Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - December 21, 1991, Winnipeg, Manitoba Oms Cut of Canadian newspapers company mud Winnipeg free press december editorials Freedom of Trade Liberty w5 Equality of civil rights Bruce Kenneth Jones controller John Dafoe editorial Page editor David Lee managing editor in a it constructive inaction pome minister Brian Mulroney Little gathering in Ottawa this week accomplished exactly what it ought to the prime the first minis ters of nine of the 10 provinces and the two along with the finance minister of Quebec sat around a ate their Sand tossed about a few ideas for saving the Economy and agreed to meet then they returned wreathed in Given the circumstances of this weeks meeting it would have been Foolhardy to try anything the meeting was called on a weeks notice with Tittle or no Advance prep there was not the time for substantive negotiations about the Economy and the first ministers would have been wrong to try to adopt any firm Given the time available to Ontario Premier Bob who arrived at the meeting holding some naive Hopes of immediate recognized the reality of he told reporters after the meet youve got 13 people around a you figure it How Many minutes each one gets to the answer is not Many and the first ministers were Wise to use the few minutes each of them was Given to put Forward Gen eral proposals for economic revival rather than trying to reach hard agreements on any one of the time for hard agree ments will come in february when the first ministers will have before them a report from a meeting of their finance very Little will be lost by waiting two months because government actions Sel Dom have an immediate Impact on the econ their Impact tends to be Felt after a considerable time lag and sometimes after the need for the action has already under the Best of the opportunities for action this time Are not All of the first ministers agreed that there was Little scope for increased govern ment spending to stimulate the if billion dollars in Federal and provincial deficits Are not stimulating a few billion More Are not Likely to do the Job and in Likely to do considerable Lon term damage to the Premier Rae offered some suggestions for better use of Money that is including shifting some expenditure from the current to the capital account which do More to increase employ Premier Rae floated another proposal which got some warm attention from the other he suggested allowing holders of registered retirement savings plans to take Money from their plans to put a Down payment on a House without having to pay the taxes that would normally be applied to Money removed from an it was typical of the climate that prevailed at the meeting that no one showed any Surprise that a proposal for a tax break for yuppies should come from an nip pre whatever else might be said about the plan would pour a Little More Money into the housing Industry in the present economic it could clearly what the housing like a lot of other could use even How is even lower interest if those lower interest rates brought Down the value of the Canadian few in business would getting interest rates further Down involves keeping inflation Low and holding the lid on government that fact puts strict limits on the actions governments can take to boost the Economy out of no action by Canadian governments will do much to restore the Canadian Economy to health so Long As the Economy next door in the United states remains As Flat and in promising As it is at the an elec Tio Nyear relation in the might help a especially if Canadian Industry is poised to take advantage of prudent government action now will help ensure that it a nato recruit Only russian president Boris Yeltsin can know exactly what he had in mind when he declared that one of the Lon term goals of Russia is member ship in the North Atlantic treaty Organiza it will be in the Best interests of nato to agree in principle that the Lon term goal is but to resist any Early attempt to gain membership before matters in rus and Between Russia and its new neigh Are More settled than they Are the last thing current members of the Al Liance need is an As they would have should Russia be granted member to provide instant assistance should Russia become involved in disputes with its it is a situation which should not be sought by nato or encouraged in the Short by accepting a Canadian proposal to use Alliance troops and equip ment to transport Relief supplies to Russia and other members of the new soviet com has taken a positive step toward demonstrating its Good will to the people who used to make up the Warsaw the organization nato faced for the sight of nato aircraft and personnel bringing badly needed food and other sup plies will be a Welcome one within the new also encouraging is the Dis Cussion in nato councils about the possibility of offering certain Security Guaran tees to the new group of former soviet re it is in natos interests to have Russia and other Commonwealth nations clothed and free from worries about their new National All this can be accomplished through cooperative Simi Lar to those already under russian membership in the Alliance is not required for the Alliance to carry out programs de signed to help Russia survive the avoid famine and enjoy a climate in which democracy can it is certain that Yeltsin knows All no one should blame him for wanting More if he can get membership in nato would provide him with a read made mechanism to expand his this would not necessarily be in natos Best in Terest and the Wise move would be to receive the membership application but to put it on the Back Burner until a More suitable overpriced booze liquor profits Are in even though the provincial liquor control commission is Selling it is simply charging the commission report shows that sales decreased Overall by per but that profits inched up by million to the