September 29, 2023

OnPerfect

A Home Grown Success

The housing crisis additionally other letters, Aug. 18: ‘The ideal issue I can do to provide for my young children in the distant foreseeable future is to purchase serious estate and lease it out’

Open up this picture in gallery:

A for sale indication is exhibited outdoors a home in Toronto in December, 2021.CARLOS OSORIO/Reuters

Discomfort points

Re “Bank of Canada trapped wanting to know why desire fee hikes have not been more than enough to tame inflation” (Report on Company, Aug. 17): I have to dilemma the standard knowledge that significant desire prices by itself will eradicate inflation.

The existing strain factors are house loan costs (instantly similar to amount raises), rents (immigration at report levels and massive taxation on new housing source), food (primarily created outside Canada) and electrical power (price ranges established by intercontinental marketplaces and generation decreases).

How will bigger costs increase these key contributors?

Greg Nevison Toronto


Due to the fact submit-pandemic inflation was mostly brought on by factors outdoors the labour sector – supply chain disruptions, the Ukraine invasion, aggressive corporate gain-having – the Bank of Canada ought to not be astonished that amount hikes and an engineered boost in unemployment have had no obvious effects on price tag increases.

Immediate rate hikes can make fiscal instability, enhance inequality and slow the economy, top to even larger premiums of unemployment. Increased credit rating expenditures and career reduction inflict the most soreness on all those at the bottom of the economic ladder, who are having difficulties to shell out expenditures and who are initial to be fired.

If inflation is a illness, then I discover our central bankers are dispensing quack solutions that hurt the most vulnerable.

Larry Kazdan Vancouver

Pay out it ahead

Re “Canada’s costly housing sector requires a fact check” (Editorial, Aug. 17): 1 wonders if a thing a lot more basic is at perform than a regular imbalance of source and desire.

Possessing genuine estate, we are reminded on an virtually each day basis, is a person of the best investments a human being can make. Having a roof above one’s head is an included reward.

I am in the fortunate posture that my home is totally compensated. The best point I can do to offer for my children in the distant future is to invest in true estate and hire it out. With any luck , the rental profits is enough to address property finance loan costs.

With city housing price ranges rising at a rate exceeding fascination costs, I can not assist but gain out. Urban attributes will extra probably than not aid my children’s long term means to find work in commuting length, and also has developing scarcity worth.

So, what is the difficulty?

Boudewyn van Oort Victoria

Union forever

Re “Hot labour summer season? Not particularly. But a union revival could bode very well for workers” (Editorial, Aug. 14): As a lifelong union man on the West Coast – Worldwide Brotherhood of Electrical Employees, Teamsters, Telecommunications Personnel Union, United Steelworkers – I am encouraged by the interest in trades by the youth of Canada and their wish to unionize.

If companies were being a lot less greedy in their pursuit of at any time-bigger 6- and seven-determine bonuses, when these who do the get the job done make 5 figures, they may well recognize that there is lots to go all over.

My United Steelworkers Local 1944, Unit 60, has asked for mediation to settle for a new deal with the employer, which was Shaw but is now Rogers. I am making ready for a lockout.

Find me on the picket line. I have been there ahead of. In solidarity.

James Molesworth New Westminster, B.C.

Read to me

Re “Could lawsuits spur college boards to strengthen their literacy applications?” (Aug. 15): Discuss about shirking parental responsibilities. If we’re chatting litigation below, then we’re most likely conversing about affluent dad and mom and not individuals performing a few aspect-time employment at minimum wage.

I acquired to read before I went to university for the reason that my mom and dad read to me, to each other and to themselves. They established an illustration, and the stories they read through stimulated my hunger for much more. Early looking through of perfectly-composed and superbly illustrated publications hones the ear and eye.

Perhaps these litigious dad and mom really should be likely just after the tech guys for the current addiction to screens.

Pamela Cornell Kingston

J’ai mon voyage

Re “Why the Québécois accent is a joy to behold” (Feeling, Aug. 12): Though vocal cords vibrate to make speech, speech styles and phonemes are typically produced in the upper vocal tract by way of articulation at the tooth, tender palate, etc. While some phonemes are unusual cross-linguistically and therefore really hard to imitate, I come across this is not the situation below.

Probably French actors cannot get earlier their individual bias against the Québécois accent. “The reverse is not true” – Québécois artists have no dilemma manufacturing the (normal) French-from-France accent. This will make perception, considering the fact that they would perspective the accent positively.

Social notion of dialect influences speech output, and comprehension.

Veena Dwivedi Director, Dwivedi Mind and Language Lab, Brock College St. Catharines, Ont.

Pardon me

Re “May I interject? Interruptions can have favourable consequences on our conversations” (Opinion, Aug. 12): As a persistent interrupter who habitually statements the defences of signalling engagement, enthusiasm and rapport, I heartily concur.

An early perform-life lesson taught me the added benefits of spontaneous and direct interruption. In consumer presentations on a massive challenge, one particular colleague typically interjected with responses like, “Why would you do that?” or, “That does not make feeling.” In the meantime, I took copious notes and waited for a pause to listing comprehensive (and frequently lengthy) considerations.

Purchasers termed my conduct “calculating.” I realized that honest reaction, even if unfavorable, can really encourage open up discussion that builds believe in, in contrast to surface area politeness that hardly conceals closed judgments.

With the rise of equipment mastering and machine interaction, alongside with improved distant do the job, “creative overlapping” may well really encourage what a seminal and prescient 1999 Harvard Company Critique post termed “the human moment at work” – an exercise crucial to workplace social fabric and employee psychological wellness.

Chester Fedoruk Toronto

The subtlest knowledge

Re “The commonplace book, in which early modern-day thinkers gathered suggestions, was the world-wide-web of its time” (Opinion, Aug. 12): I am reminded of the critic F.L. Lucas’s observation about the pervasiveness of imitation and borrowing in the dramatic functions of the Elizabethan playwright John Webster, who “soared on borrowed plumes and was sublime by the assist of a commonplace e book.”

But crafting everyday in a commonplace reserve was a labour-intensive exercise. Webster labored arduously to soar on borrowed plumes, and it took genius for him to synthesize his imitations and borrowings into sublime plays like The Duchess of Malfi.

For us, it takes seconds to soar on borrowed words and phrases with the aid of the online and other specialized products. Nevertheless, know-how these as ChatGPT is incapable of attaining, permit alone sustaining, the sublime in the outdated sense.

No bot shall resuscitate the useless art of poetry.

Greig Henderson Toronto


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