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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1990-12-05, Page 5Arthur Black Speaking of naked emperors There’s an old fable called “The Emperor’s New Clothes’’, in which a fast-talking tailor manages to convince a mighty monarch to prance about in the altogether. The emperor thinks he’s wear­ ing the most magnificent outfit of cloth so wondrous and subtle only people of discriminating sensibilities can appreciate it. His loyal subjects know its worth their necks to see anything other than what their emperor wants them to see, so they, too, praise the tailor’s masterpiece. It takes a guileless little kid to point out the obvious. “Look! The Emperor has no clothes” he shouts. And the whole house of cards come tumbling down. Canadians identify strongly with that fable because we’re living through a parallel version of it. Except in our version it’s not clothes that are missing. In the Canadian adaptation the little kid would stand up and shout “Look! The Empire has no brains!’’ To put it bluntly, the country is rudderless. There’s nobody at the helm. We should hang a giant OUT TO LUNCH The International Scene Junk, American style BY RAYMOND CANON We have all heard any number of times about the open border between Canada and the United States. While this may be in contrast to the border between any other countries, it does have its drawbacks. One of the most annoying has to be the influx of unwanted American practices. It doesn’t help that we share a common language but it all reminds me of the oft-repeated claim that what is good for the United States is good for the rest of the world. One of the most objectionable practices, or should I say two, that started in the U.S. and have infiltrated our society are junk mail and its more recent companion unsolicited phone calls. I’m sure all my readers have been afflicted by both of them. Perhaps the most obnoxious of the lot is the phone call which comes at about supper time, or more precisely just when you are taking that first bite. Some of the calls are downright insidious; the caller will claim that they are (1) doing a survey (2) not selling anything or (3) 1 have won a prize. It seems as if our friends south of the border are getting fed up with these twin phenonomena every bit as much as we are. A few days ago I was watching an American TV channel which was showing the huge bag filled with printed matter which was purported to represent the sum total of all such mail which each family receives each year, subsequent to that I ran across a few more details on the matter. According to the report no less than 13 billion catalogues are sent out each year by American companies, said to number about 8,000. You may wonder how they get names; the answer is that they buy subscription lists which most publishers are happy to sell them. They also apparently exchange lists so that, if they don’t get you the first time around, they will the second. I can deal to a considerable degree with junk mail. Almost without exception it goes into the pile set aside for my blue recycling box. What really annoys me. as it apparently does the Americans, are the sign on the hook of the Avalon Peninsula. From what I can see on my TV, Ottawa has been pretty much reduced to a smoldering Beirut-like ruin, infested with roving outlaw gangs of Fat Cat Tories and Old Fart Senators. Oh, we get a plethora of droning speeches about fastening our seatbelts prior to GST takeoff; about how this country is not in a recession. Well, not really a recession per se. Well, not a really DEEP recession ... But folks, I fear these are merely recorded announcements. I don't want to frighten anybody but I think this country is running on automatic pilot. There doesn’t appear to be anyone in the cockpit. We’ve all heard the radio and television ads about the federal government’s “deep and abiding commitment” to the environ­ ment. Tell that to the consultants who tried to prepare report cards on environmental quality across the country. They finally had to give up. They found out that by and large, nobody’s monitoring anything. In short, nobody in the country’s capital can say with any degree of certainty how good or bad Canada’s doing in terms of forests, fish stocks, farmlands, wetlands or hazardous waste disposal. Because nobody in Ottawa has bothered to keep track. “I was flabbergasted, not only at the gaps, but at the lack of correlation across the country.” telephone calls. The vast majority of them come in the early evening, i.e. about the time I have my supper. Sometimes they are not human voices at all, at least, not at the time. It is nothing less than a recorded message which I hear. To a considerable degree such outfits are relying on the fact that Americans, and with them Canadians, are turning more to phone orders. My U.S. statistics show that no less than one American in every four used the phone last year to order something which is a fifty per cent increase over the number only six years ago. The situation has become so bad that the U.S. government is starting to take action. More specifically they are zeroing in on what is known as telemarketing fraud. This involves purchases of materials which are paid for by credit cards but which are never received by the consumer. While the Senate is working on this one, the House of Representatives has already passed a bill Letter Press conspiring to keep global wanning quiet? THE EDITOR, Canada’s media has turned a blind eye to the surest threat facing our species. Certainly the threat of War in the Persian Gulf deserves covering. Certainly the explosion of world population from five billion to 10 billion or more over the next 60 years deserves coverage. The death of 40,000 youngsters every day from prevent­ able disease and starvation deserves coverage. Nuclear War, pollution - the list goes on. The question I raise is why the dismal coverage given to the second World Climate Conference held in Geneva last month? One Canadian reporter, Anne McIlroy of Southam capably covered the event and the reality of Global Warming; the surest threat to our survival. The World Scientific Community reach­ ed consensus that there will be warming of two to five degrees Centigrade and a sea level rise of 30 - 100 cm. during the next century. All other consequences aside it is estimated that the costs to protect Cana­ dian property alone from a one meter sea-rise is 9.5 billion dollars! Scientists concluded that a 20 per cent reduction in Carbon Dioxide emissions Who said that? Farley Mowatt? Some Greenpeace activist/hippie? Nope - Peter Vivian, one of the would-be report card writers and corporate vice president of Bell Canada International. Then, of course, there’s the recently delivered Auditor-General’s report which tells us that our ecological watchdog, Environment Canada, is