Ad - The Terrgce Standard, Wednesday, February 12, 2003

._ TERRACE -

STANDARD

ESTABLISHED APRIL 27, 1988

PUBLISHER: ROD LINK
ADDRESS: 32106 Clinton Street Terrace, B.C. » V8G 5R2
TELEPHONE: (250) 638-7283 * FAX: (250) 638-8432
WEB: www.terracestandard.com
EMAIL: newsrcom@terracestandard.com

HERE'S WHEN THE AMERICANS WERE THINKING
OF SCREWING US OVER WITH A 46% DuTY AND
HERE'S WHEN THEY STARTED SCREWING US OVER
WITH A 27.2% DUTY AND HERE'S WHERE THEY
SCREWED US OVER IN '01,’91,'86 AND &2 AND HERE'S
WHERE THE AMERICANS SCREWED US OVER IN 1853
AND HERE'S WHERE NEW BRUNSWICK GOT
SCREWED OVER BY MAINE IN THE 19205 AND
HERE'S WHEN THE AMERICANS LANDED AT
PLYMOUTH ROCK,AND SCREWING US OVER
WAS TUT A TWINKLE
sy In THOR EYe AND
_HERE'S WHERE A

Get it over with | 2@4Z\\\ “SA, Fee
“TELL ME about the buses again, grandpa. | S o, Fe

DAY SCREWED OVER
. KAN A CANADIAN
Were they really big and yellow?” ¢
“Well, they were also a bit of an orange

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colour, grandson. And each morning they car-

ried classes of students to school and home

again in the afternoon. Now go set your alarm

clock. 5 a.m. comes pretty early for the new
one-day-a-week school day. You’ve got a five-
mile walk to get to school and you’ll want to be
rested if you want to get home before
midnight.”

Sound drastic? Perhaps, but not totally out of
line given the brutal decision-making awaiting
the Coast Mountains school board over the next
few weeks.

Faced with a budget freeze and the need to cut
upwards of $5 million from an already-
squeezed annual spending plan of $47 million,
the news over the next while won’t be pretty.
Indeed, the polite word “reconfiguration” being
used as the school district prepares to cut costs
might easily translate into “smoking ruin of a
public education system.”

Aside from the ugly reality of more job losses
in teaching and support worker ranks, bigger
classes and fewer schools, a wholesale shift is
about to happen. In effect, parents will be asked
to become volunteer administrators, teachers,
teaching assistants and the like to fill the gaps.

Students already relegated to the role of
worker bees in having to raise money for re-
creation and equipment, will be sent out with
more chocolates, more cookie dough, more
Christmas decorations and more empty bags to
forage for place cans and bottles...

Above all else,.:the possibility: of:a four-day

school week raises the most problems. To be
sure, it will reduce school district costs — esti-
mates range up to $1.2 million a year

But this is a society tuned and geared to a fi-
ve-day week. Working hours and school hours
are meshed closely together in this rhythm. A
four-day week will place more onus on parents
to provide for care. Employers will face more
requests for time off. Parents will have to shell
out more money for care or put together patch-
work care arrangements.

And because women remain the primary care
givers, the burden of coping will fall to them to
a larger degree than it is already. It’ll be off-
loading of the most extreme kind.

The school district should take up the provin-
cial government offer of experts to help out,
even to the extent of turning over the keys. Cut-
ting out the middleman would remove the shield
the province has erected between itself and par-
ents.

If the province says it can do better than by
all means, let them have at it. It’s probably
something it wants to do anyway.

Se enn TESTE
PUBLISHER/EDITOR: Rod Link
ADVERTISING MANAGER: Brian Lindenbach
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Edouard Credgeur
NEWS: JelT Nagel
ee NEWS/SPORTS Sarah Zimmerman
2002 WINNER NEWS/COMMUNITY: Jennifer Lang
CCNA BETTER FRONT OFFICE: Darlene Keeping & Carol McKay
NEWSPAPERS CIRCULATION SUPERVISOR: Terri Gordon
COMPETITION ADVERTISING CONSULTANTS:
Bert Husband & Stacy Gyger
TELEMARKETER: Stacy Gyger

COMPOSING: Susan Credgeur
AD ASSISTANT: Sandra Stefanik

SUBSCRIPTION RATES BY MAIL: ;
$56.25(+$3.94 GST)=60.19 per year; Seniors $49.50 (+$3.47
GST)=52,97; Out of Province $63.22 (+$4,43 GST)=67,65
Outside of Canada (6 months) $152.34 (+$10,66 GST)=163.00

MEMBER OF

B.C. AND YUKON COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS ASSOCIATION,
CANADIAN COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS ASSOCIATION

<ya

eT Minwsharens
a eeowmeiarien

TeHid Collie oot Babee

AND
B.C. PRESS COUNCIL (www.bepfesscouncll.org)

Serving the Terrace and Thomhill area, Published on Wadnesday of aach week al 3210 Clinton Street,
Tortaca, British Columbia, V8G 5A2. .

