British Columbia Premier David Eby listens as Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks to reporters at a press conference to close the Council of the Federation meetings in July, 2024.Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press
Low energy
Re “Changes to Bill 5 possible amid warnings of Indigenous protests, Ontario ministers say” and “B.C. outlines fast track for critical mineral mines” (May 27): The Ontario and B.C. governments admit the approval process for large projects in their provinces are too slow due to unnecessary and duplicative regulation.
One might expect Doug Ford and David Eby would be rolling up their sleeves and getting their ministers working to eliminate red tape. Instead, they have introduced legislation that will give their cabinets the power to pick and choose projects to be fast-tracked.
So rather than streamlining the approval process, they propose to add another layer of bureaucracy – as well as introduce a political element in what is meant to be an apolitical process.
This would be comical, if it wasn’t so sad.
Constance Smith Victoria
Re “Coalition files appeals against Alberta Energy Regulator over orphan well clean-up costs” (Report on Business, May 28): I’ve lost count of the number of stories that illustrate the slipshod way the Alberta Energy Regulator “regulates.”
In this instance, a landowner laments that “many energy companies have betrayed Albertans and dumped their cleanup duties onto someone else.”
That someone else in all likelihood is going to include Alberta taxpayers. But I feel the real betrayal here lies with the AER and, ultimately, the Alberta government.
It’s obvious to me that “someone” should garnish more of the industry’s royalties to help clean up their act.
Chris Gates Cobourg, Ont.
Re “Governments should call oil patch bluff to win carbon capture project commitment” (Report on Business, May 27): Taxpayer money should be used for the most evidence-based and cost-effective climate solutions, not those with the strongest support from the fossil fuel industry.
If energy companies want to go forward with carbon capture and storage projects, they can fund them on their own.
Why shouldn’t taxpayers further support these projects? Well, simply put, CCS is still too expensive and it probably doesn’t work.
Mary Blake Rose London, Ont.
Re “Trump wants the U.S. to dominate uranium production. What does that mean for Canada’s miners?” (Report on Business, May 26): The quality of uranium mined in the United States is orders of magnitude lower in quality than that mined in Canada.
Yet here we are embarking on the installation of multiple small modular reactors that require enriched uranium as fuel, a product not available in Canada. Perhaps Cameco is only thinking of their business, not the exposure to the U.S. that Canadian utilities are inviting by risking Canada’s energy future on SMRs.
David Kister Kingston
Doctor in the house?
Re “Can’t find a family doctor? Ontario has more physicians, but fewer are taking patients, study shows” (May 28): Since I began practice in 1976, traditional components of family medical practice such as emergency medicine, palliative care, obstetrics and in-hospital care of one’s own patients have evolved as independent careers.
Common to all of these are attractive incomes and minimal, if any, overhead costs. Importantly, most doctors choosing these eventual pathways must first go through a family medicine training program, which leads to misleading data about the numbers of general practitioners being trained.
Debts on graduation in excess of $100,000, and the prospect of having to borrow yet another $100,000 to start a practice, where overhead costs can run at levels of $15,000 per month or more, are major barriers to working as a family doctor.
That most new graduates in Ontario have to be paid from an antiquated fee-for-service system is a further disincentive.
Tom Bell, MD (retired) Peterborough, Ont.
One point stood out for me: that hospitals employ doctors for some work that nurses could perform, because the expense will be OHIP’s directly and not on the hospital’s budget.
From a taxpayer’s perspective, this seems to be an administrative issue that results in a misallocation of resources, an unnecessary expense. One might call it an unintended consequence or even a loophole that could be easily rectified by the Health Minister.
John Madill Oshawa, Ont.
Opposite effect
Re “Victoria is spending millions to tackle its homelessness crisis, stressing taxpayers” (May 26): When assessing solutions for social ills, I often like to run the project in reverse: If it were to be decided that we don’t have enough drug users on our streets, what steps would we take to increase that number?
I would provide money to the users in the form of social assistance, and non-cash assistance such as kitchens, warming centres and a relaxation of petty-crime prevention. Provide readily available health care. Provide safe places for injecting drugs. Perhaps even provide legal, free drugs to protect users from potentially dangerous street drugs.
Why do we adopt the very things that encourage what we actually don’t want? Which is the kinder, more humane course: To tell an addicted drug user, and their family and friends, that we will do all we can to encourage their continued use?
Or that we will do all we can to help them return to society?
Tom Curran Prince Edward County, Ont.
Bookmarked
Re “When we remove books from schools or libraries, we prune the landscapes of children’s imaginations” (May 30): Another serious consequence of book bans is that parents and teachers are relieved of the responsibility of discussing important societal issues with their children.
Mary Hawken Calgary
In the mid-1970s, my father’s job transferred our family to Baghdad where I attended the international school.
Our textbooks passed through the Iraqi censors, who blacked out words or paragraphs that mentioned Israel. When the school imported inflatable globes, the censors carefully cut Israel out, rendering them useless.
When I returned to Canada, I never imagined that my experience in Baghdad would be relevant to education in a supposedly stable democracy. But Danielle Smith’s decision to impose rules on school library acquisitions has blasted my once secure confidence in freedom of expression in Alberta.
Ms. Smith likes to cast this as a “parents’ rights” issue. But either we live in a free and open society, with the right to choose what our own children read, or we live in a failing democracy where government decides what information people can or cannot access.
Healthy democracies don’t ban books; they debate ideas.
Kirsten McCue Calgary
Addendum
Re “Unboxing” (Letters, May 30): A writer recalls the saying “to err is human, to forgive divine.”
My uncle, much loved and with an ironic sense of humour, had on his desk a plaque with this quote, but with the addition of “but to find someone to blame it on is genius.”
Irwin Walker Hamilton
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