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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1981-01-07, Page 2 1872 Brussels Post BRU ONT. Established 1872 519-887-6641 Serving Brussels and the surrounding community Published at BRUSSELS, ONTARIO every Wednesday morning by McLean Bros. Publishers Limited Andrew Y. McLean, Publisher Evelyn Kennedy, Editor Pat Langlois, Advertising Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association, Ontario. Weekly Newspaper Association and The Audit Bureau of Circulation. Subscription rates: Canada $12 a year (in advance) outside Canada $25 a year (in advance) Single copies 30 cents each Box 50, Brussels, Ontario NOG 1H0 ,p.,4111115FPIH4 -,: e spAKRsc A o c, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7, 1981 New beginnings A new year means a time for new beginnings. Hopefully it will mean renewed progress for Brussels and area. Already, the village's main street is starting to look better with new businesses setting up in empty buildings. Work on the sanitary sewage treatment plant and pumping station started last year and hopefully that project will be completed in 1981. While the influx of new businesses is promising, what would be even better, would be to have some of the village eyesores removed from the main street. 1981 will be the year when Brussels and area can look forward to some interesting celebration, including the Brussels Legion's 50th anniversary and Morris Township's 125th birthday celebrations. Perhaps it can be the incentive year to bring some type of industry to Brussels or to start some type of annual event, thus bringing more people into the village to do business. A new year, new beginnings - let's see what Brussels and area can do with it! An ordinary- special man There's a man who lives in Belgrave Who's a very special guy, But you'd pass him on the street and never know, Cause he's always busy doing All the things that should be done But he's private. . . He never makes a show. He can shingle, dig a garden And :hell do it with a smile He'll wash windows, rake up leaves or fix a tap He'll paint your back verandah, or glue your rocking chair, Build a Birdhouse, mow your lawn or fix a tile. He never is too busy to lend a help iii hand, To anyone who needs a helpin hand. He's long on doing favours and, short on taking pay he's just an ordinary special kind of man. Lewis Cook's the man we're cheerin -- as if you didn't know. But I guess he won't be hearin -- cause He's off to shovel snow! Ross S. Procter rn Behind the by scenes Keith Roulston Just in case you haven't enough thing to trouble your mind today, here arc some headlines from the future, just as gloomy as the ones from today. Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, June 1984: Premier Angus McLean said today that while he deplores such actions he can do little to halt the current growing separatist feelings in his province. "There has been a long history of injustice towards our province from the wealthy sections of Canada," he said. "Unless the rest of the country changes its attitude I am afraid that this current popular ag.,,itation may lead to complete independence." The premier scoffed at the suggestion of one reporter that this was a mere bargaining ploy to try to get a better deal for the province in the upcoming constitu- tional conference with the federal govern- ment. Instead he cited the injustice of the province of Ontario's retail sales tax on restaurant meals. "They take our potatoes, make them into french fries and then collect tax on thernitax that should be coming to us," he said. He also said he understood the attitude of Islanders who were angry because Albertans and other Canadians used Island potatoes but called them french fries. "I am proud of the many people of French descent here on the island," he said, "but it seems to me that such food should be called Island fries or PEI fries, not some foreign name. AN EXPORT BAN Angry calls at recent separatist meetings have insisted on a ban on the export 'of." potatoes to the rest of Canada An even more alarming call has come for the recall of all copies of the book Anne of Green Gables from other provinces. Observers say this would cause the collapse of the entire Canadian cultural. system leaving people with nothing to read but The Diviners, HALIFAX, Nova Scotia i October 1988: Premier Peter MacDonald today threat, erred to cut back on production of cod liver oil unless the federal government retracts its newly announced tax on transportatiOn of lobster from one province to another. The Premier said one people of his province would never stand for this flagrant interfetetic4 in the affairs of the province. Lobsters, he said, are a provincial resource and must be free from federal interference. Asked if he thought cod liver oil was a very good bargaining tool in the 1980's the premier said that if that didn't work he would be prepared to take an even more serious step and not allow. any players from the Nova Scotia Voyageurs to be called up for use by the Montreal Canadiens. That, he said, would hit hard at the people of Quebec who have had to suffer without winning the Stanley Cup for two seasons now. ANNE MURRAY? If that also didn't bring action from the federal governin'ent, he said he was willing to make the ultimate step: he would ask Anne Murray to move back to Springhill and ban export of her records to Canada. It is believed this last ultimatum has people in Ottawa thinking seriously of abolishing the tax. FREDRICTON, New Brunswick, March 1989: Premier Rene Beauchamps today said he would not follow the lead of other provinces and threaten to secede from CanadaN if failing a better deal from confederation. "I know that Quebec won concessions with threats and Alberta and British Columbia are now the central powers of the country because of their tactics and 'that even Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia are now I much better off than we are because of such threats but I refuse to use blackmail." He dismissed as absurd opposition party charges that he was afraid to use the tactic because no one in Canada might notice if New Brunswick went missing. TORONTO, Ontario, August, 1992: Premier William Davis today said that unless Prime Minister Peter Lougheed changes his arrogant attitude toward the provinces he would be forced to take the only action he had left to him to gain a better deal from confederation for Ontario. The Premier said that since Mr. Lougheed became Prime Minister 'he has centralized power in the new capital of Lethbridge and has ruled the country with a clique of advisers as if it was a private company, paying little attention to the wishes of parliament and particularly to the poorer provinces