little to do. with group ho mes. _ The planned-group home for children in care ofthe. Human Resources Ministry at 953 Gladstone: in- North Vancouver has been jor at least nine months. Ie onsumed:‘many hours of District council's. aiid. staff's time. It even began to lay. the seeds of. confrontation with the two other North. Shore: ties- because District wanted a unified bylaw on group home zoning in order to avoid being the sole North Shore “dumping ground” for such institutions. . After all that, it finally emerges that provincial. Jaw. on group homes overrules municipal zoning bylaws. No municipality has the power to reject a group home or. dered by Human Resources. How:such a situation could have continued undetected for so long is beyond com- prehension. North Van Seymour MLA Jack Davis wasn’t aware of it — nor even, ap- parently, Municipal Affairs Minister Bill Vander Zalm. The only people, it seems, who knew the trath all along (but didn’t bother to proclaim it) were the civil servants of Human Resources. ° The affair is a shocking example of the powers of Victoria’s bureaucrats to act without adequate consultation with either their own political masters or with junior governments. This kind of nonsense should be stamped on hard — right from the top. Wrong meeting? The bad news is that the end of the world is coming. The good news is “not yet and not necessarily”. That was the message from well-known futurist Maurice Strong at last week’s Global Conference of the Future in Toronto. With so many similar warnings issued over the past centuries we can’t help wondering whether Mr. Strong turned up at the right conference hall. sunday news north shore news NEWS 985-2131 1139 Lonsdale Ave . North Vancouver, B C V7M 2H4 (604) 985-2131 ADVERTISING CLASSIFIED CIRCULATION 980-0511 986-6222 986-1337 Publisher Peter Speck Associate Publisher Editor-in-Chief Advertising Director Robert Graham Noel Winight Eric Cardweti Classified Manager Production & Office Administrator Tim Francts Berni Hilhard Faye McCrae Managing Editor Andy Fraser News Editor Photography Chris Uoyd Efisworth Dickson Accounting Supervisor Barbara Keen North Shore News, founded in 1969 as an m t Commun id n and qualified under Schedule 1, Past I) Pasageaph 1) ot the Excise Tax Act, is published each Wednesday and Sunday by North Shore Free Press Lid and distributed to every door on the North Shore Second Ctass Mai Registration Number 3685 Subscriptions $20 per year Entwe contents © 1980 Nonh Shore Free Preas Lid. Ail rights reserved No responsibility accepted for unsolicited matenal mctuding Manuscripts end pictures, which should bo sccompamed by 4 atampod, addreased return envelope VERIFIED CIRCULATION: 50,870 Wednesday, 4 49,913 Sunday THIS PAPER IS RECYCLABLE "about the details for far too | spring’s three big NATO maval exercises in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic approaches to Gibraltar, the task group commanders left the seven Canadian warships involved with relatively minor roles. That's not to say Canadian warships aren't good at their job anti-submarine warfare — it's just that they don’t play with the big boys very often, and their ships are woefully naked in modern weaponry _§ for surface and air self- protection. We are the only NATO nation which claims to be something of a maritime power and has no surface-to- surface missiles on warships. We are also alone in not having the ability to fight off an air attack from the required distance. We are also one of NATO?’s richest nations on a per capita basis, yet at a time when the Soviets are spending billions to achieve maritime superiority, here's Canada with the longest OTTAWA (SF) - During this’ coast line in the | world, running down her Navy. It takes almost 10 years of planning to build new warships unless: you buy “off the - shelf” from another nation and lose the industrial benefits. Canada’s plans at this stage indicate that the ove intends to allow Canadian Comment BY PETER WARD - “That was the interior decorator. He says you'll have to go. Few North Shore issues in recent years have raised such a storm of controversy — evidenced week by week in our MAILBOX columns — as the abortion issue which will dominate Sep- tember’s annual general meeting of the North and West Vancouver Hospital Society. It deserves a close look by all mght-thinking North Shore citizens. Actually, issues. The first is the kind of abortion policy, under the existing law, which a majority of North Shore residents want their Lions Gate Hospital to follow. A “liberal” abortion policy? Or a sharply restricted abortion policy — limited, perhaps, solely to cases where the mother's life would otherwise be endangered? In practice, the only way for North Shore residents to register their wishes in the matter is to spend $6 on taking out a membership in the hospital society. They can then elect to the hospital board directors who will represent their wishes and work to realize them. Obviously, however, it's unrealistic (even if theoretically possible) to expect all 