Page 4, The Herald. Friday, December 29, 1978 TERRACE/KITIMAT daily herald General Office - 635-6357 Published by Circulation - 635-6357 Sterling Publishers PUBLISHER . Laurie Maltett GEN. MANAGER. Knox Coupland EDITOR - Greg Middleton CIRCULATION - TERRACE - Andy Wightman 635-6357 KITIMAT - Pat Zelinski 632-2747 KITIMAT OF FICE - 632-2747 Published every weekday at 3212 Kalum Street, Terrace, B.C. A member of Varified Circulation. Authorized as second class mail. Registration number 7201. Pastage paid in cash, relurn postage guaranteed. NOTE OF COPYRIGHT The Herald retains full, complete and sole copyright in any advertisement produced and-or any editorial or photographic content published in the Herald. Reproduction is not permitted without the written permission of the Publisher. it is that time of year for New Year's resolutions. While the management and staff of . fhe Herald wish you all the best in the New Year, we would aiso like you to think very carefully about your resolutions for the caming 12 manths. There are, of course, all those personal im- provements you would tike to make. Most of us have some little vice we would like to give up. Probably there are many of us who could cat a ‘little less and exercise a little more. Some should ' give up smoking. Others should look at drinking more moderately. What we would like you to consider tor a moment Is not the selfish vows that, if kept, would make us look and feel better. We would like you to consider the community and larger . social body we iive In. ; Could we not all make some improvements in alf our Jives, if we saw not [ust our own situation, hut that of ofhers as well. We too easily identify ourselves with groups, causes. political ideologies and sects. _ ifwe couid all make a conscious effort to tearn _. tittle more about each other without trying to i impose our views and ideas we would alt be a little more understanding and through that understanding more tolerant. , itis the differences between people that makes them interesting. Let us cherish and preserve those differences, allowing them to have and influence and a broadening effect rather than cutting ourselves off from them. Then we will all have a Happy New Year. ITOR'S JOURNAL BY GREG MIDCLETON © There will doubtless be some complaints about ‘the fact that several of the CP Air jets scheduted to take Christmas travellers were unable to land. Before the yelling and screaming starts | would like to offer my congratulations to the CP Air ticket agent at the airport last Thursday and Friday night for not having a nervous breakdown or committing mayhern. . It was a difficult situation: With about a. hundred or more people walting for that airplane out, and the expectations of seeing friends and family running high, the disappointment when the weather deteriorated and the plane couldn't land was hard to handle. I is a difficult enough situation to have to make decisions effecting the safety and comfort of your fetlow man without having some half. corked individual get belligerent. Now, | was no more pleased to have to wait almost 24 hours to get out than any of my fellow travellers. Ihave, however, seen what a pilot has fo deaf with when he tries to land on a difficult runway in less than ideal conditions. Bussing passengers ta Prince Rupert is an alternative that neither CP Air nor the passengers themselves like. It is something the company tries to avoid. On this particular night a defay in the decision to bus was made as the roads were in questionabije condition. The roads ware later closed. You have to give the pifots credit for making .scveral aitampts te land here. You also have to give them the discretion to not land if they have doubts. After all, a number of lives depends on their decision, and none of us, thinking clearly would like to see a pilot risk flying a hundred peaple into a mountain on the off-chance that it he tanded those waiting al the airport wouldn'+ be inconvenienced. bam not quite sure if the most obnoxious of the customers actually offered to jake a pair of airline employees and flap them until he got to Vancouver. t may have been hallucinating from lack of sleep and the continuous stream of coffec supplied by the airline. | think | heard the ticket agent suggest the fellow who was doing the yelling take a dog sled and see how long it would take him to get {fo Vancouver that way. At the time and considering the weather it seemed like a pretty reasonable suggestion to me. | feel chat in our sober moments we all realize there is nothing we can do about the weather. I is a shame that in the less sober moments somc. people feel they have the right to yell about it al someone who has no more control over it than anyone else. { think we were treated well by both the airline and the caterer who operates the cafeteria al the airport. EDITORIAL |. Cerio JOURN AL ON Lang ie MONTREAL (CP) --pi year anda half ago, the Quebecois government out to make Quebec, in: words of . Culta Development Minis Camille Laurin, “as Frem as Ontario is English.” --i The yelps of protest