Letters, April 25

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/04/2024 (867 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Questionable choice by MPI

Re: Woman feeling run over by MPI decision after her vehicle side-swiped in traffic (April 24)

Unless more people complain or take MPI to small claims court, it’s just too easy for MPI to say an accident is 50/50. If people just lie down and surrender, why should MPI need to do their job and investigate when it is so much cheaper to just claim 50/50?

Hopefully Premier Wab Kinew has seen the story and tells MPI to get off their arse and do a proper investigation of such claims like the person who had their car hit while parked but is 50 per cent responsible somehow.

All government departments/Crown corporations need to do their jobs properly, especially when something is questioned.

Ron Robert

Winnipeg

 

MPI’s “decision-making process,” if you can call it that, has always been based on what is best for MPI, not the customer. 50-50 default findings bring in two deductibles and increase two policy rates, resulting in more revenue than an investigation which results in a more accurate and fair judgment. Plus, investigations cost staff time, which also hurts their politically-motivated bottom line.

By the way, don’t waste your time on the independent adjudicator. It’s just a retired judge who reads MPI’s own report and nothing else, so the findings stay the same. MPI even ignores police reports, so despite being hit by a drunk driver who ran a red light, I was forced to take the other driver to small claims court.

But the savings to Manitoba drivers, say the politicians. I lived in Toronto and was paying $800. When I moved home to Winnipeg, the same car cost $1,200 to insure, and with the full merit discount.

MPI relies on its monopoly to extract additional revenue for the government while providing poor service to their customers. Government’s role should be to regulate those private companies providing the service to keep them honest, not to provide the service itself, because right now there’s no one keeping MPI honest.

Keith Gordon

Winnipeg

The battle with lupus

Re: Sick and tired (April 22)

AV Kitching’s article really hit home for me. I felt like I was reading my own story. I felt seen and heard. No one else in my family has lupus, and I only know of one other person who has it, so for once I felt like I wasn’t alone.

I was diagnosed with lupus in October 2023. To say it has been a struggle has been an understatement. Getting the diagnosis was a struggle. Like so many others, I had struggled for decades, and for decades I was told it was always something else. I would get treated for one thing, and another thing would pop up. When I received my diagnosis, it was a relief to know that I was not imagining things, and that it wasn’t just in my head.

Had it not been for my dentist, who noticed something was up with my teeth, despite great oral hygiene, and my optometrist for putting all of the weirdly connected symptoms of dry mouth, dry eyes, dry skin etc. all together in August of 2023, I would not have my diagnosis.

My optometrist urged me to advocate for myself, and to ask my GP to do bloodwork to rule out an autoimmune disease. She was right. All of the inflammatory markers were off the charts. I feel like my optometrist saved my life.

Life has been a struggle. In October 2023, my rheumatologist also shared that I had a strong positive for lupus, in bloodwork that was done on me in 2013! No one told me! So for the last 10 years I struggled, unaware that I was living with an autoimmune disease, and I continued to push through life.

During these past 10 years, I was hospitalized several times, suffered a life altering injury, I missed out on a lot of life: time with family and friends, and I missed a lot of work. Every year I use up all of my sick days, because getting sick is never just a cold or something small that I recover quickly from. When I get sick, it always turns into something big, that requires prescription medications, and takes forever for me to recover from.

All this time I had lupus and had no idea!

Now that I know what this is, the struggle has been finding a treatment that works for me. Other than meds, I haven’t been given any other advice. I feel like I have had to find out information on my own. Your article has shed light on other treatments options, and resources I did not know existed.

Thanks again for writing this piece. It meant a lot to me. Education and awareness are key to helping people understand the silent struggle of people who are living with lupus.

Melissa Carter

Winnipeg

Companion animals

Re: Dogs are our greatest creation (Think Tank, April 23)

I enjoyed Dogs are our greatest creation by Tommy Tomlinson. He gives a plausible account for the domestication of wolves,which produced an enormously useful creature which we still benefit from today.

I found it somewhat ironic that he owns a cat at home. I believe the cat played an important role in humanities’ history as well. Cats were useful in protecting the first granaries from rodent infestations,and gradually became domesticated.

I confess I am a cat person at heart.

Michael Dowling

Winnipeg

 

Seniors suffer on property deals

Re: Affordable housing in the core (Letters, April 20)

Public/private options for mixed/social housing were developed in the late 1970s, but with no safeguards to ensure that the public and rental money that paid off the mortgages in the private, non-profit title-holders under CMHC agreements that were public money guaranteed.

Just make sure that there are no more rip-offs of millions by those non-profits, who eagerly signed up to put their names on the land titles of these projects and (like Lions Place in Winnipeg) then sold them to the private sector once the millions in mortgages were paid off by the renters (seniors, in the case of Lions Place) for millions in pure profit mere decades later. Lions Place was even paid management fees from the rental income.

Vulnerable seniors tossed into the rental market and displaced.

Lions Club did not contribute a dime before or after the 40 years.

All this can no longer be done on a “handshake” between the levels of government, the CIBC, the CMHC, and religious or service groups, such as Lions. The initial money for these projects also went to the private building and construction trades, etc.

They all did well, but the concept that the equity would then pay for renovations and improvements by further guaranteed rentals on an ongoing basis fell by the wayside in favour of the enormous quick bucks. Where is that $22 million in pure profit derived from seniors’ four decades of rental payments? We may never know, as these are private corporations that are not at all accountable to the public.

This can’t be allowed to continue, and there are many such projects already sold off, and many more now at risk.

Victoria Lehman

Winnipeg

Tragic memories

Re: ‘We loved you in life, we loved you in death’ (April 20)

My heart goes out to Preston Heinbigner’s family, friends and co-workers. What a tragic story.

The article indicated that firefighters want Workers Compensation to recognize his death “as being in the line of duty.”

If so, I hope Workers Compensation treats Mr. Heinbigner’s widow better than they treated the seven widows whose husbands died in the line of duty related to government plane crash in 1952.

In this case the widows were offered a choice: prove negligence and sue or accept a $50/month payment until such time as they remarried.

The Department of Transport inquiry into the crash later proved that there was negligence involved in how the plane was serviced.

By that time it was too late to sue. My mother and the other widows accepted the small monthly payment. My mother never remarried.

Mac Horsburgh

Winnipeg