of central Canada where the Prime Minister has little representation. He said it was a travesty of the purposes of confederation that the federal govern- inent had reduced transfer payments to poorer provinces Mich as Ontario. Asked Please Ulm to page 3 Sugar and spice By Bill Smiley Been one of those weeks, The first snow. School buses going into the ditch. A great screaming of summer tires just outside our door. A stately elderly gentleman with a cigar walked past me as I was warming up the car. Went flat on his keester at the corner, but retained his cigar. Before I could get out and help him somebody else was there. Got him to his feet, and off, he went, probably to get his morning paper, badly shaken, but complete- ly unshaken, cigar still going. Went to work arounti the sage way, no hills, despite the iniquitour lie of the car salesman that with radial belted tires you didn't need Snow tires. Poppycock. This ain't Florida. Tried tOclimb a tiny hill, did a 180 degree turn, and went the long, long way around, arriving at work ten minutes late, sweating, scrambled, and me with the 'flu that's lasted only six weeks, There's nothing like a `flu fever, along• with a fear sweat, to make you have to change all your clothes every •fifth day, instead of every two weeks. Oh, well. We dang near got the lawn-mower away last weekend. And we'll get it into the tool shed one of these days, as soon as I can find somebody who realizes how valuable those twelve-foot windows (storm) are, for the glass in them. Must be fifty bucks worth of glass there, and a good Saturday night's worth of firewood, once the glass is removed. Yep. We went for the aluminUm jobs this year. My wife thinks we could cut the glass out ourselves. She bought a "genuine" glass- cutter from one of those television shows. I can just see the two of us in the tool shed, leaking blood from every limb, framed in fine old Georgian wooden window-frames. And the lawn-mower still out in the snow. But it wasn't all bad. We had our own South American guru home for a few days, and he fixed me up with a potion call Devil's Claw, supposed to cure arthritis. You drink about two pints a day for three weeks, and it tastes like boiled lumberjack socks. I had one treatment, and my, pains vanished. He was quite'annoyed. He'd got a special on it, only $2.99 for a six dollar bottle of the blank. Despite a week of supervising examina- tions, and realizing that the only people. duinber than kids are teachers, I kept my spirits up. Spiritually. With spirits. And along came a few more items to make me refuse to hope that the ski resort operators all go broke this year because Short Shots by Evelyn Kennedy Continued from page 1 little to improve our ind or give enjoyment. ****** It was pleasant to receive news of Mrs. Margaret Ballantyne, a former long-time resident of Brussels; now of Toronto Grace Hospital, 650 Chureh Street, frOm her niece, Mrs. Dorothy Cameron, Mrs. Ballantyne, at 104 years of age is still very alert: She looks forward to the arrival of the Post with news of this community:. She appreciates very much the letters and cardS she receives from old friends here. Because of illness Christ- maS cards' were not Mailed but Holiday Greetings are extended to all her friends in this area. Still a Maple Leaf Imckey fan, the highlight of her week is "Mickey, Night in there won't be any snow. I couldn't do this. I hope there's just enough snow so they can stay alive, and go broke next year. What ultimately kept my spirits as buoyant as an anvil in a swamp was the news and the pictures of our revered leader and Sacha freaking about in an Arab, tent, mounting the Spinx and climbing a camel. I'm sure it, or they, warmed the cockles of every Canadian heart. In another incarnation, that man would be a Rain-Maker. Have you ever observed his technique? It's one that every husband in the land would love to emulate. When there's a lot of heat in the kitchen, he tosses a few fragments of fat on the already burning oil and takes off for far places, there to don outlandish garb, and participate in exotic rites,. and leave his sergeants at home to fight the war. It's fool-proof. He gets a lot of headlines; distracts the country's attention from such trivialities as unemployment and inflation, and conies up with some stuff' about , Canada being the thirty-third best-loved ' country in the third world. - = I wish I could get away with it. If I went to Yemen, they'd probably be serving me up instead of sheep's eyes. And if I even tried to go to Egypt or Saudi Arabia, my wife would complain about the lack of air-conditioning, and I'd be sent home, slit open, filled with oil, and sewed up again. One half-barrel of oil for Canada. On the other hand, he has Margaret. There's always something to cheer one up, of course, in the daily press: Just this morning, I read that Ronald Reagaii had had two children by his first children by his second wife., Not, with. Zero in, you feminist head (or.dther •pareg) hunters. In the same edition, I learned from someone called Peregrine that, "We are the only couple in Canada who have done it. "Out of context, of course, but it struck me funny. Bone. And in yet the same issue of Canada's "leading newspaper" , (leading what I do not know) I discovered in an advertisement that for $19.95 I could purchase the latest copy of a book by Canada's "leading author" (leading what I again do not know, unless self-glorification and the ability to chew his cabbage twice, or thrice.) So. All these things cheer me up on a bad day. And then I read a few students' essays and I plunge once more into the pits. One guy says Hugh Garner is Canada's greatest writer, because he could understand his prose and there was none of this symbolism and junk to cloud the meaning. Another tells me that Sylvia Fraser has remarkable insight into human character, and repeats it eight times. Oh, well, 1981's on the way, U-g-g-ghl Canada". She was thrilled when Darryl Sittler called on her. Mrs. Ballantyne has become quite a celebrity,. When Premier. Davis opened the newly renovated hospital she presented him with a carnation. Her picture was in the Toronto newspapers and on T.V. news. Happy 1981 to you Mrs. "B". * * itt Oh to hear the music of the sleigh bells that chimed so merrily in years gone by, Alas, it is heard no more since the noisy, polluting automobiles cha,sed the horse and cutter off the road. Wrapped warmly against the bite of the wind, tucked secur iy in the warmth of a snug buffalo robe, it was exhilarating to glide swiftly behind a high stepping horse with the music of the bells ringing out on the cleat, frosty air. Those bells Were the pride of the miner who spent hard earned ash tO have the sWeetest Set of chimes On the road.