from “the province’s English minority have taken on a quieter tone since the Charter of the French Language—popularly known as Bill 101 and Laurin's chosen instrument of francization—was passed by the national assembly. But during 1978, the year in which most of the charter’s provisions took ‘legal effect, ‘there were . plenty. -of ~ remindere that “te gap between French-and - English-speaking Quebecers ‘was as wide a5 ever. The year was not a month old when Chief Justice Jules Deschenes of Quebec Superior Court, ruling on a petition by six Montreal lawyers, declared that Bill 1091's restrictions on the use of English in the provincial > ti =O er taJ courts were wncon- atitutional. be at. ruling is beiug an- pealed by Quebec. Another challenge has been filed against * regulations which make French the only language of commercial advertising, Under preparation for action in 1979 is a ‘bid challenging restrictions on English-language schooling. Resorting to more direct tactics, a band of Mohawk Indians pulled about 300 of their children out of public schools to protest the law, and hundreds of Greek immigrants in Montreal refused to enrol] their chil- dren in French classes. Robert Litvack, a young lawyer who led the fight against the expansion of French in the courts and now is working on the challenge to the school provisions, “Sigh... another day, another 84.7 cents.” - IN QUEBEC candidly admits that his real complaint about Bill 101 is phicsophiral Where Laurin sees Quebec as a Freneh state, Litvack . favors Prime Minister - Trudeau's vision of “in- Stitutional bilingualism’’ from coast to coast. “But whether you can hammer and stretch and mould the constitution ta that effect is another question,” Litvack mused recently. “We may be trying to put a size-22 girdle on a size-3d woman." Recent opinion polls report that 57 per cent of Quebecers support the government’s language policy. wae Breaking the e5'down on Into ge ee ba:per- cent backing among French voters, whe make up 80 per cent of the population, esily offsets the 76-per-ceat a position among the English. Two days after the poll Was published, the _hationalisl St. Jean Baptiste Sociely said that only a few people, such as Liberal Opposition Leader Claude Ryan, were still “trying to ‘incite the minority for electoral purposes.” But on the most emotional issue, the language of schooling, even Ryan is careful. ; He would open English public schools to ‘all true anglophones,” his words for American and British im- migrants and = English- speaking Canadians who move to Quebec from other provinces. All of them now are forced inte French schools, with only Queboc-born anglopnenes retaining the right lo scheoling in their own language. Ryan would still bar from English schools the children of an estimated 200,000 immigrants—mainly Greek and Italian. Many of them want to see their children in English school ruome. Quiside traditionally bilingual Montreal, the most vacifereous opposition to Bill i01 has been in the Ottawa Valley and Hull areas— bordering Onlario—and complaints there have been tempered by a conciliatory attitude on the government's part. Officials at the Hull branch of the French langnage of- fiee, which enforces Bill 101, reported at one point that they had found 30 businesses which did not conform to the legal re- quirement to post signs and advertsing ia Frenrh. But businessmen have up to three years to comply, and Cultural Development . Minister. Laurin: reported that the “language police” so feared by some anglophones had not un- dertaken a single prasecution anywhere in the province, Many small businessmen have nevertheless vowed nat to obey the law until ordered todo so, and Herbert Devine, a Montreal florist who has Bone to court to press his claim, says the cost of converting to French would break him. “There is no possible way I can stay in business, and most small businesses are in the same boat," Devine told reporters. His court case, launched in combination with two other English-speaking businessmen, cites the Quebec Charter of Human Rights, which forbids dis- crimination on language Hrounds. Premier Rene Levesque was drawn inte the debate after Toronto author Pierre Berton threatened to come to Montreal, post an English circular in a bookstore, and Invite the province to prosecute him. Within days, Levesque Zave assurances that the government had come up age policy continues with a “fresh interpretation” of Bilt 101, and English bookstores would be able to advertise in the language of their customers. The premier was not so conciliatory when he declared that hig govern- ment would refuse to '‘get down on its"knees’’. to keep Sun Life Assurance Co,, Can- ada’s largest insyrancé firm, from moving its head office to Toronto from Montreal. Sun Life had cited Bill 101 as one reason for its move, but regulations published later in the year revealed the PQ was willing to go a Jong way to-calm the fears of Montreal’s Englishspeaking business community.. “_ Any company doing half of _ its business outside Quebec--and under certain