Letters, July 21

A bad mix

Re: Police and mental health don’t mix: so why can’t we fix it? (July 16)

I would like to thank Dan Lett for his recent column regarding mental health and police. Things like that are a good way to start a conversation.

Unfortunately, guns and people in crisis don’t mix well. And that’s what uniformed police officers bring to people in crisis, whether that crisis is fuelled by drugs or mental-health issues. To a person in psychosis, that can be pretty scary. Especially if they have had previous interactions with police. They might be afraid of a police officer, or angry, and want to defend themselves against past wrongs, whether real or imagined. I am willing to bet it feels real to them.

And if there’s a communication barrier, it’s all the more difficult. For example, shouting or talking softly to someone who can’t hear very well is going to be difficult. A person in crisis might not hear a police officer shouting or asking them to put down a weapon or get down on the ground.

Unfortunately, I have seen what can happen in situations like this. I won’t bore you with the details.

But I do know how helpless someone can feel when someone they care about is in crisis. I also know how it feels when someone you care about was hurt by police while they were in crisis.

You can live with people with mental-health issues your entire life and still not know what to do when the next crisis occurs.

But when you seek help, whether by calling police or trying to utilize other methods, you don’t expect police to shoot or hurt someone you care about. You expect to be helped, and you expect the person in crisis to be helped.

So, it is disappointing and heartbreaking to know that another person in Winnipeg has been shot and killed while reportedly in crisis.

Michelle J. Melanson, Winnipeg

The ‘broken windows’ theory

Re: Sharing the road (July 18)

Many of us have written all sorts of letters during the last several years regarding the unregulated use of unregistered e-vehicles on our streets and pathways. It’s dangerous. So, thank you Zoe Pierce and Joyanne Pursaga for your informative and thought-provoking article.

Dithering on establishing some rules and regulations for the use of such conveyances calls to mind the blind eye New York City’s council turned on enforcing the law upon the vandalizing of residential, automobile, and shop windows in the 1970s, and the escalation, thought consequential, in other sorts of crime.

Chris Jensen, Winnipeg

Big picture thinking

Re: Cool yourself, not your car: stop denying climate change (July 19)

Dan Lett’s column prompted me to compare the fuel consumed by an idling car with that of a Boeing 747 in flight. A quick search shows that a car idling for an hour uses up to half a gallon (1.9 litres) of fuel. A 747 burns roughly one gallon per second or (almost 15,000 litres) per hour.

On the surface, this may seem like comparing apples and oranges. Still, the numbers should give us pause. We hear a great deal about the environmental impact of idling vehicles, but far less about the staggering volume of jet fuel burned daily. The contrast is worth noting.

Of course, fuel should never be wasted and I agree that idling is unnecessary and wasteful. But if we are serious about understanding what contributes most significantly to climate change, we also need to “think big.” The internet now offers real‑time images of global air traffic — thousands of aircraft criss-crossing the planet every hour of every day. Those images remind us that meaningful ecological change will require sacrifices far beyond shutting off our engines at the curb.

We certainly ought not to ‘sit idle’ in our cars. But let’s not kid ourselves about the relative magnitude of that impact. If we are going to confront climate change honestly, we must be willing to look at the global picture.

Edwin Buettner, Winnipeg

Dan Lett’s column about people running their cars to either warm up in the winter or cool down in the summer struck a chord with me.

It has long been a bugbear with me when City of Winnipeg or Manitoba Hydro vehicles park on the street and leave the engines running. As Dan pointed out, vehicles do not need to be warmed up before moving so that isn’t a valid excuse for doing so. In the summer, the windows are often down so they aren’t enjoying the cool air of AC. Often no one is even in the vehicle as it is running. These are usually big trucks, so they spew lots of green-house gases into the atmosphere.

I would think the companies that own these vehicles would like to reduce costs of running them, especially with today’s high fuel prices. Companies that have fleet vehicles could invest in cut-off switches that would shut off their vehicles after idling for a few minutes.

Alternately, they could mandate that their employees turn off the vehicles and sanction any who do not do so. I imagine this would cut down substantially on emissions in our city and province.

Wendy Barker, Winnipeg

Avoiding a tantrum

Re: Making deals with ‘the Donald’ (Think Tank, July 18)

David McLaughlin (and others) question why there is so much secrecy around the Gordie Howe bridge deal with the Trump government.

Can they not think of the major reason for that secrecy? What do they think would happen if the details revealed that, once again, Mr. Carney has outsmarted Mr. Trump (like that is hard to do)?

Can’t think of it? Well then let me tell you. The ‘crybaby in chief’ would tear up the deal, hold his breath, and stomp his feet until a deal that actually benefitted him was put in place. Accept the secrecy as a template for how (Carney) has to deal with the Trump government. As he implied, the old Canada-U.S. relationship is not coming back.

Rene Vincent, Winnipeg

Blowing smoke

There was a time when America’s response to massive wildfires in Canada would be to send equipment and personnel to help meet the emergency, just as we routinely do when our southern neighbours are faced with their own annual wildfire problem.

In fact, there is an agreement between our countries to assist one another in such circumstances. That time has passed and we are now faced with an ugly America that has abandoned science in favour of a mindless, greed-driven primitivism.

Since official U.S . policy is that climate change is a hoax, we should be similarly characterizing America’s “smoke problem.”

Norman Brandson, Winnipeg

How ironic that Donald Trump is talking about raising tariffs to punish Canadians for the smoke from our forest fires, when efforts to combat global warming — the cause of these fires — are being thwarted, reversed and cancelled by him and his administration!

Georgia Klass, Winnipeg

Dear Donald,

Perhaps we’d have better success fighting these forest fires if there wasn’t so much hot air blowing from down south.

Anne MacLean, Winnipeg