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HomeMy WebLinkAboutTimes Advocate, 1995-01-04, Page 4Page 4 Times -Advocate, January 4, 1995 Publisher: Jim Beckett Business Manager: Don Smith Composition Manager: Deb Lord Advertising; Barb Consitt, .Theresa Redrnono News; Adrian Harte, Fred Groves, Heather Vincent, Ross Haugh Production; Alma Ballantyne, Mary McMurray, Barb Robertson Robert Nicol, Brenda Hern, Joyce Weber, Laurel Miner, Marg Flynn Transportation: Al Flynn, Al Hodgert Front Office & Accounting.; Norrna Jones, Elaine Pinder, Ruthanne Negrijn, Anita McDonald, Cassie Dalrymple e.AM 0,4,4The Exeter Times -Advocate is a member of a family of community newspapers providing news, advertising and information leadership tate- taw �,.�°' ♦/ A SO(' • • inion Publications Malt Registration Number 0396 StiBSCRIPTION RATES: _GAMMA Within 40 miles (Ss km.) addlMasd to am retail • carrier addresses $33.00 Om 62.31 O.S.T. Outside 40 adios (115 km.) ow any Istter canter address =33.00 plus $30.00 (total 113.00) + 4.31 Q.S.T. Outside Canada $99.00 plus $6.93 OST (Includes $88.40 postage) Published Each Wednesday Morning at 424 Mail 6t., Exeter, Ontario, NOM 1611 by 1.W. Eedy Publications Ltd. Telephone 14192361331 • Fax: 6192850706 e.e.T. EDITORIALS Chretien's show of strength ost Canadians are no doubt pleased with Prime Minister Jean Chre- tien's tough stance with the natives pro- testing changes to the tax laws. The natives, which had staked out the Revenue Canada offices in Toronto for three weeks, were demanding the gov- ernment change its decision on elimi- nating tax exemptions on the incomes of natives working off the reservation. How could Chretien decide otherwise when many Canadians already com- plain that our governments give native residents far too much leeway already? Duty-free border crossings, casinos springing up on reservations, GST and PST exemptions are all seen as benefits of a privileged class, despite other hard- ships faced by native Canadians. Chretien knows it would be political suicide to give in to the demands of the protesters, who have unwittingly man- aged to make known to all of yet another inequity in the status of natives versus "nor>; -native" Canadians. The exemptions cannot go on forever. Canada, two hundred years from now, cannot still be paying penance for errors made five hundred years before. The time must come to integrate our two (or three?) societies, and the elimination of unfair tax breaks is part and parcel'of that. Native leaders surely recognize that, accounting for the relative lack of vocal support for the 20 protesters holed up in the Revenue Canada building. The Canadian government, and the provinces, devote considerable sums of money addressing native issues and con- cerns. Natives who are able to earn'bet- ter than average incomes outside the res- ervations should be proud to be -able to contribute, in taxes, towards the better- ment of their nation. Shiny new license plates no surprise ews item: Ontario govern- ment introduces photo radar speeding enforcement on Toronto -area' high- ways. News item: Photo radar operators are having trouble•getting clear photos of rear license plates of vehicles. News item: Province proudly1intro- duces new' "reflective license plates for Ontario vehicles. Billed as a safety item for. cars (even though vehicles al- ready have reflectors built in) an added incentive to get the new plates is you can have one personalized with a trilli- um, or logos from the Toronto Raptors, Argonauts, or Blue Jays. Surprisingly enough, many people fell for the ploy, and have gone out of their way to replace older . a es on their ve- hicles with the new s ny ones. Per- haps it gives their older ar a "new" look, maybe they wanted . - rsonalized plates anyway. Whatever i e son, they are bound to show up nicely in a photograph. Photo radar vehicles use flash guns to light the targetted vehicles, even in day- light. The addition of a'reflective sur- face on the license plate is bound to in- crease the visible contrast of those plates by a large factor, much like catching animal eyes in your headlights at night. Still billed as a safety measure to re- duce speeding in the Ministry of Trans- portation's latest release, the photo radar program brought in many, many extra dollars in speeding tickets in its first few months. Traffic on the 401 and other Toronto -area highways has indeed slowed down, particularly as drivers go by those minivans parked on the high- way shoulders. Even the radio stations , are in on the act, including photo radar sightings in their regular traffic reports: • Consequently, photo radar revenues have dropped drastically, so the opera- tors, to keep the machines earning their keep, have lowered the threshold at which the radar is tripped. At 10 km/h over the limit on a clear day with traffic flowing,smoothly, few OPP officers would be concerned enough to write a ticket. There are, however, reports that photo radar is now running at that threshbld. So what "safety" initiatives can we ex- pect from our government in 1995, if photo radar revenues continue to lag? Dropping the 401 speed limit to 80 km/h could be justified in the name of safety. But it all depends. After all, the first provincial party to announce it will abol- ish photo radar if elected is bound to capture a few thousand votes on that is- sue alone. A View From Queen's Park By Eric Dowd Your Views Letters to the editor Paring federal debt -financing by billions More re-employed workers translate into more tax revenues and less -strained social services. Dear Editor: Unbelievably, our senior governments in Canada still use the simple annual cash flow system of ac- counting that can easily distort our true economic situation. For example, all government acquisitions of assets, including land, buildings and equipment, are simply written off fully in the year of purchase. No private business, Targe or small, could afford such sillyness because it inflates costs unrealistical- ly and thus adds to perceived inflation. Our Federal and Provincial