Page Ad — Tarrace Standard, Wednesday, May 27, 1992 a "TERRACE STANDA * ESTABLISHED APRIL 27, 1988 . Rod Link Registration No, 7820 4647 Lazelle Ave,, Terrace, B.C., VBG 186 Phone (604) 638-7283 - Fax (604) 638-8432 Senving te Terrace aoa, Published on Wednesday of cach week by Cariboo Press (1968) Ltd. a1 4647 Lazcile Ave, Tories, British Columbia, Stories. photographs, ilustrations, designs and typastyles in the Terrace Slandand are the property of the copyright boders, including Cariboo Prass (1960) Lid., its it. ' bustration repro servicas and advertising agencies. RBepraduction in whole of In part, without wiillen permission, is Specifically pronibited. Auiforized & second-class mail pending the Post Office Desartment, lor payment of postage in cash. Gena Publishar/Editor: Advertising Manager Marlee Paterson Producilon Manager: Edouard Credgeur Jaff Nagel — Naws/Community, Malcolm Baxter — News/Sports Rose Fisher — Frant Offica Manager, Carolyn Anderson — Typesetter * Avene Watts — Typesetier, Susan Credgeur — Composing/Darkroom, Janet Vivelros — Advertising Consultant, Sam Collier — Advertising Consultant, , Charlane Matthews — Circulation Supervisor Aneel COMMU AN ‘ Chu CCNA Z j VERIFIED | CIFGULATION CONTROLLED Special thanks to all our contributors and correspondents for thelr time and. talents. __ EDITORIAL Voodoo at work The hospital budget situation has at- tracted a different kind of doctor. It’s the spin doctor, a term coined in the United. States for 4 person who tries to put the best possible light on a tricky or bad public re- lations circumstance. And what a situation the spin doctor faces here in Terrace. Mills Memorial Hos- pital’s budget is. frozer, resulting in $525,000 less: money this year to do what it did last year. Translated it means 22 bed closures and job losses. There’s no recog- nition that the hospital acts as a regional centre. _ Sy The spin doctor put the voodoo to work fast. No sooner had Mills Memorial an- nounced the extent of its cuts .then. the phone rang. The message is that the news. isn’t bad. Oh no. You've got to realize that the provincial health care budget has in- creased despite the nasty thing that has: . happened to Mills. The spin doctor’s point is that the health ministry has shifted its spending priorities away from hospital care to community and - preventative health services. Generally, the - expectation is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, mo, It’s not bad reasoning. The NDP last year said this kind of plan would be a priority and it was.a main point of the recent royal - commission on health care and costs. - All signs point to. another disappointment to those ‘who philosophically ‘support the NDP. This time -it involves the provincial ‘government’s response to the federal court ruling which struck down the requirement for a federal review of the Kemano Com- pletion Project. ays First, provincial environment | minister John Cashore said there would be a provin- But spin doctors weave their webs in mysterious ways. They remain hidden in the background after studying the x-rays and prognosis of public opinion and decid- ing how the surgery should take place. In this case, the spin doctors used a real physician, Dr. David Bowering, the head of the Skeena Health Unit. Dr. Bowering is no doubt happy that community and pre- ventative spending in the health unit is going up. Yet it’s a tad scungy on the part "of the spin doctors to put. Dr. Bowering into the position of being the government spokesman forthe plan, Shifting budget priorities is not an admin- istrative function. Its origins are in consid- ering and making policy. Responsibility for that area rests with elected officials. _ The effect of this is to give the ap- pearance of one local body competing with another local body for the same health care ‘dollar, Another effect is to treat health care as an economic development project by comparing the numbers of people to be hired by the health unit against those who will lose their jobs at the hospital. All of this merely confuses the whole is- sue, leaving the public unsure of who is tight and who is wrong. Then again, maybe that’s what the spin doctor had in _ mind all along. cial environmental review of the project. Now premier Mike Harcourt says there will be a public review. But he’s yet to ex- plain what the heck that means. One thing is sure - the NDP government needs to put people to work. And that means it won’t be able to satisfy Kemano’s hardcore op- ponents. a Hoard Even one-bedroom. ‘apart- er heaven ment dwellers quickly adapt to living in a larger house. By the . end of unpacking, as though they were accustomed to so | Bifocals many rooms, their belongings fill every space -- except the PY Claudette Sandecki garage. Cramming a garage so it blends with an established Through | neighbourhood takes’ time and persistence, While microwaves speed cooking, fax machines zip written communications through phone cables, and the . Concorde. wings travellers to . another continent quicker than you can drive out of an airport parking lot, good garage gathering happens little by little: A green ‘plastic flower pot set on a ledge, A plywood remnant leaned against a wall. Raggy coveralls hung -from a nail. A’ week's newspapers - stacked on ashelf.. . Those .of..us who. grew up with Depression -parents can draw on twenty years experi- — ence hoarding. . cardboard boxes, old clothes, and three- legged chairs only. a jour- neyman joiner- could restore. Younger folk -- unless they’re fans of Fred McMurray movies, readers of Erma Bom- _ instinctive packrats -- have to learn ac- | beck books, or cumulation by trial and error. So far neither Sunset Books nor International) —s car+ respondence Schools offer in- struction, os Accumulation shortcuts -ex- © ist, These I shall share, 7 -~ How do I qualify to advise others in the art of squirreling, since I don’t own a garage? ‘One look at my closets, base- ment and outbuildings would answer that. My stashes stack up against anybody’s, , I cannot bear to whisk any- thing from