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The Brussels Post, 1980-01-09, Page 2WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 9, 1980 Serving Brussels, and the surrounding community. Publi'shed each Wednesday afternoon at. Brussels, Ontario By McLean Bros. Publishers Limited Evelyn Kennedy - Editor Pat Langlois Advertising Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association IM Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $10.00 a Year. Others $20.00 a Year: Single Copies 25 cents each.. BLUE RIBBON AWARD 1979 Wanted: a correspondent Not too long, ago, a cheque for a subscription renewal came into the Brussels Post along with a note suggesting that there should be more Brussels news in the paper, and that Brussels should have its, own . correspondent. We agree and are hereby advertising for someone to take on the job. Meanwhile the Brussels Post staff is always interested. in hearing about any news that Brussels residents have. We are eager for people to call us or drop their news in at the . newspaper office. We're right here in the middle of the village, right downtown, for your convenience. Correspondents in communities surrounding Brussels do a terrific job of keeping their area's news well covered. We'd weicome the help of a correspondent for the village itself. If you are interested, or even a little bit intrigued at what the job involves, call us at 887-6641 and we'll talk it over. Correspondents have.to phone people up for news and a great deal of it is phoned to them by the people of the community. Here at the Brussels Post, we usually only get a few names of people in the community who have had visitors or been visiting..Maybe a' Brussels correspOndent could change that. We hope so. The Post is your newspaper, but you have to help us, by sharing your news. It's the only way we'll all see more Brussels news in the paper. Su ice gar and sp By Bill Smiley I will not think about the election. I will not write a word about the election. I will put the election right out of my mind. I am not about to let an election spoil my new year. There. How do you feel about another election? Probably as much as I do. Another sixty million dollars out of our pockets to pay for the damn thing, and when it's all over, we'll have another bunch of liars, or the same ones, back in the House. It makes one puke. Silly sods. Our glorious leaders. The arrogance of those in, and the lust for power of those out, is no new thing in our Canadian political history, but nowhere has it been better focussed upon than in the past few weeks. Clark's Tories, whose favorite epithet for the past decade has been "arrogance", walked into the House of Commons, after six months of non-government, stinking of the stuff. As though a divine light had suddenly fallen upon the party, they immediately broke most of their election promises, and superciliously informed the nation, and parliament, that it was going to have to bite the bullet: more inflation, more unemploy- ment, more taxes. A little power is a dangerous thing. Like a toothless lion, the Liberals, leaderless, in disarray, and informed only last May that nobody wanted them to govern the country, or at least that a grbat many didn't, cuffed the new boys with its clawless, but powerful, paws. Like jackals, the NDP, with nothing to bse, ran yelping in to tear off some choice bits of meat from under the nose of the toothless lion. Like looters in a riot, the people who sell gas and cigarettes, and everything else that would raise taxes, joyfully hoisted their rates, before the budget had passed, adding the tax and a little more, to make it come Out in round figures, a favorite game fOr years, If you feel like me, you'll be mtittering, "A curse on all their houses." SO, exhausted politicians will stagger back' into the harness of the campaign trail, mouthing the same old cliches, trying .to stir something in the dull, sullen pond of the Canadian voter, who has never been more disillusioned. The media, which feeds on disaster as cancer feeds on cells, will have a field day. And you and I, Jack, when the smoke has cleared, will pick up the tab, as usual. Every vindictive bone, and he had a lot of them, in John Diefenbaker's , buried body must be chuckling, as he watches Joe Clark make an ass of himself. Even the duit of Mackenzie King must be stirring a bit as he overviews his beloved Liberal party putting sticks between the spokes of the government's wheels, a tactic at which he was a master. Mike Pearson, wherever he rests, will be ' chortling and relating the whole thing to a baseball game he once played, in which the biggest bat on the team struck out, with the count three and two. Renee Levesque is probably smoking . eight packs a day, furious because his tame pussy-cat, Joe Clark, has upset all his referendum plans by turning into a mouse. Robert. Stanfield must be weeping into a pair of longjohns, and shaking his head, slowly and sadly, as he contemplates the asininity of the party he once led with grace and dignity. Ed Broadbow, the people's hero, who was thoroughly rejected by both farmers and industrial workers in the last go- around, is probably desperately searching for a formula that will get some votes from the middle class. Pierre Trudeau, picking up the torch that everybody else dropped when it burned their fingers, is probably thinking, "I wonder what that bloody Margaret is going to say to screw up this one." If nothing else, the election fits the season. January sales are up for grabs, along with cheap power, political. Oil prices rocket, while our "leaders" tell'us that we have lots, or there's going to be a shortage, whichever fits the matter of getting votes. Arid worst of all. We're going to b. subjected to a winter of lies, hot air, Colk. comfort; and a complete stagnation Of our country. 