Sam Bennett (9), Brad Marchand (63) and Tom Wilson (43) celebrate after a goal by teammate Shea Theodore during the men's ice hockey semi-final game at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan last Friday.Carolyn Kaster/The Associated Press
Value system
Re “Justice prevails” (Letters, Feb. 25): A letter-writer notes that, “as former justice Rosalie Abella says, the Supreme Court is the final decision-maker on Canadian values.” And in the opinion of many, that’s where we went wrong.
How many Canadians support the notion that a mere nine people, unelected, should be deciding Canadian values? Any at all? Canadian values should be decided by the Canadian people: rich and poor, urban and rural, from all parts of the country and all walks of life.
I am sure that when historians write about our history from 1980 on, in part to explain the rise of Western alienation, the emergence of right-wing populism and the origins of our massive political divide, Ms. Abella’s rather elitist view may be the opening sentence of such a treatise.
Tom Curran Prince Edward County, Ont.
Wild west
Re “By calling Trumpist ideas ‘Western values,’ we’re handing dictators a gift” (Feb. 20): “Western values” must not be reduced to blood and soil nationalism. But it would be an error to detach those values from their deepest historical source: Christianity itself.
Universal human dignity, equality before the law, rights, constitutionalism, compassion for the weak: These ideas did not arise in a vacuum. As historians such as Tom Holland and Larry Hurtado have shown, the ancient world did not assume the equal worth of all persons, it assumed hierarchy.
It was Christianity, uniquely proclaiming that every human being is made in the image of God and that God himself became human in Jesus Christ, that revolutionized the world. Hospitals, universities, abolitionism, modern science and even a free press grew in soil tilled for centuries by biblical faith.
If we sever Western civilization from Christianity, we risk sawing off the branch on which we sit.
Gary Cymbaluk Greek Bible College, Athens
Certainly, the movement toward secularization of thought was crucial to the development of “human rights.” Reading this evolution through a feminist lens, however, tells a different story.
The Reformation continued to proclaim the inferiority of women. Similarly, the Enlightenment’s “individual rights” did not extend to women, nor did those signal 18th-century documents of “human rights,” the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and U.S. Declaration of Independence.
What should be the 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Rights Amendment, was introduced in 1923, and revivified by feminists in the 1960s, but only garnered sufficient state ratification post-deadline in 2020. In 1929, the Persons Case decision put Canadian women on a stronger footing; they were included in Section 28 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms from the beginning.
What is important to note is that neither “Western values” nor “individual rights” were universal.
Jacqueline Murray FRSC, FRHistS; Guelph, Ont.
MAID access
Re “On MAID” (Letters, Feb. 25): The CEO of Inclusion Canada states: “Track 2 MAID grants people with disabilities special access when their death is not reasonably foreseeable.”
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms grants people with disabilities exactly the same access to medical assistance in dying as every other Canadian whose death is not reasonably foreseeable. Does she really mean to exclude disabled Canadians from this right?
Perhaps advocacy efforts would be better spent focused on improving social supports for those with disabilities, rather than undermining all Canadians’ right to access MAID.
Mary Anne Cecutti Toronto
Customer first
Re “Bloc Québécois proposes banks be held liable for customer fraud losses” (Report on Business, Feb. 20): Whenever meaningful regulation is proposed, we hear a familiar chorus from banks, a Chicken Little warning that the sky will fall on them, on customers, on Canada. Yet history suggests otherwise: Stronger rules rarely send corporate profit into free fall, they simply require institutions to do better.
Banks already detect suspicious credit-card transactions in real time, decline purchases, freeze accounts and alert customers within seconds. The same technology and risk-scoring systems should be applied to bank-account transfers.
If a bank can flag a $200 unusual credit-card purchase, it should be able to flag a $17,500 withdrawal in small bills over four days, which was the case with my mother. If they can reimburse customers who suffer credit-card fraud, they should do the same for bank-account fraud.
Why, then, does that vigilance so often vanish? Less finger-wagging at victims and more bank accountability would better serve Canadians.
Pamela Foster Ottawa
Greener pastures
Re “Absence of Quebec presence on men’s Olympic hockey team a sore spot for la belle province” (Feb. 21): The decline in the cohort of Quebec hockey stars is baffling.
One tentative explanation is that the hockey monoculture has ended in Quebec youth sports. Young men focus on several team sports now.
Football, for example, has been undergoing a huge boom in Quebec’s junior colleges in recent decades. They have served as feeders for the rapid rise of varsity programs at Laval University and the University of Montreal, now perennial Canadian U Sports champions.
Laurent Duvernay-Tardif on the Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs highlighted the arrival of half a dozen Quebec players in the National Football League. Meanwhile, the Canadian Football League has jumped this century from single-digit French players to roughly 40 regulars in recent seasons.
Still, who can doubt Quebec’s passion for hockey will breed more Guy Lafleurs in the future?
David Winch North Hatley, Que.
Viva Las Vegas
Re “Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert may be the greatest concert documentary ever made” (Feb. 20): In 1970, when I was 12, my parents attended a car dealers convention in Las Vegas and brought me along.
During the convention, they put me in a party room chaperoned by a young man. It was only him and I, until a precocious girl came in and asked me if I wanted to see Elvis.
She said her dad was a movie producer and they practically lived at the hotel. She took me through a kitchen area before arriving at the side stage. There he was in all his white, sweaty, sequined glory.
After the set, he came right over to the girl. She introduced us before he was swept away.
Back in the lobby, we were met by my frantic father, security guards and the poor chaperone. I can’t remember the girl’s name, but I’d like to thank her for giving me rights to brag about famous meetings.
Donna Austin Caledon, Ont.
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