Our local heroes are here to help
Just a shout out to the fire departments, the police, and B.C. Hydro crews for the amazing job they did with the fire on Quadra near Palmer.
First they contained a dangerous fire fanned by strong winds. Next they organized an evacuation of nearby residents to safety.
One of those residents was my 97-year-old mother.
They prevented the fire from spreading to other homes and buildings with minimal damage.
Once contained, the B.C. Hydro crew swung into action, working through the night to restore power to the neighbourhood.
This happens all over B.C. and in our own backyard.
To me, they are heroes. Thanks a million!
Norm Tandberg
Esquimalt
Special thanks to paramedics, hydro crews
Now that the dust (or perhaps “smoke”) has settled on the Quadra/Palmer fire I would like to send a thank you to the excellent service from paramedics.
They came to my door to make sure I was okay in the belief that I was in distress. In reality I was just enduring the dark and the lack of heat, since our entire area had no hydro power.
We so often take their service for granted and offer criticism when things go wrong.
A shout out also to the B.C. Hydro crews which are working hard to keep the lights on for winter ravaged British Columbians. Having just survived 48 hours of no electric power I really appreciate their efforts.
Joan Barton
Victoria
Congratulations, Alison, for getting worse
Given her name, Alison Acker’s obituary led the parade of 31 such notices that appeared in Saturday’s Times Colonist.
But what really got my attention was how her beaming photograph cheekily complements her obituary’s startling opening line: “Alison was a rebel at 17 and simply got worse.”
A+ for sparkle and spunk, Alison!
Patrick Wolfe
Victoria
Canada Post needs government subsidy
The impact that the labour disruption at Canada Post is having on the country’s economy and the hardship it is imposing on those who depend upon it demonstrates that it should be considered an essential service.
Many people and small businesses are in remote areas that are not serviced by alternate delivery services, while others simply cannot afford the extra cost of those services.
Canada Post is their only option, so a disruption in that service is not acceptable.
Canada Post management claims that they are on track to lose more than $300 million this year, which perhaps explains why they are having difficulty meeting the postal workers wage demands, even if they are reasonable.
If it is Canada Post’s mandate to provide postal service across our vast land, no matter how remote a location may be, at a reasonable cost, then the federal government should subsidize this Crown corporation.
Compare this year’s projected loss of $300 million to the Liberals’ lame attempt to buy our votes in the federal election by sending out cheques in the amount of $250 to all “working Canadians” (estimated to cost $4.7 billion) and pausing the GST on certain goods and services for two months (estimated to cost $1.6 billion) and it appears to be minuscule.
It is time for the federal government to realize that Canada Post should be subsidized so that it can continue to provide postal services across our entire country at a reasonable cost without further labour disruptions.
Bruce Edwards
Saanich
A tunnel could ease McKenzie congestion
I believe a viable solution to the McKenzie/Quadra intersection problem would be to partially “tunnelize” McKenzie from approximately Nelthorpe to Century.
The tunnel could be two motor vehicle lanes wide and more or less horizontal because at these points McKenzie begins to rise to Quadra.
This would allow through traffic to avoid Quadra and so reduce the stress on that intersection.
Mike Harrison
Victoria
A small city in France has three tram lines
As many writers have pointed out, it is wrong to compare Victoria to the much larger Paris.
Our daughter lives in Angers, France, which has a population of 150,000 with about 430,000 in the metropolitan area.
In an effort to be more environmentally friendly, the city has installed light rail in the form of three tram lines. Many main streets have no more than one lane of cars each way. (There is admittedly a dearth of bike lanes.)
We were quite impressed when we visited last summer and found using the tram to get from our daughter’s house in the suburbs to downtown and to other suburbs easy and pleasant.
Our daughter and her husband have not seen the need to own a car. If Angers can do it, why not Victoria?
Gisèle Bourgeois-Law
Oak Bay
Shame on all of us for electing these people
I have a grudging respect for Donald Trump.
He took over the Republican Party and took down the Democratic Party. He tapped into the frustration people have with the ruling classes, left and right.
Their dominance in politics and their arrogance in government became too much for people. They were ruling to rule, not to make things better.
We have the same situation in B.C. The NDP (really Liberals — there isn’t a Tommy Douglas in the group) were almost beaten by a fringe party because the NDP ran around the province putting on a circus act, telling us how they were going to spend our money solving problems they created.
Never once did they ask us what we wanted.
