4 - Sunday, April 26, 1987 -

- North Shore News

Bob Hunter

@ strictly personal @

SPEAKING objectively, | would think Canada’s doom

a

as a centralized state is ultimately unavoidable — but
then along comes this idea of a Triple ‘‘E’”’ Senate.

I can easily see a scenario
where the Senate becomes the
trade-off in a struggle over
union, this. time with strong

{ separatists in the West as well as

Quebec ganging up on Partia-
ment Hill against Bay Street.

One of my favorite journalists,
since I was a wee tad on the
police beat at The Winnipeg
Tribune, is a chap named Ted
Byfield, currently famous as the
editor of a hard-hitting conser-
vative’ weekly magazine called
Western Report.

They do a lot of CBC-bashing,
want to privatize the Post Office,
that sort of thing.

Back when I briefly knew him,
Byfield was merely the best
reporter around,

Now a crusty 57 years old, he

| has been editorially stickhandling

the case for looking at Western
separatism for over a year now,
ever since he came sadly to the
| . irrevocable conclusion that the
i Canadian fedcrai system as con-
stituted is inherently unfair to the
West. -

In an odd reversal of the way
crusading publisher Claude Ryan
came to lead the Liberal side in
Quebec against separatism,
Byfield has become the voice of
the separatist movement in the

’ West, even though he disclaims
being a separatist himself.

Given that the game of power

For Your
a2

We will check all this for $4@

in Canada is fixed, there has to
be some kind of revolution. How
to do it bloodlessly?

Cancel the current Senate,
throw the bums out and elect a
representational Senate with
law-making power, giving each
province 10 senators regardless of
population base, basically like
the Americans do, and you have
a worthy and workable national
system of power sharing, Byfield
argues.

Make no bones about it, the
American system is more demo-
cratic than ours and in exactly
the area where ours is weakest,
theirs works best as a great, na-
tional equalizer: the Senate.

To be a Senator in the U.S. is
to be an ombudsman for your
region, a powerbroker, a voice at
the king's elbow in the federal
court,

Here? It is to weep with
shame. Here, if you want to cast
someone's name in a favorable
light you mention that, iike Stu
Keate, they turned down a senate
appointment.

Of course there are some peo-
ple who might want to take the
idea of ‘‘Western separatism’’
and refine it a bit to make it a
West Coast Garden of Eden
variety thereof, expressed in the
searing cry: Seal the Kicking
Horse Pass!

1 mean, who hasn't toyed with

the idea of what kind of a fabu-
lous eco-utopia you could make
an independent British Columbia
into, setting an example for the
whole world, maybe leading a
planetary political movement to
save the biosphere, if not the en-
tire universe? Hm?

It's perfectly possible that the
next stage of ce-colonialization,
if there is one, will see the
gargantuan geopolitical units like
the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics breaking down into
their natural components along
geographical, ethnic, linguistic,
religious lines.

In theory, with political diver-
sity, nobody gets to be so strong
they can destroy everybody else.
After nuclear disarmament, the
next big item on anybody's list of
essential post-20th century
reforms should therefore be the
dismantling of the modern
mega-states, including Canada.

Good luck, by the way!

Behind such disloyal! thinking,
for me, lies the ideal of
bioregionalism, sometimes
known as watershed democracy,
whereby it ought to be possible to
build human ‘communities in
harmony with the
ecosystem. That’s the sort of
West Coast utopian separatism I
can get behind, an ecological
thing.

Too bad there’s that dreadful
word ‘‘ought.’”’

In any event, I doubt it could
be pulled off, even if the doctrine
was sound.

Ted Byfield’s rap on all this is |

that the only way to get an

elected Senate is to threaten to |

take your marbles and leave if
the power barons Down East
won’t play by new, improved
rules. Can’t bluff, though. Gotta
mean it.

And without an elected Senate,
it’s not worth staying, he says
flatly.

Scary, eh?

its,

immediate |}

Mill to comply

to B.C.

From page 3
were reasonably effective in
removing TRS, but failed
“drastically’’ to control particulate
emissions.

The company, he said, had con-
sequently decided that installation
of a similar scrubber in the mill's
larger third recovery boiler would
‘not have been wise.’’

MacMillan said the $2 million

levels

allocated by the company to im- -
prove air quality at the mill over
the next two years will be used
primarily to reduce TRS emissions
by climinating short-term peak
concentrations of the pollutant.

He added that the mill will be in
full compliance with provincial
TRS levels by the time the mill’s
special waste permit variance order
expires in June 1988.

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