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THE HERALD Wednesday March 1991 Page 11 Opinion Planning staff vision will benefit community Halton Hills residents as much as any group in Region should be supportive of the new public transit and environmental ly friendly vision Halton Regional planning staff is proposing be developed for the future Regional planning staff is cur rently touring the Region to ob tain public input as part of its Of Plan Review The Regions Official Plan is the blueprint for where and what type of develop ment will happen in the Region Staff is asking the public to sup port changes to the review that conform to two principles Healthy Communities and Land Stewardship From Halton Hills persepec tive the first principle benefits the community because it will create something residents have always desired an improved transit system The second prin ciple also benefits local residents because it will maintain something people fear is disap pearing farmland The principle of Healthy Com munities is the promotion of more compact urban centres and companying public tton systems While the people of Halton Hills have spoken in favor of a better transportation system they generally come out against higher density development The only problem is the one cant exist without the other Right now a public transportation system involving Halton Hills Bens Banter by Ben Dummelt makes no sense because the area of coverage would be too large to justify the cost If however more people lived closer together a system would be less costly and therefore more viable As for peoples fears that higher density development will ruin the rural lifestyle of Halton Hills unless people accept higher density development there will be no rural lifestyle to appreciate whether they like it or not cant escape the fact its part of the greater Toronto area and as a result will continue to feel the pressure of growth That means if Hills is only will ing to accept low density develop ment it will only be a matter of time before the rural area is swallowed up anyway At the same time higher densi ty development doesnt mean the elimination of single family hous As Regional Planner Rash Mohammed said recently it wont be a free for all The higher density development will be created around pre determined locations where it makes most sense to establish a transportation system in other words people shouldnt expect four and five storey buildings in the middle of the rural area Indeed the second principle underlying the official plan review is Land Stewardship This principle is the protection of environmentally sensitive and agricultural land Regional plan ners realize the importance of the rural area The future look of Region and more specifically Halton Hills depends on a vision and the vision currently held by Regional planning staff is one local residents would do well by if they help it become a reality Mike the Knife slashes to cover mistakes OTTAWA To no ones sur prise Mike the Knife had his eye firmly fixed on federal bureaucrats and the provinces when he unwrapped his seventh budget this week Finance Minister Michael Wilson let it be known that he plans to carve million out of operating expenditures which in cludes public service wages in the fiscal year beginning April For an encore he intends to lop another million from federal employees and million from the provinces in 1992 Over five years the provinces would lose a total of billion This toughness was an ticlpated Wilson spoke of strong discipline and vigorous restraint in government spending repeating past themes But he also revealed a package of new ideas that havent been tried in Canada before or in many other places for that mat Wilson backed by John Crow the Bank of Canada governor has now set up explicit inflation targets with the aim of reducing costof living increases to two per cent by And even lower after that He also wants to legislate limits on Ottawas program spending thats total spending minus in terest payments on the national debt with a ceiling of 8 billion in fiscal and a maximum of 6 billion by Furthermore he plans to set up a Debt Servicing and Reduction Fund which will take all net revenues from the goods and vices tax money raised in the sale of federal corporations and whatever voluntary gifts to the Crown you people are kind enough to send to Ottawa AMBITIOUS GOALS These are all ambitious aims Not only because they will recharge the oppositions bat teries but also because Wilsons economic forecasts of the last couple of years have missed the mark A year ago for instance the finance minister predicted healthy economic growth in of three per cent On Tuesday he estimated the economy will shrink this year by one per cent despite a recovery starting this Ottawa Bureau by Vic Parsons Thomson News Service Such mistakes have a nasty tendency to play havoc with estimates of inflation tax revenues and spending But Wilson isnt likely to let a little thing like botched pro phecies deter him His budget papers argue the key to sustained economic recovery is a decline in both actual inflation and the publics Inflationary By the end of 1992 Wilson hopes consumer prices will be increas by only three per cent down from 6 8 per cent January The target for mid 1994 will be 2 per cent and two per cent at the end of 1995 These are levels unheard of for two decades The goal is socalled price stability a favorite phrase of central banker Crow Some economists take this to mean zero inflation