‘Take A stand. __ Argue a Point. - Give a Bouquet, Tell Everyone. Write a Letter to the Editor of the Castlegar News Yes, if you've got something to say, we've got the way for you to say it. Write a Letter to the Editor. We believe in a fair and responsible press. And part of that belief is a commitment to share your comments with the rest of our readers. And no matter if you write a letter of sup- port, or even one of disagreement, they ‘Il be treated with equal fairness. But you don't have to write a letter to enjoy this regular feature. Just reading them can be an educational and entertaining experience. The Letter to the Editor: A fascinating forum of public opinon that makes your Castlegar News even more interesting. Address your letter as follows: Editor Castlegar News, Box 3007, Castlegar, B.C. VIN 3H4 Letters must be signed and include the writer's full name and address. Vo, RS Castlégar News SPECIAL OUTINGS . . . Students at the Special Education Centre in Castlegar have received assistan- ce from the Castlegar Kiwanis Club for out-of-town trips such as that made recently to the Easter Seal Camp at Winfield, in the Okanagan. Kiwanis president Brian Brown presents student Jack Miller a cheque for $200 while head teacher Mike wi Balahura looks on. — CosNews Photo TORONTO BOOMING _ Let good times roll By PATTI TASKO Canadian TORONTO — Steelworkers in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., and Cape Breton may be fretting about the future of their jobs but in Toronto the newspapers are fat with pages of career ads. The depressed price of land in Canada’s agricultural belts gives farmers sleepless nights but in midtown TO, yuppies are snug in their beds with visions of condos that double in value dancing in their heads. Albertans are still staggering from the effects of last year's plummeting oil prices but in Toronto, a burgeoning financial services industry and strong U.S. markets have kept business humming along nicely. ‘The regions — traditionally united in resentment of the city they think unfairly sets itself up as the hub of Canadian life — have even more reason to resent Toronto these days. Toronto is the chief profiteer of most of the country's recent economic growth, which has been fuelled by the export manufacturing business, higher auto production, an expanding financial services sector and a resulting real estate boom around the aptly named Golden Horseshoe industrial belt of south-central Ontario. Fat City’s image certainly isn't a new one. Even lifelong residents of Vancouver can laugh with familiar disdain at the mention of Rosedale, home to industrial magnates, church cardinals and wealthy pop singers. Or sneer at Yorkville, where Torontonians sip $5 glasses of wine at sidewalk cafes and where three designer maternity shops can actually stay in business in one block. The wealth of Toronto is more pervasive than ever before. It’s obvious in the transformation that has overtaken formerly working-class, midtown neighborhoods by DINKS — double-income, no-kids couples. They spend thousands of dollars upgrading four-metre-wide rowhouses with Italian- designed kitchens, spas, solariums and brass kickplates on $1,200 front doors. Strips along north Yonge Street that used to be home to Mom-and-Pop stores are being refitted as designer clothing and shoe boutiques. Business is good. One sporting goods emporium, which caters to people who think spending $400 ona ski jacket is perfectly reasonable, hires a traffic cop on Saturdays to keep order in the crowded parking lot. Torontonians dine well.The hardest restaurants to get into on a Saturday night are the ones that serve up dinner for $100-plus a couple. Neither do they stint on entertainment. Newcomer Debbie Redan, who moved to the city recently from Kingston, Ont., says she and her husband “were just flabbergasted that the arts are so well-supported.” She's not talking about $2.50 Tuesdays at the movies, either, but the opera, the ballet, the symphony — where tickets go for $20-plus and thousands are happy to pay that. Redan and her husband recently toured Toronto's ballooning north-end suburbs, which used to be where young couples with growing families and limited incomes bought their first homes. “As far as you could see, there were huge new mansions going for $500,000.” In April, the average resale price of homes surpassed the $200,000 barrier, a 50 per cent leap from April 1986. | GRIZZLIES LOGGERS Bear valley | endangered By ROBERT PLASKIN Canadian Press OTTAWA — In a primeval rain forest northeast of Prince Rupert, the grizzlies are woefully unprepared for a battle with bulldozers and chainsaws. Unaware of the threat to their idyllic setting, the bears munch on roots and berries, waiting for the salmon that swim up the Khutzeymateen River in August to spawn. Once the grizzlies have stored enough fat to see them through another winter, they will follow well-worn paths from the Khutzeymateen Valley floor back to their mountain dens. It is a cycle that has endured for centuries in the valley of