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Thank you for the recognition of service to the community provided by the Royal Canadian Legion, and the Army, Navy and Air Force Veterans clubs in the area. These organizations are not often credited for the good work they do, and are suffering from lack of public awareness. Anyone interested in becoming a member should contact the clubs direct.
Once again, thank you for the recognition.
Lenora Yasinsky
president, Royal Canadian Legion branch 209
Readers of your newspaper must be made aware that recent comments by Richmond-Steveston Liberal MLA Geoff Plant in his Nov. 22 letter "Debate Treaty Now" are not only seriously flawed but is a blatant dishonest attempt to misrepresent the Nisga'a Treaty in his attempt to oppose it.
Plant's objections to it throughout his letter are premised on a quotation from chapter 18, section 4 of the treaty. From this "real zinger" of a quote, Plant claims that changes to the provincial election boundaries and even changes to the provincial election process will be impaired because these will be subject to a Nisga'a veto, claiming further that the Nisga'a people will end up having a "different constitutional status as electors" from anyone else in Canada, and so on through his letter.
The fact is that Plant is actually misquoting the original text. Indeed, Plant misrepresents the entire chapter in his letter because chapter 18 refers only to local governments and the Regional District of Kitimat Stikine. The entire chapter, less than a page in length and very short because it deals only with the relationships of these local governments, has nothing to do with the provincial government or its election boundaries. And the language of chapter 18 is quite clear and unconfusing here.
Yet, by taking this sentence and misrepresenting it by misquoting it and taking it out of context, he intended the reader to draw an insidious conclusion that the Nisga'a Treaty would establish "a patchwork quilt of frozen electoral boundaries across this province." This is absolute rubbish.
But this is no simple error or leap in logic. Plant's letter obfuscates the Nisga'a Treaty by constructing an argument based on false premises designed to scare readers into opposing it rather than providing a proper critique based on facts - a continuing habit of the B.C. Liberals.
Also, readers should be troubled by Plant's insinuation concerning the upcoming debate in the legislature ("Will we have a chance to debate the real treaty?"). To be sure, the provincial legislature will be debating a real treaty called the Nisga'a Treaty. Plant and his Liberal colleagues better come to real grips with it fast instead of relying on their dishonest misrepresentations of it because there are several real issues that need to be addressed and real points that need clarification. But I suspect, as usual, instead of the Liberals providing a substantive critique and argument followed by a rigorous cross-examination, we will just hear a lot of noise and insubstantial nonsense to attract public attention designed to portray themselves as doing something in their opposition to the treaty.
As for Plant, I believe he should apologize to your readers for attempting to mislead them. In fact, given that he continues to illustrate an appalling lack of integrity for someone aspiring to be attorney general, perhaps he should consider an honourable course taken by his federal counterpart Andy Scott and resign himself to the doghouse.
Allan Warnke
Richmond
Who pays for B.C.'s universities? The usual answer is the taxpayer since tuition fees amount to only one third of university teaching costs. This answer, however, is incomplete since it ignores a second way that students pay, namely, through higher taxes after they graduate. When the tax payments are taken into account, university students pay more than the full cost of their educations.
There are many reasons why people attend university, and one of them is to make more money. On the whole, they succeed. University graduates have lower unemployment rates and higher salaries than people with less education. According to the 1991 census, British Columbia women in their thirties working full time earned $34,000 if they had a bachelor degree, $29,000 with a college diploma, and $26,000 with high school graduation. For men, corresponding figures were $47,000, $42,000, and $38,000.
Since university graduates earn more money, they pay more taxes. The present value of the extra taxes paid by male university graduates is $62,896. Female graduates pay an extra $49,586 in taxes. Including tuition, fees, men pay $74,376 on average for their degrees, while women pay $61,066.
These payments exceed the operating capital costs of degrees: both men and women repaid the treasury more than twice the cost of their degrees. University education is a good investment for Canadian governments.
