The Leader-Post from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada • 14

3' Leader Post PageA14 Printed and published Monday to Saturday by Storing Newspapers Company at 1964 Park St, Regna. Postal address: Bck 2020, Regna, Sask S4P 3G4. Cerate Post Canadan Puttcatwns Mai Sales Product Agreement No. 454435 Bob Calvert, Publisher Bob Hughes, Editor An abuse of govt power Editorials Little choice on severance Morally, the idea of paying severance to former SaskPower CEO Jack Messer may be offensive, but legally the company didnt have a leg to stand on. Last week the Crown corporation announced that Messer had, by mutual agreement, resigned from his position.

Following discussions on the future of the corporation, which included a review of such controversial issues as the possible purchase of an equity position in the Guyana electric utility and the botched sale of SaskPower subsidiary Channel Lake, Messer and the corporation decided to part ways. But this week, outside lawyers hired by SaskPower to examine the case, used a phrase that puts a different spin on whether Messer jumped or was pushed. They said Messer was terminated without just cause at law and that a severance package was in order. Thus SaskPowers decision to offer a package that could total close to $300,000 when all is said and done. So why did the government not just bite the bullet and refuse to pay Messer severance? Had the corporation decided to try and fire Messer for just cause, which would have meant no severance, it would most likely have faced a suit for unjust dismissal.

Apart from the difficulty of winning such a case, the government also undoubtedly weighed the possibility that politically damaging revelations could have emerged during the course of the trial. Dismissal for cause is a ticklish situation and lawyers will tell you that an argument over competence is extremely difficult to win. Most jobs have neither a job description which clearly delineates requirements and standards nor any quantifiable way to measure competence which would stand up in a court. Thus a lawyer will often advise a company to offer a severance package because fighting an unjust dismissal case can be expensive and should you lose, you will not only likely end up paying at least as much and in some cases more, but also costs. That is the long and the short of the mess in which the NDP government finds itself this week.

pened long ago. And anyway, whos going to listen to the complaints of a few hundred aging retards? Or as Justice Minister Jon Havelock explained, the law was intended to balance the interests of (the claimants) with the interests of all Albertans. Whether to respect the charter, then, or whether to slip out the notwithstanding" escape hatch, was strictly an exercise in electoral arithmetic. Which is more or less to make the charter useless to anyone who actually needs it: if the claimants were not a marginalized minority, they would not have to go to court to redress their grievances in the first place. What we have just witnessed, then, was no accident It was not an overreaction in a moment of crisis, based on a hasty misreading of the law.

It was a deliberate frontal assault on the charter, and everything it stands for. Regardless of whether the government had the nerve in this instance to invoke the notwithstanding clause, Albertans must now wonder what other rights it proposes to suspend. Havelock has made no secret of his distaste for the document or its values, not to mention the independence of the judiciary. In a recent speech, he railed against the legal systems seeming preoccupation with the rights of the accused, and the incursion of judicial discretion into areas which traditionally have been the preserve of duly elected representatives, even wondering aloud whether the answer might be to repeal or amend the charter. He would not lack for supporters.

The charter has a thousand enemies: Tory sentimentalists, trembling for the sovereignty of Parliament; Osgoode Hall jacobins, vexed that anything should impede the realization of the Common Will; Quebec nationalists, repelled by such naked symbols of Anglo-Saxon triumphalism (although, of course, in Quebec we have one that is much better); post-modernist charlatans, sneering at the very notion that some ideals might be so universally held as to merit enshrining in a charter. For all these groups, the notwithstanding clause has been a beacon. But come down from the mountaintop of abstraction, and the clause is revealed in all its thuggish particulars. Its not about judicial activism or parliamentary sovereignty: its about specific rights being denied to specific people, usually a defenceless minority. To see it actually being used is the best case for its abolition.

For as we have just had demonstrated, any government that insists on the power to override fundamental rights cannot be trusted with it. Coyne writes for Southam News. Toronto oh no, you dont get off that easily. The government of Alberta may have withdrawn, one day after it was introduced, the odious Bill 26, legislation that would have invoked the Constitutions notwithstanding clause to deprive some of the provinces most vulnerable citizens of their rights. But the spirit of the legislation lingers on, and so do the men who acted upon it.

