The Citizen, 1991-05-01, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MAY 1,1991. PAGE 5.
Facts nobody
needs to know
Okay, quick now: Sir John A.
Macdonald. Sir John ... A.... Macdonald?
What's the "A" stand for?
No good? Alright. Name the Fenian
assassin who greased D'Arcy McGee back in
1868.
Still batting zero? Try this: give me die
date of the Battle of Queenston Heights.
How ya doing so far? Complete
strikeout? Well, don't feel bad as you settle
your pointy little head into that dunce cap
with the big maple leaf on the front of it.
You've got a lot of company. A veritable
legion of Canucks are right now scratching
their chins and smacking their foreheads over
arcane morsels of Canadian historical trivia
that managed to whistle right in one ear and
out the other writhout so much as richoceting
off their cerebral cortexes.
A research company called Goldfarb
Consultants recently quizzed 1,628
Canadians to see how much homegrown
history they knew. Conclusion: not enough to
put a bulge in the tobacco pouch of a coureur
de bois, that's how much.
The Goldfarb survey revealed that four
of 10 Canadians couldn't name the date of
The International
Scene
Australia’s
in a bad mess
BY RAYMOND CANON
I have always had something of an
admiration for the Australians and their
approach toward life. Crocodile Dundee may
be Hollywood's idea of what an Australian is
really like but there is no denying that some
of Dundee's attitudes are to be found in many
of his countrymen.
I'm not sure whether because of or in
spite of this attitude the country is in a real
mess these days to a degree that makes
Canadians rather virtuous. At least the
Aussies are not suffering the plague of
separatism that has afflicted a number of
other countries, including Canada but, in just
about every other aspect, they are having a
worse time than we are.
One of the problems, if not the chief
one, is that the Australians have too much
government and are fed up with it all. This
has come about with the realization that,
when everybody was having a good time and
thinking that the government would handle
all the problems that were confronting the
country, it was just the opposite. This "I
thought you were fixing it" attitude has now
reached the point where it threatens to take a
potentially very rich country and let it go
down the drain.
When you have such a resource-rich
country with a high standard of living, it is
easy to get the impression that problems can
be solved by throwing pots of money at them.
(Does that sound familiar?) It is only recently
that Australians are coming to realize that
there is no free lunch and they are starting to
scramble to do something about the mess
they find themselves in. The Labour
government, under Prime Minister Bob
Hawke, has been in power for eight years and
what measures it has introduced so far have
turned out to be ineffectual. The latest effort
is an attempt to lighten the screws a bit.
Before I go any farther, I would
Arthur Black\.
Confederation. The same percentage didn't
know the name of our first Prime Minister -
John, A., or MacDonald.
They didn't do much belter on
contemporary political poohbahs. Only 40
per cent of students who were polled could
name the leader of the federal Liberal party
(Jean Chretien, as I type) — and just a fraction
over half the people could reel off the names
of three Canadian prime ministers since
World War II. (There have been nine
counting Willie King. I looked it up).
John Eagle, professor of history at the
University of Alberta, has a blunt retort to the
dismal findings of the Goldfarb survey. The
professor says "so what?"
I'm not big at pushing a lot of names
and dates" says Professor Eagle. "It’s more
important to know why Louis Riehl was
hanged than when and where."
To which I can only gasp "Amen!" and
wonder with just the hint of a sob in my
throat, where Professor Eagle was when I
needed him — which is to say, back about a
thousand years ago when I was memorizing
dates and terms of proclamations and
developing megathrob migraines in
CanHistory 101.
Are there any other High School
History refugees out there who still have the
terms of the Rush-Bagot Treaty rattling
around in their heads? Does anybody else still
wake up with the night sweats mumbling
"The chief causes of the 1837 rebellion were
— just a minute ma'am, it's on the tip of my
tongue — were...”
suggest that you look at what I have to say
about Australia and see how many parallels
you can draw with the Canadian scene. For
quite a few years the central government
there has tried to keep out foreign comptilion
by erecting and maintaining high barriers,
with tariffs running at about 30%. Not
surprisingly Australian industry became
highly inefficient. Toward the end of the last
decade Hawke began lowering these tariffs to
about half of what they were and he intends
to get them down to five per cent by the
middle of this decade. There are some
expectations; unfortunately these industries
are the ones that need the biggest jolt.
Mr. Hawke shows a further reluctance
to grasp the nettle by continuing to permit all
kinds of non-tariff barriers. In addition, he
has yet to address a major problem in his
country, that of the labour unions. Labour
relations in Canada are not something that in
general I like to brag about but what we have
here is positively exemplary compared to
what is going on in Australia. There are over
300 unions, many of them small and the
typical industry in that country has to deal
with at least five of them. A recent survey
conducted by the OECD of which Canada is
People
Brussels Citizen of the
The Editor,
Your committee made a great choice for
the Brussels Citizen of the Year.
Among other things, what I like about
Betty Graber are: (1) her birthday parties and
Grey Central seeking
THE EDITOR,
Grey Central Public School Parents'
Association at Ethel is attempting to contact
former students and teachers to help celebrate
the 25th anniversary of the school combined
with the grand opening of the new addition.
