Al2 - Wednesday, May 30, 1984 - North Shore News Is Bob Bonner having a giga-joke on us? OB BONNER OF B.C. HYDRO has never struck me as a practical joker, but he’s just sent a little notice to our house in which he’s obviously having fun. No doubt you got one too. get this Straight by Doug Collins First, he tells us that our bill for natural gas will now be expressed in gigajoules, and then he says that the price of gas per gigajoule won’t be any different from what it used to be in billing units. ; Now it has to be confessed that I never knew what a bill- ing unit was. The wife handles al! that stuff, she having: more brains. All 1 know is that for a long time now she has been complain- ing about the hydro bill, which is higher now than it was before the kids ieft home, and God knows they spent their lives in the shower, which is why we're SO poor. But if I didn’t know what a billing unit was, I know even less what a gigajoule is. Ac- cording to the clever little Believe it or not...! T’S A WEIRD, WEIRD WORLD. If you don’t agree, just consider a few of the latest happen- ings both at home and abroad. In an effort to provide Canadians with a_ bigger chunk of the oil industry, the federal governmem set up Petro-Canada, which used taxpayer dollars to pay a high price for, first, Petrofina, then British Petroleum. In this way, it was argued, Canadians would be able to purchase petroleum products from their very own oil com- pany, thus saving us ali money in the long run. Many Canadians didn't agree with the new policy, but at least there was a cer tain amount of logic attached to the proposition So what does the fledgling Petro-Canada announce? The organization will de clos ing down 400 service stations across the country Somehow, that doesn't compute. Shouldn't Petro Canada be opening, cather than closing, stations as it al tempts to make its products available to more and of its taxpayer owners? More oo © The wonderful world of tn ternational finance is perhaps unfolding as it should the years banks Over the international (including © anada'‘s) loaned too many billhons of dollars to third world) and particularly South American countries When some rea pients of the funds couldn't even pay the debt charges on the money, the once prudent bankers loaned them morc money to cover the interest payments Now that may sound hike an odd way to operate a bank but ios the lates! move in the world of interpbational finance that seems (O come dincethy Alico in Wonderland from GIVE BLOOD. W. ROGER WORTH The bankers, it seems have allowed several countries to lend a few billion dollars to a neighbor so the interest can be paid on some of the bor- rower’s huge loans. What's mind-boggling is that high risk Mexico, which owes the bankers almost as much as anyone else in the world, was one ot the lenders That's a lot like one bankrupt tndividual bailing out another by lending money he or she doesn’t have The principle of connec ting compensation to tesulas seems a good one Tf a com pany's managers can double or triple profits, then those responsible for the good results deserve bonuses latching onte a pood con cept. the elite that run eo ub mtrey s Cot the oowWw fh (moverniment owned) cor porations have taken the age old) business Concept one step further Recently Crown owned aircraft companics awarded hefty bonuses to them top cxccutives Whats Last wrong with that? CODD Ares chalked up the largest losses year these In Canadian corporate history The new question of course as what would occur if by some muinracte the © town corporations oaetually made thomcy ) Woah the caceutives lake a pay cut? The top brass necdn t worry Such a mitacte i nmeot about to happen CO PTKH beature Service) Hydro card, though, a giga- joule equals 10 billing units. Which, for reasons already explained, doesn’t help much. The card states that the change in terminology was approved by the B.C. Utilities Commission. But do they know what a gigajoule is? I don’t see how they can, because the silly word doesn’t exist. It’s simply not in the dictionary. Not in my dic- tionary, anyway, which is the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, five inches thick and containing over 260,000 words ‘‘catering to almost every conceivable need’’. No gigajoule, even though there are lots of words begin- ning with ‘‘gig’’. There is, for instance, such a thing as a gigasecond, which is a billion seconds. Also a gigahertz. There is even, believe it of not, a gigacycle, which is a billion cycles, although why anyone would want so many Tcan’t think. _ But there is no gigajoule, and even if you deduce that a gigajoule is a billion joules, no one seems to know what a joule is. I asked everyone ex- cept my dag Sykes and the word is beyond human ken. Then there’s the question of price. Under the new method of billing, states the Hydro catd, ‘“‘the bill will in- clude the $9.28 basic charge plus 39.6 gigajoules at $4.04907 per gigajoule for a total of $169.62.’’ And that, we are assured, is the same as it was before for an equivalent amount of natural gas. Lies, all lies. No one can tell me, for instance, that the price of gasoline hasn’t gone up now that we're paying 50 cents a litre, which is $2.27 4 gallon. It seems only yester- day that we were paying $1.50. And the day before that it was a dollar. That’s what metric does for you. As with gas, so with gigat joules. Just you wait and see. Unless Bob Bonner’s joking, that ts. *s I hereby nominate Rosemary Brown of the NDP for the gigajoule prize of the year. Which isto say, does she really exist, bearing in mind that she recently made the following statement over in Victoria while defending homosexual schoolteachers: **Read the annual report ... On the sexual abuse of chiddren, and you will find that 90 per cent of the cases in that report involve adult heterosexual males against female children. If we’re real- ly- serious about protecting children and net haying. peo- ple teach in our schools who are a threat to female children then we should keep heterosexual males out of the classroom. That’s what we should be talking about ...”’ Over to you.