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Nothing Probably the newcomers to th area don't appreciate area fall fai as much as we do who have liv here for some time, but we enj them tremendously. On Monday, for instance, we we sore tempted to stay home and some much needed work at hon and the office, but forced ourselh to head for Port Perry where th fair was in its final day. The weatl was ideal and the grounds packe Horses and tractors were on I track pulling weights, a sight behold. Riding horse classes young riders were underway in t rings and beyond were the pr cattle, groomed by young showmr and women until their coats we gleaming. What we liked most about t show was the people we met, ma of whom we hadn't seen in months years. It was like old home week o Like a Fair family picnic that brought many many memories of good times of yesteryear, treasured memories. There was an added attraction, the competitors for the Dairy Princess crown, making their speeches and then milking the patient Holsteins standing there in their glistening black and white coats while these attractive young ladies went to work. It was a good day and there'll be others this weekend at Orono where the Durham Central Agricultural Society's annual fair will be«held from Thursday night until Sunday. We'll see you there and guarantee a good time. Our only regret is that our eyesight isn't the best and either those cows are going to have to get hpusebroken or we're going to have to watch our step more closely. A Difficult Month August of 1979 is not likely to go down in history as a month in which the USSR and the United States moved closer towards friendship. The first incident had all the makings of a good television script, movie scenario or paperback novel. The ballerina was in the plane with 67 Soviet citizens waiting to return to Russia but the Americans were holding the airliner until they knew for certain whether Ludmilla Vlasova wanted to remain in the U.S. with her husband, the dancer, or whether she wished to remain in Russia. Would the ballerina be re-united with her husband? Would the airliner be allowed to leave? Would the flurry of negotiations between Soviet and American diolomats be successful? These were some of the questions that presented themselves as the events unfolded like a daily soap opera. But the nightmare of this situation was that the scenario was not cooked up in the mind of a scriptwriter but was unfolding in The Tax The latest indictment of the federal public accounts system by the Auditor-General of Canada ought to be taken by every Canadian taxpayer into the privacy of his own confessional and there scrupulously searched for his share of the responsibility. Clearly, we have allowed our government to so warp the purpose of government that the nation is now seized by the doleful apprehension that government have lost all ability to manage the economic affairs of the nation. So says Auditor-General J.J. Macdonnell, whose one hope, slender and fragile as it is, is that the new Conservative government of Joe Clark may stop the rot in time. Macdonnell's indictment was contained in a speech he made Wednesday to the annual conference of the - Institute of Public Administration of Canada. For years, he told the bureaucrats, the ureaucracy has carved gargantuan spending programs out of some mythical conviction that there is no limit to the taxes that can be exacted from the citizen and, worse, that there is not now, never has been and never will be, a calling to account. The tax money flowed in through the automatic payroll deductions. Budgets for ever-burgeoning departments were struck not on the basis of provable need but to absorb the revenues coming in. Nowhere throughout the system was there any control, any voice to say Hold, enough! "During the sixties," Macdonnel said, "the bouyant economy and the thrust of every level of government for more and more costly social and other services to soak up the swelling revenues created a climate within the federal public service which real life with very real people serving as actors and actresses. History records that wars have flared up over incidents as seemingly trivial as this one. Most of us heaved a sigh of relief when the issue was resolved apparently to everybody's satisfaction. But it seemed as though the ballerina had hardly planted her slippers on home soil before we learned of more bad news in Russian-U.S. relationships. This time, the action didn't take place anywhere near a þallet stage but on Cuba, where 3,000 Soviet troops are reported. And this situation, which has not yet been resolved, bears a striking resemblance to the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s. These two unrelated events are spine-chilling reminders that perhaps the so called cold war is not exactly over. The last few weeks of August were enough to give the world's peacemakers ulcers or at least splitting headaches. Sponge placed a premium on devising new and ingenious ways of increasing