circumstances other com- paniee as well—would be eligible to apply for special Status for its head office operations. . Much of the work could continue in English, a8 long as good faith was shown in the hiring and promotion of francophones, Raymond Gosselin, a former CNR executive who now heads the French language office, says no head office will be justified in leaving the province be- cause of the regulations, which do not differ markedly from legislation brought in by the previous Liberal. government, More acerbic was Dominik Dlouby, himself a bilingual immigrant and former chairman of the Montreal Stock Exchange, who assailed Sun Life's move to Taronto. “The people on the board of Sun Life are too old,” Diouhy told a reporter. “They've been out of touch with Quebec for years, “The government déesn’t want to destroy the economy. They are not going to hound business to death.” MONTREAL (CP) — The translation industry is booming in Quebec with costs for translations up 50 per cent in two years and now costing as much as 22 cents a word compared with five cents in Paris. These costs, industry executives say, are regulated by supply and demand—there is a huge backlog of English-lan- guage manuals and documents to be tran- slated, and a dearth of quality translators. “We are making up a 10 to 15-year backlog,’’ says Pierre Desaunettes, president of the computer translation specialist T.LM. Translation Ltd. "Tt will be four or five years of boom.” Henri Tasca, Montreal manager of the Paris- based Traductor, says there aren't enough people who can turn out good French. “There are more now than before, but they're taking advantage of it.” About 90 per cent of all translation is from English into French. Montreal has about 2,0) translators. Among the established firms, annual revenues range between $500,000 and $1 million, Guy Vauban, president of Universal Translation Co., sees a future where employees will — be required to write in both languages, The agencies work al justifying their prices, They say they can't produce good translations for under 12 cenls to 15 cents a word, of which about nine cents goes to the tranlator and another Translating it to money | three cents to the reviser- editor, Translator fees are such that writers com- plain they get less for the original copy than the ‘translator gets for the translation, ' Bul agencies — say business must realize that the difference between the 15-cent translation and the _ eight-cent translation is “not thr difference between & Cadillac and é Volkswagen to get fror. Toronto ta Quebec,” say. Mary Proctor-Barr, “It’s the differenc between a Cadillac and .. tricycle," said the president of Proctor- Barr, Bernard De Vienne, president of Bernard De Vienne Iic.,, says tran- slations costse much here because a translator is really a rewriter trying to get a message across ina different language and “that goes beyond translation.” De Vienne predicts translation will grow world-wide because of better communication systems ‘‘but the general trend toward more translation has been compounded in Canada by our special cir- cumstances,” “Translation in a wnilingual country such as France is done just for information purposes,”* he explained. ‘They want ito know what's happening elsewhere.” ” “In Canada, we want to tell French-Canadians what is happening in their own country, in their own back yard,” he added. OTTAWA BY RICHARD JACKSON OFFBEAT OTTAWA - You can tell by Postmaster General Lamontagne’s protestations in the Commons that Christmas mail is flowing “smoothly” through the Pest Office that, as might be expected, there is trouble, The postal workers, smarting under penalties for defying Parliament’s back- to-work law ending their recent strike, have been threatening openly further disruption unless granted amnesty. The mail, as Lamontagne told the Commons, will go through for Christmas — but slowly, and perhaps late. Now, in retrospect, some parliamentarians are suggesting that in cracking down — after 10 years of cravenly backing off — the government, with its back- to-work law and subsequent pensities, ‘“‘saved"’ the Postal Union. It didn’t have rank and file backing, they say, and was kept going for the few days before the’ government ended it only by the militancy of union ex- tremists. ' - Therank and file — in face of threats of damage to personal property, injury to person and retribution still to come — were defying the militants and trickling Gack to work, The mail, despite the strike, was moving. Not very rapidly perhaps, but really not much more slowly than it has for years in its on-again-off-again- strike again pony express rate, Had the government sat tight even for another few days, say these parliamentarians — and they will raise the matter in the House when the final strike settlement and penalties have been tied up — the union militants, rapidly losing rank support, would have been isolated. And the postal workers would have collapsed. There was some support for this argument even in government circles, but Liberal parliamentarians, with their public