Today’s letters: Does Canada have its spending priorities right?

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It’s time to reset spending priorities

It is time for a serious rethink of our priorities and income distribution. Homelessness on one page of the newspaper, and doctor and nurse shortages on the next — and then the story of an athlete leaving a team  because they could earn more than their $10 million elsewhere. Then another story on CEO salaries being more than 200 times the wage of the average worker.

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We can do better than this. Either seriously change our progressive tax structure or everyone should be prepared to pay higher taxes. For a wealthy country like Canada, I am ashamed.

Michael Wiggin, Ottawa

Drug problem not just about downtown

Re: Drug-paraphernalia debris in Ottawa ‘a parent’s worst nightmare,’ Feb. 19.

One thing that has been clear to me as I have busked around Ottawa is various parts of the city, whether Centretown or the ByWard Market, is that illicit drug abuse is everywhere to varying degrees, in every ward in our fair city.

And yet, there is an ignorant and rabid form of NIMBYism among those with the power to enact the intergenerational revolution this crisis  demands. This is a battle that will outlast most council terms.

It’s ByWard’s drug crisis; it’s Centretown’s drug problem; it’s Vanier’s … blah blah blah. Hey, it’s Ottawa’s problem!

What is needed is a pan-Ottawa solution and an pan-council solution that crosses ward boundaries and gets to the root of this issue, which is a cancer on our city and its weakest citizens. The current convenient NIMBYism is killing us.

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Thomas Brawn, Orléans

Housing doesn’t fix drug problem

It was frustrating to see Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper implying that a large federal program for affordable housing was going to somehow help fix this problem.

At 1095 Merivale Ave., The Shepherds of Good Hope opened an affordable housing project with an $8.3-million grant from the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. Since the opening of the facility in June 2023, Carlington has experienced a drastic increase in the impacts of intravenous drug use.

As Adam Crupi described in the article, providing no-cost housing to addicts has a huge, negative impact on those who live in the surrounding neighbourhood. Providing social housing to IV drug users without a comprehensive rehabilitation program helps no one. It actually makes the problem worse.

John Haslip, Ottawa

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