Letters, May 28

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/05/2024 (529 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Downtown church worth preserving

Re: Praying for seven million miracles (May 25)

On Aug. 4, 1884 in the heart of what grew into the thriving City of Winnipeg sits the beautiful and historic Holy Trinity Anglican Church. A feast for the eyes, she boasts a spectacular hammer-beam ceiling, a Gothic-inspired interior truss system replacing the use of columns, giving one the sense they could be standing in a grand European cathedral.

Holy Trinity celebrated the turn of the century. She welcomed the men and women of our Canadian Armed Forces going to and returning home from both world wars. She continues to ring her original bell for services held twice weekly. Lunch for those in need is regularly served on her grounds.

Sadly, this grand gem might go the way of the wrecking ball. Sixty years ago the Exchange District was also slated for that same fate but lucky for Winnipeg, that didn’t happen. This grand building is an irreplaceable icon.

It would be a shame if we are a city that knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

Catherine King

Winnipeg

The City of Copenhagen will rebuild the Old Stock Exchange building, which was built in the 1700s and suffered extensive damage due to a fire in April. The cost to restore the historic building is still unknown, but I am sure it will be considerably more than the $7 million that it would cost to shore up and repair Holy Trinity. Copenhagen is more than 900 years old, so a building from the 1700s is by no means the oldest structure in that city.

Notre Dame Cathedral on the banks of the Seine in Paris is being reconstructed, following a 2019 fire, at a cost of approximately 700 million euros, or almost $1 billion. I realize Copenhagen and Paris are much larger cities than Winnipeg, but history has shown us that when we tear down part of our past, it disappears forever.

Thank goodness for Paterson Global and the Pollard family (Pollard Bank Note) who rebuilt and repurposed two prominent buildings on Main Street: the Royal Bank tower next to city hall and the Fortune Building.

Bill Loewen has made sure the Canadian Bank of Commerce building north of the Birks Building has not disappeared and is being repurposed.

Allowing our heritage to be sold and torn down turns our back on our heritage. Yes, we need new growth and renewal, but the 18,000 surface parking spots in our town is a better place to start.

That $7 million is a lot of money. It is three to four per cent of what the repurposing of the Bay will cost and almost as much as our superstar hockey players make in a year.

We tore down our gingerbread city hall in the ’60s and replaced it with a nondescript new building, which has little architectural merit and certainly will not attract tourists to our town.

We can’t afford to make more mistakes.

Peter Kaufmann

Winnipeg

Library hours a bookworm’s bane

On Saturday, May 25, my grandson and I arrived at the library to find that it is now officially closed on Saturdays for the summer.

Really? How sad and frustrating is this? For many people with children in school or daycare full time, Saturday is the only day of the week available to use this valuable resource.

Shame on the City of Winnipeg. When did literacy and healthy diversion for children become such a low priority? Councillors, you should give your heads a shake.

Daryl Brooks

Winnipeg

Government’s role to play

Daily we read about zebra mussels, and international car theft.

Both issues arise due to International Trade. First, mussels were introduced to Canada in the early 1990s. They came in the bilges of foreign ships anchored in the Great Lakes. The federal government waited until the late 1990s to bring in International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) regulations.

Car theft is always an issue, but if you are going to export them then documentation is required. So how do the cars get out? The containers are not physically inspected on an outbound basis. If there were regular physical inspections, theft would be reduced by 70 per cent.

What I am saying is that these two issues were the direct result of Canadian government inaction. Now it’s the public’s problem and they leave the impression that the public is to blame, which is untrue.

Robert MacKidd

Winnipeg

Rethink health-care strategy

Re: Province targets health regions’ reliance on private-agency nurses (May 23)

I am astounded to hear the government’s solution to nurses choosing the best working environment for themselves is to punish them for working two jobs, that is part time in the private sector (agency work) and part time in the public sector.

In my opinion, the public setting is a very difficult working environment. Who else is required go to work never knowing when the work is over (mandatory overtime)? Who else is shunted into specialized workplaces without proper training (fill-in ICU and ER nurses)? Who else has to work two or three 12-hour shifts back to back? No one but nurses.

This approach will only worsen the nurse shortage in public settings and I am shocked to hear the head of the union agrees with it.

It seems only logical to me that in order to lure nurses back to the public system (and save much of the money spent on agency nurses), the public system has to compete more effectively with the private sector. So far, based on the voting on the new contract is concerned, the government has fallen way short. Perhaps the Shared Health bureaucracy needs a shake up, just like our new premier promised in the last election.

How can the solution possibly be,”you can’t work for us if you work for them”?

If I were a nurse, I would say my freedom to choose where and when I work at a decent rate of pay supersedes being forced into one mode.

This crackdown is anti-women, anti-free choice and looks like forced labour! I suggest the premier and the minister of health think again.

Laurie Allen

Winnipeg

Price of the party system

Canada pays a horrendous price for its party system. We transform a House of Commons, which could be a forum of our best and brightest, into a chamber of schemers whose statements are aimed solely at the acquisition and maintenance of power.

We have, I believe, 338 MPs and a significant majority are intelligent, experienced people. Imagine if those 338 could meet in an atmosphere of amity, genuinely concerned to help one another in finding answers to social problems. Instead, we have individuals measuring every word by how it will influence opinion polls.

You may say the party system is necessary to impose discipline on what otherwise would be a mass of recommendations that possess no policy coherence. This is a valid point. Yet I think of a family discussing a problem within the home. These people may have different opinions as to the solution, but as they are members of that family, they are motivated to do what is best for all concerned.

Can anyone say that this spirit is reflected in our party system, even to a small degree? Not a chance. As long as we allow politicians to play us for the purpose of power we will have an increasing crescendo of anger and vulgarity in the House of Commons.

Kurt Clyde

Winnipeg