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The Citizen, 1991-11-06, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6,1991. PAGE 5. Looking ahead to the millenium Well, the end of the century is less than a decade off, and you can bet your Bartlett's Quotations that the editors of Maclean's, Time and Newsweek will soon start pumping out special "commemorative'' issues, summing up the highs and lows of the past 100 years of human achievement. They'll talk of Bell's telephone and Edison's lightbulb. They will remind us of Gandhi's grace and Hitler's infamy. The editors will quibble over the most famous phrase of the 20th century. Some will say it was Churchill's "blood, sweat and tears". Others will vote for Neil Armstrong's "one small step for man ..." One or two might give the nod to McLuhan's "the medium is the message." Not me. My vote for the most significant phrase of the 20th century goes to a children's poster that appeared back in the 1960's. It was a simple question scrawled naively in black poster paint on a piece of green construction paper. It asked: What If We Gave a War and Nobody Came? The poster didn't get a lot of national IH International Scene By Raymond Canon International firms now in vogue BY RAYMOND CANON In case you haven't noticed it yet, most of the large companies whose products you buy or see on store shelves are international to a great degree. This also includes many well- known Canadian businesses such as Northern Telecom, Bombardier, McCain's, to name a few. There are several reasons for this. One of the main causes of such expansion is due to the saturation of the local market. It goes without saying that Northern Telecom has not much room left to expand in Canada and the only place it can do so is on an international market. One of the largest of these markets is, of course, right next door to us and thus it has come to pass that Northern Telecom has several large manufacturing facilities south of the border. Not being content with that, it has expanded elsewhere in the world and at the present time is one of the telecommunication leaders on our planet. Any one of its marketing people will tell you that it is a very competitive business out there but it had to be tackled if the company was to survive in any healthy condition. There are several ways that a Canadian company can expand on an international market. One is to set up totally new production facilities which is what Northern Telecom has done. Another is to buy up a foreign company and use it to expand production in the country in question. Yet another is to licence a foreign company to produce your product and sell it in a specific area. One notable Canadian example is Bombardier. Il not only makes its line of aircraft under the Canadian label but it has recently bought our Lear Jet in the United States and uses this facility to sub-contract work from its Canadian plants and to attention in the sixties. I saw it reproduced on T-shirts at folk festivals once in a while, but that was about it. The slogan disappeared, but not the sensibility. The notion that wars are something that each of us can choose not to fight, sank beneath the human consciousness like one of those delayed reaction depth charges destroyers drop on submarines. If you've been listening closely over the past few years you might have heard the detonations. There was a loud one in the courtyard of Malacanang Palace in The Philippines a few years back when Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos tried to crush the popular movement that eventually drove them from the country. It all came down to one moment when the Philippine army, its tanks and soldiers massed and menacing, was ordered to fire on the demonstrators in front of the palace. The troops refused, and the Marcos dynasty shuddered and died in that instant. Who can forget the Chinese student, white shirted, standing calmly in front of — and stopping — a line of government tanks in Tienanmen Square? It happened in Romania when the disgustingly corrupt Ceausescu regime ordered the troops to massacre protestors. Once more, the troops refused. continue to produce the Lear jets which are well known in their own right. It does exactly the same thing with its Short Bros, facility in Britain; it goes without saying that Bombardier is a much bigger company than it could ever have hoped to be by staying at home, even if it continued to produce snowmobiles and the like. Many times when you go shopping and buy a specific product you have no idea who owns the company that produces that product. I would imagine that very few French are aware of the fact that about half of all the french fries made in their country are produced by local companies owned by McCain's of New Brunswick. The fact remains, however, that his famous Canadian company has expanded far beyond the small town of Florenceville, N.B. where the head office is located. The whole concept of foreign production was given a sharp jolt by the famous Auto­ pact of 1965 which permitted cars to be produced anywhere in the United States and Canada to be sold anywhere else in the same area. Thus you may be driving a car that was produced somewhere in the United States a good distance more removed. All in all this has been extremely beneficial to both economies and I doubt that there are many people that would want to do away with it. Letter to the editor policy Letters to the editor must be signed and the name must also be clearly printed and the telephone number and address included. While letters may be printed under a pseudonym, we rriust be able to verify the identity of the writer. Iq addition, although the identity of the writer may be withheld in print, it may be revealed to parties directly involved on personal appearance at The Citizen's offices. And it's just been revealed that, but for a handful of soldiers, the recent attempted Soviet coup d'etat would have been a bloodbath. One of the coup leaders, chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, ordered a KGB anti-terrorist unit to storm the Russian