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RW cs A Nt 23% AST Zr BR - S308 Dor CH Ra x IAT Ye " RSE CX Tear ENTE oe ty NAM RUAN ADEE Sa La SI Ape AANA RAI UPAR Fr MRNA 5 FAA HF CRNAN RARE SEARLE sat ie ANA ENE RRL, EAE Ls ~ An Easy _ Decision Scugog Township council had no choice when faced with the' decision last week whether to close up the old Port Perry Arena this season and have it torn down in 1980. In light of reports on the structural condition it is obvious that the old building has had its day, and spending money for patch-work repairs to get the building through another winter would just be delaying the inevitable, and creating a potential hazard te-public safety. The old arena is going on 30. It has had its day, and obviously must come down. " What is concerning about the issue is not so much that the building was found to have rot in the beams, and if kept open this season, could not be used in a heavy wind storm or when there is a little snow on the roof. Although these are bad enough. But last week, a couple of Scugog councillors also suggested that sinking and cracking of the floor could result in broken cooling pipes, which in turn could result in leakage of dangerous ammonia gas. If that is the case, then it seems that the real danger was not so much overhead, but rather underfoot. All the more reason to tear it down and the sooner. the better. In light of these revelations, council, it seems had a rather easy decision to make. But the local council finds itself in the middle of another issue, also one in which public safety is the focal point. ) Late last month, a delegation from the Scugog Fire department : asked council to begin negotiations to opt out of a fire protection agreement the Township has with the Uxbridge department for a large-area in.the northwest corner of Scugog. At tha¥ time, council agreed and unanimously passed a resolution to start negotiating out of the agreement. ' Quite naturally, property owners in that area of Scugog are. - concerned that the response time for the Scugog department will be longer than the Uxbridge department because of the difference in distance. And they are right. While members of Scugog council concede that their original decision to negotiate an end to the agreement was premature, the council nevertheless would not rescind that resolution when asked to do so by a group of ratepayers last week. Scugog council wants to study the matter more fully, before reaching a decision on the whole issue. That's fine, but is it really necessary? The bottom line in this issue is that the distance between the fire hall in Port Perry and the property owners is not " going to get any smaller, and there is no way the Scugog department could get men and trucks to a fire as fast as the Uxbridge department, which is closer to the area. ' The wild card in this issue is that the Uxbridge department may be looking for an increase in the annual retainer fee and rate per fire call that Scugog pays. Well, if that is indeed the case, then the time to assess the situation is when all the cards are on the table. 'In the editorial poge 4 meantime, the status quo should remain as is. THERE ARE 0 TIMES WHEN JHE DECO. Y BEGINS JO LOOK UWREAL bill AVOIDING TROUBLE Some people, like me, believe in rolling with the punches, rather than sticking out our chins to show how many we can absorb. I have found that, in general, if I avoid trouble, trouble avoids me. If I know that some pain in the arm has been trying to get me on the phone, I also know immediately that he or she wants me to do something that I don't want to do. Therefore, I take the phone off the hook and leave it off until the pain has found some other sucker. Another invention of mine to stay out of trouble is patented as Nega-Prod. This is. short for Negative Production. The theory is simple. The more you produce, the more problems you have, whether it is children, manufactured goods or farm products. The more children you have, the more emotional and ec6nomic problems you create for yourself. The more goods you produce, the more you have to hustle to find customers to meet payrolls. The more farm stuff you raise, whether it's beef or beans, the greater your chance of being caught in a smiley glut on the market. } Our great national railways caught on to this years ago. When they had lots of passengers, they had lots of problems. People wanted comfort, cleanliness, decent meals and some assurance that they would get where they were going on time. There was much more money to be made, and fewer problems, by transporting wheat and lumber and cattle. So the railways began treating people like cattle. Passenger trains became un- comfortable and dirty. Quality of the food dropped like a stone. And they never arrived on time. Presto. End of problems. No more passengers. So the railways were able to cut off non-paying passenger lines, get rid, of all those superfluous things like station agents and telegraphers and train conductors, and concentrate on taking from one point to another thirigs that paid their way and / didn't talk back; newsprint, coal, oil, wheat. Perhaps this is the answer for our provincial governments, which, are quickly and quietly building massive mountains of debt for future taxpayers. Perhaps they should just stop building highways and repairing those already in existence. We'd all be sore as hell for a while, but as the roads got worse and worse, most of us would stop driving our cars. The government would save millions of dollars now spent on highways, and they would fire two-thirds of the highway cops. I don't quite see how the governments could use Nega-Prod to get out of the liquour business, which certainly produces plenty of problems. The booze trade is so profitable that asking government to abandon it would be like asking a millionaire to forsake his country estate for a run-down farm. Perhaps if they had a Free Booze Day, once a week, every week, say on a Saturday, it would solve a number of problems. It would certainly reduce the surplus population. This, in turn, would cut down, drastically, the unemployment figures. Should the provincial governments find that Nega-Prod is all I've suggested, some of it might spill over into the federal gover- nment, usually the last to catch on to what the country really needs. Instead of manna and honey flowing from Ottawa in the form of baby bonuses and pensions, we might get some terse manifestoes: "People who have more than one and a half children will be sent to jail for four years. Note: separate jails." "Persons who plan to live past 65 and claim a pension will be subject to an open season each year, from October 1 to Thanksgiving Day. Shotguns and bicycle chains only." "All veterans of all wars may claim participation by reason of insanity, and may apply to Ottawa for immediate euthenisation." These might seem slightly Draconian measures, but they sure would put an end to a lot of our problems and troubles. Think of what they would do for such sinful activities as sex, growing old, and hanging around the Legion Hall, playing checkers. But we must also thing of the economic benefits. With a plug put into that river of paper money flowing from Ottawa, taxes would drop, inflation would vanish and un- doubtedly, separatism would wither on the vine. People would be lined up six deep at the U.S. border, trying to get across, and that would solve, in one swell foop, our unemployment difficulties. We could go back to being hewers of water and carriers of wood, which was our manifest destiny before the politicians got into the act. Fishermen or lumberjacks, in short, which most of the rest of the world thinks we are anyway. Nega-Prod may seem a bit lofty and ab- stract at first glance, but it works. I know from personal experience. Every time I try to make something or fix something, it costs me a lot of money, and I get into a lot of trouble. So, I have a policy of never trying to fix something or make something. It's a lot less trouble to put up signs: "Beware of falling bricks; Not responsible for slivers from Picnic Table." And so on. 1 --