Here’s the CBC link for the Remembrance Day ceremony to go live before the 11 am minute of silence on Monday morning.
Federal offices are closed but most things are business as usual. Open and closed.
Do any readers have a story about a relative in World War I? My great‑uncle John joined the Irish Guards on October 13, 1914. Five days later he was discharged as “not likely to become an efficient soldier” and lived till 1957. So much for military glory.
Montreal recently decided to stop fluoridating the water provided to Pointe Claire and Dorval, and this has become an issue, given that a total nutbar member of the Kennedy family is likely to soon be in charge of all health measures in the United States and he hates fluoride, as do a lot of people affected by similar conspiracy theories.1
Jean Drapeau hated fluoride too, which is why Montreal has inherited a policy of not fluoridating. The city position now includes three semi‑legitimate points, viz:
Canada has a nifty experiment with a control already running, which is that Calgary ceased fluoridating while Edmonton didn’t, leaving Calgary kids with a lot more cavities than those in the other city.
Following from these thoughts, the fact that the vaccine facility that was started here during the height of Covid has never been completed should be faced, and the project moved up the priority list. We won’t be able to count on the United States for health assistance now for at least four years.
There may be other areas in which Canada will have to gird itself not to get sucked into a black hole along its southern borders.
1. We mostly won’t need to worry about Kennedy unless there’s another pandemic and he keeps the U.S. from developing or deploying vaccines.
2. I don’t know how many people use alternative toothpastes instead of aggressively minty grocery store brands, but one of their selling points is usually that they’re not fluoridated. So granola kids, and poor kids, might not get fluoride at all.
The amount of fluoride in drinking water isnt high enough to cause negative health effects.
The vast majority of people don’t know enough to make informed decisions about their own health.
I wonder if water fluoridation is still a good venture in light of the prevalence of fluoridated toothpastes and mouthwashes?
If those millennial parents’ “Purity Of Essence” ideologies still have some leinenancy for fluoride in toothpastes and they can also have their kids properly brush it twice every day, I guess cavity won’t be a general problem.
Also the kids in Quebec can use some of the free annual dental examination. A preventive fluoridation at a normal dental clinic costs around 20$, and it is usually covered by the familial group insurance.
Personally, I would like to see the government invest more in the monitoring and removal of PFAS (yet another significant invention from over the southern border, so smooth that it seems like no conspiracy theorist can grasp it) in tap water. And if the government is removing things from the tap water, instead of add stuff to it, I guess even the most seasoned conspiracy theorists would not be able to find an angle.
I used to only buy natural toothpaste for my kid, but when she started to get a few cavities, her dentist recommended Colgate Prevident as it has a higher amount of fluoride than regular toothpaste. Then later, my dentist (a different one) also recommended to me. This toothpaste costs around $13 so I only used it on occasion when I finally noticed that the gel was sparkly, which usually means it contains microplastics! This really pissed me off. I thought microplastics would’ve been phased out of most toothpastes by now?! The last thing I want is for trace amounts of this crap being ingested by my kid and leaking into the environment!
Sure, RFK’s stance is extreme, but it seems to me there are a lot of good arguments against fluoridating water. In addition to those already mentioned:
it’s expensive
it’s only needed for teeth, not the many other things we do with water: watering plants, showering, etc.
Your teeth can get extra fluoride by rinsing, toothpaste, etc. Schools could also bring back those sachets of fluoridated water that students rinse and spit with.
Vitamin supplements can be helpful for some too, why not add that to the water?
Chris, we get vitamins from food, and even people with poor diets in this society don’t turn up with scurvy or beri‑beri because there are always enough vitamins and most people are eating similar foods over large geographical areas.
But some minerals are not evenly distributed throughout water supplies and diets. We iodize salt, and in some places, we fluoridate water, because we found out that a trace of those minerals helps people avoid health problems.
