PAGE 2, THE HERALD, Wednesday, July 19, 1978 Somewhere, right ‘this very minute, a man is pacing a hospital ward in Northern Manitoba who may have the secret to the lost Franklin Expedition locked in his brain. But unfortunately no one will ever know for sure, or ever be able to find out, 7 Ninety-seven years of age, with a bag strapped to his waist to collect his kidney wastes, his six feet three inches of height shrunken and bent like a drawn boy, until his head is actually facing his feet, Roderick MacKay (not his real name, of course) dressed in hospital pajamas looks out of the hospital windows, through the branches of tropical plants flourishing in the artificial, hot-house temperature of the modern institution, and gazes, blankly and puzzled, across the waters of Hudson Bay, where, though. it is mid - July, the Easterly winds are blowing shoreward, the ice pack, with the incoming high e5. For a few moments - sometimes longer - his by Richard Jackson Gtiawa Offbeat Bill C -28 Con Job Ottawa, - It’s all so cosmetic, says Dan McKenzie, the independent-minded and out- spoken Conservative MP. for Winnipeg South Centre. ; . And in a lot of cases, he adds, simply so much con. He could be talking about almost anything this - or indeed, almost any - government does in the months running up to an election. It’s not so much what it does - for usually that doesn't amount to much - as what it says it’s going to do. The main thrust is image. Like with Bill C-28. ' That was the celebrated piece of legislation introduced by the Liberals to appease public outrage at the overpayment and underworking of the overblown civil service which, leading the national pay and fringe benefits parade, has been blamed in large part for inflation. Bill C-28 proposed putting a ceiling on the civil service by: . ; - Tying its pay rates to. comparable levels of competence and responsibility in business and industry, - Allow the government to lock out civil ser- vants as a sorely-needed strike weapon. - Limit membership. in civil service unions to those earning less than $35,000. - Examine methods of controlling the indexing of public service salaries. Great stuff. : Produced by a proud government to prove that it, and not really the public service bureaucratic mandarins monitor the economy, serves as a model in setting standards and generally oversee the running of the country.. So what happened to it? It was given first and second reading in the Commons and than shuffled off to the House Committee on Miscellaneous Estimates. Where it remains. Stuck. , And won't emerge until after Parliament reconvenes next October 10 - if Prime Minister Trudeau does not interrupt proceedings with a belated call for an election. Wf there is an election intervening, well, farewell Bill C-28, it was good to know about it if only for a fleeting minute. And if there’s no election, that still won’t guarantee that Bill C-28 will resurface from the House Committee for approval and passage by the Commons and Senate. ’ And you know why? Because, as Dan McKenzie says, it’s all so cosmetic. A con job, How so? Well, while Bill C-28 grows moss in the Com- mittee, the government - instead of bringing high-level public service salaries into line with those paid in business and industry, as promised by Bill C-28 - has given some 2,000 senior bureaucrats a $2,400 raise. Not that they were being underpaid, mind you - perish the thought in the civil service - since 33 of those 2,000 or more bureaucratic boffins were already drawing down between $45,000 and 3, , And the government did it, Treasury Board admitted by way of explanation, to bring the pay of boffins up. So much for equalization under Bill C-28, Get this too. There was Transport Minister Otto Lang, the Prime Minister's ‘'strong man” in the West openly boasting that the government had brought in Bill C-28 as a means of “resisting popular pressure to clamp down even harder on the public service.” So it was not only a con job. But a phoney. A sop thrown to an outraged public to appease its anger against the excesses of the civil service. Meanwhile Bill C-28 rests in peace in the now non-existent Committee on Miscellaneous _ A Story That's Hever Beon Told (Pt, 1) brain seems to clear. “Where am I?” He will ask, “What the Sam Hill am I doing in this place? Where's my dogs? Where's my cance? I've got to get back up to Willow Creek and tend my trap line., They're paying fifty dollars for prime mink, and | can’t afford to miss out.”’ For more than seventy years, this man trapped the Canadian North ;.from Quebec to Alberta, Many were the mysteries he came across and reported, enabling the authorities to clear them off their books, Many also were the strange happenings he turned up, but common sense and experience led him to believe it best not to report them. One such incident that fell between these two categories was the time he was called upon to ferry a tall man with a heavy German accent across the Churchill River to Fort Prince of Wales. There the man insisted on being left alone, becoming almost violent when Roderick returned to warn him the tide would soon. be out, and that he better hurry. Roderick insists the man carried a suitcase with him when he took him across, but did not have it with him when: he returned. He cited various reasons for believing the man had buried it, (he had a shovel) in the environs of the 100 yards square Fort Prince of Wales, whose walls are actually twenty feet thick, of locally hewn. basalt and granite. ; From. movie newsreels and. photographs in magazines, books and newspapers that Roderick saw later, he had reason to believe his ferry passenger that day was a well known man. Building up his evidence, piece by piece, in the face of public ridicule and laughter, Roderick came up with the name of. Richard