People watch the Montreal skyline in August, 2025.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Final four
Re “Four Canadian cities compete in race to host defence bank headquarters” (Report on Business, May 11): Is it disappointing or amusing that four Canadian cities are competing to headquarter the new defence bank?
If this multilateral institution requires a comparative advantage in aerospace, then Montreal would be the logical location. If the institution requires a resident advantage and skillset most appropriate for shovel-ready resource projects, regularly championed by David Eby, then Vancouver is the obvious city. If lobbying skills are most desired – I hope not – then Ottawa is the place.
(Calgary, the heartland of Canada’s oil and gas sector, appears to have reasonably declined participation.)
The defence bank is tasked with providing long-term low-cost financing for defence projects undertaken by participating countries. Toronto is, without doubt, Canada’s financial centre. It has an unmatched breadth and depth of financial capital, financial markets and financial talent.
To our dear pragmatic Prime Minister: The answer is Toronto.
Scott Kerr Mississauga
Here at home
Re “University Health Network recruits senior NIH investigator, more than 70 global scientists” (May 4): Canada is right to see science as central to its economic future.
The $1.7-billion investment in recruiting international researchers is an ambitious attempt at “brain gain,” especially amid instability in U.S. academia. University Health Network shows how quickly institutions are moving.
The United States became a global research magnet because it built a powerful funding ecosystem. For example, the National Institutes of Health budget is US$48-billion, about 0.7 per cent of U.S. federal spending, compared with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s planned spending of $1.37-billion, closer to 0.23 per cent of Canadian federal spending.
Canada has exceptional homegrown scientific talent. Yet amid high-profile recruitment campaigns, early career researchers and trainees in Canada may reasonably be concerned that international recruitment is being prioritized over sustainable investment in domestic talent.
If Canada wants America’s scientists, it should recruit the investment strategy that made American science so powerful in the first place.
André McDonald and Vasily Giannakeas Toronto
Lost in translation
Re “Telus using AI to alter the accents of customer service agents” (Report on Business, May 6): Based on public information from 2025, Telus reduced its Canada-based workforce by 2,800 employees to 25,200; Telus increased its foreign-based workforce by 7,500 employees to 86,300; the vast majority of Telus’s call centre workforce is based in countries such as the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Bulgaria and Romania.
These numbers alone seem to indicate that telecom globalization has been detrimental to Canadian employment. I am dismayed to learn that given the economic condition of our country and unstable political situation globally, Telus would devote more resources to its non-Canadian workforce.
Instead of using artificial intelligence to make its foreign staff better understood by English-speaking Canadians, Telus should make every effort to reshore call centres and provide employment to the residents of many towns in Ontario, where unemployment levels range between 6 per cent to 9 per cent, or some Maritime cities where similar percentages of people are looking for work.
Robert Lubinski Uxbridge, Ont.
Choosing MAID
Re “Mom chose MAID. I now accept it offered what she wanted: a loving exit” (First Person, May 7): My mother died by medical assistance in dying in 2022.
She always kept up on current affairs and knew that MAID was available. After she was informed about her cancer, she got on her computer and did a deep dive into the requirements for accessing MAID; my brother, a retired social worker, was her assistant. She was successful in her request.
My wife, our daughter and I saw my mom before she died at age 91. She said in an e-mail that she had a good life and didn’t wish to fight her cancer. She said that she enjoyed her last weeks like it was one big party.
I am glad that this option was available to my mom as it prevented unnecessary suffering.
Craig Harris Edmonton
I have been lucky to live a long, happy, healthy life. But if I’m not living the life I’m enjoying now, I want to have the option of medical assistance in dying.
I have spent time with people in long-term care and my heart breaks for them. I am sure if they were told 20 years before that they were going to spend their last days being cared for by strangers, throwing balls to each other and not knowing their loved ones, they would choose dying with dignity before getting to that stage.
I have great admiration for the wonderful people who work in LTC, but it’s not where I want to be. Perhaps we have to look at another option for MAID, and that would be for those who have decided that they have lived long enough.
Elizabeth Thompson Oakville, Ont.
Another way?
Re “Drug-overdose deaths are falling across Canada. Why is Edmonton an exception?” (May 5): Although the work of this volunteer nurse is laudable, who in their right mind thinks that handing out sterile paraphernalia and drugs is the answer to this universal problem? I believe it only tends to normalize this aberrant lifestyle.
Most of us agree that drug addiction is a disease, but we fail to realize that it is highly contagious. This is where quarantine and treatment should kick in. To allow drug use to happen so openly on transit, in parks and stairwells across most North American cities and towns only serves to bring this behaviour into acceptable norms, almost like promoting it.
We’ve lost too much human potential to this monstrous curse. The drug trade is big business, and we should take a new approach and actually cure these slaves to it. Unfortunately our governments have stepped in, not to cure but maintain through harm reduction.
Leslie Martel Mississauga
Around the bay
Re “Marjorie Hughson Tozer’s Windswept” (Made in Canada, May 5): My late father grew up in a thriving village on the edge of the North Atlantic on Bonavista Bay in Newfoundland.
One of his earliest jobs required him to travel by ship north to Labrador to purchase lumber and fish for export overseas. That opened his eyes to the more isolated parts of what was then a colony of England.
His vivid verbal descriptions of those trips have stayed with me all these decades later. Those memories were brought to life in fine style in Marjorie Hughson Tozer’s riveting painting.
Such scenes have now largely disappeared from the Newfoundland coast. The men and women who made a living in these isolated spots were lauded during the Second World War by Winston Churchill as the finest small boatmen of the British Empire.
Les Dominy Renfrew, Ont.
Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Keep letters to 150 words or fewer. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com