The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 1

1 X-;" I THE GAZETTE, MONTREAL, MONDAY, MAY 6, 1991 A 3 -MMiMjftlMnlWi 1 11 11111 1 'in i mil Canadair rolls out world's first regional jet 1,800 to attend today's party saluting million commuter craft ALLAN SWIFT CANADIAN PRESS JACK TODD pate a world market of at least 1,000 commuter jets this decade. Canadair is aiming for 40 to 50 per cent of that market. So far it has orders and options for 109 aircraft. "There has been concern that there haven't been that many orders for the plane," Reider said. But he thinks orders will begin to pour in now that the first plane has left the hangar.

"The key factor in the success of this program is getting the plane done on time, on budget," he said. "They're right on target." "I think it's an extremely major accomplishment for Canadair and the Canadian aerospace industry." The RJ has a cruising speed of 850 kilometres an hour and a maximum range of 2,750 kilometres. The base price is $16.5 million. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Premier Robert Bourassa are among 1,800 guests invited to today's ceremony, when the first RJ will be presented to DLT of Germany. DLT won't take possession until after a year of tests.

CANADIAN PRESS Design of Canadair's new Regional Jet is same as Challenger's, but stretched out. It will be the start of something big when Canadair rolls out its Regional Jet at a gala ceremony today in St. Laurent, an aviation analyst says. "Canadair is the first company in the world to bring out a regional jet, and Jon Reider believes the gamble will pay off handsomely for the aircraft manufacturer and its owner, Bombardier Inc. The timing couldn't be better for the RJ, a twin-engine jet aircraft with 50 to 56 seats, says Reider, who is with Richardson Greenshields of Canada Ltd.

The project was begun in 1 989, so the plane's production and engineering were done during a recession, he noted, adding that the economy should be ready for the aircraft by the time it goes into full production in 1993. "It will really fill a need in a market that will grow dramatically in the next couple of years as a result of congestion at major hub airports," Reider said. Intended to fill the gap between tur-boprops and 1 00-seat jets, the RJ's mar- to-three-year head start." It would cost another manufacturer at least 1 billion to build a new regional jet, he added. Canadair says it has spent $275 million to develop the RJ. It reduced costs by using the same design as for its wide-body business jet, the Challenger, and stretching it.

Airline analysts like Aviation Systems Research Corp. of Golden, antici ket is airlines providing non-stop shuttle service between cities up to 1,000 kilometres apart, avoiding hubs and transfers. The only competitors are turboprops, and experts say riders prefer jets on trips longer than one hour. "Canadair has a tremendous advantage," Reider said in an interview. "If someone else were to come on the market, Canadair would have a good two- CENTREPIECE Amy's answer Looking for good Then shop in the States My friend Big Arny Selinsky the cabbie was telling' me how he.

spends his weekends. I can't remember what he was talking about. Biscuits, maybe. Or cookies. Definitely not frozen yams.

Anyway, the point was the price, not the product. And the place. These days, Arny Selinsky does his weekend shopping where the price is ij which is in the U.S.A. And sometimes, Arny the price is downright rewarding: "My wife and I pick up the paper, we cut out ever coupon we can get our hands on." That's how he got to the biscuits or cookies or whatever it was. "With the coupons, they ended up paying us 32 cents to carry them out of the store," Selinsky "Imagine that? They're paying you to take 'em off their hands." -1 2 Like just about every Montrealer who owns a driveable set of wheels, Selinsky is taking part in that great Quebec tradition shopping in the States.

-1: Even with the two-hour wait at the border on the way home, he figures it's worth it: For $100 U.S., and his wife can get a week's worth of groceries. Now if you've seen Big Arny, you'd have to figured that in Quebec $100 would buy him a nice lunch. But like the rest of us, Arny can add. Shop in the U.S. and you maybe have enough money left over to eat out once a week, providing you also buy your own wine down south and take it along.

