VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
DEGLAMOURIZING BOOZE
Re: “Think outside the wine box,” July 17 opinion piece. Lee-anne Richardson is absolutely right: “booze is glamourized” in our society. You just have to flip through the glossy pages of the NSLC’S Occasions magazine to see that. We all know that drinking alcohol can be detrimental to one’s health and has destroyed many lives and families.
Thank you, Lee-anne, for having the guts and insight to create Sober City — an online resource for those who want to live an alcohol-free life and feel validated.
Karyn Dougherty, Halifax
ETERNITY IN ER
Re: emergency health care at our local hospitals.
On July 6, I consulted with my family doctor and she felt my symptoms warranted immediate testing at the Halifax Infirmary.
I arrived at the emergency department at 1:30 p.m. and then waited for seven-and-a-half hours before I was able to see a doctor at 9 p.m. to give me a CT scan and other tests.
At 10:30 p.m., in my exhausted state and on account of my age (91), I was allowed to stay overnight before I returned home the next day.
It was obvious to me that many others had to wait as long as I, or longer, on July 6, and probably the same on July 7. Duty staff were doing their best, I am sure, but sadly there were too few of them.
Is this not a crisis that we should be focusing on now? Couldn’t we look carefully at this situation with the same urgency we confronted COVID-19?
Diane D. Davies, Halifax
CAN’T PAY FOR ALL THIS
The writ is dropped. COVID obsession has made everyone forget about the myriad problems we face in Nova Scotia. Physician shortages, long-term care improvements, affordable housing, to name a few, will become issues again.
Each party will tell you it will tackle these issues, but with what? There is no money for any party to achieve its objectives. Citizens keep wanting, but are in denial about the resources needed to fix some things. A party with a solid plan to grow the economy might just save us from the inevitable increase in taxation needed to feed our wants and needs.
Ask your prospective MLA when he or she comes knocking how their party plans to deal with all of our wants. Listen for the silence. Malcolm Macpherson, Valley
BLOATED LEGISLATURE
In their wisdom, Nova Scotia legislators have added four new seats to the legislature. This brings the total number to 55.
To put this total number in perspective, I’d like to compare it to California’s state legislature.
California, with a population of over 39 million, has a total of 120 state legislators, including both the assembly and the senate. Nova Scotia, with a population of less than one million, will have 55 MLAS.
If California had the same per capita representation as does Nova Scotia, there’d be over 2,200 legislators in California! To illustrate this difference in another way, there are 329,000 citizens in California for each state legislator. In Nova Scotia, there is one MLA for every 17,808 citizens. On a per capita basis, Nova Scotia’s elected government is over 18 times bigger.
In addition to the provincial situation, Halifax’s council numbers are also unnecessarily inflated.
Surely something must be done about this situation.
Don Dougherty, Halifax