but antiinflation moderates suggest its something less than two per cent Target set ting is an innovation for Canada and the only place where Finance Department officials can confirm its being is in New Zealand EXPLICIT TARGET The idea is to try to quantify price stability for the benefit of the public which will have to restrain its demands if the goal is to be achieved Were saying here are the inflation expecta of the government and we want people to accept them one official A Bank of Canada background paper argues that inflation distracts householders and businesses from productive work because they want to ensure they are not losing out to higher living costs is also hardest on those with fixed incomes the elderly and the poor receiving govern ment benefits People with money in the bank can always move their cash to make up for inflation losses What brought on this interest in targets Bureaucrats turned back the pages of history and noted that between 1950 and 1973 the Canadian economy ex perienced average annual infla tion of about 8 per cent a per formance that compared favorably with that of Japan and Germany Although those two economic powerhouses do not have infia tion targets they have managed to keep costs under control at times when Canadas com petitiveness and production have been hurt by rising pnees and in terest rates Officials appear confident the target can be reached They ex pect inflation at the end of 1991 to be at five per cent with one percentage point of that due to the onetime impact of the GST Then its downhill all the way And they believe the tough line Ottawas taking on public service wage and the provinces will catch on with other governments and the private sector The question is will the public gnn and bear it Arab anger against the west will remain constant Enough already about this rising tide of Muslin anger predicted to be the consequence of the defeat of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein Yes its true many Arabs sup port Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in his war against the coalition From conversations I had in Cairo a few days ago with per sons familiar with the mood in Arab countries it emerged that a great anger is accumulating among wide segments of the population in Egypt and other Arab states Mideast expert Prof wrote in a re cent Jerusalem Post But this rising anger theory presupposes there was no cant anger beforehand The paraphrase idiosyncratic commentator Dyer The Arabs the street have always been anti Western Radical nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists simply lead the pack Westerners are infidels atheists and imperialists whose women do shocking things and whose men lack dignity and honor As Saddam is fond of pointing out Muslin and Arab hostility to the West goes far back into history Unlike Western liberals Arabs and their Muslin cousins the Turks and Persians have no guilt over their world conquests In their eyes it was the will of God they succeeded Now equally it is the will of God that the American British French colonialists and their Arab lackeys in the coalition have defeated Saddam The masses may not like it but theyll live with it because they have no choice TOLERANCE This is the point The world is not made up of nations and peoples who love each other Group dislike even hatred is a much more common human emo tion Only in the West has tolerance acquired religious status Assume the dislike Assume it infects all groups of Arabs to a greater or lesser degree and rests on years of hostility to which Saddam has simply added another chapter What keeps that anger in line What keeps Islamic armies from riding forth in holy war against the West The answer is partly self interest Arabs are neither stupid nor monolithic in their thinking The oil rich monarchies and their peoples for instance didnt want their comfortable lives ruin ed by an Arab Napoleon like Sad dam But there is also fear Libyas Moammar on ly stopped playing his deadly ter terrorist and other games after the S bombing raid against him in 1986 Remember the predictions about rising Arab anger after this raid Unfortunately Saddam more impressed by how the S was paralyzed by con over the fate of hostages in the Iran Crisis a decade ago World Affairs by Derek Nelson Thomson Newt Service dam axed any plan to withdraw Yes Many Arabs are angry at the West now just as many have always been But if there hadnt been war if the U S had once again backed down then the at titude would have been former secretary of state Alex ander has suggested total contempt for a pitiful giant Instead there is respect along with any distaste He also remembered the S cutting and running because Marines were killed by a suicide car bombing in Beruit during the EuroAmerican intervention there So did the French The American Enterprise Institute s Michael writing in The American spectator recalled the French preference in 1983 was to shoot back DOUBLETRACK They the French were en titled to wonder if we were really going to fight at all in Kuwait So their policy was a doubletrack one if we were to fight they would join if we were going to cut a deal they wanted to make sure that they got theirs Respecting only strength Sad dam saw Novembers attempt by President George Bush to pursue diplomacy attempting to send his secretary of state to Baghdad as weakness The BBCs John Simpson was in Baghdad where he said the feeling was that this meant Bush wasnt serious about war Sad Berrys World