HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1998-04-29, Page 5International Scene
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THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 1998. PAGE 5.
Road conditions: icy
Driving in winter is no great thrill for most
Canadians. It's hard enough to dodge traffic
jams and nutcake drivers in good weather.
When you have to fret about black ice and
whiteouts, a lot of us would like to hang up
the car keys until say, late April.
That's not the way it is in Yellowknife. A
lot of drivers up in the capital city of the
North West Territories can't wait for the real
cold weather.
Professional drivers, I'm talking about.
Long-distance truckers and heavy-load
haulers.
The dead of winter is their busiest season.
That's when, in a silence usually broken only
by the croak of ravens and the howling of
wolves, you hear the growl of 18-wheelers —
whole convoys of them — snaking out across
the land.
Well, across the water, actually. They are
taking advantage of ice roads to deliver
thousands of tons of cargo deep into the
Canadian hinterland.
The ice roads only last for about three
months. The ice isn't thick enough before
Christmas and it's too risky by early April.
So the truckers get just 11 or 12 weeks to
scoot their cargoes from Yellowknife into
remote 'fly-in' mines and camps.
Once the ice roads melt, all supplies have
to come in by float plane and that's
horrendously expensive.
Ice roads don't just 'happen'. A crew of
workers goes out as soon as the ice is thick
enough to plough snow off the lakes along
which the ice roads are slated to run. This
allows the exposed ice to thicken up.
The work crews also smooth off the
'portages' — the land between lakes — by
covering them with a mixture of snow and
gravel. Just add water and the goop sets like
concrete — sturdy enough to support trucks
Exchange rate
fallacies
The early weeks of 1998 have seen the
drop in the value of the Canadian dollar, in
terms of its American counterpart, to about
the 68 cent level and, judging from some of
the things that I have heard in the news
media, one would get the impression that this
was a tragedy of Titanic-like proportions.
Each day that the dollar dropped, the news
was greeted with something approaching
hushed tones, as if there were a death in the
family.
I'm not sure why this is so. I would like to
say right at the beginning that much of the
doom and gloom is misplaced.
When you have the kind of exchange rate
mechanisms that we currently have, the
dollar, or any other currency for that matter,
is going to fluctuate quite a great deal.
Furthermore, this fluctuation may be
considerably more pronounced with respect
to one currency than to others.
A case in point is the value of the Canadian
dollar compared to the German mark. While
our dollar has certainly dropped quite a bit
against the American dollar, the change in its
value in terms of the German mark is much
less.
If you look at the Japanese yen, there is
hardly any change at all.
If you are a Canadian going to spend some
time in Florida, Arizona or California, you
carrying 45 tons.
Danger? Plenty. It's risky enough to drive
through wilderness where there are exactly
zero towns, houses and gas stations on your
route. When you have to do it in a lumbering
vehicle on a layer of ice that as far as you
know is at least three feet thick ...
You begin to see why many drivers don't
make it through even the short season.
For those who do, the money is good, but
the hours are incredibly long and the stress
never quite goes away. Drivers have to worry
about sudden whiteouts that can descend in a
flash and leave you stranded in the middle of
nowhere for 48 hours or more. They have to
watch for pressure ridges and "caribou
bumps" — the frozen carcasses of dead
caribou that freeze and weld themselves to
the ice so thoroughly that they can snap the
blade on a snowplow — or the axle on an 18-
wheeler.
Drivers also have to watch (and listen) for
cracks in the ice they're driving on. 'Blue'
cracks are okay. If they show white, get the
hell out of there — but slowly! Any trucker
who tries to highball it back to safety is
practically committing suicide. Heavy trucks
create a huge undulating wave in the water
under the ice. If a truck comes to shore too
fast, the underwater wave it's pushing
rebounds from the shore with enough force
to explode the ice between the truck and dry
land.
And down you go.
Despite precautions, trucks go through the
ice with some regularity. That's why many
drivers refuse to close their doors when
they're on the ice. It's also why the
companies forbid their drivers to wear
seatbelts. When you're in the cab of an 18-
wheeler going through the ice -into deep
black water, every second counts.
Marvin Robinson knows the feeling. He's
the president of RTL Robinson Enterprises
Limited. Each winter his firm builds a
are certainly going to notice a difference, in
that your stay will cost considerably more
than if the dollar were trading at 80 cents
U.S. One way to avoid this situation is to not
go at all, but many Canadians, who like to
get away from the Canadian winter, seem to
take it as a personal affront when the dollar
drops as it did this winter.
However, going to Florida is far more a
privilege than it is a right and Canadians
should not consider it their duty to create
jobs in Florida.
As in many other situations, there are,
therefore, winners and losers. In addition to
the losers indicated above, Canadians will
pay more, in the short term, for their fresh
fruit and vegetables that come from
California or Florida. For that matter• they
will pay more for anything that they buy that
comes from the United States.
However, by judicious budgeting, they
should be able to get over that hump until
such time as the dollar gets back to a higher
level of exchange as regards the American
dollar.
As for the winners, Canadian goods
become cheaper for foreign buyers; our
export industries should benefit from a dollar
in the 68 - 72 cent level. In addition, there
will be a greater tendency for foreign
tourists, especially Americans, to come to
Canada and, judging from what I have been
hearing on my trips to Sarnia, this is exactly
what is happening.
