Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 22, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 WEDNESDAY JANUARY 22, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights A lament for the vanishing art of letter-writing D EAR reader, I can’t help but wonder if Canada Post’s re- cent 29-cent price hike will be the final nail in the coffin for the fast-fading art of letter-writ- ing. The current price for one postage stamp — $1.44 — might well be too much money and bother for people struggling with the high cost of living. Letter-writing, already seen as archaic, might now, too, be cost-prohibitive. And that is a shame. Who cares, you might exclaim; we’re all texting and emailing now anyway. Well yes, that’s true. But just because technol- ogy can make things faster and easier and more convenient doesn’t mean the things it replaces aren’t losses worth mourning. Letters were once the lifeblood of human com- munication. Everyone anxiously awaited the post, whether it was news from a relative on fragile blue airmail paper or a cologne-scented love note. There was something thrilling about getting a personal letter, particularly written in someone’s actual hand. Coffee stains, wine blots, smeared ink or lipstick kisses added even more personality to the missive, making you feel that much closer to the sender. Reading letters written by others provides insight into the author. It is one thing to read a novelist’s work, for example, and quite another to see how he or she comports themselves with friends and loved ones or even with readers. I just finished the collected letters (1976-1995) of Robertson Davies, For Your Eye Alone, and they provide a fascinating portrait of a man you could only catch glimpses of through his fiction. “Letter to a woman in Manitoba” is my favour- ite. It was written in 1981 in response to someone who had written Davies after reading an excerpt of his novel The Rebel Angels and finding it too salacious for her taste. You can imagine the acid dripping from Da- vies’s pen as he writes with sly humour: “Though it filled me with shame and remorse, I was grate- ful for the Christian impulse which moved you to stretch out a hand to me in my wretchedness. … Will you send me a photograph of yourself, so that I may behold a countenance suffused with Chris- tian love, and perhaps even yet repent?” So, too, the correspondence of Virginia Woolf reveals who she was beyond just the creator of well-known characters. The letters between Virginia and her husband, Leonard Woolf, are particularly intimate and poignant, as they were often written when he was away on a brief respite from caring for her during periods of debilitating mental illness. In July 1913, she writes, while under nursing care: “How are you, darling Mongoose? I’m very well, slept well, and they make me eat all day. But I think of you and want you. Keep well. We shall be together soon, I know. I get happiness from seeing you. … Darling, I love you.” We tend to bare our souls in letters in ways that we would not in face-to-face conversations or dashed-off emails. Letters are often written in solitude, when our words are not influenced by the immediate response or reaction of the person we are addressing. We can say what we want unfettered, often in the stream-of-conscious- ness type of writing for which Woolf herself was known. And who keeps emails anyway? Do you print them off and file them away to read later at your leisure, dear reader? I thought not. No, letters are tactile things, idiosyncratically personal, direct connections between you and the sender. Of course, the examples I’ve used are from professional authors, and you would expect them to be worth preserving for posterity. But you don’t need to be a wordsmith to write a letter worth keeping. Going through my own correspondence recent- ly, I was engulfed by nostalgia and moved beyond measure by the sight of handwriting I haven’t seen for years. A 1951 letter from my father to my mother, before they were married: “Remember that I still love you very much and am longing to see you…” And then one from my mother to me in her elegant cursive script, which makes my eyes mist: “Hope you’re alright, I always worry about you…” It is precious beyond words now, knowing she will never write to me again. The word “correspondent” has come to refer to someone who works in journalism — a reporter on an international beat, for example, or someone covering a war. But we were all correspondents once, putting pen to paper and reaching out across the miles. Goodbye for now, dear reader. P.S. I hope I’ve convinced you that letters hold a place in our lives and our hearts that cannot be replaced by toneless emails or text lingo — “R U ready? I’m OTW.” Write when you can. Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s. Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com X: pam_frampton | Bluesky: @pamframpton.bsky.social Column misrepresented Sinclair’s position IT is a poor tribute to the Honourable Murray Sin- clair to engage in residential school minimization and misrepresentation. Jerry Storie (Residential schools: consider- ing intentions and consequences, Think Tank, Jan. 20) interprets the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) use of “cultural genocide” as reflecting Sinclair’s view that residential schools do not meet the legal definition of genocide. But one needs to bear in mind that the TRC’s mandate did not include adjudicative power, and Sinclair was clear that genocide is a legal ques- tion to be decided by the courts and not the TRC. He did not refuse to call residential schools genocide. Storie also misrepresents the origins of the genocide concept. He misattributes to Raphael Lemkin a notion of genocide as “a plan to eradi- cate a whole people based on ethnic and religious divides.” This is different from Lemkin’s definition of genocide as “a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” For Lemkin, the “essential foundations” of group life included the cultural life of the group. Genocide did not “originally” mean killing people, as Storie claims — for Lemkin, cultural destruc- tion, or ethnocide, was always involved in the crime of genocide. The United Nations General Assembly, in their debates over what would become the UN Geno- cide Convention, would eventually dilute this component, though Lemkin did feel his concept of cultural destruction was preserved somewhat through the inclusion of article 2(e) “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Debates continue about whether residential schools meet the criteria of the Genocide Con- vention — for the record, I contend they do. But even those genocide studies and legal experts who think they do not would agree the schools were, at minimum, a crime against humanity, which is still a very serious charge. Storie also minimizes the destructive intent of residential schools and at times conflates intent with motive. Residential schools did borrow from strategies used in other disciplinary institutions, such as religious schooling and reformatories. But these strategies were redirected toward eliminating the so-called “Indian problem.” What