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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1990-07-25, Page 5Arthur Black THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 1990. PAGE 5. The animals strike back Heaven goes by favour. If It went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go In. Mark Twain Old Sam Clemens was right, you know. It’s a lucky thing we humans wrote the Bible. It gave us a chance to make ourselves look good and to grab the captain’s cabin on Spaceship Earth. Ever since we put ourselves in charge of the planet the way we’ve treated our fellow tenants has been something less than charitable. When white men first came to this continent, the skies were blackened by migrating passenger pigeons each year. You can’t find a single one now. We slaughtered the beaver and decimated the buffalo herds. We obliterated the Plains Grizzly and reduced the once common eastern mountain lion to little more than a ghostly rumour. Mind you, we haven’t always killed our colleagues outright. Sometimes we settled for simple animal humiliation. Tigers pacing in cages, elephants balancing on Random thoughts BY RAYMOND CANON I have been back to Europe for the first of my two business trips this year and I was mercifully out of the country when most of the debate on the Meech Lake Accord was going on. I say mercifully since there were so many comments being made by so many people who knew so little about it that I just couldn’t stand listening to it any longer. However, if events are moving rather fast in this country, it became very obvious to me in Europe that life is very much in the fast lane over there as well. Last year when I was in Germany, the Berlin Wall had yet to be torn down now there is the question of how long it will be before the two Germanies are united. There is confusion there just as there is in Canada over what the future has to bring; at times it seemed to me that each German has his or her own version as to how this re-unification should be brought about. Frankly, I don’t think many of them know what the situation will be at this time next year. Canada is certainly not alone in its confusion. One Saturday morning in St. Gallen, Switzerland, I was standing across the road from Globus, one of the main department stores in that city. All of a sudden a young girl ran out of the store followed seconds later by another girl in full pursuit. Only then did I notice that the first girl had a red jacket in her hand and, as the second girl was about to overtake her, dropped it. The jacket was picked up and the sales clerk, for it was obvious that’s who the second girl was, walked back with it to the store. What I had witnessed was a blatent example of shop-lifting. Later that day I met a business acquaintance and, after a short meeting we headed in the direction of the train station so that he could catch a train back to Zurich. Seeing that we had about a half hour before the train was to leave, we found ourselves in the Second Class Dining Room. This was something of an error balls. Bears in clown hats waltzing to Strauss. And all the while, the animals endured, with scarcely a cheep or a hiss or a bellow of protest. Oh, once in a while a Great White picks off a surfer, a tiger snags a Bengali villager or a Spanish toro outfoxes a matador and pins him to the plaza sand - but tally those paltry victories against, say, the number of Big Macs sold each day. No contest. Ever since man began using his over­ sized brain to compensate for his under­ sized musculature, it’s been a lopsided battle, but folks ... I think the tide may be shifting. Something tells me the Big Referee in the Sky is about to start marking his scorecard in favour of the, um, underdogs. Evidence? Purely circumstantial, so far. But read these three stories that appeared in the papers recently. The first table tells the plight of Troy Brewer, delivery boy for Domino’s Pizza in Balch Springs, Texas. Troy’s np greenhorn in the pizza delivery game. He’s handled drunks, deadbeats and no-shows. But he draws the line at hold-up amphibians. Late on Tuesday night, two rough-look­ ing customers cornered Troy on a dark street. “Don’t move’’ growled one as he drew his weapon from under his coat, “or yer gonna git bit.” And there Troy was, nose to beak with a snapping turtle. “A big, huge, ugly one!” recalls Troy. “That sucker was gonna bite me!” The turtle­ armed men escaped with about $50. Scary, but not as scary as the story out of Fort Richey, Florida, where an outlaw gang since we had intended to go into the First Class Dining Room for a coffee but, since we were there, we decided to stay. Hardly had we started enjoying our coffee when a hulk of a man nearby took exception to something said to him and challenged another man to step outside and settle it once and for all. It appeared for a minute that it might be settled there and not outside but a smaller man intercepted the big man and told him to cool it. It looked very much like a case of David and Goliath; the big man was about to take a swing at the smaller one when all of a sudden the latter swung into action. It seemed that he had mastered the art of kung-fu or something of that nature for, with a few well placed blows of both his hands and feet he soon drove the far bigger man right out the door, to the obvious relief and amusement of all the patrons including ourselves. When we paid our bill, we thanked the waitress for the floor show. I guess it just goes to show you that, even in a peaceful and law-abiding country such as Switzerland there are a few undesirable elements. No nationality is perfect. Canada is trying to come to grips with an unacceptable level of inflation, much to the Letter Canadians fight to save Post Offices THE EDITOR, Ever heard of a place called Westwold, British Columbia? That’s where residents held a Canada Post car ‘hostage’ in early July. The reason: to save their 112-year-old federal postal service. How about Heron Bay North, Ontario? On July 10, members of the Pic River First Nation Band there set up a roadblock into Pukaskwan National Park in an effort to save their post office, also over 100 years old. Mings Bight, Nfld., Aroostook, N.B., and Falmouth, N.S., are also fighting hard at present to save their post offices. And there are many more. What does all this have to do with you? Well, since rural communities right across the country are subject to the same Canada Post policy, your town could be nexV is terrorizing a quiet law-abiding commun­ ity of peaceful retirees. A gang of Muscovy ducks. It’s a big gang - at least a hundred members. In the past month alone, six residents have been assaulted. One woman had her dress chewed. Another man fell over a fence and cut his hand trying to escape. “They are mean” says one Fort Richey victim. “They keep after