The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

THE HERALD Wednesday November Page Columnists- Council should learn from development fiasco lesson In past columns I have written about how important it is for Hills Council to ensure that the town has sufficient numbers of well qualified staff to meet the needs of the community A good case in point of what can happen to the town without well- qualified staff serving is reveal ed in the controversy ding a residential development project Stewarttown The residents of Harrison Place court and Thompson drive had to ex a new homeowners worst nightmare before getting the quality homes they were sup posed to have over a year ago Residents originally found their homes to be in such disrepair that if they had been left as is they could have presented a safety hazard to the occupants The onus was on the developer Halton Hills Development Cor poration to live up to its promise of building quality homes But it failed and failed badly Thursday the corporation was fined after being found guilty on 162 charges under the provinces Building Code Water Resources Act and Planning Act The towns building inspection staff detected the numerous deft ciencies in the houses including several unsafe fireplaces during its final inspection of the homes in the summer and fall of 1989 The staffs efficient work led to Bens Banter By Ben Dummetl the charges being laid and the town and the province new home warranty program taking over the project When the charges were laid this summer the towns Administrator Clerk Dan Costea said of town staff we now have an inspection staff that is very well qualified and reliable But the town didnt have the same inspection staff in place during a good part of the develop ments construction which began in 1988 It was the previous staff that carried out four of the five in during the construction of the houses that the town does with all developments to double check the quality of work being done Most of the deficiencies were ound during the final in by the new staff Something went wrong during the first four inspections As Mr said this summer there is a probability that some of the deficiencies could have been detected earlier But Mr stressed at the time the houses were being fix ed Is this the Yes and no Yes because the homeowners now have good quality homes But no because most of the pro blems and the subsequent headaches could have been prevented if the previous building inspection staff had been tive to the work at hand Council should learn from this episode and ensure that before it cuts out jobs as a socalled act of responsibility it should fully understand the consequences of its actions Successor to Dye will be chosen carefully By STEWART MjcLEOD Ottawa Bureau Thomson Newsservice Ottawa Prime Minister Brian Mulroney no doubt with a great deal of help from his ministers now must decide who will become the new auditor general of Canada After completing his 10- year term Kenneth Dye is preparing to step down And while choosing Mr Dyes successor may not be the most crucial ever faced by the prime minister it s not something hell take lightly Its akin to an actor having to hire a theatre critic It used to be that an auditor general kept his nose in the counting books Traditionally that was his job a watchdog on government spending Of course it used to be a small operation with a couple of dozen accountants Now the auditor general commands some employees and the operation costs more than million a year It wouldnt be surprising if one of these days outside auditors are hired to audi the auditor general department Meanwhile Mr Dye has been spreading his wings so to speak to the where he now goes far beyond the books and is offering views on policies and programs Accounting procedures are no longer the sole aim of his studies its a question of whether lax payers are getting value for their buck As a result the auditor generals annual report has become a broad critique of the governments performance MANY EXAMPLES This doesnt mean the books are being overlooked In his latest report Mr Dye entertains us with all sorts of horror stones about wasted dollars Were told of millions that go into non productive companies the un necessary refitting of rusty ships the purchase of land thats never been used and of unpaid debts and taxes Its all there But in his 750- page report which used to come in folder size we get a far broader look at certain depart ments For instance Mr Dye this year spent a great deal of lime looking at the defence depart ment and reached the conclusion there would be extreme sion if our army goes to war He says the military has no defined wartime objectives an observation thats not the normal preserve of accountants He goes on to say the defence department in times of war could not proper recruit train or care for per sonnel surprisingly Mr Dye comments brought a tart retort from Defence Minister Bill I am not sure with all attributes that the auditor general is the best qualified to be a military strategist he said I suspect Immigrtion Minister Barbara McDougall had similar sentiments about Mr Dyes com ments on AIDS testing for new Canadians But in looking at the govern