PERHAPS JUNE 18
Election? Ho-hum
Southam News Services1 OTTAWA — Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau held forth for the better part of an hour Thursday on a possible election date and his government’s legislative plans without shedding much light on either subject.
The Liberal leader did indicate he won’t hold onto the keys to 24 Sussex Drive beyond the end of June, unless the Canadian electorate agrees to renew his lease.
Kibitzing at a press conference here, Trudeau indicated June 18—an election date being touted by Southam col-
umnist Charles Lynch-might be the magic one. “If I go behond that date. I will have to consider the political consequences.”
His commitment not to go beyond the five-year stay in office outlined in the constitution aside, Trudeau kept all his options open. And that meant there were no indications as to what legislation his government intends to proceed with in the days, weeks, or months left before the prime minister pulls the plug on Canada’s 30th Parliament.
( THE WEATHER )
(featured inside)
Thanks, but no thanks . . .
The National Hockey League has again voted against taking in four World Hockey Association teams. Page 12.
The people liked Mork
Robin Williams and Pam Dawber of Mork and Mindy collected People’s Choice Awards in Los Angeles Thursday as the favorite male and female performers in a new TV program. Page 5.
Index
...9-11 .............5
City, B.C..2, 3, 17, 36, 38,45
.18-27 .............6
......32 .....46, 47
......20 ...........31
.34, 35 ...........33
Gardening column... .......45 ...........36
' NOW HEAR THIS)
TODAY
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20' Copy
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Princ^George, British Columbia
This week:
Killed: 0 Injured:14
Arrested us impuired: 9
This year:
Killed: 3 Injured: 156
To same date, 1978: Killed: 2 Injured: 100
• When a local office employee asked another what was wrong with a third, who had failed to show up at work, the reply was: "How much time have you got?”
• And then there’s this classic case of underkill which comes to us via the British Columbia School Trustees’ Association: “Let’s get rid of educational double-speak and jargonese. We can’t expect much support from the general public until we learn to talk straight. Complicated language confuses fact, obfuscates the obvious.” Obfuscates?
• People who have experienced frozen water connections: Don’t turn off that running water tap yet. City engineer Ernie Obst says the warm weather hasn’t thawed the frozen ground eight feet down where the connections are, and they’ll still freeze up if water isn’t left running. A pencil thin stream should be let run for at least another month — no matter how warm the weather gets.
Friday, March 9,1979
Vol. 23; No. 49
\ v
THE QUEST FOR PEACE
Mideast 'breakthrough'
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt (AP) — Presidents Carter of the United States and Anwar Sadat of Egypt held talks during a train ride along the Nile delta today, but appeared no closer to a breakthrough toward an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
Sadat said he is ready to sign such a treaty, but that Israeli misunderstandings and mistrust block the way. He said that only “some words here or there” now separate Egyptian and Israel.
In Israel, Prime Minister Menachem Begin spent three hours briefing his cabinet and said afterward: “Everything now depends on the Egyptian answer. Israel has done its part.”
The Israeli cabinet has already accepted compromise suggestions offered by Carter, but Sadat is seeking some modifications. Carter is to relay Sadat’s response to Begin on Saturday night in Israel.
Begin told a parliamentary committee that a positive response from Sadat would “pave the road to peace," but
a negative response would be “Egypt’s responsibility.” Carter, speaking to reporters as he and Sadat rode an open railway car from Cairo to this ancient port city, said: “We still have some problems, obviously.”
But Carter said the talks are going “very well,” adding that he is neither disappointed nor pleasantly surprised by the talks.
HALIFAX (CP) -.Canadian authorities clashed violently early today on the Gulf of St. Lawrence with seal hunt protesters who had painted seal pups with dye before dawn and eight of the protesters were taken in custody aboard a Coast Guard icebreaker.
Stan Dudka, Canadian fisheries officer in charge of the seal hunt in the area, said he had been struck on the head by one individual who carried a stick “about six miles long.” Dudka said his head was
Said Sadat: “I’m doing my best. But without the intensive effort by President Carter and the American people ... we would have never reached a position (in which a treaty is within reach).”
As Carter and the Egyptian president rode through 220 kilometres of blooming cotton and cheering throngs on the fourhour trip from Cairo, crowds along the way chanted:
swollen but neither he nor anybody else was seriously hurt in the clash, he added.
He said the protesters had put up “fanatical resistance” when the Canadian enforcement authorities, including eight members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, attempted to arrest them on the ice.
“They’re a bunch of i.in-atics . . . Even though they’re under arrest aboard the (icebreaker) Wolfe right now,
elusive
“Carter, Carter,” and “Long live Sadat.”
The train slowed, but did not stop as it passed through towns and villages.
There were reports the U.S. Secret Service had objected to the train trip, fearing that travel through open country, villages and towns was an invitation to trouble.
See also page 5
they’re still putting up resistance.”
He said some of the protestors have been charged with resisting arrest and some of them with carrying concealed weapons.
One man carried a knife in a sheath but it was not used in the scuffle.
The protesters slipped over the side of the trawler Sea Shepherd before dawn to dye the pelts of the seals in an effort to render them worthless to seal hunters.
Medicare
'review'
threatened
OTTAWA (CP) - Prime Minister Trudeau said today the federal government will have to review its payments towards medical care programs run by the provinces if the principles of universal availability are undermined.
Trudeau was questioned in the Commons by Ed Broadbent, who said doctors in Ontario are withdrawing from the 11-year-old federal-provincial health insurance program and boosting fees by 25 to 30 per cent. This threatens to cut people out of the tax-backed program, he said.
