This is Thursday and our mail includes opinions on polygamy, lack of running water on reserves and Canada's new guidelines on how often women should get mammograms has not impressed many of our listeners. We read your letters.

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Part Two of The Current

Mail: polygamy, mammograms and access to running water on reserves

Time for our weekly look at the mail and Pedro Sanchez, one of The Current's producers joined Anna Maria in studio to help read your letters.

Polygamy: Yesterday, the B.C. Supreme Court upheld Canada's laws banning polygamy. In a 355-page decision, Chief Justice Robert Bauman acknowledged an infringement law on rights guaranteed by the charter but he said they were reasonable. He made it clear that it may not be used to criminalize child brides - who he said should be exempt from prosecution.

There are plenty of people today cheering the ruling, which stems from a case centred on a breakaway sect of the Mormon Church in Bountiful, B.C. But others argue that polygamy in Canada has - unjustly - been given a bad name. They say there are thousands of Canadians in polygamous or polyamorous relationships that are perfectly healthy ... that do not involve coercion, or abuse or trafficking of child brides.

Last November on The Current, we heard from a polyamorous family in Montreal ... Kimberly Ann Joyce, her two partners, Warren Baird and John Bashinski - and their then 3-year-old daughter, Kaia who is now 4.

John Bashinski also happens to be secretary of the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association - one of the interveners in the B.C. Supreme Court polygamy case. He joined us from Montreal this morning.

Access to water on reserves: A lot of us take it for granted. But there are about nineteen hundred homes on First Nations reserves in Canada that - to this day - do not have running water. Forty percent of those homes are on four reserves in the Island Lakes region of northern Manitoba.

And last week, the federal government announced a five and a half million dollar investment to target the problem in the region. The chief of the northern Manitoba region is Grand Chief David Harper. And Monday on The Current, he gave us his reaction to the water bill. And we heard a lot more in the mail.

Breast Cancer Screening: It seems we are continually bombarded with conflicting information when it comes to our health. For a long time, Canadian women, for example, have been told to get mammograms regularly - and to do breast self-examinations. But the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care has released new guidelines saying women shouldn't get mammograms before the age of 50 unless they are at an increased risk for breast cancer. And as for breast self-examinations? The panel says we shouldn't be doing them at all.

The task force's general conclusion: That all the early screening we've been doing causes more harm - through false positives and over treatment - than good. The panel points out that 21 hundred women aged 40 to 49 would have to be screened every two to three years for eleven years to prevent a single death from breast cancer. Yesterday on the program, we put that statistic to both sides of the debate. And then we heard from you with some of your personal experiences and thoughts on this issue.

In our discussion, Dr. Gaffe took issue with the methodology and evidence used by the Task Force on Preventive Health Care to come up with the new breast screening guidelines. Specifically, he questioned the expertise of the panel - and said it relied on old information, derived from mammograms done with technology that isn't nearly as good as today's.

Well, Dr. Richard Birtwhistle had something to say in response to that. He is a member of the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care, as well as Director of the Centre for Studies in Primary Care in the Department of Family Medicine at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. We heard from him.

Naser Al-Raas Update: On November 1st we spoke to Naser Al-Raas and his fiancee Zainab Ahmed. Naser is a Canadian citizen who was arrested in Bahrain in March at a pro-democracy demonstration there. He says he wasn't even participating in the protest - just observing. But he says authorities detained him and tortured him in prison before releasing him. He says he's been trapped in Bahrain since, his passport confiscated. When we spoke to him November 1st, he was waiting to be sent back to prison for a five-year term. For an update, they join us again from Manama, Bahrain.

An added note to this story: Yesterday, a panel looking into Bahrain's handling of the anti-government protests this spring found that excessive force was used in the crackdown on demonstrators. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, which is headed by a respected American-Egyptian lawyer, concluded the government used "a systematic practice of physical and psychological mistreatment, which in many cases amounted to torture." Bahrain's King said he welcomed the report, and has pledged reforms. The government insists that any human rights abuses were not state policy - but the actions of individuals it has vowed to punish.

That's all for our Letters segment this week. But please keep sending us your thoughts on anything you hear on The Current.

Other segments from today's show:

• Mohammed Abdelfattah on Egypt's Future
• Oil & Gas Drilling in the Gulf of St. Lawrence