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Column: Right or not, letters your chance to have your say

The operator of the hot dog stand at Canadian Tire is all perfectly legal, business licence and all
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Yes guys, the operator of the hot dog stand at Canadian Tire is all perfectly legal, business licence and all

People who write letters to the editor don’t always get all of their facts right.

Sometimes we know something in a letter isn’t entirely accurate, but that doesn’t mean we don’t run it. Take the case of a letter that ran in our last edition on Wednesday.

A letter came in critiquing the City of Duncan for not allowing a man to run a hot dog stand in the city limits, as they don’t have bylaws in place to be able to grant him a business licence. The letter also referred to a hot dog stand that has been running for some time at Cowichan Commons. The letter writer was not familiar with the fact that Cowichan Commons is in the Municipality of North Cowichan, not the City of Duncan, and so the existing hot dog seller is operating legally under different regulations. Yet we ran the letter, uncorrected.

I chose to run the letter because while the writer did not have all of the particulars correct, the larger message of the letter stands. This is what I really look for. Does the point the letter is making stand up? I will not green-light a letter where the point is completely undermined by a false premise or misunderstanding on the part of the writer. On very rare occasions I will include an editor’s note to clarify what I know to be a serious error in fact, if it can’t be deleted from the text without losing the meaning of the letter as a whole, if I think the overall letter is still worth reading.

In this case, I had no idea so many people don’t know where the municipal boundaries are, so I apologize to the Canadian Tire hot dog seller for any confusion.

Letters to the editor are at their best when they are conversational, and most of us make mistakes when we’re talking to each other about dates when things happened, where they took place, or we can’t quite remember exactly what so-and-so said. That doesn’t make what you say to me, or I say to you, any less relevant most of the time. It can even invite others to join the conversation to bring clarity, along with another point of view.

I try to alter letters that come in as little as possible. Letters to the editor are where you, the readers, get to have your say, in your own words. But mostly I try to leave well enough alone. I don’t want to stifle your voice.