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The Citizen, 1993-04-07, Page 5Arthur Black nternational Scene By Raymond Canon THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 1993. PAGE 5. Only in Britain, you say? Thank heaven You read a lot of sad stuff in the newspapers these days but one of the saddest things I've read of late was a statistic. It came from a survey published in a London newspaper last month. Gallup pollsters asked 1,030 adult Britons a simple question: "Would you like to settle in another country if you were free to do so?" Forty-nine percent of the respondents said yes, if they could, they'd leave. Forty-nine percent! How is it possible that virtually half the native inhabitants of Great Britain would emigrate if they could? This is the "green and pleasant land"! This is the country that coloured two-thirds of the world Imperial Pink on my old Grade Nine Geography Rand McNally map! The Empire On Which the Sun Never Set. The Entity that Ruled The Waves. The cultural fountainhead that gave the world Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, The Beatles ... The birthplace of Burns and Yeats, Churchill and Cecil Rhodes, whose advice to young Britons was "always remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life." How much is that in yen? I have literally lost count of the number of times I have been asked what something costs back in Canada. The natural curiosity of people takes over when they see a different item together with a foreigner and they want to know how much it set the owner back. Since Canadian dollars mean little if anything to any person outside of Canada, it is important to find a way to convey this cost with any degree of accuracy. A case in point stands out vividly in my mind. When I drove to the Soviet Union, I was in possession of a brand new car which I had picked up in Paris. It was a Renault but it didn't really matter who had produced it; the fact that it was new and non-Russian had people looking at it everywhere. I recall one evening in the city of Smolensk; I was parked in front of the hotel and in very short order I had a few Russians stop to look it over. One thing led to another; before too long the questions were flying thick and fast with the inevitable one being how much it cost. 1 got around this by pointing out that the price in dollars wouldn't mean a thing to them since the exchange rate between the dollar and the rouble was anything but realistic. Instead I explained that the cost of my car made up three months of my yearly salary. Consternation in the ranks! There was no way, the Russians said, a car could be so cheap. How long did I have to wait for it? One year? Two years? No time at all, I replied. I picked it up the day 1 arrived in Paris and this was par for the course. Canadian car buyers were used to either not waiting or perhaps waiting a very short time. A year? Never!! How can something as magnificent as all that be — to cop a phrase from the Bard — "shrunk to this little measure"? Well, the recession helped. Here in Canada, we felt the economic downturn pretty bad, but the Brits really got clobbered. At last count, the U.K. had more than three million unemployed on its rolls. British businesses and factories are still sloughing off employees by the thousands as they struggle to stay afloat in a sea of red ink. Margaret Thatcher helped to scupper the operation too. She swept to power like a metaphorical new broom, promising to set the British economy to rights with some good old-fashioned housecleaning. Survivors say that in fact she gutted the joint, replacing the old British ethic of Fair Play with a rah rah chant of."Me First!" She privatized everything in sight and left Northern Ireland, Scotland and the north of England economic wastelands. Europe? She cocked a snook at Europe, preferring to cash her chips at the Bank of America through her good pal Ronnie Reagan. Sound familiar? The 12 years under Margaret Thatcher were a bit like a hit from a crack pipe — heady and exciting at first, but ultimately a massive downer, leaving the victim not much more than a basket case. It didn't help that the undeniably vibrant Margaret Thatcher was replaced by the Consternation in the ranks again. How could that decrepit capitalist system do such a thing. It would be unheard of in Russia. I assured them that what I told them was the truth. Above all they now knew the real price of car. You can use that system wherever you go; it sure beats trying to use an exchange rate which may or may not be accurate. You can use somewhat the same system to explain how much your house cost. Since it will obviously not be in terms of months as with the car above, use a multiple of years. If we use this, we find that houses in Brussels, Madrid and London, Eng. are slightly lower than they are in Toronto, which is usually employed as a benchmark in any international comparisons. On the other hand you would not want to buy a house in Tokyo since they are over twice as expensive there -as here. In New York they are half as much again while in Frankfurt, Germany and Milan, Italy they are about half way between New York and Tokyo. Los Angeles and Paris come in just slightly ahead of Toronto. Even at that, the question of taxation can distort the picture somewhat. There are few countries which do not have some form of income tax relief on house purchases but Canada is one of them (Australia is another). In the U.S. of example you can deduct the interest from your taxable income of any mortgage up to $1 million. In Britain it is only about $50,000. When it comes to buying and selling a house, prices vary a great deal. Combining the agent's fee and any taxes involved, Belgium is the most expensive country and Britain the cheapest. We are closer to the British rate than we are to the Belgian while, if houses are among the most expensive in Japan, the cost of selling one is lower than in almost any other industrialized country. I am always asked what the price of food is in other countries; my answer is that we are one of the luckiest ones. According to undeniably dishraglike John Major. A nice man, perhaps even competent, but not