Letter: The real deficits facing Canadians

By Letter to the Editor on May 12, 2021.

Dear editor,

There are many deficits facing Canadians at this time and they are far more important than the deficits the people are spending their time worrying about.

In this country we will have a deficit of approximately 60,000 nurses by 2022, there is also a deficit of nearly 30,000 doctors by 2028. With an aging population, it is safe to say we are going to have a deficit in both long-term care homes and those needed to operate them.

We also have teacher deficits. Teachers are needed across the country in the classrooms. We need teachers to teach those with special needs, including but certainly not limited to autism and other mental disorders, as well as those with physical disabilities that make it hard to attend regular classes.

We have a deficit of food that goes into the bodies of approximately 1 million kids in this country who go to school hungry every day.

What about the deficit of Affordable Child Care Funding and Child Care Workers in this country so that mothers or fathers who wish or need to work can do so affordably?

We most certainly are in a deficit condition when we do not retrain workers who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own. The vast majority of these people want to work but their skills need to be enhanced through retraining. These people need to be trained for other private-sector employment and they need to be supplied with a living wage during their transition.

A giant deficit has been shown to exist in our ability to produce vaccines for our entire population. We have been shown that this is essential and cannot be entrusted to anyone but us as a nation.

In this country, it is hard to believe that we could have a deficit of clean drinking water anywhere, but we do.

In Medicine Hat, in less than a week the mayor could name a hundred things that need to get done if he had the funding and the manpower to accomplish them; again deficits.

These are fundamental deficits that we have in our country that must be addressed in order for us to reach our potential.

These are the important deficits to the citizens of this country and not some monetary concept that is completely outdated on a federal level.