Risky restraint The warning by North Vancouver City Mayor Jack Loucks that police and fire- fighting services might have to be cut back in order to comply with budget restraints comes at a time when those services may be _ needed more..than ever — in his own ‘municipality: ‘and most others. “The sad fact is that the current depression, still . deepening, is - tending to increase lawlessness among certain of its victims. As ‘more and more people are. financially squeezed by unemploynient, the temptation by a few to get.their own: back on society and ease personal suffering ‘by theft, break-ins, burglary and arson ——.not to mention ex- tortion — obviously grows. ~ In this context, too, today’s circumstances “are very erent from Depression .in-the 1930s. The jobholders and jobseekers of the Dirty Thirties.formed a much smaller percentage of the population than their descendants of ' the 1980s. And, by.-and large, they had a more strictly disciplined background. ~~ Present. romtion of young , people raised i their oyster. The shock and. disillusionment many of them are-now ‘experiencing bring a testing time for their social values. The; recent forecast of 200,000 British the extent of the problem. Until economic recovery gets well. under way services to protect the public seem likely to have more, not.less, calls on them. They should be the last to be cut. - Sawn-off taxes A Quebec homeowner has come up with a drastic: but. perfectly legal method of avoiding a hefty. 1983 tax increase resulting from a 13% hike im the assessed value of his ouse. He applied to city. hall for a demolition permit and proceeded to saw down half of the building — which will. reduce his assessment by about 20% and point up the absurdity of tying taxes to property instead of ability to pay. THE VOICE OF NORTHLAND WwithY VANCOUVER s sunday news north shore news 1139 Lonsdale Ave., North Vancouver, 8.C. V7M 2H4 Display Advertising Classified Advertising Newsroom Circulation 980-0511 886-6222 985-2131 986-1337 Publisher Peter Speck Associate Publisher Robert Graham Editor-in-chief Advertising Director Noel Wright Tim Francis Personnel Director Circulation Director Mrs. Berni Hillard Brian A Elis Production Director Oftice Manager Chris Johnson Photography Manager Donna Grandy Terry Peters North Shore News, founded in 1969 as an independent community nowspaper and qualitied under Schedule I Part l Paragraph Ui of the (xcise Tak Act is published each Wednesday and Sunday by North Shore Free Prasa Lid, and arstabuted to every door an the North Shore Second Class Mait Registration Number 3685 Entire contents 1982 North Shore Frée Press Lid. All rights reserved. Subsanptions North and West Vancouver $25 par year Mailing rates available on request Ne Fespansititity vata tape aCoepted — for AAT PIE tyaress. SCH Teeter) Orc pies unsolicited omatenal me tucing whit ostowd Oe ACCOMpANIOd Dy a stamped VERIFIED CIRCUL ATION 54.543 Wednesday; 64,093 Sunday sx. G THIS PAPER IS RECYCLABLE By ROGER W. WORTH ose “OF the Great” Members of Canadian public sector unions, and the politicians who support their fight against government. wage restraint should wake up. -“ Columbians: ‘on ‘welfare by March “iustrates” | ~ programs, © With 1.5 million people jobless, and the rest of the. work force so uncertain about the future, there. is, aes overwhelming national support for Ottawa's six.and five program, as well as the - wage restraint plans initiated plreater Beate More > _ important, | THE SEASON of peace and goodwill being almost upon us once more, this seems as good a. week’ as any to make a personal confession: I’ve Back in the spring of 1981 I wrote a couple of columns that broadly. defended the concept of. the. nuclear deterrent (“Unwinnable war our best bet?”). | In the second of those pieces (“Is The Bomb all we deserve?”) I suggested the ultimate answer to the nuclear threat was to demonstrate -—— eventually to the Russian people them- selves’ through modern communication technology — that the western way of | doing things works better for mankind than any other. Meanwhile, over the past 18 months, the Ban-The- Bomb movement has un- dergone some dramatic changes. In particular, hard facts about cause and effect are replacing the raw emotionalism of the carlier crusaders. In scores of cities throughout the western world huge and orderly demonstrations by citizens of every political persuasion and none have called on their governments to do something — as a first step, anything — to halt and reverse the present nuclear armaments insanity. Sure, these demon- strations have included their quota of Commics § and pinkos. But they have in- creasingly included tens of thousands of people who wouldn't otherwise be seen dead in such company changed my mind about The Bomb. Nor have these latter-day demonstrators been urging unilateral nuclear disar- mament. by the west any longer. Their demands are now focusing, firstly, on a halt to all further nuclear proliferation and, secondly, on a, balanced multilateral reduction of existing nuclear stockpiles by both the west and the cast alike. 