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

THE HERALD Wednesday March 2t 1H1 Page 11 Opinion Fires and fire prevention an ongoing concern Halton Hills residents and the local fire department should both be commended in drastically reducing the number of fires that occurred last year in comparison to previous years Despite last years success however this is a time when peo ple should probably be conscious of fire safety practices more than ever Spring is fast ap proaching and that means grass fires and possibly lots of them if people dont either exercise care or find an alternative way to cleaning their land says Town Fire Prevention Officer Dave Ford Mr Ford made his comments in connection with his unwill ingness to say the drastic drop in fire calls and firerelated proper ty damage last year was a trend setting beginning According to the Hills Fire Departments Annual Report the dollar value of pro perty damage caused by fire was million down from 1989s peak of million As well firefighters answered approx imately fire alarms last year representing a drop of 100 calls over the previous year These statistics could be con strued as trend setting especially Bens Banter by Ben Dummett since in the same annual report its author Fire Chief Bill Cunn ingham states In his opinion the ongoing efforts of our Fire Prevention Division is bearing results That seems like a logical enough conclusion but Officer Ford is more restrained saying only there could be a connection No one however can determine for certain if someone decided to buy a fire alarm or a fire ex tinguisher because of the depart ments ongoing fire prevention public education program he ex plains Although Officer Ford wont predict fewer fires in Hills in years to come his attitude plies this is what could very well happen First of all Officer Fords cautious approach snows the department will aggressively pursue its public education pro gram Too much perceived success on the part of the department in its program could very well lead to overconfidence and lackadaisical attitudes towards fires and fire prevention If this happened it would only be a matter of time before a false sense of security spread throughout the community meaning an increase Instead of a decrease in the number of fires in Town possibly for years to come Bank of Canada governor admits mistake By VIC PARSONS Ottawa Bureau Thomson News Service OTTAWA John Crow is sorry he failed you As forthnghtly as one can ex pect a central banker to be the governor of the Bank of Canada admits he may have blown it in the late 1980s And the grievous fault may have made todays recession worse Crow made the confession in his recent annual report It is arguable that if monetary policy had been more restrictive then with higher short term interest rates probably interest rates would be lower now he wrote We didn gam any points by being easier then Crow told reporters in what passes for a breast beating mea culpa Come again Is he saying he sould have been tougher Arent most economists blaming the recession now months and counting chiefly on high interest rates that flattened the economy brought spending to an abrupt halt and hurt our foreign trade You must understand that Crow is Canadas leading propo nent of the philosophy of tough love Hes only doing what he believes is best for you whether you like it or not Take last week for example In both Canada and the United States federal agencies reported the February unemployment rates on Friday PREDICTABLE RISE In Canada everyone who studies the subject knew the jobless rate would go to double digits for the first time since 1985 Indeed unemployment rose even higher than most predictions hit ting 10 per cent That was a half percentage point increase over January The day before the jobless report Crow hit the brakes on declining interest rates The key Bank of Canada rate went up one hundredth of a point to per cent a modest rise but the first in more than three months The higher rates strengthened the Canadian dollar which sounds good but means our struggling exporters find it harder to sell to foreign Ottawa Bureau by Vic Parsons Thornton News Service customers who buy per cent of all Canadian produced goods What happened south of the border The American jobless rate rose too It was the steepest increase in five years and shot up all the way to per cent from 6 These levels youll note are considerably below Canadas Nevertheless the higher unemployment sent shivers down the spine of Alan Greenspan chairman of the US Federal Reserve The reserve is the S equivalent of the Bank of Canada The Americans slashed their key rate by a quarter of a tage point to six per cent nearly four percentage points lower than Canadas to kickstart the S economy the move was heartily approved by the White House There seems to be quite a between our own Genghis Crow and the kinder gentler folks who set U S interest rates Clearly Crow is a tougher nut or inflation than on unemployment WANTS CONFIDENCE Crow firmly believes that the lower inflation is the less it erodes the value of your dollars the better it is for public con fidence and thus for the economy So he says in his report it follows that the underlying basis of monetary policy should be to preserve the value of money and to avoid actions that would damage it Crow speaks fervently of price stability interpreted as zero in But hes now willing to set milestones on the way to his ultimate goal after being con vinced the public would respond better to specific targets than to