The Citizen, 1991-03-27, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 27, 1991. PAGE 5.
Why smokers
don't say much
If my father were alive, the second or
third thing I’d say to him is "Guess what,
Pop -- cigarettes are selling for more than
five dollars a pack.”
And he’d look at me and tap his ash and
snort “Still the comedian, eh?”
He'd never believe it, but it’s true.
Michael Wilson’s latest fiscal thumbscrew
has boosted the cost of 25 coffin nails well
over the five-dollar mark. In most pro
vinces. nicotine addicts are now (pardon
the pun) coughing up $40.93 for a carton of
smokes -- from which our governments,
federal and provincial, cream off a tidy
$31.53.
Like any other drug pusher, they won’t
interfere with our right to kill ourselves, as
long as they get their cut.
My old man would never believe it. Back
when he was smoking he only had to shell
out 32 cents for a pack of Sportsmans.
Some Christmases I’d splurge and buy him
a ‘flat fifty’ - a nifty tin box of gaspers that
cost me half my weekly allowance -- all of
The International
Scene
<Stitzoiaid-700 years
of democracy
BY RAYMOND CANON
I know that most of the news this year
has been concentrated on war in the
Middle East, the collapse of the Soviet
Union, economic recession at home, the
hated GST; in fact, it is almost as if the four
horsemen of the Apocalypse were making
nightly rides.
Our country may be falling apart, free
trade may be the cause of everything that
ails our industries, Margaret Thatcher may
no longer be around to bash hell out of any
upstarts, misfits or foreign finance mini
sters but in all this doom and gloom stands
o^e bright ray of light. This is the year that
Switzerland is celebrating the 700th year of
its creation. If you don’t think that is
important, it is just further proof that you
have descended from a family whose main
characteristic is its troglodytic intellect.
Now that I have sufficiently chastized
you, you are permitted to ask just what
1291 is all about. After all, you may have
had the vague impression that this date is
close to the death of Kubla Khan or that
the Babylonian Captivity was about to
begin. What did the Swiss do that was so
important?
At this point 1 hope I have your complete
attention. It was on August 1 in 1291 that
the citizens of the three communities of
Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden signed the
Eternal Pact and declared that they wanted
nothing more to do with the hated
Hapsburgs of Austria. Furthermore, they
all vowed to come to the aid of each other
should their rights, real or imaginary, be
violated.
Believe me this took some courage! It
was tantamount to Canada telling the
United States to get lost: it was going to
close its borders and sell its goods
elsewhere. Naturally the Americans would
not take this lying down and neither did
the Austrians. Three times within the next
100 years they attempted to bring the
upstairs to heel and three times. 1315, 1386
and 1388. they lost. It helped that during
that time the three communities, or
cantons as they are called, had been joined,
by five more: three of them. Zurich. Berne
and Luzern, are quite well known while
Zug and Glarus are not.
As is sometimes the case, when the
enemy from outside was subdued, the
enemy from within emerged and the
cantons fought among themselves over
Arthur Black
\
half a buck.
Of course there are a lot of things about
smoking in the '90s, that my Dad would
find incredible. 1 can just see him looking
up at an Air Canada stewardess and saying
"Whaddya mean I can't smoke? This is an
airplane isn’t it? Well, where’s the
smoking section? Whaddya mean there’s
no smoking section?”
Back in his day, folks smoked wherever
they felt like it -- restaurants, buses, other
people’s living rooms, barber shops ...
I was in the barber’s chair the other day
when a customer in the waiting room lit up
a cigarette. The barber left off trimming
my ear hairs, went over and murmured
apologetically to the guy. The guy stubbed
it out. I said "What’s the matter, Tony?
You don’t like smoke?” "No” said Tony,
"1 don’t like fines. Police dropped by the
other day and told me I could be fined
$5,000 if I .let people smoke in here.”
It turns out that Tony has two options: he
can pay 20 or 30 grand to add a smoking
room with separate ventilation to the
outside, or he can become an unpaid
member of the volunteer Tobacco Police
and make sure nobody -- including Tony
himself -- smokes on his premises.
