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Study here? Strike the thought
Re Ontario Tables Bill To End College Teachers' Strike (Nov. 17): As the father of an international student studying in Toronto, let me express my disappointment with the ongoing strike by Ontario college faculty.
My daughter is in her fifth and final year studying in Toronto and this is the third strike/job action that has affected her education. She arrived late for her first year at university in 2013 because of a slowdown in issuing visas to foreign students as a result of a federal foreign service officers' job action. Then, in 2015, teaching assistants and contract professors went on strike at her university. After university, she transferred to a college, where the faculty strike as I write this has gone on for more than a month.
Ontario tries to recruit foreign students because of the money they bring in. Foreign students pay much higher tuition. If I were asked by foreign students if I would recommend Canada for their studies, I would tell them: Go to Australia, instead.
David Kendall, Kho Yor, Thailand
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Help wanted: high court judge
Re Opinions Divided Over Supreme Court Pick (Nov. 17): I don't get all the angst over this issue. A well-written job-placement ad would solve the problem in no time. See below.
Wanted: Supreme Court of Canada justice
Must be: female, Indigenous, resident in B.C., fully bilingual
Note: Demonstrated track record of excellence in legal thought and analysis preferred but not required.
Michael Rende, Thornhill, Ont.
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Get the trains moving
Re Ottawa Says Fairfax Interested In Port Of Churchill, Broken Rail Line (Nov. 17): The 900 people of Churchill have been without a rail connection since May's flooding. There is no road into Churchill, and residents have been forced to pay the devastatingly high food costs that come with flown-in provisions in the North.
These are our fellow Canadians and we've left them without land transportation. The government needs to fix this, now, and fight about it in court with Omnitrex later. If the government can help broker a deal with another purchaser, well and good, but in the meantime it needs to at least subsidize food costs to what they were when the trains were running. We claim to be people of the North. We should act like it.
Catherine Nguyen, Vancouver
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Re Ottawa, Omnitrax Trade Legal Blows Over Manitoba Railway (Report on Business, Nov. 15): This is nothing but a case of poor underwriting by Omnitrax.
The potential privatization of the then federally controlled Canadian Wheat Board should have been analyzed as a potential risk and accounted for in Omnitrax's acquisition.
I find it ironic that the purchaser of a railway concession is complaining about the privatization of another alternative asset (i.e. the wheat board), one with infrastructure investment characteristics. Situations like these are ammunition for critics of all forms of infrastructure privatization. Omnitrax has done a disservice to the industry, to the Canadian people, and most of all, to the residents of Churchill.
Omnitrax needs to fix the railway, drop the NAFTA claim, and move on.
Benjamin Fogel, Toronto
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Copyright, chapter and verse
As you reported last Saturday (Countries Agree On 'Core Elements' Of TPP, Nov. 11), Canada has now insisted that issues of copyright and intellectual property be set to one side in the revived TPP negotiations.
The same week, we at Broadview Press signed a contract with a scholar of Edwardian literature to prepare a new edition of E.M. Forster's 1908 novel A Room with a View (an edition in which the text will be supplemented by a wide variety of background documents of the period). That edition may well be ready to publish in 2019, but in that event we will have to publish the book initially for the U.S. market only, as Canadian copyright restrictions do not expire until 50 years after the year of the death of the author (in this case, Jan. 1, 2021).
If Canada were to go along with the further extended copyright restrictions that have been proposed under earlier versions of the TPP, we would not be able to publish an edition of A Room with a View in Canada until 2041 – 70 years after the year of the death of the author, and a full 133 years after the book was first published.
Canada has traditionally struck a reasonably fair balance between the interests of copyright holders and the interests of the general public. We hope the current government keeps that balanced approach, and refrains from extending the copyright restrictions to 70 years after a writer's death.
Don LePan, CEO, Broadview Press; Nanaimo, B.C.
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Overuse cheapens 'survivor'
The increasing, ubiquitous use (misuse) of the word "survivor" to all kinds of non-life threatening contexts these days is troubling at best. Worse, it dumbs down important discussions that require facts, evidence, context and critical thought. Having experienced creepy or uncomfortable situations is by no means something to ignore, however using "creepy or uncomfortable" as a defining criteria of being a "survivor" essentially means that pretty much every one of us alive today is a survivor.
This pervasive misuse diminishes the trauma experienced by people who have survived wars, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, auto crashes, building infernos and physical assaults. What's next … I "survived" watching Wile E. Coyote getting pummelled to death by trucks, rocks and dynamite a hundred times?
Is it possible that we can re-establish some semblance of perspective in modern North American society?
Mike Abraham, Ottawa