IT WAS a helluva three
days.

First, Joe Carter's ninth-inning
home run, then a million people
showing up on the streets of
Toronto, a human tidal wave the
likes of which I had never expe-
tienced before, and, finally, like a
finely-tuned climax, the election,
featuring the Tory holocaust.

Who said Canada was dull? I
think we are well past our dull
stage. We'll look back on it as
many of us now do on the ’50s.

. God, it was dull, but so comfort-
able, eh? So safe. So easy.

The riveting irony for me was

. that just as Canada conquered
America’s favorite game and took
the World Series home as a prize,
acrack opened up along the
country’s major cultural fault line,
bringing us a giant step closer to

_ breaking apart.

I certainly won’t weep for the
Tories, even though there may be
some truth in the horrendous no-
tion that apres Mulroney, le
deluge, as General de Gaulle liked
to say about himself.

As an eco-freak, all I can say is
thanks for the fish and so long.

In the years since Mulroney
tock over the PCs in a party
coup, then grabbed control of the

_ government through a campaign
of bold-faced lies, the few tiny
environmental innovations
brought in by the Liberals (during
the otherwise wasted Trudeau
autocracy) were gutied, overturn-
ed, stonewalled or simply ignored.

It was the same spirit that led
the Conservative Cabinet to ex-
empt Alcan’s Kemano I! from an
environmental assessment and to
support Hydro Quebec’s James
Bay II, until forced by the
Supreme Court to at least go
through the motions of obeying
what few laws that do exist to
protect Crown land and respect
treaties.

The Tory government succeeded
for nearly a decade in sheltering
industry, as well as itself, from
tough reforms.

For all the window-dressing
that goes on in the form of green
advertising, substantial change has
not occurred in the way we do

’ business, provide ourselves with
energy, or move ourselves and our
goods around.

OK, the Tories are gone. The

_ wicked witch is dead, The problem
is, the system they were running is
still very much in place.

The logging industry, as UBC’s
Peter H. Pearse, former royal
commissioner on B.C.’s forests,
has just pointed out in Tae Globe
and Mail, continues to
“systematically — and deliberately

INSIGHTS
elcome to tl

STRICTLY PERSONAL

— harvest forests more rapidly
than they have been growing.”’

Almost as shocking, at the re-
cent meeting of the International
Joint Commission in Windsor, the
chlorine industry actually got
away with defending continued
production of the deadly chemical
on the grounds that jobs would be
lost if a ban was ordered. Period.
No attempt even to put up a
smokescreen.

In these unhappy economic
times, the litany goes, people are
more worried about jobs than
cancer. As for the Great Lakes,
tough.

The bottom line is that for most

‘ of the past decade the Tories were
holding Mother Nature down
while industry raped her.

Ah well, that’s all history. [
think there is one main reality to
face up to, though, as a result of
the vote.

The country is splintering.

The West going Reform was
probably as much an ‘‘ethnic’’
vote in its own way as the Bloc’s
in Quebec,

Certainly, it reflected shared
cultural, and hence political
values. Yes, even a shared lan-
guage.

Western Canadians have a
powerful sense of otherness, as
distinct from Ontarionians or
Maritimers, let alone Quebecers.

And once dow: on the Prairies,
of course, you find three pro-
totypal “nationalities,” folks from
Saskatchewan being a different
treed of vat from Manitobans or
Albertans,

As for B.C., it is only just
barely attached to Canada any-
way, having joined Confederation
as part of a huge and fundamen-
tally illegal real estate scam, and
nurturing a distinctly Cordilleran
sensibility.

. [happen to believe that a de-
evolution of poliiical power may

», HARRISON GALLERIES

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GEORGE BATES

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A New Exhibition of Paintings from
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October 28 to November 6

Park Roya! South, West Vancouver

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ie fut

ultimately be a very good thing.

This isn’t just an anarchist bias.
{tis an ecological fact: big, com-
plex, systems survive best when
there is a maximum amount of
diversity.

Anybody who thinks the laws of
ecology don't apply to human
beings is as deluded as Kim
Campbell.

Canada has just changed in
front of our eyes.

It’s frightening, yes, but from
the small-is-beautiful school of
thought, not necessarily a bad
thing at all. We might as well be
creative, since we certainly have a
fluid political situation on our
hands.

Maybe the potential here is to
remake the country into a new
configuration that works. Looked
at that way, we are possibly
looking at the beginning of a
solution, after a long period of
being utterly stalled.

UN Secretary General Boutros
Boutros Ghali recently predicted
that by the turn of the century
there could be as many as 400 na-
tions in the world. Currently, .
there are 193.

Twenty new countries have been
added in the last two years.

Obviously, some kind of
planet-wide trend is at work here.
I suspect it may be as simple —-
and complex — as the loss of eco-
nomic sovereignty,

As we move to a global
economy, the control of the state
over the flow of money is fost,
reducing the modern nation to a
shadow of its former self in terms
of what happens within its bound-
aries.

In such a vacuum — with the
money markets having taken over
from federal governments —
regional, linguistic, racial and
religious forces rise to the surface,
where they were, after all, through
all of history until the quite recent
emergence of the mighty industrial
state.

Welcome to the future.

Sunday, October 31, 1993 ~ North Shore News - 7

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aN

My very deepest thanks to all who voted for me. I! appreciate your support and confidence in my ability to
do a good job. | also want to thank all of the volunteers who spent so many hours doing the endless tasks
which are required for every campaign.

I want to assure all of you that, even though I wasn't elected, | intend to continue to work hard for North
Vancouver and the Nation. Common sense tells us that we have to work together if we are going to solve
the difficult problems facing this country.

To North Vancouver's new MP, Ted White, I wish you well. As I told you last Monday evening when I visited
your office, | amu available to help you, as are all of my supporters. Let’s gct Canadians working together!

Mowe So aia

Mobina Jaffer