the grizzlies. But some of the cubs born last spring may never have the chance to lead their own offspring on the annual trek. UN RECOGNIZES The future of the K y But the chances of the federal government getting involved in the sanctuary proposal appear to be virtually nil. Officials at Environment Canada know about the P koots-ma-teen) — which in the Tsimsian Indian language means the special place of fish and bears — has been threatened ever since, ironically, the United Nations international biological program designated the 230- square-kilometre valley in 1972 a unique ecological site. The valley has ii ingly attracted the ion of B.C. logging companies which, because of the clear-cut- ting practices the province lets them use, must look ever further afield for new stands of forest. The provincial wilderness advisory committee, with a ip that envi ists say is heavil skewed toward industry i last year d grizzlies’ pi and are familiar with the proposal, says deputy minister Genevieve Sainte-M: a But the proposal does not exist officially in the department's collective mind and won't, Sainte-Marie says, unless the department adopts it as a firm project. MANY PROPOSALS “We have a long list of proposals for national parks, wilderness areas — all the things we would like to do,” Sainte-Marie said in an interview. “But that doesn’t mean we will be able to accomplish all of them. It does mean there are other ideas people would like to see us do as well that we may not be able to ed the government allow logging of the hemlock and Sitka spruce in the valley. Steps could be taken, it said, to ensure the bears are not unduly. disturbed. But wildlife biologist Wayne McCrory says the grizzlies .will.never.be able to. share the valley with loggers. NEED WILDERNESS “Experience shows that simply won't happen,” says McCrory, who recently travelled across Canada to drum up support for the creation of Canada's first grizzly bear sanctuary, in the Khutzeymateen Valley. There are three such sanctuaries in Alaska. “When the bulldozers move in, the grizzlies will move out,” he said. “They are vulnerable to disturbance. They’re not very adaptable and they really need intact wilderness to survive.” No permits will be issued to log the valley until the B.C. Environment and Wildlife Department completes a study on the impact of logging, say Forestry Department spokesmen. But Vicki Husband, of the Victoria-based Friends of Ecological Reserves, says environmentalists in the province don't believe that study will change anything. All indications are that the study will only consider major, overall issues and “won't get into whether the bears can survive in a logging environment,” Husband says. The B.C. government says logging is years away. But Husband says i ists expect logging could start next year. The New Democrat Party's federal environment critic, Bill Blaikie, recently called for support for the grizzly sanctuary proposal. The Khutzeymateen, Blaikie said in the Commons, is “one of the last undisturbed valleys on the West Coast” and serves as home to the largest concentration of British Columbia's estimated 6,000 grizzlies. Federal Environment Minister Tom McMillan said recently he doesn’t know enough about the issue to talk about the prospects of creating a sanctuary. “You know, every single parks-related issue doesn’t have the same priority-as-every other,” McMillan said. “Right now, the major priority in the province of British Columbia for me is South Mresby.” IGNORE OTHERS Environmental actisit Colleen McCrory, Wayne's sister, says resolving the controversy over creating a national park in the South Moresby region brings mixed blessings. The southern end of the Queen Charlotte archi- pelago, 100 kilometres off the B.C. coast, was certainly worth the effort that has gone into preserving it from loggers’ saws, she says. But that effort has garnered so much public attention it has dwarfed other environmental concerns in the province, like the survival of the grizzlies, shé says. “Once South Moresby is resolved, it's going to be much more difficult to save other areas,” McCrory says. The sad part is that there are relatively few areas that require special attention, she says. LITTLE NEEDED National and provincial parks and wildlife preserves make up about 5.2 per cent of British Columbia's total area. “To protect the other areas would only require adding another two per cent to that total,” says McCrory. “That's hardly asking anything of industry or the government.” But she warns that, at the pace those areas are disappearing, few of them may in fact be protected. “The pressure to log new areas is so great that whatever we're going to save in British Columbia is whatever we can manage to save in the next five to 10 years.” By CHRISTINE MORRIS Canadian Press MOSCOW — Gregory Sandalevsky spends 40 hours a week on the assembly line at his job. On top of that, he and his wife Marina spend another 30 hours a week standing in the consumer line. This is still the reality of day-to-day life in the Soviet