Shop in 2 Canada, where a single person can make $40,000 year and feel poor, and you end the week about four Kraft dinners short of your next paycheque. The little Rae of sunshine next door It's simple and it's brutal. Ontario Premier Bob Rae last week was whining about how Canadians arev; draining the economy by spending zillions shopping in the U.S. and how all levels of government are going to have to work together to solve the This was just after Rae's budget hiked cigarettes 42 cents a pack and added 1.67 cents to the price of a litre of gasoline. Rae said that the gap between prices here and prices in the U.S.

is already so big that a few cents here and a few cents there don't matter. Premier Robert Bourassa pulled the same shuffle on Quebecers with his budget last week. As long as we're paying a 7-per-cent GST, the Bou figures, we -might as well pay an 8-per-cent Quebec sales tax at the same time and just for the helluvit, he'll keep i taxing the tax as well. i Nobody seems to care a damn that our various tak? collectors are slowly choking us to death, that they're driving business south of the border so fast that it will be a miracle if the whole country doesn't go He fled Nazis only to be interned in Canada AARON DERFEL THE GAZETTE Eight people die in traffic accidents At least eight people were killed in traffic accidents in the province this weekend. A 33-year-old Montreal man was killed yesterday when a bus slammed into the car he was driving in Longueuil.

The man was driving across the intersection of St. Charles St. and Charles Lemoyne Place at 11 a.m. when a public transit bus smashed against his vehicle, said Constable Rejean Fortin of Longueuil police. Other deaths included: Thomas Louis Ducharme, 42, of Town of Mount Royal and Karel Van AgtmaeL 64, of Sabrevois, when a motorcycle crashed into a farm tractor Sunday, on Highway 1 33 in Sabrevois, near St.

Jean sur Richelieu. Eric Guerin, 23, of Alma, Lac St. Jean, in a motorcycle accident Saturday on a road linking the towns of Larouche and Jonquiere. in the Saguenav region. Alain Jobin, 22, of Pont Rouge near Quebec City, in a motorcycle crash on Chemin de la Peche, in Pont Rouge Saturday.

Gerard Daigle, 51, of St. Hyacinthe, in a head-on collision Saturday in St. Hyacinthe. Jean-Pierre Roy, 38, of Val Alain, near Quebec City, in a car crash on Rue Principale in Val Alain Saturday. Andre Ayotte, 21, of Boisbriand, near St.

Eustache, after losing control of his vehicle Saturday, on Highway 15 north, near Broisbriand. City needs night court: councillor Montreal should have a night court to help motorists cope with traffic tickets, councillor Marvin Rotrand says. Since 1986, the number of tickets handed out has about doubled, to 1 ,503,666 from 763,473, Rotrand said. Only 0.1 per cent of people ticketed show up to contest them in municipal court, he said, noting that most people must take time off work to answer the charge. Having night courts, as 20 other municipalities on Montreal Island have, would make the judicial system more accessible, he said.

Rotrand plans to table a motion on night courts at the next council meeting, May 13. Researchers win citizenship awards Two medical researchers are among the three people chosen this year for the Montreal Citizenship Council's outstanding citizenship awards. Psychiatrist Heinz Lehmann, 79, teaches and conducts research at the Douglas Hospital in Verdun. Julius Metrakos, 75, who served for 30 years as a genetic researcher at the Montreal Children's Hospital, is the father of the Hellenic Canadian Congress. Lehmann is an officer of the Order of Canada; Metrakos is a member of the order.

Mona Forrest, director of the Montreal Women's Centre, also received one of the awards, which were presented at a ceremony at Montreal's Hellenic Community Centre on April 21. belly-up before 1992, that the gap between our standard of living and that in the U.S. is becoming iff .11 5m 8 -S so huge that pretty soon the term wetback is going to refer to people trying to swim Lake Michigan make it to the promised land. So far, the only response any of these dizzy governments seem to have to the tax crisis is to keepj on taking more, and to appeal to our sense of patriotism to keep us shopping north of the border. This only proves what I've suspected for a long time: That Arny Selinsky has more sense than the federal and provincial cabinets rolled into one.

