today in brief
THE SUCCESSOR to Dave Barrett as provincial NDP leader is likely to be David Vickers or Bill King, according to delegate counts. Page
JEAN CHRETIEN is making slight gains, but John Turner still has a big lead in the race for the federal Liberal party leadership. Page
AN ECONOMIC analyst says Canada’s massive debt puts it just ‘an accident’ away from becoming another Brazil or Mexico. Page
ONLY FOUR teams are left in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Page
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lERMtN
'I've come to ask for your daughter's hand in moving my furniture."
Index
Ann Lander*............12
Bridge..................19
Buineps...............8,5
CKy.B.C..........3,7,23,24
Classified............lfi-21
Comics ..................1
Crossword..............IS
Editorial.................4
Entertainment...........fi
Family .................12
Horoscopes.............19
International.............2
Movies...................fi
National.................5
Sports................13-15
Television ..............18
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Just watching? Page 13
Sadrack says
We’ll get one final blast of winter as colder air moves into the area from the Gulf of Alaska later today bringing clouds and showers of rain or wet snow overnight. Tuesday should be cloudy with sunny periods, a few afternoon showers and a risk of thunderstorms. The high should be near 8 and the overnight low near -4.
Sunday’s high was 9, the overnight low was -1, a trace of precipitation was recorded at the airport and we had 1.3 hours of sunshine.
A year ago on this
date we had a high of 17, an overnight low of -1, a trace of precipitation and 6.8 hours of sunshine.
The sun will set at 7:29 p.m. today and rise at 4:49 a.m. Tuesday.
The
Prince George
Citizen
35c
Monday, April 23, 1984
Pulp offer:
resounding vote of 'no'
by JOHN SPILKER Staff reporter
Prince George members of the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada Local 9 have overwhelmingly rejected the industry’s latest three-year contract offer.
In a vote Thursday, about 90 per cent of about half the local’s 750 members that voted rejected the offer, the local’s secretary Mickey Finnigan said today.
The vote was in keeping with the provincial trend in which several pulp and paper locals have rejected the offer by more than 80 per cent. Prince George members
Doctor blasts seatbelt law
VANCOUVER (CP) - The provincial government’s decision not to require children under the age of six to wear seatbelts or restraining devices is “blatantly ridiculous,” says a spokesman for the B.C. Medical Association.
“We know, and the government knows, that restraining infants and young children in cars reduces the chances in an accident of their being killed by 90 per cent, and of being injured by 70 per cent,” said Dr. Norman Hamilton, chairman of the association’s emergency medical services committee.
Hamilton was commenting on reports of a statement by Transport Minister Alex Fraser that the government has no intention to force children under six to wear the devices. Fraser made the remark on a television program.
Hamilton said 17 children under six were killed and 880 injured in traffic accidents in the province in 1982. Health Minister Jim Nielsen has said that seven were killed in 1983 and 480 injured.
bulletin
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Direc-tor John Landis and two fellow film-makers were ordered Monday to stand trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two children during filming of the movie Twilight Zone.
Landis, movie special effects coordinator Paul Stewart, and Dor-cey Wingo, the helicopter pilot whose aircraft crashed and killed the actors, were ordered to answer the charges.
of the Canadian Paperworkers Union will vote on the offer Tuesday and Wednesday.
Finnigan said he expects the government to impose the contract on the two pulp unions through legislation.
“I don’t see that the manufacturers will make any attempt at negotiating a contract. The government is on their side and will probably impose the contract.”
The wage offer is the same as the one recently ratified by the International Woodworkers of America, which included no increase the first year, four per cent the second and 4.5 per cent the third.
The old contracts of the three unions expired July 1,1983. The hourly base rate for forestry workers is $12.96.
Finnigan said a legislated agreement would be resented by the union members “which would be reflected some here down the line. It certainly will not be forgotten.”
About 13,000 pulp workers were off the job for 68 days during an eight-week lockout and one-week strike which ended earlier this month after the government brought down back-to-work legislation.
