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

ERT A en KO A Se SNR Ll i $i | & : @ i | 8 N : i ful ; Disgracetu | i iy In a democracy, the thought of the national police er force, armed with search warrants, swooping down 8 on union offices throughout the country, is not a very ( happy one. a Neither is the thought of the leaders of a legitimate iad union being hustled off to jail. Worse still is the idea Nt that rank and file members, ordinary Canadians, Ri could wind up before the courts facing stiff fines or wor jail terms. La) No, these are not happy thoughts for Canadians. In 4] fact, they are downright repugnant. ie But that situation happened in Canada last week, HY the aftermath of the strike by inside postal workers, A a labour dispute that 'must rank as one of the most AS bitter in modern Canadian history. 85 While the mail is moving again in this country, Ce Sint SERS LT Ar RRA ART oy - A LL EAR LE Ea) thanks to the brutal enforcement of back-to-work legislation, the damage that has been done may be irreparable. The mood of the country seemed to be against the management and the rank and file members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. Jean-Claude Parrot was probably the most disliked man in the whole country last week, and all members of the union were being branded as irresponsible militants. The issues seem to have been forgotten. Whether or not a person is a strong trade unionist, a believer in the collective bargaining process for all working Canadians, the police action against CUPW and the officers of the union was a bitter necessity. A law was passed by the Parliament of the land ordering the workers back on the job. Nobody, not the postal union, its leaders, or any one of its 23,000 members can defy the law of Parliament. When that happens, a bitter and damaging postal dispute starts to drift into anarchy. Once that back-to-work legislation was passed, there was no choice but to see it enforced. The strike, the picket lines, the back-to-work law, the defiance of that law, and finally the police action arereally just secondary in this whole sordid mess. What matters now is how did the Candian Postal Service dig itself into such a mess, and more important, can things ever be the same in the Post Office? The answer to the first question seems to rest on a number of factors: archaic management principals, a clear lack of communications on both sides, a preponderance of government departments involved in any negotiations, a clear lack of trust on both sides. The list could go on and on. It seems incomprehensible that al these factors could exist in 1978, a time when labour-managment "ars THE NEW i > 70PlESS walTRESS relations are supposed. to be more enlightened than they were 50 or 100 years ago. Nobody, of course, can answer the question as to whether the damage can be undone. But one thing is for certain. Canadians have lost faith in their postal service. What future will it have if that faith, or at least most of it, cannot be restored? That's the task facing everyone concerned as they start to pick up the pieces of the Canadian Postal Service, after the ludricous, shameful and disgrace- ful series of events that need not have happened in the first place. No More Legion? Canada without the Royal Canadian Legion? Impossible. Every village, town and city across the land has its own Legion branch, and the organization seems so fixed and solid as to be a part of our culture and heritage. } The idea that the Canadian Legion will someday disappear and cease to exist as an organization is beyond comprehension, even for those who have never been in a Legion Hall and have no connection with it whatsoever. And yet, that was the very message conveyed to a group of loyal Legion members (all veterans) in Port Perry on Saturday night, by a man who should know what he is talking about. Hank Rittersporn, a man who has spent 30 years of his life in the Legion, was telling other men, many of whom no doubt have spent as much time in the Legion, that the organization they all love and cherish is in danger of disappearing. Mr. Rittersporn's message to the young Bills was that it's essentially a numbers game, a matter of time. The Legion is losing its members to sickness, old age and death at a far faster rate than-it is recruiting new ones. (Turn to page 6) bill SM IF you have ever bought, or borrowed, a copy of Maclean's magazine, you have probably been subjected, in the past month or so, to the same treatment I have, a variation of the Chinese water torture. Every second day I have received a card, or a phony-looking certificate, or a sincere "letter, telling me of the fabulous bargains in subscriptions I can receive if I sign up right. now. Heck, for only $19.95 ($52.50 at newstand), I can receive 70 issues of Maclean's, PLUS a 10 percent guaranteed lifetime savings, PLUS a full-colour 78-79 calendar. It's a great piece of hucksterism. And with a good reason. If you don't get them subscribers, you don't get ads, and ads is what a magazine gets rich on, not readers. And T can understand the slight note of desperation in the mail campaign. The first few issues of "Canada's Weekly News- magazine' were not exactly swollen with advertising. There were six to eight full-page ads, mostly liquor and cigarettes, a few half and quarter-pages, a couple or three self-promotional pages, all this out of 57 pages total. Not enough money there to ley pay for the coffee breaks of about 40-odd editors, a gaggle of researchers, correspon- dents, photographers and editorial assis- tants. It is to tremor with fear. Not that it would bother me for more than one minute and a half if Maclean's went belly up. It's a fat, rich corporation, with many irons in the fire, most of them highly profitable. Through a judicious combination of whin- ing and poisonous nationalism, Maclean's managed to convince the Canadian govern- ment of the necessity to kick out of the country its only real competition, Time magazine and Readers' Digest. Nor have I any reason to wish the new weekly newsmagazine ill. Ihave an old and honourable association with the magazine "and its sister, buxom Chatelaine. The latter has become, from tenuous, wispy begin- nings, about as good a magazine as a women's magazine can get. My association with this pair began at a tender age, about 10, when I received a contract to go out and hustle up subscribers to either or both of these mags. I was a lousy salesman then, and still am, and it was Depression years, but as I recall, I sold two subscriptions to Chatelaine and one to Maclean's, to friends of my mother. I received $1.50 in commissions, and that was the end of a potentially great career in publishing. Of course, in those days, a kid didn't have a chance against the pros. Maclean's and other publishing chains, would send into a small town a highly- trained team of hustlers to sell subscrip- tions. They were personable and fast- talking, much like the encyclopedia sales- men of a couple of decades later. They'd hit the town like a hurricane, about Tuesday and depart Friday afternoon, laughing like open drains, with a lot of loot, leaving behind them a host of housewives wondering vaguely why they had signed up for eight years of Maclean's and sixteen years of Chatelaine, even though it hadn't cost them a cent, ha, ha. However, I am willing to let old business animosities lie. If Maclean's leave me alone, I'll do the same for them. Let's take an objective look at their newsmagazine, the non-pareil, according to them. It's not bad, really. There is a strong tendency to be smartass, as in this opening sentence, "The CBC is the oldest whore on the block". Somebody trying to imitate Time magazine's style. But, on the whole, the mag isn't bad. Considering the tribulations of putting out a weekly magazine in an age which every- Kass VERS pn ] good features. One of them is interestige thing is instant dead two minutes after it's been on TV, there is a fairly good analysis of provincial and federal news, and adequate coverage of international news, and a few enough, visually and verbally, but bears Me v dreadful cliche "People" as its heading. > There's a lot of cutesy business of printing over yellow and purple and orange, which is juvenile and slightly annoying. But there is some first-class writing. People like Barbara Amiel and Mordecai Richler and Allan Fotheringham seldom put a foot wrong. The last of those is an abrasive columnist from Vancouver who recently suggested that the Toronto Argo- nauts and the Federal Liberals were utterly interchangeable, and that if the Argosgy backfield were running the country, nobody would notice the difference - a nice commen- tary on both. Perhaps the magazine is happiest, so far, in its comments on the arts and entertain- ment. This is where Canadians shine; we are a nation of critics, whether we know anything about the subject or not. [tis rather weak on sports, but then sports are awfully dead, except for colour stories, once the hurly-burly's o'er. On the whole, let's give the thing a chance, for a month or two. But no way am I going to sign up for 70 issues. How do I get my maney back if I die or they go broke in the next two. weeks.