at

pos ity tha legal. abortions at
Lions. Gate Hospital co could cease completely
. within a matter of months is a very real one.
That is the measure of the controversy
surrounding the ‘upcoming September
elections to the hospital’s board.

Last year the anti-abortion Pro Life group
packed the annual meeting of the North and
West Vancouver Hospital Society, following
. a vigorous summer membership drive. As a
result, all five-board vacancies were filled by
“Pro ‘Life candidates. This year there are four
further vacancies to be filled on the 17-
member board. If the Pro Lifers repeat their
1979 achievenient they will win majority
control of the board. —

No abortion can be legally performed
unless approved by the Abortion Committee
appointed from the medical .stafi by the
board. Simply by refusing to appoint such a
committee the board can halt all further

. will not halt abor-
- tions. It will merely drive many of the
unhappy. women concerned back to the
horrors. and dangers of illegal kitchen-table
surgery. by unskilled underground operators.
Nobody LIKES abortion. But until much
greater progress is made in the fields of sex
éducation. and family planning, .legal
_ abortions under strict control would seem
the ‘only ‘humane approach to this tragic
human ‘problem. It's now up to North Shore |
citizens as a. whole — by joining the Hospital
Saciety. before July, 30 and voting at its
. September meeting — to say whether they
agree. The: alternative is. to have: the-decision
made fo them’ by: a-single pressure groups.

- Study session

A four-year, $100,000 study on.the future
of Howe Sound has been criticized by En-
vironment Minister Stephen Rogers for
reaching. ‘no definitive conclusions’.
Nowadays, it,seems, all you need do to
postpone action is call for a study.

Noting this fact, Capilano College recently
held a course to study what happens to all
the studies. We've never heard what hap-
pened to that study} either.

sunday

news

north shore

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THIS PAPER IS RECYCLABLE

OTTAWA (SF) - The big

push for constitutional
reform this summer is an

extremely dangerous game -

of brinkmanship.

Brought down to basic
terms, the issue on these
efforts to.
Canadian constitution, draft
something to replace the
British North America Act,
boils down to a trade-off
between Ottawa and the
provinces on a redistribution

' of powers and language

guarantees carved in stone.
Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau's chief goal is to get
language guarantees in the
constitution which will make
it possible for French-
speaking Canadians to be as
mobile in all of Canada as
are English-speaking
Canadians. He has told
Quebec supporters, “when I
leave Ottawa, it will be

carved in stone.”

The provinces “are
unaninf6us in demanding a
rethink on the authorities df
federal and _ provincial
governments. The provinces

.formalize a

Canadian. Comment

want more powe?o legislate
in more areas; more taxing
powers. If Pierre Trudeau
thinks the Quebec situation
can be solved only by
language laws, he'd better
think again, a copy of
Claude Ryan's Beige- Paper
in hand.

‘BY PETER WARD -

Trudeau is an avowed
centralist, ‘who has been
forced over the past few
years by the .currents of
chance to retreat step by
step. The provinces know
how important Trudeau

_ considers language rights to
They are

be. ready to

‘Your go-go mind, unfortunately, is attached to a so-so

body.’

' openers,

bargain educational and
bilingual trade-offs in return
for some or ali of the new
powers they seek. For
expect the
provinces to ask for a-
reformed Senate which
would be - provincial-
controlled and have a veto
on federal legislation af-
fecting the provinces.

Trudeau will fight like a
tiger against being forced
further into the position of
decentralization held by
Conservative leader Joe
Clark. Remember how
Trudeau ridiculed Clark for
wanting to give away the
federal store? It is Trudeau
who will be running the fire
sales this summer.

There must be give from
the federal government,
because without substantial
progress on the constitution,
the voters in Quebec who
said “no” last May 20 may be
tempted to re-think their
support of federalism;
precisely at the moment
Rene Levesque and his Parti
Quebecois are forced to hold
a provincial election.

Bad drivers and naughty teens

Hitting the headlines last week was a demand
by a group of B.C. municipalities, chaired by
Mayor Derrick Humphreys of West Vancouver,
for a drastic crackdown on reckless motorists and
teenage yahoos. The group’s specific proposals
open up a Pandora's Box of legal and moral
conundrums which might well have confused

Solomon himself.

