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The Citizen, 1990-11-21, Page 5Arthur Black Exploring the world beyond the CN Tower I had occasion to visit Morden, Manitoba last week. As lead sentences go, that one couldn’t be counted on to bulge eyeballs, cause constrictions of the gullet or cause, say, the Prime Minister to choke on his morning croissant and gasp “Good God, Mila! Wouldja look at this!” Morden is Morden. It is not Meccas or Memphis or Moscow or even Minneapolis. Just a small prairie town stuck in the middle of an ocean of wheat and canola about an hour and a half s drive south and west of Winnipeg. It boasts no waterfalls, no mountain ranges, no trophy muskies and no NHL franchise. It’s an unhosan- nahed hard-working burg hard-hit by the R-word that’s battering the bejeepers out of most Canadians and that our Finance Minister has such a tough time pronoun­ cing. The people of Morden go about their daily business wondering when real estae will pick up and the price of grain will get real. They grouse about the hated GST and wonder if there’s any future at all for their kids when they grow up. Time to take a new look at military service BY RAYMOND CANON In Canada we had not had compulsary military service since the end of World War II. When I became a Canadian citizen and decided that a spot of duty in the RCAF would do me some good, it was mainly out of what I had seen in Switzerland where every young male is called up at an early age and is expected to be part of the army or air force for most of his life. It is not that the Swiss feel threatened; it is just part of their total political philosophy to which I shall refer again later in this article. We rely today on a professional army; so do the Americans and the British. How­ ever, many of our NATO allies do not; they still resort to conscription under which males, when they reach a specific age, must go off and do a number of months (say 18) in one of the branches of the armed forces. When they are finished that, they can make a total return to civilian life, that is, unless they decide to make the military their career or unless the nature of their service, i.e. pilot, requires them to spend a considerably longer than 18 months in the service. However, even in spite of Saddam Hussein’s decision to stir the pot in the Middle East, it was becoming increasingly obvious that there was likely to be a general reduction in the number of soldiers any of the NATO countries would have to keep under arms. Among the realizations that the communist system did not work, was the inability under any system to maintain the high cost of military prepar­ edness. If the Russians were to reduce their standing armies, air forces, etc., they could spend more money on redirecting the economy. It might not make the generals too happy but Gorbachev was bent on demonstrating that he, not the Red Army, was running the country. Nowhere is this reduction coming under more discussion than in Germany. Each of the four times I have been in that country during the past four years, I have read a number of reports about what effect this reduction will have on the country. Apart Just like the rest of us. You don’t go to Morden to experience gut-wrenching adventure or to sniff the bracing breeze of high-stakes finance finagling. But you can learn a lot about your country in Morden. A stopover in Morden is especially instructive for a columnist who spends more time than is good for the soul in Toronto. Working in Hogtown, it’s easy to forget about the other 3,851,700 square miles of this country, much of it made up of towns like Morden. “Canada? That’s what you see from the top of the CN Tower on a clear day” a slightly bitter Morden lawyer told me. Two other townsfolk repeated the same brom­ ide. What’s interesting about the percep­ tion is that it shows what people who don’t live in Toronto think of people who do. Torontonians never actually come out and say that their city is the centre of the universe. They just take it for granted. Which is to say they seldom give a passing thought to towns like Morden. I admit it - I’d have been embarrassed if someone had asked me what I knew about Morden before I went there. My answer would have been “Not much”. I could have placed it in Manitoba, but I wouldn’t have known if it was bigger than Nanaimo or more industrial than Saskatoon or prettier than Fredericton. The truth is it’s been a town almost as long as Canada’s been a country. Sieur de La Verendrye passed through there. So did the explorer Alexan­ der Henry. It once was called Fort from the economic effects of the closing of the bases would have on nearby communi­ ties, it also affects the nature of military service. The German generals believe that the current plan of conscription is not efficient if the armed forces drop below the 400,000 mark which is what they are going to do if current plans are carried out. Other NATO countries such as France are running into the same problem which is where the Swiss come into the picture. As I have indicated, military service in Switzerland is not actually conscription but a life-style. Young Swiss boys go into the military at 18 to what are called recruit schools and learn the basics of whatever trade they have been required to learn. Pilots understandably spend considerably longer but the end result of all this initial training is the requirement that, from then on until middle age, everybody gets called up each year for a specific period of time. Given the nature of the training, i.e. large scale manoeuvres, this may be concentrat­ ed in a specific period of the year but nobody is excused unless there are some Letter Help cure diabetes THE EDITOR, Today, over one million Canadians have the disease known as diabetes. Complica­ tions resulting from diabetes - blindness, kidney disease, gangrene, heart and stroke - make this disease the third most common killer of Canadians. How can you help? By your donation to the Canadian Diabetes Association. The dollars you give will support vital research to find a cure and to provide educational assistance to over one million Canadians, Mabel's Grill Continued from page 4 talking about the new statistics that showed we had 392,200 kids bom last year. Hank said he found it hard to believe there were that many kids bom. After all there are so many people who don’t want Pinancewaywinning and came within a hair of being known to the world as Dead Horse Creek. Go back far enough and you would have found Morden under water - water