Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks at an event at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport on March 23.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Above all
Re “Canada is one of history’s most successful countries. Here’s a look at who’s trying to destroy it, and how” (Opinion, May 16): News by nature tends to be focused on problems, but we too easily forget to celebrate our strengths and give thanks for them.
Canada’s success has been based on acknowledging our interdependence and valuing our diversity. Neo-fascists, narrow nationalists and racists are aided and abetted by politicians obsessed with gaining or retaining power. They fail to exercise the responsibility which comes with public office and remind us that we stand or fall together.
Life is all about relationships, mutual respect and grateful collaboration.
Peter Davison Hamilton
Danielle Smith is pursuing a political goal while effectively ignoring a court order with which she disagrees. Her legal democratic remedy is an appeal of the decision.
If she continues to act contrary to the court decision, she should be in contempt of court. Contemptuous, indeed.
Mark Frayne Whitby, Ont.
Takeoff
Re “Doug Ford is right to expand Billy Bishop airport and bring it, and Toronto, to new heights” (Report on Business, May 20): Finally, a clear, sensible argument about why we should expand Toronto’s island airport. A logical counter to the continuous NIMBY rhetoric.
Toronto is a major city. If someone doesn’t like growth and change, then move out to the suburbs.
Shelagh Barrington Toronto
While economic activity does tend to become cantered around transportation hubs, this support for the expansion of Billy Bishop Airport makes no mention of its impact on things such as local traffic, emissions, noise and restrictions placed on recreational uses of Lake Ontario.
There are a lot of differences between building over Grand Central Station in New York and building on Toronto’s waterfront, particularly when we have just spent a couple of decades incentivizing residential construction and recreational uses in the area.
Neville Taylor Toronto
There once was a mediocre city by the lake which had very few attractions, but was blessed with a lovely lakefront with parks, trees and lagoons.
The businessmen who ran the city thought there were not enough tourists coming to spend money. They decided to plough under those useless parks and put in an airport so that more, many more, tourists could fly in.
Then they sat in their ugly city and wondered why nobody came.
Pierre Mihok Ajax, Ont.
BFFs
Re “Is inconvenience a worthy cost of close friendship?” (Pursuits, May 16): It is striking how often the phrases “showing up” or “show up” appear as an important feature of friendship.
I have two longstanding friends going back more than 55 years in Manitoba, where I was raised and educated. We talk at least monthly and I visit once or twice a year. The friendships have enriched my life immensely and, like most worthwhile aspects of life, require time, energy and commitment – the ability to show up.
Late in life, I have become an armchair philosopher. One of my sayings, perhaps not original, is that the secret to life is showing up.
This adage is applicable not only to friendships, but also to family, romantic relationships and the workplace.
Gordon Gislason Vancouver
Regarding regret
Re “Stories of regret and fulfilment from the Class of ‘73″ (Opinion, May 16): So many factors must influence answers to the question of regret: opportunity, ambition, energy and foresight, to name a few.
I, personally, have been fortunate to have made enough good decisions to feel satisfied with my life. Many times there has been a fork in the road, and a decision had to be taken as to which path to go down.
Regrets? Of course, but time is a great healer.
Advice from my own experience? Look to the future. Don’t dwell on the past, but retain the good memories.
Robert Glazier Toronto
The pathways of this Class of ’73, according to the authors, were the product of social structures they couldn’t control and their individual choices and personal agency. Yet they also quote psychologist William Damon who speaks of the lives “we’ve been given,” which could suggest they are dispensations.
In 1964, I watched on television as Billy Mills, a half-Indigenous U.S. Marine, unexpectedly won the 10,000-metre race at the Tokyo Olympics. The American announcers were beside themselves with excitement.
Years later, I learned that Mr. Mills had become a champion for Indigenous youth. I saw his difficult path to victory as a matter of testing and destiny, a springboard into the real work of his life, which was to repeatedly convey this adage: “Your life is a gift from the Creator. Your gift back to the Creator is what you do with your life.”
Patrick Wolfe Victoria
By the book
Re “Lady Justice may be blind, but Canadians shouldn’t shut their eyes to the system’s shortcomings” (Opinion, May 16): To augment this lament for our justice system, I offer Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.
The 1853 novel centres upon one “scarecrow of a suit” which has “become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means.” In the opening pages, Dickens describes lawyers in the “High Court of Chancery” as “tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities … walls of words and … a pretence of equity.”
It has been 173 years since Bleak House was published. My copy is an original edition, passed down to me by my father L.M. Candido, who practised law in Vancouver for more than 50 years.
When I showed it to a senior lawyer and King’s Counsel appointee at my father’s celebration of life in April, he said it should be required reading for every law student in Canada.
Indeed.
Victoria Miles North Vancouver
Emotional plea
Re “Drake’s new album trilogy – Iceman, Maid of Honour and Habibti – puts quantity over quality" (Online, May 15): Can we declare a moratorium on “emo” as a catch-all for any man singing slowly about his feelings?
Emo is a genre with a paper trail and a generation of teenagers who cried into Dashboard Confessional CDs at the mall. Confessional lyrics, loud guitars, eyeliner optional but encouraged.
The slow jams of Drake’s Habibti share roughly none of this DNA. They’re R&B ballads about being single, which is a tradition older than emo by about 40 years.
Drake did have a real emo-adjacent lane during his Take Care era, particularly the song Marvin’s Room. Critics have been mapping it carefully for more than a decade, including a charming 2015 Globe piece on a Toronto pop-punk Drake cover band (“You know how that should go: Why this pop-punk Drake cover band is the real deal” – Aug. 1, 2015). So “emo” is a perfectly good word for some Drake, just not this Drake.
If Habibti is forgettable, it’s forgettable on its own terms. The eyeliner stays in the drawer.
Sunny Grewal New Westminster, B.C.
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