6 - Wednesday, Oclober 23, 1985 - North Shore News Eiditorial Page “News Viewpoint No vacancy ms / ell, why not a trailer park in Cypress West Vancouver Council is up in arms over a proposal by Cypress Bow! Recrea- tions Lid. to build a temporary recreational vehicles park for summer Expo visitors. According. to Cypress Bowl management, the facilities are already in place, no major renovations will occur, and the temporary permit guarantees that Cypress won't turn the proposal into a long-term project. Victoria has already given temporary ap- proval to the project which illustrates that the Bennett government knows an opportu- nity to make a buck when they see one. They understand that the ski resort can make extra cash by keeping some of the fa- cilities open during the summer. They also anderstand that Vancouver wil! be spilling over with visitors and that there will have to be some place to catch the overflow. West Van Council is understandably con- cerned about uncontrolled construction in the Bowl area, but their concern over the park is TOO farsighted. By not making use of a vacant parking lot, thousands of tourist dollars will be lost to the municipality and the forecasted cramped accommodation situation will worsen. Council should look .at all of the options for Cypress Bowl development before put- ting up the no vacancy sign. : Rooms to rent he rumored plan by Port Moody’s Eagle ; Ridge hospital to accommodate bed and breakfast customers from the Expo 86 overflow is the first positive sign of free enterprise innovation in our predominantly mundane health care philosophies. Who needs . extra billing with all those extra beds: lying around empty or cluttered up with B.C. medical plan freeloaders? Let’s follow Port Moody’s lead and open up our hospitals to some real money. In with high-rolling tourists, out with wheezing patients. Disptay Advertising 980-0541 Classitied Advertising 986-6222 Newsroom 988-2131 Circulation 986-1337 Subscriptions 986-1337 1139 Lonsdale Ave., North Vancouver, B.C. V7M 2H4 Publisher Peter Speck General Manager Roger McAfee Operations Manager Berni Hiliard Advertising Director Advartising Administrator Linda Stewart Mike Goodsell : Circulation Director Editor-In-Chief BIN McGown Noel Wright Photography Manager Production Director Terry Peters Chris Johnson Classifled Manager Val Stephenson Pan vores Ov mOmTes Kann WEST vANCOUNER ‘north’shore:."” SUNDAY > WEDNESDAY + mMDAY North Shoro News, founded in 1969 as an independent suburban newspaper and qualilied under Schedule ili, Pact Ill, Paragraph (Il of the Excise Tax Act, is published each Wednesday, Friday and Sunday by North Shore Free Press Lid. and distributed to every door on the North Shore. Second Class Mail Registration Number 3885. Entire contents © 1985 North Shore Free Prass Ltd. All rights reserved. Subsctiptions, North end West Vancouver, $25. per year. Mailing rates available on request. No responsibility accepted for unsolicited material inctuding manuscripts and pictures which should be accompanied by a stamped. addressed envelope. . Member of the B.C. Press Council sq 56,245 (average, Wednesday SDA DIVISION Friday & Sunday} THIS PAPER IS RECYCLABLE Lower wages—more jobs IN RECENT publications and speeches I have been advancing the idea that Canada’s high urremployment rate may be due to excessively high wage rates. In support of this idea I provide information which few Canadians know. Since 1965 Canadian average weekly wages ad- justed for inflation have risen by 35 per cent. In: US dollars they still have risen 20 per cent. During. this same period US real wages have fallen 5 per cent. Pro- ductivity has risen no more in Canada than in the United States. Over the last several decades there has been a strong and direct relation- ship between differences in real US and Canadian wages and differences in the two countries’ unemployment rates. Currently, the US unemployment and wage rates are both 40 per cent lower than those in Canada. These facts imply that Canadian real.. wages will have to fall if the unemployment rate is to be lowered. This is an old pro- ‘ position supported by much indirect and direct historical evidence. Attempts to brand it ideological will not reduce . GRUBEL SFU Professor of Economics its validity. In discussions and letters’ to editors 1 get attacked for advancing the preceding ideas. The main thrust of the attack is that lower wages are an unacceptable solution to the unemployment pro- blem for workers and unions of Canada. The idea of lower wages is then used by these critics to conjure vi- sions of Dickensonian poverty and Asian sweat shops coming to Canada. Critics from the unions typi- cally add the vision of the rich employers getting richer at the expense of helpless workers who are unprotected by their unions. These reactions are totally inappropriate. I don’t knew by how much wages have to fall to restere the health of the Canadian economy, only the market knows. But let us assume that we had a law which overnight reduced the wages of ail Canadians by 15 per cent. This would quickly lead to increased exports and the cancellation of plans to substitute machines for ex- pensive labor. . Employers would have more cash to invest and the higher returns to capital in Canada would encourage the building of factories here rather than abroad by Ca- nadians as well as foreigners. | Many people could afford: to buy services that otherwise were too expensive for them. The result of such developments wouid be in- creased employment and a lowering of the unemploy- ment rate. Most important, the higher employment LETTER OF THE DAY NOEL WRIGHT ON ASSIGNMENT would raise labor produc- tivity, as firms would enjoy the well-known benefits of scale economies. This in- creased productivity would then permit the hiring of even more workers at the go- ing wage.. - At any rate, even if Cana- dian wage rates would have to fall 40 per cent to restore the 1965 relationship with US wage rates and to bring back the four per. cent. , unemployment rate prevail- ing then, Canadian workers would still be among the * highest paid in the world. At the same time higher tax » revenues and lower social in- surance spending would ‘sharply lower budget deficits and reduce the burden of debt payments, which lower current and future incomes of Canadians today. It may well be true that currently employed and highly paid Canadians are not interested in sacrificing any part of their income’ to get the unemployed to work. If this is so, let us be open about it. It is an understan- dable’ and valid argument. Its morality is another ques- tion. Editorial ‘irresponsible’ Dear Editor: Your editoral titted “Up-Down Creek”’ in your Sunday, September 29 edi- tion cannot pass without comment. Do you not even read your own paper? In a front page article of August 18 of this year an accurate article done by one uf your reporters stated the concerns of a few Cypress Creek residents who were concerned about a proposed flood control pro- ject. The issues here were a hell of a lot more than “views being ruined’’, Just to enlighten you in case you can’t find back issues, the concerns more correctly were: *® Attempted property rights violations. The municipality proposed to ‘steal’? one third of my property without permission and without compensation. © Extreme haste and heavy- handed attitude of the municipality, as exhibited by the short time frame residents had to respond; as an example, the proposed bylaw was made.available to the public only one and a half business days before the council voted on it! ¢ Poor engineering by the municipality’s favorite engineering firm, as exhib- ited by inaccuracies in the creek gradient at the pro- posed site. © Disaster potential as iden- tified by independent engineering opinions. In addition to these and other concerns, the ruined views that you refer . to would amount to over $150,000 in loss of property values. . A. responsible editoria would address the real issue, namely a creek that can turn into a raging river in a mat- ter of hours, given unfavor- able weather conditions, and provide a severe threat to residents of the entire Creek delta. D. Quance West Vancouver