I've got Red River Cartloads of
historical brie a brae cluttering up the already
overtaxed crannies of my mental attic. I
remember the number of fur bales sent from
Fort Chipcwyan in 1828. I can recite the
preamble to Lord Durham's report. I can even
recall (God have mercy on my soul) an entire
speech by Mackenzie King - not to mention
the dale on which he droned it.
All of which does me no earthly good
at all, because these are mere deadheads of
trivia in an unchartable swamp of
forgetfulness. I have no clear idea what
Mackenzie King was like, or whether Lord
Durham had a big nose, or where, exactly,
Fort Chipcwyan actually was.
And that's Professor Eagle's point.
What's the sense of recalling data bits if they
don't relate to anything?
Maybe that’s why the folks surveyed
by Goldfarb did so poorly. It's not that they
can't remember their history - just that they
remember the useless stuff.
Could be worse. A recent American
survey shows that an astonishing 45 per cent
of Americans polled believed the U.S. vice
president was, not Dan Quayle but ... Mister
Rogers.
True, the folks surveyed were all
American preschoolers, but what's that old
saying about "Out of the mouths of babes?"
I know if I had to choose between Dan
Quayle and Mister Rogers, America's VP
would be remembered in history as the guy in
the ratty-looking sweater.
a member (Organization of Economic Co
operation and Development) showed that
productivity in Australia was less than half
the average of the 24 members. Compared to
the Australians even we look good in this
respect.
Since the Labour government depends
on the unions for much of its support, it is not
surprising that the most recent measures
contain nothing to reform the labour union
movement. It should not cause any eyebrows
to rise when I tell you that Australia went into
recession even before we did. A few figures
will show you how bad things are. Inflation
is running at 11.9 per cent over the past three
months, the prime rate for borrowing money
is 4 '/« per cent higher than here and, with
only 3/4 of our population, their current
account deficit is marginally higher.
Canada and Australia both took an
active part in the recent Middle East war; it
does not seem to have done either of their
governments much good in the popularity
stakes. Perhaps the Aussies should have a
look at what their neighbours, the New
Zealanders, are doing. The latter seem to
have considerably more economic fortitude
when it comes to attempting to correct
economic problems.
Year a good choice
(2) her influence with yellow chicks who
deliver coloured eggs to special people on
Easter weekends.
Bev Brown,
Brussels.
former students
Activities are planned for the evening of May
18 and the afternoon of May 19. Enquiries
can be made to the school or the undersigned
for details of events.
Nancy Vanass
887-6296
Letter
from the
editor
We stagger
into the ’90’s
By Keith Roulston
If you see a member of The Citizen's
staff weaving down the street looking a little
glassy eyed one of these days it isn't because
we've had the mother of all office parties, it's
just computer overload.
We joined the 90's last week when a new
"desk-top publishing system" was installed in
our Citizen office. The system replaces a
phototypesetting system that was the latest thing
available 15 years ago. By today's standards,
however, the old system was right there with
cave paintings in terms of sophistication. We
bought the old equipment when The Citizen
first began in October 1985 because we were
familiar with the type of equipment (it was the
same kind we used to put out the old Blyth
Standard in the 1970's) and because it was
inexpensive....well, inexpensive in a way. The
machines didn't cost much to buy but they did
cost a lol to operate. They used expensive
photographic paper and chemicals and they
required a lol of labour time to piece things
together when you'd finished typing it up. Put
these expenses together with the cost of keeping
the old machines going (when you called the
company to order parts you had to wait for them
to stop laughing when you told them what type
of machine you had) and it soon proved that the
new machines would pay for themselves in
savings.
Desk-top publishing uses computers to
do the complete typesetting and ad-makeup job.
Where in the past our advertisements were set
in bits and pieces then "pasted-up" (actually we
used wax) on a sheet, the entire ad can now be
assembled on a computer screen then printed off
on a sheet of ordinary paper through a
sophisticated laser printer. Similarly, whereas
our writers used to type stories on typewriters
and somebody had to retype the stories on the
typesetter, now we type the story once and it's
ready for printing...except for catching the
spelling errors of course.
And that's one of the things the computer
is supposed to help with. The spell-checking
part of the computer programme is supposed to
catch so many of the mistakes you can make but
of course there arc problems. If you type form
and you mean from, the computer won't help
you. It also won't help if you spell somebody's
name wrong because the names aren't in the
computer, nor are things like prices in ads. And
there's the cultural imperialism involved. Most
newspapers have long ago given in and spell
colour as color the way the Americans do but
I've always been a stubborn holdout. The
computer programme, however, is American
and it keeps telling you you've made a mistake
when you spell colour, or theatre or programme.
On the advertising side of things there arc
all sorts of special effects and other things we're
supposed to be able to do...once we learn how
to make things work. Ah, there's the rub. Most
of us wouldn't have wanted to have our mothers
around to hear the language the last few days as
we struggled to master...no, not master, simply
survive, the computers. There would be the
things we tried to do and the machines would
tell us we couldn't. There would be the things
we tried to do only to find out we'd done it the
wrong way. There would be the things we did
do and saved in a file, only to find out we
couldn't find where it was in the computer's
memory when we wanted to get it back. The
office has been filled with moans and groans
and the odd expression we'd better not repeat.
Thankfully, we've been blessed with one of
those young computer whizzes, my son Craig,
who could solve the problems when they
developed.
But we're surviving. We still find the
hours fly by as we concentrate so hard to make
sure we do everything right. We still feel bug-
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