StarPhoenix "Democracy matters affecting cannot the be state maintained within the without limits Its set by foundation; the free criminal public code and opinion the and common free law." discussion The Supreme throughout Court the of Canada. nation of 1938 all S-P Opinions China needs tougher signal As the anniversary of the massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square draws near, trade between the United States and China hums along like nothing ever happened. U.S. President George Bush ensured the flow of commerce between the two countries will remain uninterrupted when he recently extended China's "most-favored nation" trade status for another year, no strings attached. China's emigration policies qualify it for the preferential low-tariff treatment, Bush says.
As well, he says, attaching conditions to that country's trade status would raise the price of Chinese goods for U.S. consumers and would put Americans out of work as U.S. imports became too expensive for China. He also used the argument that trade sanctions would only end up harming ordinary Chinese people and wouldn't affect the leadership. But what message does the United States send to the ordinary people of China when it extends preferential trade status to the bloody rulers in Beijing, without so much as a whisper of condemnation or concern? It says the free world doesn't care about democratic reform in China; it just cares about keeping the economic wheels turning.
The argument that the Chinese leadership would be unaffected by the imposition of trade conditions is without foundation. The Chinese government has been very sensitive to U.S. criticism during the past year. Making China pay for its repression in economic terms would have shown Beijing the U.S. cannot condone the trampling of human rights.
Bush has pointed to China's recent release of about 200 dissidents who were arrested after last year's pro-democracy uprising as evidence of Beijing's softening stance. But the release was clearly staged to influence to U.S.'s decision on trade status and diffuse tension before the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. And China's emigration record, while termed "respectable" by Bush, is hardly encouraging. The government has also cracked down particularly hard on students seeking to study abroad. The messages the free world sends to China are of considerable significance to the fate of ordinary people there.
And this time, the U.S. sent the wrong one. Distant honor It's hardly surprising that, according to a recent poll, Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms are more popular with urban Canadians than they are with Muscovites. Distance has a way of softening the harsh focus of reality. From a Canadian perspective, Gorbachev's reforms are impressive: the list includes the Soviet Union's first parliamentary elections, the establishment of the outspoken Congress of People's Deputies and recently announced measures to move towards a market economy.
But a poll conducted for Southam News showed people in the U.S.S.R. are far less impressed with these changes than Canadians, with 47 per cent saying the reforms are primarily symbolic. Only 33, per cent of Moscow residents polled thought the reforms are bringing real change to the Soviet Union, compared to 72 per cent of people surveyed in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. No doubt that's because the attempted shift to: a market economy means Soviets are facing huge food price increases in July- the price of bread will triple to about $1.29 a loaf. The average Soviet monthly salary is $330.
Gorbachev went on television last weekend begging people to stop the panic-buying which resulted from the announced price increases. He tried to reassure people that the poor would be cushioned from the pain of the reforms and that those thrown out of work would be retrained. But, from the Canadian perspective, it's clear Gorbachev will need a considerable amount of time to fulfil these promises. Workforce retraining and improvements to the social safety net remain formidible challenges even for our government. Doonesbury BY GARRY TRUDEAU I WANT TO PLEASE DON'T GET ALL COMPETITHANK YOU ALL TIVE WITH YOUR EULOGIES.
FOR COMING TO MY THIS CHAPEL HAS BEEN BOOKED MEMORIAL FOR THE WHOLE DAY, SO THERE'LL 1 BE PLENTY OF TIME ONE TO FOR JUSTICE! DO ME EVERY5-30 AND NO WORDS OF PITY, OKAY? I'M HEAVEN? BY THE DOING FINE NOW. IT'S INCREDIBLE! WAY, JIM A LITTLE HARD THE GUY HENSON'S TELL FROM THE WAS A HERE. DECOR, BUT I LAWYER! THINK I MADE IT INTO HEAVEN! Financial markets ignore PM's Meech Lake 'crisis' OTTAWA The financial markets aren't doing their part to keep the Meech Lake crisis going. The prime minister needs all the help he can get. It's hard enough to keep the thing pumped up if everybody does his or her part.
A lot of Canadians don't believe the country's going down the drain at midnight three weeks from Saturday. And it certainly doesn't help when the markets take a ho-hum attitude towards the whole thing. On Monday, for example, the Canadian dollar should have plunged. The weekend was a bad time for the Meech Lake accord. Ten premiers called at 24 Sussex Drive, the prime minister's official residence.
The three key premiers, Quebec's Robert Bourassa, Newfoundland's Clyde Wells and Manitoba's Gary Filmon, showed no inclination to budge from previous positions. An agreement in time for ratification before -June 23 was getting into the realm of fantasy. This should have spooked the market for the Canadian dollar. Instead, the dollar rose seven onehundredths of a cent American to close at 84.6 cents. It was a meaningless little rise in itself.