ment s spending habits the auditor general is free to say just about anything he wants IMPORTANT POST This year Mr Dye even delved into the attitude of public ser and the goal of putting fun into the workplace He em value service and per formance Weve come a long way since the 1950s when the auditor general of the day first made headlines by discovering horses were on the payroll at a military base Its not difficult to see why the choice of Mr Dye s successor is so Important to the prime minister There will always be waste and mismanagement in anything so massive as the federal bureaucracy and since orderly business procedures in spire few headlines there is no way the government can win the day with an auditor general All previous prime ministers suffered from these watchdogs while the opposition embraced them It was only seven years ago that Mr accused the pnme minister Pierre Trudeau of inhibiting the auditor generals work If a Tory government were elected he said things would change A year later he was preventing Mr Dye from getting at cabinet documents relating to the pur chase of Petrofina by Petro Canada It doesnt take long for governments to regard auditors general as another opposition party And once the watchdog is ap pointed there is little the govern ment can do to curtail his or her for the following 10 years That s why we suspect Mr and his ministers are keeping their eyes peeled for an accountant of the old school one who is happier with financial statements than policies But dare I say if now that the D e has been cast Saddams gamble could lead to bigger stakes TORONTO A great fear lurks at the heart of much of the worldwide resistance to the aims of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein It isnt just that he committed aggression it isnt at all that he runs a particularly nasty regime it isnt even that he threatens the oil of the western world Ranter it is that he unilaterally and arbitrarily changed Iraqs borders through military conquest of a neighbor That is the only ge nuine nono in international rela tions today The great postSecond World War principle is the of national frontiers One could measure this by the reaction of Arab countries such as Yemen or Jordan They abstained during the initial world outrage over Iraqs invasion of Kuwait They thought Iraq might luwe had a point in its finan cial and border disputes with Kuwait But once Saddam an nexed Kuwait they and other doubters supported sanctions ART1FH IAI Saddam s sin is so unpardonable because so many countries in the world today are totally artificial Iraqs claim to Kuwait is itself an invention based on the premise that Kuwait was once nominally part of the Ottoman or Turkish Empire even though the family has ruled Kuwait for almost years In fact Kuwaits refusal to be dictated to by the Ottomans ted it to seek British protection in 1899 This lasted until when after one last deployment of troops to face down Iraqi annexation threats of that day the K withdrew It is important to note that Iraq is itself a creation of European im penalism being carved out of the Turkish Empire at the end of the First World War as a gift for the Hashemite family in return for wartime aid Alec Guinness trayed one of the family as a cunn Arab leader politician in the movie Lawrence of Arabia The were overthrown in in 1958 but still rule Jordan Iraqs boundaries are arbitrary combining people of different ethnicity and language If Saddam really wants to negate the political effects of European imperialism then hed need to return both Iraq and Kuwait to Turkey But what Saddam seizure of Kuwait has shown is that unless done voluntarily the world won accept such boundary changes Even supposed exceptions prove the rule The Korean and Vietnam wars were treated as civil wars with the two halves of each country in con flict with each other Thus much of the world readily accepted North Vietnam s conquest of the south but would not have accepted for North Vietnamese annexation of its Laotian and Cambodian takeovers JUSTIFIED Any invasion today must be justified by subsequent military withdrawal as the S did in Panama and elsewhere or Tan zania did Uganda or the Soviets accomplished in Afghanistan Ob vious permanent outside conquest is simply not acceptable even where there is an acknowledged impossibility of withdrawal in cur rent circumstances such as in Israel s unrecognized by anybody annexation of the Golan Heights in Syria Saddam doesn even have the kind of security ex for his actions that Israel does In fact if Saddam had agreed to withdraw his troops from Kuwait it is a moot point whether interna tional action would been sus tained against him or any puppet government he left behind It is his annexation that has got him into such universally deep water The fear is that if Saddams Kuwaiti gambit succeeds other countries will draw the ap propriate conclusion and attempt to rearrange their boundaries In a world where a majority of states make no real sense in terms of their frontiers and who does or doesn t live within them and where most countries have ter ntonal claims of one sort or another against neighbors that is a genuinely scary prospect PUT op Peopta yea To save ne lousy