ure _about ‘ourselves as a mocks than all of «Br 2a ‘erry’s: ite to cancer research was d- measure, so, too, was his gift to liticians, programs " proclamatl of the past 114 years. cal” for which he strove welded Canadians in every comer of the country together into one huge family because Terry himself embodied all that is best in our national character, regardless of provincial boundaries. And Canadians everywhere responded instinctively to the mirror he held today’s ritual July 1 celebrations. Somat tesohi Scientists get their jollies in odd ways. For example, they now define the second, the basic unit of time, as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of an atom of cesium. . Personally, we've known minutes that seemed like hours and days that flashed by like minutes — all of it adding spicc to living. It's nice, of course, to be permanently right. But what a boring time a cesium atom must 1139 Lonsdale Ave. narth shore news v7ua 214 (604) 985-2131 ADVERTISING 980-0511 CLASSIFIED 985-2131 986-6222 CIRCULATION 986-1337 Publisher Peter Speck Associate Publisher Ediltorin-Chiet Advertising Director Robert Graham Noe! Wright Eric Cardwett Managing Editor News Editor Sports Editor Andy Fraser Chris Uoyd Genoral Manager Administration Bermi Hillard Production Director Rick Stonehouse nting Supervisor Circulation Director Purchaser Keen Brian A Ellis Faye McCrae North Shore News, tounded 1969 as an independent Community new and qualitied undet Schedule t Part @ Paragraph ll of the Excise Tax Act ts published each Wetneaday and Sunday by North -. Shore Free Press Ltd and distributed to every door on the North Shore Second Class Mail Registration Number 3885 Subecriptions $20 per year. Entire contents © 1981 Moth Shore Free Prose Ltd. All rights reserved. No responsibility eccepted for unsolicited matenad inching manuscripts and pictures which should be accompaniod by 4 stamped addressed envotope VERIFIED CIRCULATION 63,470 Wednesday, 52,750 Sunday Koy SING THIS PAPER IS RECYCLABLE North Vancouver, B.C. cigarettes, while the suf- fering *:addicts..:in ; Ontario, © cents per carton tax on must:-fork.-over’ $2:92'.per-’ api -earton”:.to: the | > provingial TT government... ; - whe 4 faxes. on a. com- The media have recently been airing the concern reportedly felt by many citizens that our courts today are sometimes too “soft” and per-. missive — failing in such cases to back up law enforcement agencies and protect society. But the way North Vancouver-Seymour MLA Jack Davis sees it, our judges themselves deserve sympathy as well as the police and the law-abiding public. He blames today’s Situation squarely on our lawmakers and_ their bureaucrats who are “legislating us to death”. Mr. Davis argued his case last week in the Legislature with impressive logic during the debate on the Attorney General's estimates. Along the way, incidentally, it became very clear. .why jawyers are presently Canada's No. | growth in- dustry. His first point ‘was the bewildering rate at which the actual number of laws is increasing all the time. The provincial and federal goveraments ,are currently grinding out at least 100 new acts a year but are rarcly repealing any older acts. COMPOUND VERBIAGE As a result, the verbiage we call “law” is com- pounding at around 10 per - cent annually, which means the actual volume of legislation on every subject under the sun is doubling every seven years. As if that were not bad cnough, said Mr. Davis, laws are also coming more complex, When an original 10-page law is revised, it's often replaced by 20 pages or more — sometimes as many as 50. He quoted some telling statistics from history in making this point. The Lord’s Prayer has 56 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address 266 words. The Ten Commandments (all you really need?) 297 words. The Declaration of In- dependence 300 words. A recent U.S. government regulation describing how cabbage has to be priced ran to 26,911 words! The passage of scores of new acts cach year by majority votes in the Legislature or Parliament is a big cnough problem in itself for our courts. But that’s only the beginning of the legislative horror story. Every new act forms the basis for an infinite number of more explicit “fine print” regulations which are enacted simply by Order-in- Council, without being subject to any scrutiny by the elected legislators who passed the act itself. These regulations may be . written by the cabinet, by a single minister or, even more alarmingly, by a non-elected bureaucrat. And in a court of law such regulations carry exactly the same weight as the main provisions of the act from which they are - "Ontario. and then ailing the gaspers to retail stores The two were fined'$3 200 . then, however, the Ontario’ _government.has increased its’ tax on cigarettes and tied the tax to the pricé of the ~ _ plus the lost taxes:" cigarettes, so the provincial coffers: will get more -as: inflation boosts the price of tobacco products. That also means increased temptation to fiddle with the provincial tax iaws by buying smokes in the province with the lowest tax, shipping -them to high tax areas, and avoiding the pr--vincial bite. Not only the provinces are involved, indians on '__ reservations don't pay taxes mon cigarettes, so just imagine - the traffic there. Figures show that at one ’ stage in 1980, 961 packages © . Of cigarettes per Indian per -day were entering Ontario Indian reservations. It’s .- bighly unlikely that those = smokes were being puffed on the reservations. Somebody was making a killing, and it probably wasn’t the Indians. ‘s laws - ahorror s by Noel Wright ived. | TOO MUCH TO HANDLE If acts passed after duc debate in the Legislature are Aumbered in the hundreds, Order-in-Council regulatio- ns, never referred to MLAs at all, are numbered in the thousands. Between 1970 and the end of 1979 the B.C. enacted a 40,505 such an average of ‘jor more than 11 “This is top much for our to handle,” Legislature: much for our law-abiding society {to slistain... Our judges are only human. With all this pressure of more law and more detailed law, they . astronoinical levels and you ‘have to wonder whether the tax evaders are.in the wrong, “On -it’s’>the | governments which t “rmiddle ges, was:the citizen ‘so heavily. In the ‘who hid: his .cow. from the ‘King’s -tax ‘collector really a criminal? - We're not at the state in Canada where violaters of the tax laws are executed, the way the peasant would have been for hiding his cow, -if—the tax collectors caught him, but we sure can justifiably ask some pretty hard questions about the level of taxation and spending on the part of all levels of our governments. Canadians are in the | position of being forced to watch governments which have protected themselves against inflation refuse to curb spending while the taxation rate progressively squeezes more revenue out of private hands and into government. ¢ It’s healthy process economy. are bound to make mistakes. Becoming specialists, they are losing their perspective and their common touch. Common sense is giving way to book learning... “My sympathy then to our judges. But my sympathy, even more, for our police, our law enforcement of- ficers.” The Davis solution: “A simple, straightforward and well thought out Bill of Rights — a fundamental law that guards our rights as individual citizens and prevents the bureaucrat and busy politician from legislating us to death. (A law, one also supposes, that would automatically forbid any meddling jack-in- office to add supplementary Orders-in-Council to it.) For the sake of everyone concerned, and not leagt our judges, 1 hope Attormcy General Allan Williams was listening to his North Shore colicague. As Herbert Hoover said in a 1929 message to Congress: “If the law is upheld only by government officials, then all law is atan end.” CAN CANCER _BE BEATEN? BET YOUR not a for any .