Letters, Dec. 23

Keep the pressure on

Re: Developers say protection is ‘for the birds’ (Dec. 18)

I would first like to thank Ms. Buffie for a cogent, articulate piece.

Winnipeg is smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi Flyway for migratory birds. As such, it was a cause for celebration when Winnipeg City Council included a requirement for bird-friendly construction in November, 2024.

Glass in buildings is one of the major causes of death in migratory birds since they think it is open to their flight. When they hit the glass they are, at best, stunned and open to predation and, at worst, outright killed. CSA in 2019 passed a Bird-friendly Construction Standard and this was the basis for Winnipeg’s bylaw.

Many other cities in Canada have adopted this standard. In fact, Toronto has had such measures since 2009. All of these cities have seen construction continue, so why would Winnipeg companies complain?

Ms Buffie mentions at the end of her piece that city council was “poised to delete it today” i.e. at a public hearing at city hall on Dec. 18.

Due to the blizzard that hit the city overnight, the public hearing was cancelled and will be rescheduled for some time in January. This gives the citizens of Winnipeg even more time to express their support for the current bird-friendly measures and encourage the mayor and city councillors to retain them when the matter returns to the council floor for consideration.

Sincerely,

An avid bird watcher.

Wendy Barker

Winnipeg

Good choice

Twenty additional firefighters in 2026 is the best money the city has spent in a while. I’m OK if you raise my taxes a few dollars to provide citizens with a much needed service. It’s a service that you won’t appreciate until the “you know what” hits the fan.

It’s not just the physical and mental strain on firefighters that will get some relief, it’s their ability to get my wife and I out of our home in an emergency.

Bill Allan

Winnipeg

Mitigating risk

I have to take exception to a paragraph in the lead story of Friday’s Free Press; Blizzard wreaks havoc at schools, (Dec. 19).

In discussing why school divisions don’t cancel school well in advance of adverse weather, the article refers to a blizzard in April of 2022 that “didn’t materialize”. Here is the paragraph from the story… “In 2022, metro divisions pre-emptively closed all buildings for two days owing to an impending storm that was forecast to dump 30 to 50 centimetres of snow. The storm didn’t materialize.”

I happen to be intimately familiar with this storm, as I was the lead forecaster for Environment and Climate Change Canada that issued the blizzard warning the day before the event. The city experienced a blizzard (more than six hours of visibility less than 800 metres in snow and blowing snow). Widespread snowfall totals between 15-25 centimetres were reported in the city, and most highways (including the Trans-Canada West and Highway 75) were closed.

To say the storm didn’t materialize is, quite frankly, false.

In that case, because we issued strongly-worded blizzard warnings before the event (we were actually expecting a stronger storm than occurred), schools pre-emptively cancelled classes and businesses made alternate arrangements to keep people off of the roads. As a result… not that many bad things happened. Fewer accidents, fewer people stuck, fewer negative things in general. The warning served its purpose.

The point here is that we issue warnings in order for people to take action before the event occurs, in order to mitigate disaster.

Thus, if there is a blizzard warning in effect, you should probably not plan a trip to Brandon. You should consider that people living outside the city may not be able to make it to work without risking their lives.

Yes, we are wrong sometimes — Mother Nature — is the one ultimately in charge. But in general, we do a pretty good job at predicting the future.

My hope as a meteorologist issuing these warnings is that people: “Plan for the worse, hope for the best.”Occasionally a storm may miss us, or it may not be too bad — but are you prepared should that not be the case?

Dan Fulton

Winnipeg

Independent analysis

Once again, we recently read in the news that a patient deteriorated and, tragically, died while awaiting care in one of our province’s beleaguered ERs.

In addition to the important question of why this happened, follows an even more important question: Why does this keep happening?

Does Shared Health not have a critical incident process to thoroughly investigate “unintended harm” and avoid recurrences? It does, but I think we might all question its effectiveness, as the harm keeps happening, and often in strikingly similar circumstances.

I would like to suggest that not only is our health bureaucracy struggling under the Gordian Knot of its own complexity, but that entrusting this or any governmental bureaucracy to investigate its own failures is, frankly, a fool’s errand.

Shared Health is the body responsible for “coordinated planning and delivery of vital provincial services,” and is the same entity that oversees the CI process. Herein lies the issue. When planning fails, or when delivery breaks down, I ask: Is this truly the best approach for a fully transparent and honest appraisal of what went wrong and what needs to change?

While Shared Health may be positioned to understand the issues, is there not also tremendous conflict of interest? In my view, there is, and the entity responsible for provincial coordination and delivery of services should not be put in charge of investigating itself when those services fail. Even a perception of conflict should be enough to cast doubt on any official response. Full stop.

Fortunately, there is a template for change which I think we would all agree has greatly contributed to safety in the transportation industry. I’m referring to the 1990 creation of the federal Transportation Safety Board of Canada, an arm’s length agency free from industrial and governmental control.

The TSB has a mandate to: investigate transportation incidents to determine their causes, identify safety issues, recommend solutions to address these issues, and, publicly report its findings.

Critically, the wise individuals who created the TSB recognized that public confidence in the process was essential and would only occur if the agency was free of any competing influences when performing its work and releasing its reports.

This is exactly what we need in health care — an independent body to investigate health-care incidents, free to respect privacy legislation without any temptation to hide behind it, free to recommend system changes no matter how inconvenient and free to state its conclusions transparently, without anyone’s thumb tipping the scales away from change.

Our current government came to power two years ago with a mandate to improve health care. I would suggest that enough time has passed. The culture remains broken. Frontline workers have repeatedly raised alarm about deteriorating safety (including staff safety) for years to little avail. The system is overdue for a fresh approach.

What would be transformational in health is what transportation figured out decades ago: move the investigation of critical incidents an arm’s length away from its own administration. If our government made this single change, it would be a giant step towards a safe, patient culture that is, at last, truly transparent, accountable and effective.

Robert Sweetland, MD

St. Andrews