more of a tooth­ less Chihuahua; that the Canadian armed forces are standing on guard with shoddy, outdated equipment that would shame a Colombian drug lord; that Pearson Airport is a moldering ruin; that university kids who suck on the public coffers for student loans don’t have to bother repaying them -- Ottawa doesn’t prosecute; that CS1S is double-crossing the RCMP and the Moun- ties are hamstringing Canada Customs and while those clowns slug it out at centre ice, Canadian drug smugglers are laughing all the way to their Swiss banks. All of which begs the question: Who’s in charge here? No one, I fear. Where was the govern­ ment during the Oka standoff? On vaca­ tion, apparently. And when it was over, the same absentee arbiters flatly refused to address the antive grievances that led to it in the first place. We’re all paying nearly 50 per cent more for every tank of gas. Has Ottawa lifted a finger to get Big Oil’s greedy hand out of your back pocket? Not that I’ve heard. The only finger Ottawa’s lifted lately has been strictly reserved for you and me. Centre finger. Right hand. that would set up lists of fax and telephone users who do not want to receive unsolicit­ ed sales approaches. Not surprisingly the marketing industry has started to fight back, claiming that self-regulation and the marketplace itself will weed out the sales techniques that turn consumers off. They may have a point in that the use of fax machines to market goods has tapered off considerably since it was discovered that the recipients reacted in a vigorous fashion. 1 am doing my bit. My approach is to handle such calls by informing the person politely but firmly that, while I am sure they have an interesting product, my house rule is that I never accept such calls between the hours of 6 and 8 p.m. to date not one has seen fit to call me back. At any rate, when the Americans find a solution to all this, I hope it crosses the border with the same speed as did the objectionable practice in the first place. over the next 15 years is technically and economically feasible for all countries. To stabilize concentrations of Green­ house Gases at about 50 per cent above pre-industrial concentrations by the middle of the next century will require worldwide reductions of net CO2 emissions by one to two per cent per year. Canada proceeded in Geneva to endorse the conclusions of the scientists and then to propose that Canada will only stabilize CO2 emissions by the year 2000. This position flies in the face of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment Re­ port; “No Time to Lose”. This unanimous All-Party Report concluded (after hearing over 60 witnesses and over 200 submis­ sions in the past year) that Canada must at minimum reduce CO2 emissions 20 per cent from 1988 levels by 2005 A.D. Why? Because the Committee believes that the threat of Global Warming is serious and steps must be taken now. Canadians are the fifth largest per capita emitters of Carbon Dioxide on Earth. Only nations like Bahrain or the United Arab Continued on page 23 THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1990. PAGE 5. Letter from the editor Who do you believe? BY KEITH ROULSTON Here’s a question for you: who woulc you believe, Sinclair Stevens or Briai Mulroney? Mr. Stevens, the former Conservativt industry minister who resigned in scanda over conflict of interest charges, claimec on the weekend that there was a secret dea between the Mulroney government and the U.S. government to drive up the Canadiar dollar so the U.S. would go along with Free Trade. Mr. Stevens said in a 1985 meeting with Malcolm Baldridge, then U.S. com­ merce secretary, he was told the Canadian dollar would have to go up toward 90 cents U.S. from its then 72-cent range if Free Trade was to go ahead. The government, through Finance Mini­ ster Michael Wilson denies there was any deal. Mr. Wilson says Mr. Lewis wasn’t at the negotiations (he resigned in 1986) and he was. For her part NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin said she wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a secret deal to increase the value of the Canadian dollar because it would go along with the pattern of secrecy of this government over things like the Meech Lake deal. The government’s defence against the Lewis charge would be much more believable if its actions on interest rates weren’t so inexplicable. Mr. Wilson and John Crowe, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, have insisted the number one threat to the country has been inflation and they have been determined to beat inflation to the ground. Mr. Wilson refused to admit the country might be in a recession even when every other breathing body in the country already knew we were. Even with the statistics firmly in hand, even when Mr. Wilson now finally uses the dreaded “R” word, interest rates are still considerably higher than in the U.S. We are in a situation entirely different than we have seen before. We have a made-in-Canada recession, a recession we didn’t import from south of the border where the economy, though showing signs of weakness, has not gone into a tailspin like ours. Could we have expected anything else? We threw open our borders allowing American plants to flood our markets and making it attractive for our plants to move to a place in the U.S. where they have cheaper fuel, low minimum wage laws and lower taxes, then we increased the cost of doing business here by increasing interest rates two per cent over the U.S. rate and drove up the Canadian dollar so it was more expensive to export and less expens­ ive to import. Canadians voted the government and its Free Trade agreement in because they had been frightened into thinking their jobs and their standard of living was in danger if they didn’t accept Free Trade. So now they have Free Trade and their jobs and standard of living are suffering. They believed that people with business experi­ ence like Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Wilson knew more about things like Free Trade and running a government than the Liberals or NDP. Can anybody really think Mr. Wilson knows more about running a country now despite all his Bay Street experience? This country is suffering. People are losing businesses and farms and jobs but he keeps on with the same old refrain about having to have high interest rates to beat inflation. He continues in the same smug attitude that says the rest of us are a bunch of children and only he knews enough to know what is best for us. How much longer can Canadians con­ tinue to suffer high interest rates? If Mr. Wilson’s preoccupation with defeating inflation continues, we’ll continue with high interest rates because his GST will drive up inflation. Whether or not Mr. Lewis’ claim of a secret deal is accurate, this may be the best government the U.S. has ever had.