Wednesday, July 15, 1992 &

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OurWiEws

No winners
with strike

ritish Columbia’s month-long
pulp strike should come to
an end this Friday.

Despite the defiance of our own
Local 1, the province’s other 11,675
striking pulp workers will likely
adhere to their unions’ wishes and
endorse a mediated settlement which
will resolve the all-too-costly strike.
And as the two sides grit their teeth
on the way back to their respective
jobsites, we must ask ourselves what
was gained by the troublesome
dispute.

No side can claim victory in this
strike, because there are no winners.

Sure, Vince Ready’s list of
nonbinding recommendations
appears to favor the unions. After all,
the package sees the preservation of
all four statutory holidays, tighter
contract language and better pension
plans. The only real issue Ready
failed to grant the two unions was a
$2 per hour across-the-board raise.
That fact wasn’t forgotten by Local 1.

There is no victory for the poverty-
pleading pulp industry, either. Ready
obviously didn’t buy into the
management line that every penny
had been stretched to its limit. How
else do you explain the financial
implication attached to his list of
recommendations?

If the two sides do agree to the
Ready-made deal, they will do so
reluctantly.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves about
this dispute, it’s far from over. It is
merely an intermission on the rocky
road to another shutdown.

‘has

‘No White Males Need Apply’

Call it castration by

Rotering stated in a

association, but I’m feeling a
little on edge.

Contrary to every rumor
I’ve heard, Gerald Rotering
won’t be seeking the New
Democrat nomination for
Kootenay West-Revelstoke. '
Instead, Lyle Kristiansen’s
able constituency assistant
has removed himself from
the race because he is a
white male.

Excuse me? White male?

Sorry if I feel a tad].

Harrison
Comparison

news release that he
wouldn’t run because: “It’s
a woman’s turn. It’s the
turn of a visible minority
and native Canadians and
of people with physical
disabilities, who are
virtually unrepresented in
Parliament.”

He also urged other
New Democrat white
males to stay out of
nomination races in order
to support the party’s

offended, but since when
that been’ the
determining factor in the nomination
process? In fact, why is gender even an
issue?

Rotering’s announcement caught me off
guard. After all, it was just one paper ago I
wrote that he would be running for the New
Democrat post.

While I can shrug that off as over-zealous
reporting on my part, I can’t shrug off the
reasoning behind Rotering’s decision.

‘| sD. HARRISON

| affirmative action policy.
Perhaps I’m biting off
more than I can chew, but I view Rotering’s
comments as reckless and detrimental to
the political process: I believe that any
candidate should be selected purely on the
basis of their qualifications. Whether a
person is a man, woman, a minority or
physically challenged is inconsequential to
that individual’s ability to represent a
constituency with the highest esteem.
please see HARRISON page 7

Street TALK

Question: Do you make an honest effort to recycle?

John Strelaeff
Castlegar

“I could make a
more honest effort.”

Randy Bard
West Vancouver

“Probably a half-
hearted effort.”

Jordain Lapidus
Calgary

“] recycle a little
bit.”

David Stevenson

“Yes, you have to.”

Kyle Estabrooks

Castlegar Castlegar

“Sure, definitely.”

“Mm Wodnesday, July 15;'19$2

The News

Other VIEW

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Castlegar News
P.O. Box 3007
Castlegar, B.C.
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and taste.

Letters tow E Ee aw ITO Fe

Doctors want more for less — MLA

I was surprised by the recent
Castlegar News coverage of the
passage of Bill 71.

Local B.C. Medical
Association representative Dr.
Jon Van Vliet makes a number
of errors in his comments about
the contents of Bill 71 and the
negotiations between the
government and the BCMA,
and I’d like to help set the
record straight.

Dr. Van Vliet suggests that
the government hasn’t been
negotiating with the BCMA.
Yet, as a BCMA rep, he’ll be
aware that Health Minister
Elizabeth Cull has repeatedly
met with the BCMA executive.
On 12 separate occasions to be
exact, with the latest round of
negotiations coming over the
weekend of June 27 and 28.

The offer presented at that
time was based on the central

concerns of the medical
profession and forms the basis
of Bill 71.

We've included:

1. full participation in the
management of the medical
services budget, ~

2. a co-management model

“which reflects a mechanism for

negotiation fees and benefits
and resolving disputes through
conciliation, and,

3. a, fair cost-shared
retirement plan for doctors —
instead of the entirely taxpayer-
funded plan set up for doctors
by the Vander Zalm Socreds.

Dr. Van Vliet should also be
aware that the BCMA rejected
that offer and tabled a counter
proposal that sought gains that
simply weren’t acceptable to
this government or to most
British Columbians.

