Vancouver Sun letters to the editor for Thursday, Aug. 15, 2019
Credit to Author: Gordon Clark| Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2019 01:00:57 +0000
In response to Douglas Todd’s Aug. 6 article, “Should Ottawa pay for stress newcomers place on transit?”, I propose a solution that differs from Todd’s suggestion that Ottawa should pay.
The educational institutions that benefit from the high fees they charge international students, and the employers of guest workers who benefit from their lower compensation, should be required to pay a transit fee of $1,000 per year to Metro Vancouver for each foreign student or worker.
These fees would significantly relieve the stresses that international students and guest workers place on transit throughout Metro Vancouver.
Carol June Ogden, Vancouver
Columnist Ian Mulgrew made a provocative statement in suggesting that realtors played a significant role in the pricing of homes and property. The provincial and municipal governments also contributed to the ballooning prices by their inaction.
While new property taxes have slowed the hot market dramatically, housing is still unaffordable. Realtors regularly promote houses that are not truly affordable for people earning $100,000 a year. Unless someone acts, prices will go skyward once again. I hope there is true courage to address the issue of affordable housing.
Kathleen Szabo, Vancouver
Letter-writer Joseph Hind takes umbrage at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s outing of Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s lack of commitment to Vancouver’s Pride Parade. Trudeau, Hinds states, is “nowhere to be seen” as Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig “languish” in Chinese prisons. According to Hind, Trudeau’s human rights effort is ‘found wanting’.”
Given more thought, Hind might become aware that relations right now with China are perilous. It is obvious that talks between Canadian and Chinese officials are slowly grinding on. I predict that when the case of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou is resolved, especially if she is free to return to China, Spavor and Kovrig will be on the next flight from Beijing.
In reading the excellent article Aug. 9 regarding B.C. and money laundering, one has to ask: Who has benefited and who has lost in the money laundering game in B.C. over the years?
The winners would be anyone holding capital assets, be it real estate, luxury car dealerships, expensive items for sale and so on. The losers would be the middle- and lower middle-class with higher prices for essential products and services, especially real estate.
Mark Gray, Vancouver
I did not attend this year’s Pride parade. I decided to boycott it and anything to do with the Vancouver Pride Society. The position that the society has taken to ban not only the Vancouver police but UBC and the Vancouver Public Library is appalling.
I am a 61-year-old gay man who came out in the late 1970s. For over 30 years, I have volunteered for various queer community groups, having founded not only the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, but Toronto’s Inside Out Film Festival.
The Vancouver Pride Society is not the poster child of a free, open and enlightened society that we pioneers of the LGBTIQ2S movement have been fighting for. The board of the society has either forgotten our history or chosen to ignore it, and now the oppressed have become the oppressors.
Keith Clarkson, Vancouver
Although I support transgender and other LGBT rights, efforts to support LGBT in our community should not transcend others’ basic human rights. Forcing women to wax male genitalia is uncomfortably comparable to sexual coercion.
Protecting LGBT rights is of equal importance to protecting female aestheticians’ right to consent to such intimate services.
Wendy Qiu, Richmond
The population growth of Surrey averages out to 2.12 per cent a year for the last five years. Based on the rule of 72, this means that the people in Surrey in 34 years can look forward to a city doubling in size to over a million people, nearly all based on mass immigration.
Imagine the consequences for the environment, traffic congestion and stress on the health, education and social services sector of the economy, and increased prices for limited supply products such as land and housing.
Mark Gray, Vancouver
Letters to the editor should be sent to sunletters@vancouversun.com. The editorial pages editor is Gordon Clark, who can be reached at gclark@postmedia.com.
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