Letters: Like ‘girl math’ promotion, Riders apology also misses mark

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The recent Saskatchewan Roughriders advertisement/email to ticket holders was indeed tone deaf, archaic (despite their attempt to use a modern TikTok meme) and misogynistic. However, I’d like to address the ‘apology’ for the ‘girl math’ promotion.

If you haven’t seen it, I’ll try to sum it up: ‘We are sorry some fans were offended by our playful and lighthearted message. In our defence, it was created and deployed by women. We misread how this message would be perceived by some.’

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The reason the team’s email “missed the mark,” as the team said in a prepared statement, is because of how some fans perceived it (“it did not resonate” with female fans).

There is zero acknowledgement of the harm of negative stereotypes that are being perpetuated in the promotion. Internalization of messaging like this has serious implications for girls and women whether anyone complains about it or not.

Sean Polreis, Saskatoon

We should reflect on mine remediation

The recent decision to spend $94 million to clean up the abandoned northern uranium mine sites of Gunnar and Lorado is good news for the environment, but we shouldn’t be too hasty to offer kudos to our provincial government.

It’s more like a case of “How Third World of you!” For a self-colonizing province like Saskatchewan, cleaning up the mess after international mining companies skip town makes sense in an underdeveloped sort of way, but it’s nothing to be proud of.

Of the 75 abandoned mine sites in northern Saskatchewan, 37 are uranium mine or mill sites overseen by the Saskatchewan Research Council at taxpayer expense.

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Similarly, the development of the latest nuclear reactor technology — small modular reactors, which at present exist only on paper; there are no working prototypes — will also be at taxpayer expense, par for the course for the perpetual subsidy machine that is the nuclear industry.

It’s also concerning that we’ve never been told what the cost of decommissioning these phantom small modular reactors will be. Whatever it is, it’s bound to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the tab of the two reactors the provincial government is currently selecting sites for.

Tim Nickel, Saskatoon

Online panel polls deserve scrutiny

Columnist Phil Tank (Feb. 15), citing the latest Insightrix poll numbers on provincial politics, concedes that, because online pools “are not conducted randomly, they cannot be assigned a legitimate margin of error.”

He might have added that a poll not randomly conducted is not a valid poll at all. Instead, the one he refers to presents the political views of “800 online panelists.”

Since StarPhoenix/Leader-Post columnists and reporters put such stock in the opinions of these select 800 —two articles, two columns — they shouldn’t mind mentioning how they were selected and whether their ideological bents were determining factors.

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Trevor Reid, Rural Municipality of Dundurn

(Editor’s Note: Insightrix includes on its website an open invitation to join its SaskWatch panel that it uses to conduct surveys. Panellists can earn money and win prizes for participating, according to information provided.)

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