But it was the wrong direction. The Toronto Stock Exchange also went the wrong way. It rose instead of dropping. And there wasn't even the excuse of the influence of the U.S. bull market.
The American exchanges were closed for Memorial Day. The markets have no excuse for their nonchalant attitude toward the Meech Lake crisis after being told directly by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney that they should be paying close attention to his talks with the premiers. Don McGillivray The markets have no excuse for their nonchalant attitude on the Meech crisis. He told the Commons last week that a rise in the bank rate was "due in part to the political instability that has been engendered because of serious questions raised here and in money markets around the world about our ongoing How discussions." the money markets forget about these serious questions while the ongoing discussions are still ongoing? Some economic columnists have been unkind enough to point out that a lot of things affect the market beside how many premiers can dance on a distinct society clause. Perhaps Canadian prime ministers have cried crisis too often.
There was a time when the markets took the Quebec situation more seriously. Just before Rene Levesque was elected premier of Quebec on Nov. 15, 1976, the Canadian dollar was worth $1.03 US in the currency markets. The election of the Parti Quebecois was immediately declared a crisis by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, then prime minister. He warned that Canadians would have to pay immediate attention to the "brutal question" of whether the country could continue.
"The crisis is real, the crisis is now and the crisis is immediate," said Trudeau. The markets believed him. By Nov. 30, two weeks after the PQ victory, the dollar had dropped to 97.5 cents American, a drop of 5.5 cents. It lost nearly a cent and a half on one day, Nov.
29. This proved to be a good thing for Canada. The country's s'exports jumped 10 per cent in the next 12 months, an increase attributed largely to the stimulative effects of a large drop in the Canadian dollar. Of course, the Canadian dollar was overvalued in the fall of 1976. It had been pushed up by an inflow of short-term investments lured by high interest rates.
Some Canadians at the time took pride in the fact that our dollar was worth more than the American dollar. Those with more economic insight knew that an artificially high dollar wasn't good for the economy. They were hoping it would drop. And the election of a PQ government in Quebec proved to be the trigger, not the real cause, of a welcome decline in its value. The Canadian dollar is in a similar position now.
At about 85 cents American, it is perhaps five cents too high for our own good. The markets seem to have become jaded with our crises. But perhaps a drop in the value of the dollar is still to come. The actual arrival of the deadline of doom, June 23, may trigger the slump in the dollar. The Meech Lake dollar crisis is far from certain.
But we can at least hope. (c) 1990 Southam News War crimes trials hazardous today OTTAWA The recent acquittal of Imre Finta on war crimes charges underlines the hazards of trying to bring alleged Nazi war criminals to justice in Canada. There is a basic problem in constructing a sound prosecution case at such trials: a weakness which any good defence lawyer will relentlessly exploit. It is the irrefutable fact that the alleged offences took place 45 years ago. That is a long time for purposes of witnesses' memories.
Most of us have a hard time remembering with any precision what happened yesterday, let alone events and faces from 45 years ago. The countervailing argument is that big, traumatic events tend to leave an indelible impression, endowing one with the power of complete recall. "I will never forget that face, never, as long as I live And that's definitely him, sitting right over there in the prisoner's box." Such evidence may or may not be credible. For every human being gifted with the power of more-or-less accurate recall, there are probably several who are so traumatized with fear in moments of commotion and peril that their rational processes come to a dead halt; they simply shut down. So put a 45-year time lapse together with tricks of various kinds that people's memories habitually play and you have a formidable challenge for even the cleverest prosecutor.
All these factors were undoubtedly in play at the trial of Finta, the 77-year-old Hungarian-born restaurateur acquitted on eight different charges following a marathon sixmonth trial in Toronto. Finta was alleged to have organized the deportation of 8,617 Hungarian Jews to German death camps in 1944. It was the first trial held under special war crimes legislation passed by Parliament a few years ago. The legislation makes people who helped perpetrate the Holocaust and later settled in Canada retroactively punishable under Canadian law. Canada, it says, is no safe haven for war criminals.
The objective is laudable, but inevitably it will collide with long-cherished common-law principles such as presumption of innocence and the onus of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. War crimes cases are in a class by themselves i in Canadian jurisprudence, since the law on which they are based is so inextricably tied up with the tragic experience of a particular group. It was pressure from the Canadian Jewish Congress that prompted the Mulroney government, several years ago, to set up a royal commission of inquiry into the question of war criminals living in Canada. It was a recommendation of that commission that gave rise to the present law. But the special difficulties inherent in such an approach especially getting credible witnesses to events that occurred nearly half a century ago were obvious from the beginning.
