6 - Friday, January 15, 1999 — North Shore News north shore news

VIEWPOINT

The pe

battle for a bigger share of the B.C, booze business is heating up like a hot toddy.

Later this month Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh will be receiving recom- mendations from a consultant investi- gating ways to simplify provincial liquor laws and applicable licensing classes. Changes could significandy alter the way alcohol is made available in pubs, ::otels and restaurants.

You know it’s getting quite serious when the protagonists start slinging opinion poll results at anyone who might care to listen.

This week the BC Restaurant and Foodservices Association (BCRFA) released the results of a poll conducted on its behalf by McIntyre and Mustel Associates.

Restaurants would be happy to be able to serve alcohol without having to

iruth

serve food along with it. Not surpris- ingly the BCRFA results show that 72% of British Columbians “support reviewing the liquor laws for the rea- sons of modernizing segulations, improving customer choices, cutting red tape and balancing the need for social responsibility.”

Also this week, the Hospitality Industry Coalition (B.C. & Yukon Hotels’ Association, Neighbourhood Pub Owners Association and the Cabaret Owners’ Association) released MarkTrend survey results on the issue. The coalition is well-served by existing rules. The MarkTrend poll reveals that more than 61% of respondents opposed allowing restaurants the right to offer unrestricted alcohol similar to pubs and bars.

A toast to that old adage: you get what you pay for.

mailbax

Ski hill should take more responsibility

Dear Editor:

Having skied Cypress Bow! prior to Christmas, I was dis- turbed but not surprised by the loss of a young snowboarding instructor during the Christmas holidays.

What disturbs me more is even after this unnecessary loss of life there are no indications that any control is in effect on the mountain either for snowboarders going out of bounds or their flying leaps back onto the main runs and into anyone who gets in the way. Recency I witnessed a young lady being hit, knocked faced down and dragged about 15 to 20 feet.

While I was resting at edge of a run I had another snow- boarder come out of an out-of-bounds arca directly above me. If he had been six inches closer he would have collided with me head-on, I leave you to guess what the results could have been. I also witnessed pot-smoking on the chairlift.

What really bothers me however is that none of these were isolated incidents. Where were the operators and staf” of this -mountain and why are they not enforcing the rules which they so proudly announce in their brochure?

How many more deaths or injuries are we going to hear or not hear about before Cypress Bowl management wakes up and takes on che responsibility as well as raking the moncy? My season’s pass is not worth the grief. When making the complaint co the mountain they asked me to fill out a form. I told them they would receive a copy of this email hoping this will wake them up.

K. Wilson North Vancouver ispa@axionet.com

eae ne batten Went

Mailbox policy

LETTERS to the editor must be legible (preferably type-

written), brief and include your name, full address and tele-

Phone number. Due to space constraints the North Shore jews cannot pubtish all letters.

-north'shiore

Werth Shore itews, founded in 1982 as an {adepandent suburban newspaper and qualified under Schedule 111, Paragraph 111 of the Excise Tax Act, is published each Wednesday, Friday and Sunday by North Shove Free Press (Lin. and dhstributed to every door on the North ‘Shore, Canada Fost Canadian Puutications

57,582 {average cuculation, Wednesday, Fidy & Sunday)

You UBERALS HAVE BEEN HANDPICKED To SPEND THE NEXT NINE MONTHS REACHING OUT Te . WESTERN CANADIANS —

FINDING OUT THE HOPES AND ASPIRATIONS oF THe WEST — MAKING THE WEST FEEL LIKE A VITAL AND IMPORTANT PART OF CANADA.

WELL, OKAY, J BUT NINE MONTHS EN MANITOBA SEEMS A LITTLE EXCESSIVE }/ I

ayy

fj

Ome 45 j ;

Breeding sicknesses of the sou!

I don’t like belittling somebody’s sickness.

Then again, I don’t like belitding a lot

of people’s actions and hobby-horses, but

it seems to pay better than praising everything in sight.

This profound thought was touched off by the news that singer Anne Murray is giving a specia concert fort her daughter, who has or had anorexia.