They should be held to account. That the government could even have considered such an act is alarming enough. Over a period of more than five decades, nearly 3,000 residents of Alberta mental institutions were forcibly sterilized, before the provinces eugenics board was finally abolished in 1971. Bill 26, the Institutional Confinement and Sexual Sterilization Compensation Act, would have prevented the survivors from suing the government for compensation, imposing instead an arbitrary limit of $150,000 apiece. Whether $150,000 is sufficient compensation for such an indignity is not at issue here.

Nor is it necessarily beyond the pale for the government to try to limit its liability, so far as the Constitution permits. What is atrocious is that it should have sought to place such legislation above judicial scrutiny, above indeed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If challenged, the government might have asked a court to rule that to allow each of the more than 700 survivors to sue for damages individually would have been so prohibitively expensive as to warrant restricting their access to legal remedy, whatever the charters Section 15 guarantee of equal protection and equal benefit of the law. I dont say they would have won, and I dont say they would have deserved to. But the charter does allow for reasonable limits on rights, and it would at least have been open to the government to argue that this particular limit was reasonable.

Instead, Bill 26 would have simply swept the charter off the table. Unable to defend the legislation as a reasonable limit, the government availed itself of the notwithstanding clause, or as I call it, the unreasonable limits clause. So not only were the victims denied the right to take their claims for compensation to court, they could not even go to court to overturn the legislation that took away their rights. You can imagine the governments thinking. Were in power.

Were popular. These things hap Recycling Over the past decade or so, a strong pro-recycling consensus has been developing in all the rich industrial economies. From students through to business and government, everyone seems to agree, at least in public, that recycling is a good thing. Not a few parents have suffered from their politically correct children insisting that bottles and cans be washed out and recycled rather than just tossed into the garbage. To try to argue that just throwing things away might be sensible behavior is to risk being called ignorant, selfish or lazy.

Governments around the world have followed, if not led, the recycling bandwagon. Many countries have now set arbitrary recycling targets for various waste streams. Where the targets are just pious political posturing, their economic effect is relatively minor. But sometimes the targets have become legal minimums, and here the business becomes serious. Of all peoples, the Germans are the world-class recyclers, with a host of laws to ensure national recycling targets are met In Germany, companies are responsible for collecting and reprocessing their own packaging materials, while individual households are legally required to sort their garbage into separate categories and then deposit this waste in the appropriate recycling container.

But while you can force people to recycle, you cannot force them to buy the recycled products that result With no market for much of the recycled paper that flooded German stationery, stores, Germany dumped the second-generation paper on its European neighbors at very low prices. The effect was to destroy the domestic markets of its trading partners own infant paper recycling programs and leave countries like Holland and Britain highly annoyed with their Big Brother recycler neighbor. If economically dubious, some paper recycling processes can also be more environmentally damaging than virgin paper production. Stripping the ink from paper can be a chemically nasty business. And the energy costs of collecting, sorting, and transporting the paper to a reprocessing plant can also be high.

One recent British study concluded that, in many situations, the most environmentally beneficial thing to do with waste newsprint was to burn it But people resent being told recycling is not economically or environmentally sensible and so few people dare to speak against it. As desirable as a clean kitchen floor was for a 1950s housewife, recycling is seen as an unquestioned moral good of our time. But why are we so keen on it? Partly, no doubt, we feel guilty about our high-consumption lifestyle, and especially about throw-away consumption. The obvious way to address this would be to simply consume less, but most of us dont feel that guilty. How much easier to just recycle a few newspapers, bottles and cans.

The nice thing about recycling then, is what it doesnt require us to do. The two logical reasons to recycle are that we are running out of natural resources, or that we are running out of places to put waste. It is not clear that either of these are real problems. We live in a time when the cost of gasoline, stripped of government taxes, is less than the cost of bottled water, and where raw materials are cheaper and more available than they have ever been in history. As for garbage, so long as it is not toxic, there is almost infinite space for it As archaeologists know, we have always managed to rise and live above our own waste.

Consider the city, best left unnamed, situated too far away from recycling plants for the transport of glass and paper to be economic. Equally, safe land disposal is cheap, plentiful and near-to-hand. Yet the good citizenry is vocal in demanding recycling facilities. The city administrators neatly recon-; cile the impracticably of recycling with the publics psychic need to recycle by setting up recycling points where those 1 who feel the urge can carefully sort and drop their glass and paper into separate bins which are then collected in city trucks and taken out to the town dump. I The irony is our grandparents ed and reused almost everything that went through their hands without mak- ing a fuss or demanding government action.

