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The Citizen, 1992-01-22, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22,1992. PAGE 5. Don't punish Winnipeg. Keep capital in Ottawa Here's an option to stir-fry in your brain pan as you hunker down and shiver through yet another Canuck winter: how about moving the nation's capital to ... Winnipeg? Put down that snowball, madame - it’s not my idea. It belongs to Eric Kierans, venerable ex-politicians and radio pundit. He floated the concept on the CBC national radio show Morningside back about Christmastime. Well, when you think about it, it sort of makes sense. Winnipeg is a lot closer to the geographical bellybutton of the nation than Bytown-on-the-Rideau. And moving the capital is certainly in vogue, internationally. The Germans shut down East Berlin last year. And future Russian politicians will be pointing their chauffeur-driven Ladas towards Minsk, not Moscow. Plus — let's face it — this country needs a kind of coast-to-coast crosscheck right now. Something to shake us out of our separatist stupor; to wake us up out of our constitutional coma. We need a kind of International Scene Ukrainians at not Russians BY RAYMOND CANON The decision of the inhabitants of the Ukraine to become independent as a nation was undoubtedly greeted with a great deal of delight by the million or so Canadians of Ukrainian descent. If anybody had told them five years ago that such a vote would be taken before the end of the century, they would have responded with outright incredulity but strange things have happened lately and are still happening for that matter. Ukrainians everywhere are hoping that the future is better to them than the past has been. Although the Ukrainian language is very similar to Russian in both its written and spoken form, if it is one thing that speakers of that language have been telling the world for many years, it is that Ukrainians are most decidedly not Russian. They have generally been part of Russian but so have many other nationalities in that part of the world; some of them do not even speak a Slavic language. This being the case, I thought it might be as good a time as any to relate a bit about the Ukrainians since, as with many another people, there is a great deal of ignorance about them. The Ukrainians are just another of the many Slavic people who speak related but different languages. Included in these are the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, White Russians, Russians, Croatians, Serbians and Bulgarians; there are admittedly others but this will give you some idea of their numbers. As with other linguistic groups in Europe, there has been a considerable national, head-clearing Participaction project. And what could be more intrinsically satisfying than a campaign to truck all those Ottawa windbags to Winnipeg? Can't you just hear John Crosbie shouting for a taxi at the comer of Portage and Main? Can't you visualize Sheila Copps burning crosses on the lawn of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange? Mila Mulroney shopping at The Bay? Brian tip-toeing through a late spring blizzard in his slip-on Gucci loafers? It's a tempting thought, alright ... but let's face it: it's just not fair. Look at what those worthy Winnipeggers already have to put up with. Ferocious winters. Blitzkrieg invasions of mosquitoes each summer. Plus the lousiest downhill skiing this side of Death Valley. Can we expect them to endure all that - and Michael Wilson too? I think not. I predict a populist backlash that will make the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 look like a Presbyterian Sunday school picnic. I foresee barricades on the Trans Canada; floating mines on the Red and the Assiniboine Rivers ... manifestos demanding full autonomy and language rights for the duchies of Steinbach, Rosenfeld, Gimli and St. Boniface. By Raymond Canon amount of migrations over the centuries but the Ukrainians came to call as their own the land land, the south-west part of what we used to call the Soviet Union. Nobody is quite sure where they came from but this is par for the course with many nationalities of Europe. At any rate the area which we associate with the Ukraine was actually an important part of Russian history before Moscow came in the picture. It was Kiev where the Christian church was initially established and, since it was the Greek Orthodox church that did the establishing, it is small wonder that Greek and Ukrainian alphabets have many similar letters. The Poles and the Ukrainians have something in common. While there has been frequent doubt about the actual borders of their nation, if indeed any existed at all, their nationalism has revolved around a single city. In the case of the Poles it was Warsaw; for the Ukrainians it was Kiev. The Poles and Ukrainians have had a love-hate relationship. At one time the Poles occupied the Ukraine (in the 16th century to be exact) but the latter did not like the Polish way of life and were, in addition, put off by the union of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. It was the Russians who came to the rescue and succeeded in getting back some of the territory, although Kiev still remained in Polish hands. The Ottoman Turks were then asked to help but they ended up trying to get both the Polish and Russian parts of the Ukraine; they were, in Letter to the editor policy Letters to the editor must be signed and the name must also be clearly printed and the telephone number and address included. While letters may be printed under a pseudonym, we must be able to verify the identity of the writer. In addition, although the identity of the writer may be withheld in print, it may be revealed to parties directly involved on personal appearance at The Citizen's offices. I envisage commando death squads of fanatical North Enders all disguised in Larry Zolf masks. I see them invading the House of Commons to lob netfuls of dead Winnipeg Goldeye at the fear-frozen MPs