departmental budgets Essentially the game was to keep on adding year after year and bargaining with Treasury Board as to how much of the funds asked for could be obtained ... "What has been the impact on the ordinary tax-paying citizen? It has created a feeling of apprehension that governments are demonstrably unable now to manage the nation's economic affairs because they too are bewildered and ineffective.' The case for mismanagement has been made before, but never so tellingly tied to the despair of the citizen over the emasculation of eleçted governments. People do despair. Elected governments everywhere show they do not have the political will to take back the excessive power given to the bureaucracies and to make the system accountable to Parliament and people. That spells out the gravest danger to democracy as we know it. There must be change before draconian change becomes necessary, to the anguish of the entire country. Macdonnell sees hope. We now have a new government, and in Sinclair Stevens a Treasury Board president who may be tough enough to roll back the tide. We also have a Comptroller-General, as recommended by Macdonnell to the Trudeau government, and that bodes well for the creation of a system of accountability. Prime Minister Clark has promised to reform Parliament, to make its committees such as the public accounts committee more effective. -Examiner If you have never been involved in municipal politics, you should have a go. Run for anything from dogcatcher to mayor. If you lose, it will be good for your ego. If you win, it will be good for your humility. I speak, as always, from personal experience. For two years I served on a town council. It was illuminating, if not very enlightening. I was elected, of course, by acclamation. As was everybody else on the council. So keen were the citizens to serve that some years, on nomination eve, we had to go down to the pub, drag a couple of characters out, and guide their hands while they signed up. When I was elected, I was present as a reporter. There were only five other people in the council chambers, so it was decided that I would be elected as the necessary sixth. Since I had already served on the executives of various moribund organizations which had died forthwith, I agreed. It didn't die, as I'd hoped. The next year we were all re-elected. By acclamation. It was pretty heady stuff, at first. As a partner in a printing plant, and a newspaperman, I was immediately appointed Chairman of the Printing, Advertising, and Public Relations Committee of council. This meant that our firm automatically received the contract for the town's printing and advertising, which we already had. The public relations part meant that I had to stop suggesting in the Daner that the town council was made up of nitwits, nincompoops and nerds. Another chap, with a pretty good heating and plumbing business, was named Chairman of the Interior Municipal Modification Committee. Heating and plumbing. A third, who had a tractor, a back- hoe and a snowplow, was appointed Chairman of the Public Works Department. He immediately introduced a by-law raising the rates per hour of such equipment. It passed, four to two. The opposition was from another councillor, a retired farmer, who also had a tractor and a threshing-machine, which he thought could be converted to plowing snow. His brother-in-law voted with him. But these moments of power and glory soon faded. The conflict of interest became apparent, and there was no way out for a man of honour except to resign. It took me only two years to reach that conclusion. You may think that a fair time, but it's not easy to walk away from a $75.00 a year stipend. The mayor made $150.00. As a reporter, I had been more intérested in the conflicts than the interests. I had delightedly heard, and printed, one councillor call another councillor a "gibbering old baboon." And watched the victim of the pejorative, a stripling of 78, invite the name-caller outside, stripping off his jacket during the exchange. Cooler heads prevailed. It was thirty-four below outside. Well, as you can see, as a member of that august body, the Town Council, I couldn't print that sort of thing, I had to report that the two councillors "had a difference of opinion." When I wrote that phrase and had to omit that one of the councillors was obviously in his cups, I knew I had to quit. All of this is a preamble to a thickish document I got in the mail the other day. It is a new by-law printed and dispersed (at what enormous cost I shudder) by our local town council. There are 39 numbered pages of legal inanities, and about an equal number of pages of maps of the town, equally unintelligible. As I said, the mailman delivered it, regardless of expense. A dozen kids could have covered the town in two hours, or stuffed them in the sewer. Despite my wide experience as a municipal councillor, or perhaps because of it, this by-law completely baffles me. The first thirteen pages are definitions. They tell us what is