. There was a ball game at the school. The cougar ran out of the bush and ran right by adults and pounced on the child and killed him. The school custodian shot and killed the cat.
One morning at work I walked into the job site to check my blast from the night before. As a road builder we were always remote. Because of a fresh snow I could see my foot prints.
I could also see was the cougar tracks of big cat that had followed me. I didn’t even know that it had followed me for at least a hundred yards before it went up the hill into the bush.
Right now there is two cougars hunting on Whiffin Spit in Sooke. There is a massive reduction of the deer. When they run out, who knows what they will hunt next.
Tim Young
Sooke
When it comes to drugs, teens need loving leaders
Re: “Drug paraphernalia could be a life-saving tool for teens,” May 28.
As a parent of teens, I was really disappointed to learn about the safe snorting materials handed out recently at the high school in Cowichan Valley.
Charla Huber shared that after pondering the original story, she realized that as a parent her fear was about the thought of kids using drugs, vs. the fear of kids being given paraphernalia to do it in a safer way.
My fear is more about the message that was sent, and how it may have been received by the kids in the room.
There’s a time and a place for harm reduction and safe supply, but we aren’t talking about adults here.
A child who is using drugs needs non-judgmental, trusted, loving leaders to step in and help them course-correct before tragedy unfolds.
Giving teenagers line cutters and straws to ‘hurt themselves more safely’ sounds to me like the grownups have already given up on them.
I can’t imagine having to internalize that message as a teen.
Deanna Woods
North Saanich
Janis and Jimi helped us understand the dangers
Re: “Drug paraphernalia could be a life saving tool for teens,” May 28.
I was, to be honest, stunned that the parent of a teen in high school would be so tolerant of ‘safe’ drug paraphernalia being handed out at a secondary school.
To think that this kind of presentation was made at a school in the eighth year of an opioid crisis in our province is mind-boggling; could it possibly have anything to do with parents’ attitude of “Well, they’re going to do it anyway, we may as well give them the tools to be safe”?
After I read the column I sent up a silent prayer of thanks to the teachers at Reynolds Secondary in the late 1960s/early 1970s for ramming it down our throats that “illicit drugs are bad, stay away from them.” We didn’t have to look any further than the examples of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, two rock stars who died decades before their time, to see the wisdom of this advice.
Lorraine Lindsay
Saanich
Sometimes, better to deliver the letter by hand
I was just in the Saanichton Post Office mailing a card to an address in Saanichton. I asked if it would go directly but was told no, it had to go to Richmond to be “sorted.” (No fault of the clerk.)
I wonder how long it will take for that card to make its way back to Saanichton. It took my friend’s letter more than 10 days to go across the city by snail mail.
It would have been better to hand-deliver it.
B.D. Powell
Saanichton
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