Where is the proof for those health claims?
Re: “Blame the system, not the patient,” letter, Feb. 11.
The letter says: “Who is ultimately most affected when we blame and shame patients for how they use the emergency department? It is the people who experience inequities in our society and already face discrimination and poor treatment within our health-care system.”
Who exactly are the people who “face discrimination and poor treatment within our health-care system?” Is the writer suggesting that doctors purposely discriminate against certain patients and provide poor treatment? Where is the evidence for this claim?
The letter also says: “Blaming people for a lack of ‘common sense’ in managing their own health care fails to account for what is actually constraining our health-care system: capitalist, neoliberal colonial policies that restrict health care….”
What exactly does that mean? What are the capitalist, neoliberal colonial policies that restrict health care?
Can the writer provide evidence and be specific and name these policies and their source(s)? It appears that by using the vague phrase “capitalist, neoliberal colonial policies,” the writer believes everyone will just accept that these policies exist, even though she provides no proof.
Understanding that there are real problems in our health-care system, the emergency room physician who wrote the article “Patients need to take some blame for health system ills,” is correct.
Some medical issues are better off dealt with by a person’s GP, or for those without a GP, as Dr. Stephen Sullivan wrote on Feb. 8, seeing an alternate health-care provider or a telehealth service.
Grant Giles
Victoria
$21.50 hamburger tab missed some ingredients
Ferris Grill’s $21.50 burger was a brilliant cost breakdown. It may be missing a few ingredients: return on investment or at least return of investment, higher interest rates, COVID loan payback, advertising costs, increased rent, increased food costs, increased employees pay, and possibly an owners’ paycheque.
Over the past few years COVID has hurt many businesses, and our federal and provincial governments have instituted a number of new taxes with little notice: Employers Health Tax is three per cent for anyone with more than a $500,000 payroll. The new stat holiday for Sept. 30, five days of paid sick time last year, potentially 10 days paid sick time sometime in the future.
Please, please, please consider the impact of these new stat holidays and taxes on the owners. Perhaps a more fair option would be to increase tax and holidays with three years’ notice. We need time to figure out how to pay them and to adjust our menus.
Doug Pelton
Keating Pizza
Gonzales Coffee
Priologic Software
Victoria
A pricing system based on rich fools
Re: “G’day with advice on restaurant pricing,” Feb. 13.
That probably wouldn’t work in sa国际传媒. Australians may be wild and crazy spenders, but most Canadians make an effort to shop on the day with the discount, not the day with a 20 per cent surcharge.
I’m guessing we would have very low turnout on holidays if businesses tried that sort of cash grab here. If you know you can buy something for 20 per cent less tomorrow, only a rich fool would insist on buying it at the higher price today.
S.I. Petersen
Nanaimo
If not negotiations, what is the solution?
I am gratified to see yet another letter respectfully disagreeing with my call for negotiations in Ukraine. Beginning such a conversation was the primary purpose of my commentary.
I am disappointed that the writers so far simply demonize the adversary without stating any position of their own. Permit me a brief set of questions for those who have attacked my position in such a passionate, yet civil, manner:
1. Won’t the war have to end by negotiation at some point? If so, why not focus on that now?
2. If there is to be no negotiated end, what are the other possibilities? What is your position on the probability and consequences of each?
For example:
A. Ukraine prevails militarily and drives Russia from all of Ukraine, including Crimea. Russia accepts defeat. How likely? If not, what happens next? Will there be any increased danger to civilians from a wider war, perhaps involving nuclear weapons?
B. Russian prevails militarily and occupies all of Ukraine. Western powers and Ukraine accept defeat. Same questions.
C. The current war continues until some sort of stalemate between these two extreme outcomes is accepted by the parties, with civilians continuing to die until the parties see that total victory is not attainable. What happens next? Negotiation?
If any of these outcomes, or another involving continued efforts to “win” the war militarily, represents your position then own it. Be willing to defend it. Discuss its pros and cons.
Until then, I respectfully remain convinced that it is warmakers, not peacemakers, who are “dangerously naïve.”
Let the conversation continue.
William S. Geimer
Professor of Law Emeritus
Washington and Lee University
Sooke
Housing supply in Victoria has exceeded demand
Re: “Before we look for housing solutions, check the math,” commentary, Feb 10.
Mark McInnes raises an important point about whether increasing housing supply will improve affordability. Some straightforward math based on data in the 2021 Canadian census indicates that supply in Victoria has actually grown faster than demand, yet house prices and rents have gone up even faster.
The numbers from the census:
• Between 2016 and 2021 Victoria’s population grew from 85,792 to 91,867, or 6,075 people (a 7.1 per cent increase). The average number of people per dwelling in Victoria is 1.8 (it was the same in 2016 and 2021), so simple division shows that the number of dwellings needed to meet population growth was 3,375.
• There were 49,212 dwellings in Victoria in 2016; in 2021 there were 53,070. That’s a 7.5 per cent increase of 3,858, or 483 more than were needed just to meet population growth.
• Between 2016 and 2021 the median price of owner-occupied dwellings in Victoria increased 57 per cent from $501,000 to $785,000. Median monthly rents increased 35 per cent from $962 to $1,300.
A simple economic belief is that increasing supply will bring down prices. In the case of housing, the opposite seems to have happened. In Victoria, and also in the Capital Regional District and British Columbia, the cost of housing has gone through the roof even though housing supply has met and exceeded demand.
So I absolutely agree with McInnes; we need to check the math before proposing housing solutions. The missing middle strategy and 30-storey towers may add lots of houses and apartments, but the census numbers suggest they will do little to resolve the housing crisis unless some way is found to gear house prices and rents to what is affordable for households earning less the median after-tax income of about $60,000 a year.
Ted Relph
Victoria
Climate crisis and the need for housing
Re: “Before we look for housing solutions, check the math,” commentary, Feb. 11.
Pretty good explanation, but omitted the biggest factor — we’re in a climate crisis.
A just society makes sure everybody has quality housing that doesn’t add more carbon to the atmosphere. Both are simple to accomplish. The British report New Tricks With Old Bricks (at www.No-Use-Empty.org) shows how.
Carbon means test every proposed new structure. How much embedded carbon will the new structure’s life cycle require and emit? Add up the carbon for the aluminum, cement, wood, plastic, steel, glass, drywall, caulking, copper, ABS pipe, rubber, heating system, appliances, etc.
If a current structure somewhere else can fill the bill through a high-quality renovation that the intended purchaser would benefit from — we don’t even have to build the new structure.
“Affordability” in other locations such as Austria, Singapore, Venezuela and Cuba is up to 30 per cent of income. That’s a simple political choice. So is being led strictly by the ghost called the “invisible hand of the free market.”
It’s time to reimagine “economy” without the pitfalls of prior experiments.
Larry Wartels (MA Urban Planning UCLA 1985)
Victoria
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