fuzzy notions of what the centra bank is trying to achieve His beliefs explain the hard line he has pursued since taking of fice Crow says betwen 1987 and 1989 Canadians spent and bor rowed three times more than the economy should have allowed Recent Statistics Canada figures show debt levels of Canadians compared to disposable incomes are at the highest ratio since the agency started collecting such numbers in Crows concerns werent helped by the governments political In the summer of 1988 taxpayers received a bonus with lower in come rates just in time coin surely for the federal election The election is history and Finance Minister Michael Wilson recently admitted the tax cut was not a wise economic move because it accelerated the ding and inflation Crow was try ing to control Intriguing that were getting these True Confessions now At least Crow hasnt said yet that his interest rate policy hurts him more than it hurts you Comments from Quebec should be viewed guardedly By STEWART MacLEOD Ottawa Bureau Thomson News Service OTTAWA Possibly because of the language difficulties and our dependence on translations those of us in ROC the rest of Canada have always had this tendency to place a tooliteral in terpretatlon on comments from Quebec leaders It has always been thus Many remember how Quebecs demands dominated so much of the 1960s The province never asked for anything from Ot tawa or the other provinces it was constantly demanding And that was largely because of the way we translated the French word demander Once it was discovered it also meant to ask the bonds of unity were immediately strengthened It not quite so simple nowadays but were still placing an inordinate amount of em on the exact words uttered by Premier Robert Bourassa and other political leaders in Quebec The gist of a comment is not good enough as it is in ROC we must dissect every word And given the speed of events in the province these days thats pretty well a full timejob Take for instance the premiers declaration last sum that after the demise of the accord future constitu negotiations would be on a bilateral basis with Ottawa Quebec would not take part in the type of federal provincial negotiations that led to Meech I think its fair to say that in general we over reacted to the comment IIASN CHANGED We are stilt overreacting The media and politicians in other parts of Canada seemed to hang on every word as the premier and his cabinet colleagues wrestled in Montreal recently with the constitutional issue There was reaction in most pro vincial capitals And the issue was debated in Parliament It was as though Quebec had issued a formal decree that it would never again speak to another pro vincial government about the Constitution The reaction from New Premier Clyde Wells was rather typical To suggest that they will talk only with the federal government is in my judgement to effectively say that no discussions will take place But thats not what Mr Bourassa and his ministers have been saying although in fairness they haven t been shin ing examples of clarity on the subject That probably because the interpretation has made it difficult for the premier to sound accommodating without appearing to back down But we watched Intergovern mental Affairs Minister Gil to through the third degree on television with lion after question about his refusal lo talk to other pro vinces And for the umpteenth time he explained that what Quebec re jects is the painful process that ted to the accord What we re saying is that were not go ing back to that type of Funny thing is that just about everyone in the country feels that process was flawed that a better way must be found to change the Constitution But what can appear as a Ottawa Bureau by Stewart MacLeod Thornton Hews Senltt Quebec governments position He said there is no need for the prime minister and all premiers to be in the same room at the same time to bring about con stitutional change Theres nothing in the Con sutution that says we have to have premiers brought here to sit down with the prime minister he said We all know of course that regardless of Quebecs position such a sitdown would not occur for many moons If there is going to be constitutional change a new method must be found and far from hindering the reform pro cess Quebec may be making a major contribution toward this But these are probably not the best of times in ROC for giving that province the benefit of the doubt positive suggestion in one part Of the country can also seem like a threat in another MUST TALK The fact is we can have con stitutional change without the in volvement of provinces It s just a question of a format In his nterviews Mr Remillard said Quebec would be talking with other provinces conferring with them and ex changing views on matters But it wouldn t be done with 11 first ministers meeting a la around a big table After threatening to quit the party over its new constitutional policies Municipal Affairs Minister Claude Ryan decided to remain with the Grits when Mr Bourassa assured him no doors had been closed on future negotiations Mr Ryan told reporters his col leagues were afraid of the word negotiations but they realize we have to hold discussions He said he was satisfied the party had a mandate to discuss things with anyone we want to Senator Lowell Murray the federal governments minister for federal provincial relations didnt seem unduly ruffled by the Berrys World 1M1 by Inc The BAD news Is I lost my Job The GOOD news Is I was taken In as a member of a STREET GANG