4 - Sunday, June 1, 1987 - North Shore News Bob Hunter @ strictly personal @ I GUESS the saddest moment in my experience of being a Canadian — well, apart from Trudeau running amok with the War Measures Act — came last month, when Joe Clark turned down a chance to acquire a Caribbean province. _ [have forgiven Joe for a lot of things, including the monumental gaffe of letting himself be depos- ed as prime minister by the wily Keith Davey. ! even forgave Joe for losing to Mulroney. But I shall never forgive Joe for blowing the chance to annex | the Turks and Caicos Islands. A delegation from there show- ed up in Ottawa, hinting that a union between our two countries would be beneficial for both. From the point of view of the 9,000 Turks and Caicosians, it f would mean a wonderful infusion of cash. Being a province in Canada | means all sorts of equalization payments. Overnight, the islands’ chronic unemployment problems, lack of adequate educational and health systems, all the usual Third World dilemmas, could be solved. In exchange, pro-association f advocates’ argued, northern Ca- nadians would be able to vaca- tion in a paradise that was ‘*home.’’ I predict that if the Tories lose the next election, and everything | points to them losing right now, it will not have been because of any minor blunder, like packing the Senate with cronies after running an anti-patronage cam- paign. It will have been because of the loss of the Turks and Caicos. Out here, where we have the Gulf Islands and Hawaii, the | need for a Canadian province in the Caribbean is less apparent than if you happen to live anywhere east of Maple Ridge. But I_know the Prairie mind and I have enough friends and relatives in Toronto to know the ftruly awful sufferings of Easterners between November and April. I stopped in at Ottawa last December, so my memories of an authentic Canadian winter are fresh. All I can say is it’s (expletive deleted) cold. § We're the oddball corner of the Canadian climate, remember, Except for about a million and a half people living in the south- western corner of B.C., the country deserves its reputation as the place where the Eskimos live. I think you have to be a bit crazy to live there. But it’s amaz- ing how people will accept their fate. What they surely can’t accept is Joe throwing away the chance in a lifetime of acquiring 30 fab- ulous little islands in the sacred Cariolean itself. When I say “sacred,’* { mean just that. | There is really no place that can be said to be much more beautiful. And the temperature, oh God, ‘he temperature! Some of my most joyous memories are of walking along Caribbean beaches, bare feet be- ing whirlpooled by the surf. I’ve only been to the Bahamas, Cuba and Trinidad and Tobago, but it was enough to get the basic pic- ture. The ocean has a certain more- than-luminescent quality. Astronauts call the Caribbean ‘the most translucent waters in the world.”” For the people Down Fast, i in January, having to stagger through the snowdrifts past the billboards showing Jamaican beaches, due south of them, the Caribbean is Mecca. Cuba's entire tourism industry is kept alive by Snowbirds, Americans not being allowed to vacation there. We already own huge chunks of other Caribbean islands, notably the Bahamas, where there are sometimes three Royal Banks to an island. Canadian developers have made fortunes down there, i.e. ripped the locals off with impunity. When Joe Clark says acquiring the Turks and Caicos would ruin Canada’s ‘‘reputation’® in the region, I have to stifle an impulse to gag. Canadians are the bankers down there, the fat cats: with cigars in limousines, got it? Who loves their loan officer? Come on. Joe’s other arguments for not taking the Turks and Caicos up on their offer, by the way, were that ‘‘our acceptability as a non- imperialist interiocutor in the developed world (would be) diminished ... and Cuba and the Soviet Union would be given grounds for claiming that Canada was engaged in neo- colonial activities.”’ Who cares what the Commies think? Wasn’t an interlocutor a guy in blackface on a stage, do- ing a tap dance? Come on, Joe. You really did blow it. History will remember you as the guy who fumbled the chance for a | Canadian island in the sun. Treason! That’s a hanging of- fence, surely. Or it could be. Is that why Joe’s against the noose? He figures someday it’ll be used on him.... Worth Van man guilty of assault A’ 20-YEAR-OLD North Van- couver man was handed a suspended sentence May 27 and placed on probation for one year after he pleaded guilty to charges of assault and mischief. -Paul Grant was originally charged with assault and mischief in connection with a Feb. 13 inci- dent in which a female was assaulted and a window at her East Third Street residence was punch- ed. . ‘Grant was charged with addi- tionul counts of mischief and break and enter in connection with a Feb. 20 incident in which another window at the same residence was allegedly punched and a March 8 incident in which the residence was alleged to have been broken into. Appearing before North Van- couver provincial court Judge B.P. Byrne, Grant pleaded guilty to the charge of assault and one charge of mischief. In addition to probation, Grant was ordered to pay $65 in restitu- tion to the victim. THREE CHARGES laid against a 20-year-old North Vancouver man in connection with a May 5 burglary of a freighter have been dismissed. located at the south foot of St. Andrews Avenue. Appearing Wednesday before North Vancouver provincial court Judge J.B. Paradis, Vasileff had Charges dismissed in freighter B&E all charges aguinst him dismissed. Laporte and Webster both pleaded guilty to the charges May 11 and were sentenced to six and three-month jail terms respectively. Todd Allen Vasileff was origi- nally charged jointly with Brian Allan Laporte, 22, Alexander Conrad Webster, 20, with break and enter, possession of stolen property and mischief in connec- tion with a May § incident in which the motor vessel Klondike was burglarized and a number of the ship’s storage cabinets dam- aged. 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