a lot, a yard (front) and a yard (rear), a garage, a building. They also inform the ignorant citizenry what a school is, a person, a restaurant, a motel, a boarding-house. All alphabetically. There was no mention of "brothel" under the B's. The by-law tells us how high our fences or hedges can be. It tells us how high our houses can be. How many square metres of floor space we must have if we decide to ask Auntie Mabel, crippled wit-h arthritis, to share our dwelling. How many parking places we need for each establishment. Again no mention of either brothels or bootleggers. For most of the document, the by- law dwells in metres, squared and decimaled. I know very few people over thirty who would know a metre from a maskinonge. Somebody on council must have cornered the market on metre sticks. Thenthis baffling by-law moves into "hectares". What the heck is a hectare? To me, it's an ancient French (Canadian) piece of land about as accurate as an acre, which nobody understands either. Here's an example: "RM2 uses are permitted as specified to a maximum of 550 persons per hectare." Is it a square mile? Is it a "H!acre" wit' an accent? This is crazy. When I was a councillor, we could knock off three or four by-laws in a meeting, and everybody understood them. "Moved and séconded that there shall be no loitering in the cemetery, except by those who are among the dead, not the quick." That sort of thing. This big fat by-law is for the birds. Or the lawyers. Not for us old municipal politicians. Remember what I suggested at the beginning of this column? Forget it. Otherwise you might end up in a "Detached dwelling unit", which allows "3.2 persons per unit standard." Not two. Not four. 3.2. 17 Quebec St., 17 728-3725 Oshawa L1H 2K3 Aug. 29, 1979 Dear Editor; It is all too obvious in this period that terrorism of every kind is becoming more callous and unrestrained. The notorious I.R.A., probably with Marxist support and outlawed much too late by a gutless Dublin government, will go down in history, with their Arab counterpart, as the sneakiest, crulest band of assassins. To them the ill- conceived end wholly justifies any devil-inspired means. The short-sight' and unrealistic British government should begin to regret their voting down the reinstatement of capital punishment, especially in view of the recent outrageous and unconscionable murder of Lord Mountbatten and some of those with him, as well as the cold blooded wanton slaughter of those eighteen British soldiers. Even though some or most of these fiendish criminals may never be apprehended and brought to human justice, they will, make no mistake about it, not escape the great white throne judgement when they will stand trembling before God to answer for their evil deeds and take the consequences. John Knott, Oshawa. Dear Johnny; One of my readers forward- ed me an article from "The Medical Post" concerning MD.'s opting out of OHIP, salaries and so forth and asked me to comment on it. t is interesting so here goes. Apparently, earlier this year, M.D.'s were given an increase of something less than 7 per cent with which most of us would agree as our doctors seem to be doing well enough financially. Then, the M.P.P.'s voted themselves a 7.8 percent increase, bringing their salaries to $30,000.00. This doesn't seem excessive being in the same general area as, for instance, our town manager. However, this $30,000 includes a tax free allowance of $8,000.00 which is the equivalent of an additional 14 or 15 thousand a year. Then, the M.P.P.'s get paid for being on committees $55.00 per day plus $25 per day expenses. Then also enjoy fringe benefits re: travel allowances, telephone calls, postal privi- leges, constituency offices etc., etc. Expenses charged by Ontario M.P.P.'s last year totalled $3.5 million or $28,000 per meneei n auuU no salary. The article goes on to say that "Michael Cassidy (leader of N.D.P.), a leading doctor basher, managed to spend almost $40,000.00 last year - three times more than his nearest rival." His postal bill was $22,456.00, almost $500.00 per week. Rather amazing. Tory M.P.P. Clarke Rollins spent over $8,000.00 on long distance calls. And the article goes on to state that many M.P.P.'s pursue their other careers at the same time as they serve in the legislature. A lawyer, Harvey Stros- berg, was paid $200,000.00 (exclusive of expenses) for 14 months part time work for acting as counsel to the Royal Commission on the confi- dentiality of health records. This article estimates that when the Commission winds up this year young Harry (he is 34) will gross $300,000.00. He is also free to conduct his private practice for such clients as the Royal Insurance Co. The article suggests that a counsel of Mr. Strosberg's dedication and energy is needed to serve on a commis- sion to inquire into a system that allows legal consultants to dip so deeply into the public purse, which could be a jolly goodidea. Morgan HJLC.S. Saguenay Visits Oshawa sun Iar and Spice Municipal Politi'Les e9f4