What I didn’t hear about homelessness
The campaigning is over. We’ve heard the party platforms and the guestimated costs.
Every article, sound bite, party platform groups together homelessness with mental health and addiction. Mental health and addiction are more often than not a byproduct of homelessness.
Not one party addressed homelessness and how we might mitigate it. The Ministry of Social Services and Poverty Reduction housing support is $500 a month for a single person.
Sadly with no reprieve from high rents and every party willing to turn a blind eye it will only get worse.
I’m lucky enough to have a job but my entire $1,580 a month persons with disabilities payment doesn’t quite cover the rent and insurance for my bachelor suite.
I’m not convinced there is a housing shortage but I am 100% sure there is an affordability problem. When will the poor and struggling be included? Silence is not the answer.
Frank D. Tillich
Victoria
Work on all the roads has economic impact
My wife and I, along with many friends and relatives, couldn’t agree more with the letters objecting to the extremely poor planning on the part of the engineering departments in the Capital Regional District.
The impediments to travel are extreme which leads to long tailbacks. These long delays have economic consequences because of the impedance of commercial activities.
Dumping of public money all at once also inflates construction costs. Is this all tied in with desperate political attempts to buy votes?
R.D. Kinloch
Shawnigan Lake
Our longest highway has a major gap
Driving columnist John Ducker said that the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Tierra Fuego, Argentina is the longest in the world — but failed to mention that it is not continuous.
In Panama it is interrupted by the Darien Gap, which, when I drove south on the highway in the 1970s, was described as 250 miles of dense, impenetrable jungle, with swamps, poisonous frogs and all manner of challenges, necessitating transferring the vehicle to a freight-only ship and taking a flight to Cali, Colombia.
However whilst there is still no road connection between Colombia and Panama, these past few years thousands of migrants have opened up a trail through the Darien Gap from Colombia in their quest to reach the United States.
Though the physical obstacles have been somehow overcome, the perils now involve those despicable characters who prey on the hapless travellers.
Also, new car reviews described the value of “surround cameras.” Without spending extra dollars on such innovations, better to adopt the BIDO principle: Back in, drive out.
Far simpler to reverse into a spot with full knowledge of the surroundings, rather than returning to a likely changed environment, possibly in darkness or inclement weather.
Maximum visibility is paramount.
Roger Berrett
Shawnigan Lake
Treating the homeless like livestock
Putting up fences to keep people off Pandora Avenue is as bad as putting these people in a wire corral as livestock. It is obvious that is how they are perceived by the mayor and council.
Even though former mayor Lisa Helps had some quirky ideas about helping the homeless, at least she appeared to have a heart in trying to find a solution to what to do with the homeless.
It’s time we elected someone not only with a sense of ethics, but also some brains in finding a sensible solution with a few ounces of compassion throw in.
These are human beings you are dealing with, not livestock.
Valerie Bellefleur
Victoria
If you’re under 50, you will need good luck
Re: “Promoting fear in the climate,” letter, Oct. 18.
To correct the letter: Scientists DO attribute extreme weather to human emissions of CO2, and do not require hundreds more years to draw this conclusion.
The science is clear, the measurements make the need for action obvious. Only the few die-hard objectors, such as Bjorn Lomborg, quoted in the letter, stand against the action needed, notably a higher and more widely applied carbon tax.
As a retired climate scientist, I can be happy that I will not live long enough to see the worst of what is coming, but the continuing arguments give good reasons to hope to live as long as possible to see how the future unfolds.
The effects of increased carbon dioxide, melting ice, rising seas and warming climate have so far been relatively small, but the exponential trend lines look alarmingly solid into a future which will be hard for our present civilization to survive by 2100.
I wish everyone younger than 50 good luck!
Jim Gower
North Saanich
Quality health care on the entire Island
I’d like to express my outrage over a series of television ads that have been running in an obvious attempt to influence the election, claiming that the quality of health care for those of us who live north of the Malahat is inferior to the south.
I have to wonder if these people are too stupid to understand how the health-care system works or if they are deliberately disingenuous. The government has built a new hospital in Campbell River and is building one in Duncan.
I am recovering from a quadruple bypass surgery from a heart attack that I experienced considerably north of the Malahat and was moved at no expense to me, to the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria because that is where the cardiac team has been assembled to serve everyone on the island.
I have had absolutely stellar care from the surgeon who performed the operation through the nurses who provided me with care to the cleaners, the clerks and the food service workers.
At this moment, the greatest threat to my blood pressure is the anger I feel on behalf of each and every health care worker who has been traduced by these moronic ads.
David Lowther
Mesachie Lake
(presently in Royal Jubilee Hospital)
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