If a dress is selling for $200 in one store and 100 next door, where do you shop? When Julius Pfeiffer fled Nazi persecution in Holland for the safety of England in 1940, he expected to be welcomed with open arms. Instead, Pfeiffer, a German Jew, was thrown into prison by British authorities and accused of being a Nazi spy. Four weeks later, he was shipped to Canada and spent two years behind the barbed-wire fences of an internment camp. "I didn't expect that I would be put into prison," the soft-spoken Pfeiffer recalled yesterday in an interview in his Outremont home. "I thought I was a clearcut case.

I had fled the Nazis from Germany and Holland. But I was interned because I had German citizenship." Pfeiffer's World War II story is not unique. In 1940, about 2,500 German and Austrian Jews interned by Britain were sent to Canada as suspect "enemy aliens." They were detained in internment camps in New Brunswick and Quebec and released two years later after the Canadian government realized they didn't pose a security risk. But even after Pfeiffer was set free, he was still separated "for six, long years" from his wife and two sons who survived the Bergen-Bel-sen concentration camp. Tonight, Pfeiffer and dozens of other ex-internees will hold a 50th-anniversary reunion at the Canadian Jewish Congress building on Dr.

Penfield Ave. Multiculturalism Minister Gerry Weiner is to speak at the reunion, which is open to the public. Alan Rose, executive vice-president of the CJC, said he hopes the reunion will raise awareness about a dark chapter in Canada's history. "The internment of German and Austrian Jews was an act of panic by the British in 1940," he said. "On their release, many remained in Canada, served in the armed forces, and made distinguished contributions to the culture and scientific patrimony of this country." Pfeiffer, who speaks seven languages and is "only 84," said the living conditions in the internment camp at He aux Noix in the Richelieu River weren't harsh, but he was upset that he was being detained when he could have helped the war effort.

"It was not like a German concentration camp," he recalled. "We had our food and we were allowed to read newspapers. But we didn't have freedom. "I feel that two years of my life were wasted. Of course we were being kept there unnecessarily.

They spent money to guard us unnecessarily. There was a shortage of labor GAZETTE, MARIE-FRANCE COALUER Julius Pfeiffer was among German, Austrian Jews held as enemy aliens. It ain't funny Well, if you're in the government you probably commission a study group at a cost of $212,914.87 to prepare a report on why the prices differ and on the languages used by the sales clerks in the two stores. After six months they'll deliver a 97-page -report in bureaucratese and following their advice you'll buy the $200 dress. If you're Amy Selinsky, or Joe Smith, or Pierre Richard, you'll pass on the consultants, pay the $100 and grin all the way home.

It would be funny, but it ain't funny. We live in a city with 14.5-per-cent unemployment. Kids are going hungry. Stores are empty. St.

Catherine St. looks like London after the" blitz. We're in the chilly heart of a recession which -was going on for a year before anyone admitted it and which ain't about to go away just because Premier Bou-Bou wishes it were so, and instead; of giving us a break, the budget people decided to squeeze a little harder. With his eyes fixed firmly on Great Whale and -another $40 zillion or so in high-interest borrowing for Hydro-Quebec, the Bou tells us to dig a little deeper, cough up a little more. Sensible folk like Amy Selinsky tell him to stick it- in his ear.

They take their shopping to Plattsburgh ort Burlington, and the money flows south like water through a turbine. It doesn't take a whole team of government consultants making 1 20,000 a year-to tell you that this is not good. Besides, we don't need to hire any teams of experts. Arny Selinsky has already studied the question in depth, and he was good enough to deliver his one-sentence report to me last week. J'll.

pass it on free of charge: "This is stupid." T-' Three men tried to rob cab driver Police are hoping a call to Info Crime will help solve a robbery attempt against a cab driver. The attempt was made Nov. 20 when three men boarded a Cham-plain Taxi at about 2:40 a.m. at Querbes Ave. and Jean Talon St.

393-1133 completely innocent, we were released. It was just a matter of bureaucracy." After his release, Pfeiffer who had been a judge in Germany, studied at McGill University and obtained a chartered accountant's certificate in 1948. He opened a firm on St. Alexandre St. that now has 1 7 employees.

