today in brief
ONTARIO has unveiled a budget that has a $2 billion deficit, but no tax increases. Page
NICARAGUA has an election scheduled later this year, but bullets appear to carry more weight that ballots in the Latin American nation. Page
MANY PEOPLE will lose protection against discrimination under B.C.’s new human rights code which is expected to become law this ween, say human rights advocates. An analysis.
Page
HERMAN
"They all want coffee."
Index ........11
Ann Landers ---
........19
City, B.C....... . .3,7,24,25
.....16-20
........18
Entertainment . ......30-32
.........9
Horoscopes --- ........19
International...
.........5
Sports.......... ...13-15,27
........18
Hello? Page 15
The
Prince George
Citizen
Sadrack says
Clouds and a few showers are forecast for this evening and skies could be partly clear tonight. On Thursday, we could have more sunshine than today, but there’s a chance of afternoon showers. The outlook is for more clouds Friday and rain this weekend.
Temperatures could drop to 2 tonight rise to 14 Thursday. On Tuesday, we had a high of 11, a low of 4, 3.1 millimetres of rain and 5.5 hours of sunshine. One year ago, a two-week period of warm, dry
weather started when we had a high of 20, a low of 6, and 13.4 hours of sunshine.
The sun sets at 9:10 p.m. today and rises at 5:05 a.m. Thursday.
r'iW.
35c
Wednesdays May 16, 1984
Expo walkout just the start, unions warn
VANCOUVER (CP) - Any labor problems that develop at the site of the 1986 world’s fair will be the fault of Premier Bill Bennett, the head of the B.C. and Yukon Building Trades Council said Tuesday.
Roy Gautier made the comment after some 200 construction workers walked off the job at the site of Expo 86, the transportation and communications fair to be held in Vancouver. They returned to their jobs today.
Gautier said the walkout was the first move in labor’s war against provincial government amendments to the Labor Code and warned that the work stoppages may spread throughout British Columbia.
The building trades’ desire to see the fair proceed went out the window when the labor code changes were introduced, said Gautier, adding that negotiations over the use of non-union labor at the Expo site are over.
Labor Minister Bob McClelland said in Victoria that the dispute at the Expo site was a private matter between the workers and the management of the world’s fair.
McClelland said it was up to the Labor Relations Board to determine if the walkout is illegal. “If management wants to appear before the labor board and ask for a ruling, they have the opportunity to do that.”
The Labor Code amendments, given approval in principle early Tuesday following an evening sitting of the legislature, will allow the government to declare projects such as Expo economic development projects and open to all contractors and workers.
The amendments also restrict sec-
Broadcaster Sinclair in coma
TORONTO (CP) - Gordon Sinclair, a veteran broadcaster and one of Canada’s best-known personalities, was in critical condition and went into a coma today after suffering a heart attack.
SINCLAIR
Doctors at Queensway General Hospital in suburban Toronto said Sinclair, 83, suffered neurological damage and his prognosis was poor.
Sinclair suffered the heart attack Tuesday while in a restaurant near his home. He had done his regular CFRB radio news commentary earlier in the day.
His preoccupation with money, penchant for asking embarrassing questions as a panelist on the long-running CBC program Front Page Challenge and public attacks on religion made Sinclair the man many Canadians love to hate.
ondary picketing and make it easier to certify or decertify a union local.
The Social Credit government, through Expo chairman Jim Patti-son, had been seeking assurances from the building trades’ council that there will be no disruptions in site construction and that union and non-union workers will be permitted to work side-by-side.
The government is concerned that the building trades will invoke a clause in their collective agreement which permits council members to refuse to work alongside non-union workers or those not affiliated with the building trades council.
Last month, Bennett announced after much agonizing that the fair, which runs from May to October in 1986, would proceed. But he warned that any disruptions to the building and operation of the fair would not be tolerated and said the government would bring in legislation to prevent any strike or lockout.
Start talking, Trudeau tells superpowers
OTTAWA (CP) — Prime Minister Trudeau has written President Reagan and Soviet Leader Konstantin Chernenko in a renewed effort to get the two superpowers talking about nuclear arms control measures.
The letters, sent last week, detail two of Trudeau’s control proposals outlined in a general manner during his three-month international peace mission that ended last February, a Trudeau aide said Tuesday.
The correspondence to Reagan and Chernenko is a new element in Trudeau’s peace initiative, aimed at giving the United State and the Soviet Union a new basis for discussion, Trudeau spokesman Ralph Coleman said.
Trudeau specifically mentions ways to restrict the mobility of intercontinental ballistic missiles and improvements in ways to verify future strategic weapons.
Coleman said the prime minister still plans to send letters to Chernenko and Reagan outlining in a more general manner 10 principles for a common bond which Trudeau listed in the Commons as his peace trip ended.
Trudeau had hoped to send those letters with the moral support of the three national parties.
But attempts to get an all-party resolution into the House have been torpedoed by NDP insistence on adding three points to six main points in a resolution which Trudeau composed and sent to New Democrat Leader Ed Broadbent and Progressive Conservative Leader Brian Mulroney.
Sources said the Conservatives were willing to go along with the Trudeau resolution, although they may have wanted some minor changes.
Broadbent, however, wanted the Commons to urge the government to cancel further testing of the U.S. cruise missile in Canada within one year.
The New Democrats also wanted the Commons defence committee to study the umbrella weapons testing agreement under which cabinet authorized cruise tests conducted over Western Canada in March.