teeming with giant tortoises, aquatic dinosaurs and fish the size of city buses. Centuries later, after the sea dried up the Indians came and lived and died and le|t huge mounds for us to ponder over. I came to Morden to make a speech in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the town’s library service. In the process I met councillors and farmers and artists and scientists and librarians - the human glue that makes a place like Morden live. Morden has an exciting and spectacular story to tell, but you’ll never hear about it on The Journal or read about in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s “National” news­ paper. It’s a pity that our national newsmakers find the Mordens of Canada so unnews­ worthy, preferring to fill our eyes and ear with junk food snippets about feuding film stars, the flatulent maunderings of politi­ cians and the score of the latest Jersey Devils-Buffalo Sabres game. I never was a fan of Mao’s China, but one idea the Chairman had was brilliant. Each fall he ordered the Chinese intelli­ gentsia out in the fields to assist with the harvest. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every fall Toronto’s new editors and TV pro-* ducers were parachuted into Morden to help bring in the crops? Maybe not. Probably take too long to train them. pretty special reasons. Both the Swiss and the Germans retain the obligatory nature of military service because they want to keep in their young people’s minds that there is a certain duty that is owed to society rather than the idea some young people have (both there and here) that the world owes them a living. What is so desirable from the Swiss point of view is that at any given time a general call up will produce an army of 600,000 in only a few days. In Canada we would be lucky to get 100,000 in a few weeks. Not only do the Swiss have the required manpower but it is highly trained and ready to go into action. Over half of the Swiss Air Force pilots are reservists who not only fly so many hours a year but in many cases are pilots for Swissair or one of the country’s other airlines. NATO could do well to imitate the Swiss. As for Canada, much as I would like to see some form of national service with a military option, that will obviously remain a dream. who must control their condition to avoid serious complications. Insulin is NOT a cure for diabetes; it is a priceless aid. Hopefully, the day will come that a cure for diabetes will be discovered. When a canvasser comes to your door, please give financial support. Thank you very much. Kathy Bromley Co-ordinator for Diabetes Campaign, Village of Blyth. as many kids, he said. “It’s television,” Julia Flint said. “Tele­ vision hasn’t been as boring in the last 25 years as it is now so people have to do something with their evenings.” THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1990. PAGE 5. Letter from the editor Saddom made me get to work BY KEITH ROULSTON Saddam Hussein had me out patching up cracks around the windows in the house one pleasant fall day recently. It took either Saddam, or maybe the combined finagling of the oil companies, to get me to do the job I should have done long ago. I suspect I’m fairly typical of Canadians in that I’ve been pretty lazy at improving energy efficiency recently. It wasn’t always so. We moved into our big old brick farmhouse just about the time the energy shocks of the 70’s were sending oil prices soaring. Every heating bill was higher than the one before. With the house that hadn’t exactly had tender loving care in recent years there were plenty of places to watch money blow right out through the walls. We started a program where each year we shaved a little off our oil consumption. Storm windows, caulking around the old windows, weather stripping, insulating between the interior plaster and the exterior brick, and finally turning back the thermostat steadily shrunk the amount of oil we used. I haven’t checked recently but at one time we figured we had cut our oil consumption to 60 per cent of what it was when we first moved into the house. But over the years we’d become a little slack. With the prices just inching up instead of looking like something shot out of a canon, I tended to sit back and relax a bit instead of continuing the battle to cut oil consumption. There was some pointing of bricks that should have been done and every year there were good intentions of insulating the west basement wall and banking it up with earth but somehow winter would set in and the work hadn’t been done. There are old windows that should be replaced because they’ve rotted here or there but there always seemed to be other places the money was needed more urgently. Then Saddam put the urgency back into the whole thing. With oil prices soaring again you start figuring you could pay for some of these improvements in a single winter through fuel savings. 1 would guess I’m pretty typical of the Canadian consumer. All those good con­ servation efforts of the last two decades have been squandered in recent years because we’ve let up. Despite the “green­ ing” of the country, the now concern for the environment, we haven’t been doing a lot in our own lives to improve things. The energy crisis of the last two decades virtually revolutionized the auto industry, for instance. When people turned to fuel efficient cars and North American auto industry was unable to produce the cars, the Japanese were given a toehold in the North American market. When people who drove those small Japanese cars discovered they were more innovative and at least as reliable North American cars, many made the switch permanently. North American automakers scrambled to keep up. But in recent years, sales statistics show, the size of both cars and their engines has been creeping steadily larger, not just with North American cars but Japanese cars as well. We were slipping back into our old habits, much to the concern of environmen­ talists. Saddam changed all that. When you pull into the gas pumps these days and the car that you used to fill up for $20 now takes $30, you start to hink about how a more fuel efficient engine might look good about then. I hate to pay more for gas or fuel oil but I’ve got to admit that if we care about the environment we’re probably better off with those higher prices. We may have the best intentions about reducing car emissions and not adding to the global warming problems but most of us don’t do anything about it until we’re hit over the head, or in the pocketbook.