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pe 5 ER TAY, Se A re Lr 2 SE dang Sl RR PP ema" ul ws" A ae SN a. b ' "« od oe -- Sy tt Cher 1a [3 ditoriol poge Will We Freeze In The Dark? Acting on a recommendation from the National Energy Board, the cabinet of the Conservative government agreed last week to allow natural gas exports to the United States to increase by 40 per cent over the next eight years. If the price of natural gas remains the same, this will generate about $15 billion for the Canadian economy, and is certainly welcome news for the gas production and transmission companies of western Canada. However, it comes at a time of anxiety for people in eastern Canada, now faced with four cold months of winter, the price of fuel oil inching towards 70 cents per gallon, and conflicting reports over whether there will be a fuel oil shortage this winter. While some politicians are saying the liklihood of fuel shortages is more than just a possibility, the companies say we have enough to meet the demand. The NEB has confirmed, however, that domestic inventories have dropped this year because of exports to the United States. Ontario's energy minister Robert Welch told the Legislature last week that there is enough heating oil for this season if we don't get an unusually cold winter and if there is no disruption in supplies. Those are two pretty big ifs, over which nobody in this country, not even the oil companies or the politicians, have any control. It seems absurd that we would allow supplies to reach a point where shortages could occur if we get a cold snap, or if foreign countries decide to turn off the tap. The situation in Iran is a prime example of the unreliability of supply these days. Likewise with the supply of natural gas. The NEB has changed its position at least three times on exports to the Unites States and Canadians can hardly be blamed for feeling that somehow the only people with a real handle on how much energy we have are the companies whose major concern is making profit. - Assuming Canada does have a surplus of natural gas, should we be shipping it outside the country at an increased rate? The producing companies argue they need the extra profits from exports to pay for the search for new deposits. But what will they do when they tap those new deposits; argue for further exports to find still more natural gas? There is something very unsettling for Canadians in this kind of logic. While it is all very well to look at our balance of payment and say what $15 billion would do to the column, but that obviously is a short term solution. The day of reckoning for our balance of payments is coming, especially when a non-renewable comodity like natural gas is concerned. Who do Canadians believe; the NEB which gets its information from the private companies? The governments of Alberta or British Columbia, or our federal government which wants to sell off part of the national energy company Petro-Can, and at the same time feels that selling a non-renewable re- source is the way to help solve our balance of payments problem? At best there are some glaring inconsistencies in the logic of this whole process over the long run. At worst, Canadians in some parts of the country may be shivering before this winter is out, and who knows how cold it may get next year, or the year after? ld . 27 0 Lr Dsrrrrssy, rid 7 terol or ; seers dt iers ILLS S117 reer ffFV Zor 21221221220222022212AAAANAAAAAAA "WOW 71s ret me JT" 7 2 ' "$ re \ 4% 22 x a i 4 "i 7 4 ps 22 "ery igor. wy, Hr, Sy 7 74 Lrr2, i i" 7 a5) raps ve. bill BAD SCENE There has been a tremendous change in the manners and mores of Canada in the past three decades. This brilliant thought came to me as I drove home from work today and saw a sign, in a typical Canadian small town: 'Steakhouse and: Tavern." Now this didn't exactly Knock me out, alarm me, or discombobulate me in any way. I am a part of all that is in this country, at this time. But it did give me a tiny twinge. Hence my opening remarks. I am no Carrie Nation, who stormed into saloons with her lady friends, armed with hatchets, and smashed open (what a waste) the barrels of beer and kegs of whiskey. I am no Joan of Arc. I don't revile blasphemers or hear voices. I am no Pope John Paul II, who tells people what to do about their sex lives. I am not even a Joe Clark, who rushes up to a barricade prepared to jump for some votes, then decides to go back to the starting-line and send in a real athlete, Robert Stanfield, an older and wiser athlete, to attempt what he knew he couldn't do. And the "he" is Joe. I am merely an observer of the human scene, in a country that used to one thing, and has become another. But that doesn't smiley mean I don't have opinions. I have nothing but scorn for the modern 'objective' journalists who tell it as it is. They are hyenas and jackals, who fatten on the leavings of the ""lions" of our society, for the most part. I admire a few columnists: Richard Needham of the Toronto Globe, Allan Fotheringham of Maclean's, not because they are great writers, but because they hew the wood for which this country is famous, and let the chips fall where they may. That's the way it should be. Let's get back on topic, as I tell my students. The Canadian society has rough- ened and coarsened to an astonishing degree in the last thirty years. First, the Steakhouse and Tavern. As a kid working on the boats on the Upper Lakes, I was excited and a little scared when I saw that sign in American ports: Duluth, Detroit, Chicago. I came from the genteel poverty of Ontario in the Thirties, and I was slightly appalled, and deeply attracted by these signs: the very thought that drink could be publicly advertised. Like any normal, curious kid, I went into a couple, ordered a two-bit whiskey, and found nobody eating steaks, but a great many people getting sleazily drunk on the same. Not the steaks. In those days, in Canada, there was no such creature. The very use of the word "tavern" indicated iniquity. It was an evil place. We did have beer "parlours", later exchanged for the euphemism 'beverage rooms". But that was all right. Only the lower element went there, and they closed from 6 p.m. to 7:30, or some such, so that a family man could get home to his dinner. Not a bad idea. In their homes, of course, the middle and upper class drank liquor. Beer was the working-man's drink, and to be shunned. It was around then that some wit reversed the old saying, and came out with: "Work is the curse of the drinking class', a neat version of Marx's (?) "Drink is the curse of the working classes." If you called on someone in those misty days, you were offered a cuppa and something to eat. Today, the host would be humiliated if he didn't have something harder to offer you. Now, every hamlet seems to have its steakhouse, complete with tavern. It's rather ridiculous. Nobody today can afford a steak. But how in the living world can these same people afford drinks, at current prices? These steakhouses and taverns are usual- ly pretty sleazy joints, on a par with the old beverage room, which was the opitome of sleaze. It's not all the fault of the owners, though they make nothing on the steak and 100 per cent on the drinks (minimum). It's just that Canadians tend to be noisy and TET FTL ON Bus is wl NE il gE AL crude and profane drinkers. T And the crudity isn't only in the pubs. It has crept into Parliament, that august institution, with a prime minister who used street language when his impeccable English failed, or he wanted to show how tough he was. It has crept into our educational system, where teachers drink and swear and tell dirty jokes and use language in front of women that I, a product of a more well-mannered, or inhibited, your choice, era, could not bring myself to use. And the language of today's students, from Grade one to Grade whatever, would curl the hair of a sailor, and make your maiden aunt grab for the smelling salts. Words from the lowest slums and slummiest barnyards create rarely a blush on the cheek of your teenage daughter. A graduate of the depression, when people had some reason to use bad language, in sheer frustration and anger, and of a war in which the most common four-letter word was uses as frequently, and absent- mindedly, as salt and pepper, have not inured me to what our kids today consider normal. Girls wear T-shirts that are not even funny, merely obscene. As do boys. Saw one the other day on an otherwise nice lad' Message: "Thanks all you virgins - for nothing." The Queen is a frump. God is a joke. The country's problems are somebody else's problem, as lone as I get mine. I don't deplore. I don't abhor. I don't implore. I merely observe. Sadly. We are turning into a nation of slobs. L v