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
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A showboat and grandstander
Re Trump Admits False Rationale Was Given For FBI Chief's Firing (May 12): President Donald Trump says his rationale for firing FBI Director James Comey was that Mr. Comey is a "showboat" and a "grandstander." Maybe Congress will use a similar logic when they impeach Mr. Trump?
John Ferguson, Orleans, Ont.
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Donald Trump has taken his reality TV show to the White House, except he doesn't seem to understand that, in this arena, he is The Apprentice.
Katherine Grant, Dartmouth, N.S.
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Fired FBI director James Comey is actually a lucky man. In Vladimir Putin's Russia, he would have been murdered.
Lubomyr Luciuk, Kingston
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Call it 'The Meredith Law'
Re Senate Looks For Details About Fate Of Don Meredith's Pension After He Resigns (May 11): I am disgusted by the fact that Don Meredith, according to the laws governing the Senate, will be able to keep his nearly $25,000-a-year pension for life.
This man abused his position of trust with a teenage girl. That the law allows for his pension to be continued for life is simply egregious.
Laws are changed to reflect the times we live in. Change the law, call it "The Meredith Law" and deny all future senators access to their lifelong pensions for conduct unbecoming. Otherwise, Mr. Meredith's punishment is a slap on the wrist and there is no penalty that reflects his disgusting behaviour. Set a precedent!
Marlane Tibbs, Mississauga
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Part 1: Question. Part 2? TBA
Re Asked 18 Times (letters, May 12): Perhaps citizens misinterpreted the PM's promise, since he did indeed keep his commitment to introduce a Prime Minister's Question Period.
With any luck, his 2019 re-election effort will include a pledge to introduce a Prime Minister's Answer Period.
Louis Desjardins, Belleville, Ont.
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Seniors waiting, waiting …
Re Bad Hospital Discharges Among Top Complaints, Ontario's Health Watchdog Finds (May 12): When my mother was in an acute-care hospital bed awaiting placement in a long-term-care home last fall, I crunched some numbers provided by GTA Community Care Access Centres (CCAC).
At that time, 85 people were waiting for every 100 occupied beds. At the then-current rate, it would take 51 months to place all the fragile seniors languishing in hospital beds. Wait times for nine out of 10 seniors ranged from two months to more than eight years, the average being 2.5 years.
The "waiters" had all been assessed as having health-care needs that "cannot be met with any combination of caregiving in the home or community." Sadly, many will die before they are accommodated.
Using some of the dollars newly allocated to health care to create more long-term-care capacity would go a long way toward alleviating this bottleneck. But it will also take time that waiting seniors and their families just don't have.
The number of Canadians over 85 will quadruple in the next 20 years. This issue is going to get far worse very quickly.
A faster way to address the problem would be – dare it be said? – two-tier long-term-care capacity. Seniors paying $3,500 to $7,500 a month in retirement homes could afford privately provided long-term care.
This would shorten wait lists for less well-off seniors, and allow acute-care hospital beds to be used for the people they were intended to serve.
We stand on the shoulders of our seniors who helped create this wonderful country. It is a shame we treat them so poorly in their final years.
Murray Lapp, Whitby, Ont.
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Hospitals are getting the flak for the bottleneck in discharge planning, while there are just not enough nursing home beds for seniors in the system.
Elderly people who are past the acute stage of medical intervention could recover in government-funded "nursing home beds." This could be a temporary or permanent move.
The government could forestall this growing crisis by an increase in licensed long-term-care beds at the recommended standard of one bed per 1,000 population over age 75, and by developing a system of time-limited licences for long-term-care beds which can be revoked when population needs have changed. Government priority for licence applications should be given to not-for-profit and municipal long-term-care homes.
Edeltraud Neal, president, Provincial Council of Women of Ontario
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Men, women and their money
Re Listen Up Planners: Women View Money Differently (Report On Business, May 10): Thanks for the excellent article by Kathy Kerr on an often overlooked issue when discussing personal investments and banking.
I fully agree. Somewhere in my 42 years of banking, I came across a simple analogy for how men and women think differently about money.
Men think of money as a river. As long as the flow coming in covers what is going out, all is okay. Women think of money as a lake. If the levels dips a bit, for any reason, there's cause for concern.
Peter D. Hambly, Hanover, Ont.