The Stamp Out Smoking movement is
not just a Canadian phenomenon. Thanks
to a very tough and militantly anti-nicotine
Surgeon-General, most American states
have similar restrictions. A 220 pound pal
of mine with a penchant for smoking big
smelly cigars was recently accosted in the
who should do and have what. At times it
seemed that only a saint could resolve the
differences but fortunately such a saint
appeared. No, it was not William Tell but
Nicholas of Flue who was able to calm the
tempers and get the cantons headed in the
right direction. For his efforts, he was later
canonized. (A nice touch; I like it when
they canonize people).
I could go on but by now I think that you
get the point. The Swiss were on their way
and, although they may have glanced back
now and again, there was no retrograde
motion.
Now for the question you have all been
anxious to ask. Who was William Tell and
what role did he play? First of all, I am
tired of music teachers in our school
system who let students hear Rossini’s
William Tell overture without telling them
the gripping story of this great hero. The
story, which some of you may know,
involves that horrible Hapsburg, Gessler,
and his efforts to bring the embryonic
Swiss to heel. A big stumbling block in
these efforts was the above mentioned
Reader wants chance to tender
THE EDITOR,
In regards to your article titled "Blyth
Office Renovation Generates Heat” from
March 20/91's paper:
Maybe "preparing specifications for
tender is too expensive” quoted from
Reeve Albert Wasson but, perhaps had the
renovations been put up for tender the
savings to the town would have more than
compensated these costs. Also as part of
this tender the desired results could have
been explained and each contractor could
have included advice as to the best way to
accomplish the goal costing town taxpayers
$1.00 for the actual advice.
I wonder if the town employees and
councillors could have picked a more
expensive trim for the office. In most
places of employment, the employees are
too busy during those eight hours a day,
five days a week of work to notice the kind
of trim, and I’m sure it would be
considered sensible to spend taxpayers’
dollars on a less expensive trim.
Maybe this type of planning bv Blyth
Councillors and staffing accounts for such
middle of New York city by a 90-pound
suburban housewife who screeched that he
was "polluting her air space.”
He says he might have been a lot more
sympathetic if they hadn’t been standing at
a traffic light in Times Square surrounded
by belching buses and wheezing taxis.
The "Defense de Fumer” signs are
going up overseas as well. You know the
old stereotype of the Parisian
"boulvardier”, sitting at a cafe with a
glass of wine in his hand and a smoulder
ing Gauloise hanging off his lip? Well, you
can scratch the Gauloise. Earlier this year
the French parliament passed a law
prohibiting smoking in all public places,
including schools and public transport,
except for designated areas. It also banned
all tobacco advertising in the country.
Smokers aren’t happy about the frontal
assault on their cherished addiction, but
their protests don’t amount to much more
than a few feeble emphysematic gasps.
After all, you’d have to have the I.Q. of a
cigarette holder to argue that smoking is a
good thing. Lung cancer, liver cancer,
heart disease, fetal damage ... the facts are
in, folks. If somebody invented smoking
tomorrow, we’d throw him in jail with
Manuel Noriega and all the other drug
dealers.
That’s why smokers don’t say much.
But boy, if my old man was around he’d
have plenty to say. He smoked two packs a
day for as long as I can remember.
Right up until the heart attack.
Tell, who was known among other things
as a great archer. Gessler, in order to put
Tell in his place, ordered that an apple be
placed on the head of Tell’s son and the
father was to shoot it off. That he did but
he informed Gessler that, had he missed,
the next arrow would have been for him.
It was probably predictable that sooner
or later somebody would get around to
discrediting the- story of William Tell but
he was saved from national disgrace and
the Swiss version of tarring and feathering
by the fact that his version was so dull and
unreadable that few people were aware of
what he had written.
I will not bore you with the details of
further research into all of the above. It
makes a good story as is. Any country that
can hang together for 700 years deserves at
least one good legend and I think that of
William Tell is as good as any we are likely
to get. Needless to say I will be back in
Switzerland sometime this summer to take
part in celebrations. I would, however, feel
remiss in my duty if I failed to set the
record straight before I leave.
high taxes in a small community.
