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PRINCE GEORGE
Citizen
HOPE FOR JOBS MUST BE PRIORITY - AXWORTHY
Trend shows bleak future for youth
by ERIC BEAUCHESNE Southam News
OTTAWA — Canada could lose a generation of young Canadians to despair if it doesn’t act quickly to give them some hope of-jobs, Lloyd Axworthy warned Friday.
The dire prediction by the new Liberal minister of human resources came on the heels of a Statistics Canada’s report that 30,000 jobs disappeared last month, most of them full-time and most among young people.
“We’re going to have a lost generation in front of us if we don’t work fast,’’ Axworthy said.
“While employment gains have been made by adults over the last year, youth employment continues to trend downwards, although the rate of decline is slowing,” Stat-sCan said.
The number of employed young people between ages 15 and 24 has fallen by 374,000 since the recession began in March 1990, it noted.
“The important priority will be to try to give young people a chance to get some confidence that they can be employed in the future,” Axworthy said.
The unemployment rate eased a notch last month to 11.1 per cent from 11.2 per cent But this is only because another 42,000 persons gave up looking for work and were therefore not included in the official jobless figures.
There were 1.6 million unemployed, little changed from the previous month.
The latest exodus from the workforce “took the pressure off the unemployment rate,” StatsCan noted.
The rate is “going in the right direction but. . . the change is really because people are withdraw-
ing from the labor market,” Axworthy said.
The jobless rate — over 11 per cent for much of the past two years — is as much a gauge of the challenge facing the new Liberal government as it is a measure of the failure of the previous Tory government.
It presents a “formidable challenge” to the new government, said investment firm Bums Fry Ltd. “The labor market continued to be plagued by layoffs,” it said.
Canadians need incomes if they’re going to spend and turn this economy around, Axworthy said.
“People have to work, they have to have money, they have to have confidence to spend money,” he said, noting that Henry Ford justified giving his workers more money because it allowed them to buy his cars.
Axworthy said that, in addition to its program to rebuild sewers, roads and bridges, the government will be implementing its promised youth services corps to get young people into the job market, as well as its apprenticeship program.
The government will also look at ways to encourage small businesses to hire more young people coming out of school and ways to get welfare recipients to take available jobs. Axworthy noted that two Tory pilot projects in New Brunswick and British Columbia that allow people to work without losing all their welfare benefits are promising.
The Liberal infrastructure program could be especially useful in generating construction jobs. StatsCan noted that the industry was particularly hard hit last month with the loss of another 23,000 jobs, leaving employment in construction at a six-year low.
Busy night for police
A 30-year-old woman is in custody after RCMP investigated an allegation of pointing a firearm, forcible confinement and death threats against a 21-year-old woman late Friday.
Both are from Prince George. No one was injured in the incident that took place on the 200 block of Dupre Place at 8:58 p.m.
★ ★ ★
A 23-year-old man was taken to Prince George Regional Hospital with severe facial injuries early today after his 1980 Honda Civic was in collision with a city public works sand truck downtown.
The 4:18 a.m. mishap at the intersection of Second Avenue and George Street occurred when the man’s car failed to stop for a stop sign. The car received heavy damage, police said.
The accident is still under investigation, RCMP said.
★ ★ ★
Police are looking for a man who robbed the staff of a grocery store of $100 Friday and left in a getaway car.
Around noon Friday the lone male entered Bee’s Better Buy, 1788 9th Ave. He produced no weapon, but pushed a staff member away from the till and grabbed the cash, police said today.
He’s described as white, 5 feet 11 inches tall, of slim build and with straight black greasy hair to the collar. He was wearing a light-blue ski jacket and blue jeans.
He was last seen leaving in a blue 1993 Pontiac Sunbird another man was driving. It was parked in a lane behind the store and after the robber got in it headed toward the downtown area.
Anyone with information is asked to call RCMP at 561-3300 or CrimeStoppers at 564-TIPS.
INDEX
SWITCHBOARD: 562-2441
CLASSIFIED: 562-666
CIRCULATION: 562-3301
Farcus
‘‘We’ve got too many damn bureaucrats! Submit a requisition for more people to study the problem.”
Ann Landers .... 37
Bridge................. 34
Business.........20,21
City, B.C...............23
Classified.......25-34
Comics................. 35
Commentary...............5
Crossword...............33
Editorial................4
Entertainment .	. 35,36
Horoscope...............33
Lifestyles............. 37
Movies 35,P16
Religion.........22,23
Sports...........13-17
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00100
Tina and Charles Fraser are the proud parents of Brandon, 4, Rhlannon, 16, (rear) and Tessa, 11.
Couple offers kids a helping hand
by SHERYL THOMPSON
Citizen Staff
Raising a four-year-old son with Down’s syndrome, a teenage daughter and a pre-teen daughter would challenge any family.
But Chuck and Tina Fraser don’t let that stand in the way of opening their home to foster children who need their help.
