Ontario Finance Minister Vic Fedeli is handed a copy of the 2019 budget as Premier Doug Ford looks on at the legislature in Toronto on Thursday, April 11, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank GunnFrank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com
..................................................................................................................................
Budget out of balance
Re That Surprising Taste? It’s Austerity-Lite (editorial, April 12): Premier Doug Ford continues to obfuscate while spending his time pretending to be Toronto’s super mayor, focused on multibillion-dollar subway routes and expansions. Annual deficits in good economic times only hurt our children’s future. We need a government that will tackle the deficit through a balanced approach – raise taxes and cut services. Our future is too important for Mr. Ford to use his position as Premier to seek revenge on the City of Toronto.
Dale Mills, Guelph, Ont.
..........................................
Once again, transit in the Toronto area has become a political football. Two things are certain:
1) The public was the last priority in transit planning;
2) Ontario’s latest rebranding as “A Place To Grow” will be self-fulfilling with the deficit.
Joel Rubinovich, Toronto
..........................................
Place to Grow? How about: “Ontario: NOT just Toronto”?
Gideon Bloch, London, Ont.
..........................................
Tailgating? Save money on the truck and event tickets. Attend a block party with Queens students in Kingston. Surround yourself with the same youthful drunken crowd. Get arrested along with others. Help overwhelm the EMS system and the emergency room. Make new friends as you dance on a house roof. Do not worry about the extra drain on police services – taxpayers will gladly pay. And remember to stick around for the court appearance.
K.R. O’Brien, Kingston
..........................................
Does this mean my husband and I can walk to our local park and enjoy a glass of wine without being arrested? Or do I need to have a car and drive home afterward?
JoAnn Breitman, Toronto
..........................................
Ontarians, there’s lots to cheer
Even if teachers will soon disappear.
Our Premier is great,
Let’s just tailgate
And drown all our sorrows in (cheap?) beer.
Grace Brooker, Toronto
Acclaimed, not detained
Re WikiLeaks Founder Assange Arrested, Faces U.S. Extradition (April 12): The United States disregards international laws, then makes laws that it tries to apply to people in other nations. It is cowardly on our part that we aid them in persecuting – not just prosecuting – Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, and now Britain is likely to hand over Julian Assange to be locked up like poor Chelsea Manning. The video the two of them exposed of the 2007 helicopter attack in Iraq that killed civilians and journalists was in many minds clear evidence of a war crime. Mr. Assange and Ms. Manning should be acclaimed – not detained.
Hugh Jones, Toronto
1 in 2 of us by age 40
Re Small Talk (Opinion, April 6): While Dr. Norman Doidge presented compelling evidence last Saturday about the problems that changes to OHIP billings for psychotherapy will create, the specific research he cites and disagrees with also provides strong evidence that the status quo is not working.
Ontario has recently expanded access to psychotherapy, and is evaluating effects on access and patient outcomes. Health Quality Ontario (HQO) has published standards for the treatment of major depression, anxiety and schizophrenia that recommend provision of evidence-based psychotherapy. The standards are based on reviews of worldwide evidence, such as studies done by NICE (National Institute of Clinical Evaluation) in the U.K. This evidence is reviewed by an HQO panel of clinicians, patients and families, who then recommend the quality standards.
The OMA and government should seek the advice of HQO on the proposed changes. The Mental Health Commission of Canada estimates that one in two of us will experience mental illness by age 40, and 70 per cent will by age 90. So we need to get this right.
Steve Lurie, executive director, Canadian Mental Health Association (Toronto)
More at stake here
Re PM Says Threat To Sue Scheer Is About Accountability (April 10): Actually, more than accountability is at stake here. When an untruth or half-truth is repeated often enough, in the public eye it becomes a “truth.” After a point in time, it morphs into the truth. And after that it is like a “mantra,” which is hard to erase. One example of this occurred during the election campaign in 2011.
The Conservative Party launched a series of ads, repeatedly targeting Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, claiming he was “Just Visiting,” because he had spent some years working abroad. This was followed by another mantra: “He Didn’t Come Back For You.”
The implication was that Mr. Ignatieff was un-Canadian, which was simply not correct, yet it had a devastating effect.
A more recent example was the U.S. election in 2016. As that campaign drew to a close, a last-minute attempt to discredit the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, pointed to her “criminality” because she had used her private e-mail server to send e-mails containing classified information. Though nothing criminal was found through investigations, the now infamous chant of “Lock Her Up,” repeated endlessly, drowned out everything else.
These examples show how important it is to stamp out falsehoods early, even if it takes a libel suit to do so.
Nini Pal, Ottawa
..........................................
Re Scheer Reads News Release That Sparked Threat Of Lawsuit From Trudeau (April 11): If Justin Trudeau’s lawyer hoped to silence the criticism directed at Mr. Trudeau over the PM’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin affair by threatening a libel suit, it clearly isn’t working. This is as much a moral issue as a legal one. In the court of public opinion, threatening a lawsuit is throwing gas on the fire. All it fuels is justified suspicion of the PM’s motives.
Angelina Knowles, Vancouver
Don’t count your robots
Your editorial, The Robots Came From Canada (April 8) was surely a tad premature. Without question, the investments that are being made in Canada in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) are spectacular. From the superb work of Geoffrey Hinton as a world leader in AI, through to major research investments by the federal government, the University of Toronto, companies such as Google and Facebook and, of course, the philanthropy of business leaders Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman, the commitment to AI in Canada is phenomenal.
But let’s not count our robots before they’re hatched. There is still a lot of work to be done, major milestones to be met and commercial investments to be made in order to be sure that we put the puck in the net in terms of real job and wealth creation following these research investments. And here, Canada doesn’t have such a good track record.
Mark J. Poznansky, Toronto