A4 - The Terrace Standard, Wednesday, January 18, 7995

TERRACE

STANDARD

ESTABLISHED APRIL 27, 1988

ADDRESS: 4647 Lazelle Ave., Terrace, B.C. « V8G 188
TELEPHONE: (604) 638-7283 » FAX: (604) 638-8432
MODEM: (604) 638-7247

A better way |

ABOUT TEN years ago governments realized
they had a problem. The number and type of jobs
available was changing rapidly due to the evolu-
tion of the economy and technological advance-
ments. People already in the job market and
those about to enter the wage world simply
didn’t have the skills or training for the new eco-
nomic world. .

And so was created the wonderful world of
training programs. Governments began to pour
money into anything that moved which promised
to prepare people for the real world. There was

.no shortage of people, the raw material of this
particular type of industry, and those numbers
grew as another push began — to take people off
welfare and put them into the labour force.

What then happened was the inevitable creation
of bureaucracies associated with training pro-
grams. These things take on a life of their own.
Within a very short time, energies are poured
into sustaining bureaucracies, sometimes at the
detriment of why a program was.set up in the
first place. Chasing government money caused
competition among the multitude of groups set
up to run training programs. It’s really nobody’s
fault. It’s just the way things happen.

Training programs have become a vibrant
growth industry in this area. All feed off of
government money in one form or another. All
depend upon people which for cultural, lan-
guage, racial, gender, geographical and age rea-
sons are semi or non productive participants in
the economy. Given the time and resources,
someone could probably find a healthy number
of people who have drifted from one training
program to another.

There’s now a move here to change that. North-
west Community College is working on a com-.

munity leaning council: The-philosophical base~~'}~

to thé council is that learning'of one kind or an-
other goes on forever no matter what type of job
a person has or may want to have. |

As important as that is, a result of the council
just might be to provide more direction, co-
ordination and reality to training programs. It
simply doesn’t make sense to have a variety of
training programs pursuing different goals, par-
ticularly nowadays when government monies are
tight and growing tighter. —

To not achieve a higher level of co-ordination is
to risk increasing competition for government
monies as they become scarcer. The result is a
loss of productivity within the training programs
and the ultimate loss of what they are supposed
to be about in the first place.

Our winters

THIS WINTER’S WEATHER proves once
again Terrace and area is a place to brag about to
people who live elsewhere, While those others
only have four seasons worth of weather, we
have at least seven.

Not only is there spring, summer and fall, but
there’s winter-rain, winter-snow, winter-cold and
winter-wind. All of this makes us experts in
raingear, layered clothing, winter tires, insulation
and how to keep shingles on roofs. And that sure
as heck beats some boring winter down south.

onnA
| WA
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CORIAR LG

rte ;
CS) PUBLISHER/EDITOR: Rod Link

ADVERTISING MANAGER: Mike L. Hamm
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Edouard Credgeur
NEWS COMMUNITY: Jeff Nagel * NEWS SPORTS: Malcolm Baxter
OFFICE MANAGER: Rose Fisher, Terry Miller
DARKROOM: Susan Credgeur
ADVERTISING CONSULTANTS:
'-. Sam Collier, Janet Viveiros, Tracey Tomas

_ CIRCULATION SUPERVISOR: Karen Brunette

MEMBER OF B.C, PRESS COUNCIL ve
Serving the Terrace and Thornhill area. Published an Wednesday of each week by Cariboo Pross (1969)
Lid, at 4647 Lazelte Avo., Terrace, British Columbia. re
Stories, pholographs, illustrations, designs and typesiy'es in the Tentace Slandard are iha property of the
copyright holders, including Cariboo Prass (1969) Lid, its illustration fepro servicas and advertising
agencies. : vas eet
Reproduction In whale or in part, without written permission, Is specifically prohiblled.- : ~

Authorized as second-class mall pending tha Post Office Dapartment, for payment of postage in cash.

Speelal thanks to all our contributors and correspondents
: for their time and talents

X

™~

Crime stats not that bad ~

VICTORIA — If ever we
needed proof that perception
tends to usurp reality, it was
delivered in spades by Univer-
sity of Ottawa criminologist
Dr. Julian Roberts.

In a federally-sponsored
study, parts of which were
released a couple of weeks
ago, Roberts found that public
rerception of crime in Canada
differs sharply from the actual
facts.

Opinion poll after opinion
poll shows that fear for life and
limb weighs heavily on ithe
public mind. Canadians are
convinced that crime rates,
particularly those. of violent
crimes, are soaring.

They are certain that the

‘courts are too lenient, and that
“the parole system’s primary
~purpose’ is to ~molly-coddle

criminals...

Roberts’ findings fly in the
face of these public percep-
tions. He checked opinion
polls done over the past few
years, compared the results to
actual crime statistics, and
found that crime rates have
Temained stable ovex the past
five years. Yet, two-thirds of
Canadians believe they have
risen.

Likewise, the public is firmly

FROM THE CAPITAL
HUBERT BEYER

convinced that the use of guns
in crimes is on the rise whereas
in fact, the rate of gun use in
robberies dropped from 37 per
cent in 1978 to 26 per cent by
1990. ‘4
-~Yhe murder rate has been rel-
atively stable and actually-has
begun to fall since the aboli-
tion of the death penalty. Yet,
most Canadians belicve that
the murder rate is rising, caus-
ing renewed demands for the
death penally.