The result, therefore, is a greater number of
jobs than would normally be the case. Add to
network of ice roads that, if they ran in a
straight line, would stretch from Toronto to
Halifax. Marvin wears a suit and tie most
days, but he knows how to get through the
gears of a tractor-trailer.
He knows what it's like to lose one through
the ice, too. Robinson's hands are big and
meaty like a hockey player's and the tips of
his fingers will never be confused with those
of a Bay Street stockbroker. His fingernails
are misshapen and gnarled. That would be
from the time the truck he was driving along
the MacKenzie River started to go down and
Robinson jumped out — right into an open
patch of fast-moving water. Seconds away
from being swept under the ice to his certain
death, Robinson clawed and wriggled like a
madman, somehow managing to break the
rivers grip and haul his body up on the frozen
ice.
Luckily, he had very little feeling left in his
hands, which meant he couldn't feel the pain
caused by the fact that he'd ripped almost all
of his fingernails off.
It's a tough business, but Robinson
is still in it, even though he's gone through
the ice at least a dozen more times.
Why does he do it? Well, it pays well, the
challenge is undeniable, and there's no
question that he's providing an essential
service. Just ask the people in the mines and
camps who cheer like hockey fans when they
see Robinson's 18-wheelers roll over the
horizon.
And it's got to feel good to be at the wheel
of a big semi cruising across a frozen lake
knowing there's not a stop sign or a radar cop
between you and the North Pole.
As I sit in traffic jams on the outskirts of
the city, I think of Marvin and his fellow
truckers up there, tooling along on some of
the smoothest throughways in the entire
country.
Not counting the occasional caribou speed
bump of course.
that the spending by Canadians that decide to
stay home instead of going southward and
you get the impression that the benefits could
well outweigh the negative aspects.
If our dollar is dropping to such low levels,
is there a reason for this? The answer is yes.
Admittedly it is not 100 per cent accurate
but it goes a long way toward explaining the
phenomenon. At the end of the year and the
beginning of the next, American companies
with branches in Canada tend to send their
profits home with the resulting increase in
demand for U.S. dollars. In addition those
mysterious men, called speculators, like to
play around with currencies and, if they think
that the Bank of Canada is unlikely to
support our dollar on international money
markets, they will carry out policies that add
to the downward pressure.
Finally, the money markets themselves are
neurotic at times, just as the stock markets
are, and this results in the dollar hitting levels
for which there is no real justification.
The Canadian economy is in much better
shape than it has been for a number of years.
Unless the question of the future of Quebec
starts to boil over, you should see more
rational behaviour on the part of our
currency.
A Final Thought
Look where you are going because you
will inevitably go where you are looking.
The
Short
of it
By Bonnie Gropp
And the winner is?
So what exactly does it take to be a best
picture?
This question has been insinuating itself
into my mind time and again since I sat and
with much anti-climax watched the envelope
open and Titanic spill out. A big winner at
this year's academy awards, the blockbuster
film about the sinking of the luxury liner in
1912, was still a number one box office draw
after many, many weeks.
Like millions before me, I was drawn to
the theatre. Unlike millions before me, I was
not impressed. Perhaps it was all the hype,
but while this was a perfectly good film, I
was decidely underwhelmed.
I recall as a child seeing an earlier film
about this disaster at sea A Night to
Remember. Produced with limited technical
razzle-dazzle and, if memory services
correctly, in black and white, the people and
scenes affected me greatly. So much so, that
while obviously the tale of this fateful
voyage mesmirizes while it haunts, I wasn't
sure that even my curiousity could surpass
my reluctance to witness this tragedy played
out again.
Yet as I watched this Titanic unreel, I was
surprisedly struck by a sense of the surreal.
Despite the romance, the bravery, and the
bitter irony, Titanic with all its grand special
effects, plays out more like an action movie
than a story about human tragedy. Never at a
loss for tears, I expected this real-life
disaster to break my heart. It did not. So,
while one cannot help but be impressed by
pyro-technics and simulated walls of water, I
wonder if we are forgetting the magic of
subtleties.
Then I saw Good Will Hunting this past
weekend.
An Academy Award winner for Best
Original Screenplay, and for supporting
actor Robin Williams, this is a lovely story
about a young genius with a troubled past
and future.
Lacking any of the big-budget
pretentiousness of a movie like Titanic this
inspiring story made me laugh, cry and more
importantly think. Also, I was very much in
awe that such profound messages as it
carried were penned by two 25-year-old
friends.
They created characters that I cared about
and moments I could relate to. Everything,
including love scenes, was subtle. With the
exception of some rough talk (which fit the
mood, so may have been necessary, though
the jury's still out) I didn't feel that the
director thought I had to be hit over the head
to understand all the emotions in play.
So what makes a best picture is like
everything else not a black and white issue.
Titanic was an example of filmmaking,
while Good Will Hunting was to me, more
an example of story-telling. So while the
former is a winner in that it showed what
Hollywood can do, I guess I'm a little more
impressed by a movie which shows me what
people can do - on both sides of the camera.
Two young men had an idea and a talent that
surpassed possibly even their expectations.
Their story about the strength of friendship,
of people needing and helping each other
will be something I'll be remembering long
after that other ship sails.
Arthur Black