e

IN THE end, I think it will be the helicopter issue that will
forestall another Tory government, untess Jean Charest
becomes prime minister and finds a way to quietly brush
Kim Campbell's helicopter madness aside, in the same way
that his mentor, Brian Mulroney, shunted a previous
defence minister’s crazy vision of a fleet of nuclear sub-
marines off the agenda entirely.

Between now and the Tory
convention, we can assume that
“Stormin’ Kim’’ won't change her
mind about anything so big as the
chopper purchase, if only because
she can’t afford to look like an
utter ditherer.

(Personally, I like a certain
amount of dithering. It means
somebody’s trying to keep up to
date.)

In the meantime, it certainly
can’t be helping Campbell’s cam-
paign to have to keep playing
Maggie Thatcher, bronking like a
goose to show how tough she is.

Sure, it must be a fine line be-
tween offering a new, implicitly
gender-inspired ‘style’? of lead-
ership, and yattering the same old
warhorse stuff that we have
always heard from the Tories to
justify massive expenditures of tax
money on what is basically a form
of defence socialism.

All she is doing with her
decidedly out-of-synch Cold
Warriorism is carrying on the
tradition of the modern industrial
state depending on military spend-
ing.

As John Kenneth Galbraith
pointed out back when defence
minister Campbell was in high
school, ‘military expenditures are
what now make the public sector
Jarge."’

How can you fight deficits
while making the military bigger?

Since the 1950s, “the relation of
the Cold War to the needs of the
industrial system has been ex-
tremely close,’’ Galbraith wrote in
The New Industrial State, some-
thing Campbell should have, must
have — read long ago. Like, the
Sixties?

Other thinkers, like Ralph E.
Lapp, a member of the Manhat-
tan Project and author of The -
Weapons Culture, have been argu-
ing since a decade before even -
then that free enterprise has been
distorted by a system in which the
welfare of the country is perma-
nently tied to the continued
growth of soilitary technology and
the stockpiling of military hard-
ware.

This criticism was aimed mainly
at the U.S., of course. Certainly,
it applies to a lesser degree in
Canada, or in most other indus-
trial powers, but the point is, it

HUGE SAVINGS «

STRICTLY. PERSONAL
still applies.

The helicopter issue is a perfect
example.

If we were to take $6 billion
and blow it on something other
than enormously expensive hunt-
er/killer air machines, we could,
for instance, quite possibly clean
up our filthy harbor.;, from Vie-
torid to St. John, where untreated ~
sewage is still being dumped into
the oceans.

instead, if combative Kim has
her way, it will be gunships, not
daycare and doctors. Where on
carth is her head at? What Cana-

dian needs a goddam flying death
“machine, when so many of us are
in such dire straits?

Yet, with her attitude and the
peculiar parliamentary system we
have (which allows a prime
minister many of the prerogatives
of a king or queen, and his or her
cabinet the powers of a de facto
oligarchy),who is to doubt that
she won't push her program
through? | have to take her at her
word,

And I have to wonder, surely
we don’t need a re-run of the
Celtic chieftaness routine that
served poor old Britain so poorly
in the dying days of the Cold
War!

The Iron Lady struck heroic
postures — still docs — but any-
body who thinks the Thatcher Era
did the Brits a whole lot of good
hasn't been paying attention to
what’s going on over there these

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MON. - FRI 10-8

SAT. 10-6
SUN, 12-5

5550 FRASER
Van.

Sc isn t just the Queen, Charlie,
Fergie ard the Prime Minister
having a hard time of it. An entire
generation has been thrown to the
tender mercies of the banks, after
having been sold a patently out-
of-touch-with-reality (either that
or just plain cruel) neo-conser-
vative bill of goods.

I dwell on the image of the [ron
Lady because it seems clear that
this is the person who serves as
Kim Campbell’s role model.

This business of vowing to fight
them on the beaches with 50
high-tech superhelicopters worth
nearly $6 billion (and rising), ata
time when the country has almost
three million people on welfare,
with another 1.5 million unable to
find work, throwing all that
wealth to a European consortium
(working, granted, with a Quebec
partner), does seem a bit weird,
especially since most of the chop-
pers are stated for anti-submarine
work...

Against whom? Are we plan-
ning to fight the Americans over
arctic waters? The Russians aren't
exactly coming. And the Serbs
don’t have any subs.

{t's a bit scary, | must admit,
watching Ms. Campbell show her
fascist side so quickly.

I mean “‘fascist,”’ of course, in
the loose sense of the word, in the
way that she herself apparently

meant ‘‘enemies’’ when she refer-
red to all non-deficit-fighters as
“enemies of Canada.”

With her tough-guy comments
about us non-deficit-fighting,
non-card-carrying party member
slobs being published just a week
after the departing Sun King,
Mulroney, told the media in Paris

he didn’t give a damn what people

icopters could sink Jory aspirations

thought back home about his
boar-shooting escapade outside
Moscow, is it altogether surpris-
ingly that some of us get the feel-
ing that we’re generally being told
by our Tory rulers to eat cake?

Cake? Hm. More like ... weil,
never mind.

When You Can’t Believe
Everything You Read.

Come in and we'll rid you of that blurry feeling.

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