The group consists of the
twelve municipalities —
representing some 800,000
B.C. taxpayers — _ that
operate their own police
departments as distinct from
hiring the RCMP to do the
job.

They are urging Attorney-
General Allan Williams to
suspend immediately the
licences of all drivers who
collect 10 or more penalty
points; and also to allow 16-
year-olds charged with
offences to be tried in adult
court.

(At present, in B.C.,
anyone under 17 must be
tried in juvenile court, with
restrictions on publicity and
a ban on the publication of
names.)

The municipalities in
question contend that the
present penalty points
system is ineffective because
it doesn't remove bad drivers
from the road. It merely
increases the price of their

licence to keep right on

being bad drivers.

As to juveniles, the
municipalities are fed up
with hard-core yqung punks
who frustrate appropriate
police action by yelling: ‘I'm
under age. You can't do
anything to me!’

POINTS PROBLEM

These arguments for a
tougher approach to the two
problems merit serious
consideration. But there arc
holes in them that also need
to be looked at if the best
solutions are eventually to
be reached.

Most of the holes are in

the proposal to suspend
immediately the licence of
any driver with 10 or more
points. The problem with the
present points system is that
you can be penalized for
things that have nothing to
do with your personal safety
as‘a driver.

For example: having no
light on your rear licence
plate; crossing and smudging
a freshly painted white line;
driving at 64 km/h on an 80
km/h highway. It's quite
possible to collect 10 points
for offences of this. kind
alone.

Then again, people who
drive for a livelihood are
obviously likely to ac-
cumulate points faster than a
‘pleasure only’ driver, even
though the latter may be a
much bigger menace. The
way is wide open for grave
injustices in individual cases.

The obvious first step here
is to revise the whole system
so that points are handed out
solely for offences that
directly cndanger other
road-users (like speeding,
ignoring stop. signs and
running signal lights. )

BACK TO SCHOOL

Even when 10 points have
‘been clocked up by driving
habits that threaten hfe and
limb, hcence suspension —
except for impaired driving
— is not the most con-
structive solution and may
do nothing to cure the root
causes of the problem, once
the hcence ts restored

A defensive driving course

might) pay much better
dividends all round. with
compulsory attendance

Noel Wright

spread over a number of

weekends and the
delinquent driver himself, of
course, picking up the tab
for his instruction.

Juvenile offenders are a
trickier matter.

B.C. law now says you're a
‘child’ until your 17th bir-
thday. If you're naughty, you
may be punished a littl —
but only in juvenile court,
with the press firmly gagged
and no publicity about your
misdeeds permitted.

The theory is
youngster shouldn't be
branded for life and on
public record as a criminal
because of an isolated lapse.
Or even a whole string of
lapses, it seems. Un-
fortunately, over recent
years. the theory has tended
fo become increasingly
divorced from reality.

that a

Within the teenage
population as a whole the
actual percentage of hard-
core juvenile offenders who
have the police worried is
very small. But ins any
community even a limited
number of today's physically

mature, sophisticated and
defiant 16-year-olds (or
younger) can cause a lot of
mayhem _ whether
driving, stealing, vandalizing
or fighting the cops with —
beer bottles.

DIVIDING LINE

They don't behave like
‘children’. They behave like:
unpleasant adults. But this
still begs the question of
whether an arbitrary
dividing line based solely on
age is the most effective way
to differentiate between trial
in juvenile court and trial in
adult court — the latter in
the full glare of publicity
with the chance of a per-
manent criminal record.

What about the handful of
unrepentant juvenile
delinquents aged 15, or even
14? It's patently nonsense to
pretend, for court purposes,
that a young person can be a
‘child’ one day and an ‘adult’
the very next day. his bir-
thday.

A more rational system
might be to treat each case
on its merits — by leaving it
to juvenile court judges to
decide, according to the
seriousness of the case,
whether to try it themselves
or transfer the accused to
adult court.

In practice, such transfers
might be rare. But their
mere possibility mnight well
encourage our present ‘I’m-
under-age’ gangsters (Iet
alone their fond parents) to
think twice before
repeatedly flouting law and
order.

No doubt there are plenty
of other creative ideas on
how to deal with the costly
problem of bad drivers and
naughty teens. If you have
any of your own, ['m sure
Mayor Humphreys and his
colleagues would like to be
the first to hear about them