Letters, April 20

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This article was published 20/04/2024 (874 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Affordable housing in the core

Re: Coming to market: deeply affordable housing (April 18)

Yes, Winnipeg needs more affordable housing, but is it what we need to restore a downtown as normally conceived? Downtown traditionally is a place where shops and businesses concentrate and benefit from office workers and nearby upscale residential living.

Eaton Centre and surrounding area in Toronto illustrates such a mix. The price for new condos being built near Eaton Centre varies from $600,000 or so to millions of dollars. There are many benefits to such a model for Winnipeg, albeit on a more modest scale.

First, everyone benefits from taxes that upscale developments bring without the massive investment in infrastructure that results from new suburbs. And private owners invest in their units, which maintains and increases value without government (i.e., taxpayer) assistance.

Second, downtown shops, restaurants, and numerous other businesses benefit from the local presence of residents with money to spend. And a concentration of well-off customers brings new businesses to occupy vacant properties, such as medical professionals, lawyers, and the like.

Third, the environment benefits both at a local level and more widely. Residents of such communities are less likely to drive, such as younger people who work in offices or thriving businesses located nearby, and retirees who find themselves walking to most amenities, including theatres and a concert hall that already exist in the area.

A special benefit for cities like Winnipeg is the opportunity to save and convert even more heritage buildings. Such buildings are prevalent in the west Exchange, including several just east of Market Lands on Princess. Why build new when potential for tax revenue and quality living exists, and the many “for lease” store fronts downtown hardly need competition?

Some will charge “NIMBYism” because I have lived in a converted warehouse in the East Exchange for over 30 years. But similar conversions have increased the number of residents in the area and the value of properties, a trend that should be encouraged. Affordable housing can be built in many areas close to the core of downtown without compromising opportunities to increase taxes and restore a true downtown for Winnipeg.

Jim Clark

Winnipeg

A new chant

Go Habs Go, Go Flames Go, Go Oilers Go, Go (InsertTeam Name Here) Go, and their ilk are ubiquitous throughout the league yet our fans’ chant of Go Jets Go has been missing the net since Day 1 of the WHA.

Winnipeg Jets hockey fans have the league’s best shot at uniqueness so wouldn’t it be wonderfully appropriate for 15,000+ fans to be screaming out Fly Jets Fly?

Jerry Rubin

Winnipeg

Portrayals of vice

Re: Women, violence and art (Think Tank, April 18)

There was something missing in Shannon Sambert’s well-written piece about violence against female characters in opera.

In Carmen, Don José is tied up in a chair, humiliated, physically assaulted and attacked with a knife by another man. However, none of that gets a trigger warning about violence, in this case, against men.

On television, plays or films when a woman slaps — which is assault — a man, it’s not taken seriously, or it’s played for laughs.

Female characters commit violence too: Norma kills her children. Salome makes John the Baptist to be beheaded. Delilah is a treacherous woman. Medea murders her own children. In Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel Beloved, Sethe does the same. In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra lures her unfaithful husband into the bath and hacks him to death with an axe. Cathy Ames, in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, drives her teacher to suicide, burns down her family home with her parents still inside, becomes a prostitute, and then murders her madame to get her job. And who can forget serial killer Annie Wilkes in Misery by Stephen King? See What I Have Done’s Lizzie Borden gives her mother 40 whacks with an axe, and her father 41, when he sees what she has done.

And many female characters goad male ones into murder: Lady Macbeth, Phyllis Dietrichson, Abigail Williams, Thérèse Raquin, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace…

Archetypes, whether they are male or female, just like the portrayal of some of the seven mortal vices, namely jealousy, lust, greed and rage, are universal, and mortal, for a reason.

Jesus Angel Miguel Garcia

Winnipeg

A real think tank

Just finished reading the “letters to the editor” and I have often wondered if our politicians ever read them. There are so many good suggestions put forward by the people over the years and in my mind it would be in their best interest if they did.

So many good people run for a political position with good intent whether it be starting as a school trustee, councillor, reeve, MLA or an MP. However, once elected they become a different person who eventually gets disengaged with their electorate with the power that was bestowed upon them, and then they just become another party member collecting their pay and accumulating their pension credits.

I understand they have to be a team member if their party is to succeed or on the other scenario, I’ll rub your back if you rub my back if you support me on a particular bill etc. — but that’s not why they were elected. The system has got so polarized over the years maybe it’s time now to start listening to the people and a good start would be by reading the letters to the editor.

James Hannah

Winnipeg

Unrealistic expectations

Once again folks in Canada are complaining about the high cost of gas while they sit in line in their SUV’s and trucks while they shout they cannot even afford to eat.

Seems to me that if you can afford a $60,000 vehicle, you can afford the gas and afford to eat, and if you can’t, then you should consider purchasing a cheaper, more fuel-efficient vehicle. But no, it’s all the prime minister’s fault again apparently, although I am not sure how the PM is supposed to stop oil and other companies from gouging customers.

And if you think Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre will be able to lower prices, you are dreaming. He is a politician who stands up for corporations. We are living in a society where people want a certain lifestyle and think its their right to have one so they go in debt and then blame whoever they can.

Stewart Jacques

Winnipeg

Don’t wait to get jab

Re: Silence on vax cutoff (Letters, April 19)

Kudos to letter writer Kristen Hardy for alerting readers of the government’s foolhardy intent to cut off access to COVID vaccinations at the end of this month.

After I had my latest (seventh) vaccination last week, I should have thought of blabbing through the letters to editor portal in the hope of embarrassing the mucky-mucks at Manitoba Health into cancelling the looming cutoff.

Even though they seem to be unaware that COVID is still about, they seem to be taking the similar route of “don’t tell the public anything” that the old PC government followed. Shame!

Hurry up people, you might still be able to get a vaccination at the local drug store before April 30.

Bob Sales

Winnipeg