commissions vice president of i Al said the decline in sales was due to changed drinking habits and the current economic Independent suggested that the decline was due to More Manitoban Cross order shop Ping for their to More making their own and to other measures designed to avoid the combination of High prices and High taxes which face liquor purchasers in some of the decline is probably due to the fact that Manitoban Are less inclined to drink and drive than they were in previous and to the fact that they have fewer dollars in their pockets than they did a year is due to the factors Al ready pinpointed the Cross order shop Ping and the increase in Home the provincial liquor commission should take an objective and hard look at what is happening in it is not enough that the commission dutifully As it does year after More profits for the Provin Cial if the commission exists to serve then it should Start doing it is possible to buy liquor in North Dako import it pay All the duty and tax and still save Between and a Bot it is this spread that is causing Manito bans to look South of the Border for their i while they Are buying leave More Cash there for other no one expects Manitoba to match the prices being offered in North where the government looks upon liquor tax Revenue As but not quite As Neces sary As the Manitoba government regards Manitoban Are not buying nearly four per cent less liquor than they did a year they Are simply buying it when the Only store in the province makes it so at Tractive to shop nobody should be a bit surprised that people follow where their wallets Lead it could be time for the province to look at the possibility of de manding a bit less in order to sell while providing the service that should be part of a monopoly marketing the Charm of no fault the bad news for motorists in British Columbia is that their insurance premiums Are about to increase by a whopping 19 per cent on february the worse for the new government of that is that the provincial insurance the insurance corporation of Brit ish is expected to lose More than with the new higher pre the government can push its insurance costs troubles a bit into the future by blam ing this years hefty rate increase on the previous it cannot avoid the troubles which Are bound to follow if it is forced into similar rate increases just to keep the provincial corporations head above it is possible that British Columbia will take a Leaf out of Ontario policy Book and introduce a limited form of no fault insure this coupled with Ontario Premier Bob Raes move to delay the implementation of a provincial insurance corp has enabled the private insurers in Ontario to mail out substantial rate cheques to their it is possible that More provinces will Fol Low Ontario and Quebec into no fault insure in British current predictions Are that the Cost of claims in 1991 will be 80 per cent higher than they were just four years Crim related including thefts and Are expected to triple in 1991 when compared to the benefits of no fault insurance Are most readily seen in the area of personal in where no fault in All but the most serious the Cost of in a switch to no fault insurance was recommended by judge Robert Kop Manitoba motorists Are facing a modest increase in their automobile insurance premiums made necessary mostly by the imposition of the Federal goods and services tax on parts and on the Sale of written of f Lehi the provincial government in spite of this increase this continue its investigation of the benefits of no fault before it is forced to do so by escalating costs such As have been experienced in British Toothy muck dupes denture diggers by Christopher Dafoe special to the free press every so often there appears in the news papers a Story so Odd and seemingly far fetched that the astonished Reader is tempted to suppose that somebody made it that it in a contemporary such a Story appeared in the papers last it told of the draining of an ornamental Lake under the old rollercoaster at Black a popular Holiday resort of the old fashioned on the Bottom of the Lake were found hundreds of sets of false not to mention numerous Glass eyes and these artefacts had been lost Over the years by screaming riders on the it must have been quite a imagine being so terrified that your dentures popped they must have called that rollercoaster the Den Tal mechanics if those strange artefacts had remained undisturbed for a thousand years what would the archaeologists of the future have made of them As we All items found buried in the Earth often give scholars an idea of what life was life in times a few broken a fragment of a Clay cooking pot and a Stone Arrowhead Are often enough to give us an image of a Long vanished or of the Chaldee lives again in a piece of broken pot Tery or a handful of notions there is no Way of knowing for of whether the picture of ancient times produced by the experts is an accurate the Good people of or might be astonished by our notions of what their town was like and the men and women who built stonehenge might laugh out loud at our theories about How and Why they did that Rose red half As old As time May have been Little More than a those false Teeth at the Bottom of the Lake in Blackpool May Well have fired the imagination of the archaeologist of the future if they had been left in the scholars Are a notably disputations lot and one can easily imagine what might have happened in the year 2991 As rival experts pushed their Theo Ries on the notorious Blackpool school of thought one school of for might claim to be convinced that Blackpool in the far off twentieth Century was a Centre for Faith Healing in which thousands of devotees of the goddess Isis Marilyn threw away their artificial choppers after being by methods now no longer of their others might Well Cleave to the View that Blackpool had been a Centre for a great primitive religion that