P>AGEl 4. WEDNESDA MA Rl 4. 113Y . ll FRI*l PRESS whitby r Voice of the County Town Michael lan Burgess, Publisher - Managing Editor The only 'hitby newspaper independently, owned and operated hy whitby residents for Whithy residents. 1ulished ever. Vdna bx i1IF. ublishig .înd 1hotogratphy [lie. P Ihone 66X-61t 11 The F-ree lPress Building. lai Brock Street North, p.(), Box 21)6. Whitbv, O>nt. Michael J. Kn~tII Michael J. Knell Community Editor Marjorie A. Burgess Production Manager Karen Thompson Advertising Manager Mailing Permit No 460 Member of the Whitby Chamber of Commerce Transit service will prove beneficial to all given time and achance It is a well known and well established fact that all public transit systems lose money. For some reason, they always do. Despite the best intentioned efforts of men with considerable managerial skills, there is no way that a public transit service can run in the black (and still encourage ridership). This publication no more expects the Whitby Transit Service to run in the black than it does the Durham Board of Education. Because ours is a public service it is designed to meet the needs of the residents of this com- munity, not to make a profit. The Whitby Transit Service is designed to provide a service to those people who cannot af- ford conventional means of transportation, that is, the low income wage earner, the senior citizen, the student and a host of others including those with the good sense to leave the car at home. When all of the figures are in and the projec- tions are made, it is expected that the Whitby Transit Service will run a deficit of about $5 to $10 a year for every man, woman and child living south of Rossland Road. The question now becomes, is it worth the time, THEI BEST OF , A weelcly news commentary from one of Canada's outstanding news personalities 1 was listening to the Canadian Brass rendition of Per- cell's Sonata in three movements recently, to try to clear mv head of the constitutional row and restore a little saniîtv. Henry Purcell, who was born in 1659 and died in 1695, put that heavenly combination of notes on paper about 400 years ago. They'll be as good and as pure 400 years from now as when they were written. And in Rome, at the Sistine chapel, some slow and careful restoration work has made Michelangelo's brilliantly colored mus- cular figures almost leap out of a fresco that was grimy, gray and barely visible a vear ago. Michelangelo lived, painted, sculpied and invented between 1475, when he was born, and 1564, more than 500 vears ago. I won't belabor the point, but I can't help but wonder how many of the people so prominent in our broadcast will be anything more than footnotes 500 vears from now. There is no doubt in my mind that the constitution is important to the sur- vival of the countrv, but there is another more insidious threat to our national identitv, and that involves what might loosely be termed our national culture. The last time we took a hard look at Canadian culture was in the Massey report, 30 vears ago. Now we're about to get an updated version of that report, from 16 people called the Federal Cultural Policv Review Committee, and the community of arts and letters in this country is worried about it. If thev're right, we ought to worry about it too. If the govern- ment makes the wrong decisions, we could become more and more vulnerable to imported culture, a process that saps our identity and weakens the will to survive. "Gill- igan's Island" may be more dangerous in the end than all the Rene Levesque's in the country, French and English alike. That's not news, but that too is reality. effort and money to provide a public transpor- tation service in the Town of Whitby? From this publication's point of view, the an- swer is yes. A community of this size and state of develop- ment is in need of a public transit system to serve those groups of people that we have mentioned previously. A community has certain social responsibilities to its members. As a community we are respon- sible to each other for contributing to the well being of everyone. As a municipality all of us pay taxes to provide those services that we believe are essential to the well being of all of us. A public transit system is one of those respon- sibilities that, as residents of the Town of Whitby, we all share. There is a group residing in the East Ward, known as the Corridor Area Ratepayers' Association. It is their intention to have the municipal bus service withdrawn from their area so that they may regain a "free" school bus tran- sportation service from the Durham Board of Education for their high school age children. (When the town's system was introduced, the Durham Board withdrew their service for high school students only.) This group, which is quite vocal, have said that the Whitby Transit Service is too expensive a ser- vice for them. They believe that it is unfair that they should have to pay for a public transit service to take their children to high school. It's funny, but no other group in this town has made a similar complaint since the service started up last July. They have also said that they believe no one will use the Whitby Transit Service. Well, their arguments are emotional and, therefore, difficult to respond to, but we suggest it is just as "unfair" for familles without children to be paying more than half their tax dollars to sub- sidize other families to send their kids to school. However, let us say this. Our bus service, which this publication fought for along with many other groups and individuals in this town, is a needed service, and we would gladly, if given the choice, re-direct our school taxes to the bus service. The cost is presently not great, about 451 per month per capita. If we fight to keep the cost down, we will have an efficient service, a service that is beneficial to ail of the people of the Town of Whitby. Whitby's service is not as badly off financially as is Oshawa's. It is admitted that Ajax's service is better off, but then they have been operating for a longer period of time. Perhaps in five or six years, our transit system will be in a similar situation. We are hopeful that it will. Address letters to the editor to P.O. Box 206, Whitby