This is hard to believe, I know, but it is absolutely true. My own grandson, who is three quarters Tsimshian, was taken by the Ministry of Child Abduction and kept from his family for more than three years. We hired a lawyer and paid more than $30,000 to get him back in a process that saw government workers submit openly dishonest “assessments” in order to justify their actions. While lingering in waiting rooms at their various offices, his white relatives discovered that our own was not an isolated case; the difference was that we had enough money to buy representation, while most First Nations families do not.
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A study done in 2015 found that a site could prevent as many as 15 new cases of HIV each year. Each case costs as much as $1.3 million over a lifetime. It is a win-win to provide full funding for safe injection sites.
Fran Forsberg, Saskatoon
Front-line workers deserve altered vaccine timetable
When Premier Moe revealed his objection to vaccinating essential workers is based on how doing so would affect his proposed schedule, he also admitted that he is a prisoner of his own bureaucrats and their self-imposed deadlines. His failure to include those whose work puts them at risk in favour of an arbitrary date shows he would rather allow working citizens to face an increased chance at sickness and death than admit the schedule his advisers proposed must be adjusted.
I worked in psychiatry in Victoria in the late 1980s and it was a revolving door for those who returned to the community without a stable and secure environment once their hospitalization ended. The victimization and criminality that is being experienced today had not materialized to today’s levels, but then, as now, it was inhuman to watch the never-ending cycle: hospitalize, stabilize and release. Governments and society must acknowledge that there are those among us who do not have the capacity to care for themselves and we as civil society must care for them. We have allowed this social experiment to continue over the last 40-plus years under the guise of self-determination and mitigation of structural costs.