Bruno Hauptman - the kidnapper and killer in the 1930’s, of the infant son of Charles Augustus Lindbergh - the first man (in 1927) to make a solo -airplane crossing of the Atlantic ocean, in his ce singte engined, Spirit of St. Louis. Whether or not the man actually WAS Hauptman, chroniclers of the kidnapping case that shocked the world believe Hauptman DID - cross the border’ into Canada, before he was caught. Also, although much of the ransom money was recovered, a good amount was not. and has never-been, accounted for. - But perhaps the most tantalizing mystery, to my mind, was Roderick’s contact some forty to fifty years ago with an Eskimo being brought for treatment of tuberculosis from the Back’s River area of the Keewation - the Central Arctic. That Eskimo, he had good reason to believe was a direct descendant of a member of the Sir John Franklin Expedition; possible old Sir John, himself, though more probably of one of his leaders. oo, I shall deal with the rest of this account, in part Estimates. APPEAL REJECTED MOSCOW (Reuter) — A porn court 1 ueaday rejected an appeal by Yur Orlov, leader of the dissident Helsinki humanrights group, against his sentence for anti- Soviet agitation, his wife sald. Irina Orlov said the Supreme Court of the Rus- sian Federation upheld the sentence of sever years In a labor camp and five years of internal exile, imposed last May on her husband by a Mogcow court, Fraser River Fish Hatchery or Water Highway VANCOUVER (CP) — With the Fraser River acting as a conduit for a million sockeye salmon fry heading to sea and as a major navigational route, conflicts are unavoidable, While the federal fisheries service works to keep the river undisturbed for fish, the public works ministry haa a responsibility to dredge it for navigation, an action that takes its toll of fish. The two departments have finally worked out a system that allows them both to use the river with minimal damage to fish runs. “The problem is that we are two agencies with diametrically opposed needs for the river,” said John MeNally, acting chief of the land use division, habitat protection, fisheries and marine service of En- vironment Canada. “Our job is to look after the fish and dredging interferes with the fish. In additlon to the public works department dredging for navigation, private companies also operate in the river dredging up sand for sale as land fill, among other uses.” DAMAGE SEVERE The operations are quick death to salmon fry. Fisheries service tests show fingerlings three to four centimetres long have a death rate of 98.8 per cent when caught up’in a hy- draulic suction dredging operation. . The river system produces an annual average com- mercial catch of 4.1 million sockeye, 2.1 million pinks, 500,000 coho and 1.3 million chums with an estimated gross value of $86 million in - 1976, ‘Ideally, I'd lke to say to public works, ‘Just go away, fellows,’ but we have to work together,” said McNally. “And, in faitness, there has been a positive effort by public works to change their operation to suit us,” One of the first efforts at regulation, which started in the early 1970s, was to have observers placed on board all operating dredges. “These people stand by a fine mesh screen, wash and sweep the debris off the screen and snatch up and identify any fish that ap- pear,” said McNally. If the observer on any dvedge spots 10 fry per hour for two successive hours then the dredge Is shut down for the remainder of the shift. The same rule applies ifa sudden rush of fish, about 20 fry atone time, are caught up. REGULATIONS DETAILED A list of 10 detailed regu- lations laid down by fisheries In 1975 forms the basia for co- operation between the two ministries. _ The rules specify the types of dredges permitted, when and where they can be used and where material can be dumped. While private dredging for sand is not subject to time restrictions, dredging for navigation cannot be delayed, “So in our guidelines we've tried to separate the two types of dredging, though, obviously, the fish can’t tell the difference between a private and a public works cage. “Gur first concern is the fish so fram March 15 to June 1, the major time for downstream migration, all suction dredges have to stay out of the river except for what we recognize as emergency situations. "From the point of view of the fish it would be nice to or- der all suction dredges out of ‘the river but in practical terms that wouldn't work. We can't shut down the whole port because one dredge has caught one fry. But the guidelines we are using now are practical and they're having a fair degree of success,” Sticky Bacteria- Next Medical Miracle LETHBRIDGE, Alta. (CP) — A study of bacteria which cling tenaciously to the digestive tracts of cattle - may eventually lead to the discovery: of diseasefighting antibiotics. Dr. Bill Costerton of University of Calgary is one of several Canadians in- volved in research on sticky bacteria. Costerton is working on development of an antibiotic to combat the cystic fibrosis bacterium which builds 4 suffocating slime in the lungs of young victims. - The research might also result in savings of millions of dollars annually for livestock producers. Proceeding on the basis of research done a decade ago, Canadian scientists have Identified several types of bacteria which cling to the surfaces in the digestive tracta of cattle and in human lungs and bladders where they can feed on a stream of passing nutrients. Scientists have used portholes opening into the cattles’ stomachs to facilitate sampling of bac- teria. Antibiotics can wipe out bacteria with indiscriminate blasts, but the latest research indicates it might be easier and safer to break - the bacteria’s grip than to kill thern. STUDY STICKY GERMS Costerton, Dr. Kuo-joan Cheng at the Lethbridge federal agriculture research station and Dr. Gill Geesey at University of Victoria, have spent two years discovering which germs cling inside human and animal hosts. Thelr studies have in- dicated that the stlckiness of the bacteria is essential to the germs’ success. “We've known where the bacteria were in general, such as in stomach fluids,” said Costerton. “But we didn't know they were stuck on to surface by means of tangled fibres that don't let antibiotics through.” “We've discovered where they are, and that they're more numerous than fleating populations of bacteria."’ In the cattle research at Lethbridge, Cheng and fellow-researchers Dr, Peter Bailey and Dr, Bob Hironaka have isolated about 300 types of bacteria which cling to cattle stomachs. Cheng said they have dis- covered that the bacteria in cattle come from the surface of the rumen—a stomach. “This is a fairly big discovery." ‘ The bacterium is one which helps cattle digest cheap uresor fertilizer- based feed. “Through our work, we may be able to control the bacterla and cattle can make use of the urea more economically.” The Lethbridge scientists also expect they will be able to protect newhorn calves against scours, a deadly form of diarrhea, and against other diseases which cost miilions of dollars an- nually in lost animals, WILL, NOT LONDON (AP) — Jour- nalist Derek Humphry, who admitted helping his cancer- siriken wife to kill herself three years ago, will not be prosecuted. a spokesman for the director af public prosecutions said Tuesday. The spokesman said there was insultimwient evidence ta PROSECUTE - justify prosecuting Hum- , who sald on a television program last March that he gave his ter- minally-ill wife, Jean, a lethal dose of drugs in a cup of coffee. Humphry said his wife of 20 years chose the moment to die by saying - “dts time you went and got me something to drink.” two of: this “editorial” in tomorrow's HERALD. info health columns A , BRITISH COLUMBIA MEDICAL ASSOCIATION 1807 West 10th Avenue, Vancouver, B.C. V6U 2A9 By Dr. Bob Young In 1977 B.C. Doctors Made 698,904 Housecalls “Doctars never make house calls." This statement is made so often that some people believe it. : Historically the doctor was often one of the few citizens who possessed _tran- sportation -- originally a * horse, with or without a buggy. Later he was ‘one of the first in dow’ to own a n automobile. It was only sensible and humane that he visit patients in their homes to dispense his compassion and potions. cHaabb sg OE - thedoctor has access toa full range of medical equipment and services. It is not possible to provide complete care out of a little black bag. anymere, House calls usually are an inefficient way of delivering health care. A doctor can look after several patients in his office in the time It takes to visit one at home. Doctors have to remain productive in areas where demands for their services are high, and they also must carry a large patient load (some feel an _ excessive load) to pay thei overhead and maintain their income. House calls (and I've madea million of them!) fall into four categories. The emergency house visit wastes time and may be dangerous for the patient. Symptoms such as severe chest pain, coma, oF collapse, and accidents where a_ laceration’ or fracture has occurred are sufficient reason to transfer the patient to hospital. House calls are frequently of value if the complaint is vomiting, fever, or pain. The doctor can often reach a satisfactory diagnosis, but most are more comfortable ae ~ if the ‘meet the patient inthe,’ Now; in many instances, it — the pa ! is better practiceste take! the: -: ‘patient to a location where Emergency Department’’’ where blood testa and xrays . pre readily available. The third type is the convenience call. The patient is either marginally ill or is well, and may even be out shopping or playing bridge with the neighbors when the visit is made. These families wonder why they have difficulty when they request the next house ea Finally, most doctors willingly make calls to the homes of elderly or infirm patients, or to see children when there is a harrassed mother with a houseful of Last year 693,904 house calls and emergency visits were made by BC doctors. Doctors never make howe talls? Don't you believe it! _ Is Aloxi Putting Us On HALIFAX (CP) — Alexei Volkov, the Soviet Union's fisheries representative in Halifax, says the Russian fishing fleet off Canada has been reduced to. about one- quarter its previous size since Canada introduced its 2+mile fishing-control zone, Some of the fleet has been transferred to southern areas ani to fishing banks off Africa, he said. Russian biologists feel the 20¢-mile limit extends too far," Volkov sald. ‘They support a 50-or 60-mile zone. He said a country cannot save up its unharvested fish resources forever as it could with mineral resources. General Office - 635-4357 Circulation - 635-6357 TERRACE/ KITIMAT daily herald | PUBLISHER...Laurie Mallet MANAGING EDITOR...Ernest Senior REPORTERS...Oonna Valileres (Terrace- Thornhill) KITIMAT OFFICE:..Pat, Zelinski - ¢vz-cuur “The fish will die for nothing if they are not caught," The Russian fishing in- dustry employs close to one million peaple, including shipbuilding, processing and canning personnel, he said. Its backbone is a fleet of 3,000 large vessels of more than 100 tons each. There are also about 20,000 smaller vessels working in Russian > coastal waters, “We have about 60 bilateral international | fishing agreements, We fish practically everywhere in the world and need in- ternational co-operation,” a Published by Sterling Publishers. Published every weekday at 3212 Kalum St., Terrace, B.C. Amember of Varifled Circulation. Autherlzedas secand class mail. 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