Letters, April 10

Critical thinking

Re: Tough to make repairs when you don’t know what’s wrong, what parts are needed (April 7)

Tom Brodbeck’s opinion piece about the problems in health care was devastating!

The inability of government workers to develop “workforce planning figures” for future ministry hiring has long been a problem in Manitoba. I suspect that the same problem exists in all the government’s ministries.

What could explain this “mysterious” shortcoming?

What abilities do government workers need to effectively perform their duties?

They need to be able to think and reason, and they need a broad range of knowledge.

Where could future government employees get the proper training for their careers?

The answer used to be education. What happened to education in Canada?

I know what happened to education in Ontario. In the 1950s/1960s, Ontario changed the way future teachers could become licensed to teach in the elementary schools and in the high schools. All prospective teachers were required to attend the social science faculty at universities and receive a three-year degree and another year receiving a second degree allowing them to teach.

When the first social graduates were hired, they spent their first year revising the long-established curriculum. It seems they were more interested in the happiness of all the students than they were in the quality of education. They made the curriculum easier to pass. That was just the beginning – over the years, they announced that since the students were “equal” they all should all pass every subject and avoid being examined.

Education in Ontario became “social” rather than academic. Happiness became the chief goal of the education system.

When graduates of this system arrived at the college where I was teaching (1980s/1990s), I discovered that these poorly educated students had great difficulty in passing the required college subjects.

What are the present-day students missing in their “education” these days?

They do not have to take much in the way of analytical subjects — mathematics, natural sciences such as chemistry, physics, biology, etc., — subjects that teach the students how to think. There are no thinking skills needed in social “education.”

When, I moved to Brandon ten years ago, I found the social education was well established — as it is in most of Canada.

If you want people who can solve future-needs problems, you are going to have to teach them how to think.

Barry Kavanagh

Brandon

Wise words

Given the current state of violent conflicts in the world with the wars in Ukraine and Iran to name just two, I’d like to share some words I saw painted on a wall in Mexico that have stuck with me.

It goes like this: “When the power of love overcomes the love for power the world will know peace.”

David Hedman

Winnipeg

Consequences of AI

The book Artifically Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI by David Eliot notes that Geoffery Hinton of Canada perhaps did more to make AI useful than others. Hinton’s idea of neural networks added much to AI developments.

A key comment by Eliot was that AI only amplifies such problems as homelessness, inequality and poverty that already exist. David Eliot has done an excellent job of telling how AI developed. He hopes people today will focus more on societal problems and ignore the billionaires in Silicon Valley who mainly work to enhance their profits.

Our concern about putting AI to work may overlook the people who now are doing their best to make a better world.

Barry Hammond

Winnipeg

Unfathomable strategy

Re: Appeal launched to halt war on ground squirrels (April 8)

Parents, wake up. As I write this, nine athletic fields in Winnipeg are in the process of being doused with not one, but two lethal poisons — Rozol and RoCon — to kill ground squirrels.

Rozol, a powerful anti-coagulant, guarantees a slow, excruciating death to anything that ingests it — whether it be ground squirrels, other wildlife, pets or children. These poisons are not selective; they are indiscriminate killers.

According to James Hare, a professor of biological sciences at the U of M, Rozol doesn’t just disappear after it is applied on a field. Rather, it remains “persistent in the environment,” something that should strike fear into the heart of every parent.

It is unfathomable to me that the city thinks it is making athletic fields safer for people by dousing them with a lethal poison that doesn’t simply disappear when the job is done – but continues to linger where kids run, tumble and play.

This raises a serious question for parents: Do you want your kids playing on poisoned fields?

With one stroke of the pen, Environment Minister Mike Moyes can stop this insanity — today — by suspending the city’s poison permit, much like he kiboshed the city’s misguided plan to use Giant Destroyer last year.

John Youngman

Winnipeg

Thirty days or free

Re: Improvements for patients or window dressing? (Think tank, April 8); Kinew drops hints about another gas tax cut for Manitoba motorists (April 7)

In a change that has been largely ignored by the media, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government just implemented a service guarantee respecting passport applications. Any application not processed within its 30-day service standard will result in a full refund of the fees paid for the application. While it is limited in scope, it is a model that should be considered for other government services, especially those that are plagued with an ongoing inability to provide even more important services on a timely basis — like health care.

Paul Thomas in his review of Manitoba’s Bill 27, The Declaration of Principles for Patient Health Care Act, notes that its provisions are largely performative. The bill states that patients are entitled to “timely access” to health care but makes that entitlement irrelevant by providing that a failure to comply with any provision of the proposed law cannot be the basis for legal action.

A more serious approach to “timely access” would be for Premier Wab Kinew to make meaningful commitments for Manitobans on wait lists — to articulate specific service standards for various high demand procedures (e.g. joint replacements) and important diagnostic tests (e.g. MRI’s, CT Scans, etc). If the service standard is not met, then the Manitoba government would pay for those services to be provided in another province. (Several other provinces allow clinics to provide services to out-of-province patients). The payment would be limited to the amount that would be paid if the work was done in Manitoba with patients making up any shortfall, so that there would be no additional cost to Manitoba taxpayers.

While there would be an impact on cash flow, Kinew’s government seems unconcerned about its deficit and the burgeoning Manitoba debt. He is apparently considering another reduction in the gas tax similar to what he did in 2024. It appears we are willing to go further into debt by spending another $350 million on a gas tax reduction but unwilling to spend that money to alleviate the pain and suffering of Manitoba patients.

Let’s get our priorities right.

Implementing a process to fix health care by committing to service standards and providing a government-supported alternative when those standards aren’t met would at least be a bit closer to “the most important thing that a government ever did in the history of Manitoba” than cutting the gas tax will ever be.

Robert Pruden

Winnipeg