Federally, the situation is the same, if not worse. The arrogance of the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP is appalling.
Does anything shout “Let them eat cake” more than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offering a $250 cheque and the lifting of GST for two months on selected items, and a crowing Jagmeet Singh claiming credit for it?
How removed from reality are they? We elected these people. Shame on us.
We have a health-care system that has fallen apart, a drug epidemic and a housing crisis. These are problems that affect every family and our ruling classes have done nothing to help us.
There should be a public inquiry into how our health-care system was gutted over the decades by every party that held power, federally and provincially, during that time.
We paid our taxes. Where is the health-care system we paid for?
We are tired of having to deal with drug sick and mentally sick people on our streets. They need help and we need to feel safe in our communities.
We have a housing crisis that we will get no help with because every level of government makes too much money from it.
We are taxed to death on every aspect of housing on top of the obscene profits developers and investors are making.
Everyone is frustrated with our governments, but we still vote for the illusion that these parties will make things better.
Voting for that illusion is how we ended up with Trump and his cabinet of clowns as the leaders of the western world.
He just gave the ruling classes the middle finger, and I respect that.
Jeff Magee
Langford
Centennial Square needs a gentle nudge
It seems that Victoria council may be reconsidering the project proposed for Centennial Square. Given the demands on the city’s finances, this would be a good idea.
The extent of the proposed changes, and their estimated cost, falls into the “answering a question that nobody asked” category, and the opportunity for a second look is welcome.
Of course the square does need revitalization and repurpose. This can be achieved by expanding its current use for seasonal entertainment, and in particular by returning the courtyard level spaces to commercial/retail or public occupancy rather than civic offices.
There has been much written about Centennial Square as an urban design, and a progressive rejuvenation of Victoria’s image and potential at the time. The case could be made that the revitalization of Old Town stemmed directly from the square.
The fountain is the symbolic core of the space, and it has been difficult to consider that this centrepiece was likely to be thrown away.
Centennial Square, with its dedication to public space, culture, and the arts says much about what is good about Victoria.
It needs a gentle and respectful nudge, not a wholesale recalibration.
John Keay
Victoria
Touchdown Pacific never made sense
In the build-up to the Touchdown Pacific game at Royal Athletic Park, I was curious to know how much government was contributing but I could never find the numbers.
The city now reports it paid about half a million dollars to host this Canadian Football League game. This event never made sense to me.
The B.C. Lions turned down a sold-out B.C. Place (40,000-plus seats) to play a game here in Victoria, a city that will never have a CFL team, in poor little RAP with 14,000 uncomfortable temporary seats crammed into it.
The effort required to put that game on was enormous and I always wondered how much money the municipal and provincial governments must have poured in to make it happen.
The estimates they give of “economic activity” generated by these events are always dubious as little of it is actual new money.
Most of the money would have been spent in the city anyway and guests attracted actually prevent other visitors from coming as Victoria’s hotels are usually full during the summer.
I would still be curious to know how much the province ponied up for their day in the sun.
The uproar in Vancouver is going to be deafening when the billion dollar FIFA boondoggle comes due.
Bryan Tronsgard
Victoria
It’s up to all of us to set a new direction
Elections for societies feeling less than overwhelmed by war or disease have usually been focused on the economy.
From a broad perspective, this is one of the last things that should be among our priorities.
It is not that poverty and economic troubles are not severe. They are horrendously so for a large portion of the populace.
It is that no matter who is prime minister or premier, most of us, and probably all of us are on a downhill slope to economic collapse.
It may take some time, and there will be some short jags of improvement, often accentuating a following fall, but the problem is overshoot on a global scale.
There have been local overshoot cases many times in history, when civilizations have overloaded their accessible resources or climates have had large hiccups.
Populations have dwindled or dispersed and lived in smaller social groups and taken less from the earth, to reconnect and build either elsewhere or when ecosystems have recovered.
This time it’s rather different. It is not that there is nowhere else to go, but that there is nowhere else to go without further destroying the world’s climate and other supports.
There are too many of us who have polluted our planet to make it a place of unfamiliarly useless and diseased and dying flora and fauna.
What sliver of hope we have lies in reduction, reuse, and a wholesale change in the technology and equitable and collaborative organization of our societies.
It is up to all of us, from the bottom up. The few at the top have rarely shown themselves interested and capable of moulding their societies in other than grandiose and self-serving ways despite their claims.
Glynne Evans
Saanich
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