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NEE WE PRT NAAT A SEA editorial poge Taxpayers Ripped-Off Political appointments to plum and cushy jobs that pay rather handsome salaries are something that the taxpayers of this country simply must live with. It is an age-old way of rewarding the party faithful for long years of service. All the parties in Canada do it, both at the federal and provincial level. Last week, the federal Conservatives pulled the rug from under former Liberal Cabinet minister Bryce Mackesey, who was appointed by the Liberals less than a year ago to a $90,000 per year job as chairman of Air Canada. That appointment was to have run for seven years, which would have given Mackasey a tidy little nest-egg for his retirement. As it stands now, he is still going to earn about $40,000 per year just because he was fired by the Conservatives. It's a laughable situation, one that must be of great amusement to the 700,000 Canadians out of work, or the single parents who don't have enough to live on, or the war vets on skimpy pensions, or senior citizens. Yes, they must get a great chuckle out of it all. Itis a slap in the face to hard-working Canadians who find governments at all levels dipping further and further into their weekly pay-cheques. While it is doubtful that the practise of paying off the political faithful with big plums can be stopped, the Canadian tax-payer must demand -an end to these kinds of sweetheart deals. A $40,000 a year pension for Mackasey is outrageous. The original seven year deal at $90 grand per year is even more so. The new Conservative government under Joe Clark has promised sweeping changes in the way business is done with the tax-payers' money. No doubt the Conservatives will start filling the top civil service posts with people a little more "friendly" to their party, which is fine. That's the way the game is played. But for goodness sake, the Conservatives could score a major public relations coup with the taxpayers of the country if they keep their salaries at a more reasonable level, and not try to pull any guaranteed pension stunts. While $40,000 or even $90,000 per year is not much of an amount for a government that spends about $50 billion in total each year running this country, to a lot of "little Canadians'* wondering where their next mortgage payment is going to come from, it HIJACK "79 probably seems like a king's fortune. And it has to stop. If retired or defeated politicians and party hacks want to make $90 grand per year, they should go to work for the private sector and not park themselves comfortably down to such at the end of the public trough. Pickering Airport After seven years of controversy, the spending of $500 million in taxpayers money, and the up-rooting of many farm families, it looks like the final death knell is tolling for the Pickering Airport. Since 1972, a total of 18,000 acres, much of it prime farmland was expropriated, to make way for an airport, which, in the final analysis, nobody seemed to want. The project was *'put on the shelf' by the federal government in 1975. Already there are people beginning to ask that those who lost their homes and land through expropriation be allowed to return. And maybe they should. ' Critics of the airport say the area is now nothing more than an 18,000 acre wasteland, a rural slum. If the project is indeed dead, sorting out the legal entanglements may take years and countless more millions in public money. If that is the price, then it is an expensive lesson. Possibly, when all the dust finally does settle on this unhappy story, the federal government should spend a few dollars more and erect a permanent monument to remind future generations what happens when big government goes slightly insane. a number of decades? How can a guy write explicit sex scenes ience. I went through a world-rending NOVEL TIME Every September, after a long summer vacation, several of my collegues ask me, jeeringly, I'm afraid, "Well, did you write that novel?" Or, did you polish off your play?" And every September, I have to come up with an excuse. '""No, I broke my pelvis sky-diving."" Or, "I had it well in hand until the day I was out sailing we crashed into a 200-pound sturgeon, and I suffered a bad concussion." One gets pretty good at the instant retort, the swift riposte, after twenty-odd years of it. To tell the truth, "Well, uh, no, I spent the summer drinking beer and going to auction sales and swimming and cutting my toe- nails, and trimming the corn on the ball of my foot, and reading four hundred novels, and cooking up a storm of frozen dinners', would be out of character. Because every June I swear to all and sundry that I'm going to turn out a piece of prose that will make Dylan Thomas, Ernest Hemingway, Mordechai Richler and Margaret Laurence wish they'd been born thirty years later. Some years it's going to be an auto- biography novel, with absolutely nothing held back. I warn my wife: "Can you take it sweetie? There will be no holds barred. Everything exposed. The whole business down in black and white." She nods as she finishes the dishes. Other years it's going to be a play that exposes the whole, rotten, corrupt, per- verse, middle-class life of this country. The wet tea-bags in the sink, the un-made beds, the after-breakfast martinis, the secret racism as we watch the Indians being decimated on the late-late shows. But somehow, after twenty years of this charade, I might as well face the fact that I am neither a Margaret Trudeau nor a Tennessee Williams. A new piece of fiction that is going to sell, must have certain ingredients: sex, drugs, violence, perversion. How can a guy write a red-hot article when he has lived a practically pure life for / 5 about nipples hardening and the scream of an orgasm, when all he's seen for the last twenty years is a couple of robins having an affair in the back yard? How can a guy write about drugs when his nose is so many times fractured that he can't even smell onion-breath, let alone the sweet scent of marijuana on the air? How can a guy write about violence when the worst incident he has seen in years is one grandboy giving the other a cheap shot in the back when the other wasn't looking, knocked the other's head against the corner of the picnic table, and drawn blood and tears? It's not exactly Attila the Hun. How can a guy write about perversions when the only thing he's seen for years is a baby-girl bluejay trying to pretend she's a baby-boy bluejay? Or a hen-pecked hus- band trying to pretend, when his wife has gone to the john, that he's Henry VIII? No, I'm afraid you'll have to stick to TV, the movies, and Harlequin Romances, if you want your favourite ingredients. I just don't seem to have any background upon which to draw. When my wife says to me, after a particularly brutal party or weekend, "How come you never have bags under your eyes, like me?", I merely answer the truth: "A clean heart and a pure mind, my dear". | must admit that after the thirtieth repetition of this little slogan, she emitted an unlady- like remark. But it's the truth. It's not that I haven't had lots of exper- depression and ate potato-skin hash and porridge soup. I went to work at 16, for thirty dollars a month, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. : I'survived a war in which both sides were shooting at me, especially the British Navy. I was almost kicked to death by a German Feldwebel, just because I'd stolen his pipe and tobacco. I ate mangels and drank rainwater in a prison camp. I spent a year in a T.B. sanatorium. I've survived thirty years of marriage, two rotten kids, and am still coping with two grandboys who are the most ingenious methods of torture since the Inquisition. I even graduated from a university, with honours, when they still had standards. . I spent eleven years in the editorial chair of a newspaper, which has buried many a man. Ihave lived through, and thrived on, teaching teenagers, which has sent more people to an early grave than did the editorial chair. But still whenever I think of writing a searing play, or a violent autobiography, I can't seem to put fingers to the typewriter. I think I know what's wrong. I didn't hate my father. That seems to be what you need to get you going. Or, if you're Jewish, your mother. | My father was a mild decent man. He didn't beat me. Indeed, he didn't pay much attention to me. My mother was loving, but not overprotective. Darn it, why didn't 1 have rotten parents like everybody else, so 1 could write a vicious, sexy, perverse novel? ¥