Letters, May 14

Setting the stage for decorum

There’s so much roundabout conversation with respect to disrespect in the legislature. Unlike roundabouts, where drivers depart and progress towards their desired destination, provincial politicians choose to add another roundabout thinking that this will actually help drivers successfully reach the destination!

The answers are so obviously simple that only politicians, the people who continually and consistently show they’ve lost touch with reality, believe adding more problems will fix old problems.

Only a fool or member of a political party believes that matters are actually debated in the House. There has not been debate for decades, period! It is all about casting stones upon the person(s) across the floor. Salient points with respect to a bill or question are nowhere to be heard. Only contentious, disrespectful, barbs tossed across each other’s bow!

The remedy is so simple — enforce existing rules.

“Debate, questions, answers, comments” must be directly related to the topic of discussion, period. At the first hint of wandering away or non-discussion point comment, the speaker must interject. The House speaker must steer the floor speaker to the topic. Benefit of speaking time going to the compliant with non-compliant losing some of theirs. Period.

Hecklers. Gone immediately. Punted out of the house for the remainder of the day. Period.

Personal attacks. Gone immediately for the remainder of the day with no return until a formal apology is presented in the House.

The rules are in place for the Speaker to enforce. There is no room for partisanship, real, implied or perceived with respect to the Speaker. Enforce the rules equally, fairly and vigilantly.

That is the only way to establish decorum and debate in the legislature! Not by adding more rules that typically don’t get enforced anyway.

Andre Desrosiers

Beaconia

Rethink closure of training tanks

Re: “City needs better plan for pool” (Letters, May 12)

I agree with Robert Granke. Mr. Granke points out that many Winnipegers use the Pan Am Pool to stay fit and healthy. Like Mr. Granke, I use the training tank several mornings a week for lap swimming.

Up until a year ago, I swam with a masters club at the Joyce Fromson Pool at the U of M. Like the Pan Am Pool it required major renovations and appears to be closed until at least the fall. Unfortunately, there are really no options for lap swimming in the south end of the city.

When I’m at the Pan Am pool in the mornings, only half of the training tank is used (it’s really two pools). I expect this is on account of insufficient staff to operate both pools and not enough demand. While the training tank is to remain open for competitive training (most of whom are likely school age), it’s difficult to imagine that there can’t be any time for public lap swimming if the two training tanks are open just as they are now during school/daytime hours. With the main pool under repair, one would expect there should be staff available to adequately guard both training tanks.

It seems the city needs to do a rethink on closing the training tanks to any public lap swimming. I agree with Mr. Granke, we should expect nothing less.

Penny Kelly

Winnipeg

Breaking things

Re: Google disrupts hackers using AI to exploit weakness in digital defences (May 12)

Facebook once had a saying: “Move fast and break things.”

AI companies moved fast and are in the process of breaking things. Companies like Google have hyped their generative AI’s ability to code; Microsoft has pushed Windows security updates primarily authored by AI.

Programmers have been facing layoffs as managers seek to have computers code themselves. Labour issues aside, this is fundamentally a bad idea, as generative AI is notoriously poor at math compared to humans and programming requires a solid grounding in logic and mathematics. A human can troubleshoot their code, an AI cannot, since that process involves piecing context clues together.

This shift from human coders to AI coding has introduced security issues that can be exploited by less-skilled hackers. This is a self-made problem created by a desire to shrink work forces and, thus, standards of living.

Google broke our leg and wish to be acknowledged and praised for putting a Band-Aid on it.

Kelsey Enns

Winnipeg

On sector expansion

Re: Churchill project not worth the risk (Think Tank, May 12)

I take some issue with throwing shade on big plans for the port of Churchill. The columnist wrote: “The Manitoba government could have focused on established industries such as aerospace, biosciences, mining and/or agrifoods as the foundation for one or more national-scale projects, but it didn’t.”

The four economic sectors mentioned are completely in the private sphere. Why haven’t the captains of industry expanded those sectors in the past? Why would they need government funding to do so now?

As well, none of those sectors offers any sort of economic benefit to our Indigenous population — at least they haven’t in the past — and the port of Churchill project is built around Indigenous involvement. The port project could have massive social, as well as economic, impact on Manitoba’s North and its people.

I realize the author’s basic gripe is that the NDP government is disinclined to shower cash on Tory strongholds — but it’s more than naïve to expect otherwise.

Kelly Armstrong

Ile des Chenes

How we got here

The cause of the drug crisis is not moral failure, and it has nothing to do with criminals being so much better at crime.

The cause of the drug crisis is the loss of the world I was born into as a Gen-X kid, where I was led to believe that I would be able to have a home and drive a car on any sort of job, and on a good job, I would be able to support a family.

Through the late ’70s-early ’80s, I rode my bike everywhere. Never saw an encampment of homeless people. I saw “down and out” people, mostly old men, around Main Street. It’s not like we didn’t have poverty, we did, but we did not have universal precariousness, to the degree that both parents in a family must work, and work long hours, just to have a roof and food. Forget about PTA bake sales and coaching the kids’ team. That’s the other, departed world we grew up in.

That world was the legacy of a century of struggle by organized labour, and socialist thought more generally, where it was self-evident that science and reason were important tools, and that the remarkable genius of any given Einstein is darkened by the truth of just how many other minds, equally equipped for great breakthroughs, spent their entire lives picking cotton or driving a truck, for lack of access to knowledge and opportunity.

But starting in 1980, we have fetishized the profit seeker as the most moral among us, their holy greed supposedly the engine of progress. But for all their promises of great prosperity if we just hand enough of our treasure and lives over to these oligarchs, what has happened is that the world we were born into, the bright future I grew up believing in, has been juiced like a piece of citrus, and we are left living in the dried up husk thereof.

I believe that Premier Wab Kinew understands that more cops and more jails and more violence is not going to fix any of this brutality we have become so inured to. I see the attempts to bring a form of care to those in crises they have reacted themselves into. But with a right-wing conservative federal government in power and wearing the skin of the supposed “left” side of this is insane post-Reagan overton window, he will forever be hampered in his ability to execute even that Band-Aid level help.

And soon enough, the demographics, infuriated to spite, will cast their vote for the arsonist party, once again. God help us all.

James Paskaruk

Arnes