Dear Editor:
RE: ‘Tangible commitment,’ Sept. 22.
I’m a little confused with one of the letters you printed the other week, namely Peter Bush’s letter and his 1% levy idea.
He’s proposing a tax on unsuspecting people for any land sale or transfer within the Haldimand Tract (six miles on either side of the Grand River), but he does not specify where that money would go.
Assuming that he hopes this extra source of revenue would go to the First Nations, I’d say that’s a pretty terrible idea.
It seems to me that Mr. Bush may be taking a leaf from Trudeau’s playbook with the hopes that injecting more money will help with reconciliation. We are all fools if we think money is the answer, and we are all ignoring the past mistakes (some of them recent) that have cost us billions.
Maybe we need a new approach, a totally radical approach perhaps, one centred around love and not money. Let’s keep these issues in the history books and not in the headlines.
I would love to see, in my lifetime, true reconciliation, where we all can see each other as Canadians from many different backgrounds, but all with the same colour blood under our skin.
Is it possible to be more intentional about serving our nation as a whole, rather than keeping these clear lines in the sand?
Doug Vanderveen,
Belwood