60,000-70,000 adult North Shore residents to join the socicty — whose membership hitherto has run to around 600. At that level i's pretty casy for a single cnergetic interest-group to “pack” the annual mecting and clect its own brand of directors This is precisely what the anti-abortion Pro Life Society did last year As o result, all five vacancies at that time on the 17-member hospital board were filled by Pro Life nominees MEMBER DRIVE Pro Choice = supporters fear the same thing could happen again if ovcrall voting membership tn the there are two hospital society is not greatly widened. During the past couple of months they've been conducting their own vigorous membership drive ih an effort to make the society more representative of overall North Shore opinion. To make the society anywhere near completely representative is numerically impossible. But at least these membership drives — whether spearheaded by the Pro Life or the Pro Choice people — are moves in the right direction. The more North Shore residents buy themsclves a $6 vote on how the hospital should be run, as regards both abortion policies and everything clse, the more responsive the hospital is going to be to the needs and outlook of the pcopie it serves. That, for the moment, ts the primary issuc as far as Mr., Mrs., Miss and Ms. North Shore are concerned. And the deadline for joining the hospital society in time to be eligible to vote at the September mecting 1s August 14 NEAT AND TIDY The primary issuc for the (wo protagonist groups in the controversy is not concerned with the wishes of the majority. lt concentrates on absolute social and moral aspects of abortion with which the majority may or may not agree. The Pro Choice faction (whose members vigorously by Noel Wright deny being “pro-abortion”) contend that a woman has the right to decide what happens to her own body: that the choice for or against abortion should be ex- clusively a matter for her and her doctor. They point to the many tragedies of illegal kitchen- table abortions before the abortion law was liberalized during the 1970s to permit legal “therapeutic” hospital abortions. They stress that abortions, like the poor, will always be with us. Then again, there are the social costs of un- wanted children and the whole wider question of surplus population in a world of diminishing resources. Neat and tidy arguments in @ materialistic and per- missive age where the pill doesn't always work There's no faulting the Pro Choice logic The Pro Life people would probably agree that a woman has the right to decide what happens to her own body — but not to the body of a scparatc person whom she happens temporarily to be the Canadian fleet to shrink by 1990 to 10 effective war- ships, and by 1995, to six. We already have dif- ficulties meeting our alliance obligations to control our sector of the North Atlantic, that part between the tip of Greenland and the Canadian East coast, which runs down as far south as the New England states. . A senior officer in this spring's Atlantic exercises said no present Canadian force could survive in our own area in wartime, _ because we lack surface-to- “surface-missiléS; and area air defence weapons. He was putting it politely. A chief petty officer, with more color, said Canadian ships at war would be “F ... all but fodder.” Fine. If we can’t do our job, somebody else will. But Canada loses control over vital interests off shore, and becomes even more of @ NATO freeloader. You can't belong to a club without paying your dues. Our dues - with NATO are in arrears by 20 years. Abortion on demand...? ing. By the seventh week of pregnancy, with seven more months to go _ before delivery, the unborn child is complete and normal as a small-scale baby. By the twelfth week be can kick his legs, turn his feet, curl his toes, make a fist, bend his wrist, squint, frown, open his mouth, suck his thumb, swallow and drink his surrounding amniotic fluid. 99% APPROVALS This, say the Pro Lifers, is the human being (albeit unborn) whom abortion kills. They produce other facts and figures that give food for thought, such as the fact that there are 33 abortions for every 100 live births in B.C. This is almost double the national rate of 17.4%. Even more startling is the Lions Gate abortion rate of treble the national average (last year, 55 abortions for every 100 live births). Worse still, say the Pro Lifers, 99% of abortion applications at Lions Gate were approved in 1979. This, they maintain, amounts to abortion on demand — which is not permitted by the Criminal Code. The stark figures make it hard to arguc with that assertion. So once the hospital society becomes a3 representative of the community as is practical for such a body, the final question boils down to this: Does the North Shore approve of abortion on demand? Or would we prefer to see it mach more strictly controlled than at the present time? It's a tough question for responsible citizens tn A civilized modern society to face up to. But it won't go away by being ignored. And neither should it