Letters, Jan. 20

Make room for camp

Re: New homes, businesses and parks anchor plan for revitalized Point Douglas (Feb. 19)

The planned redevelopment of Point Douglas should include as many campsites as practical to accommodate the hundreds of citizens who have no homes nor the means to acquire one.

You can see in Thursday’s Free Press that the southeast corner of Point Douglas is completely empty, so why not establish a temporary riverside campsite acreage here? It can be converted into the planned national park further in the future when homelessness has hopefully been dealt with.

For many years now, Winnipeg has had to contend with helter-skelter encampments; unregulated, unsafe, demoralizing to look at and no doubt hard to live in by most of their occupants. Today’s answer to dozens of unsafe river encampments is one very progressive, humane and temporary campground.

Kevin Ferris

Winnipeg

Why systems fail

Re: Family of woman who died after 11-hour wait in ER calls for inquiry (Feb. 18)

The death of Stacey Ross at St. Boniface Hospital should stop us in our tracks.

For those of us who have spent decades in cardiac care, this was not simply a busy night in an overcrowded emergency department. It shows a system that has come to accept levels of risk that would once have been unthinkable.

An 11-hour wait for a patient with escalating cardiac symptoms should never be treated as a routine capacity issue. I have worked through staffing shortages and full units. Those pressures are not new. What is new is how often they are accepted as explanation. In cardiology, time is muscle. When warning signs escalate, clinical urgency must override logistics.

Years ago, Manitoba moved toward a multidisciplinary cardiac model organized around the patient’s journey from presentation to definitive care. It was imperfect, but its purpose was clear. Over time, institutional silos and administrative priorities reasserted themselves. When care fragments along departmental lines, each provider may follow protocol and meet internal targets, yet no one is clearly accountable for the whole arc of the patient’s experience. That is where harm occurs.

We now default to the language of “system failure.” But systems are built through decisions about governance, authority and resource allocation. When responsibility diffuses, accountability disappears.

External reviews have become our reflex. Too often they audit compliance rather than confront structural flaws. St. Boniface is Manitoba’s only tertiary cardiac centre. That carries a fiduciary duty to deliver timely, definitive care. Reform must restore clear governance and transparent lines of responsibility, where clinical outcomes are the primary measure of legitimacy.

When a cardiac patient waits 11 hours, someone should be able to answer, plainly, why?

Alan Menkis

Winnipeg

The end of winter

Re: Vonn, Shiffrin and Brignone among the Olympic skiers voicing concern over receding glaciers (Feb. 18)

This piece about glaciers provides a sobering reminder of what we lose when cold weather is threatened.

This hits home for me because I come from a region that doesn’t reliably get snow anymore. My mother grew up in Philadelphia in the ’60s and her mother used to take her skating on frozen ponds.

By the time I was growing up in nearby Baltimore in the ’90s, skating on bodies of water just wasn’t really something you could do. If we protect our environment, we protect our winters and so many cherished pastimes.

Mary Blake Rose

London, Ont.

Looking at the positives

Reading, listening or viewing the news these days is a challenge of mental fortitude. Who can keep track of misinformation or disinformation? Who has the appetite or mental bandwidth to absorb absurdities that humanity continues to provide? Who can pause the longest and grieve for the atrocities of war, senseless murders and daily domestic accidents? Who can handle hearing about the failures and wrongdoings of systems until we think the sky is falling? And I didn’t even include “what’s his name.”

Lately, I am exhausted when listening to media coverage of the Manitoba health-care system that is primarily critical with far fewer examples of what is working well. So, today, I will share my own anecdote.

A few weeks ago, I fell on the ice while skating and smashed my knee. I knew I would have to give the bruising time. When acute pain continued, I made an appointment at the minor illness and injury clinic using their online booking, it was easy to do. I showed up. Greeted by a friendly front desk, waited five minutes and then was seen by an empathetic doctor.

X-ray requisition in hand, I returned to the waiting room for another seven minutes and proceeded to the X-ray department just down the hall. Snap, snap, snap. I returned to the doctor and we made plans for treatment.

There will always be terrible instances of poor judgment, human error — system failure. But for folks like doctors, nurses, aides and clerks who show up every day with the intention of helping, it might be encouraging to hear something complimentary as they drive to work. Talk to anyone who has come from a country without public health care — they would remind us how good we have it.

It wouldn’t hurt if positivity occasionally grabbed a headline.

Shelagh Mcgregor

St. Andrews

Canadian identity

Decades ago, it was common practice for young American travellers to attach Canadian flags on their backpacks and luggage while travelling in Europe. Rightly so — they were ashamed of the reputation of their country due to American involvement in the war in Vietnam. Today the situation is the same due to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the reputation of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Tourist guides we encountered were trained to avoid potential tense situations with American citizens who were in their groups of visitors. The touring professionals are trained to explain to U.S. tourists that they cannot buy their way to the front of the line. The boisterous reputation of some American tourists is a known fact. It would be easy for Trump to explain to American tourists how to lie about their identity.

Canada’s positive reputation abroad has taken generations to build and it is not for sale — especially to Donald Trump and his thoughtless supporters.

Imagine the horror of having to give up your precious Canadian identity and becoming American citizens. Does this mean we would have to own an American passport? As resistance to U.S. threats increase, look to Trump to manufacture an international incident as an excuse to invade territories he wants to take illegally. Our elected officials need to be vigilant.

Believe me, Canada is worth fighting for!

Denis Gautron

Winnipeg

The right to be angry

When I took counselling courses, I learned one of the worst things you can do is tell an individual how he or she should feel.

I am sick and tired of politicians and administrators from the United States talking about how we should react to being treated after all the aggressive behaviour, insults and lack of respect from our southern neighbours.

According to many Americans, we should just lie down and take their verbal attacks and insults. If we do retaliate (totally justified), we are told that our behaviour is akin to a child having hissy fits.

I am tired of Canadians being portrayed as kind and friendly, but without any backbone. Americans — you are wrong. Don’t tell us how to feel.

Kenneth Miller

Oakbank