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Tek SEN TCA NNMINNONN chatterbox by John B. McClelland FOR THE RECORD First of all, let me set the record straight. I was not the author of the column in last week's edition even though my name appeared at the top of the page. I have never met Flossie the Secretary. I do not own a barn-full of cats. I don't even have a barn. I don't like cats, especially. The column last week was penned by Cathy Robb who _has recently joined the Star as a reporter- photographer and will continue to contribute columns to this space in the paper. THE FAMOUS LEAK Since just about everyone else is talking about the famous "budget leak" last week when the federal minister of finance Marc Lalonde got caught by a zoom lens on a TV camera, I might as well add my two cents. Shoddy. That's about the only word I can think of to describe the way Lalonde handled the affair. He should not have been flashing pages of the budget in front of photographers. . But what's more disturbing is the fact that once he got "'caught" with a budget leak, he simply took the document back to his office and re-wrote it, adding $200 million to the recovery program. Thus he could claim that the page caught by the zoom lens was in fact not the federal budget he introduced to the country the next day. How neat and tidy. Now, $200 million may not be much money to the federal Liberals who are running a deficit of $31 Billion. But it is a fair chunk of change, and of course, it all comes from the same pocket. Lalonde just plucked $200 million to wipe the egg off his face. All I can say is that it's a good thing that -.TV camerman just captured one page of the budget on film. Had it been five pages, would Lalonde have up- ped the ante by a billion dollars? Probably. It's only tax- payers money, and what's a couple hundred million? As I said, it was shoddy; not quite sleazy, but close. And so typical of the cavalier attitude of the Liberal Par- ty under Pierre Trudeau. Just another small example of why a very large number of Canadians have lost con- fidence in that Party and have lost all respect for its leader and his front line generals. Lalonde might well have said to Parliament and the Canadian people, "Yes, I made a grave mistake. It was foolish of me to flash the budget around in front of the cameras. I'm sorry." An apology and little humility would have satisfied the vast majority of Canadians, and saved them $200 million. But that's not the Liberal way of doing things. Humility is not a word that springs readily to mind when one thinks of the federal Liberal Cabinet and leader. DIRTY TRICKS I can't help but chuckle at the great fooferaw go- ing on now over the so-called "dirty tricks" involved with the election of Conservative delegates to the leader- ship convention in Ottawa this June. There were attempts to stack meetings with Tiny Tot Tories, Ten Minute Tories, and even in one case, with a bus-load of derelicts in a Quebec riding who were promised free beer if they voted for a certain slate of delegates. These tactics are bit on the sneaky side to be sure, but to label thm political "dirty tricks" is a bit of a misnomer. One need only go back a decade or so and read the operations manual of the Republican Party south of the border under Richard Nixon to get a true ~ meaning of the words "dirty tricks." But how about old George Wallace who ran the state of Alabama for so many years and came closer than many people know to the Oval Office itself. Three British authors who wrote a marvellous book on the 1968 American Presidential race, devote a chapter or two to George Wallace and the way politics is-played in the deep south, especially Alabama. Talk about dirty tricks. In one delicious anecdote, the authors describe how Wallace literally controlled the Alabama State Police force as his own private army for his own political ends. ~ And when an Alabama citizen wrote a letter to the editor of a local newspaper critical of the way George Wallace was governing the State, here's what might happen to that citizen. Late at night, a couple of very burly State troopers would roar up to the citizen's home in a cruiser with lights flashing. ; They would pound on the door, often rousing the poor citizen from his bed. He would answer the door and see these two troopers standing there in the dark of night, wearing mirror sun-glasses, revolvers and night sticks dangl- ing from their belts. . One would say to the citizen. 'Somebody from this address is writing very nasty letters about Mr. Wallace and we're just checking this out because there is a lot of phony letter-writing going on these days. (Pause) "Oh, you mean you really are the author of that letter?" The troopers would slowly walk back to the squad car and drive off into the Alabama night leaving the poor citizen standing on his front porch wondering what had just happened, and no doubt wondering what might happen to him should he ever have the audacity to publicly criticize George Corly Wallace again. (Turn to page 6) No, The Budget Business likes it. Labour hates it. What? The federal budget, of course. So what else is new in Canada. Getting government, labour and business to agree on what time the sun comes up tomorrow would be a major accomplishment. Business liked the budget because there were no immediate tax hikes, and in fact some incentives. The day after the budget came down, the Toronto Stock Ex- change was very busy with the index hopping upwards by more than 40 points. Labour said the budget did nothing in the short haul for the 1.5 million Canadians who are out of work, and Marc Lalonde admitted on budget night that the drop in the unemployment rate is not going to be very dramatic even by the end of 1984. What seems to be important about the federal budget of last week is that the government has served up the economic ball squarely in the court of the private sector. Even though nearly $5 billion will be pumped into the economy by the Government, the budget seems to say to the private sector: 'Here, you have the respon- sibility for turning things around. You have been com- plaining about too much tinkering in the market-place, so you get the country back on the rails again." Maybe the most important thing about last week's budget, is that it seems to be a response to the mood of the country which is anti-government generally these days, and more specifically, is opposed to massive in- jections of government money into the economy. The government band-aid approach to an ailing economy has not worked very well in recent years, so this budget may have been a reflection of a change in' direction. Will it work? Nobody knows the answer to that question. But what most Canadians do know is that a long list of federal budgets over the past several years have been dismal failures. It is very possible that they were doomed to failure even before the ink was dry. Perhaps we Canadians put too much hope in the federal budgets to bail us out of difficulties, when in fact it was each and every one of us who should have been doing the bailing on our own. As tor Marc Lalonde, his tirst budget was a clever one. If the Canadian economy continues to show im- provement as it has in the past few months, he will be able to say his budget helped the process. If things go flat again in six months or a year, he ~ will point to the private sector and say it did not (or could not) take advantage of his budget in the right ways. And that is good politics. . The Movement Grows Last Saturday, more than 20,000 people took part in a parade in downtown Toronto. : The same day upwards of 30,000 people marched in a similar parade in Vancouver. 'Both marches were staged to protest the decision by the Canadian government to negotiate testing in Canada of the American Cruise Missile, but in a more general sense, they were also voicing their dis-approval of the nuclear arms race. Slowly, the anti-nuclear weapons movement is gain- ing momentum in Canada as more and more average, every-day people are becoming concerned that if the nuclear weapons spiral continues un-checked, the end result may be a holocaust that wipes out life on this planet as we know it. With the growing numbers come increased credibili- ty, and the serious anti-nuclear weapons groups and organizations are not so naive to call simply for unilateral dis-armament on the part of the Wester powers without equal movement on the part of the Soviets. What is needed right now from the super-powers is a new era of meaningful and eventually an actual reduc- ion in the current levels of the nuclear arsenals on both sides. The anti-nuclear organiZation§¥eceive their share of criticism, most of it stemming from ultra right wing fringe groups who twist facts and logic to label anyone connected with the movement as being "pinkos, com- mies, marxists and subversives' who are simply pav- ing the, way for a Soviet takeover of Europe, North America and Easter Island. : Indeed, several of those people involved in scuffles (Turn to page 6) -