The Citizen, 1988-03-16, Page 4PAGE 4. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 1988.
In praise of dialogue
Blyth’s recreation agreement is finally approved (at least
verbally) after a meeting of the five municipalities supporting
the Blyth and District Community Centre Monday night that
once again proves the value of face-to-face dialogue.
The councils had met once before five months ago to try to
iron out problems with the agreement and when the meeting
was over, problems seemed to have been smoothed out. But
when the individual councils got together in their own meetings
there were second thoughts. Second thoughts led to letters,
letters led to sometimes harsh words, harsh words could have
led to hard feelings.
But when the councillors all sat around a table Monday night
and shared discussion and shared the facts and were faced with
having to either support the agreement or watch it go down the
drain, common sense prevailed.
Meanwhile a lack of dialogue has caused problems in another
area as Brussels and Morris councillors are each unhappy with
the other over the Brussels, Morris and Grey Recreation
Agreement. Morris reeve Doug Fraser says he plans to seek a
meeting with Brussels to thrash out the problems. It’s a good
move.
Areas like recreation are toosmall to cause the problems they
do between municipalities. Reeve Fraser, in talking about the
$22,000 surplus his municipality rang up last year, pointed out
that one bad month of winter storms would have wiped it out.
Compared to that, the few thousand dollars it costs
municipalities to support recreation looks pretty small.
If a community is faced with doing without its arena we can
soon see how important people regard it. Blyth and Brussels
quickly raised hundreds of thousands to rebuild their arenas a
decade ago. Belgrave residents dug deep to put a new roof on
their arena a year or so ago. Arenas are obviously very
important to people in the community.
Isn’t it silly then to let a thousand dollars here or there stand
in the way of two municipalities getting along on recreation.
That amount would barely pay for two councillors to go to a
convention like the Good Roads convention.
Yes, councillors must protect the interests of their taxpayers
but quarrelling over small amounts is foolish when sitting down
for a talk for a couple of hours could solve the problem.
Wrong knows no race
External Affairs Minister Joe Clark got himself and his
government in fiot water with many Canadian Jewish leaders
last week when he strongly criticized Israeli government tactics
to try to quell riots in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip
areas of the middle east.
It was ironic that the Jewish protests about Canadian
government policies toward Israel and the occupied territories
occurred in the same week at the 50th anniversary of the Nazi
takeover of Austria was marked, an event observed with
sadness by Jewish groups around the world because of the
horrors it brought when the Holacaust came to Austria.
Canadian Jewish leaders feel Mr. Clark isn’t being fair.
Israel, one said, is fighting for its life with people who want to
kill the state. That might have more weight if Israel was fighting
within the boundaries of its own country and not in territory
occupied because of its last war. It might have more weight if
Israel showed any interest in reaching a settlement with its
Palestinian neighbours, but there seems little indication of
that. Instead Israel seems intent on building more and more
settlements in the occupied territories and driving out more and
more Palestinians.
Very few Canadians don’t support Israel’s right to exist but
our friendship can’t mean a blanket support for all its activities.
Israel’s activities towards the Palestinians in the occupied
territories are as wrong as the actions of others over the years
have been toward Jews. Mr. Clark should feel no need to
apologize.
Will the winners win?
Everyone realized that if Huron County politicians supported
the idea of county tax reform as they did at the March meeting of
county council, there would be winners and losers. We know
some people who were in losing municipalities will pay more
taxes. What we don’t know is if people in winning
municipalities will save money.
Exeter Mayor Bruce Shaw was quoted last week as saying
that the tax reform will save the average homeowner in his town
$200 but he was hesitant to predict taxes would actually go
down. He would prefer, he said, to put the estimated $200,000 a
year savings into a reserve fund and ‘ ‘ hold the line on taxes for
five or six years.”
There may be some sense in that because it would allow
Exeter residents down the line to save even if they don’t save
now. But there may also be the temptation for some councils to
increase their spending since they know they can spend more
money without an actual increase showing on the tax bill. If that
is the case, tax reform in Huron would go from being a win/lose
situation to being a lose/lose situation.
Let’s hope councillors who were sensible enough to vote for a
fair tax system over individual gains or losses will be sensible
enough not to try to pull the wool over taxpayer’s eyes. Lefs
hope they will pass the savings along to the people who deserve
it: the individual taxpayer.
w
Spring breakup
The International
Scene
Those foreign
Germans
BY RAYMOND CANON
When I was going to school in
Germany, some of the students in
my classes were what we called
“Volksdeutschen”. This was used
to refer mainly to those people of
German origin who lived in that
part of Czechoslovakia called the
Sudetenland and which Hitler used
as an excuse to cut up that
unfortunate central European
country. However, it could also be
used to describe any person of
German origin, and there were
considerable, who lived in many of
the eastern European countries.
It is interesting to note that 43
years after the end of World War II
these ethnic Germans are still
showing up and are being allowed
toreturn to the ancestral home
land. Perhaps as a result of Mr.
Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, no
less than 12,500 of them have been
allowed to leave the Soviet Union in
the last year; in the previous year
only 753 were allowed out.
These people are the descen
dants of those who were invited to
settle in Russia during the reign of
Catherine the Great; over the years
they developed a number of
prosperous communities, espe
cially in the region of the Volga
River. In 1920 the Volga Germans
evenhadtheir own autonomous
community and it has been sugges
ted that Lenin himself had a soft
spot in his heart for these Germans
- his own mother came of Russian
German stock.
If this soft spot was there, it
disappeared in Stalin’s. The Red
Army moved close to a million of
them far away from the war front
and many of them ended up in
labour camps. When the same
army finally got around to invading
Nazi Germany in 1945, they came
across another 200,000 of them and
promptly shipped them back to
Russia as “traitors to the socialist
homeland.’’
Even after Stalin’s death, things
did notgetbetter. The government
under Krushchev shipped any that
it could find off to join the others in
Soviet Central Asia and they were
forbidden to even try to return to
Germany. Today there are more
than 2 million of them living in
Kazakhstan and over half of them
still claim German as their native
tongue.
With Mr. Gorbachev things
have changed and there are
calcu lated to be as many as 300,000
who would like to get out of their
present habitat and return to West
Germany. However, while all that
Continued on page 17
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