Readers offer their opinions on city council approval for a planned Saskatoon Freeway and provincial funding for food banks in Saskatchewan.
The city government tells us that this is so everyone can plan for the future. We know it will cost billions of dollars and that it will create more urban sprawl. What we don’t know is what good it will do us.
They want to spend billions more to build nuclear reactors, even though solar and wind are both cheaper and available sooner. Now, Saskatoon needs another highway, one just for trucks.
This last vote would have been an excellent place to shelve this expense for good, but no. I don’t need another highway and I wonder how much any of us does. Tell me again about how we’re all in this together, as long as we’re paying for the trucking industry’s convenience.
Curt McCoshen, Saskatoon
Food bank help fails to solve issues
Should we laud this stop-gap funding designed to prevent some 44,000 Saskatchewanians from going hungry? Makowsky twice uses the verb “help” to describe this government action, suggesting it is a benevolent response and at least adequate given provincial responsibilities.
But what lies unaddressed? Does it matter that 40 per cent of Saskatchewan’s food bank clients are children and youths when the national average is 33 per cent?
What about Michael Kincade, executive director of Food Banks of Saskatchewan, reporting that families with double incomes are now accessing food banks?
Does Makowsky’s vague recognition “that there are challenges,” contextualized by claims that “we have some of the lowest costs of living in the nation” and that the new funding is “the first of its kind,” indicate real caring?
Had Makowsky talked with food bank users, would he have heard how Saskatchewan’s $14/hour minimum wage, the lowest in the country, generates food insecurity?
Do we all need to search our hearts to ask what we can personally do to address the current crisis and insist on a longer-term vision for overcoming food insecurity in Saskatchewan?
Susan Gingell, Saskatoon
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