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Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com

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The National(s)

Re CBC Names New National Anchors (Aug. 2): The CBC has missed an opportunity to be truly national by omitting the Atlantic provinces from the mix of locations for its new anchors, while having two of them based in Toronto and one in Ottawa.

Oh, wait – those locations are the centre of the universe.

We should count ourselves lucky to have Andrew Chang representing the rest of Canada.

Penelope B.M. Hedges, Vancouver

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While the work of each of The National's new anchors is strong and will bring about much needed change to our public broadcaster's flagship news program, I think The Beaverton provided a better headline, which could just as easily work with your article: CBC Splits Single White Man's Salary Between Two Women, Two Minorities.

Isabella Tatar, Toronto

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The CBC, like the Australian Broadcasting Corp., was founded as an alternative to commercial broadcasting. ABC remains commercial-free. Whatever the gender or skin colour of the new anchors, The National will evidently remain little more than what it's become under recent governments, Liberal and Conservative: National advertising (with breaks for news).

Edward Smith, Peterborough, Ont.

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Interesting that it takes four hosts to replace Peter Mansbridge.

It's no longer The National.

It's The Nationals.

Douglas Cornish, Ottawa

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A national outlook

Re Minimum Wages: The Small-Town View (Aug. 1): Margaret Wente doesn't think Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne "thought too hard about the impact on small communities" of the minimum wage issue.

Why shouldn't Ms. Wynne pay more attention to Toronto than to the rest of Ontario? Toronto is where most of the money is, and where most of the people with whom she consorts are.

Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Justin Trudeau have the same myopia. Take the capital-gains exemption on principal residences. Who gets the greatest dollar savings from this? People in Toronto and Vancouver, of course. Did they do something like hard work to deserve it? No, they just happened to live where housing prices spiked most rapidly. And who pays for that? All taxpayers, of course.

Where will the new federal infrastructure bank reside? In Toronto. Who will pay for it? All Canadians. Where will most of the new infrastructure be built? Without doubt, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Small-town Canada has been struggling ever since the automation of agriculture took hold early last century. Nearly every government and corporate policy has served to intensify rather than moderate the migration of Canadians to the largest cities. The minimum wage is but a minor cog in all of this destructive, divisive change.

I, too, am enjoying a summer retreat in rural Canada. But I keep my principal residence in Toronto because that is where the doctors I need are located.

I arrange to see them in the winter – when they are back from rural Muskoka.

Patrick Cowan, Toronto

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Arms and bread

Re Sometimes, You Just Have To Say No (editorial, Aug. 2): Canadians expect their government to fulfill its legal obligations. If it fails to do so, the courts will hold the government and, in effect, the Canadian taxpayers to account, and rightly so. The Globe and Mail pointed this out just last week, in the context of the Omar Khadr settlement (Playing Politics With Khadr And NAFTA, editorial, July 24).

The Saudi arms deal, initially entered into by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, is a contract, the breach of which would give rise to a claim for damages, potentially for billions, by the other parties involved.

Absent very hard evidence that the government has a legitimate excuse for breaking the contract, it is not accurate to say that blocking the sale will be on "the Saudis' heads."

It will instead be on "the Canadian taxpayers' heads."

Peter Love, Toronto

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You either sell arms or you don't. You don't sell wheat and tell bad guys not to eat bread.

Mark Knudsen, Mississauga

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E-cigarette, e-caution

Re A Sea Change In The War On Smoking (July 31): It's disappointing to read again the tired claim that public-health officials have pursued a dogmatic "quit or die approach" to tobacco cessation. Those officials and tobacco-control advocates are concerned because too much about e-cigarettes is unknown.

The devices may well create more problems than they can possibly solve.

I monitor the burgeoning literature on e-cigarettes closely and the portrait on e-cigarettes is far from rosy. A Canadian study that was just released found that youth who have tried an e-cigarette are nearly twice as likely to be susceptible to future cigarette use. Then there's the risk of burns, cardiovascular effects, nicotine poisoning and, the greatest danger of all, tobacco industry domination of the market, meaning the merchants of death profit whether you vape or smoke cigarettes or are a dual user.

We've seen the catastrophic result of cigarettes being marketed without proper testing beforehand. It's easy to assume that e-cigarettes are less toxic than conventional ones. But less dangerous does not mean safe.

If e-cigarettes are to be marketed as cessation aids, they have to be proven effective for that purpose, and the jury is very much still out on that question.

Stan Shatenstein, publisher, STAN Bulletin (Smoking & Tobacco Abstracts & News); Montreal

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Whack. Stack

On Monday, a reader described the similarities between Joe Pesci's foul-mouthed character in Goodfellas and Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director (X-Rated Politics, July 31). Too bad the letter writer didn't wait a few hours to watch the ending of the real-life drama in Washington. He would have noticed that Pesci's character and Mr. Scaramucci both got whacked – by their boss.

Steve Chan, Edmonton

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You speculate about Donald Trump's unscripted show getting "bogged down in boring plot lines about Russian collusion, financial disclosures and emollients."

It is a truly remarkable thing that the creators of the U.S. Constitution had the foresight to include an Emollients Clause. I don't know whether the President's daughter's business empire sells skin creams, but the thought that Mr. Trump's narcissistic administration might get bogged down – perhaps even brought down – in a swamp of foreign-made skin-care products is just too wonderful.

Ah, the random delights of auto-correcting spell chequers!

Nigel Brachi, Edmonton

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