Letters April 9, 2023: ‘Help is on the way to get our streets safer, and it can’t come soon enough.’

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The time is now

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Rest easy Calgary! Help is on the way. In a year or so more of our city’s finest will be patrolling transit stations for the low lifes that threaten citizens on a regular basis. The horse is out of the barn! We need action right away. We also need these weak kneed judges and prosecutors to do their jobs and get criminals more than a slap on the wrist so they don’t just repeat their bad behaviour. Meanwhile, this will continue until these punks are locked up. Sit tight and hang on folks.

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KEN UHREN

(Judges hand down sentences, parole boards let criminals out to reoffend. The system is in fact broken.)

Time to fix the funding

Premier Danielle Smith and the UCP are trying to appear like bastions of justice and public order by deploying Alberta sheriffs downtown in Calgary and Edmonton, and promising further resources. This seems contradictory as the UCP’s 2020 budget saw the province take 40% of the fine revenue from cities rather than 26.7%. This funding directly pays for local policing. In 2021, this action amounted to defunding the police $32 million for Alberta municipalities. The province should consider reversing this decision as it would help ensure cities have the resources they need to effectively deal with social disorder.     

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BRETT DIBBLE

(Don’t love the idea of incentivising police to hand out fines, regardless of who gets the cash.)

Please, do butt out

So Premiere Danielle Smith is running an ad campaign where she asks the question of whether or not a checkup visit to a doctor should be “paid for by the government”. Well, premiere, let me ask you a question: whose money do you think is funding these routine visits to a doctor? I’ll give you, and anybody close-minded enough to agree with you, a little clue: That money is ours! Taxpayers pay for those visits, so kindly butt out of healthcare discussions if  you don’t mind?  

CHRIS NEVEU

(Pretty sure the NDP pay for those ads, and they are clearly working.)

Not the time

My $8 rib-eye now costs $23. My $80 tank of gas costs $110. My heating bill was $200 and is now $340. All that and my mortgage has increased thanks to your spending, Mr. Trudeau. As a Canadian, I am BEGGING you, don’t increase the carbon tax so I can at least afford to drive to work to continue to be able to be gouged by my own government.

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YANCY JONES

(We are all feeling the pain of this government’s bad choices.)

Time to demolish

24 Sussex Drive and its rodent problem reported April 3, I say dismantle, raze, tear down this dilapidated building of no historical value. Looked at real estate in Ottawa and the most expensive house I found for sale right now was a six-bedroom, five-bath, three-storey house on a large park-like lot priced at $2,389,000. Why waste $36 million on renovating a dilapidated building? Another example of Ottawa bureaucrats wasting money and not looking at reasonable options.

GWEN ZEEGERS

(But what are the neighbours like?)

Backpedalling council 

The city ramps up security for transit and a poll finds we all think crime is getting worse. It wasn’t so long ago that the current mayor and her minions were whistling a different tune with regards to policing in Calgary. Back then, they were seriously proposing to defund the CPS. What happened? Why the change of heart? I would hate to rain on everyone’s parade, but crime and violence will get progressively worse before it gets better in this province. For a long time, our leaders have stuck their heads in the sand pile, hoping this ugly side of life would disappear on its own, and guess what?

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DONALD K. MUNROE

(As long as they see the error of their ways, right?)

Enough is enough

I’m fed up. The guy who went on a stabbing spree on Monday was out on bail. We hear too much about having to deal with addiction, homelessness, mental illness. Solution – arrest and detain. While locked up, they have a home, they have full access to ALL services, from all professionals. From counseling to AA meetings to anger management, all can be done under medical detox supervision.

IAN PORTER

(Sounds like a very expensive, and likely ineffective, solution.)

Flopping all over

During a very recent open-mic press conference, a journalist put the issue of violent crime before Mayor Gondek. Given her well-known ‘defund-the-police’ position not so long ago, Bexte wondered how the public would perceive this revised ‘get-tough-on-crime’ stance being put forth now.  He actually used the term ‘flip-flop’. Her Worship stood before the mic; apparently listened to the question; then walked away without a response. They next addressed Premier Danielle Smith, who went forward to the mic, listened, and responded. Fully and respectfully. Anyone needing a demonstration of actual leadership, and the absence thereof, certainly saw it at that press conference.

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BARBARA JESSIMAN

(We do love a question from the press ruffling some feathers.)

Impossible to please

Well I’ve finally gotten around to reading a breakdown of the UCP budget which, of course, shall be the destruction of Alberta according to the NDP. It has allocated ONE BILLION into Health Care. The NDP should be ecstatic over such news, yet their most recent problem with UCP workings in the area of health care (in my memory) was in the government’s reduction of an overpaid board of directors to a single, well qualified person. It has long been known that a good amount of funding has been absorbed in the wages of managers within the system, so there’s a good place to start on savings! What must upset the NDP most in any cost cutting measures throughout health care is in its loss of union supporters! 

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DAN DRINKALL

(If those board members were also union members they may have actually cared about health care staff.)

Send a message

Now I’m not exactly a rocket scientist, but if the Canada Arm is attached to the Artemis 11 that will do a lunar flyby of the moon, I hope that when it passes over Russia the Canada Arm will give the finger to Putin.

TERRY TOLL

(He wouldn’t be able to see it through the throngs of people-pleasing minions.)

Well done!

Congratulations to Jeremy Hansen for being named the first Canadian to encircle the moon. Sadly his accomplishment was easily beaten by the Prime Minister, who is the first to be lost in space. Justin Trudeau likes to say he has our backs. I think he’s a lot closer to the seventh planet from the sun.

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PAUL BAUMBERG

(Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Ur….. You’re a funny guy, Paul.)

Dishonest honesty?

During the 2015 election campaign Justin Trudeau looked into the camera and said: ‘I am looking straight at Canadians and being honest the way I always have. We will balance that budget in 2019.’ Was he being honest as he had always been? YES. Was the budget balanced?

Of course not.

MIKE SWANN

(The Prime Minister is very good at twisting his own words.)

Won’t get my vote

As an American-born Canadian with dual citizenship between the two countries, I was able to vote in the 2016 U.S. elections. Therefore, I voted for Donald Trump and the Republican Party in Nov 2016. It is now 2023 and I would still vote for the Republican Party without a doubt, but never in a million years would I vote for Donald J. Trump again. He basically shot himself in the foot during the Capitol Hill fiasco in January 2021.

DONALD K. MUNROE

(It was a sad day for Americans world-wide.)

A novel idea

I think it’s hilarious how many letters come in decrying the growing popularity of socialism among young people. Yeah, I wonder why alternative economic systems become popular when our current one has been pushing down wages, blowing up the price of housing, and rewarding corporations handsomely for polluting the environment. It’s no mystery that people who get shafted by an economic system are more willing to change it.

MICAELA SLOMKOWSKI

(You mean like: make Canada great for everyone?)