A4 - Wednesday, August 29, 1984 - North Shore News ‘*fire’’ about strictly personal by Bob Hunter Separate glory HEN I first heard John Turner shouting separatists having penetrated the Tory ranks in Quebec, I almost fell out of my chair laughing. Turmer was actually presenting this as an accusa- tion. Out of touch? Whew! Maybe he never knew it wasn’t long ago that a substantial percentage of the population of the North Shore was considering separatism too. I] know, in the darkest hours of the Trudeau era, | started considering separatism pretty seriously myself. Reading about it. Thinking about it. Thinking about the implications. Some of them were wonderful, by the way. Just not having to deal with silly edicts from Ottawa was going to free up about twice as much energy for getting on with real life. Who knows? Maybe we'd hit upon a peculiar British Columbia vi- sion and lead the world to salvation, eh? What was astonishing, to me, was the number of peo- ple — from executives to lun- chbuckets — who were also reading about separatism, thinking about it, considering the implications .. . At one point, I was starting to get fired up about forming a new political party devoted to the idea of kicking the feds out and then sealing the Kick- ing Horse Pass. Of course, It was going to be a Good Thing, this new party. Dedicated to such ex- cellent principles as _ bio- regionalism, small-is- nature. Prairie people. New- foundlanders. Cape Breton Islanders. Pequistes. Toron- tonians. Inuit. Sikhs. We all had another self besides the Canuck ego — no matter how few generations we went back. Look through our history. (ft doesn’t take all that long.) Where does it cease to be a struggle between centrifugal **T noticed that everybody in the country was at least a half-separatist by nature.’’ EE beautiful, laws against trashing nature, referendums on everything, and ultimate- ly, I guess, a Declaration of Rights for All Living Things — you know, the standard 1960s agenda for highspeed evolution. The point was, everything seemed possible if the federal bureaucracy could just be thrown aside. Until that hap- pened, basically nothing could be done about anything. That was my feel- ing. And, as | say, not just mine, In my travels across Canada, I| noticed that everybody in the country was at least a half-separatist by social force and the heavy Magnetic core? So. In dreaming separatist dreams, | was actually in the mainstream of Canadian thought. A mellow form of sovereignty association is what this country has always been about. It is a relatively small step, when you get right down to it, to go further and slap customs barriers between the regions. There are already border crossing points, as you may have noticed, going over the mountains. As things turned out, a separatist movement flowered and deflowered in the West before 1 could . Tories aren't psyche myself up to do much more than cajole my _ best friends. And when the Western separatist movement emerged, it proved.to be far to the right of Jabba the Hutt, Genghis Khan and even Doug Collins, bless him. The point is, Turner’s bug- eyed screeching about the Tory machine harbouring un- patriotic Canadians in Quebec misses the point by so wide a margin I can hardly believe we are all talking at least one of the two official languages. If Brian Mulroney has pulled separatists over to his side — and he has, Robert Lemieux, the FLQ lawyer, among them — then I say, more power to him! Separatists who turn into the problem. Liberals who drive, even redblooded citizens fo think about separatism are the problem. if all the Pequistes in Quebec join the Tories, then there is no separatism pro- blem any longer. It is as sim- ple as that. Pierre Trudeau is always being praised by his fans for ‘‘holding Canada together.’’ Are you kidding? He came within a hairbreadth of shattering it beyond repair. The trick to holding the country together is to share power with the regions, and the Liberals just couldn’t do that. Their game was divide- and-rule. The current rebirth of the Conservatives, in my humble opinion, is the rebirth of Canada as something more than a crudely-administered empire with a distant, and alien, centre. Hallelujah, I think we is free! HERE'S AN EXAMPLE OF THE MICROWAVE OVEN “SUPER VALUES” DURING SHARP. CAROUSEL WEEK at Y. 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