His story has a happy ending, but he doubts there's any lesson in it. "We've learned from history that we don't learn from history," he said with a smile. "Too often we're like lemmings who jump into the water and drown." and they needed people to make tools. I still can't understand why we were behind barbed wires and couldn't help." Pfeiffer, head of the German Jewish Heritage Association, said he doesn't feel any bitterness toward the Canadian government nor does he want an official apology or financial compensation from Ottawa. "Everything was mixed up back then," he said.

"These were the days of Dunkirk, when the Germans were trying to invade England. We were shipped to Canada and nobody got any information about us. "When they found out we were At the corner of Durocher and St. Roch one man pulled out a knife and demanded money from the driver. A scuffle took place and the cab bumped into a car parked on St.

Roch. The attackers fled empty-handed, heading south on de L'Epee Ave. The first man was about 5-foot-9, and weighed 1 55 pounds. He wore a black coat. The other two were about 5-foot-6 and weighed about 1 50 pounds.

One of, them wore a brown coat. The three, who appeared to be of Mediterranean descent, were about 1 8 and had black hair. They spoke accented English. Info Crime is a joint program of the Montreal Board of Trade and Montreal Urban Community police. It awards up to 1 ,000 for information leading to prosecution for major crimes.

Callers may remain anonymous. Quebec delegation visiting Italy in bid to drum up business ELUN BESSNER CANADIAN PRESS food for seniors: The Sun Youth Organization is distributing food hampers to needy seniors from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 4251 St. Urbain St.

The food is available to persons on welfare aged 60 to 64, and to those 65 and over receiving the federal guaranteed income supplement. For information, call 842-6822. joint venture to develop a line of bat- tery-run buses. Although the concept js still on the drawing board, Pierre Coutu director of new projects for the. hopes to find an Italian counterpart supply the technology for the Several Quebec financial institution's have joined the mission, Ciaccia Although a number of Italian banksC already have offices in Montreal, Ciac-' cia predicted that other Italian banks will be persuaded to do business in thef city.

The provincial government has sent! several special advisers to seek out busi-J ness for Quebec's electricity and heavyj industry sectors. Reed Scowen. former representative' of Quebec in Britain, will try to firtd contracts for four heavy-equipmenti firms, three from the Montreal area. Tremblay. French wine sales amounted to $100 million in Quebec last year, while sales of Italian wines amounted to only $20 million.

Spar Aerospace based in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, is scheduled to meet representatives of the European Space Agency in Frascati, outside Rome. Spar's director of marketing, Rejean Crcpeau, said Italy has increased its spending on space during the last decade, especially in satellite technology. "Now is the time to come and see where the industry is going." Crcpeau said. Spar already supplies equipment for Italy's railway system as well as some subcontracts for satellites with the European Space Agency.

In the field of transport. Lcs Autobus MCI of St. Eustache is looking for a ly's favor of almost $500 million a year. With the European Community months away from forming a unified trading bloc, the provincial government believes Quebec companies should firm up deals before the EC possibly puts up trade barriers with North America. For the Societe des Alcools du Quebec, the mission is an attempt to diversify its supplies of wine.

Jocelyn Tremblay, president of the corporation, said Quebec wine lovers traditionally favor French wine. Italian wine forms a mere 1 1 per cent of the annual sales of wine in the province, although it is less expensive than French wine. "It's a question of security because I think it's dangerous for us to be dependent on only one producer," said A delegation of Quebec business and government officials arrived in Italy yesterday to begin a week-long trade mission that will focus on wine, aerospace, transport and banking. The 60 executives, and officials of provincial government corporations, are taking part in Quebec-Italy Week, sponsored by Quebec's International Affairs Department and led by the minister, John Ciaccia. "They have identified projects and sectors in which they will try to promote their products in Italy, while trying to firm up joint ventures with Italian firms," Ciaccia said in an interview.

Italy is Quebec's seventh-largest trading partner, with a trade balance in Ita Repairs to the northbound Laurcntian Autoroute (Highway 15) in Laval, starting today, will result in traffic delays for about a month. Beginning at St. Martin two of three lanes will be closed for a distance of about one kilometre. The work will be done between 6:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., Monday to Friday..