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Canada's shame
Wapekeka First Nations children are five to six times more likely to kill themselves than other Canadian children. Yet when Health Canada was approached with a request for funding for a mental health team "at a cost of about $380,000," these funds never came (In Wapekeka, A Community Grappling With Suicide, Calls Grow For Federal Funding And Local Solutions, July 17).
Heritage Canada, however, will spend an extra $9.3-million, over and above the $200-million already allocated, for some of the federal government's Canada 150 projects (Canada 150 Projects Given Extra Funds, July 17).
Meanwhile, two more Pikangikum girls killed themselves, making a total of four children there within two weeks (Two More Girls Take Own Lives In Northern Ontario, July 18).
Health Minister Jane Philpott says her department is working on an "urgent daily basis" to determine the root causes of the cycle of despair. But as Gloria Galloway reports, many root causes of the suicides are already known, and I am absolutely sickened that millions of dollars are being spent on frivolous projects by Heritage Canada, while this government's lack of real action, such as a mental health team on each reserve, is creating one more sorry chapter in this country's tale of how we let our First Nations peoples down.
Cherie Hill, Mississauga
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Shut it down
Re Families Call For Reboot Of Inquiry (July 13): Inquiries and commissions, royal and otherwise, don't achieve much and Indigenous lives in Canada never seem to improve as a result of them.
Consider former columnist Jeffrey Simpson's prescient June 25, 2015, column, where he predicted nothing would come of a public inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women. As he noted, the causes are "economic, sociological, political, attitudinal, institutional – in other words, vast in scope and complicated in analysis, way beyond the scope of a public inquiry" (A National Inquiry Can't Solve The Problem).
Obviously there are no easy answers to bringing justice to Canada's Indigenous people, but the millions upon millions of dollars spent on these inquiries (such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba and most famously, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples) amount to little or nothing.
Let's stop putting money into these useless inquiries and put it into helping to improve the lives of Canada's Indigenous people.
All the monies spent on these useless intellectual exercises could have given many First Nations fresh and clean drinking water. Now that would be an accomplishment!
Andrew van Velzen, Toronto
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American-speak
Re Iceberg Panic And The Horror Movie That Is Climate Change (July 15): In her excellent article on the looming catastrophe as a result of the breakup of the Larsen C ice shelf, Elizabeth Renzetti says we need "emotional connections" and "recognizable symbols" to mobilize responses to climate change.
Comparisons to PEI or 10 Madrids or one-sixth of Taiwan won't stir the American public to action. Let me suggest something that will. The new iceberg is the size of 1,332,000 American football fields.
Steve Dart, Toronto
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IT's complexity
Re When The Public Service Is Outsourced, Canadians Suffer (Report on Business, July 17): The premise of this article by the president of PIPSC (Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada) is that employees deliver better results, more cheaply.
Some 40,000 employees work in IT in some 100 federal departments and agencies: Who would believe all their projects deliver quality work to a budget of time and money?
Contracts, by their very nature, define deliverables and timelines, a contractual commitment to getting a job done rather than simply a "best effort." Visibility and public scrutiny exist in a way that they don't for projects done only by employees.
Large, complex projects require large pools of staff who have specific expertise. Try hiring 200 staff with the requisite skill set within two or three months. And once that project is done, what do you do with that staff?
Contracting turns fixed costs – the cost of an employee and the requisite support costs of building space, pension, etc. – to variable ones, which can be turned on and off.
Government of Canada managers have a choice among multiple vendors and are not simply held captive by in-house expertise, or the lack of it. They can draw on the expertise of global firms and lessons learned from around the world.
The real issue is understanding the complexity of large IT projects and not doing them on a DIY basis.
Alex Beraskow, Ottawa
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Private-school access
Re Can We Ever Knock Down The Walls Of Wealthy Ghettos? (July 17): In Ontario, independent schools receive no direct government funding, and in fact parents still pay provincial education taxes for no apparent benefit.
In most other provinces, governments pay a varying level of per-student funding to independent schools, but it is in all cases less than the per student funding for public schools. Accordingly, students attending independent schools cost the government less than if the students attended public schools.
Doug Saunders says independent schools "are not required to admit a large percentage of lower-income students." While this is correct, many if not all independent schools share a commitment to financial aid and have significant bursary programs; families that cannot otherwise afford the tuition, can apply for bursaries that cover up to 100 per cent of tuition costs. In 2016, a total of $70.2-million of financial aid was distributed to students attending independent schools.
Barrie Laver, chair, Board of Governors, Havergal College, Toronto
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Feeling the love
Re Federer Joins Pantheon Of World's Greatest Athletes (Sports, July 17): While Roger Federer is a marvellous athlete and a gracious competitor, he has also earned respect for his wonderful relationship with his wife and family.
Shortly after his marriage, he was asked what it was like to be married. After knowing someone for so long, it was amazing, he said, that at his wedding, his love for Mirka was as overwhelming as ever. At his interview after his eighth Wimbledon win on Sunday, he was asked about retiring. He said that if Mirka wanted him to retire or the children were tired of travelling, he would quit tomorrow.
Contrast this with the behaviour and pronouncements of many top male athletes. Is it any wonder that we love him?
Diana Rowles, Victoria