As for the parole system, join
any conversation on crime and
you'll find that in the public’s
perception, criminals obtain
premature release ftom prison
more easily than they got

~y

— TER tows

eianee!

locked up.

Again, the facts say some-
thing else. It’s not as easy fora
convicted criminal to obtain
premature Icase as the public
believes, More criminals serve
out their time than get released
on parole. .

Says Roberts: “The system
is not the lenient joke people
believe it to be. Everything's
not fine, but the problems are
not necessarily what the public
believes them to be.”’

Roberts doesn’t blame any-
one in particular for this dis-
crepancy between perception
and reality, but there can be no
doubt; that. the media play a
large role. ;

I’m not advocating the

-““good-neig spproch (0 the”

“ghrotiicling of society, by the
“fiedia,” Biit'the’ fact ‘remains’*’

that when someone ‘gets mur-
dered in a city of half a mil-
lion, 499,999 people didn’t.

‘It’s not 30 much the reporting
of crime,. as the absence of
balance that causes the prob-
lem. Whenever a violent crime
is committed, it ends up on the
front pages of our newspapers
and leads the newscasis on
radio and television.

This constant barrage of
violent-crime reports is bound

© thatthe murder rate has actual-

to leave people wondering’.
about their safety. Newspaper
accounts of a rape and murder,
in Los Angeles make women’
in Victoria afraid to walk-the
strects of their neighborhood |
after dark, no matter how safe
the streets may be. aye
The result is a growing pub-
lic bunker mentality, Don’t
walk the streets after dark or’ .
you'll get mugged, raped or-
killed. an
And wherever there is public.
concem, cven if it’s .not™
founded in fact, there will be.
politicians eager and willing to:.
exploit that fear.
That's why the Reform Party
is advocating a referendum on
the death penalty. Never mind
ly fallen ‘since the abolition of.”

Mr

capital punishment. ‘The’ pub-”

‘lic’s fear and loathing of crime

provides a convenicnt and
cheap fuel supply for the:.
political engine of the right.

The media will not stop.
reporting crime, nor should _
they, But readers and viewers °
must maintain a sense of
balance and reality, rather than
be swept away on an ever
stronger tide of hysteria.

Hello? Anybody out

READERS MAY = suppose
columnists are inundated with *
mail like Dear Abby, or
deluged by phone calls like
Rogers Cable. Not sa.

Even big time columnists
feel isolated. Roslyn Kunin, in
her Province Job Market
column, recently wrote, ‘‘Let
me note that Iam delighted to
hear from you. I can get awful-
ly lonely sitting at the com-
puter by myself. So I am al-
ways glad to know that you are
not only reading my column,
but also are sufficiently
motivated to respond.’”

Readers usually speak up for
one of three reasons. A column
says exactly what they would
write, They have more in-
formation to add to the topic.
Or the viewpoint expressed is
opposite to their own. Upset
readers react quicker than a
dental cavity.

Even a complimentary
column can bend at least one
reader out of shape. Vaughn

SORRY! MARTEN |
THAT LAKE'S
TOO SMALL

THROUGH BIFOCALS.
CLAUDETTE SANDECKI

70 wa! L
LANDED HERE
LAST YEAR |

Palmer, columnist for the Van-
couver sun, received his big-
gest reader response when he
wrote a column apologizing
for an earlier column.

But Dave Barry, who writes
for the Miami Herald, must
take the prize for reader
response, if you leave Dear
Abby out of the contest. Alert
readers mail- him a steady
supply of news clippings,
mostly oddities, which he uses

¢
9 P27 ap .
2g Cia

as topics for his wacky articles.
Then last week he went one
better.

According to a Province
news item, the humorist,
who'd joked in his syndicated
newspaper column that ‘‘opera
can kill you,’’ accepted an in-
vitation from the Eugene
(Oregon) Opera to play a
corpse.. in Puccini’s Gianni
Schicchi.

. Painted with ghoulish
- makeup and wearing a bed-
shirt, nightcap and white
socks, Barry lay dead in bed
mouth open, arms half-raised
and fingers curled. After a long
aria, he was stuffed head-first
- under the bed.

He returned to say a few kind
words about opera.

Kind words are always wel-
come, though both praise and
criticism give me writer’s

_block.. My column averages
one response. per year, Last
year | harvested a bumper
crop.

DANG | SAME
THING HAPPENED
LAST TIME!

there?

One reader let me know you
can buy Econo-Clean in liter
bottles at Colour Works.

One reader gave me a report
of the fall fair’s barn dance. He
had stopped by the fair at mid-
night. A rock hop was happen: '
ing, kicking up dust in a dirt-
floored tent, dark except for
glow tubes worm by the dan-
cers. Vocals and instruments,
drowned each other out. He
wished he had worn car pro-
tectors.

Following my column about -
the Terrace air show, a pilot
phoned to Jet me know. cliff.
Howard, the stunt flicr about |
whom I’d written, had died .
some years back while test fly-:
ing for Boeing in Seattle.

For the columnist, writing is .
a way to learn, As one writer |
put it, ‘How dal know what"
think until I see it written on
paper?’’ cy

Likewise, a columnist has no
way of predicting teaders’
reactions. ee

NEVER LISTEN
To THE
PASSENGER |