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Fletcher taken to task for his column

Reader: 'If Highway 16 carried any tears for Mr. Fletcher, he’d get it'

To the editor:

Re: Myths of the Highway of Tears by Tom Fletcher, Free Press, Nov. 5, page A9

Mr .Fletcher’s title for his piece sums his attitude up nicely.

He has presented a line of flawed logic through a sequence of misdirection and distraction, liberally sprinkled with demeaning terms like "melodrama" and being sure to put "prostitution" and "aboriginal" in the same sentence.

Mr. Fletcher dismisses a formal inquiry by the Information and Privacy Commissioner that is a scathing report of the repeated offense of deleting and hiding e-mails.

After initially testifying under oath that he did not engage in the practice of “triple deleting” e-mails, George Gretes ultimately admitted that he did, in fact, engage in this practice.

From ‘Access Denied’ blithely telling us it just ain’t so, "since they were not deleted but rather excluded from release."

Mr. Fletcher then cites Wikipedia, that well-used source of unsubstantiated, subjective, and all-round patchy information, to assure us that we’ve all been led to believe a rumour of violence that is a "dramatic media narrative," and there really aren’t any murdered and missing women.

If there are, it is inferred they should have taken the available bus services he describes, and not been too – what? lazy? stupid? to conduct themselves in a safe manner and thus bring about their own fate of abuse, violence and death.

This is the tactic of countless self-serving politicians, police, citizens, opinion-writers, and public servants to reduce this generation’s most glaring social and legal travesty to something as banal and irrelevant as inadequate transportation service as the core issue.

Dissembling, fatuous commentary and demeaning language are tactics that seek to smother the real narrative of our most shameful historic truth – that we are a country founded on and still continuing the attempted genocide of a people, and the destruction of so many cultures and sovereign nations that we don’t even know how many there are, or what they are called.

Perhaps if Highway 16 carried any tears for Mr. Fletcher, he’d get it.

Rita Giesbrecht

100 Mile House