Stories, photographs, Illustrations, cesigns and typesivles In the Terrace Standard are the properly of the
copyright holdars, including Cariboo Press (1969) Lid, its ilustration repro services and advertising
agencies, :

Reproduction in whola or In part, without written permission, is specilically prohibited:

Authorized as second-class mail psnding tha Post Offica Daparimani, for payment af poslaga in cash.

Special thanks to all our contributors and correspondents
for thelr time and talents =

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Big Money means big trouble.

VICTORIA — Canada’s mass
media are so very predictable:
When Prime Minister Jean
Chrétien unveiled his proposed
campaign finance reform
package last week, editorial
writers and columnists went
into their usual righteously in-
dignant finger-wagging mode.

“Don’t give taxes to politi-
cal parties,” blared one editor-
ial. “One step forward, one
step back,” said another.

All agreed that the proposal
was the worst thing to come
along since Bismarck intro-
duced social programs such as
health care and welfare in
Germany.

To refresh your memory,
here is what the prime mini-
ster wants to enshrine in legis-
lalion aimed at making cam-
paign funding more transpar-
ent:

W@ Donations by trade un-
ions and corporations to politi-
cal parties and leadership
campaigns would be banned.

@ A ceiling of $1,000 a

tion to riding associations,
candidates and those seeking
nominations.

W@ Personal contributions to
politicians and their parties
would be limited to $10,000, -

year would be imposed on do- ~
nations by unions and corpora-.

So far so good. The part

that has mainstream media,
big corporations one and all,
in such a state of anxiety is
that lost private contributions

vay pee

Hey. It worked for canning lids

“ARTIFICIAL HEARTS are
nothing new. Politicians have
had them for years.” Mark Mc-
Ginnis

Governments are elected
one vote at a time. They can
also be kicked out one vote at
a time. Petitions, demonstra-
tions, griping on call-in shows
- while they indicate vaters’
unhappiness, don’t deter poli-
ticians.

Personal letters are some-
thing else.

For the average voter to ga-
ther a clean sheet of paper, an
envelope, and a pen with ink
is not easy. ;

To marshal his thoughts and
write a coherent message may
be a foreign task. To buy a 48
cent stamp and drop the letter
into the mail before he loses
the commitment, the voter has
to be riled.

Every riled letter-writer

could be a lost vote come next
election. Politicians know this.
They also believe for every
upset letter writer, 50 more
feel the same way but couldn’t
find paper or pen.

Plenty of us are angry with
the Liberals for their ill treat-
ment of education. Instead. of

we WINCH! WHERE'S THAT
fee NEW TOQUE UNCLE
Re Vic. BOUGHT Your

-FROM THE CAPITAL.
HUBERT BEYER

are to be replaced by federal
funding, a.k.a. taxpayers,
money. Heaven forbid that a
fairer, more transparent and
democratic election system
should actually cost individual
Canadians a few dollars.

Much better to have unions
and big business slug it out by
proxy through their often ob-
scenely large contributions to
parties and candidates, regard-

less of whether, or not their,
members, employees ar,
clients, agree. ..,

Chrétien’s plan would boost
public financing of election
campaigns to 89 per cent from
the present 59 per cent. The
present share consists of donor
tax-credits.

Major parties would receive
a combined total of about $33
million in public funding in
non-election years and roughly
$80 million.in an--election

THROUGH BIFOCALS
CLAUDETTE SANDECKI

bellyaching to each other over
coffee about Gordon Campbell
refusing to fund the pay raise
he gave teachers, each one of
us needs to write, fax or email
(or do all three) both the pro-
vincial finance minister and
education minister.

Finance minister Gary Col-
lins’ mailing address is Post
Office Box 9048, Station Pro-
vineial Government. Victoria,
B.C. V8W 9E2. Fax 250-387-
5594. Email
gary.collinsmla@leg,be.ca.