11- by Keith Ro - Everybody talks about the long run but nobody ever does anything about it. When the Conservative government brought down its budget last month it justified its tough policies by saying this was the bitter medicine we had to swallow in order to,make our sick economy well in the long run. Ironically-that was the same message the Liberals had been telling us last spring at elect:kin time -while the Conservatives were saying that the Liberals were selling our country short, that if they had a chance to run things we wouldn't need to be told we we had, to cut back. There's no doubt that we need to make short' run sacrifices in order to make the long run better but when is someone going to really be honest 'about dealing with long-run problems instead of just putting bandaids on a leaking economy? There's the matter, for instance, of our barely floating dollar. The health of our dollar, we are told, is bad because we spend more outside the country than we sell. Our productivity, we are told, is. not goOd. Yet every month amid that bewilder- ing onslaught of figures that comes out of the statistics office in Ottawa there is one that is very positive. The tally of things we actually manufacture in. Canada and sell abroad versus what we buy is actually almost always in a surplus position. Then a couple of days• later comes another figure, one that includes all transfers of money and in that one we always have a deficit. Why? One of the factors leading to this deficit which is regularly pointed out is the tourist deficit. Canadians have become world travellers and they're taking their dollars with them at record rates, no matter how badly the dollar suffers- and they have to pay high exchange rates. On the other hand, fewer and fewer people Seems to be visiting Canada as tourists. Certainly the economy would be aided if more people vacationed inside Canada instead of outside but this is still a small part of the whole deficit situation. The Conservative government found another villain in the guise of the government deficit which has grown during our years of demanding more and more services from the government. GOvernments in Canada and government agencies like Ontario Hydro often borrow money from outside the Country. BetWeen the exchange they pay and the interest payments it means a large Chunk of money is going across the border every Month. But there's another factor, one that gets glossed over most of the time, It's the =mint of Money that getS transferred out ulston of Canada to the head offices and stockholders. of foreign-owned companies... doing business in Canada. When one considers that no country in the world is so dominated by foreign-owned businesses it is easy to understand why our economy is in such trouble. There was a time *hen the issue of foreign-ownership was a big one on the election trail. The NDP made a lot of hay over it. The Liberals finally brought in a foreign investment review act which has hardly been heard from in recent years. Foreign ownership goes on, taking over larger 'and larger...hunks of the Canadian economy. And nobody even mentions it. Take for instance the policy of both the last two governments of handing more and more money over to the multi-national oil companies in the hope that they'll find more oil to ease the danger of shortages and foreign domination. Yet in doing so we simply raise more profits for the companies who either use it to buy up more Canadian businesses or transfer it out of the country to fill the pockets of Americans or Dutch 'or some other nation's businessmen. We in a vicious circle. Whenever times . get a little tough people cry that we can't scare off foreign investment by clamping down. Whenever times are good we say that the system is working well. And all the way around the vicious circle the foreign companies get more and more control. What can be done about it? Many experts say Canada can't live without' foreign investment. Why not? We are one of the richest nations in the world. If we turn our own resources into developing our own resources why can't we do it? If we can't what country 'pray tell. can? What hope is there for the poorer nations of the world? It seems we're in another vicious circle here. We bring in foreign companies to develop our resources because we don't have the money but the foreigners take all the profit out meaning that we don't have any money to develop the next resource so we have to bring in more foreign comp- anies to do that And on it goes. Breaking the foreign economic dependency would be hard in the short run but in the long run it , could give us freedom to control our own, economy. The problem is that no political party has the guts to tackle the problem. They keep talking about the short term sacrifice for the long term good but they've got the long term mixed up. I'd gladly suffer in the short term to have a healthy future but the governments aren't really offering the long term solution that's necessary. They're busy fighting the wrong war. DUCKS ALONG THE RIVER'S EDGE—These ducks would have had a hard time making their way across the half frozen Maitland River, but were almost attempting the crossing when they heard the photographer. Ducks, like the rest of Us, have been enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. (Brussels POst'Photo) Behind the scenes