Governments, who happen to be our largest businesses, indeed our very own, continue to use this inadequate and misleading system. Today's deficits would be billions of dollars less if accredit- ed capital budgeting replaced the cash flow system. Capital -budgeting has been recommended by the auditor general since 1985 but to no avail. The eco- nomic quagmire grows. With the new system, each government department could be fully scrutinized easily and quickly by auditors and citizens alike. According to W. Krehm in, "A Power Unto Itself- - The Bank of Canada", resistance to such updated bookkeeping "is not unrelated to the fact that it would inhibit governments in their effort to whip up panic over their deficits and undermine their pre- texts for demolishing social programs." If capital budgeting were used already, the deficit would be billions of dollars less too, and social pro- gram cuts would be totally unnecessary. I hope you are listening Mr, Axworthy, because democratic governments have a moral responsibility to separate corporate agendas from citizens' needs. Since capital expenditures are really a list of as- sets to be balanced against a corresponding amount of their debt as a liability, our public balance sheets would improve by billions of dollars yearly. In conclusion, Mr. Chretien's Liberals, by adopt- ing capital budgeting, could immediately spend bil- lions of dollars to create badly needed capital public works without adding any cost to our existing defi- cits. Such programs would have enormous spin-offs like, "Jobs Jobs Jobs" - remember? More re-employed workers translate into more tax revenues and less -strained social services. In severe recessions, governments are always lobbied by the business world to cut deficits, often just when extra spending is the real cure. Note the precedent in 1929 that caused the onset of the depression . It is regrettable that our Treasury borrows still, from the profitable chartered banks at unnecessarily high rates when it is no longer wise nor necessary. Ottawa can re -use her constitutional powers to bor- row from herself, namely the Bank of Canada at cost (1/2 to 1 percent rate). At special times of national crisis, and few can disagree that it's now, we must act, not just re -act. Bold, leadership and historically proven economic schemes can again give Canadian citizens balanced books and hopeful government. It's your lead Mr. Chretien. Yours Truly David Hern, RR I Woodham Premier Bob Rae has hit where it really hurts by saying the news media have no sense of hu- mour. The New Democrat premier, down so low in polis that journalists need a bathysphere to find him, did not explain fully what bothers him. But he must have affronted a whole industry of columnists and editorialists who do their best to inject some light-heartedness into the seriousness of Ontario politics. Rae probably has even smiled at some of their efforts. He would have liked a columnist's observation that 'to call Progressive Conserva- tive leader Mike Harris wooden is to be mean to trees.' Rae must have chortled at another's quip that 'listening to Liberal leader Lyn McLeod speak- ing is like enduring the drone of an air condi- tioner. At first it's annoying and after a while one ceases to hear it.' Rae would have appreciated these both be- cause they hit his opponents rather than him- self and because he fancies himself as a stand up comedian. Rae once confessed in Hamilton, where he has family roots: 'You may think that I'm a son -of -a -something -else, but I'm the son of a Hamiltonian.' Rae after one ex ggerated Harris claim, joked that the Tory 1 'reminds me of the person who sings the national anthem before the hock- ey game and thinks that he single-handedly caused the game to start.' Rae more pertinent to his current concern, also once lamented: 'If I trained my dog to walk onwater and asked the media to come and they watched it, the headline next day would be Bob Rae's Dog Can't Swim'. But Rae and his party may'have been less amused by some recent banter. When the NDP held its last big conference before an election, one newspaper recorded somberly that 'the New Democrats gathered last weekend to view the corpse,' sounding too close to an obituary Bob Rae's dog can't swim for comfort. There was the pithy putdown that ' NDP has had a learner's permit for the pas our years and is still finding it hard to steer the ship of state.' And the jibe that 'Bob Rae gets all the advice he needs every day from his bathroom mirror.' , -- Rae like many others may have failed to de- tect humour in a cartoon in the right-wing To- ronto Sun which depicted his middle-aged at- torney -general, Marion Boyd, discussing preventing sexual assault while a male in the audience scoffs: 'Surely she c 't be speaking from experience.' - MPPs in all parties similarly failed to see any- thing funny in calling a minister so unattrac- tive that no one would rape her and:missing the point that many victims of sex assaults are not phylically attractive. Rae'may not have seen humour in the paper stepping up its campaign against the minister and wittily dubbing her 'Boybrain' and running •-. } another cartoon show' -Rae in storm-trooper helmet and'tpeaking with a German accent. There is not much humour (or truth) in portray- ing Rae as a Nazi. The premier also may not have found much humour or perspective in his newest row with media in which the Toronto Star is indignant because the NDP put out a paper crammed with stories praising Rae's government and with a name, the Ontario Star, and format looking sus- piciously like the Toronto Star. The Toronto Star says it is afraid readers will confuse the NDP publication with its own purer pages, but the Toronto Star has spent a century supportingrvirtually any Liberal intelligent enough to know his own name and no one who ever read the Liberal Star is likely to mistake it for the NDPs propaganda sheet. But the Toronto Star is now on its high horse and says it is consulting its.lawyers -- Rae may be right in saying the media do not have much sense of humour. • 1