50,000 WARHEADS The present possibility of communicating the message to the populations of the other camp, the ordinary people of the Sovicts and China, is, of course, the immediate problem — to which we'll return in a moment. The insanity of the current situation lies primarily in the fact that the U.S. and Russia already control over 50,000 nuclear warheads of al kinds, more than enough to blow up cach other and the entire globe many times over, However many new warheads are now added by cither side doesn't make any difference. If only a fraction of the existing arsenals were ever unleashed, the destruction of the human race could be just as complete as if the whole 50,000 were shot off. The chilling facts of the situation have been ob- jectively documented by professional groups like the Physicians for Social Responsibility. \ re _ Tule, ‘or close down the system: :Common sense, it ‘seems, is prevailing. « But,‘as might be expected, appalled at the fact they might have to limit salary increases to five or six per cent. ; -” In Quebec, for example, “public” sector -is . heavily backed’ oy. grassroots. . “>ynion members. In Ontario, . _the_.public__. being forced to_accept.. pay _ cuts. In° ‘addition, | -Mirtually sector leadership ‘recently put together :a .protest that . incorporated the slogan “Let the B...Pay’”. The “B...", of are_the- taxpayers, “imany ‘people. - Ae ‘understand i , Won- - im- \ by Noel Wright A one-megaton bomb (equivalent to 20 Hiroshima bombs) can set furniture on fire 10 miles away. Such a matt! bomb on Seattle _ would destroy over 80 per cent of its hospital beds and kill or maim 60 per cent of its doctors. There would be no transportation, no clectric power, no plasma and virtually nothing fit to cat or drink. Disease would rage in a wasteland of dirty water and rotting corpses\! Depletion of the ozone would bring about haywire weather. Medical and all other public services would cease td exist, as a slow agonizing death from radiation came to hundreds of thousands of temporary survivors in the area. reaten to work to on ‘the leadership heavyweights. from the public sector are people . threatening to strike, -even time though there is little: $ public: ai ee . ‘That's ie | that they have been able to ar - hold up legislation that will force. public sector em- ployees: to be happy with a five per cent raise. ‘Other provinces are experiencing similar dif- “ficulties, ‘It’s true, such a raise may eep. up | with: the rate of : But ‘for — these ‘to. complain so vehemently, while hundreds of.-thousands: of “others simply | can’t find work, is ' akin te toou right greed. , the: oie’ A Ke are “down generations’ ‘old family farms . and, . Leven” company. ‘executives some are every. ‘government .. in the country is running a deficit as it attempts :to keep up “with the needs of the less affluent among us. In a compassionate yet -still_-paying... society, --that's necessary. What isn’t needed, though, is the cry from our employees (the civil servants) who seem to think” they — should be coddled. ‘It’s ‘too ‘bad’ they weren’ timore responsible. CFIB Feature Service just’ the one- megaton bomb. Con- servative estimates indicate that. a‘; nuclear exchange ~ between the U.S. and: Russia would amount to between 10,000 and 20,000 megatons on each'side. The deterrent argument is that such an exchange will never actually happen, precisely because the consequences are too un- thinkable. In view of the proven capacity of fallible mortals to commit ghastly mistakes, I can no longer remain blind to the fact that this argument makes just about as much sense as saying your house will never catch fire because it would damage the fur- niture. What today’s anti-nuke crusaders are also saying is that a return to sanity somewhere — even if it can’t yet include the Russian and Chinese people — is better than doing nothing. Hence, the referendums on balanced disarmament last month in 21) B.C. municipalities and 93 others across Canada, sponsored by Operation Dismantle as 4 prelude to a world referendum via the United Nations. To make a _ start somewhere — however long it takes to reach an ultimate solution —~ makes sense. The theory that the world can continue to squander $600 billion a year on ar- maments that nobody is ever going to use makes no sense whatsoever. That's not emotion. It's simple, cold logic.