Saturday, August 8, 1992 & OurViEWS Duff defends paying public fter three weeks of no Aeenments and no thank yous, Castlegar has buckled under. At an in-camera session Wednesday, city council agreed to appoint Victoria lawyer Murray Rankin to review its secret Price Waterhouse report before presenting it to the public. The decision follows a series of Castlegar News stories which exposed the hush-hushed document and city hall’s refusal to disclose any information surrounding the $24,000 study. Virtually all of Castlegar’s elected officials agreed that the material in the taxpayer-funded review was far too sensitive for public consumption. The study was well on its way to being swept under the carpet had it not been for one lone: maverick councillor, Kirk Duff. Riding alone, Duff shot holes in council’s rehearsed comments, calling for the release of the 35-page document which reviews the city’s entire operations. And well he should. The public has and should always have the right to know what its money is being spent on. As the defenders of the public purse, Castlegar city council must begin to practice what it preaches. It sings the praises of open and _ honest representation, only to censor the lyrics. Duff must be applauded for his defiant stand. Perhaps now, the conspiracy of silence will end. Street TALK Digging up bones in Secuiiber It’s amazing what a pile Badlands. But Drumheller of old bones can do for a town. Take Drumheller, Alta. — a place remarkably similar to Castlegar. Drumheller is about the same size as Castlegar: 6,500 population. And like Castlegar it has a suspension bridge nearby and a cable ferry (okay, so we don’t have a cable ferry anymore, but we used to and there is one in nearby Glade). . But Drumheller doesn’t have a beautiful sandy beach just 20 minutes from downtown. If you want to swim in Drumheller you have to fight the bugs for a spot in the Red Deer River. And Drumheller isn’t on a major highway. Unless you consider the road to Hanna major. And Drumheller isn’t situated in a fabulously treed valley. It is captive in a dry, dusty coulee appropriately named the i Comments §! from the Crossroges'” does have something Castlegar doesn’t have: dinosaur bones. And those bones are helping to draw hundreds of thousands of tourists a year (more than 500,000 to be exact) to what would otherwise be a backwater community. I better clarify. It isn’t so much the dinosaur bones themselves that | attract visitors but the fact Drumheller is home to the —————~ Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. The museum only opened seven years ago, but already has proved to be the most popular in Alberta — even though it is located in sleepy Drumheller and not some major centre like Edmonton or Calgary. The museum has the skeletons of more than 30 complete dinosaurs, and while they are the major attraction, they are by no means the only feature. please see NORMAN page 7. Feb. 15, 1973 Question: Do you think it’s important to vote in civic elections? Mary Drapaka Winlaw “If you want to see something done, yes.” Joe Chernoff Robson “Yes.” Ada Oglow Castlegar “Yes, definitely.” Sukhi Dhillon Thrums “No, I don’t give a damn.” Pam Cameron Kelowna “Yes.” @ Saturday, August 8, 1992 OtherVIEWS! Please address all letters to: Letters to the Editor Castlegar News P.O. Box 3007 Castlegar, B.C. VIN 3H4 or deliver them to 197 Columbia Ave. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and not longer than 300 words. Letters MUST be signed and include the writer's first and last names, address and a telephone number at which the writer can be reached between 9a.m. and 5 p.m. The writer's name and city or town of residence only will be published. Only in exceptional cases will letters be published anonymously. Even in those cases, the name, address and phone number of the writer MUST be disclosed to the editor. The News reserves the right to edit letters for brevity, clarity, legality, grammar and taste. Letters coWHE EDITOR Moscow might far from dismantled “Communism is dead and buried!” declared Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin to the American Congress and then to the Canadian Parliament recently. Really, Mr. Yeltsin? What happened to those hard-core communists? Are they all dead and buried? You know the ones I mean: they make up the Moscow Military Committee. They warn that to allow Atlantic-Israeli predominance in the Middle East is so unacceptable as to be resisted by force, “nuclear if necessary. With the “collapse of communism” the Russian bear has not lost either its teeth nor its claws. With technology stolen from American, Russia submarines can travel in the oceans without being heard on sonar or seen on radar. These submarines are equipped to wipe out as many as 2,800 cities any time they are ordered to by Moscow. The Moscow Military Committee is allied with Islamic forces. It is difficult to believe something you don’t want to believe. But ignoring or rejecting a fact doesn’t change it. ’ Islam is a “religion” whose teachings are the exact opposite of Christianity. Consequently, the United States, being the largest Christian country in the