Call me cynical but I’m not going to take medical advice from a professional conspiracy crank like Captain Brainworms. Look up his opinions on pizza as relating to teenagers’ sperm counts, for instance.
Fluoridating water is cheap: roughly $50 per year per person.
The cost of one filling is about 3-5 times that amount.
We also live in a country a significant number of people think it’s acceptable to not push their children to brush their teeth, resulting in children getting root canals, and damaged adult teeth before they even erupt.
Don’t underestimate stupidity and laziness.
>Chris, we get vitamins from food…
Exactly. And we get fluoride from toothpaste and mouthwash. Some fools don’t eat right, and some fools don’t brush right.
Yes but those “fools” cost us all. Cheaper to prevent.
Why might kids get root canals, or wisdom teeth removed? Possibly because they are insured. Way back when, on the tail en of my childhood dental insurance, the dentist comes out says “time to remove your wisdom teeth”. I had not said anything about them. Asked “why?”. No answer offered.
Guess who still has all his wisdom teeth?
There are significant numbers of people who don’t get their kids to brush their teeth?? I feel like that’s something even the worst parents get their kids to do.
A surprising number of people actually do get scurvy or other deficiency diseases.
CE
Yup. It’s got nothing to do with insurance or family wealth/income: there is a whole “natural” movement that has taken root and we end up with kids in the ER screaming in pain because they have never seen a toothbrush, and if they are lucky they get a root canal. If unlucky they get dentures, and by that point the adult teeth in the jaw are already damaged.
I’ll never mock “adulting” classes because some people were raised by assholes.
I’m not denying the idiocy of people who make these decisions, but I suspect they are in the minority of the children with dental issues who would benefit from flouride in the water.
Poverty impacts children’s teeth because parents don’t have time/money/consciousness/access to dental care. Drugs and abuse are a factor as well. A drunk parent forgets to remind their kids to brush their teeth or lets them eat whatever. This is where flouride benefits them much more than the rest of us who do benefit from modern dental technology.
Blaming doesn’t fix the problem.
The Calgary evidence alone strongly suggests that fluoridating the water supply is easily justified from a straight-up cost-benefit analysis, both from the individual’s (fewer cavities and interventions) and the collective’s (better dental health, fewer costly interventions) perspective. Leaving aside the ideological/philosophical/political arguments, the case for fluoride in the water supply is quite strong. The benefits, though, may not be worth the political price of trying to make policy in this particular area, given the times…
NDG people want to maintain access to Falaise St‑Jacques park while the city says it has to be closed.
Alex Norris can go kick rocks, sanctimonious prick that he is. The path that traverses the falaise has been there for decades and is perfectly safe. Also, in what world does removing trees and plants with their attendant roots and shade stabilize a slope and prevent sudden disastrous erosion? Remind me again why the Parc Jeanne Mance softball game had to be shut down again?
I assume the “Stabilizing the cliff could require significant amounts of vegetation to be removed” comment means that they would have to remove trees in order to get big machines in to move earth around or add big rocks. Also, apparently they had professionals evaluate the whole escarpment and they concluded that it’s unstable. If that’s true, why not be transparent and share some of the details of the study so that people have the facts and won’t just respond with “This is stupid and mean and I really like walking there and it seems safe so it must be safe”. Patronizing and opaque communication like this leads people to anti-science.
Jeanne Mance softball field had to be removed bc people couldn’t lounge in the field around the field with the risk of softballs flying round. I loved watching the softball games, but the parc is now a better park for everyone who likes sitting peacefully on the grass. Expecting other people to assume a risk because you want to do a thing is asking a lot and in this case asking too much, the city decided, and I agree with them.
There is an imperfect but apt parallel with hunting season. Outside of hunting season the forest can be enjoyed my many people, doing many different things. During autumn hunting season, only hunters can use the forest and everyone else has to stay out, even though the forest in autumn is the best season to be out enjoying the forests.