Proposals to reform university finance by raising fees and introducing contingent repayment loans are misplaced and unnecessary. The tax system already acts like a contingent repayment plan, and students already pay for their educations. Raising fees will reduce access, retard economic growth, and increase inequality along American lines.
University graduates who complain about high taxes should realize that they are paying for their education.
While the B.C. government has been wise to freeze tuition in the province's colleges and universities, the federal and provincial governments have been derelict in other respects.
The problem is that the "alumni contributions" of their graduates are not being passed back to the post-secondary system. The federal government has cut transfer payments to the provinces and is using the taxes collected from university graduates to pay down the national debt. The provincial government has been forcing the universities to accept more students without - in most recent years - giving them more money.
Robert Allen
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Vancouver
Until five and a half months ago, we didn't have any reason to pay much attention to the debates about health care in our province.
In June, our daughter Amy was born with a congenital heart defect that required open heart surgery in order for her to grow. Over the past few months, we have spent five weeks in and out of Richmond Hospital and B.C. Children's Hospital and have discovered first hand how troubled our health care system really is.
Our daughter's surgery was cancelled four times, in most cases due to critical care nursing staff shortages. The fourth time our surgery was cancelled, we were in the waiting room at the time. These cancellations were extremely traumatic for us, but we considered ourselves lucky since we met other people who travelled from out of town and faced such cancellations.
During our time at B.C. Children's Hospital, we found that there were simply too many children for each nurse for the nurses to provide adequate care for each child. We witnessed several occasions when nurses ran from one patient to another as monitors beeped and the children cried out for attention at the same time. For this reason, we spent our days and nights at our daughter's bedside during her hospital stay as did many other parents.
We were very impressed with the physicians and nurses who took care of our daughter. They were positive and cheerful and appeared to be doing their best under difficult circumstances. We feel fortunate and are truly thankful that our daughter had a successful heart operation and is now home safely.
Nonetheless, we feel that the health care system is strained near the breaking point. There is a real problem in our hospitals if life threatening illnesses cannot be treated quickly and effectively because of medical staff shortages. Unless the health care system is improved, there may not be adequate care the next time someone from my family or yours need hospital care.
Julie and Gunther Eckert
Richmond
Richmond citizens should wake up and realize that the negotiations with native bands with overlapping land claims in Richmond are reaching a critical stage and provincial negotiators are now asking the City of Richmond to prepare a menu of civic assets and programs that might form part of a final settlement. Meanwhile, the provincial government refuses to allow the citizens of British Columbia an opportunity to vote on the Nisga'a Treaty. Instead, they are launching a debate in the legislature next week, without any prospect of implementing suggested changes that might arise from the debate. Perhaps Richmond voters should have a chance to vote in a local referendum on some of the issues that might be on the table with negotiations that are already started with the Musqueam band, the Sto:lo Band and the Tsawwassen Band. For example, are city parks to be on the table for future co-management? What about city library services being contracted to a new third level aboriginal order of government, known in politically correct terms as a "neighbouring first nation"? Are we prepared to put all of our local assets in an inventory and turn this information over to the province so that they can offer it to native bands as a menu of treaty concessions? At Richmond's city council meeting last Monday, the vice-chair of the Lower Mainland Treaty Advisory Council, Vicki Huntington, put it aptly when she said "there is nothing the province is not willing to discuss with first nations" as part of the negotiations.
In response to Mayor Greg Halsey-Brandt's question about whether or not the province would allow all parties to hold a referendum on future treaties, the provincial negotiator politely explained "there will always be a higher standard of ratification for first nations people because of the importance of the treaty to them".
Obviously, the province doesn't think these negotiations are important to the rest of us. Perhaps we showed them just how important we think they are.
It is time we demanded that our city government give us an opportunity to take a stand on this important issue, well before the treaties are finalized. A civic referendum on the principles we are willing to negotiate as part of native land claims settlements would be a good start.
Bob Ransford
Richmond