Being foster parents is “just another way to lend a helping hand,” the Prince George couple say. The Frasers were among nine foster families in B.C. recently awarded the Lieutenant-Governor’s Foster Families Award.
Seated around the kitchen table in their modest three-bedroom bungalow, the couple share their philosophy about lending a helping hand wherever it’s needed.
“We believe if you aren’t part of the problem, be part of the solution,” Chuck said.
Both have been involved in various community organizations and were recipients of the Governor General’s Award for Community Service in 1992. Their community work includes starting the Stuart Nuclear Awareness Group in Fort St. John as well as working with Amnesty International.
Chuck is an employee of B.C. Rail, where he and Tina are active volunteers as alcohol and drug counsellors with the company’s em-
ployee assistance program. Tina is a hairdresser by trade with nursing experience and “para-professional” counselling skills.
They were trained as volunteer telephone counsellors through the Prince George Crisis Centre. These skills have helped them to be foster parents.
“We’re here again, to listen, like we were on the (telephone) lines,” Tina said.
“Fostering was another step for us,” Chuck said, adding they have had about 40 foster children in their home since they started as foster parents in 1987.
Their door is always open and many emergency placements for foster children have ended in their home.
“We do it to help the kids,” he said, adding the social workers know “Tina has a big heart.”
To help ease the pain of parting with the foster children, Tina said she prepares for their departure by working as much as possible with the natural parents.
“These kids are not ours. We’re here to support them and be here for them,” Tina said. “The ultimate goal is to get the children back with their own family.”
Tina grew up with 13 siblings, so having a full house is natural for her, Chuck said.
But the success for the Frasers doesn’t lie within the four walls of their home.
“Prince George is a very supportive town,” Chuck said, referring to services like social workers, the foster parents association for about 80 foster families in Prince George, the Down’s syndrome support group, Native Friendship Centre, Children’s Development Centre and Project Parent North.
Even the drivers for the Handy Dart service help to support the children, Tina said.
When drivers bring children to their home, they help ease the child’s anxiety “by saying things like ‘Oh, you’re going to the Frasers,’ ” Tina recounts.
To Fit fostering into the family’s routine without adding problems, the couple consider their own daughters.
When their daughters were younger, the couple dealt with teenage foster children. One of the First girls who came into their home attended the ceremony in Victoria — along wilh the Frasers’ “foster grandchild.”
Now that their girls are older, the couple won’t take any foster children who are older than them.
How does one keep this type of a household going?
“I’m a very organized person,” Tina admits modestly.
SOCRED LEADERSHIP CONTEST
Frontrunners clash over deficit control
by MICHAEL SMYTH
VICTORIA (CP) — The two frontrunners for leadership of the B.C. Social Credit party battled for last-minute support from party members who were heading to the polls today.
Grace McCarthy, the apparent favorite, and Graham Bruce, who seemed to be gaining steam, clashed Friday over the central campaign theme of deFicit control.
McCarthy criticized a plan put forward by her rival that would require the provincial government to seek approval through a referendum in order to run Fiscal deFicits.
“I don’t believe in the suggestion that everytime you want to overspend in your annual allotment that you go back to the people in a referendum,” McCarthy said.
“That’s too costly. It’s too inconvenient and too slow.”
She said she would instead push
to have the provincial constitution changed to force governments to restrict annual spending to one per cent below the previous year’s gross domestic product.
“You just put it straight into the constitution — make the government spend within their means only,” she said.
But Bruce said governments must be made more accountable to taxpayers when it comes to the bottom line.
“You don’t want to vest that kind of authority in anyone else other than the voters,” he said, adding that legislated balanced budgets would force large tax increases.
Party ofFicials were hoping at least 10,000 Social Credit members would vote today at more than 130 polling stations set up around the province. The party
says it has more 49,000 members on its books.
The candidates are former Socred cabinet ministers McCarthy, Bruce, Claude Richmond and Vancouver businessman Jim Turner. The party’s interim leader, Jack Weisgcrbcr, did not seek the permanent job.
Both McCarthy and Bruce — the two apparent frontrunners — were looking for any advantage as the campaign came to a close.
Ray Irvine, a spokesman for Bruce’s campaign, said a poll taken by Bruce campaign workers suggests 42 out of 75 constituency presidents support the Vancouver island grocery store owner.
“We have the momentum we need,” Irvine said.
McCarthy, the former deputy premier and a Fixture on the province’s political scene for a quarter century, said she was ensuring her
support was solid by working the telephone.
“I’m feeling very good about the whole thing,” said McCarthy, 66, making her third bid for the party leadership.
Ron ChcfFins, a public administration professor at the University of Victoria, said today’s outcome could depend on where the heaviest voter turnout occurs.
“The urban vote would appear to favor McCarthy. A rural turnout could help Bruce or Richmond.”
But ChefFins said the party still faces a long road back to respectability.
The party holds just six seats in the 75-seat legislature alter the Socreds were swept from power by the NDP in the 1991 election in the wake of the scandal-racked Socred government of Bill Vander Zalm.
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