‘

6 - Friday, March 8, 1996 — North Shore News

1129 Lonsdale Avenue
North Vancouver, B.C.
VIM 284

PETER SPECK
Publisher
985-2131 (101)

UN FOR your tax shelter: it’s

budget time across the land. The

initial response to Finance
Minister Paul Martin’s budget, unveiled
on Wednesday, is one of relief that no
new taxes were announced and that no
major spending cuts were instituted.

Good news, you say.

Far from it.

Good news, the real long-term kind,
would have initially been bad news:
some real decisive steps towards climi-
nating the debt cancer that is relentless-
ly sapping the life out of Canada’s fisca!
vitality.

Instead, Canadians got a politician’s

PEATE TTS aS LES FS tn OM RE!

news viewpoint

wersion

idea of good news: a feel-good economic
plan designed to upset the fewest people
possible.

Tough taik about reducing govern-
ment’s size and spending heard not long
ago from Liberal quarters in Ottawa
has again been relegated to the plugged
warehouse of empty political promises.

it’s the kind of sugar-ceated good
news Canada can il! afford to swallow
again. Because even though the Liberals
are on track to reduce the country’s
annual deficit from $42 billion in 1993-
94 to $17 billion in 1997-98, Canada’s
debt will have grown by $112 billion to
$620 billion in that same period.

Servicing the debt already costs
Canadians, who pay haif their income in
taxes to government, $47 billion per
year, By 1997-98, it will cost Canadians
$50 billion per year.

Scandalous stuff. But Ottawa
remains deaf'to public demands to slay
the debt dragon and continues to pro-
mote wholesale inter-generational rob-
bery. It’s a legacy of inaction and fiscal
irresponsibility that will be handed
down to our children and our children’s
children. The time for honest and
painful action is now. Not tomorrow.

Not next budget.

Now. —

tax tales
‘THE FEDERAL ‘government just

MY WIFE HAS
DECIDED TO KEEP HER
MAIDEN

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NAMED

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| THE New
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can’t resist being in the business of.
business. It spends billions of-our
dollars on — businesses.

bob

; pes
E-MAIL: Government, however, has a truly

appalling record of picking losers.

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» Distribation
Display & Real Eotate Fax
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Werth’ Shore News, founded in 1969 a6 an
independent subvsben newspaper and qualified
undzr Schedule 111, Paragraph 111 of the
Exiise Tax Act, is published cach Wednesday,
Fridzy end Sunday by North Shore Free Pres
Let. and distributed to every door on the North
‘Shore, Canada Post Canadian Publications Mail

Sales Product. Agreement No. 0087238,
; Mailing retes available oa request,

buffy. com. ISNT
iT CUTE?

FINE biep: ff Judy
@be.com. How J
ARE You?

/THE NORTH Shore i is
. such a clean, decent place,
inhabited by trustworthy

citizens, continually on
guard against the forces
of wickedness and social.
decay.

So itis astonishing that the
scandal around B.C. Hydro has
touched this shore in any way.

But, in the unwavering pur-
suit of truth, we must face up to
the fact that certain disclosures have not reflect-
ed well on the circumspection of all North
Shore residents. Or even their judgment.

First, though, credit where due to North

_Vancouver-Seymour Liberal Dan Jarvis.

Uncharacteristically quiet for a politician, in fact
suspected of being unpleasantly surprised when
he was swept in on the Gordon Wilson tide in
the 1991 election, Jarvis is the North Shore’s
lowest-profile MLA.

But Jarvis has made the news lately because
last summer he was the first, and only, MLA to
ask Glen Clark about International Power
Corporation’s links to the Grand Cayman
Islands.

IPC, in case you have only recently been
retumed to earth by space aliens, is the small
private company that piggybacked on B.C.

' Hydro to take part in a Pakistan power project,
‘ with large potential rewards predicted for the

few dozen who hold its shares, and with ties to a
tax haven in the Grand Caymans.

Jarvis asked Clark, now premier and then
development iinister, about IPC and specifical-
ly the Cayman connection. Clark swept by the
question — unwittingly? — and rattled on about

a HAS ANYONE

SEEW http:// al

&, COM THIS
WEEK?

what a great thing IPC was.

It was — for, apparently, /
the few shareholders, includ-
ing some Hydro-linked insid-
ers and prominent New
Democrats. Chief among these
is very successful lawyer and
former NDP provincial presi-
dent John Laxton, whose West
Vancouver house is approxi-
mately 60 seconds and $5 mii-
lion away from my own, and
several Laxton family mem-

° rs.

Laxton was quickly fired as B.C. Hydro
chairman, as well as president John Sheehan.
Laxton, who would have been considered a
great B.C. character in other times, was seen as
swashing buckles rather too vigorously and pun-
ished for his dual role as (unpaid) Hydro chair-
man and IPC mover and shaker. Sad. I have a
soft spot for larger-than-life types like Laxton,
with a zest for life and a twinkle in the eye. (1
had the same feeling for his ideological oppo-
site, Bill Vander Zalm.)

Ard then there’s North Vancouver-Lonsdale ©
NDP MLA David Schreck. He tco is good for a
bright conversation and exchange of ideas,
although a loyal socialist when it comes to the
crunch. ‘And the crunch same when it transpired
that Schreck, Clark’s man on Hydro’s board of
directors, let {PC's deeper realities whistle right
by him.

No one in the NDP’s top echelons knew from
nothing. So they insist. And Clark, as responsi-

ble minister, is stuck with the old reproach: If he |

didn’t know, he should have.
Well, it sure is more exciting than the
Caulfeild heritage Plan.

http://www alice
~—. com

The Western Economic *

and handouts’ during the 1993-96
period of an ..\: araazing
$i ,061 ,576,000.. More” than $1; bit
lion —. that’s. more than: 219:300

taxpayey years. :

Here’ ;
money went (a taxpayer, year. j is the
amount. of. total personal i income tax
an average paxpeyer P Pays in one cat.

yy
a. S647, 279 to the Pacific. Music
_ Industry Association n (134, taxpayer

(265 taxpayer years). :

- = From Tales. ‘froni the ax
“Trough Hl, .a National: Citizens’
~ Coalition publication. a

Did you notice that Social Credit, ithe shadow ;
of its old self led by North Vancouver's Larry

’ Gillanders, has put on some substance?

At least that’s the projection of the Dniversity -
of B.C, “election stock market,” dreamt up by |,
UBC commerce faculty and administration to
show students how markets move in reaction to.
recent news through investing real money in the
market.

In the last week of February Social Credit

‘edged out Reform for third place in the market.’

It projected that the faded party of the Bennetts.
and Bill Vander Zalm would win 14.9% of the : -
seats in the next elec-

tion; Reform, 13%.

The leading Liberals
would win 39%, the
New Democrats 33.3%.

That was before the
dam burst on the B.C. |
Hydro story.

Gillanders, who put —
on an intense radio
advertising campaign a
month or two ago with
the message that B.C.
has-long keen legally
relieved of any respon-
sibility for Indian land claims, must have
beamed when he saw those figures.

And the NDP, hit by fresh disaster, must have
briefly taken heart too. Because, obviously,
every rise in the fortunes of any non-socialist
third party can only whittle away at the numbers
for the leading Liberals and the second-place
(by most measures) Reform party.

Mind you, veteran stock-market watchers .
might well iook at UBC figures and declare this |
is a market that doesn’t bear scrutiny. Others
would say it’s siraply bull.

Diversification Office gave. loans. . Ae