A6-Wednesday, March 12, 1980 - North Shore News editorial page ‘Illegal’ suites The acute shortage of rental housing on the North Shore was highlighted in a recent report to North Vancouver City council. The vacancy rate in the City, which provides 52% of all North Shore rental accommodation, is virtually zero and since 1973 the building of new rental units has almost ground to a halt. Without subsidies or tax shelters developers no longer find such projects economical and now concentrate, instead, on the strata title market. Meanwhile, however, thousands of North Shore people remain in desperate need of rental ac- commodation. They include young families saving to buy their‘first home, employees of local businesses and industries, senior citizens and college students. For many the only immediate answer is a so-called “illegal” suite in a single family home -- whére they live with the constant threat of eviction if discovered by a municipal inspector. In the present acute housing crisis North Shore municipalities might do well to re- think their whole policy regarding “illegal” - suites. Provided proper health and safety standards are enforced, there are strong arguments for leaving responsible owners and their tenants in peace. Current circumstances, indeed, indicate that the “illegal suite” may already be an outdated concept, a heartless relic of much easier days for homeseekers. Laws, after all, are meant to serve man -- not man to serve laws. Hurtful hymn Last Saturday in the heart of London, England, an angry crowd of 2,000 demon- strated outside Canada House chanting an oldhymn with some hurtful new words: “All things bright and beautiful, “All creatures great and small, “All things wise and wonderful, “Canadians kill them all” Slanderous, you say? In that case, just how much longer are we going to tolerate the bloody annual slaughter of baby seals which starts again this week off Newfoundland? | sunday news north shore news 1139 Lonsdale Ave . North Vancouver, B.C V7M 2H4 (604) 980-0511 NEWS - ADVERTISING CLASSIFIED CIRCULATION 980-0511 986-6222 986-1337 Publisher Peter Speck Associate Publisher Editor-in-Chief Advertising Director Robert Graham Noe! Wright Eric Cardwell Classified Manager Production & Office Administrator Tim Francis Berni Hitiard Faye McCrae Managing Editor News Editor Andy Fraser Photography Chris Uoyd Elisworth Dickson Accounting Supervisor Barbara Keen North Shore News, tounded in 1969 as an independent commun: ty newapaper and qualified under Schedule tl, Part I, Paragraph Il of the Excise-Tax Act, is published each Wednesday and Sunday by North Shore Free Press Lid and distributed to every door on the North Shore Second Class Mail Registration Number 3885 Subscriptions $20 per year Entire contents ©. 1979 North Shore Free Presa Lid All rights reserved No responsibility accepted fot unsolicited manuscripts and pictures which should be stamped. addressed return envelope Gana THIS PAPER IS RECYCLABLE Matenal ine tueting accompanied by SK.‘ VERIFIED CIRCULATION 49,503 48,478 Wednesday Sunday ena” Some 120,000 people on the Lower Mainland claim German as their mother tongue -- or, at any rate, the language of their mother. Many can now hear it weekly on “their own TV program” -- a two and a half hour presentation Mondays at 6 p.m. over Vancouver ‘Cablevision Channel 17. And they love it. So far, ‘““Deut- schsprachiges Fernsehen — GTV”, introduced by a jazz version of Vivaldi’s “Spring”, is a one-man ‘show, the brainchild of German-born journalist Henning August Alexander Graf von Platen- Hallermund (“Just call me Henning!”). As a. self-confessed idealist, Henning’s main problem has been money, or rather the lack of it —- since the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecom- munications Commission permits no commercial advertising on the program. “It's tough,” he says. The cost for putting together two and a half hours’ with European produced material would be between $5,000 and $10,000.” So from the start he has had to. substitute = in- A new look at German PRODUCER HENNING... support wouldn't hurt. ventiveness, by writing to governments, tourist departments, chambers of commerce and any other institution that might have material available for free. He discovered’ the National Film Board (believe it or not) has a number of -German language films. The Swiss defence department sent him footage about their famous military system. Then there are locally produced interviews..-- a high-ranking German MP from Bonn, the former chief of West Germany’s TV network, members of the About 130 million years ago the dinosaurs got themselves into a no-win situation which quickly led to- o—their extinction. Their addiction to unlimited physical growth proved, in the end, to be something their tiny heads were quite in- capable of coping with. There may be a parallel here with modern iridustrial society and its in- creasingly menacing unemployment problem. Canada’s present jobless total, hovering close to 900,000 with no early relief in sight, is the most familiar statistic, but it’s reflected in growing unemployment throughout the western industrialized world — at last count around six million in the U.S. and another six million in the European Economic Community. The truly grim figure, however, is the dangerously high proportion of unem- ployed youth, a phenomenon that is again