Union — long queues at stores to buy scarce and poor quality foodstuffs and clothing. It’s one of the most frustrating and mystifying aspects of life in this country — why is it that a superpower which keeps spacemen whirling around the earth for 255 days straight cannot feed its people efficiently? The Sandalevsky family have had enough. Of all the economic and social reforms promised by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, most of all they want to be able to go out and get a bottle of milk in five minutes instead of two hours. “] would like our service system to be at the level you have in Canada,” says Sandalevsky, sitting in the cramped two bedroom apartment he shares in Leningrad with Marina, their six-month-old daughter and his elderly mother. “Everyday life would be much easier if I didn’t have to lose timé and wear out my nerves standing in long lines to get things,” he says through an interpreter. Shopping in the Soviet Union's big cities is like being aauuuusenapnenvere Ute RUC LOOUAEUESORONTT eNO PUNENNUDEn NULLA LABUEC SA GUNUATELLUEAAUCAEUCAUL EEA ueeene cae tt Shopping Sovie stuck in an unending Christmas rush. The Eaton Centre in downtown Toronto, Place Ville Marie in Montreal and West Edmonton Mall on the last shopping day before Christmas are quiet compared with the daily afternoon mob scene in the huge GUM department store in Moscow. Ten million people are jammed into Moscow every day — eight million live here and another two million are constantly in transit. Ostensibly, Russians from outside Moscow visit the capital to pay their respects to Lenin at his tomb in Red Square. But the real reason they're here is to shop. Soviet department stores are generally large, multi-level buildings with well-dressed windows facing the streets. They're state owned and operated, although some are beginning to sell goods from co-operatives — privately run enterprises that are gaining popularity in this era of change. GET IN QUEUE Goods are displayed behind counters manned by one or two harried clerks who ferry items back and forth to customers. People line up for service and once they've made it to the front of the line, they make their choice, get the price, then move to another queue to pay. After that, they fight their way back to the original counter with a slip proving they paid the required amount. Then, having wrested their prize from the state, t-style: they wearily move on to the next item on their list. But western-style self-service and computerized cash registers are starting to appear in some stores. Raisa Hamburger runs one such shop, and she knows all about the chronic problem of too many people chasing too few goods. SEEKS STYLE Hamburger, director of the chic women's fashion store Moskvitchka in downtown Moscow, is round and jolly with a figure like a down comforter tied in the middle. She is no fashion trendsetter, but — like Raisa Gorbachev, wife of the Soviet leader — Hamburger has wholeheartedly embraced the goal of introducing style to Soviet womenkind’s dour, no-nonsense wardrobe: “We're trying to improve fashion tastes here,” says Hamburger, who has run Moskvitchka for 20 years. “We want people to enjoy clothes. We're even arranging fashion shows in factories as well as the ones we have here in the store.” Every day, lanky models swish along the ramp in the design salon. The slinky dresses can be made up quickly, in any size, for Moskvitchka's customers. Prices for the made-to-order dresses start at the equivalent of about $300 Cdn and go much higher. Hamburger says proudly that her customers include famous actresses and dancers as well as the wives of diplomats, cosmonauts and leading scientists. ineups The wives of assembly-line workers settle for dresses off the rack, but even there, it's difficult to buy a decent outfit for under $170, slightly less than the average weekly wage. Polyester and nylon dresses are popular and expensive — most start at about $100 — and they don’t look worth the money. Hamburger bemoans the huge crowds pressing into the store. Every day, 60,000 peple churn through the doors to make about 45,000 purchases, and annual sales amount to about $175 million Cdn. “We still cannot cope with the problem of queues,” sighs Hamburger, staring sadly at the enormous crowd milling around the perfume and cosmetic counter. “There are just too many people.” She has computerized cash registers on order from Finland, and she hopes they'll make a difference. Soviet manufacturers finally clunked into gear and started producing blue jeans and jogging suits that have practically become the national dress But for some reason, no one in the country makes pantyhose. Although the occasional imported pair of pantyhose can be spotted in stores, most Russian women still struggle into uncomfortable garter belts and stockings, topped by heavily reinforced brassieres that could do double duty as missile launchers. Soviets dote on their children and their are several large toy stores, but there's a depressing sameness about the products.