Letters, April 28

Advancing decency

Re: A civic sermon: teaching our children well (Think Tank, April 27)

John Wiens’ op-ed on the importance of how and what our children are taught in school, in this age of distrust and political and religious polarization, is spot on.

I remember hearing a podcast a while ago where the interviewer commented that in school he was taught how to read and write and do math, but not how to be a good person (and he lamented that fact). Some may argue the latter teaching should take place in the home, and I would agree.

However, some children don’t get that at home, and for those that do, learning about it in school as well can only result in a firmer, more well-rounded foundation for the child: an education that not only includes academic and physical skills, but also how to be a positive influence in the world.

And for that to happen, I concur with Wiens that teachers “need to be able to name and call out inhumanity wherever and whenever it occurs without fear of retribution.”

Let’s encourage our teachers to be enthusiastic advancers of human decency and kindness.

Mary Ann Loewen

Winnipeg

In desperate need of innovation

Re: Changing a broken economic system (Think Tank, April 24)

I agree with Alex Passey’s assessment of the problem in the April 24 Free Press about the government’s response to runaway cost of living inflation and critique that it seems any government solution to any challenge these days is tax cuts. Squandering our collective assets is a major cost to government and minor help to citizens.

The big question becomes what do we do about this inflation beast? How do we change the broken economic system, as the title of Passey’s column says, to address consumer price gouging, driven by profit and war? What kind of international agreements do we need to get off the blood-for-oil-economy roller coaster?

This oil-war price inflation crisis is a big crack in the system, a trigger point of intervention and opportunity to build public understanding and support for just transition. We should be moving to renewable energy at breakneck speed like many other countries, instead of passing legislation to speed up more extractivism pipelines and mining projects.

In the meantime, if you don’t want to pay for gas, hop on a bike, or bus, start a car pool, or work from home. Grow more food or start a food buying group.

At the individual level this is our just transition, but at community and systems level we need leadership to establish the mode shift in transportation, renewables for heating and cooling buildings, growing food without petro-chemicals.

The good news is we know how to do all these things and in some cases have the public policy calling for it. We desperately need social and economic innovation, not gimmicks and tax cuts. More neoliberalism will not address the problems of poverty and climate change caused by neoliberalism; only a just transition at the systemic supply chain level will do that.

Marianne Cerilli

Winnipeg

Bans won’t fix everything

Re: Manitoba premier says social media ban coming for kids, like Australia (April 25)

Premier Wab Kinew has announced that Manitoba will move to ban youth from using social media and AI chatbots. While this may seem like a logical step to protect children, particularly given the concerns for mental health harms often associated with these technologies, the move actually fails to account for nuance and complexity.

First, social media and AI chatbots are not the same. Arguably both are extractivist, can contribute to myriad social ills, and can co-exist on the same platform, but it’s important to distinguish them nonetheless. Good policy requires clear definitions and a deep understanding of these technologies.

Second, although it is true that Silicon Valley social media behemoths like Meta have worked opaquely and insidiously to “move fast and break things,” we must remember that fundamentally, social media is still a reflection of real-world human behaviour: banning the online world doesn’t shield youth from similar threats offline. Social media bans ostensibly shift punishment from problematic corporate and adult online behaviour onto youth and are also premised on ethically questionable surveillance (such as AI-powered age verification).

In my teaching experience (I am an associate professor at the Universite de Saint-Boniface and adjunct professor at McGill University), policing behaviour rarely translates to greater discernment and judicious use of tech; if anything it disempowers youth rather than holding the real perpetrators of harm and corporate greed to account.

We can agree that social media may need better guardrails and regulation — there is consensus around this point — but we may also consider that bans are unlikely to be a panacea.

Renée Desjardins

Winnipeg

Premier Wab Kinew told his fellow New Democrats at a party fundraiser that the province plans to protect kids from technology platforms by moving to ban children from using social media accounts and artificial intelligence chatbots.

Although Kinew did not immediately reveal the details of this plan, and while many including myself share his concerns about the negative effects that exposure to harm content online has on children — and certainly to adults, as well — I am fearful that the government means to follow the widespread and growing trend of banning youth from social media by using age verification tools as enforcement, which is both impractical and will ultimately put all Manitobans at greater risk of losing their rights and privacy in the digital space.

In a March 2, 2026 open signed by 438 security and privacy academics from 32 countries across the globe, the signatories called for a moratorium on the deployment of age-assurance technologies, noting that the efficacy of such technologies remain unaddressed, and that if implemented without careful consideration of the technological hazards and societal impact, may also even establish an infrastructure that could be exploited to ban access to Internet services for reasons unrelated to safety. To quote, “it is dangerous and socially unacceptable to introduce a large-scale access control mechanism without a clear understanding of the implications that different design decisions can have on security, privacy, equality, and ultimately on the freedom of decision and autonomy of individuals and nations.”

The core problem is not that children are on social media — it is that the companies and their social media platforms have deliberately designed to maximize engagement at the expense of everyone’s well-being, for children and adults alike, and are not properly held accountable for their responsibility to provide a safe environment for all of its users through moderation and safety features.

Any serious legislative efforts and right-respecting online harms regulation should be addressing the root of the harm: requiring platforms to take responsibility for any intentional facilitation of harmful illegal content, demanding transparency about its predatory algorithms, and giving its users like Manitobans more control over our feeds, our data, and our experience on these platforms. Banning children through weak age verification systems designed by companies whose real interest is retaining users does not and will never protect children — it only creates the appearance of action, while putting everyone at greater risk.

Manitobans deserve a government to consider and commit to meaningful, evidence-based consultation with the public regarding any future proposals to address the real, urgent, and multiplying online harms that appropriately targets the companies and their social media platforms themselves — not by blocking Manitobans from technologies until they reach a certain age.

Nick Anandranistakis

Winnipeg