Else where in the province, pulp and paper workers in Quesnel and Crpfton have joined workers in several other British Columbia communities in rejecting the industry’s final contract offer.
Members of the Canadian Paperworkers Union at the B.C. Forest Products Ltd. mill on Vancouver Island voted 83 per cent to reject the contract proposal, while members of the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada at the same mill voted 81.5 per cent against three-year deal.
In Quesnel, members of the paperworkers union at Cariboo Pulp and Paper voted 99 per cent to reject the proposal.
Voting results released Friday showed that unionized pulp workers in at least four other British Columbia communities also rejected the offer. Negotiators for the unions had recommended that the 12,700 members of the two unions turn down the contract proposal, put to a vote following provincial government legislation earlier this month.
Voting began last Wednesday and is to be completed April 25.
Union locals at Kamloops, Powell River, Nanaimo and Squamish were reported to have rejected the contract by as much as 90 per cent of those who voted.
WUt, '' i';S . v -A*
Citizen photo by Ric Ernst
Curtis Downie, left, and Gerard Ryder on the job near top of Permanent tower.
NEW HEIGHTS IN SPRING CLEANING
No daydreamers need apply
by DAVE PAULSON Staff reporter
One of the more bothersome rites of spring is spring cleaning.
But when you’re complaining about washing windows on the outside remember it’s probably better than washing windows — somebody else’s yet — more than 100 feet off the ground.
Curtis Downie and Gerard Ryder had the honor of washing windows this spring on the 130-foot Permanent Tower, the city’s tallest. They’re the ones who look like Spiderman to passers by, manoeuvring precariously on an 18-inch wide platform.
The two adventurers insist the job is perfectly safe. It has to be, or else the Workers’ Com-
pensation Board “would have a fit,” says Ryder, who started work only Monday when his predecessor quit because the thought of working 130 feet above terra firma didn’t appeal to him. Sounds reasonable.
“I got a kick out of it the first time,” smiles Ryder, now a veteran of two and one-half years, off and on, of window washing.
But for all its height and 800 or so windows, the Permanent Tower job is a snap compared with the city’s hands-down winner for difficult window washing — the Plaza 400 Building.
“The Plaza 400 is the toughest because it’s an odd shape. TTie windows are all set in from the outside of the building, so you really have
to reach,” says Downie, a window washer for three and one-half years.
There are enough multi-storeyed buildings in Prince George to keep window washers busy through the summer. They repeat the task again each fall, doing the buildings in the same order every time.
Neither have ever had anything close to resembling a near-miss, or near-fall, saying it’s quite routine when you concentrate only on washing.
“Looking down isn’t bad, it’s when you look up and you follow the clouds,” says Downie.
“An accident is always in the back of your mind,” admits Ryder, “but 1 just make sure I’m hooked up.”
Libyans start packing in U.K
Citizen news services
LONDON — Despite expressions of “astonishment and displeasure” at the breaking of diplomatic relations, Libya has indicated it will meet next Sunday’s deadline imposed by Britain for evacuating its embassy in London.
A spokesman at the embassy told Reuters news agency by telephone: “We will go on the last day, on the Sunday, in the afternoon.”
The 20 to 30 diplomats and students were given until midnight on Sunday night to leave when Britain broke off diplomatic ties Sunday with Libya over the machine-gun murder of a policewoman outside the embassy, last Tuesday.
British diplomats in Libya will leave Tripoli, the capital, by the
same date, the latest British decision said.
As hundreds of armed police remained around the embassy on the seventh day of a police stakeout after the shooting, a police spokesman said contacts with the Libyans inside the embassy were continuing, “in the same friendly, quiet and cordial way.”
Hie embassy spokesman said the embassy staff was making its own arrangements with Libyan Arab Airlines to leave Britain.
British officials said London’s order is likely to mean freedom for the gunman who killed the police Constable Yvonne Fletcher and wounded 11 Libyan dissidents.