you. They get ugly and want to bite people.” My final animal horror story occurred right here in Canada - in Fairview, Alberta as a matter of fact, where Donald Zenert decided to climb a fence into a deer enclosure to snap close-ups of some white-tailed does. He apparently didn’t notice the white­ tailed buck. Next thing Zenert knew, he was parrying antler thrusts from the infuriated male. And it was no bluff. “He was getting in some pretty good shots with his horns” says Zenert. “I figured the only way to keep him from putting an antler through my heart was to grab them and hang on.” So he did. For nearly two hours. He might still be there if the owner of the farm hadn’t rescued him by shooting the buck. Big deal, you say. Three unconnected stories, you say. Well, maybe. But I’ve been having nightmares about that Hitch­ cock movie, “The Birds” recently. And there was that owl hooting in the shopping mall. All I can say is, if animals do take over the world, I trust the ants will put in a good word for me. They better, after all the picnics I took them on. annoyance of those who are having to pay the penalty for such actions. I discovered that inflation is also a concern in both Germany and Switzerland. The latter country, in fact, is experiencing about the same level as we are for the Swiss this is even more disturbing than for Canadians. The prescription is the same there as here; you raise interest rates in order to try to cut back on aggregate demand and, as I have tried to explain in the past few months, if interest rates are higher elsewhere, they are likely to be higher here whether we like it or not. Finally, one last little observation. If you are flying to Europe, be prepared to arrive or depart later than scheduled. Not only are the major airports there starting to exceed to their capacity if they have not done so already but the air traffic control system is unable to handle efficiently the traffic that already exists. I say that even though Lufthansa managed to get me into Frankfurt 10 minutes early^ That, I can assure you, was something of an exception. However, we do not have to go to Europe to find congestion; it exists already at Malton airport. When we taxied out to take off, we were 12th in line. If I didn’t have to travel, I might be inclined to stay home. Canada Post calls its privatization scheme ‘equal or better service’; we say it’s a sham which always leaves somebody the big loser. Usually it is the private contractor who unknowingly takes on a poor postal contract, but it is often customers and rural route drivers too. It all adds up to yet another way rural Canadians are devalued by the powers-that-be, who usually live in cities, far from the consequences of their ill-conceived schemes! Here’s how Wes Keller, Editor of the Shelburne Free Press/Economist, sees it: “Canada Post has a curious way of satisfying the concerns of its customers. But, on reflection, maybe the corporation is simply acting in a manner consistent with the attitudes of all levels of government in the final decade of the 20th century. Those Continued on page 23 Letter from the editor Gap growing in county pay scales BY KEITH ROULSTON You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in Huron county that wants to see restructur­ ing of the county, eliminating all munici­ palities under 4,000 population, but for people who apparently don’t want it, we sure seem to be pushing ourselves toward it in a hurry. It’s not just that the county, prodded by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, is currently studying restructuring that’s of concern. The problem is that our municipal leaders are creating the kind of financial conditions that fall right into the hands of those in the Ministry who want to prove the need for amalgamating municipalities. One of the points brought up by provincial officials when county councillors were studying “Patterns for the Future”, the 1987 provincial study that urged restructuring, was that with too many small municipalities providing municipal staff would become too expensive. In recent years we seem to be heading in that direction. It’s easy to justify why municipal and county staffers should make as much as they do. There are lots of people who make more for doing the same job across the province. The $30,000 a year that seems to be the minimum for municipal clerks (one in a nearby municipality makes more than $50,000) isn’t a lot compared to people in some other public offices who have less responsibility. It’s equally easy to justify county highway employees starting at more than $10 an hour and municipal roads crews close behind. You can always find figures to compare these people to, that will make them look underpaid. But you can find other figures as well. Last year’s economic development study for Brussels, for instance, showed that in 1987, the last year for which figures were available, the median male income in Brussels was only $15,900 and female income was $8,200. Figures from the 1988 census show household incomes (counting both part­ ners) ranged from $25,798 in East Wawa- nosh to $38,554 in Blyth among the area municipalities. While in the urban areas income may have increased since then, statistics say farm incomes fell drastically last year and are expected to fall again this year. The fact is there seems to be a class system growing in Huron, with those who work for government organizations or a few large unionized industries in the upper class and people who work for small businesses or for themselves in another. The latter group, farmers, shop keepers, tradesmen, service industry people who make up the largest part of the population, are dependent on the market place. If the income of farmers goes down, for instance, people in businesses that depend on selling to farmers can give up any hope of just keeping up with inflation, let alone keeping ahead of it. They may be happy just to keep a job. If free trade cuts into business people may have to take wage freezes or rollbacks and be darned glad the job is still there, not moved to Georgia. Not so the public sector. From education to hospitals to county and municipal employees, cost of living increases are taken as given (as is job security). The rest of the economy may be in the dumper but the public service is isolated from the problems. It means that those in the public service get farther and farther ahead of those who pay the taxes that support them. It would be interesting, for instance, to know in all the municipal councils in the county how many councillors make more than they pay the municipal clerk (let alone how many board of education trustees make as much as they pay their teachers). The problem is, how can people making less continue to pay more to support public service employees? Someday the well has Continued on page 19