The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 3

Nation Province A3 The Vancouver Sun, Thursday, August 29, 1996 NATIONAL NEWS Payoff 'typical NDP incompetence' IN BRIEF Liberal finance critic Fred Gingell said he was outraged about the $70,000 severance given to an NDP troubleshooter. JIM BEATTY ernment with no choice but to pay the half-million dollar settlement Premier Glen Clark fired him this week. "I remain angered and disappointed that this payment has been made," Clark said in a press release. "I agree with members of the public who will view this outcome as unacceptable." Clark, who is vacationing with his family, could not be reached for further comment. A report released Wednesday from Clark's deputy minister, Doug McArthur, says Surich will receive a set-dement of $70,000.

"The error he made is a serious one and thus I believe that the rather severe penalty is justified," McArthur wrote. But Gingell called the payoffs to Surich and Austin inappropriate, saying neither would be necessary if the government had the courage to fire people for just cause. "They don't have the courage to do what they should do and it comes back to haunt them. It's typical NDP incom petence," Gingell said. "Glen Clark is very good at closing the barn door when the horse has already bolted." Surich was unavailable for comment Wednesday.

Until recently, Surich headed the province's information technology access office and was informally known as the "information czar." He was responsible for implementing the province's Electronic Highway Accord. Joachim Surich, 50, is a native of Cloppenburg, West Germany, who came with his family to Montreal in 1956. The family later setded in Kitchener, Ont. where Surich earned a master's degree in political science before taking a teaching job at the University of Waterloo. His longtime commitment to the NDP began in 1971, when he ran unsuccessfully for the provincial party.

He moved to Victoria in 1989 where he ran a software company, specializing in human resources programs. Around 1992, he joined the B.C. government. screwing up? Only when you work for the NDP," Gingell said Wednesday. "When you're fired for cause do you get anything more than holiday pay? No you don't." Earlier this year, when the RCMP recommended Austin not be criminally charged, Surich, as acting commissioner of the Public Service Employee Relations Commission, decided Austin was due a setdement.

Surich referred the matter without Treasury Board approval to commercial arbitrator Judy Korbin, also a prominent New Democrat. When both sides agreed that two years compensation was appropriate, Korbin worked out the details and awarded Austin $525,000. Korbin said Wednesday the award was not based on merit but on a mathematical calculation of two years compensation, including details such as pension benefits and vacation owed. For Surich's error negotiating without authority and then leaving the gov- Rock defends stand on parole OTTAWA Throwing away the key on murderers won't keep the streets safe if provinces slash social programs that help set kids on the straight and narrow, says Justice Minister Allan Rock. Rock, speaking Wednesday to a national meeting of police chiefs, also maintained his refusal to abolish the "faint-hope" clause that allows first-degree murderers to apply for early parole.

The justice minister, under public pressure to scrap the clause, instead launched a political counter-attack. "Making streets safer has as much to do with literacy as it does with the law," he said following his speech. "It has as much to do with the strength of families as it has to do with the length of sentences. It has as much to do with early intervention as it does with mandatory supervision." Canadian Press Quebec police search for killer TRINITE-DES-MONTS, Que. Police used a helicopter and an armored Sun Legislature Bureau VICTORIA A $70,000 payoff to a man who made a mistake costing taxpayers a half million dollars is testimony to the New Democratic Party government's incompetence, according to the Liberals.

Finance critic Fred Gingell said he was outraged over the severance pay given to Jo Surich, a top NDP troubleshooter who was fired this week for mishandling the firing of Gordon Austin, the former head of the Health Labor Relations Association. Austin was awarded a $525,000 severance settlement after he had been dismissed in 1993 for misusing taxpayers' money. "Do you get a dismissal settlement for Olympians honored Firing worries leaders of high-tech industry erous a severance package for Gordon Austin, who was fired in 1993 from his job as president of the Health Labor Relations Association. "All one can observe is that Jo was making significant change within the government," Hughes said. "Anybody who does that maybe causes a bit of a bow wave." He said the industry will lobby the government to appoint a successor who will do the job as effectively as Surich, "The Technology Industries Association is interested in this and wants to see a positive outcome and things going forward, because the whole Electronic Highway Accord, I think, was a major step in the right direction," Hughes said.