a man to inspire a confidence-stricken nation to follow him "over the top". John Major is rather, as the London Times described him "a well-intentioned chap — the sort you would like to see marry your problem daughter." And then there were the Royal Troubles. One thing that has long distinguished Great Britain from the rest of the world is its veneration of royalty. Regrettably, the British Royals chose this moment in history to become publicly unglued. First there was Fergie, plastered all over the front pages of the tabloids, having her toes sucked by her Texan financial advisor. Then Chuck and Di called it quits, and the selfsame tabs got hold of their private cellular phone calls and ... Enough. Small wonder, really, that 49 per cent of polled Britons say they'd up stakes and move off the Sceptred Isle in a flash. Small wonder that more than 75 per cent of those interviewed said they expected things in the U.K. to get worse before they got better. We have our share of problems here in Canada, but I doubt very much that anything like 50 per cent of us would emigrate. To paraphrase the old tea commercial: "Only in Britain, you say? Thank heaven." the Consumer Price Index, a Canadian is likely to spend just about one-fifth of his disposable income on eating, just over half of what it costs to house him or her. Food is cheap in the United States but consumers elsewhere are not so fortunate. It helps that Southern Ontario is one of the great bread- baskets of the world. If you want to see the truth in this, just sit down and make a list of all the agricultural products grown here. When it comes to gasoline, we are also among the most fortunate. The Americans pay far and away the least for this product and, while our gas is much more expensive than theirs, we do not come close to European countries where the cost is two to three times as high as here. I should point out, of course, that the chief reason for the great variety in prices is that of tax. European countries tax their gas much more heavily than we do while the Americans put on much less. I have a feeling that Bill Clinton is going to change ail that. There you have it. By and large we do not do too badly but at least you know now how to talk to people in other countries when it comes to telling each other how badly done by you are. Letter to the editor Continued from page 4 with people's lives, not only the employees but the people who receive those services. In the past two years the civil service numbers have been reduced and more is being done with less money. A social contract with the public employees is to be one component of the plan to protect jobs and services. This will be negotiated with public sector employees and unions and its aim is to restructure the public spctor and reduce its costs. Paul Klopp,IMPP Huron. The Short of it By Bonnie Gropp Longing for a taste of paradise Have you ever just wanted to chuck it all? Isn't there a part of you thinking this roller coaster just isn't fun anymore? Granted when you first got on, it was exhilarating, but too much excitment, too much of the fast life, like too much of anything, wears a little thin after awhile. We are living a life of excess, which always astonishes me, considering today's baby boomers are yesterday's hippies. In what began as an idyllic crusade to make the world better, the anti-materialistic, anti- establishment generation seems to have made a wrong turn. We protested and rallied life's injustices but soon lost our idealism when we saw we couldn't "get no sa- tisfaction". The result seems to be a group of harried middle-agers on a treadmill gone berserk. Everywhere you go you run into people bemoaning the fact they have no time to themselves, yet unable to come up with a way to fix it. In search of the better life for ourselves, our families and our world, we have taken on many times, more than we can handle. Watching the Andy Griffith show recently (the TV was on, I was running past) I took some time to remember those easy days. When was the last time my entire family was able to sit outside on a hot summer's eve and just bask in the warmth of the day and each other's company? I asked myself. It always seems that everyone's too busy, following their own pursuits, to just stop and catch their breath. Racing a mad dash through life is all right, until you fmally have that couple of seconds to breathe. That's when you start thinking, a dangerous pastime of mine, which lately has taken a rather provocative turn. Recently my thoughts have strayed, only half facetiously, to selling everything I own and whisking my family away to Bora Bora. They don't seem quite as sold on the idea, mind you, but there are others in this world, who are thinking along the same lines as I. I recently read in a magazine that Pitcairn Island, located just below the Tropic of Capricorn, 300 miles west of New Zealand is inundated annually by thousands of letters from people yearning to live there. Pitcairn is a speck of volcanic rock, a paradise, which has been a subject for literature and Hollywood. The population, primarily descendents of the mutineers from Captain William Bligh's ship The Bounty, numbers 50. What's the attraction of Pitcairn that so many are interested in making it their home? Nothing! Literally! In Pitcairn there are no taxes, banks, cars or TV's. Another pert, especially for we snow-bound Canucks, is the fact the temperature in Pitcairn ranges from 60° to 82°F. And best of all, Pitcaim's crime rate is almost virtually non-existent. Ah ha, the skeptics say, if Pitcairn is so perfect why do they still have only a handful of residents when so many express an interest? The reason is that not just anyone can move there; they have to be accepted by the Island Council. Dreamers are seen as a potential burden to the community. Probably because too often dreams we pursue are not in reality what we had in mind. Which explains why I will quite likely not be making the pilgrimage to paradise. A taste would be nice; actually I long for it, but I think after about a year that might go sour. There are aspects of this lunacy I would miss. So, I guess I'm not a serious applicant. Yet.