Letters, July 13

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/07/2023 (848 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

True cost of cuts

Re: Tories jump onto police bandwagon after years of digging potholes (July 7); ‘Desperate plea’ made to minister last year: agency (July 11)

Two recent articles outline how funding freezes, when adjusted for inflation, are actually a funding cut in real dollars.

I decided to use this to look at the same numbers on the City of Winnipeg’s Open Data portal and found most services have had their funding frozen for the last eight years, or, as the articles point out, a real dollar cut.

From 2014 to 2022 areas like libraries, recreation, economic development, and parks and urban forestry have seen real, and in some cases nominal, cuts in funding (13.8, 10.8, 34.3 and 25.9 per cent reductions, respectively).

At the same time service areas like roadway construction and maintenance has seen a near doubling (71.5 per cent increase).

At this rate we’ll have a lot of smooth roads to get places, but nowhere to go.

Steven Snyder

Winnipeg

Health mess one of province’s making

Re: Why is the province opting for private care? (Think Tank, July 11)

A recent op-ed by Dr. Dan Roberts disentangles the provincial government’s approach to dealing with the backlog of cases of individuals requiring sleep studies. He explains that the province received a proposal from the Sleep Disorders Centre that would have been cost-effective and would have led to a significant reduction in the wait times currently experienced by Manitobans with sleep disorders.

Rather than taking that advice, the government decided instead to offer a lucrative contract to a private provider, Cerebra. The cost to the public purse will be significantly greater than would have been the case had the proposal from the Sleep Disorders Centre been accepted.

To add insult to injury, the wait times will not be reduced by the private provider.

Dr Roberts’ op-ed comes on the heels of a news story on July 7 that the Manitoba government paid $60 million for private nurses in the fiscal year 2022-2023. And a few weeks ago, it was reported that the province was allocating $110 million to address surgical and diagnostic test waitlists.

A substantial portion of that allocation involves contracts with out-of-province private providers.

The headline of Dr. Roberts’ op-ed was “Why is the province opting for private care?” The evidence seems quite clear— this government is opting for private care because it wishes to demonstrate for purely ideological reasons that the public system doesn’t work.

Forget about all of the things that this government has done to undermine the public system. Forget about their disdain for the doctors and nurses who work on the frontlines and actually understand intimately what’s wrong and how to fix the system. Nope! They would have us believe that private, for-profit approaches are going to lead us to nirvana.

The fact remains that the government has been systematically destroying the public system through its adherence to austerity. The mess that they are trying to fix is one of their own making. The problem is that we are all paying for it — not just in financial terms, but in the health and well-being of Manitobans throughout the province.

Karen R. Grant

Winnipeg

Value of life

We searched and searched and searched for Morgan for months! During some of that time the Winnipeg police knew she was potentially in the landfill and did nothing.

Morgan is a mother, cousin and human being who deserves the dignity of not spending eternity in a landfill.

Resources were made available in Toronto for Nathaniel Brettell to be found in their landfill in 2021. No feasibility study, no questions of cost. Took seven months.

Why does his dignity have more value than Morgan Harris or Marcedes Myran? Why does his family get closure of knowing he won’t lie for eternity in a landfill and their families are offered mental health services instead of a search?

Why do some people have more value than others in our society?

Ruth Baines

Winnipeg

Story behind statistics

Re: “Underground solutions” (Letters, July 11)

There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics cited in letters to the editor from people like Kelly Ryback regarding Portage and Main. Citing a 2017 traffic study, Ryback incorrectly states that pedestrian times would not improve if we allowed them to cross the street at grade, but the opposite is true. How could it possibly be otherwise if you’re saving hundreds of metres per trip, especially for wheelchair users?

Ryback then says vehicle delays would increase by up to 421 per cent during peak times, which sounds much worse than vehicles may be delayed between about 10 to 50 seconds per trip at peak times. Both are true and both are from the same study.

The trouble with traffic studies is that they are worthless as soon as you make any of the intended changes they purport to study. As all Winnipeggers know, if you slow traffic on one street (due to construction or, heaven forbid, pedestrians), then traffic will move to other streets to compensate. If we allowed pedestrians to cross at Portage and Main, we may find that some cut-through traffic would find other ways to go around downtown.

Ryback notes that vehicle-to-vehicle collisions fell by 43 per cent at Portage and Main after the hideous concrete barriers were put up in 1979. However, vehicle-to-vehicle collisions fell almost that much everywhere between 1979 and 2021, according to the National Safety Council in the U.S.

Ryback says vehicle-pedestrian collisions fell by an astounding 82 per cent, but conveniently forgets that we’re talking about very small numbers here so percentage changes are meaningless. By the way, the worst intersections for pedestrians are found outside of downtown, according to MPI, so let’s not clutch our pearls over pedestrian safety at Portage and Main please. Slowing traffic down improves pedestrians’ life expectancy.

Finally, Ryback raises a fake problem by suggesting the only way to solve this problem is by digging a traffic tunnel under the downtown so vehicles don’t have to worry about annoying pedestrians at all.

It’s stupefying the knots people like Ryback will tie themselves in to justify their position that pedestrians have no place at Portage and Main. If barriers are great ideas at one major intersection, why don’t we see them at all major intersections? The answer, of course, is that would be ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as not being able to cross the street at our most famous intersection.

Apparently, Ryback prefers the current set up with its stinky, unsafe public stairwells and the dying underground mall they lead to. The intersection needs to be rebuilt now due to the aging structure. I hope this city council won’t spend stupidly to recreate barricades that have failed us in every way imaginable.

Adam Dooley

Former Chair of the Vote Open Campaign

Winnipeg