Practised human professor for might Point in a paper published in the Learned Jour nals in that the giant traces of which were uncovered in a dig of May have been a High altar from which sacrificial victims were hurled by the High priest of the Blackpool professor Xerox is sceptical of earlier claims by professor microchip to the effect that Blackpool in a Colony established by the iranians in the year professor microchips theory includes the notion that iranians shed their As the Snake Sheds its once a the wigs and Glass eyes continue to baffle bitter professors Xerox and microchip find themselves in total agreement when they consider the laughable paper published on the Blackpool excavations by the upstart graduate student Myra who is unlikely to obtain her degree if she persists in her unscientific claims to believe that Blackpool was actually a Holiday resort in nineteenth and twentieth Century Britain attended by Large numbers of working class families from the North of strange As it May the false Teeth found in the Lake Actu ally flew out of the jaws of people Riding on a giant contraption called a the Speed attained by riders on this Struc Ture was so great that wigs flew Glass eyes popped out and dentures sprang out of Moo unit suggests that the rollercoaster May have been part of a courtship ritual involving British youths and although she has not ruled out the possibility that the so called roller coaster was simply a toy created to provide cheap thrills for anyone woman or had the Money to pay the standards numbers of false Glass eyes and wigs Are displayed in a museum raised near the site of the Blackpool excavation and an animated display illustrates another that of old professor who insists that the Blackpool artefacts belonged to a species of wild the so called that died out late in the then to first it is comforting to As we look ahead to the that can be expected to maintain All its traditional Stan ask who is the enemy now rear Admiral Eugene of the respected Washington based Centre for defence is angry at accelerating expenditures on nuclear he asked this question who is the enemy who Are we arming ourselves against the same thing can be asked about Why Are we spending billion on defence Why do we allot this huge sum on arms when the country desperately needs funds for eco nomic and social purposes the present defence system was Cre ated and designed to defeat the soviet says Admiral Carroll in an the soviet Union has collapsed but the crazy outlay on weapons keeps the military Industrial Complex is alive and Well and says Admiral while the will reduce its forces by 20 per or in the next five the savings will be ploughed Back into outrageous weapons where the profits the will be spending billion on de Fence this an increase of states the defence published by the Centre for defence information plans for nuclear War with the soviet Union remain virtually there Nave been Steps Forward in the world such As the emergence of the unas a More potent Force and the agreement Between the and the soviet Union to slash nuclear arms under the strategic arms reduction talks even with this sizable says project an ecumenical coalition on Dis by 1999 the nuclear arsenals will not be much smaller than when Start talks began in meanwhile More sophisticated weapons Are being there is no valid Mili tary requirement for either the strategic de Fence initiative Star wars or the b2 stealth says the defence but the plans to spend an incredible billion on these programs in the it says that Star the most expensive of nuclear will Only add to the National debt but not to it is sup posed to protect against any missile attack but will not be Able to shoot Down missiles delivered by aircraft or As for the stealth it serves no Pur pose and should be says the Moni the already has aircraft Capa ble of bombing any the production of the stealth bomber is riddled with corruption and con tractors Are being allowed to produce the b2 before it is fully developed and tested to add insult to the prime has been caught in flagrant cheat in the past two years it has been found guilty of More than 30 counts of criminal Val Werier fraud and fined almost million by the Federal the arms Industry is riddled with Hank pan its also a lucrative Ruth Leger in the 1991 edition of world military and social expenditures states that since the second world prices of High tech weapons have increased 200fold compared to the general Price level of Sivard looks to the based on the level of world military expenditures and Gross National product per there has been a slight downward trend in arms spend ing at the beginning of this if this is projected to give a rough clue As to How the world is the message is grim it will be 18 years before the worlds arms Trade drops Back to the More moderate Levels of the and it will be 125 years before the annual expenditures per school age child match the current level of military expenditures per the military Drain is Sivard reports that to of every spent by Central governments now goes for Mili tary triple their budgets for Educa eight times their budgets for As for developing they spend 23 per cent More on foreign weapons than they received in economic Aid in the period from 1978 to the arms outlay is evil and new nuclear weapons Are being developed even though there Are enough to destroy the world several times and this takes place while there is Lack of control of those in including the disintegrating soviet a paper issued by the in this week Esti mates a billion people Are living in absolute they Are so characterized by Mal illiteracy and disease As to be be Neath any reasonable definition of human every Day children according to project Only about on Quarter of one per cent of the Money spent on the world military would pro vide billion to save 50 million children from hunger and Early we need to keep on asking who is the ene my ;