The key elements of the
doctors’ proposal were

1. an estimated $50 to $100
million in additional spending
on doctors’ fees — on top of the
record $1.27 billion already in
this year’s budget,

2. setting taxpayers’
contributions to doctors
pensions at $25 million per year
in perpetuity,

3. a request to de-insure
items like eyeglass prescription
exams,

4. deleting references to the

Canada Health Act in Bill 71 —
such a move would effectively
open the door to massive de-
insuring of medical services and
the creation of a two-tiered
medicare system,
’ §. the right for the proposed
Medical Service Commission to
request Special Warrants to
cover future cost overruns and

6. the assurance that they
will be permitted to extra bill
patients.

We did not want to engage in
a confrontation with the B.C.
doctors. We repeatedly
attempted to carry on an open
and honest dialogue with them.
But the BCMA simply hasn’ t
seemed that interested.

The leadership of the BCMA
must acknowledge that
government has the sole
obligation to determine the
overall amount taxpayers can
afford to pay to maintain a high
level of medical service. While
other options were open to us —
like the voluntary five per cent
roll-back of doctors’ fees
recently in Saskatchewan — we
wanted to move forward with
the medical profession to build
a stronger medicare system.

Ed Conroy, MLA

Ed Conroy’s comments leaves seniors wondering

MLA Ed Conroy’s comments (The News,
July 8) regarding care facilities for seniors
are disturbing and indicate that he does not
fully understand seniors, their problems
and their concerns.

His comments about your taxpayer
dollars obscures the real waste, which is the
spending of more taxpayer dollars on new
structures, of any type, when, in many
other areas of Canada, private enterprise is
encouraged and assisted to provide facilities
at no cost whatsoever to the taxpayer.

The burgeoning Canadian population of
seniors presents potentially serious
situations in housing and health that
should be beyond rhetoric and ideology.
While we may not need extended care beds
at this time, we most certainly shall in the
future.

What we do need is other alternatives for
seniors housing.

There is a desperate need locally for
creative choices in alternatives for housing
seniors in order that seniors may remain
well and independent and out of expensive
government-funded institutions for as long
as possible.

Many of our seniors believe that once
they can no longer handle, for example,

their own personal hygiene, the only
alternative for them is institutionalization,
such as in Mountainview or Castleview.
Statistics Canada has just released data
on the increasing aging of our population.

‘Mr. Conroy has stirred up a
hornet’s nest if he thinks that
families will take their
‘seniors quietly, outside
their communities...’
— Elma H. Maund

At a time when all official government
policy places emphases on keeping seniors
in their own homes, how can he then state
that seniors, when their deteriorating

*health so dictates, cannot be “allowed to

stay in their own communities.”

Seniors want to stay in their own
communities, close to family, friends and
familiar surroundings.

When seniors have to enter a facility, the
trauma of removal from their home surely
is sufficient, without moving them from
their community as well.

This also places undue hardships on
family members who wish to remain in
close contact with parents and
grandparents. Seniors, like others, do not
want to be concentrated.

It was Charlotte Whitton, a social
worker, a feminist and, later, Mayor of
Ottawa, who first used the phrase
“concentration camps” to temporarily
dispose of unwanted unemployed men
during The Great Depression.

It took Hitler to make the phrase
infamous.

At a time when we have an increasing
population of older seniors, Mr. Conroy has
stirred up a hornet’s nest if he thinks that
families will take their seniors quietly,
outside their communities, to where they
are instructed by governments because of a
numbers game played in Victoria.

Otherwise, when the time comes, Mr.
Conroy may well be found in a bed in
Knuckleknee, N.W.T., where he will have no
friends or relatives close by.

Elma H. Maund
Co-ordinator

Castlegar and District Senior
Citizens Action Committee

Harrison

continued from page 6

While I appreciate Rotering’s
convictions, I find it disturbing
that he sights his ‘white
maleness’ as the chief reason he
won't take a shot at the New
Democrat nomination for
Kootenay West-Revelstoke.

If you think I’m scared,
you're right. After all, as a 27-
year-old white male with
political ambitions of his own, it
scares me to think that I can be
systematically excluded from
the game on the basis of

something I have no control
over — my color and gender.

I agree that more women and

minorities must be recruited
into the political fold, but I
draw a line at affirmative action
programs.
Let’s face it, after sifting
through the rhetoric attached to
a phrase like affirmative action,
it always spells discrimination.
And discrimination in any way,
shape or form is something I am
fundamentally opposed to.

I don’t see affirmative action

programs as progress.

Instead, I see them for what
they are — quick bureaucratic
fixes to old institutionalized
problems.

As much as I'd like to see it
happen, I’m not naive enough to
think that our patriarchal
Canada will be changed
overnight.

I become even more skeptical
when I realize that the
acceptable practice to correct
the wrongs of the past include
the exclusion of one segment of

Canada’s diverse population.
I was always raised believing
that two wrongs don’t make a

right.

With that, I find ‘it hard to
understand how any political
party, government, business or
agency can recruit or hire any
individual on the basis of color,
creed or gender.

I leave you with a simple
question: If it was wrong to
recruit individuals on that basis
before, what makes it right
today? -