4 - Wednesday, October 7, 1992 — North Shore News Royal flush: Yes or N 1AM beginning (o suspect that what is in fact facing Ca- nadiaas within a aronth is the chance of a lifetime — a chance for dramatic, therapeutic change that will improve our lot in fife enormously, not dimiaish it in any substan- tial way. Lam: sell not absolutely certain how I'm going to vote in the ref- erendum, fiwon't know, probably, until lam. marking the ballot in the privacy of the booth, knowing full well that 1 can He about it later, anyway. Such is the joy and genius of the secret ballot. Between now and then, I can agonize like hell — just like everybody else in this country is agonizing. Even the people who have made up their minds are agonizing, whether they want to admit it or not. The luxury of making up your mind easily is that henceforth you “know? what you want. You act and spez.k accordingly. But beneath the veneer of projected confidence, there are always bound to de doubts. The more intelligent you are, the more doubts you are bound to have, since intelligence implies some degree of recognition of the fact that you can never really know what's going to happen in the frature, Yor can just pretend fo. Thus, the Yes and No forces alike claim to be absolutely certain about what the future will be like in Canada. indeed -— although both appear to have a much better idea of how bad it will be if their side loses than tow geod it will be if their side wins. Mulroney and his untikely i Maple Leaf Forever cheering * squad have niuch to say about what will happen if the referen- dum gets the thumbs-down. Doomi. Disaster. Lebanon. Yugoslavia. Buc if the thing miraculously flew? Ah, well, more of the slways-surprising Tory agenda, one presuines... Likewise Bouchard and Bob Hunter Bs, STRICTLY PERSONAL Parizeau are fuzzy on how in- dependence would actually work for Quebec. Certainly, by all accounts, the average Pequiste has been fed a totally unreal set of statistics about the economic heaven that will ensue automatically if Quebec separates. For one thing they mostly seem to assume that some kind of monetary union could be negati- ated, but there are a fot of im- mutable-seeming reasons why that wouldn’t work, especially if the remaining provinces stuck together. Also, instead of appreciating that their province has been receiving billions of dollars in transfer payments Cor nearly three decades to keep it from sinking into a permanent Depression, the hardcore Quebec nationalists have convinced thernselves that, along with Ontario, they have been car- rying the rest of the country on their backs through taxation all this time, simply because they are Guo DURING Baby WER Aw Save A BUNDLE Woodward's Baby Week has just arrived. And once again, you can save big on practically everything for your little bundle of joy. Check out our Baby Week flyer for all the bargains available now. . Sale continues ‘til Sunday, October 18th, 1992. WOODWARDS So MICH To CELEBRATE more numerous. Thac's right. Tell. a Pequiste that British Columbians and Albertans, as well as Ontarians, have been shelling out billions of hard-earned dollars for a genera- tion now to keep Quebecers healthy and happy, and he or she will laugh in your face, What Ll get ceally offended by, however, isn’t so much ignorant, inward-looking, quasi-racist na- tionalists in Quebec. You have their type in every corner of the world. Anybody who appeals to bloodlines, to race, 1o language as the common basis for inclusion in the tribe, is pointing the way back over history’s bloody grounds, certainly not ahead to a higher humanistic plateau. But bankers? Shouldn't they know better than to throw wild assumptions around? Aren't they the arch-rationalists, the steeliest of capitalism's steely managers? Surely, the day after Quebec separates, the banks will be open for business on both sides of the new border. That's why I think the worst gaffe by the Yes forces so far -— or the worst piece of bad luck — was the release of the ‘‘report’’ by the Royal Bank of Canada, claim- ing that disunity would see unemployment go as high as 15%, with another 720,000 Canadians out of work by the end of the century. Personal income would drop by $4,000 a year, the bank said, with annual household income drop- ping $10,000. This is what would happen in- stead of the ‘tanticipated {1% in- crease in the standard of living with unity,”’ asserted Allan Taylor, Royal’s chairman. Oh yeh? Things are recovering again, eh? Wow. How timely. He added: “Our study could find no country that has broken up both peacefully and cheaply. tt concludes that the costs to Canada would be huge and long-terni. These costs would be paid by people in every province and region for generations to come.”” Good grief, is this to be taken seriously? All the Royal Bank's researchers had to do was go lo the library and [cok up the exam- ple of Norway and Sweden, which separated peacefully, both coming out economically ahead of the game, to say nothing of being much happier, each in their own corner of the glacier, playing by their own sets of cules and fune- tioning far more efficiently. 1 don’t know how much credi- bility financial institutions with a major vested interest in the status quo enjoy with all of the people, all of the time, but f smell a rat personally when the biggest such institution in the country comes out with a buach of computer spreadsheets saying precisely what the money managers want to hear. Wl, a white, English-speaking, banks will be open | middle-class, middle-aged, mar- ried male parent and grandparent, have my doubts about a bank's objectivity, imagine the negative impact in Quebec, where the Brinks trucks were caught trying to sneak out of Montreal with the loot just before Rene Levesque's election. : Canada has been showing signs of serious stagnation and even decline, with the bureaucratic load uetting heavier and heavier, thanks, among other things, to the duptications of federal and pro- vincial ministries and departments. The national government has been gridlocked politically for as long as some of us can remember. It has lost the will or capability to act coherently on any important front, such as the environment, so protected has the power struggle at the federal Cabinet level become. Maybe it’s time for the sub- sidized jet-set oligarchy that con- trols this country to get a good hard kick in their pin-striped pants. 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