popularity on the toboggan, were nervous of taxpayer reac- | : into political trouble. ton nw In their panic over their sliding political fortunes, they forgot that the tax- payers have been through some 17 strikes — legal and iJlega] —- in the Jast 10 years, a few of the mail stoppages of weeks’ duration. Meanwhile out of the ongoing postal turmoil — the Post Office has been in a mess ever since former Prime Minister Pearson gave public servants the right to strike — a new at- titude to these work stop- pages, or “withdrawal of services", as the socislists term them, is developing. And that is...don't worry about taxpayer reaction to public service strikes because the vast majority of voters regard all govern- ment employees — federal, provincial and municipal — as overpaid and = un- derworked, underdisciplined and overprivileged. Who else in the land draws a pension worth 70 percent of the best paid six years of their service indexed ta the cost of living. And don't worry because labor solidarity gets a little soft when the aute workers or the steel workers, the wood workers or the. con- struction trades face | the prospect of extra union dues assessments tu keep public servants — federal, provincial or municipal — living in the ultra com- fortable style to which they have become accustomed. Dont’ worry — either, because in the majority of. public service strikes, the government concerned, with use of managerial and non- union staff, can keep a skeleton operation going. It may not be good, but much better than a complete shutdown and another sickening surrender to union militancy that does little but in the final settlement run up inflation and bring down the dollar. And one thing more, in the last federal-provincial conference, if the prime minister and provincial premiers agreed on anything, it was to hang tough — especially in the face of strikes ~- against a greedy public service that in recent years has got them all Two stories vie for year’s best The fall of the Canadian dollar and the mass murder- suicide at the Jonestown Peoples Temple settlement in Guyana have been selected as the top 1978 Canadian and international stories by newspaper editors and broadcasters. Prime Minister Trudeau, who spent much of the year, rying to restore the popularity of his Liberal government, was picked as the most newsworthy Cana- dian. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, whose initiative launched the Middle East peace talks, was chosen the most newsworthy world figure although most editors, voting inthe annual year-end poll conducted by The Canadian Press, grouped him with Israeli Premier Menachem Begin. The Canadian dollar, buffeted. by inflation, unemployment and balance- of-payments problems, was -. under pressure throughout the year. It started at 915 cents in terms of U.S. currency, fell below 84 cents in early October and settled down around 35, never quite approaching the alltime low of 90,08 that occurred in December, 1931. It was chosen as the No, 1 national stery over such incidents as the drowning of 12 Ontario students and a teacherinLake Temiskaming in Quebec in June, the fall of a nuclear- powered Soviet satellite in the Northwest Territories in January and the Progressive Conservative party’s vic: tories in 10 of 15 federal byelections in October. - . The Jonestown horrow, in which 912 members of the Peoples Temple cult died of cyanide poisoning and shooting, was a runaway choice over the Mideast peace talks and the deaths of two Popes and selection of Kara! Cardinal Wojtyla of Poland as the first non-Ital- ian Pope in 456 years. Trudeau, who postponed a federal election until 1979 while fighting a rearguard action to regain public support, was picked over his finance minister, Jean Chretien, who brought down ~ two budgets in a government effort to turn the economy around, - Rene Levesque, the Quebec premier, who at- tracted wide attention with his retreat to sovereignty- association from outright separation, was third in the poll followed by Con- servative leader Joe Clark, whose party made strong gains in voter popularity. Levesque had been voted top Canadian newsmaker the previous lwo years, Margaret Trudeau, the prime minister's estranged wife, was picked as the mast hewsworthy Canadian outside public affairs. Her movie career and recurrent Tumors that she might return to her husband kept her name in-the news for much of the year. Sadat was the top world newsmaker for the second consecutive year although ‘peace talks with Begin at Camp David, Md., promoted by President Jimmy Carter - . did not quite produce a signed pact. Carter, Peoples Church leader Jim Jones and the first Polish Pope were others prominent. in voting for top world figure. Letters welcome The Herald welcomes its readers com. ments. All letters to the editor of general public Interest will be. printed. We do, however, retain the right to refuse to print letters on grounds of possible libel or bad taste. We may also edit letters for style and length, All letters to be considered tor pubtication must be signed.