Letters: Nov 7/13

Nov 07, 2013

Re: Will the Conservatives throw the Senate under the bus

(Will the Conservatives  throw the Senate under the bus" Editorial Frontenac News oct 31/13) is the type of journalism I have come to expect from this paper.

I wonder where the comment and indignation was/is over the scams overseen by Chretien, and more recently McGuinty. How about commentary about the individual, a previous Deputy Minister of Education, in the mess called the McGuinty government, involved with child pornography. That individual is involved in the Wynne transitional government but unless I missed something, I have seen no mention of any scandals perpetrated by the Liberals and NDP.

If a member of the Harper government has dirty nails, they are soundly condemned while billion dollar scams perpetrated by the political left are ignored. Ho hum.

Funny how we see no comments on the public death threats of a black organization against Caucasian voters in the USA, nor a comment on the bigotry of affirmative action where minorities are favored over Caucasians in government hiring here in Canada.

One would think that like the msm majority, your paper squints out of the left eye and speaks out of the corner of its left mouth. Some things never change.

Conversation always gives vent to character and to this paper I will say, "Mene mene teckel upharsin". Keep up the slanted and inequitable reporting and commentaries. You do yourself, and the left you appear to favor, proud.

Edward Kennedy

Questionnaire for Scott Reid

Feb. 11: Duffy meets with unidentified host (and possibly other participants) in Room 204 from 12:07 - 12:54 pm. Later that day and in a different room, Conservative Senate Leader Claude Carignan meets with Government House Leader Peter Van Loan and his parliamentary secretary, Scott Reid and Conservative caucus chair Guy Lauzon, as well as an unidentified PMO host, between 3-4:30 pm. Posted by Kady O’Malley, Oct. 28, 2013.

So Scott, given that your February 11 meeting with a PMO representative coincided within three hours of a meeting about what to do with Mike Duffy, it seems possible that you may have been involved with the Senate-related controversy that soon enveloped the Conservative caucus. Yes? Or No? If yes, then what?

Ken Fisher

Tasers Vs Mental Health

I believe that we need a better approach to dealing with the mentally ill, particularly when police have been alerted to their condition. Tasers, which all front line officers in Ontario can now carry, are not the ultimate answer to our problem of dealing with these situations .

I support an alternate proposal to have an on-call mental health professional for situations where an acutely distressed individual is threatening harm to self or others, in an effort to prevent any escalation of the situation. When police alone are dispatched to a situation of a person in mental distress, the situation can escalate to shooting, as happened this last July 27 to Sammy Yatim in Toronto and on July 25 to Bob Srigley in Frontenac County (Bob was shot multiple times and died from his injuries on July 28, 2013). If either situation had employed a mental health professional to talk down the distressed individual, a fatal shooting could possibly have been prevented.

At the very least, all our front line officers should receive enough training so that they have sufficient knowledge of how to defuse most of these situations before the escalation to fatal shootings.

The goal should be to save lives and get the correct long-term care for the distressed individual and to prevent the significant complications of any fatal shooting. A good example of this is the Mental Health Unit of the Ottawa Police Service.

It would be good to give the first responders a new tool to deal with these issues – not a taser, not a gun, not pepper spray – but a mental health professional experienced in dealing with very disturbed, agitated individuals.

Marilyn Garrett