parliament building and capture President Boris Yeltsin. The troops refused. “We couldn't fight against our own people” said a KGB officer, “and this our former chairman didn’t take into consideration.” All these moments show great bravery on the part of unarmed protestors, but that's not the point. We've always had handfuls of brave people ready to die for their beliefs. What's revolutionary is that each incident features soldiers thinking for themselves. What a frightening prospect for the military mind. If I had my way, I’d flood the world with T-shirts with the slogan “What if we gave a War and Nobody Came?” emblazoned on the front. And on the back of the shirt I'd print a photo from one of the Gulf War videos that U.S. military censors refuse to release. It shows Iraqi soldiers being sliced in half by helicopter cannon fire. A senior Pentagon official explained the censorship, saying “if we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.” Gosh, we couldn't have that, could we? In the car industry the Japanese are a classic example of what I have outlined above. While they prefer to establish their own manufacturing plants in Canada, they are not above making other deals as well. The prime example of this is the Cami plant at Ingersoll; the cars produced there are a combination of Suzuki and General Motors. The fact that North American auto manufacturers hold shares in Japanese companies only contributes to this cross­ breeding. While there are certainly poor corporate citizens in the international field, the fact remains that firms in this category do play a positive role in our standard of living not to mention that of other countries. One thing that you will note is that many of these firms have ceased to show any one nationality; they prefer to be considered as a global enterprise. Almost without exception when I come across advertisements by those companies with Canadian origins, there will be no indication of this in the ad. Their products are being offered to a clientele by an international company and that is the way business is done. Given the fact that money now flows around the industrial world without any barriers, it is not surprising that so many large enterprises want to do business that day. Letter from the Editor By Keith Roulston First you have to admit there's a problem When somebody has a problem with alcohol, they say the first step in recovery is for the person to admit they have a problem. Listening to people around Huron county in the past few weeks, I've come to the conclusion the same could be said about environmental problems. If you could get people in a room alone and asked them if all this concern for the environment was real or just a figment of somebody's imagination, I'd bet a lot of Huron county residents, maybe a majority, would say it's all a lot of media hype. Many people, for instance, don't see what all the fuss is about choosing a site for the Huron county landfill. Quite aside from whether or not the six candidate sites are safe in themselves, some people argue that a site in the centre of the county should just be picked and the garbage trucker there to save trucking costs. Tell these people that there may be no safe soils there and they may look at you like you're some kind of environmental nut. Ground is ground. Garbage is garbage. Deep down I suspect many of the county councillors who are reluctantly paying the bills for the county Waste Management Masterplan don't believe in it but are only doing it because the province insists. Many, I'm sure, would be quite happy to put a match to most garbage. To them, garbage that goes up in smoke is garbage that's gone. You can’t convince them that the smoke has to come down somewhere and that wherever that is, there may be problems from the chemicals that are in the sediment. You can't convince them that there really is something to the greenhouse theory. You can't convince many people that burning their leaves is a problem, for neighbours with breathing problems and for the environment in general. You can't convince some farmers that the chemicals they use routinely are dangerous to themselves and their environment. You can't convince people that keeping swamps and wetlands may pay off in the long run. The kind of society many people say we need, is the society of our grandparents: a society where everybody used and reused and very little was actually left to be burned or buried. That society, however, reused and recycled out of necessity, not out of moral purpose. The pioneer, the people who lived through the Depression, reused because they didn’t have money to buy new things. Flour bags became clothes, worn-out clothes became rags which became rugs, because people had little choice. They were short of cash. What we're asking of today's society is more complicated. We want people to do things from a sense of moral responsibility, not because they have to. People don't like to be told what they have to do. So despite the fact we're bombarded with information about the problem of loo much packaging, most of us are still gravitating toward the fancy package rather than the environmentally-sound, minimally- packaged goods. The most recent trend in toothpaste has been the "pump" container, using far more plastic than the old tube (and probably wasting more toothpaste as well). If we really cared, we'd be buying as much of our groceries in bulk as possible. One of the great environmental victories in recent years has been how the public has jumped on the bandwagon of recycling, often leading the politicians. I wonder, though, if this might be just one more trendy issue and that, unless there is something for people to gain, if recycling may lose it's momentum. Sadly, many people won't be ready to admit there are environmental problems until we do suffer the greenhouse effect or the ozone layer's thinning brings on an epidemic of skin cancer or our groundwater is contaminated with chemicals leaching out of dumps. By the time these people realize there is a problem, it will be loo late to do anything about it.