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The Citizen, 1988-03-23, Page 4PAGE 4. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 1988. Editorials One more step Those in centres like Blyth and Brussels and the larger towns in Huron there hasn ’t been a lot of concern over the future of the post office because people somehow felt it was only smaller hamlets like Ethel were in danger because of Canada Post’s franchising plans. The decision last week to franchise the post office in Tillsonburg, a town of more than 10,000, should cause some rethinking of our concerns. Canada Post has sold its building in Tillsonburg for expansion of a shopping mall. The retail operations (selling the stamps, weighing the packages, etc.) will be franchised. The sorting operations will be shifted to larger centres although some sorting may still be done if the post office finds another location in Tillsonburg. However, Tom Dalby, spokesman for Canada Post is quoted as saying, the corporation wants to be­ gin centralizing mail sorting to take advantage of electronic sorting equipment. The closest plant with such equipment is the one on Highbury Ave. in London. The move indicated that the Harvard MBA thinking of Canada Post’s top management has not been altered. The solution to everything for the managers is mechanize and centralize as if they were producing cars instead of operating a mail system that stretches from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland, from small isolated settlements in the Arctic to huge cities like Montreal. Efficiency is to take all the mail to large centres untouched by human hand, sort it by machines in factories few people would care to work in and send it back to where it came from to be delivered. It’s the kind of efficiency that a few months back had mail posted in Toronto and going to Toronto destinations, flown by plane to Winnipeg to be sorted because the Toronto plant was backed up. This mechanization and centralization has been brought on in part by the intransigence of some post office unions but it may be a case of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Ask yourself, if the post office can fumble so badly with its relations with the general public over super mail boxes and franchising or closing rural post offices, how likely are they to have practised normal employee relations? The post office is not a car plant. It’s a decentralized “people” business. What other company serves every one of our 25 million citizens? What other business is represented in every corner of the country? If Canada Post put people first instead of electronic sorting machines or business systems learned in business schools where General Motors and McDonald’s are the great models of success, maybe both the public and Canada Post employees would be better served. Maybe the mail might even be delivered as speedily as it was in the days when it went by train. There's only so much room It’s one of those times of the year when it isn’t a lot of fun working on a weekly newspaper. Every week the staffers of the newspaper must decide who they are going to get mad at them this week. Hard economics comes into play in January, February and March each year. Community groups, schools and hockey teams are all in full swing generating lots of stories. On the other hand many businesses are still in the mid-winter doldrums and many store owners aren’t prepared to advertise. Without advertising there isn’t room for news. There is a basic misunderstanding on the part of many subscribers who feel that the $17 subscription rate pays for the costs ofrunning the paper. It costs nearly $200,000 a year to run TheCitizen. About20percentof that comes from subscriptions and sale of copies on newsstands. The rest of the money comes from classified advertising (about five per cent of revenues) and the large block ads that merchants buy. So to a large extent how much news we can print in the paper depends on how well our local businesses are doing and how aggressive they are in going after new business. Since The Citizen is a community-owned newspaper we often break our own economic rules to try to serve the community better. Last week, for example, we ran a 24 page paper even though there w as only enough advertising to support 20 pages so that we could accommodate as much news as possible. Some still had to be left out. It doesn’t make our staff feel better either when they have to leave out pictures or stories that they have worked on weekends or late into the night to turn out. And so people complain that we left their group’s news out when we put too much hockey in or we left out a hockey story when we had too many meeting reports in. Then there’s the complaint that we have too much Blyth/Brussels news in and not enough Brussels/Blyth news (we’ve noticed that many of the weeks people in Blyth will say we don’t have enough Blyth news and too much Brussels news are the same weeks people in Brussels think we have too much Blyth news and not enough Brussels news. You just can’t win. Please be patient. We’re doing the best we can without having the wisdom of Solomon to decide who should and shouldn’t get in the paper or (even better) without the advertising to support a 32-page paper each week. Anony rpous nasty phone calls don’ t suddenly get us more pages or make the pages out of rubber so they can stretch to fit all the news. Good to the last drip Mabel’s Grill There are people who will tell you that the important decisions in town are made down at the town hall. People in the know, however know that the real debates, the real wisdom reside down at Mabel s Grdl where the greatest minds in the town [if not in the country] gather for morningcoffee break, otherwise known as the Round Table Debating and Fili­ bustering Society. Since not just everyone can partake of these deliberations we will report the activities from time to time. MONDAY: Billie Bean was com­ plaining this morning about the suggestion from the insurance industry that insurance rates are going to go up more than 20 per cent this year. ‘ ‘I may have to buy a bicycle”, he groused. Julia Flint said she thought the whole mess showed it was about time the government took over the insurance business. Ward Black nearly hit the roof on that one. Private enterprise can always do a better job than government, he said. After all they had govern­ mentinsurance in Manitoba and it went up over 20 per cent too. x Yeh, said Tim O’Grady, private enterprise is great. In Manitoba the rates go up and we say it’s because government can’t do things right. In Ontario they go up and we say the insurance compan­ ies have a right to make a decent profit. The one difference is that in Manitoba when the rates went up the government got turfed out. Who do we fire in Ontario? TUESDAY: Ah yes, Julia was sayingthis morning, it’swonderful to see the world still has its priorities straight. She was point­ ing out the picture in the paper about the big diamond found in South African that is said to be worth $40 million. It was only a piece of shiny rock, she pointed out and it wasn’t worth a thing unless somebody was willing to pay the $40 million to hang a stone around somebody’s neck. There had to be something better to do with the money, he said. They could probably buy new houses for hundreds of people in one of the native homelands in South Africa with that money she pointed out. Sure, said Hank Stokes, and you could do something worthwhile like pay the payroll of the Toronto Blue Jays for nearly two years or you could pay George Bell for the next 20 years to grumble how hard used he is. WEDNESDAY: Ward Black said hewasn’tsurprised when he heard John Turner had decided not to run in Toronto in the next election but return to the Vancouver Quadra riding even though many people say he can’t win there. He’s so unpopular he wants to get as far away as possible from people who know him, Ward said. He’d probably runinFiji if they had a constituency there. THURSDAY: Billie Bean was upset when he heard the Ameri­ cans were in Honduras to head off the Nicaraguans, all three million of them whom they fear are going to march right up the Central American Penninsula and invade the U.S. “It’s kind of scary living beside a country that thinks it can solve any problem by flying in the troops,” he said. Ah, Tim told him, you don’t have to worry about the Americans ever sending the troops into Canada. Have you ever noticed, he said, that the Americans only ever invade warm countries? Since they think every bit of bad weather that ever touches the U.S. weather maps comes from Canada, we’re safe. [Published by North Huron Publishing Company Inc.] Serving Brussels, Blyth, Auburn, Belgrave, Ethel, Londesborough, Walton and surrounding townships Published weekly in Brussels, Ontario P.O. Box 152, P.O. Box429, Brussels, Ont. Blyth, Ont. NOG 1 HO N0M1H0 887-9114 523-4792 Subscription price: $17.00; $38.00foreign. Advertising and news deadline: Monday 2p.m. in Brussels; 4p.m. in Blyth Editor and Publisher: Keith Roulston Advertising Manager: Dave Williams. Production and Office Manager: Jill Roulston Second Class Mail Registration No. 6968