Employees at Surich's information and technology access office learned he was leaving when the story appeared in Wednesday's Sun, communications manager John Webb said. Surich has been on vacation for the past couple of weeks, but staff members have been told he'll make a final appearance in the office next week. Surich named Byron Barnard acting chief information officer before he left on vacation, Webb said. Barnard was one of three executive directors under Surich and the architect of some of the projects in the accord. Webb said Surich's firing should not affect any of its projects.

"We've talked to our main clients, the people we're doing business with at trj is point," he said. "Our feeling is that it's business as usual, and that we're going to WILLIAM BOEI Sun Business Reporter B.C.'s high-tech industry wants the provincial government to keep its Electronic Highway Accord on track despite the firing of Jo Surich, the man in charge of the project. Surich's dismissal, reported Wednesday in The Vancouver Sun, is reason for concern in the high-tech sector, said David Hughes of Sierra Systems Consultants and former chair of the B.C. Technology Industries Association. "My sense is that there will be significant concern because Jo was doing some things that needed to be done," Hughes said.

"A fellow who makes change and stirs things up the way he did always has detractors. But as somebody fairry close to what he was trying to achieve, and given his interests in and concern for the development of the industry, I would say we don't regard this as a very positive move." Measures under the Electronic Highway Accord, signed last year by about 50 government agencies, private groups and companies, include trying to create growth in B.C's high-tech sector by dismantling the BC Systems Corp. and farming hundreds of millions of dollars in government data and computer contracts out to the private sector. Hughes said he had no evidence that Surich, whose office was gathering control over data operations in all ministries, was fired for any reason other than the one stated: that when he headed the Public Service Employee Relations Commission, he approved too gen car to search Wednesday for a gunman who killed two men and wounded two others in a bizarre incident that also forced firefighters to dodge bullets. Dead are Nelson Belanger, 29, and his 43-year-old brother Carol.

Their bodies were found Tuesday night on the ground near a maple sugar shack in this community about 300 kilometres northeast of Quebec City. When the Belanger brothers arrived separately in an all-terrain vehicle and a pickup truck, the sugar shack was on fire, an apparent trick by the gunman to lure them to the site. Canadian Press Women's prison experiment fails EDMONTON An experiment with a kinder, gentler prison for women in Edmonton has failed, federal officials grudgingly admitted Wednesday. The Correctional Service of Canada conceded even $440,000 in security improvements couldn't contain unruly or mentally ill maximum-security prisoners at the troubled Edmonton Institution for Women. The prison service announced it will put only minimum- and medium-security convicts at the seven-month-old institution and build a new unit for maximum-security females at Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert.

Cunadian Press Three stowaways recaptured HALIFAX Three shackled stowaways were recaptured Wednesday after escaping ship custody imposed when they were refused permission by Immigration Canada to disembark. Acting on a tip, police found the three Africans in a city apartment building. They were arrested without incident, said a regional immigration official. Canadian Press Yukoners to vote Sept. 30 WHITEHORSE Yukon government leader John Ostashek on Wednesday called a territorial election for Sept.

30. Ostashek's Yukon party has been in government for nearly four years. The Yukon party has seven seats while the NDP has six and the Liberals one. There are three Independents. Canadian Press Mulroney's libel suit to be heard in January Canadian Press MONTREAL Ajudge has set Jan.

