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the HERALD Pay equity bill cost 50 million Home Newspaper of Halton Hills Established 1666 A Division of Canadian Newspapers Company Limited Street Georgetown 3Z6 Ontario DAVID A BEATTIE Publisher and General Manager BRIAN MacLEOD Editor Phone DAN TAYLOR Advertising Manager Number THE HERALD Wednesday March Question period We re watching with interest as councillors in debate the merits of having an open question period at their meetings The idea is to provide a minute session at each council meeting for the general public to question their tatives about anything and everything Sounds good In the proposed format Orangeville according to the Banner councillors would field questions from he public after delegations The question period would be scheduled for council meetings only they would not be held in general commit tee meetings Orangeville councillors do have some concerns about the idea They fear the possibility of losing control of the meetings during emotional question periods They are also worried that too many questions would remain unanswered because councillors would be unprepared for the questions One councillor said citizens with questions should talk to councillors during a recess or on weekends But sometimes residents feel better about the process when they get to make their point to council True they could ask to appear before councillors as delegations but many people with just a few questions can feel intimidated by such presentations Here in Halton Hills we often watched as confused audience members scratched their heads asking what just happened after councillors have made a decision on a topic without explaining the results to the audience pie who are unfamiliar with wordings of motions and the process can easily be confused at such meetings In many cases the public has turned to the press table to find out what decision councillors made just a few seconds earlier open question period under tight control by the chairperson of the meeting would give the public a chance to ask the entire council with staff members present about their concerns And it might provide better informa tion about those concerns to all the councillors who will eventually make the decision Marriage happy vinces with just people lying the knot per There were 78 marriages in Ontario in up from 76 201 the previous year And the number of divorced peo ple remarrying has risen tially in the past 30 years Divorced people made up 21 per cent of the people who tied knot in 1988 compared to just J per cent in Brian MacLeod Notebook In Ontario our license plates say Yours to Discover Well it seems a lot of people have been do ing a lot of discovering in this pro vince of ours if statistics on mar riages released recently by Statistics Canada are to be There were 3 marriages for every 1 people in Ontario in the last year for which statistics are available I guess that means 16 people out of every got married One has to wonder If they re destined to have 2 3 kids each The closest province to us is British Columbia with 8 2 mar riages per people followed by Alberta at Manitoba marriage rate in was 7 per people while Quebec has the lowest marriage rate among the Canadian pro- It encouraging to see that jour nalism seems to be attracting so many would be to sities these days According to the Ontario Application Centre applica lions to liberal arts specifically journalism has skyrocketed in re cent years The centre reports that in the last years applications to jour nalism courses have increased by almost 263 per cent There were 2 applications to journalism programs in 1990 It seems the lure of the typewriters keys is just too much to ignore While journalism can be an ex tremely rewarding and satisfying career a word to some of those ex journalists you work long hours generally for less pay than you 11 make in other fields and you have to develop a thick hide And you 11 like it Derek Nelson The self congratulations you hear over the pay equity deal bet ween the province and its unions masks a looming problem What happens once pay equity moves out of easy tohandle job situations such as the civil service graduates to the small office or factory in the private sector Pay equity of course is one of our modern ideological fantasies the idea that certain jobs are paid less because they art traditionally women work To solve this disenminat on equity requires comparing those female jobs with certain male jobs within the same job class And if there are no male Jobs for comparison Then there are no special pay increases This comparison supposedly can be done scientifically and objectively as though there were some ar standard against which all jobs can be measured The provincial settlement in how ridiculous this restructuring of women wages can be About one in four of the unionized staff who benefit are men As for the management people who 11 benefit its clear a majority are men The real point of the agreement which took two years to negotiate was caught by one participant There wire very very few jobs that received no increase THE PRICE For the taxpayer and that s who picks up the tab the price is million to start escalating annual It amounts to 2 5 per cent of payroll But it the implications for other organizations that really create the worry After all governments by tion are massive bureaucratic structures where every employee is pigeon holed from the day he or she joins It is realbvely easy to play games with the salary struc ture Worse governments do not worry about being competitive They know there is an endless source of revenue available through taxes Even large or more employees private sector firms which do have to worry about money tend to formal tuxes when it comes to wages And it is those two categories that are covered by the first stage of the pay equity legislation that passed in All public service employers about 500 in number and 700 private sector concerns are ed Technically they were all sup posed to have met a Jan l 1990 deadline for posting their pay equi plans although many like the government itself were and are late CAREER CHANGES Our ecomony defies the odds Vic Parsons Like the bumblebee the economy continues to defy odds You recall that the according to experts is for flight Its rotund relative small wings suggest creature that should be crawling with the creeping Charlie instead of buzzing about your clover patch have been saying similar things about the economy of late We are already in reces sion some economists have been declaring for months The cepted definition of a recess on is two consecutive three month periods in whih the economy con tracts But the numbers just don t bear out the theory that recession is already here Last week Statistics Canada released its estimates of economic growth for the final three months of 1989 and the full year Instead of a shrinking economy production of goods and services as measured by the gross domestic product rose per cent in the October December period For the whole year the economy grew per cent very close to the Finance Department estimate of three per cent made in last April s budget On Monday there was more positive news StatsCan com posite leading indicator which is made up of 10 items that together suggest economic trends rose in December for the fourth con secutive month Six of the components namely house spending furniture and ap pliance sales sales of other durable goods stock prices employment and tht States composite index were up Two components fell and two others were the same as in November One of the most significant of these is the US index This in crease together with higher employment in January said somewhat the concerns about a recession in the United States Coming on top of recent remarks by Alan Greenspan chairman of the U S Federal Reserve that the chance of a recession south of the border is now below per cent there is reason to voice a brief cheer Greenspan is the American and a kinder gentler equivalent of our John Crow governor of the Bank of Canada He predicted that US growth in the first three months of 1990 will be slow but positive Much of Canada production is intimately tied to developments in the S About a quarter of our economy depends on international trade and about per cent of that trade is with the Americans Our export trade performance has been pretty sluggish of late Our surplus in trade of goods last year was a mere 7 billion the most dismal level since the mid 1970s Moreover our current count deficit which includes both goods and non merchandise such as travel spending investment payments and other services hit a record billion EXPORTS REDUCED Part of the huge erosion in our trade balance was due to high in rates These pushed up the value of Canada s dollar and made our products more costly and less attractive to foreign customers But exports to the S also fell because the Americans were on the verge of recession themselves and stopped buying our goods If the likelihood of the collapse recedes south of the border it can help but be good news for us Meanwhile at home consumers continued to spend freely at the end of last year with the expen diture rate rising about 5 2 per cent after inflation House sales in the West rose sharply car sales re bounded as a result of manufac rebates after months of sluggishness and sales of services were up sharply perhaps in an ticipation of the coming goods and services tax There was continued sprightlmess in business invest ment especially in capital spen ding on plant and equipment which rebounded after a drop in the JulySeptember quarter of The skunk at the garden party continues to be interest rates Crow is not overly pleased to see all this activity The spending and investment will contribute to he maintains So the buoyancy of the economy will likely mean a hard line on in rates for a while yet It makes you wonder if central bankers believe in bumblebees