Make way for readers | Your reactions to the topics of the week

Here is an overview of the mail received in recent days on various current topics.

When is a heat commissioner?

Nathalie Collard’s editorial published on July 28 sparked many reactions on heat in urban areas.

A quality of life commissioner

In this process, what Quebec needs is not a heat commissioner, but a quality of life commissioner whose main role would be to intervene in the event of pollution standards being exceeded air, water and noise pollution that make you sick, so neglected by Public Health in addition to advising the government in the adoption of laws relating to these issues.

Claude Gelinas

Beware of heat islands

Above all, the city should be developed to reduce heat islands as much as possible. Governments should help finance companies that sell equipment and fittings that offer better protection against the heat and invest in assistance programs so that citizens can install this equipment. The solutions exist, but they are still often too expensive because they are little used and therefore not profitable enough: greening of roofs, planting of trees on all parking lots with a mandatory tree/square meter ratio, installation of fountains , water jets, misters, swimming pools, ban on asphalt everywhere you can do without, development of the heat pump sector rather than polluting and energy-consuming individual air conditioners, etc. We have a long way to go in Quebec, in the municipalities and ministries, to change mentalities towards a management of financial and material resources not according to “history”, but according to the reality of current and future urban life.

Christine Besson, Montreal

COVID, from state control to laissez-faire

Although the seventh wave is sweeping through the community, a magical thought carried by collective indifference surfs the troubled waters of denial. For its part, the Legault government is on vacation from the pandemic and leaves the director of public health, Luc Boileau, to face the new variants. The advantage for the latter is not having to be elected on October 3rd.

The Minister of Health’s hand washing has nothing to do with sanitary measures, because it is rather an electoral purification so that his government presents itself “clean clean” in front of the electorate. We are no longer talking about a pandemic, nor the death of thousands of elderly people in CHSLDs, nor management errors. No, it is now part of a past to be forgotten. Collective protection against COVID no longer exists, it is now a matter of individual decisions, everyone is now responsible for their little person, ignoring the others. Unfortunately, too many people downplay the impact of newer variants by claiming they are as dangerous as a big flu. We have to look around us to see the long-term negative consequences of COVID for certain infected patients.

Given the situation, it seems to us that Public Health should be more directive in order to impose the wearing of a mask in public transport as well as in restricted places such as small performance halls, meetings or others.

Even if the laissez-faire advocated by the Legault government suggests that COVID is behind us, deaths related to this virus continue to add up daily in Quebec hospitals. Isn’t the electoral calculation of the CAQ’s strategists likely to explode in their faces this fall during the election campaign? If so, waking up may be painful.

Marcel Perron, Neuville

Lessons from the Surfside Tragedy

François Dauphin’s text on the need to tighten the rules of governance and promote the training of condominium administrators caused some readers to react.

Common sense

I fully agree with your plea for better governance of all condominiums, especially small ones extremely exposed to potential financial disasters. Like you, I encourage the training of members of management committees in order to make them alert people to detect urgent action, common sense.

Noël Grondin, real estate broker

Fears of too much regulation

I have been the administrator of a 39-unit condominium building for several years. I am a professional accountant, retired CPA. The financial statements (Notice to readers) are prepared annually by an external professional accountant, CPA. […] We consider that we have preventive management of our building and fear that a law will force us to incur expenses that would exceed the ability of the co-owners to pay. I am thinking of the idea of ​​having to use an external manager or the obligation to use professionals to supervise the administration of the Syndicate. There are certainly unions that do not have a contingency fund and I am of the opinion that the government should focus more on bad managers, rather than going after unions that have internal management made compliant.

Helene Nantel

The pleasure of writing

Laurence Vincent’s text, “The Pleasure of Writing”, published on July 16, sparked a wave of positive reactions to this activity.

To find his bearings

M^me Vincent, I found myself reading you! Writing has allowed me to better live different stages of my life. We write down our moods on paper! And when we reread each other, we realize how far we have come.

Claudette Castonguay, Rimouski

A free remedy

Writing is also our best friend, the psychologist we can’t afford, who listens to us without judging. Writing allows us to defuse the anger that invades us during difficult times. Writing allows us to structure projects that are important to us and to carry them out in our lives. In short, writing is the free remedy for many ills and should be prescribed to everyone, it feels so good!

Elyse Beaumier

A gift of life

What a beautiful reflection! I have always liked to write, to say what I felt at certain times in my life. When I became a grandmother, I decided to write, by hand, a personal diary to each of my 7 grandchildren, in order to tell them about the precious, very simple moments that we lived together. At my eldest’s 16th birthday party, I gave him this present. He was very happy to relive a little part of his forgotten childhood. Writing is a true gift of life!

Doris Guimond

Pope’s visit: hiding the essentials

“I ask forgiveness, especially for the way in which many members of the Church and religious communities cooperated, even through indifference, with these projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation of the governments of the time which resulted in the residential school systems” (says the pope in Quebec). That’s all well and good, but where are the excuses for sexual abuse in residential schools (not only for aboriginal youth, but equally for white youth). Exposing the residential school system is easy: it was created by our good federal government. But sexual abuse, they are well and truly the responsibility of the Catholic clergy.

Michel Lemieux, sociologist, Quebec