Letters to The Province: Tuesday, April 16, 2024

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Re: Canucks tickets are skyrocketing, so is sports and entertainment now the exclusive realm of the rich?

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To answer the question J.J. Adams has posed: The answer is yes, sports and entertainment tickets have always been a luxury item for the wealthy and anyone else who is willing to max their credit cards to catch some exclusive show or sports event.

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I’ve lived in Vancouver since 1988 after arriving from “Winterpeg” as a teen, and to this day I’ve never bought a ticket to see the Vancouver Canucks nor have I spent any money to watch some mega-celebrity singing at a packed venue.

What is a treat is seeing the UBC Thunderbirds and other college and school teams who need the support and cheers of loyal fans or even buying tickets to the St. James Music Academy, which offers the chance for underprivileged kids to learn to play music and they host wonderful concerts throughout the year, especially their annual Christmas concert.

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Hopefully, one of those kids from a single-parent family who has the chance to learn the cello or violin might be playing at concerts around the world one day, and there are CFL alumni like Grey Cup champions Angus Reid, Sean Graham and Lui Passaglia who, like many of us, came from modest backgrounds and played at SFU and UBC and who have become champions on and off the field and continue to inspire others to achieve success.

Leslie Benisz, Vancouver

Re: Liberals have a chance to reverse their fiscal doom spiral. Expect them to pass

Many media commentators fall victim to a common fallacy — that the federal government is like a household whose spending is constrained by its debt burden. But since Canada has a government-owned central bank that can create fiat money at will, the determinant restraint on spending should be the resource capacity of the economy, including available labour.

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Canada currently has over 1.3 million residents actively seeking work — individuals whose talents could be employed to increase available goods and services, and thereby help combat inflation.

Our children are threatened by a lack of job opportunities, growing inequality, a fragile health system, and potential food crises arising from climate change. Solutions will require urgent public action and should not be weighed down by hysterical notions of debt that are inapplicable to monetarily sovereign countries like Canada.

Larry Kazdan, Vancouver

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