my life without ~ “possibility or retrieval, Whether it’s a lamp with fried ’ wiring or a jacket five sizes too. small, a sojourn "in the, garage”? permits me to Teconsider - its fate. Eight. months later, loading a hinge- less suitcase on to a pickup heading to the dump is almost painless, , _ , So. How to fill that, garage pronto. co First, tinderstand garage grist can be any infrequently used possession’ unlikely ta be harmed by dark; damp, or desertion... This.” includes lawnmowers, ladders, hockey gear, garden tools, canning kettles, ‘sleighs, recyclables, casters. ' Let nothing except kitchen refuse go directly to the gar- bagé can ‘or .dump. Refuse sorting takes thought. "Tweez- - "ing /a'sliver is lightning: com- pared to deciding the resting place of a broom handle. ~ Search the want ads. Haunt. garage sales.. Scour landfills for cheap repairable castoffs only an ambilious, skilled ‘handyman would or could revive. ; Persuade Welcome Wagon to organize a block party. In- stead of a casserole, have cach neighbour drag along some junk. . Cement tentative friendships by offering to warehouse thelr tent trailer, barbecue, or left- over wallboard. And if, after all - these measures, there’s still oodles of garage space? - .Parkthe car. | tg tragtte ” nase oy le i A Ptah i f eee i hab Escort services do haved place. | VICTORIA -- Every 10 years or so, the politicians in Vic- toria rediscover sex, and are quite shocked that it happens in places other than the bedrooms of married folks. Back in 1983, Bob McClel- land, one of Bill Bennett’s ° cabinet ministers, made quite a splash when he announced out of the blue that "baby The media, forever unable.ta resist the temptation of stories involving murder, mayhem _and lurid sex, played McClel- land’s allegations for all they could, but in the end, the honourable minister was un- able to substantiate his story. After a decade of relative quiet on the sex front, Victoria finds itself embroiled, once again, in a sex story of consid- erable proportions, this one in- volving escort agencies. It alf started when it was learned that a 14-year-old girl was allegedly working for an escort agency. Attorney Gen eral Colin Gabelmann responded quite correctly by ordering an immediate investi- gation. No sconer did Gabelmann announce that his ministry was conducting an investigation, than the Times Colonist, the local daily newspaper, was stricken by an attack of con- science and suspended its hitherto quite lucrative clas- sified ads for "Escort Ser- vices." And as the story continued to unfold, the media had a hey day. The 14-year-old, who was alleged to be working for an escort agency, appeared on television, face obscured to prevent identification, saying she only answered the phone. She never discussed sex with potential clients phoning in, and she certainly didn’t have _ sex with clients, the girl said, - And then she made what I consider one of the saddest comments on our society and - the system which is to protect — From the Capital by Hubert Beyer children. She told the inter- . some of which she had been sexually abused. The first real home she has ever known, the girl said, was the escort agency. The ‘women, she said, are kind to her and protect her. For the first time in her life, she said, she feels secure and safe. But the story continued to grow bigger. Trying to get a new angle on it, the media in- terviewed the owner of the agency, a.certain Grant Lindsay-Dickson, who just happens to be in jail for at- tempted murder. Lindsay-Dickson waxed wise about escort agencies in general, how they serve clients from all walks of life, and then he put the cat amongst the pigeons. The Victoria police department, he said, had hired a couple of women from his agency for a party. And while at most of such parties, the women only , engage in exotic, spell erotic, dancing, this was the excep- tion, he said. Sexual favour were granted, Lindsay-Dickson had even more titillating news. Some police officers were regular clients of his agency, he said, and one Greater Victoria fe- male officer sometimes worked as an escort. To get some perspective on the story, one must consider the source. Just how reliable are the statements of a man who is in prison for having ~ knifed his common-law wife? Still, Victoria’s police chief: Dovg Richardson was spooked enough to immediately order an internal investigation into ei” Hi MARTEN, WE'RE JUST BACK FoR ANOTHER / | CHECK- UP, How S IT HMM... WELL YOUR DIARY LOOKS OKAY... ANY REASON You FEEL BETTER THS oe OD URGURART Viewer she had been through = 17 different foster homes, in’ |, THEY! THar WAS. Lindsay-Dickson’s allega- tions, | Meanwhile, the purists'and’!?“ the moralizérs are hidpitig that!" the outcome of the con- . troversy will be a legislated end to escort agencies, which, Isubmit, would not bea desirable goal. I think it can be safely said ~ that prostitution is here to stay. The question is in what form society is willing to tolerate it. One only has to take one look at Victoria’s Government Street after dark to see that street prostitution is the least | acceptable form for a number of reasons, , Not only does it turn the downtown cores of our cities into a place where most people would rather not be at night, but being forced to take to the streets places the women ina _ very vulnerable and dangerous position. _ In all the years that escort agencies have operated in Vic- toria, no women working out of an agency has been mur- dered, while quite a few women working the streets have ended up dead, Escort agencies take prostilution off the streets into a safer environment for the women, while leaving the streets to folks in pursuit of pleasures, those of sexual grat- ification, It’s understood that the government should make sure ho juveniles work for escort " agencies, and that owners or operators of escort agencies should have a clean police record, But beyond that, the goverment should help, not . hinder escort agencies in their efforts to take prostitution off the streets, oe ATOKE! I AIN'T BUSHEP T SWEAR'! a