THE RESIGNATION of
Lucien Bouchard comes as
no great surprise.

I asked him just a couple of
months ago, when he unveiled his
vaunted “‘Green Papers,”’ if he in-
tended to go back to Quebec to
fight for the separatist cause, leav-
ing the rest of us stuck with two
more wasted years while a new
federal environment minister
learns his stuff.

AIL I got back was a lot of
evasive mumbo-jumbo. There was
no firm ‘“‘non’’ by way of answer.
He left the door open, in the cunn-
ing way that politicians do when
they are thinking ahead a few press
conferences down the road, when
they are going to have to say the
opposite of what they’re saying
now.

*<,.-despite all the
hullabaloo about
Meech Lake,
Bouchard was set
up to be dumped
by the prime
minister...””

So now that he has pulled the
plug, I guess 1 have my answer.

And, yes, the nightmare part of
it is the fact that Brian Mulroney
will toss some other ecologically-
illiterate MP into the driver’s seat
and the Department of the En-
vironment’s achingly slow-building
momentum will grind to a halt
while the new minister tries to fig-
ure out where the bells and whis-
tles are.

But there is much more to the
sudden resignation of Lucien
Bouchard than his angst over his
tribal identity.

The inside track I pick up is that
despite all the hullabaloo about
Meech Lake, Bouchard was set up
to be dumped by the prime
minister for coming out in favor of
a reduction in fossil fue! emissions,
a proposal which is anathema to
the powerful energy minister, Jake
Epp.

You may recall the story that
broke just as Bouchard was setting
out a couple of weeks ago for a
global warming conference in
Europe.

A document leaked to Friends of
The Earth in Ottawa showed that
Canadian diplomats had agreed
under the table to back a foot-
dragging exercise launched by the
American and British govern-
ments.

Neither George Bush nor Maggie
Thatcher wants to take steps to
reduce carbon dioxide leveis, for
the simple and brutal reason that
the multi-billion-dollar petroleum
industry would freak out, and
there goes a fortune in donations
to Republican and Tory coffers
alike.

(9 outlets to serve you)

4 - Sunday, May 27, 1990 - North Shore News

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It is against this background that

we have to look at the short,
unhappy carzer of Lucien
Bouchard, the promising
*‘super-minister’’ of the environ-
ment, who was billed as the man
who would lead us to eco-paradise.

His failure to push radical legis-
lation — indeed, virtually any leg-
islation — through the briar patch
of the Ottawa bureaucracy, is
perhaps forgivable, but the fact
that his masterplan to save
Canada’s crumbling environment
wound up being gutted.

He was forced in the end to drag
a tired old questionnaire about en-
vironmental concerns before the
public, trying to pass it off as the
basis for action this fall.

But after missing two previously
announced deadlines for action, he
had very little credibility feft.

People who have met Bcuchard
privately tell me he is a deeply
frustrated man, a true — if belated
— convert to environmentalism,
but increasingly convinced that he
couldn’t move the federal mour:-
tain of inertia and vested interests.

In Europe last week, the en-
vironment minister did a surprising
thing. At the end of the conference
on global warming, he made a
passionate speech in which he urg-
ed a reduction of 10 per cent in
carbon emissions between now and
the end of the century.

This was totally contrary to the
secret deal Canada had struck with
the U.S. and Britain.

Bouchard’s call for a cut was
modest enough, considering that a
similar conference in Toronto last
year called for a minimum cut of
20 per cent in that same period of
time just to avoid worsening the
climatic situation.

But even this was apparently too
much for Mr. Mulroney, who
knew he would be getting phone
calls from his petrochemical in-
dustry buddies, calling for
Bouchard’s head on a platter.

Shortly thereafter, Mulroney
made his famous speech about
there being no room for separatists
in the federal Conservative Party.

it was an unusually blunt state-
ment, coming from the PM.
Parliament Hill insiders said it
amounted to waving a red flag in
Bouchard’s face, goading him to
respond. Aad respond he did, sen-
ding a wire from the Canadian
embassy offices in Paris to a Parti
Quebecois convention, hailing the
ghost of Rene Levesque.

From the moment Mulroney
kicked sand in his face,

Bouchard’s finger was bound to
come up. It must have been clear
to him by then that he was doomed
to bomb as a federal cabinet
minister.

There was no way he was going
to be allowed to implement any-
thing except a watered-down en-
vironmenta! package. Given his
promises of substantive legislation,
he was going to end up with egg on
his face. It would be him taking
the fall for the Tories on environ-
ment. ‘

The tragedy in all this, I’m told,
is that Bouchard, for all his fail-
ings, was the pick of the crop of
Tories so far as the environment

portfolio was concerned.
e

Free Estimates

275-6237

School gets
French name

From page 2

North Star was erected in the
1920s but ceased to function as a
school in 1982 because of declining
enrolment.

The board's motion last Tuesday
Stated that the name change will
apply ‘‘during the time that Pro-
gramme Cadre is the primary user
of the school building’’ and that
the building would revert to the
North Star name if it were to
‘change significantly’’ in the
future.

Both Bell and Trustee Marg
Jessup pointed out that North Star
Elementary Schoo! holds a signifi-
cant place in the hearts of former
students, many of whom still live
in North Vancouver, and that the
North Star name would be retained
to identify the building for heritage
purposes.

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