We probably shouldn’t tear this scab off, but Orr, that is not at all what actually happened to that softball field. In the end, I think despite my frustrations with the process, consider it a better situation. However, the path there was some really terrible politics and Alex Norris had a similar high-handed and untransparent approach.
Irony there: Alex Norris was a Gazette reporter before he became a councillor. That might be informing his approach to giving out information.
MarcG A quick google search will show that vegetation is one of the most efficient ways to prevent erosion and stabilize slopes. The root systems bind the soil while the foliage lessens the force of the rain hitting the soil. Additionally, large trees serve as windbreaks, thus lessening the effects of storms. That’s science that I learned in university.
Would you care to offer any more detail on how big machines moving earth around and adding big rocks could help?
My point about people using the area for decades is that there isn’t a history of landslides and that perhaps the August one was an outlier. The slope where the slide occurred is much steeper than the one that the path traverses and is located far from the path.
Also, going straight to an ad hominem argument isn’t the best way to win people over. One reason I like this blog is that it’s one of the few places where the comment section isn’t full of people shouting and insulting one another, it would be a shame if that changed.
@Orr the JMP softball community went to great lengths to propose lots of different solutions to make the ball field safe for passersby that would ensure PM’s main priority (preserving as much of the view of the mountain as possible) and enable a ‘mixed use’ approach, so that the field would be accessible to loungers when not in use. You may recall that the previous field installation, which Ferrandez promised to preserve, did not haven outfield fence, meaning it the grass could be easily traversed and used. There’s really no reason why a compromise couldn’t have been neogtiated. Nobody from the borough/city, elected officials or technocrats, thought it worthwhile to engage with the proposals. It should come as no surprise that they are treating the citizens engaged in the use and preservation of the falaise the exact same way.
@dwgs: Sorry if my statements weren’t clear, I wasn’t trying to attack you. I was attempting to say that the city should share the knowledge it’s basing decisions on rather than just saying “We know best” and expecting people to roll over. The same problem is happening with science communication in general and it leaves huge holes for people to fill with ‘common sense’ or worse, mis/disinfo. The counter-arguments you and others users in the articles provided (“has been there for decades and is perfectly safe”, “It’s very unfair. It’s pretty safe to go by there”, “It’s not dangerous, the city has overreacted”, “Too many people are using it now”, “we don’t think it’s a very big risk”, “It’s not really a dangerous situation in our opinion”) are simply not strong. Would you feel differently if the city provided evidence that a reputable group analyzed the falaise and determined that it was likely to have more problems in the near future causing potential harm to people? If they have such a study they should have a meeting with the users and explain the reason they think it’s dangeorus. If they don’t have the study, then, well, I don’t see how they can claim it’s dangerous and their arguments don’t hold any water either.
Margaret 09:13 on 2024-11-11 Permalink
My grandfather returned to Scotland from World War I with some version of PTSD that stayed with him all his life. He struggled but made an good life for his family, who came to Canada and then later returned to Scotland. His brothers came as well and Quebec golf courses resulted. My father, who was born here, made another attempt to settle here and this time we stayed!
dwgs 13:28 on 2024-11-11 Permalink
Both grandfathers were in the trenches. Maternal grandfather seemingly came out all right, went back over to serve as a quartermaster in WW2. Paternal grandfather was never the same when he came back, a lifetime of PTSD that damaged the family in ways that continue to this day.
Kate 16:17 on 2024-11-11 Permalink
Multiply that by all the families that must have suffered similarly. It’s a sobering thought.
Kevin 21:03 on 2024-11-11 Permalink
One of my great-grandfathers had a leg shot off in West Flanders in 1917.
He gave his boys the name of the town as their middle names.
I don’t know much about the other side of the family, because everyone except my grandfather was killed in WWII.
My great-grandfather would have been 40 at the start of WWI and he lived in a town that had been fought over for centuries, with all the shifting borders and various ethnic groups. It was part of the German Empire at the start of the war, but following the Treaty of Versailles plebiscites it wasn’t any more.