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The Citizen, 1987-09-16, Page 4PAGE 4. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1987. The lesson for politicians is be yourself If there’s a lesson to be learned from the stunning results of the Ontario election last week itshouldbethat politicians • should stop trying to be something they are not. Biggest loser in the election was Progressive Conservative leader Larry Grossman who not only saw his party drop to third place in the standings but lost his own seat in the Legislature as well. Abraham Lincoln said thatyou can fool some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Recent elections seem to show the Canadian public is wising up and you can’t even fool all of the people some of the time. Mr. Grossman once again, as so many politicans seemed to dolately.triedtobesomethinghewasnotinthiselection campaign. A Tory who was more “progressive” than “conservative’ ’ he got desperate when the election was called and his standing was low in the polls and he tried to appeal to the rock hard support in his parly trying at least to hold that strength. The problem is the harder he tried to sound conservative, the phonier he sounded. He probably didn’t have to try so hard to hold the core vote because after 40 years in power, it's hard to imagine many Tory supporters ever voting Liberal. By concentrating on the core vote, however, and trying to sound suitably right-wing, Mr. Grossman just ended up sounding stupid even to his best supporters. The Grossman case is similar to the plight of John Turner as leaderofthe Liberal party in Ottawa. Mr. Turner was picked as leader of the Liberals at a time the party thought that moving to the rightwas the key to future victory. It’s not his fault that now, when he expresses his own views on issues, he finds he is totally alienating traditional Liberal supporters. The party is being torn apart by having a right-leaning leader of a party of the centre. In order to try to be concilliatory, Mr. Turner tries to espouse some of the traditional Liberal policies but they sound totally phony coming out of his mouth. The public instinctively picks up in the lack of sincerity in his speaking. Politicians who try topretendthey stand for things they don’t just won’t win support from a public that is deluged daily with political news. Those who keep trying do so at the risk of the kind of disaster Larry Grossman suffered. This party really deans up There was a time, before we became so ecologically conscious, when faded election signs littered the countryside for months after an election. Today that’s not acceptable. Special praise must go to theelection team of Jack Riddell for their rapid cleanup of the Huron County countryside last week. While the vote counting was still going on in Liberal headquarters Thursday night, campaign workers were coming in with armloads of signs. It’s easy for candidates to talk about the importance of cleaning up the environment. It’s more impressive to see such tangible action. Let's talk sense about 'mandates' There is much talk these days about the new Liberal government of David Peterson having a mandate to take its free trade arguments to Ottawa. It would be nice if that was the last time we heard the word mandate used in connection with the sweeping support the Liberals received. Mandate may be one of the most abused words around politics. In connection with free trade the use may have more relevancy this time than normal because Mr. Peterson did make free trade a major part of the campaign but even then, how can we know voters chose to support the Liberals on that particular issue over the hundreds of other reasons they may have made up their minds. The federal government of Brian Mulroney with its equally huge majority has alsobeen known to say it has a mandate to do this or that when really all it had a mandate from the Canadian people to do was to be different than the Liberals who people were tired of after 20 years. Governments are given a mandate only to govern. Just because they get large majorities doesn ’ t mean the people have given their blessing to all their proposals. BY RAYMOND CANON It is always interesting to see what happens to people after they win a huge prize in one of the many lotteries which are currently on the go in this province. Some of them handle their newly acquired riches very well; others make a complete hash of it while still others muddle through. In this connection it is just as interesting to see what the OPEC countries did when they found themselves with more money on their hands than they ever imagined possible. All this instant wealth took placebackin the middle 1970’s. As a result the world started to beat a path to the doors of the OPEC countries, trying to get them to spend their immense wealth on any number of projects. I must confess to having been part of this cavalcade; in 1975 I took a trip to the Middle East to represent a number of Canadian companies who knew very little about the mechanisms of international trade but were honest enough to admit it. I am still involved in that part of the world; what it has done, however, is give me an even better insight into what makes the Arab nations tick. Like the individuals to which I referred above some have been less successful than others. There are a few that have become economic basket cases due to the fact that they forgot one very important economic law which can be phrased in a very simple way: what goes up must come down. Just about everybody in the OPEC world jumped to the conclusion that the price of oil would continue to climb. For this reason not only could the OPEC nations commence any number of grandiose projects but they could keep on doing so ad infinitum. Any idiot could see that the western world would continue to have an insatiable demandfor oil and since OPEC was supplying at the time about two-thirds of all the petroleum produced, wealth in OPEC terms was here to stay. Some countries literally could not spend all their money at the time. A case in point is Saudi Arabia which has long appeared to be one of the more sensible Arab nations when it came to handling its money. At the beginning of the decade it was earning about $150 billion a year in oil revenues and had been relatively frugal in how it spent it. Needless to say its bank balances were climbing to astro­ nomical levels and, like the cricket in Aesop’s fab les, they (Saudis) started giving little thought for the morrow. Inordertohelpitspeople.the Saudi government, or should I say the royal family, started to build all sorts of hospitals and schools. They not only cost a small fortune but, what is even worse, the Saudis have found that they cannot find the personnel to staff them al­ though they are looking all over the world. In retrospect it might have been more advisable to go a bit Continued on page 24 [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. 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