sitting rigidly below. And suppose Winnipeggers win? Suppose the politicians, faced with such implacable western wrath, cave in and rescind the order to make Winnipeg the new capital — what then? Do we try to move it to Moose Jaw? Flin Flon? Pond Inlet? Tempting. But don't forget there are people in Pond Inlet too. Law-abiding people with a right to peace and harmony. In fact, that's probably why they live in Pond Inlet. Up there, they don't have to worry about politicians popping out from behind a pingoe to shake their mitten and kiss their kids and promise a free snowmobile in every garage if only they'll remember to vote for him next election. No, you think it through, I believed you'll agree the best solution is to leave our federal politicians right where they are. After all, Ottawa’s used to them. Besides, there's a real bonus for the rest of us if we stick with the status quo: Sending our politicians to Ottawa is a sure-fire way to get them out of town. fact, partially successful. That will give you some idea of the turmoil that the Ukrainians have gone through over the centuries. They hoped that they might escape the Russians' clutch when the Tsarist regime was overthrown but, in spite of some uneven help from the Poles, who were probably more anxious to regain domination over the area than in achieving any ultruistic goals on behalf of the Ukrainians, this, too, came to nought. Now, finally in the 1990's, the Ukrainians have found their chance to become a real live nation. How much the Ukrainians hate the Russian domination was revealed to me when I was accompanying a delegation of Russian farmers in Canada while I was working for External Affairs. We took them to visit farms in western Canada and tried to steer them around any predominantly Ukrainian areas. As I said, there are approximately one million Canadians of Ukrainian origin and most of them were waiting for us at the Winnipeg airport when we arrived. In order to avoid a confrontation, I hustled the Russians out by taxi via the military section of the airport. The crowd took out their spite on me and the plain- clothed Mounties that were there; I didn't get much sleep that night. Most people will applaud the Ukrainians' efforts to set up an independent nation. They will find, as others have before them, that economic and political problems are equally difficult to overcome. Letter from the Editor By Keith Roulston How can the playing field be level if you can't find it for the snow1? Times like last week, when you were lucky to even be able to find your car or truck, let alone be able to drive it, make me wonder who's kidding who when we talk about globalization and international competitiveness. Economists, our government leaders, and big business leaders, keep talking about the glories or the new open and freer trade and scolding us that we must work harder and smarter if we're not going to be left behind. Critics slam our high tax structure, our poor education system and a generally self- satisfied, comfortable work force as reasons why Canada is losing jobs to other countries. All fine and good...to a point. Our education system could be doing a better job of preparing our children for the times ahead. Most of us would agree our taxes are too high but few of us want to give up the standard of living those taxes have brought us: cheap education, medicare and protection against exactly the kind of recession we're now suffering. We have, indeed, achieved a level of comfort that all the world seeks to attain... and now we're not competitive because we want to sit back and enjoy life instead of working ourselves into an early grave. But even if we had the world's best education system dedicated to doing nothing but turning out trainees for modem business, even if we were willing to forsake medicare and unemployment insurance and subsidized education in the name of lowering taxes, even if we agreed to surrender the industrial average of $12 an hour and take the $1 an hour wages they get in Mexico, how can we be competitive in a climate that does things like last week compared to hot, dry countries. Ever think how much a storm costs that shuts down an area for a week like that one did? The cumulative cost to Huron county companies probably was in the millions last week. That's not counting the lost wages for many county homeowners, leaving them with less money to spend in area stores. And how many people, from workers trying to get to work when they should have stayed home, to truckers trying to keep going because they have payments to make on their rigs, were driving the stormy roads last week when they shouldn't have been. If we were designing an economy to match our real climate, not just the business climate, we'd have an economy that made allowances for us to stay home where it's safe in this kind of weather. But with globalization, a day lost by a local factory, may lose the competitive edge that allows it to keep a contract that might otherwise go to some plant in Tennessee or Mexico. That lost edge doesn't count the additional cost of fuel to heat our plants in cold weather; insurance because our cars and trucks are at greater risk on slippery roads than on the bare, dry roads of the south; wear and tear on trucks and equipment because of our harsher climate; or the cost of delays in shipping goods in or out because of weather conditions. We can’t all live in the sunbelt. There isn't room for all of us to leave the northern snowbelts and move with our factories to the sunny south. Somebody has to continue to live here and we must have jobs here, but if we have to compete against low wages, low taxes, low environmental laws and weather conditions, what future does industry have in this country. We can work harder and smarter, even take less for doing so, but we can't change the weather. Unless we can be like those American entrepreneurs who were shipping snowballs packed in dry ice, to southern climates at $14 apiece, what natural advantage do we have?