Education minister Christy -

Clark’s mailing address is Post

I tour was

YOUR FAVOURITE 2

year.

The share individual parties
Teceive, based on the results of
the previous ‘election, would
be about $1.50 cents for each
vote they obtained.

One of the typically Cana-
dian aspects of the proposal is
that the’ Bloc Quebecois,
whose sole aim is to break up
the country, would also re-
ceive its fair share.

Aside from that, I see little
wrong with the plan. As long
as I have cast my ballots in
federal and provincial elec-
tions, the feeling that both un-
ions and corporations do their
best to buy elections has never
left me.

} have worked for newspa-
pers whose unions contributed
to the NDP coffers during
election campaigns. I was
never asked if that was OK by
me,

Memories of the 1975 elec-
tion campaign in British Co-
lumbia are stiil vivid. The
Dave Barrett NDP government

CAP por

pohly ep eae “yu tha
oAiieg sts: first, and only, term

ad introduced the Insurance

Corporation of B.C., the pro-
vincially-run auto insurance
Crown corporation.

In the course of the cam-
paign, private insurance com-
panies poured vast sums into
the Social Credit Party’s cof-
fers,

Mind you, the payoff. never
came. The Socreds won, .al-
right, but Bill. Bennett, the

Office Box 9045, Station Pro-
vincial Government, Victoria,
B.C. V8W 9E2. Fax 250-387-
3200. Email
minister.educ@gems7.gav.be.c
a.

If you think your personal
note won’t count in Victoria,
remember what homecanners
did last year to Bernardin,
manufacturer of Gem canning
jars.

Hundreds of homecanners
couldn’t find lids to buy for
their home canning jars. One
farmer’s wife, mother of eight
kids, had 3,000 jars she could
not fill for lack of lids. She
was not happy.

The Muncie, Indiana man-

ufacturer quit making 78mm. .

lids claiming sales were too
low to be profitable. Never
mind homecanners across Ca-
nada had shelves full of empty
Gem jars; they wanted to can
full of their garden produce,
Did. housewives settle for
the manufacturer’s excuse?
Not likely, They set up.a web
site for homecanners across

the country to add their names.
_ About 9000 angry people
signed a petition which was

CT ts.

co Wi
ial? . .
late as 1948, there was much

new premier, never scrapped
ICRC, =

The Prime Minister's plan
would put an end to. such: bla-
tant election-buying practices
once and for all.

The individual voters,
casting their ballots for the par-
ties or candidates of their
choice would be the real win-
ners. Their votes would no be
rendered ineffective by inordi-
nately large contributions from
unions and corporations, the ef-
fects of which cannot be under-
estimated,

The way we shape our de-
mocratic institutions, the way

we govern ourselves is anever- .

evolving process. We add a lit-
tle here, we fix something
there.

When women were given
the vote, many an editorial
writer warned darkly that
women were simply not suffici-
ently informed to make intelli-
gent political choices.

When native Indians and
Canadians of oriental origin
eye, given the right to vote as

“opposition from newspapers.

I] am therefore not: surprised
that, once again, our media
line up against what can only
be an improvement to our elec-
tion process.

Good thing Izzy Asper isn’t
the prime minister. _

Beyer can be reached at:
E-mail: hubert@coolcom.com;
Tel (250) 381-6900

eventually delivered to Bernar-
din. ,

They bombarded the media,
doing interviews, writing letters
to editors. CBC radia and tele-
vision ran news stories.

Finally, January 21, 2003
The Wall St. Journal ran a front
page story. Imagine, house-
wives on the front page of New
York's money newspaper?!

The next day Bernardin
phoned the Saskatchewan rin-
gleader, Marla Rauser, promis-
ing to produce this summer a
one-time volume of millions of
lids. ;

Bernardin urged Rauser to
get the word out to homecan-
ners they should buy a lifetime
supply of lids this summer;
they dogsn’t plan to make
more, _

Berardin’s finality didn’t sit
well with many homecanners.
But in the meantime, a Toronto
factory promises to produce a
Steady supply of facsimile lids
beginning in April.

So write to Collins and
Clark. Be brief, but firm. Either
cuts have to stop or Campbell
has to go, Start writing,

HE'S SPENDING WAY [28]
100 MUCH TIME WiTH

THATS wity THE DOG:

—~— |

Caan 2 dT ee a SR hn wl ea ea