Letters, Jan. 15

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This article was published 15/01/2024 (970 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Out with the old…

Several articles have appeared around the PC party and its process for selecting a new leader. I would like to suggest that they add an additional condition to their selection criteria. The new leader, and indeed the entire current slate of party members, must be replaced with new people not stained by the abysmal performance and attitude of this one.

Several PC MLAs are trying to say that they never believed all the bad things that they were doing; from health reorganization, through COVID practices, various union busting attempts and the vile mudslinging campaign they are trying to explain themselves with “I was only following orders.”

I will not be able to vote for a conservative member until I know they have shaken off the dogmatic ideological approach of Brian Pallister and his ilk and freed themselves of the extreme right anti-science conspiracy cultists they currently allow to dictate their policies

Daniel Roscoe

Winnipeg

Cheers for superintendent

Re: Math education needs high expectations and love (Think Tank, Jan. 12)

Thanks Matt Henderson for your thoughtful response to the ongoing math teaching debate. So good to know that you’re now heading up the Winnipeg School Division as superintendent.

False dichotomies and black and white choices between one chosen teaching strategy and another are just another mirror of the larger political and cultural polarization we see all around us in so many ways. Choosing a side is comfortable because then we don’t have to think. I spent my career working in adult English- language training, and there was frequently the same dichotomy in how much emphasis to give to grammar teaching.

As Matt points out with his useful sports reference, one could spend a lot of time doing pushups and sit-ups, lifting weights or running on a treadmill, but if all that wonderful strength never got used for playing a game or running a marathon, where would be the joy in life? In teaching we need drills, we need supported practice, we need tests and we need authentic usage.

Wonderful to know that Matt gets this and is at the steering wheel of our largest school division.

Dale Klassen

Falcon Beach

Vaccines not a complete fix

Re: Don’t forget pandemic’s lessons (Editorial, Jan. 12)

The editorial is missing the elephant in the room. COVID is a vascular disease that affects our immune system. The public has evidently not learned that lesson, due mainly to the total absence of Public Health guidance that refuses to inform us of the damage even a “mild” case can do to our bodies.

More people would mask if they understood this. Vaccines alone are not going to control this pandemic.

Jackie Corrigan

Winnipeg

Less talk, more action

Enough talk and empty promises, it’s time for some action. Did the NDP bite off more than they can chew with their election-winning promise that they would rescue our health-care system? Here it is over three months after their election win and what do we have?

New historic wait times at ERs and exhausted health-care providers. They seem to make promise after promise, such as reopening emergency rooms, adding more beds to hospitals, etc., but never saying how they are going to staff these promises. Having a plan is one thing, putting it into action is another.

They can only blame their predecessor for so long.

Alfred Sansregret

Winnipeg

Free up acute beds

As a retired nurse I am listening to the sincerity that our esteemed health minister and premier purvey in trying to find a solution to the ER wait times. I have not heard much lip service given to decreasing the number of acute care beds that are taken up with our elders waiting for personal care home beds.

This is the primary cause of the bed stoppage in the ERs. Freeing up these acute care beds makes room for more admissions from the ER allowing the flow of patients through the ER, thereby decreasing ER wait times. Has no one considered building more care homes? Every solution incurs cost, however this is a win/win solution in my lowly opinion.

As I personally see the possibility of needing personal care creep closer, I hope I have a place to go and I will not be the cause of some poor soul lingering on an ER stretcher in their pain and misery.

Sandy Reimer

Gimli

Stop twice, save lives

Every year I drive a grain truck during harvest south of Winnipeg in the Glenlea area. For a number of years, when coming off Glenlea Road onto Highway 75 to turn north, I stopped at the stop sign to check for traffic heading south, but to check for traffic going north there was just a yield sign.

Why? I don’t know. But one year there was a second stop sign there. At first I found it a bit of an inconvenience. Why stop twice if no one is coming? When I thought about it, I realized that stopping twice made sense especially in today’s world with our major highways being busier than ever. The second stop sign was in relation to two young women losing their lives in a collision just north of this intersection.

At the time I wrongly assumed the whole province had made the switch. But I sadly watched coverage of the collision at Carberry to discover that the second approach to Highway 1 had only a yield sign. Could a stop sign have prevented what happened on that tragic day?

We’ll never know, but it does give drivers another few seconds of pause. Since that collision I’ve checked up and down our highways and the second approach on almost all of our four-lane highways have yield signs.

Can anyone from the highways department explain to me why that is? To me it’s a no-brainer. And what is being proposed for the Carberry junction is an expensive fix for that one interchange. What about all the rest of them?

Replace all the yield signs with stop signs and prevent more carnage on our highways. I was in central Alberta this summer and was appalled to see yield signs at all the second approaches on the main busy Highway 2 corridor between Calgary and Edmonton. I’m assuming Saskatchewan highways are the same. Why? Ontario would never allow that.

Stop twice and save lives. Doesn’t that make sense?

Larry Gompf

Winnipeg

Overpass necessary

The Manitoba government’s decision to ignore the most obvious solution to the problem of the intersection between the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 5 near Carberry was a great disappointment. How many more lives are going to be lost before a proper overpass is constructed at that intersection? Instead, the government is planning to study and consult with Manitobans and to spend millions of dollars in doing so to avoid the inevitable.

Most of the alternatives being studied and discussed are a waste of time and effort.

What is necessary is a simple two-lane overpass taking traffic on Highway 5, like the bus taking seniors to the casino just outside of Carberry, over the TransCanada Highway. These sort of level crossings exist in many places on Manitoba’s busiest highways, including the junction of Highway 16 and Highway 1 and should be replaced by overpasses as soon as possible.

In the Carberry case, the bus should never have come into contact with the semi-trailer truck because the bus should have been driving over an overpass. On and off ramps already exist at the Carberry location to provide easy access to traffic making right-hand turns.

James McAllister

Ajax, Ont.