Prime Minister Mark Carney shakes hands with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the G7 Leader's Summit in Kananaskis, Alta., in June.Amber Bracken/Reuters
Good ideas all around
Re “One for all” and “Pay for it” (Letters, Dec. 30): An interesting juxtaposition of letters to the editor in Tuesday’s Globe. One suggests that Canada should have a single driver’s licence, health card, vehicle registration, etc., which would eliminate the costs of having separate administrations for each province and territory in issuing these documents.
Then another writer decries the fact that Quebec refuses to fund a drug that has been shown to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and has been approved by Health Canada after rigorous review. Surely it would be far more sensible and cost-effective to have one single health care plan administration for all Canadians, rather than 13 separate ones that all do basically the same thing but often with different, and often confusing, results.
John Arbuckle Ottawa
One for all contributor has it right. Costa Rica has had it right for decades – one identification number that follows each individual through life, applying across government and private entities, capturing every aspect of life: licensing (cars, businesses); voter registration and voting; commercial regulation and registration (directors and officers, legal signatures, loans, mortgages, investments, banking, telecom, utilities); health care (medical records, hospital visits, prescriptions, labs); taxation (personal, business, property, vehicle, house); education and employment. Easy to use and track. Highly protected by a government serious about punishment for fraud or data breaches. Minimal carbon footprint, largely paper-free.
Mike McCrodan French Creek, B.C.
A few questions
Re “It ain’t easy” (Letters, Dec. 30): A letter writer offers up several barbed questions regarding the federal government’s interest in scrapping the single-use plastics ban – questions that might insinuate that less than moral motives are involved.
I would like to suggest that better questions would follow the lines of “How many new Canadian jobs will this initiative create and what would be the total estimated tax revenue increase of such an industry?” Also, “How many jobs and how much tax revenue was foregone when the plastic ban was first set in place?”
Canada needs more industry, not less, and this initiative follows that economic vision admirably, even with all the political cynicism it might generate.
Nick Bryant North Vancouver
A matter of will
Re “A plea to Gen Z” (Opinion, Dec. 27):
Doug Saunders is right that we shouldn’t declare Gen Z’s future dead before it arrives. He is right that the present doesn’t dictate the future. And he is right that a massive rebuilding will be necessary. My question is: Are we anywhere near ready for it?
The comparison with the postwar situation is apt, with one striking difference: There was a shared will among the allies to collaborate in establishing a new global order.
With the resurgence of the right in Europe, a retreat to protectionism – not just in the U.S. but also in Canada and abroad – erosions of civil society and a digitized world that alienates us as it connects us, where will we find the political will and energy to save the future?
Jade Schiff Ottawa
Self-promotion
Re “Why don’t we know more about our judges?” (Dec. 27): The entire article reminds me of Much Ado About Nothing. So what if a judge is not interested in dedicating a considerable amount of time to write an autobiography? While some may choose this path, some may elect to be interviewed by an author who will then write a biography. Others may choose to do neither. There is no right or wrong approach. And, for the curious, there are many books about specific judges and the Canadian judicial system in libraries and archives. Just because U.S. judges choose to promote themselves, that is no reason for Canadian judges to follow suit.
Tom Driedger Toronto
No clothes
Re “It’s time to leave starchitects to the past” (Dec. 27): Finally, someone has had the courage to call the excrescence, designed by Daniel Libeskind and attached to the north side of the Royal Ontario Museum, the aesthetic disaster that it so obviously is. It resembles nothing so much as the wreck of a crystalline spaceship that crashed into the roof of the ROM. That the museum’s administration and the donors who paid for this monstrosity could have been gulled into believing that because a famous architect designed it, it must be beautiful is, sadly, completely unremarkable.
James McCall Toronto
I was one of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s patrons Marcus Gee disdained for lining up to tour the new Frank Gehry renovation in 1997. I could not disagree more with his criticisms, specific and general.
The AGO’s Gehry facade has an exciting, distinctly Canadian feel, both inside and out. His overhanging tilted glass panel, which runs the length of the building, is genius. The architect was dealing with an existing structure that had virtually no setback from the sidewalk. He was given a mandate to create a new front that would fit in with the existing streetscape. He brilliantly achieved this by having the reflection of the quaint, well-kept Victorian vista on the other side of the street mirrored in his building’s new glass cladding!
Architecture is its own art form, and Marcus Gee’s flippant, generalized dismissal of Frank Gehry and others in the “starchitectural” firmament is just plain wrong.
Tam Nolan Hamilton
Fix ‘er up
Re “The state of 24 Sussex is an insult to Canada” (Opinion, Dec. 29): I could not agree more with Mr. Westdal’s article about the sorry state of the official residence of our prime ministers. The restoration of 24 Sussex or its replacement with a new house, showcasing Canada’s best architecture, landscaping and interior design, ought to be among the government’s priority projects. Let it be a demonstration of how Canada can get important things done well and quickly.
As to the perennial excuse that Canadians would punish a leader seeking to build a “palace” for himself, that is an easy one to address: The Prime Minister can announce that he will never move into the new 24 Sussex. Given the time to design and build, even on an expedited timeline, that promise should be easy to fulfill.
Robert Vineberg Winnipeg
Not the same
Re “2025: The year Canadians re-embraced nationalism” (Opinion, Dec. 27): In their otherwise informative article, Michael Adams and Andrew Parkin write that the approach to individual rights “in Canada can hardly be compared to that in the United States.” Of course it can. The two approaches cannot be equated, but they certainly can – and should – be compared.
Some time this century, the confusion between “compare” and “equate” become entrenched in public and professional discourse, despite the fact that “compare” simply means to examine similarities and differences, whereas “equate” means to treat things as the same. Is it too much to ask that writers and editors retire this clumsy formulation?
Paul Axelrod Toronto
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