Nothing good about Bill 14

Re: “Legislating language” (Letters, Dec. 7)

Heiner Theobald writes that The Gazette prints too many negative letters and articles about the language laws.

Guess what? There is nothing positive to say about legislating language laws. They are inherently repressive, authoritarian, and hence a negative cloud that hangs over our heads. Murray Shostak

Côte-St-Luc

Letter-writer Heiner heobald seems a little confused.

The Tim Hortons location, I assume, is the one on Sherbrooke and University. It is safe to believe that a large chunk of that outlet’s clientele are transient McGill students. Why one would be upset at the lack of French heard there is beyond me.

Second, it is not The Gazette’s job to become a partly French paper. There are three of those to choose from. Marc Guerard

N.D.G.

With its proposed amendments to Bill 101, the PQ evidently wants to bring about a confidence vote that it would lose, triggering an election that would give it the chance to get the majority that it wants by campaigning on the latest threat to the survival of French.

Let’s hope that when the election campaign begins and the PQ starts demagoguing the language issue once again, the electorate will be smart enough to see through the nonsense and vote based on the real issues.T Andrew H. Heft

Montreal

Re: “Why we need a new Bill 101” (Opinion, Dec. 5)

Many companies with head offices in Toronto or the United States have their eastern Canada branches in the greater Montreal area.

Eastern Region in most cases means Kingston, Ont. to Newfoundland and in many cases, these offices serve the northeastern United States as well. Any employee in these branches who has to interact with customers in Ontario, Atlantic Canada or the United States or communicate with the various departments at head office can only do so if they are bilingual.

The péquistes have already chased a lot of head offices and professionals out of Quebec, and now they want to have regional offices move to Cornwall, Ont., or Plattsburgh, N.Y., as many have already done. Ronald J. Lucas

Pierrefonds

Dementia-care policy is intolerable

Re: “Canada is in the dark ages with Alzheimer’s care” (Letter of the Day, Dec. 4)

Pat Walsh not only highlights the woeful neglect of people with such dementias as Alzheimer’s living in nursing homes, but exposes how our governments have adopted an egregious costsaving model of care.

Quebec, for instance, has prioritized communitybased services at the expense of additional longterm beds and specialized dementia care. Frequently, as dementia progresses, even the best communitybased care is grossly insufficient. The lack of longterm beds forces too many family caregivers to endure a crushing burden of care longer than is reasonably possible. Not only do family caregivers suffer brutal health consequences, but as a society we eventually pay for these consequences.

At the same time, we need to consider those with dementia who are alone, without family or friends, and will succumb to a predicament such as Walsh describes, without anyone to oversee the abysmal care they may receive once placed in nursing homes. Even if people with dementia have caring family members, they may not live close by. People with dementia require adequate and trained professionals who can provide specialized care.

The shortfall in longterm beds and specialized dementia care cannot be simply offset by an increase in community-based services. The need is dire and wait times intolerable. People with dementia and their families require a dementia-care strategy that must encompass a wide range of services to suit diverse needs. Cost-saving measures that exclude access to long-term beds and adequate and trained staff is cruel and abusive.

Linda Furlini

Montreal

Pipeline article didn’t convince

Re: “Quebecers have many reasons to question pipeline plan” (Opinion, Dec. 1)

Anne Chudobiak gives us five Equiterre talking points.

Going through them, it is immediately apparent that points one to three cover the same event: the oil spill from an Enbridge pipeline in Kalamazoo. One break, in one pipeline. North America has almost a million km of fossil fuel pipelines, and yes, some of these occasionally do spring a leak. The economics of growth require these lines, and all we can do is to hold the companies’ feet to the fire to ensure that the technology is there to detect leaks, and effect a shutdown of the line. Very doable.

Point 4 is a red herring. Be that as it may, her statement that “oilsands are responsible for more greenhouse gas pollution than all the cars on our roads put together” is not in accordance with latest facts, per Environment Canada. In 2010, oilsands operations contributed 48 Mt of emissions, while cars and light trucks contributed 88 Mt of emissions.

Finally, Point 5, about worse air quality in Montreal due to harder-toprocess crude: It would be nice to know the basis for this concern and, if true, why proper facility design cannot fix this. As to the possibility of a connection to Portland via the Montreal-Portland pipeline, one notes that it runs through Vermont and New Hampshire. Pipelines run across state and provincial borders as a matter of course. There are 19 pipelines crossing the U.S-Canada border. What is so different about Quebec?

It is a given that Equiterre and other environmental guardians wish to lower the use of fossil fuels everywhere.

A pipeline that promises to lower the price of fuel in Quebec does not fit this objective, even though the flow of cheaper western crude would provide an important economic benefit to the industry and might result in lower price for gasoline.

Henno Lattik

Montreal