made Indigenous Peoples a problem was that their cultures and values connected them to territories in a manner that interfered with Cana- dian settler colonialism. This was not simply benevolence intended to uplift groups threatened to be left behind in a new world, though such rationalizations were at times used. It was first and foremost an effort to denigrate and remove groups perceived as obstacles to land settlement, resource extraction and national consolidation. When leaders presented arguments for the need for residential schools, it was all too common for them to disparage Indigenous cultures as savage and backward. In the residential schools, staff treated Indigenous children as dirty and profane. Some among the latter group may have been motivated by a Christian humanism, but that is a separate issue from the intent of the system itself to erase Indigenous Peoples. Because Indigenous children were dehuman- ized by the residential school system, it meant that the brutality of corporal punishment, which Storie notes was a normal practice in schools of the time, often took more frequent and extreme forms, especially when Indigenous children re- sisted assimilation. The sexual violence that was all too common is likewise not equivalent to any that occurred in non-Indigenous schools. Indigenous children were abused and violated for who they were, because they were viewed as less than human until they fully accepted their forced assimilation. As someone who teaches criminology, I am skeptical of criminalization as a strategy to correct behaviour and sympathize with Storie’s worries about laws against denialism. In an ideal world, those who deny or minimize the genocide against Indigenous Peoples in Cana- da would be persuaded of the wrongness of their thinking through reports like those produced by the TRC and National Inquiry for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. But criminalization is not solely about correct- ing perpetrators. It is also one way society recognizes certain actions are so harmful they cross a line in terms of their acceptability. For victims, criminaliza- tion of denial thus provides recognition of the suffering residential schools caused to Indigenous Peoples and demonstrates a social concern not to exacerbate this suffering further by enabling dis- ingenuous debaters who try to salvage residential schools from their genocidal history. Andrew Woolford is the department head and a professor in the De- partment of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba. It’s time to come home THE Manitoba government must be com- mended for taking a crucial step toward meaningfully addressing chronic homeless- ness in Winnipeg. The Your Way Home plan aims to tackle encampments head on with a well-supported set of recourses. For Manitobans, the key is whether this $20 million approach offers the right tools to reduce the growing number of people choosing encampments over existing alternatives. Encampments have grown dramatically not only in Winnipeg but throughout North America over the last decade, increasing rapidly post-pandemic. The rise of encampments has presented challenging issues, with few cities success- fully reducing numbers without drastic measures such as criminalizing the very act of “camping” on public or private land. Punitive measures have also been shown time and time again to be less effective than focusing on root causes such as absence of affordable housing, lack of mental health and addictions services and the economic resources needed to invest in sustained programs to stem the revolving door of homelessness. Ultimately, chasing people out of encamp- ments results in shifting locations rather than long-term solutions. It is important to note that the debate over encampments has often pitted those supporting a punitive solution with those citing a harm-reduction approach. The outcome is often ideological debates over whether to punish people or allow them to choose their own path, with neither side making progress toward transi- tioning persons into stable housing. For its part, Your Way Home has a bold and focused approach that tackles the core aspects of homelessness. By stating “tents are not an acceptable replacement for safe, warm, secure and dig- nified housing,” the plan sets up a straightfor- ward issue to be resolved. It would seem hard to argue against the idea that having Man- itobans living in precarious situations with temperatures plummeting is unacceptable. A second key element is referred to as the One Manitoba approach to ending chronic homelessness. This is a subtle but critical aspect of the plan that will see enhanced co-ordination and streamlining occur among government and community-based organizations who must agree to shutter encampments. This buy-in is crucial in moving past any hes- itancy in directing people toward stable, affordable and dignified housing. However, make no mistake, the most difficult aspect of the initiative is the ability to work with persons in encampments to support them finding a way home. I can speak to the importance of the step directly in having led the At Home Chez Soi (AHCS) project using a similar approach. During AHCS, we were able to move 1,000 Cana- dians into stable, affordable housing (with supports) in 18 months in five cities. We did this using a Housing First approach that is well supported. In fact, what we offered was a fully fur- nished apartment, a fridge stocked with food and ready access to a team willing to work on a recovery plan. It was ready access to housing with supports that helped convince persons to exit homelessness. It has been a long time coming for the province of Manitoba to launch a plan that is focused and funded. What is perhaps the strongest evidence is how the plan addresses two logjams; the first being the establish- ment of the navigation centre which will serve as an intake step in supporting the transition to stable housing. What this will do is give persons an immediate place to go, be assessed and supported. The second and most difficult logjam is the commitment to securing housing and backing it up with critical supports, much like within a Housing First framework. In addition, tapping Tessa Blaikie White- cloud is an important leadership layer and brings all the pieces in place to overcome many of the existing barriers. Certainly, the premier and mayor being fully onboard ensures intergovernmental co-operation that will be fundamental to success. Make no mistake that the next few months will be hard, heavy work with lots of ups and downs. In the end, Your Way Home offers hope during a time when little has existed. It will not end homelessness overnight, but for a growing number of people experiencing homelessness it brings more opportunities for recovery. For me, we just might see more doors unlocked to a better place for many Manito- bans who have otherwise been locked out for far too long. Jino Distasio is a professor of urban geography at the Univer- sity of Winnipeg. JINO DISTASIO ANDREW WOOLFORD PAM FRAMPTON PHOTO A letter from Margaret Laurence to a reader is one of Pam Frampton’s most prized possessions. PAM FRAMPTON ;