Libya expressed “astonishment and displeasure” at the British order and said it “holds the British
government responsible for this decision and its consequences.”
Witnesses to Tuesday’s shooting said a submachine-gun was fired from an embassy window at Libyan exiles demonstrating against Col. Moammar Khadafy’s government, killing Fletcher and injuring the 11 protesters.
The Libyan government has not given any indication as to when the Libyans in the embassy would leave. Britain said the building in St. James’s Square will lose its diplomatic status — and immunity from assault — at midnight next Sunday night.
Home Secretary Leon Brittan said the emerging Libyans will be searched for arms but will be given safe passage home.
Britain conceded the Libyans will
by Canadian Press TORONTO — Tucked away in a dull federal tax document is a little-known statistic that might startle some taxpayers. In 1982, 239 Canadians with an annual income of more than $250,000 paid no income tax.
Members of this select group were able to convince Revenue Canada they owed nothing to the public purse by claiming a series of deductions on their tax forms — deductions available to everyone, but in many cases only applicable to the wealthy.
The United States has a minimum tax of 20 per cent to ensure high-income individuals cannot reduce their taxes to zero, but Canada has not been so hard on its wealthy.
This country still has an income tax system under which a millionaire can go tax-free while someone with an income near the poverty line will have to pay more than $1,000 in tax.
Even within the same income group, there are surprising discrepancies. Some people who earn $100,000 a year, for instance, pay tax at a rate of 30 per cent, while others with the same income pay no tax.
The federal Finance Department, which designs Canada's tax policy, has admitted such figures reflect “a source of unfairness among taxpayers that is difficult to justify.”
Those comments were contained in a 1981 Finance Department brief called Analysis of Federal Tax Expenditures for Individuals. The document also argued that if all special tax breaks were eliminated, tax rates for all Canadians could be cut by 45 per cent.
At that time, Ottawa was flirting with the idea of closing some of the loopholes identified as primarily benefiting high-income Canadians. Those notions proved short-lived.
Ottawa quickly retreated from promises of
tax reform made in a November 1981 budget, after then-finance minister Allan MacEachen encountered a storm of protest — primarily from high-income Canadians and business groups.
Ernie Lightman, a University of Toronto economist and professor of social policy, says discrepancies in the tax system are becoming even more evident than they were in 1981.
“It’s getting much, much more pronounced,” he said.
In 1979, $20 billion in federal and provincial government revenue was lost to tax breaks for individuals.
As the Finance Department pointed out, in 1979 the average benefit due to tax breaks for individuals with incomes of more than $100,000 was $46,000. For those with incomes between $10,000 and $15,000, the average benefit from tax breaks was only $771.
be able to move out any arms in diplomatic bags, which are inviolate under the 1961 Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations, and official sources said there is little chance of finding the killer of Constable Fletcher.
Brittain said the investigation into the shooting will continue as a “matter of record.” He said police will be free to search the embassy, officially known as the Libyan People’s Bureau, after next Sunday.
“Taking account of the need to rid the country of this dangerous presence in that bureau and the safety of our fellow countrymen in Libya, we concluded that what we re doing is the right thing,” the secretary said.
In Libya’s capital of Tripoli, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement which said: “The British decision has come amid an atmosphere of acute tension created by the British government, which paVed the way for it by launching a racialist campaign of hatred against the Libyan Arab people.”
However, the ministry said “the Libyan people are anxious to provide all security and care” for the 8,000 Britons living in Libya. The statement was carried by* Libyan television and monitored in London.
Richard Luce, the British Foreign Office’s minister of state, said Britons in Libya, many work at remote oilfields, are not being advised to leave but should “consider their situation carefully.”
British reaction to the Conservative government’s decision mingled reluctant acceptance with outrage.
The left-wing newspaper Daily Mirror carried a banner headline* “Yvonne’s Killer Gets Away With Murder.”
TAX RULES GIVE BREAKS TO RICH