As you surely know, anorexia and bulimia are highly publicized cating disorders linked by the groundless — I was about to write irra- tonal — tear of being or becoming too

fat. My thoughts strayed to other n.cdical problems that have a leck on media atten- tion. Among them: AIDS. Drug addic- tion, “Alcohol abuse.” (I use this chic term mockingly. Personally, I have never abused alcohol. [ treat it with tender care. And in return by and large it’s been pretty damned nice to me.)

What's the common thread in these disorders? With the tragic exception of AIDS transmitted at birth, or through tainted blood transfusions or otherwise unknowingly to the recipient, they ail come from within,

The surrounding “culture” doubtless has its influence, including the culture of victimization that eats away at the belief in tree will. In a strange way, these disorders are chosen,

And they are equal-opportunity prob- lems, felt not only by the poor and igno-

PETER SPECK Publisher 885-2131 (101)

Entire contents © 1997 North Shote Free Press Ltd. All rights reserved.

rant but also, maybe even disproportion- ately, by the privileged young and the upper-incomed. They look very much like a kind of soul sickness — rooted in malaise, discontent, depression, restless- ness, boredom with what it is, reaching our for what isn’t. Perhaps its most acute form is the conviction that somehow nature cheated you out of your correct gender, your “true” sexual identity. In my youth, there was nothing internal about the major -liseases. ‘They were, no kidding, physical.

Polio: In the carly 1940s the “March of Dimes” was known to all, turning up in print, in promotions in movie theatres and everywhere clse in the fight against this dreaded, largely childhood disease, There was even a president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who demonstrated that it could strike wealthy American aristocrats — though photographers henored the pact never to show Roosevelt in, or getting in or out of, his wheelchair.

In 1995 the Salk vaccine was invented and polio all but vanished.

* Tuberculosis: As a child { once lived short miles from “the Sanatorium,” where victims of this awful killer were treated — many, poignantly, Eskimos far from their homes, Within a generation TB was large- ly beaten in the richer countries, and “the San” became part of a general hospital.

This is no place to stretch out the point. The fact is that within little more than a century some of the most savage diseases were tamed, like smailpox,

cholera, diphtheria, the deadly forms of flu like the onc that struck the world in 1919 and is now all but forgotten — as is the- great accomplishment of a Jewish doctor named Semmelweiss, who outraged the haughty physicians of the 1850s by urging them to wash their hands in a chlorine solution to prevent carrying germs from corpses to birthing mothers (who should praise his name today).

But the paradox is that the more sci- ence saved the body, the more the soul sickened. It’s as if mankind can’t stand success. No one has explained this paradox better than Dostoevsky, 135 ycars ago. Man, he said, showered with every earthly blessing, afloat in bubbles of bliss, will. nevertheless risk everything and desire “the most fatal ruboish ... will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive suffer- ings of all sorts” in order to prove that he is a man, and not a piano key -—~ played by forces outside himse!f.

Within mankind there is this strange fight between life and death, the lure of self-destruction. And for that there is no cure — nothing but the astounding revela- tions to the mysterious heart.

00a

Speak of the angel: Having mentioned journalist Nicole Parton a couple of columns ago, I got a surprise call from her” —- just days back with husband David Elkins from a year in Australia, and ready to write a book caiied, appropriately, A Year in Australia,

goog

If you miss West Vancouver's popular Jackson Davies in the comedy Tie Ships Passing at the Stanley, closing this week- end, it moves on to Capilano College Jan. © 19 and 20. .

LETTERS T0 THE EDITOR

Letters must include your name, full address & telephone number.

VIA e-mail: trenshaw @ direct.ca

Evers . Acting Display Manager ©

Pantone dag 909-0511 (307)

985-2231 (218)

shed by Horth Shore Free Prass Ltd., Publisher Peter Speck, from 1138 Lonsdais

General Office Manager 985-2131 (105) Internet- httpy//wuww.nsneers.com

Display Advertising

Real Estate Adverticing Classified Advertising

” ewsroore Olsplay & Real Estete Fax Kewsroom Fax Classified, Accounting & dials: Office Fax -

Micha! Becker - News Editor 985-2134 (114) Androw Mc Cradie - Sperts/Community Editar. 885-2131 (147).