Have your say

Benefits of wetlands

Re: Peat mine proposed for Manitoba park (Jan. 6). I do not understand why protection from floods and excess nutrition in Lake Winnipeg that presents no extra cost is ignored by governments.

The most significant social and economic benefit wetlands provide is flood control. Peatlands and wet grasslands act like sponges, absorbing rainfall and controlling its flow into streams and rivers.

When peat becomes completely saturated and unable to absorb any more water, surface water pools and peatland vegetation helps to slow and reduce runoff. When the peat bogs are drained and the floodplains are reduced, the risk of floods is increased.

Wetlands also act as filters, cleaning up water in a number of ways. For example, nitrogen in water is transformed to harmless nitrogen gas and nutrients are taken up by wetland plants in the water. Wetlands also remove pollutants such as phosphorus, heavy metals and toxins which are trapped in the sediments of the wetlands.

According to the World Wildlife Foundation, New York City found that it could avoid spending US$3-8 billion on new waste water treatment plants by investing $1.5 billion in the purchase of land around the reservoirs.

Leaving peatlands untouched seems an obvious, simple and inexpensive proposal. It is likely both fiscally and environmentally prudent, something often difficult to achieve.

Jean-Guy Pageau

Winnipeg

Ethiopian mouthpiece

Re: Protests called work of Eritrean regime (Jan. 7). It is becoming abundantly clear that the Canadian Eritrean community is being accused, tried and convicted in your newspaper. Canadian Eritreans are Canadian citizens who are law abiding and pay their taxes just like everyone else who contributes to society. If anyone witnesses a crime, they have to take it to the appropriate Canadian authority and not the newspaper.

Why are some in the Eritrean community being accused of a heinous crime such as terrorism without providing any independently verifiable proof, with the exception of the words of individuals who are deeply connected with the ethnic regime in Ethiopia?

It is becoming increasingly difficulty to differentiate your newspaper from the various mouthpieces of the Ethiopian ethnic regime.

Walday Abeda

Fort McMurray, Alta.

Consider the voters

Re: NDP leadership race is a real snoozefest, but... (Jan. 9). Mia Rabson makes a good point that parties of all stripes lose interest in electoral reform once they achieve 100 per cent of the power with 40 per cent of the vote, or think they have a realistic shot of doing so.

The Liberals are toying with the idea of an "alternative vote" or preferential ballot, hoping that by voters choosing the centrist party as the second-choice strategic preference -- the lesser evil -- AV will skew the winner-take-all game in their favour.

AV is used in other countries, the main one being Australia, where the system proved so engaging they had to force people to vote by threat of law. Like our current system, AV leaves most voters represented by someone they didn't want, the overall national results equally distorted, and Parliament just as adversarial and dysfunctional as it is now. This, supposedly, is "renewal."

Electoral reform cannot be about what is best for parties. It has to be about what is best for voters. What would work for voters would be to give each of us an effective vote -- one that elects the candidate we genuinely support -- and national and provincial governments whose seats reflect how we actually voted.

Anita Nickerson

Kitchener, Ont.

Prayer has its place

I would suggest to the writer of the letter A matter of politics (Jan. 9) that prayer has its place in the home and in the church, temple, synagogue or mosque of the parents' choice.

Churches appear to be doing just fine at promoting Christian values. I would be interested to know which of those values, rights and beliefs are suffering from "outright intolerance" in the school system.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is founded on those very values, such as "love thy neighbour as thyself," and not "force your prayers on thy neighbour."

If you really think your prayers are the only ones everyone should hear, and you don't see the problem with it, spend a week hearing someone else's promoted as the only way. You may then understand how improper and unethical it is to impose your belief system on everyone else.

RUTH LIVINGSTON

Winnipeg

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Enlightened people have found that freedom is maximized when personal choices are not funded by governments. In fact, the less government interference with people's faith, the greater is the personal choice of individuals to select a faith or no religious faith.

The Free Press reported last March 6 that the Manitoba government is helping to support about 59 private schools, with at least 34 being Christian. Taxpayers who may come from many faiths are pouring millions of dollars into faith-based education.

If the Office of Religious Freedom wishes in future to increase freedom, then it must work to decrease government support for faith-based schools. Certainty or fundamentalism has and is causing many problems in the world. The more broadly we think, the larger the commonalities we humans appear to share.

In fact, finding food, shelter, security and so on are often major issues for people, while faith issues become minor. Surely Iran and other theocracies ought to alert us to the folly of government involvement with religion.

Barry Hammond

Winnipeg

Begrudging disparity

Re: Making CEOs paupers won't improve your lot (Jan. 7). It is true that many of us envy CEOs' inflated salaries and it is also true that even if we were to simply reduce their salaries it would not help the rest of us in any real sense.

However, I don't believe it is the actual amounts they make that so many people begrudge. It is the disparity between their salaries and those of the rest of us. It seems that, as always, the rich get richer at the expense of the poor (or middle class), who get poorer.

So here's a suggestion. Pass a law that ties the salary of the highest-paid employee of any company to the salaries of all the other employees of that company. Set a limit that says no one employee of a company, or its subsidiaries, can make more than 25 times (or whatever rate you want to use) that of any other employee. As well, if the top paid employee gets a 10 per cent raise, all employees get a 10 per cent raise.

This is a simple example that would require a lot of checks and balances, but I think it would help us move toward the better goal, which is not to make the rich poorer, but to make the poor richer.

DOUG DANBERT

Winnipeg

Pathetic reporting

Re: Local shooting spoofed on SNL (Jan. 9). Regarding the news of the lady who wanted to finish her beer before having medical treatment and now it's gone Hollywood, I see this in my small opinion as pathetic reporting.

In a private setting, I certainly get the humour, but in the newspaper it's in poor taste. Do we not have more important stories to write about than to laugh at someone who has real issues? I enjoy the Free Press, but please don't make it into a rag mag like some others.

EVA MOHAMMED

Winnipeg

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 12, 2012 A11