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THE HERALD Wednesday February Page Opinion Political process is cloaked in confusion Its no wonder a lot of people are easily turned off by the political process as its usually cloaked in confusion instead of clarity When Hills Budget Com mittee approves a capital budget forecast the layman naturally assumes construction on a cer tain building slated to go ahead in for example would happen in that year Furthermore when the province announces it will in crease this years school board funding by per cent the layman justifiable assumes all school beards will receive the same increase The truth of the matter however is none of these assumptions should be made lest one is prepared to accept the unexpected In the case of the Hills capital budget nineyear forecast there is no provision for construction of a senior centre in Georgetown The exclusion has occurred in spite of a council directive to staff last fall to prepare a report informing coun cil when a bylaw had to be sub mitted to the province indicating councils support for a centre and Its possible location Halton Hills Mayor Russ Miller said during an interview last week he expected the centre to go ahead in 19 or 1997 If the Mayors prediction is correct why has the centre been excluded from the forecast Bens Banter by Ben Staffs position on the centre is that the projects relative price tag is too high to be included in the forecast A lot of councillors share the opinion that the capital forecast is always open to change since it covers sudh a long period of time While some projects may be dropped from the forecast others may be included This reasoning implies the centre could still be built in 1996 as the Mayor ex pects But wait The Mayor said the centre would only be possible as part of a twinning of the Gordon Alcott Arena According to the capital budget forecast that pro ject is slated for the year 2000 Then again the forecast isnt per manent Confused yet If not lets con sider provincial school board fun ding Although the province an nounced school funding will in crease by 79 per cent in school board funding may actually decrease The per cent increase represents an average increase across the pro vince The exact amount each board receives depends on their relative needs Halton Board of Education Director Bob Williams predicts the total provincial fun ding Halton receives will actually drop a percentage point or two As Mr Williams says the governments announcements are misleading Governments regardless of which level will only gain the publics respect if they earn it something they are not doing now Bourassa keeps options open and buys time OTTAWA From the beginning of the current constitutional crisis following the demise of the Lake accord the one thing Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa wanted more than anything else was time As far as Quebec independence is concerned the premier ob viously wants to strike when the iron is cold Had he wanted a hot hit a referendum now on the pro vinces future would be in the making And if Mr Bourassa wanted to get a yes result from the people he would have ab solutely no problem The premier as an influential politi cian should never be underestimated But Mr Bourassa is basically a federalist perhaps not with the same conviction of a year ago but nonetheless a federalist Practical considerations ie re maining a credible leader in Quebec require him to take a more flexible approach at the moment but thats entirely understandable Apart from hav ing to hold a rather divided Liberal party together he cannot afford to leave the separatist turf to the Parti Mr Bourassa has to be a lot of things to a lot of people And as long as he can continue doing this he is getting that precious commodity time There are signs that its already beginning to pay off TOO EARLY Its far too early to talk of a changing mood in Quebec but there are some small indications that the heady emotionalism that followed the drowning of Meech is already beginning to dissipate At least were beginning to hear some other voices For the last six months there have been very few of these other voices All we heard was an endless cry for independence Those hundreds of witnesses who appeared before the Campeau commission talked of little else It seemed no one liked federalism any more Those who did were too embarrassed to ad mit it Imagine what might have hap pened if Premier Bourassa mov- Ottawa Bureau by Stewart MacLeod Thomson Nbws Service immediately on a referendum And dont think he wasnt under pressure to do this Its common knowledge that at least half his caucus lean sharply toward some form of sovereignty The party established a com mittee to bring in a new constitu tional policy it was so separatist in its conclusions that Mr sent it back for rewriting Even the revised ver sion of the Allaire report is strongly sovereigntist in nature but so far it is keeping the caucus united Thats probably because it closes no doors Furthermore it gives Mr all the time he needs to explore every con stitutional option Even if a referendum is called It wouldnt be until the fall of 1992 and that wouldnt necessarily be the final one Somewhere in between the premier could even work in an election Meanwhile he must be en couraged by recent poll results They might not suggest any drastic change in public opinion but they at least indicate the debate is moving to a more prac tical level ONE CHANGE Actually one poll could in dicate a change in opinion although because of the wording of questions its difficult to be sure In any event a poll by the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir tells us that per cent of want one more round of constitutional talks with the rest of Canada Another poll says 64 per cent of Quebec businesses support some form of renewed federalism Mind you there are still poll results that tell us a majority of favor sovereignty in one form or another But confu sions and inconsistencies in the questions make the results dif ficult to analyze The Devoir poll for in stance suggested per cent responded favorably to ques tions about sovereignty- association and outright in dependence And even allowing for confusing and inconsistent questions this represents a sharp drop from earlier polls Some had nearly 70 per cent of favorably disposed to greater in dependence But any poll that suggests per cent of are willing to give Canada another try seems rather remarkable in light all other recent events It certainly speaks volumes for Mr Bourassa policy of keepng all options open while buying time Saddam Husseins horrendous miscalculation One has to wonder what might have happened in the Persian Gulf if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had been a man of half- measures A little cunning from him a bit of political cleverness rather than brute force and the Persian Gulf wouldnt be aflame What if Saddam had simply stopped his armies after grabb ing the two islands of Warbah and and the silver of an oilfield his apologists say was his real target Does anyone seriously believe we would be seeing fullscale war in the Mideast if he had done only that In Iranian soldiers seized two strategic islands named the Tanbs near the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf They had been owned until then by one of the several sheikdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates Iraq in terestingly had demanded their return to their rightful owner several times In the past 15 years But certainly no one has gone to war to make it happen WANTS SULTANATE Iran has also laid claim to ownership of Bahrain the in dependent island sultanate from which Canadian naval vessels operate in the northern gulf But Iran never tried to seize Bahrain Why What was the dif ference In a word sovereignty Bahrain is accepted as a sovereign nation the insignifi cant Islands are not Iran would have been subjected to international sanctions equivalent to what Iraq has World Affairs by Derek Nelson V Thomson Service ft theyd given up in and liberate the Arab section of Irans Khuzestans province Irans later war aim was not the conquest of Iraq but the removal of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein an objective it failed to- accomplish Iraqs ex istence as a sovereign nation was not threatened This incidentally is the dif ference between Panama Grenada Afghanistan Cam bodia and such and what Sad dam did to Kuwait NOT THE SAME Overthrowing a government or armed bandits such as those the Americans disposed of in Grenada and Panama is not the same as ending sovereignty If Saddam Had stuck to his original intention of removing the government of Kuwait withdrawing his troops and leav ing a puppet regime inplace the world might well have accepted his conquest There would pro bably have still been sanctions until he left but war would have been unlikely Even now there is a strong opposition to returning the Sabah government to power in Kuwait undergone if it had grabbed Bahrain and unlike Saddam Hus sein Irans rulers understood what that meant These arent the only border disputes in the Arabian Penin sula Qarawah and Umm al two small sand islands off Kuwaits southern border and claimed by Kuwait were oc cupied by Saudi Arabia in Saudi Arabia lays claim to much of the hinterland of the coast states of south Arabia Qatar just south of Bahrain and where the Canadian CF18s are stationed the Oman and Yemen The Oasis has changed owners several times sometimes violently No one has cared much about those squabbles either Even the vicious eightyear war between Iran and Iraq pro duced general neutrality mainly because no one was threatening the sovereignty of either country The initial Iraqi aims were to regain complete control over the Shatt al Arab waterway which