The prime minister said the medical care plan is “basic and essential” in Canadian society and is “based on the principle of universality and accessibility.”
“If anything is done by any province to go away from those principles, we will have to review the high payments the federal government is handing out to the provinces for half the share and the costs of medicare.”
Seal hunt violence erupts
AND TAXPAYERS SHELL OUT $200,000
Nuclear debate mushrooms into open war
An analysis by PETER CALAMAl Southam News Services VANCOUVER --Here’s how your tax dollars injected cool, scientific reason into a nuclear debate this week:
-a distinguished medical researcher from Britain dismissed as “misguided” an equally distinguished U.S. scientist standing directly in front of him.
-a federal government scientist, whose findings had been ripped apart, rounded on his critics as more propagandists than scientists.
-the secretary to the national science bodies sponsoring the meeting said an Ontario woman was “lying” in complaints about shoddy treatment.
These incidents reflect the irrational and scrappy tone of a three-day conference here that wound up
a $200,000, year-long effort to give Canadians ‘balanced’ information about nuclear energy.
That attempt by the federal government has failed, admits organizer Dr. Jim Harrison, and a national inquiry on nuclear energy may be the only remaining technique, even though powerful political and industry forces oppose it.
“We’re didn’t get our money’s worth out of this committee,” said Harrison, a renowned geologist and co-chairman of the illfated Committee On Nuclear Issues in the Community (CONIC).
A brain-storm of federal Energy Minister Alastair Gillespie, the committee was supposed to calm local citizenry alarmed over uranium mines, nuclear reactors or atomic garbage dumps proposed near their communities; with co-sponsorship of the elitist Royal Society of Canada
and the Science Council of Canada, the group was allegedly free from the pronuclear bias of Ottawa.
But, as the conference which ended here Friday underlined, the committee had almost no credibility among the activist environmental groups across Canada -despite concessions to critics both in composition and objectives.
The depth of the suspicion was encapsuled here Thursday when a few die-hard nuclear opponents in an audience of 300 rejected the assurances of committee integrity offered by Dr. Patrick Moore, president of the Greenpeace Foundation and a respected figure in West Coast environmental groups.
“Being on this committee for a year, I really found out what accountability is all about,” sighed Moore. “Boy, you really have to be careful.” The fate of CONIC may be decided
over the weekend when the remaining committee members --minus protest resignations and silent withdrawals -shape recommendations to the two sponsoring bodies. If the Establishment’s attempt at nuclear education is a failure, however, the opponents’ try didn’t fare much better.
Although just as many people turned up Thursday night for a counter-conference sponsored by anti-riuclear forces, the session was largely preaching to the converted, with a vegetable soup of scientific facts ladled out with the passion of an oldtime revialist prayer gathering. “Take the issues seriously...but please don’t take yourselves too seriously,” pleaded Walt Patterson, author and energy consultant with the Friends Of the Earth in Britain.
GOV'T 'UNDERMINED'
The forecast for tonight calls for cloudy skies with some clear patches. Saturday and Sunday should be mainly cloudy.
The expected high today was 8, the low tonight -6. The forecast high Saturday is 5. Thursday’s high was 5, the low -8. On this date last year the high was 6, the low -2.
Details page 2
Celestial colors
Planet Jupiter’s giant red spot dominates what looks like an abstract painting in this photograph transmitted from the U.S. Voyager I space probe, now on its way to Saturn. The transmission was broken down into three separate pictures representing the basic colors of yellow, red and blue and then re-transmitted to newspapers like The Citizen which are linked to a “Laserphoto” network. These three “separation” pictures were printed on top of each other, utilizing the three basic inks, on the newspaper’s press to give us this spectacular look at the colors of the universe.
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Dissent splits Iran's regime
TEHRAN (AP) - Premier Mehdi Bazargan resigned from the Iranian provisional government today, but his resignation was turned down by the Ayatollah Ruhollah’Kho-meini, a source close to the premier said.
Bazargan, 70, is reported to have submitted his resignation in the holy city of Qom, 150 kilometres south of Tehran, during the second special meeting with the religious leader in 24 hours.
The ayatollah, who masterminded the overthrow of the shah and appointed Bazargan to lead a new civilian government, is reported to have given Bazargan assurances of his continued support.
He was quoted as saying orders will be issued that will bolster government authority and curb the powers of Khomeini-appointed revolutionary committees, which run a parallel government to that of the premier.
Bazargan told the holy man Thursday he could not remain in office if “provocations” against his government continue.
The premier threatened to quit a week ago because the revolutionary committees and their Islamic revolutionary courts — a parallel government to his own — were undermining his attempts to es-
BAZARGAN
tablish his government’s authority.
“If this goes on,” he said then, “we will have no alternative but to resign.”
On Wednesday, Khomeini attacked suggestions from the Bazargan government that the people should have the opportunity of establishing a Western-style democracy if they wish instead of the theocratic Islamic republic envisaged by the ayatollah.
"You are weak, sir,” Khomeini said, addressing himself to Bazargan. "You are weak, and as. long as you are weak you are under the influence of the strong ones.”
Deputy Premier Amir En-tezam, the official spokesman for the Bazargan goverment, insisted Thursday that the government was not planning to resign.
Bazargan was chosen by Khomeini to head the provisional government after the ayatollah returned from exile.
Strike hits university
BURNABY, B.C. (CP) -The more than 600 members of the Association of University and College Employees have begun a full-scale strike at Simon Fraser University.
The workers voted Thursday to take immediate all-out strike action in response to the university’s selective lockouts.