Broadbent also asked that the resolution include a call for all countries with nuclear weapons to pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons and a call for the Soviet Union and the U.S. to begin immediately a nuclear weapons freeze.
by DON McGILLIVRAY Southam News columnist
OTTAWA — If Canadians can handle two languages, why can’t we handle two systems of measurement?
The most sensible solution to the metric mess would be to use the old and new systems of measurement side by side.
Then Canadians who feel comfortable with the metric system could use it. And those who have trouble with it — 72 per cent according to a Gallup poll last November — could use the imperial system.
Judy Erola. the minister of consumer and corporate affairs, has pointed to this hve-and-let-live solution by deciding to change regulations which now say foods must be advertised only in metric units.
Erola isn’t doing this because she’s a convert to measurement in the familiar pounds and ounces. Her action stems directly from an Ontar-
io judicial decision fast year.
Provincial Court Judge William Ross dismissed charges against two Toronto service station operators who had defied metric edicts for more than a year by continuing to sell gasoline by the gallon. Ross rules that forced metrication was a violation of the Charter of Rights.
Erola’s latest action is more a reprieve than a rollback. She intends to revert to a metric-only rule at the end of 1985.
But this should give her. or her successor, time to rethink the problem. And the most gentle, sensible and democratic way to deal with it would be to follow the precedent of the Official Languages Act.
Canada would be a country with two official languages and two official methods of measurement. Either would be legal. A store could operate in either or both, depending on the preference of its customers.
And if a retailer refused to use the measurement system the customers wanted, he or she might find the customers drifting off to a store that measured in the units they understood.
This is, in essence, the method being used by the United States with much less confusion and trauma than in Canada.
Because the U.S. is going metric by voluntary methods rather than trying to force the pace, distances will be measured in feet and miles for a long time to come. And temperatures will be quoted in Fahrenheit.
The federal government has been trying to pretend this makes no difference in Canada. But it obviously does. Our consumption of American television programs, movies and magazines will keep those measures in our lives.
In other words, just to understand what we’re watching and reading, we’ll have to understand how long a mile is and how heavy a pound is.
To say this will cause Canadians terminal confusion is to underrate our intelligence. Even if the number of units of measurement we handle is double what it would be if Canada were an island cut off from every other country, it will still be a very small number compared to the number of words or human faces each ol us knows.
We’ve been used to parallel systems of measurement for a long time. In liquids, for example, we've had pints, quarts and gallons alongside ounces.
What about the cost?
Alisdair McKichan, president of the Retail Council of Canada, said in January that measuring in imperial as well as metric could cost “lens of millions of dollars’’ in addition to the $150 million the retail trade has already spent converting to metric.
It sounds like a lot. when you say it that way. But suppose the extra cost is $50 million. That’s only $2 per Canadian, which may not be a high price to pay when nearly three-quarters of the population is having trouble with metric.
What about the school children now learning the metric system? No problem. When they’re adults, the country may just naturally become mainly metric.
8,000 'INMATES'
Escapees head for Coast
by JOHN SIMLKKR Staff reporter
About 8,000 inmates of the Hudta Lake prison camp, about 25 kilometres southwest of Prince George, escaped this week and will soon start their freedom swim to the Pacific Ocean.
While there's something suspicious about any prison break, this one is especially fishy.
These tiny escapees are chinook salmon and were raised by inmates at the minimum security prison’s hatchery. The human inmates, who serve an average of seven months, will have to wait a little longer lor their release.
This is the second year the camp has raised salmon as part of the federal Fisheries Department salmon enhancement program, says camp director Brij Mad-hok.
“This is a good place to raise salmon." he explains.
“This is a forestry type of camp and we re involved with the outdoors,” he says of the camp which has a sawmill and specializes in forestry work.
“It’s cheap for us to do because it doesn’t involve much staff time and we’re doing something for B.C.” he adds.
The camp received a $2,000 grant from the federal government to set up a hatchery and buy hatching trays, holding tank, a water pump and plumbing sup-
plies. The rest of the log cabin structure was built free using inmate labor and wood products.
“I’m sure it would have cost anyone else $40,000 to $50,000 to build this place," Madhok adds.
This year the salmon were released in Slim Creek, near Purden Lake, where the eggs were taken in the fall. Last year, the camp raised about 6.000 sockeye salmon for the the Stellako River.
This fall, the camp will take about 80,000 chinook eggs from the upper section of the Mud River where the inmates are doing habitat rehabiliation work. “I doubt more than 15 to 20 chinook return there every year," he says.
However, rearing salmon is not easy and there are many lessons to be learned, he says. About 17,000 fish died last winter during an overnight power failure. Once the pump stopped drawing water from the lake, the fish suffocated from a lack of oxygen. During a more recent power outage, inmates hauled water about 30 metres from the lake to the fish tank. “We are now more experienced,” he explains.
Besides helping to rebuild the dwindling salmon resource, Madhok says the hatchery provides good work experience for inmates.
“It’s a nice type of work," says Walter Sochan. who oversees the project and feeds the fish five times a day. “I really like fishing." he laughs.
Walter Sochan of the Hudta Lake prison camp gives a group of chinook salmon one of their last prison meals before they are released on parole
Citizen photo by Brock Gable
into Slim Creek near Purden lake. The tiny inmates are expected to report back to the creek in four years.
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