Statue an example of local issues ignored
Re: “Conversation on future of Macdonald statue slated for May 2020,” July 21.
We’re just a few weeks shy of a full year since Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue was surreptitiously removed from a place of honour in front of City Hall.
Now we’re advised to wait well into 2020 for a mere workshop to “consider the politics” of further action.
What we may really be getting is a political lesson in “avoidance behaviour.”
It appears that Mayor Lisa Helps and selected fellow travellers have implied such extensive reconciliation due First Nations that they’re “avoiding” at least some of their long list of “unofficial” promises made by their “unofficial” City Family (which includes non-elected members).
Let’s stress to the mayor and council that when they address the UN Declaration on the rights of Indigenous People, or the broader reported range of what are really federal government Aboriginal issues, they’re significantly avoiding the principal City of Victoria duties for which they were elected.
It’s past time for the mayor and councillors to realize their primary responsibilities do not include national issues. And let’s see if they can soon find an honourable site for Macdonald’s statue.
Ron Johnson
Saanich
Comments about dialogue are an insult
Re: “Conversation on future of Macdonald statue slated for May 2020,” July 21.
I suppose we should be pleased that Mayor Lisa Helps has arranged a city workshop to educate us on what to do with statues of “controversial historical figures such as John A. Macdonald.”
But of course she already decided that for us — steal them away in secrecy in the wee hours and hide them in a lost storehouse somewhere!
It really adds insult to injury that the mayor feels she is entitled to pontificate about arranging “dialogues of reconciliation” after herself committing the very sort of act fact she decries.
Macdonald was very much a part of our history and the dialogues should have taken place before he was excised from our history and our community.
Whether she realizes it or not, Helps is guilty of perpetrating the very sort of act she is so acidulously educating others to avoid.
Terry Milne
Victoria
Island of downtown losing to the suburbs
Re: “The folly of Victoria’s war on the car,” commentary, July 26.
The city’s new anti-auto leadership has certainly succeeded where we are concerned.
Not wishing to ever again willingly get caught up in this nonsense, we simply don't go downtown anymore, unless absolutely necessary. Many of the independent merchants we used to patronize have also moved or closed.
I doubt, however, that long-term loss of these businesses is of much concern to people who can believe that “free” bus passes are really free, or that apartment builders will opt for losing money on new “inclusive” developments, or that the expenditure of $1 billion and counting on an unneeded sewage disposal system is an “investment.”
It’s la-la land, but they’re hurting the city core in ways that will come back to haunt. They seem not to understand that the city centre runs on entrepreneurship, not taxation.
Oh, well. We now find what we need in the surrounding communities, leaving the island of downtown to the inhabitants.
George Manning
Langford
Victoria council should stand against idling
Victoria city council has an obsession with punishing those involved with the past, whether it be Sir John A. Macdonald, or oil companies.
I would propose city council try more legitimate efforts to stop climate change by doing the following:
• Ensure that police and fire vehicles are not left idling for hours for a few flashing lights or to use a computer. Cops and firefighters can use cones and crack a window or wear a toque if they’re too cold or too hot.
• Further strengthen anti-idling laws, have parking ambassadors and police regularly write tickets for a few hundred dollars to those idling and wasting gas, needlessly polluting air pedestrians must breathe.
• Insist all traffic-control contractors have vehicles with deep-cycle batteries instead of running vehicles for hours for their low draw LED lights that may or may not be needed. These vehicles can be plugged in at night.
• Insist traffic-control contractors and police have a priority to keep traffic moving. It is obvious that traffic controllers and police do not prioritize getting the taxpaying motorist moving on the roads and highways they have paid for, exacerbating idling and climate change.
An idling vehicle is one of the most wasteful examples of stupidity, human laziness and climate change. Furthermore, we all pay for the fuel wasted in city vehicles with our taxes.
Council should get more fiscally and environmentally responsible.
Ken Mawdsley
Victoria
Complexity matters in our health-care system
As a consultant pediatrician of almost 20 years, I wish to highlight not only the lack of primary care, but the general undervaluing of “generalism” in the medical system.
As any practitioner will tell you, the system pays those who do procedures, and those who deal with well-circumscribed problems within highly specialized areas.
The areas of complexity, ambiguity, chronicity and problems that don’t fit into a well-defined box are the longest and most challenging problems a practitioner deals with …. and the most poorly paid, most cumbersome and most fatiguing.
Experts on compassion fatigue point out that any doctor would rather deal with 20 patients with one or two problems each than two or three patients with 30 or 40 problems between them.
Each patient with complexity, in areas of medical health, social issues and mental health have not only a lot to navigate, but their system needs are frankly overwhelming for any single practitioner.
My own inbox is simply overflowing with requests for tax credit forms, special authority to fund prescriptions, requests from schools to summarize my diagnoses, requests from lawyers and to co-ordinate community supports and so on and so on.
I could see at least 25 per cent more patients a day, if not more, if I simply had help with paperwork and fielding the calls, forms and system issues.
This speaks not at all to the fact that I must see patients with “primary care issues” simply because I have no GP with whom to share care.
Supporting and rebuilding a primary care system that works is essential, but as we look to solutions, it is generalism as a whole that must be valued and supported; general internists, general pediatricians, general psychiatrists and so on, in the community where the patients are.
It is exactly in the gaps between silos of super subspecialists that patients fall, and although teams have a role to play, we must be careful about building unwieldly care providing groups that reduce face time with caregivers, see very low volumes and cannot meet societal needs.
Dr. Jennifer Balfour
Pediatrics, Clinical Associate Professor UBC/UVic
Reduce bed sores with some old ideas
As an old Jubilee Hospital nursing graduate from many years ago, I was shocked to read about the increase in bed sores among patients in care homes — even leading to death in some severe cases.
It wasn’t mentioned in the article, which was a surprise to me, that prevention is the best medicine.
As student nurses, we were taught the basics of prevention, and we would have been in deep trouble with our supervisors if a patient was to develop such a ghastly thing.
It wasn’t all about treatment after the fact, but instead good personal care that was stressed and adhered to.
Really, it is simple. Help with frequent turning from side to side, even throughout the night, to prevent pressure in one area over a long period of time.
The other prevention was also simple. God old-fashioned back rubs, and rubs of other pressure points, such as the heels of the feet.
Get back to the “basics” when instructing the residential students and others.
As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention prevents a pound of flesh.”
Ann Drew
Sidney
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