Some of the statements heard in the wake of Finta's acquittal and discharge revealed the special, ethnic-based passions which attached to this case. For instance Sabina Citron, co-founder of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, criticized the jury for deliberating only 12 hours or so before reaching its lateFriday-afternoon verdict. "I can't believe anybody could deliver a verdict in such a short period of time unless they were in a hurry to go home." It does not seem to have occurred to her that the first impulse of people anxious to get home for the weekend might equally have been to convict convict and get out of there. A Hungarian-born Canadian who was a teenager in Budapest at the time of the Holocaust, Eugene Lawrence, blamed the outcome on the "young on the jury. "They wouldn't understand what really happened over there.
The jury was not qualified because they wouldn't The implication that only people of a certain age a and with a certain basic "understanding" of the Holocaust should have been admitted to jury duty is deeply troubling. It vaguely suggests a bias in favor of a guilty verdict. It is understandable that the Canadian Jewish community wishes to keep faith with those including, in many cases, close relatives who perished in the Holocaust. But most Canadians will consider that preserving the integrity of the country's legal system more important than pursuing the last, tottering, alleged Nazi war criminal to a jail cell or to his grave. Health statistics get mind off Meech EDMONTON When a distinguished medic tells you your chances are 50-50, you pay attention.
Dr. Lowell S. Levin wasn't talking to me, personally. He was talking to, and about, everybody who comes in contact with the medical profession. And the chances he was talking about were simply whether going to the doctor would help or hurt.
Fifty, fifty. And he added that 30 per cent of medical care is worthless, 30 per cent of it is helpful and 30 per cent is harmful. Levin is professor of public health at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven and he is a widely published critic of his own profession. That is why he was invited to address a conference titled Health for All, sponsored by the faculty of nursing at the University of Alberta. Levin gave the nurses and all who heard him an earful, with catch phrases like "women are a disease," followed by "women carry the health-care gene if it were not for women, the health-care system would collapse." One of the best things that could happen in the health-care system, he said, would be for doctors to show more humanity in their approach to patients, but there is little chance of it happening.
There were similar nuggets from Irving K. Zola of the department of sociology at Brandeis University, who said most doctors don't keep up with their studies once they enter into practice. And hence, their skills suffer and become moribund. Forum Page A4. Star-Phoenix Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Wednesday, May 30, 1990 Richard Thompson, Executive Vice-President; Bill Peterson, Executive Editor; Michael C.
Sifton, President; Michael G. Sitton, Vice-President; James K. Struthers, Vice-President; Printed and published by Armadale Communications Limited at the office of the Star-Phoenix, 204 Fifth Avenue North, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. S7K 2P1 We are committed to deliver products and services which consistently meet our customers' requirements. John Best Zola was especially scornful of physicians as authorities on matters pertaining to sex, since the poor things study so hard to get their degrees they don't have time for sex in their prime and, hence, lack personal experience.
The nurses laughed at that. And Zola ha3tened to agree that possibly doctors make up for lost early sex by the quality of their sex lives in later life. The real sensation of the conference, for me, was Dr. Debora Phillips, professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California and a member of the Hemlock Society. At least, she said she was, although her paper to the conference had to do with enhancing the self-esteem of children with chronic conditions.
The Hemlock Society, as she described it, is a sideline with most of its members. It is named after the poison that Socrates took and the idea is to help patients who want to die to do so with dignity. Terminally ill patients are found and offered the society's help, having elected to decline all life support systems. Police are noti- Charles Lynch fied when the society sends a delegate, assigned to sit with the patient and provide all possible comfort to the end, including the life-shortening pill. I came away from this learned gathering with a diminished awe of the medical profession and a renewed interest in faith healing, since it was agreed that the attitude of the patient is the most important thing in most treatments.
Indeed, Zola seemed to be saying that 90 per cent of the time you would be doing better not to see a doctor at all and just do the sensible thing like resting or going easy on the part that aches. And if you do see a doctor, don't let them kick you around insist on knowing what is going on and what is involved in any treatments or operations that are prescribed. He gave a vivid outline of his own attitude as a patient and as a polio victim and sufferer from arthritis he has had plenty of experience. We can't all be like Zola and, in this age of depersonalized medicine, it is hard even to get to see the doctor, let alone consult. But as he put it, in the words of the playwright, "whose life is this, anyway?" Listening to these people certainly got my mind off Meech Lake.
I think they said Canadian health care was better than that in the United States, though they may have meant that our hospitals are fancier and the government pays most of the bills. However, they added that, when government pays the bills and the patient pays little or nothing, there is a danger the patient gets what he or she pays for..
