Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau speaks during a rally in Peterborough, Ont., on Sept. 26, 2019.CHRIS HELGREN/Reuters
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
The final piece
Re When A Party’s Promises Just Don’t Stack Up (Editorial, Sept. 26): The Globe’s editorial describes governing in Canada as "a game of coast-to-coast-to-coast Jenga.” While the three-coast description of the country is laudable and respectful in its own way, it renders the southern border with the United States invisible – that should be the largest block in this complex Jenga puzzle. Canadians need to hear more of the parties’ promises on U.S. relations and how they plan to play it.
James Read Winnipeg
What goes around
Re Tories, Liberals Pitch Green-housing Platforms (Sept. 26): In 2009, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government brought in a Home Renovation Tax Credit. Hot tubs qualified, provided they were a permanent installation. Many homeowners thus installed hot tubs, and took home the tax credit.
This year, Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives are promising a new renovation tax credit where energy efficiency is targeted. Removing those energy-guzzling hot tubs ought to qualify. I guess that would be the rinse cycle.
Tim Howlett Calgary
Unmasking Trudeau’s actions
Re The Many Masks Of Justin Trudeau (Online, Sept. 25): Occasionally, I am rocked from the complacency of being white and what that means to my friends of colour. One such moment came when I read Omer Aziz’s commentary.
Mr. Aziz astutely addresses Justin Trudeau’s blackface moments as arising out of privilege and power. More importantly, he drew a bead on the insidious nature of Canadian racism symbolized in Mr. Trudeau’s actions. The issue is not simply one of forgiving frivolous behaviour in order to move on. This is too convenient, particularly for white people.
From our cocoon of willful blindness, we seem to push racism to an illusory yesterday and take refuge in politically correct language, all while being anesthetized by collective virtue signalling. Our anxiousness to forgive may be inconveniently rooted in our need to be forgiven.
Gordon Young Halifax
Re We Should Judge All Prime Ministers By Their Present, Not Their Past (Sept. 24): Blackface and similar racist gestures may be part of Justin Trudeau’s personal past, one that is “increasingly covered in ashes,” as contributor John English writes. But the issues that they expose, such as white privilege and our lack of collective appreciation for minorities’ struggles with racism, are very much part of many Canadians’ social reality.
By critiquing Mr. Trudeau’s actions, we are not harping on a racist past, but trying to reveal and shed a racist present.
Roy Fu Department of Humanities, Philosophy and Religion, John Abbott College; Montreal
The business of innovation
Re Seeing The Light (Opinion, Sept. 21): Jim Balsillie points out that innovation in Canada is tied to the economy of yesterday, which is all about resource extraction. He’s right.
We seem content to be the world’s open-source idea factory, giving away our ideas for others to make into products and services to sell back to us. We need to stop thinking about research outputs as just another raw resource to ship off the land without refinement. But we also need to increase industry spending on research and development (where we fall well below international peer countries) to match our very high public-sector research spending.
Going from idea to invoice – where applicable – requires us to rethink how we link industry to academic research. Economic nationalism along the likes of what Mr. Balsillie is promoting will help us not only keep more intellectual property in Canada, but ensure that we have better jobs for the future.
Robert Luke PhD, vice-president of research and innovation, OCAD University; Toronto
Jim Balsillie articulates the strong and urgent need for better innovation policy in Canada.
As someone who has worked in the funding and administration of science and technology programs over the past two decades, I am keenly aware of the apparent confusion between science and technology, and innovation. Indeed, many funding announcements for research programs use the word innovation to imply that innovation will come out of the results – without any associated programs and policies in order to make that happen.
Our future economic security will be linked to how well we can play in the knowledge economy. Canadians should ask their political candidates how they intend to make that happen.
Kofi Agblor Saskatoon
Jim Balsillie makes the case that an innovation economy is different from an industrial economy, but he also leans on the usual argument against foreign direct investment (FDI) in any industry.
While it is true that FDI means the Canadian economy may lose a profitable firm, in the end there is still a group of Canadians netting the value of that just-sold firm. If we don’t like what those Canadians do with that money, there is scope for government policy. But preventing a company from generating its maximum value through FDI is mainly a gift to Canadian investors who would be happy to underpay for domestic firms.
Calum Stranack Kingston
Gun control’s impact
Re Why Does Any Canadian Need A Handgun? What The Gun Control Debate Is Missing (Sept. 21): After mass shootings happened in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, each country moved swiftly to ban semi-automatic weapons. In Canada, after enduring mass shootings by semi-automatic weapons at École Polytechnique, Dawson College and in Moncton, what has been done? Why the wait?
Banning handguns, automatic and semi-automatic weapons and large-capacity magazines will not stop all mass shootings or firearm homicides. But it will be a big step in the right direction.
Tom Suhadolc Grimsby, Ont.
The introduction of any new law undoubtedly imposes additional expenses on enforcement and the judicial system, and a handgun ban would impose more than most. But I cannot buy Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction Bill Blair’s argument that such a ban would be overly expensive and ineffective. The benefits, however little, are worth trying to achieve.
Stephen McNamee Ottawa
It was stated in The Globe’s investigation of Canadian gun-control laws that the number of gun deaths by homicide across Canada continues to climb, and that by the end of 2018, it hit 249. What shouldn’t go unsaid is that 75 per cent of firearm deaths in Canada are due to suicide, and that number is regularly in excess of 500 deaths per year.
A focus on urban gangs, smuggled handguns and gang shootings detracts substantially from developing a more reasoned approach to lessening firearm mortality. There needs to be a greater public-health emphasis on suicide and intimate-partner violence prevention.
Alan Drummond MD, co-chair of public affairs, Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians; Ottawa
Best picture
Your editorial cartoon (Sept. 26) takes the Green Party to task for taking “the moral high ground." Perhaps a counterpoint could show the three major party leaders arguing about how to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Gordon Yanchyshyn Toronto
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