A4 - The Terrace Standard, Wednesday, August 6&, 1997 TRER RACE: STANDARD | 4647 Lazelle Ave., Terrace, B.C. V8G 188 (604) 638-7283 Fax (604) 638-8432 ESTABLISHED APRIL 27, 1988 A Division of Carthoo Press (1969) Ltd. ADDRESS: 3210 Clinton Street Terrace, B.C. * V8G 5R2 TELEPHONE: (250) 638-7283 * FAX: (250) 638-8432 EMAIL: standard@kermode.net Hello, Premier THE GROWING number of victims of the: Skeena Cellulose crisis have to wonder when. Premier Glen Clark is going to take an interest in their plight. That’s because it seems that nothing happens on any specific issue until the premier locks and loads and goes to war. ; Witness the gamesmanship between the provin- cial government and Alcan regarding the latter’s Kemano project. After the province killed the project, the issue became one of compensation owed the company for its loss. After all sorts of threats, bluster and havoc from both sides, it appears as if the provincial govern- ment and Alcan are going to reach an agreement for the company to receive electricity to replace what would have been generated had the Kemano project gone ahead in the first place. + The company will have that secure source of" power it said it needs to justify a major capital * investment in B.C. and Mr. Clark can claim all victory in his attempt to provide more high in-, come jobs in the province. : Witness the premier’s actions on the commer-: cial fishery. First Mr. Clark picks a fight with the: federal government, the American federal: government and several American states. You ' get the feeling that if he could, Mr. Clark would: arm the provincial ferry fleet and send it north to confront Alaskan fishing boats. At the very least, Mr. Clark made everybody . pay attention to the need for a salmon treaty where all sides may achieve some satisfaction. But on Skeena Cellulose, Mr. Clark is strangely quiet despite having some inviting targets for an, ‘NDP premier. There’s an eastern-based corpo-. rate interest which literally cut and ran. There are the banks which are making tons of money, enough to gobble up other parts of the financial sector to produce even more profits, but which seem to want somebody else to take the big hurt to revive Skeena Cellulose. . A very rough estimate calculates that the job loss here from Skeena Cellulose is the equivalent to chucking 50,000 people out of work in Van- couver, You know if that did happen down south, Mr. Clark would have both barrels blaz- ing. Why should we expect anything different up here? Fishy logic LET’S SEE if we have it right. The Vancouver Canucks are a Canadian NHL team owned by an enormously wealthy American. He has enough cash to pay a Canadian playing in the States (U.S) $20 million to return to Canada. The ex- pectation is that this will result in Canadians paying more money to see a Canadian play for the American owner to generate more profits for the American. Now if only we could convince a rich American to spend as much money to buy a huge whack of salmon which could then be caught by Cana-. dians and then processed by Canadian fish plants and then sold to the Americans to provide that rich American with a profit, we’d all be just fine. 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Special thanks to all our contributors and correspondants for thelr time and talents OVERTHERE | GOT 20 MILLION... DOlMEAR 20 TRILLION ¥,,, ta e/ ATrABOY-. . PAPPIEL. | Liberals looking pretty bad VICTORIA — In the dying days of the legislative session, a political bomb went off, the destructive force of which may cause the end of two careers — that of Liberal leader Gordon Campbell and his lieutenant, Gary Farrell-Collins. The bomb was planted, ac- tivated and detonated by the Liberals under their own feet. It was one of the most blatant breaches of a promise ever made by a party and a politician. Remember the Liberal prom- ise to wipe out the ‘‘gold- plated pension’? MLAs were used to? Campbell and his Lib- erals would have none of it, they kept saying. ‘Being an MLA is a public service, not a career. We can- not ask others to tighten their belts if MLAs aze not willing to tighten theirs,” said Camp- bell in a 1996 Liberal party election platform document. “We will vole to wipe out pensions for MLAs,’’ the doc- ument went on. During the campaign, all Liberal candidates made ample use of the pledge to scrap the MLAs’ pension plan. It was a major plank in their platform. Mind you, the plan had al- ready been scrapped. The NDP government under former "FROM, THE CAPITAL HUBERT BEYER premier Mike Harcourt, in a shameless display of political expediency, killed the pension plan itself, thus taking a major initiative from the Liberals. I would like to reiterate here my personal position on the is- sue. I’m with Gordon Wilson, former Liberal leader and now leader of the Progressive Dem- ocratic Alliance: “We need to say to the peopl of British Columbia, if you're going to pay peanuts, you're going to hire monkeys.’’ Simply killing the pension plan without having another, perhaps less lavish plan in place, was stupid, but hell, op- portunism knocks only once. For better or worse, the pen- sion plan existed no more. All along, it was understood that eventually, a new plan would come into force, but the Liberals kept insisting that il wouldn’t be ‘gold-plated.’ Benefits would tio exceed those of people in the public service and the private sector. And them last week, the politicians got caught with their hands deep in the cookic jar, It turned out the four parties, NDP, Liberals, Reformers and the lone Wil: son, had reached a quiet agree- ment to give birth to a new pension plan thal was far from the version the Liberals bad promised. To make matters worse, the cozy litle arrangement was hidden in the Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, a housekeeping bill that might easily have gone unnoliced, Thanks to Vancouver Sui reporter Justine Hunter, it didn’t. She spotted it and broke the story. The first one to run for cover was Campbell. He hadu’t real- ly known about the changes, having left the all-party negoti- ations over what shape the new plan was to take to Farrell- Collins. Left hung out to dry by his leader, Farrell-Collins took a swing at Campbell, saying the matter had been thoroughly discussed in the Liberal caucus. It was Campbell’s word against that of Farrell- Collins. Following a hastily convened meeting between the | two, Farrell-Collins announced that if his party colleagues had had the wrong impression, he was somy, What was really sorry was the way Farrell-Collins folded under pressure, Two possible conclusions can be drawn: either Campbell knew about the arrangement, thereby committing the most obnoxious political flip-flop, or he didn’t know about it, which would make him look pretty stupid, In either case, he has added a big nail to his « political coffin. a Farrell-Collins, for long the heir-apparent to Campbell, lost all credibility when he suc-. cumbed to Campbell’s pres- sure and became the fall guy for his leader. All of which should please Mike de Jong, who has been very busy grooming himself to take over the Liberal leader- ship when Campbell bites the dust. He’s one giant step closer to his goal. Beyer can be reached at: Tel: (250) 920-9300; Fax: (250) 385-6783; E-mail: hubert@coolcom.com : Smoke packs prove useful WE CRITICIZE smokers for fouling their lungs, polluting ours with secondhand smoke, and escalating health care coasts needlessly. But where would our world be without empty cigarette packages? Think of all the desultory conversations kept alive over a ‘cup of coffee by someone flip- ping a cigarelte package over and over, end over end, cart wheeling from edge to edge, like worry beads occupying thoughts. Boxes can be flat- tened, folded, or bent like a musical saw. , Smokers keep their aim sharp by flicking them into the nearest waste basket. : How many drivers would be lost wilhout the guidance of a rudimentary road map hastily sketched on the back of a ~ cigarette package? And which songs would we . be missing if song writers hadn't jotted a melodic phrase or two on a package to hang on to it until they got their hands Sorry IM LATE! CONFERENCE CALL! Buc! You Took Your SECRETARY TO MACDONALRS FoR LuNcH!! THROUGH BIFOCALS- CLAUDETTE SANDECKI ona guitar or piano keyboard? Which novels and poems, even jokes, would have evaporated if key ideas hadn’t been preserved on a cigarette package until the writer reached a typewriter. They sre as popular as Rolodexes for noting phone numbers. As doodle paper, they rank supreme. They also make great fake packages to decorate a Christ- mas tree, crisply wrapped in Yuletide paper, tied with a satin ribbon or Phentex yarn in a contrasting color. Cigarelte packages are al- ways close at hand. Why, I bet even the boat formation in the fishermen’s Malaspina blockade was plotted on a Craven A pack- age. Legal or not, the blockade had the same effect on the fish war as a policeman’s knock during a domestic dispute, It reconfigured the dynamics of the argument. Suddenly the lopsidedness of the west coast fishing situation was first up on both American and Canadian national news. Maybe we'd gain a trealy with the U.S. in record time if Canadians would stand togeth- er on this side of the border. After all, this is a dispute witb a forcign power, not a fellow Canadian group inconvenienc- ing our travel or incomes. But no, Nanoose Bay’s eighty em- FRESH SNOW! TRACKS FROM “| [Z'MSORRY!! So HER OFFICE DOOR TO YOUR CAR! TRACKS FROM YOUR. CAR 10 THE DUMPSTER WHERe RAVENS ARE. PULLING OUT HAMBURGER CARTONS f ployees are suing to keep the | missile testing range open even . if it means sacrificing 1200 fisher’s livelihoods to U.S. overfishing. Dawson City’s sending Vic- toria a bill for $100,000, the — amount of tourist business they expect to lose since Alaska fer- Ties won't tie up in Prince Rupert. And in Vancouver, Liberal MP Hedy Fry's Lamenting the momentary loss to Vancouver's hospitality in- dustry. Meanwhile fisheries minister David Anderson is racing from one high level mecting to an- other placating ruffled Amer- icans, pretending he doesn’! - seé Glen Clark’s line in the Nanoose sand. Americans laugh at our inter- nal bickering, Experience has -faught ihem we self-destruct. They keep on wiping out our fish stacks, Prince Rupert fishers can tel- ly their year’s catch on a cigarette package. SORRY '] ANP L'tL BRING BACK THE LAPTOP AND THE CAMERA AND PAY FOR MY BoGus EXPENSE CLAINIS AND THE FIRST CLASS SEATS TO , THE CONFERENCE .