world, is “the great satan” to use Saddam Hussein’s words. Islamics believe that killing non-Islamics earns eternal reward. History abounds with evidence of Moslems (whose religion is Islam) committing atrocities against Christians. PLO chief Yassar Arafat has said “Peace to us means destroying Israel. It is difficult to believe something you dontt want to believe. But ignoring or rejecting a fact doesn’t change it. The words in the Bible are true. Bible prophecy foretells World War III in which one-third of the earth’s land area will be affected.Only a nuclear war can do such widespread damage. One-quarter of the people who are left behind in the rapture will die either in the war itself or from starvation or disease resulting as aftermaths of the war. What gloom and doom. But there is a way of escape: God. Karl Kristensen Ivujivik, Quebec “,,.Mathieson.is expect to resign because her and her husband is relocating to Vancouver...” (page 1 of the Aug. 1 edition of The Castlegar News.) Just who’s proofreading this stuff anyway? Please bring back the proof reader. Even a good proof reader will not be able to eliminate innocent typos or printers’ errors like ’expect’ in place of ’expected’, but most certainly would save us from such atrocities as "her and her husband is relocating to Vancouver.’ Fred G. Marsh Castlegar Province must get tougher with logging industry Wi Forestry guidelines a paper tiger against province’s bully-like industry Forest Minister Dan Miller has revealed that logging operations on Vancouver Island are “appalling” (Vancouver Sun, July 31). An independent audit found that two- thirds of the 53 randomly selected fish- bearing streams suffered major to moderate damage from sloppy logging practices. Forest companies have been operating under Ministry of Forest guidelines designed to minimize such damage. This audit reveals MOF guidelines to be ineffectual and the Ministry a paper tiger incapable of enforcing its own guidelines. It’s time that those responsible for this outrage be made accountable. The audit is also in direct opposition to recent statements by the B.C. Forest Alliance’s Jack Munro. Munro is on the public record as saying: “We did some things wrong in the past, we’re not doing them wrong anymore.” (“Early Edition”, CBC Radio, February 4, 1992) Either Munro and the Alliance are grossly misinformed or they’re misleading the public. In either case, whatever credibility they may have had is now shattered. Jim Pine Victoria continued from page 7 In fact, the Tyrrell is actually devoted not to dinosaurs but to the study of how life evolved on Earth and includes fossils, mod- els, computers, films, an indoor science garden and preparation laboratory. And make no mistake, it is the museum that makes Drumheller a tourist destination, not the fact the valley is littered with dinosaur bones. If you need any proof of that, just take a look at Brooks, Alta. where the Tyrrell has its field sta- tion. That’s where the actual fossil preparation from excavations within nearby Dinosaur Provin- cial Park are taking place. Almost everyone knows of the Tyrrell in Drumheller, but few re- alize the dig is near Brooks. To their credit, Drumheller’s tourist association and chamber of commerce haven't simply sat back and watched as tourists flocked to the Tyrrell Museum They have been working to keep tourists in the area by pro- moting other attractions — like the suspension bridge and the ca- ble ferry. (The chamber can afford all this because it has the contract to op- erate Tyrrell’s gift ship, which was the busiest place in the museum the day we were there.) If our family is any indication, the chamber’s efforts are working. We did the scenic drive. ‘Mind you, my wife wondered aloud what the heck we were doing waiting for a cable ferry. It’s not like it was unique experience for us. You see, when we first moved to this area we lived in Robson and took the ferry to work every day.’ For instance, they have pub- lished a full-color brochure show- ing 32 attractions in the area (some of them quite dubious) and developed three scenic drives that they also promote via radio thanks to a special tourist infor- mation channel. Yes, even the Bleriot cable ferry that crosses the Red Deer River northwest of Drumheller. (Mind you, my wife wondered aloud what the heck we were do- ing waiting for a cable ferry. It’s not like it was unique experience for us. You see, when we first moved to this area we lived in Robson and took the ferry to work every day. Needless to say, we didn’t walk the suspension bridge.) The interesting thing is the contrast between the Alberta gov- ernment’s attitude to the Bleriot Ferry and the B.C. government’s (NDP or Socred, take your pick) attitude to the Robson Ferry. The Bleriot Ferry is a big deal with Don Getty’s government. The provincial Ministry of Transpor-tation and Utilities even prints a full-color brochure detail- ing the ferry’s history. The day we were there the fer- ry was so busy we had to wait for one sailing to get on. The Robson ferry? As far as the provincial govern- ment is concerned, it is as dead as those dinosaur bones in the Tyrrell.