6 as the date when Brian Mulroney's libel suit against Ottawa goes to trial 15 months after the former prime minister filed his $50-million action. Justice Andre Rochon of Quebec Superior Court, who has been in charge of pre-trial arrangements, announced the The trial is expected to take about three months. Mulroney launched the suit after learning of a confidential letter from Ottawa to Switzerland alleging he was part of a 1938 kickback scheme involving Air Canada's purchase of 34 Airbus jets. Mulroney has denied any wrongdoing and his lawyer Gerald Tremblay sajd the sooner the trial begins, the better. JACQUES B0ISSIN0TCP PROUD PREMIER Lucien Bouchard presents gift to Julie Cournoyer, a blind cyclist who won gold and silver at the Atlanta Paralympics, at ceremony held Wednesday in Que trial date Wednesday after listening to arguments from lawyers for both sides.

bec City to honor 20 Quebec athletes who won medals at Olympics and Paralympics. NDP's low-profile leader can't afford to sink much lower As a result, staff for her office went to four from 52. McDonough also points out that she has no seat in the Commons and has devoted Barbara YAFFE Incredibly, the only leader in the land with a public approval rating lower than the NDP's Alexa McDonough is the Bloc Quebecois' Michel Gauthier. Gauthier, of course, is a separatist committed to breaking up the country. Canadians are not supposed to like him.

But McDonough is a personable federalist. Yet, a recent Angus Reid poll shows only 22 per cent of respondents approve of McDonough's performance; 24 per cent disapprove. And more significantly, 54 per cent say they're unsure, suggesting the leader is largely unknown even nine months after taking over from Audrey McLaughlin. McDonough, fresh from a sojourn on Vancouver Island where she met with fishers this week, shrugs off the numbers: "It's not surprising, really." She notes that she heads a party that lost its official status in the '93 election. Saskatchewan, to 21-per-cent from 17.

McDonough says her party needs to win "somewhere betweenlS and 50 seats" in the next election. "Fifteen is absolute rock bottom. We simply cannot fail to achieve the dual objective of electing the leader and re-establishing official party status," which calls for 12 seats. McDonough will run in one of four Halifax-area ridings. Dan O'Connor, principal secretary to the leader, says: "Common sense would say Quebec is not going be a priority for us in the next election." And the Liberals seem to have a lock on much of southern Ontario.

To do well in the next vote in targeted areas the Maritimes, B.C., the Prairies and northern Ontario O'Connor says the New Democrats will have to fight the "old and false stereotype" that they're weak fiscal managers and that the party is not in synch with the current Canadian pre occupation with deficits and debt. "That's dead wrong, it's a hoax," McDonough says, asserting that NDP governments, going back to that of Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, have managed money responsibly. She says that, under her direction, New Democrats would take a more balanced approach to deficit-cutting. "A balanced budget is a key priority but not the exclusive priority." With all other parties clustered on the right, the NDP will be the only party to speak for working people, the leader says. And it would put a bottom line on how deeply social programs could be cut, regardless of deficit exigencies.

The NDP is also advocating "major, major reform" of the tax system including the introduction of inheritance taxes. McDonough says the NDP has just paid off its $4 million debt and the party "is right where I'd hoped we'd be at this point." The caucus has a retreat scheduled next week in Ottawa. On Sept. 7, the NDP's 100-member federal council gathers in Montreal for election planning. Next April, the party holds its convention in Regina.

A national election planning com-, mittee has been struck, with one of the vice-chairs Angela Schira coming from B.C. And Hugh Blakeney, son of the former Saskatchewan premier, has just been hired as NDP media secretary. As for the leader, McDonough is planning to spend more time in Ottawa and in Nova Scotia, with an eye to letting voters get to know her better. She isn't interested in getting into an unpopularity contest with Michel Gauthier, she says, laughing. On a serious note, she says: "I'm interested in the NDP being a strong political force in this country so we can restore some balance to Canadian politics." her time to party organizing rather than pursuing a media profile.

But her low profile clearly hasn't helped the New Democratic Party. With nine MPs down from 43 before the last election it's at nine per cent in the polls. In Quebec, the party is behind Reform. And in the all-important 99-seat battlefield of Ontario, the socialists score a scant seven per cent. That said, there are a few brighter spots.

Between April and July, the party moved to 19-per-cent support from 13 in B.C. In Manitoba and Discover the different world of Rado at JEWELLER Importers of Gcmstones, Manufacturers of Fine Jewellery I ft .1 Metrotown Eaton Centre, 430-2040 Capilano Mall, 984-2040 Mayfair Mall, Victoria, 382-2040 i If hi i I.