common to all the western nations. In the nine-nation European Community, for example, almost 40 percent of the six million jobless are under 25. Most of them have never been employed and many may not be for the rest of their lives. Perhaps it's hardly surprising, therefore, that Europe is now taking the lead in the first fun- damentally new _ thinking about unemployment since the Industrial Revolution A move has started there to make unemployment, particularly among the disillusioned young. a respectable occupation GROWTH FALLACY? Hitherto, peniods of high unemployment (as in the Great) Depression) have been regarded as cconomic aberrations which could and would, eventually be overcome - with jobs in plenty once again for almost all who wanted them as soon as maternal growth resumed its former pace. | ; Material growth, measured by the annual increase in the Gross National Product, has so far been the only known method of creating sufficient new jobs to keep pace with a growing population. But today material growth throughout the in- dustrialized west is threatening to slow down permanently -- due partly to energy and raw material shortages, and partly to the inability of consumers to absorb all the products of automated industry without massive and inflationary credit. As in North America, these factors have reduced the annual growth rate in Europe to around half the level it maintained during much of the past quarter of a century. With no prospect of any significant change in that situation during the 1980s, the outlook 1s for a continuing rise in the number of = jobless especially among the young who will be reaching working age in ever in: creasing numbers. JOBS A PRIVILEGE The European Com munity’s council of ministers has now looked these facts squarely in the face and has adopted a program aimed at coming to grips wath them The program admits for the first Ume that) em ployment 1s rapidly becoming a prectous consular corps, and big game guides, to name just a few. A further attraction is European news in much greater detail than = any Canadian media carry, which Henning obtains from DPA, the German Press Agency. The shows are produced, together with five similar foreign-language programs, in a small Burnaby studio and one of Henning’s big ambitions is ta extend the service to the estimated 10,000 German-speakjng residents on Shore. He thinks there is a good chance this could happen in the not too distant future if the North Shore’s separate cablevision company, Cable West, applied for CRTC licensing of the program and agreed to pay for the costs of the “feed” from its Van- couver opposite number. Meanwhile, says Henning, some support from __in- terested North Shore residents themselves wouldn’t hurt. He suggests, if they would like to have the programs, that they make their wishes known to Cable West -- and be prepared to the ~ buy a converter if they don't already have one. For Henning himself the program remains a genuine labor of love. He earns his livelihood as B.C. editor for the national German- language weekly “Courier Nordwesten” ~— doing his TV work, for which he doesn’t get a nickel, in the evenings and on weekends. With that kind ‘of dedication GTV_ richly deserves the praise it has already won south of the Inlet. the jobless Noel Wright privilege rather than a duty expected of all responsible adults. It accepts the present inabi- lity of society to provide wo- rk for a large number of its young people -- together with society's obligation to feed, shelter and clothe them without blaming them for their enforced idleness. And it presents practical remedies. Specific proposals under the progrem (involving agreement between unions. management and nements) include: *Banning overtime. No one would be allowed to do more than his fair share of work In rare exceptional cases employces to be rewarded by time off instead of cash. *Parn-tlme employment, with flexible working hours to be encouraged in all industnes at regular industry some gover- pay rates lo guard against exploitavon *Flextble retirement with innovations such as longer holidays and shorter working hours to ease the eventual withdrawal from em- ployment. eWork sharing. Programs to encourage the alternation of work and _ training throughout an employee's working life. eYouth training to provide not only vocational skills but also broader education to prepare young job-seekers for their role ina changing world. SOCIETY'S “GUILT” In short, the European industrial planners have abandoned the idea - still prevalent on this continent -- that unemployment = can somehow be solved solely through work-orientation and vocational training programs for school-leavers. The Europeans have seen the writing on the wall and have begun thinking creatively in terms of a decade or more ahead, rather than just from year to year. Most important of alli, their program places the “guilt” for unemployment on society, not on the = in- dividual victim. It's) worth remembering. perhaps, that the first sweeping social security measures in the Western world -- si€kness, accident and old age insurance, and maximum working hours -- were introduced in Germany in the 1880s by the Iron Chancellor, Otto Bismarck, a tough ruler but asmart one von A century” later the kuropeans, at any rate. arc sull showing no intention of following tn the footprints of the dinosaur