As a taxpayer of Blyth, having a wife and
two children to support, being a contractor
who has already built three new homes
bringing two new taxpaying families into
this community, I feel I have the capabili
ties and a right to be given the opportunity
to at least tender towards these local,
publicallv, paid for jobs.
RONALD RITCHIE
DOREEN RITCHIE
BLYTH
Property taxes too
high, reader says
THE EDITOR,
I have a concern I would like to discuss
with my fellow readers. It is about the
property tax in McKillop and Hullett (the
townships in which I have first-hand
knowledge. ,
For the last four years, the property tax
has been steadily rising -- to the point of
being ridiculous. I have enough trouble
Continued on'Page 6
Letter
from the
editor
Many still believe
bi the dream
BY KEITH ROULSTON
It was interesting last week that the
same day the Ontario Legislature’s com
mittee studying Canada’s future released a
report saying there must be radical
changes to save the country, former Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau was speaking at a
convocation at the University of Toronto.
The two visions of Canada were on view on
the same day.
The notion that there must be huge
changes to the country is more in vogue
among political leaders today than the
vision of a strong central government put
forward by Mr. Trudeau and Mike Pearson
and John Diefenbaker before him. Still it’s
interesting to see that public opinion polls
still support the Trudeau vision and in a
recent opinion poll he was named the most
popular of Canada’s prime ministers, far
ahead of Brian Mulroney, even in Quebec
where, to listen to the intellectuals, his
vision of a bilingual country has been
rejected.
Given the various demands coming from
Quebec political leaders these days it does
seem that Mr. Trudeau’s vision of a
Canada where, French or English, you
could feel at home wherever you travelled,
seems dead. There have always been two
competing views of Quebec’s role within
the province and the current view of the
nationalists that Quebec must be sovereign
gained ascendancy once Mr. Trudeau left
the political scene in Quebec.
One could call it a realistic view. It is a
view held equally by some in the rest of
Canada: that French and English can never
live peaceably beside each other in one
country and must be kept as far away from
each as possible. They have held that Mr.
Trudeau’s vision was never realistic: that it
was an idealistic dream doomed to failure.
But was it the dream that failed or the
people of this country. It was, it is, a
magnificent dream, a dream that if
Canadians could make it work, would be an
example to the rest of the world of how to
live in peace. It was a dream of tolerance
and co-operation. It was a dream for those
who dared to think big.
It was a dream that French speaking
people from Quebec could feel that the
Rocky Mountains belonged as much to
them as to Albertans; a dream that
Quebecers didn’t have to huddle behind
artificial borders in their province, but
could venture out and travel or take jobs
anywhere in Canada and have services in
their own language. It was a dream that
eventually people would be Canadians
first, not French-Canadian or English-
Canadian or Quebecer or Albertan.
Many of us believed in that dream,
believed that Canadians, of all the people
in the world, could pull off this kind of
challenge. You had parents flocking to
enroll their kids in French immersion
programs, even in the Prairies. You had
exchanges of school students. You had the
majority of people welcoming bilingualism.
But along the way the "think-small”
people managed to fight their way to the
top. In Ontario we had the English-only
resolutions by various municipalities and
the infamous flag-stomping incident in
Brockville. In Quebec you had the nation
alists put enough pressure on, that Premier
Robert Bourassa overrode the Supreme
Court when it said Quebec’s insistence that
all signs on stores in the province be only in
French, was unconstitutional.
For the dreamers in the rest of the
country this was a terrible blow. They saw
that the bilingualism they had worked so
hard to support over nearly 20 years didn’t
seem to be what Quebecers wanted at all.
Quebecers saw the image of that trampled
flag over and over again and when the
Meech Lake constitutional package died,
they ascribed the attitudes of that handful
of fanatics to the majority of English
Canadians.
Since then there has been a hardening of
attitudes in Ouebec and the differences
Continued on Page 6