Letters, April 6

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/04/2023 (1147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We all need clean water

Re: Winnipeg chosen as site of federal water agency (March 29)

This news is most welcome, but let’s hope that it will result in more than words. In Manitoba, we have a government that has been facilitating the expansion of industrial hog barns while steadfastly refusing to collect any data on how much phosphorus and nitrogen they might be contributing to the pollution of our lakes.

Blue-green algae has become an annual blight on Lake Winnipeg and many other Manitoba lakes. Is it just coincidence that this problem has grown exponentially at the same time as the explosion of hog barns in the 1990s?

All of us, humans and animals alike, depend on safe, clean water for life so treating water with respect and reverence will be essential for life as we know it to continue. This will require significant changes in what we allow in agricultural, human sewage and industrial practices.

Let’s hope that a Canada Water Agency will have the teeth to make this happen and not just be window dressing.

Vicki Burns

Hog Watch Manitoba

Winnipeg

Oh, fudge

Re: Trump makes history, pleads not guilty to 34 charges (April 5)

I saw that a number of newspapers and news outlets, including the Free Press, used the word “fudging” to describe Donald Trump’s alleged concealment of business payments to the porn actor he allegedly had sex with. There was nothing vague, noncommittal, or inadequate about the way Trump allegedly falsified business records in order to conceal this affair in his run for president in 2016.

Saying “fudging” in any newspaper or news outlet brings on images of sweet candy and diminishes his culpability. The word “fudging” is often used in describing government officials’ penchant for hemming and hawing, hedging with so many qualifiers to make a statement meaningless or shading truth with deception that’s not outright lying.

To use the word “fudging” to describe Trump’s behaviour is in itself fudging the truth about his well-documented history of lying, cheating and theft.

David Weller

Winnipeg

Library services lack support

As pointed out in the April 3 editorial We deserve to hear it from the horse’s mouth, Winnipeg is indeed the only large Canadian city functioning without an independent library board.

This has been the case since the advent of Unicity in 1972. Prior to this, both the old City of Winnipeg and the surrounding municipalities functioned with independent library boards.

For the first 25 years of Unicity, the city’s library services were a stand-alone civic department, with its head on par with other civic department heads, all reporting to the former board of commissioners.

This ended with the Cuff Report in 1997, which collapsed many civic departments, including the former Parks and Recreation Department, and our green spaces and recreation programming, including swimming lessons, have felt the pinch of both less civic profile and less city council budgetary support.

The city’s library services were folded into the Community Services Department, and the current manager of library services doesn’t rank in the top 50 civic management staff; this, as much as anything, helps to explain both the diminished support for the library system as a whole, and the absence of accountability many seek when it comes to safety measures within the system.

This is not the fault of the incumbent manager. City hall wanted a less visible library system and this is exactly what has occurred by way of the ill-conceived 1997 decision, and the subsequent austerity budgeting forced upon the library system.

Paul Moist

Winnipeg

Protect rights of accused

Re: Supreme Court rejects appeal from Louisiana man on death row (April 3)

This is yet another reason why whenever I hear how relieved people are when someone is charged with a reviled crime — “Did they catch him? They did? Well, that’s a relief!” — I mentally hear the phrase, “We’ll give ’im a fair trial, then we’ll hang ’im.”

And if I point out it may be the wrong guy who’s being railroaded, I could receive the erroneous refrain, “Well if he’s truly innocent, he has nothing to worry about.”

It is why the news media should refrain from publishing the identity of people charged with a crime — especially one of a repugnant nature, for which they are jailed pending trial (as is typically done) — until at least after they’ve been convicted.

Any person’s wrongful charge, trial, conviction and punishment should be concerning to any law-abiding person. However statistically unlikely, the average person could someday find themselves unjustly jailed, even for life.

“Justice system” vice probably occurs much more frequently than we can ever know about. And I’ve noticed that people tend to naively believe that such ethically challenged courtroom prosecutorial, and even judicial, conduct can/will never happen to them.

Such people fail to consider the potential flaws, even blatant ethical misconduct committed, in the law-enforcement/justice system — that great injustices are committed, both hidden and exposed.

With the plethora of wrongful convictions out there, humanity is not in a moral position to comfortably and in good conscience lock people up, then throw away the key.

Frank Sterle Jr.

White Rock, B.C.

Province should offer EV rebate

You recently reported that 69 per cent of Manitobans believe climate change is real and caused by humans activity (Climate change a polarizing topic in the province, poll reveals, March 29). Perhaps public opinion may have changed but by the looks of the numerous large vehicles idling beside my small car in traffic, consumer vehicle choice has not changed.

I just received my carbon tax rebate from the provincial government and my initial reaction was a smile. I understand that this money came from federal carbon consumption taxes on gas that I already purchased and was rebated to the province.

But when I reflect on why we’re getting this money back, I recall that the purpose of the carbon tax is to have us emit less carbon to stop climate change. Our federal government states that this carbon tax is for “energy upgrades to their home, or by choosing different ways or cleaner vehicles to get around.”

It would appear our current provincial government wants to buy votes with the money the federal government has given back, rather than promote ways for citizens to emit less carbon. I went searching for the EV purchase rebates that are available. Federal rebates on electric vehicle purchases range from $2,500-$5,000 depending on the model and price of the vehicle.

Manitoba hasn’t offered a provincial EV rebate in over 10 years.

Most other Canadian provinces offer rebates.

A local car salesman recently told me that one of his customers bought a plug-in hybrid with a meagre 60-kilometre-only battery range. They avoided using the gas engine and drove more than 7,000 km on their first tank of gas by using battery power for short trips!

Come on, Manitoba, keep sending me rebate cheques; I won’t mind if they’re smaller if you show some leadership with new green initiatives. Let’s see sizable provincial rebates for hybrid and electric vehicle purchases.

And how about promoting and funding more public transit with those sizable federal rebates? My Morden/Winkler area certainly needs local bus service.

Dave Stobbe

Morden