But they recycled for very differ-1 ent reasons than we recycle today in their time raw materials were scarce and expensive, and people were poor. The true recyclers today are still the worlds poor. Seeing the children of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro scouring a sec- ond-hand living from the poisonous rub-: bish mountains of Brazil is a stomach- turning lesson in the real world, where recycling is a matter of life and death. Watching these children, it is impossi- I ble not to suspect we have good grounds to feel guilty about our wealthy lifestyle. But it is not that we throw things away that is a problem.

It is that we share so little. jj Henderson, a former Regina resident, is a professor at the University of East Anglia. Todays Letters A tick of the clock It was a relief to hear that the federal government has declared it would not spend lavishly to mark the millennium. On Thursday, Prime Minister Jean Chretien said he doesnt want a big millennium blowout with nothing to show for it the morning after but a big hangover and loads of bills. That is a financially prudent decision from a government that is just beginning to get a grip on its massive debt problems.

It is strange, and disappointing, that the prime minister, in the same speech, should then reaffirm Jast months $160-million budget commitment to create and fund the Millennium Bureau of Canada. While it has proven hard to resist the temptation to spend money on the celebration of the tick of a clock, there is still time to reconsider. Certainly, it would not take long to find much better ways to spend $160 million. Perhaps a portion of it might even find its way to Saskatchewan, where it could fix a pothole or two or allow for the purchase of a much-needed piece of medical equipment. Hits and Misses Hit: Tory Leader Jean Charest for saying he needs some time to consider requests that he take over leadership of the Quebec Liberal party.

His decision should not be made in haste, given its impact on Quebec and on the national politic scene. Miss: The Alberta governments handling of a bill that would have overriden the constitutional rights of some 700 people who were sterilized under that provinces previous eugenics program. The bill, since withdrawn, would have imposed settlements on those seeking When Fougere comes to Wolseley, should we charge him and his family extra to use our facilities, should we make them feel like they are outsiders? I dont think so. It has been proven many times over that with this type of discriminating attitude, no one wins. All communities, whether large cities or small towns, should welcome all.

ROCKY BISHOP Wolseley Welcome response The damage caused by the ice storms in eastern Canada in early January was devastating. Among the stories and images of crumpled hydro towers, candlelit kitchens, and crowded shelters were the inspiring accounts of Canadians undertaking a colossal restoration effort to help their fellow Canadians hydro workers, volunteers, firefighters, security forces and neighbors. With them were the men and women of the Canadian Forces, assisting in the battle against the ice. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank all employers who granted time off for Canadian Forces reservists in their workforce to participate in this battle. Nearly one quarter of the 16,000 soldiers, sailors and air personnel deployed on this operation were members of Canada's Reserve Force.

These dedicated individuals routinely give up a portion of their spare time to serve Canada. During the crisis, thousands of reservists, with little warning, unhesitatingly left behind their civilian life, grabbed their kit and reported for duty. Our reservists provided assistance because of the generosity of their civilian employers or educational institutions in granting them time off. Your generosity has allowed our reservists the time to train, as well as serve when an emergency such as Ice Storm 98 occurred. Your continued support will ensure the valuable national resource offered by our Reserve Force will always be 4 J.M.G.BARIL Baiil is Chief of Defence Staff.

Ottawa Praise for Mossad Although one cpuld easily criticize the Israeli secret service, Mossad, for violating international law recently, one should not forget the good that it does for Canadians. Many of us wish to visit non-Jewish Holy sites in and around Israel. The Israeli national airline has an excellent safety record. The ability to detect and prevent terrorists activities has not only protected Israelis but people of all faiths around the world. To marginalize the role of any positive force to rid this world of terrorists who choose violence over negotiation is ridiculous.

If it takes Canadian passports to help rid the world of people who blow up bombs in shopping squares or blow up children on buses, then I say so be it. In many cases, the Mossad has been the only agency to protect all visitors in the Middle East. RICHARD D. JACK Regina Welcome outsiders In response to charging outsiders a bad idea, by John Spirito, in the March 4 Leader-Post, I agree with the writer. I direct the rest of this letter to Councillor Michael Fougere, as I am one of those outsiders and feel also that this issue should be put where it belongs, in the trash.

Being the father of a young family, we do, on occasion, hse many of the facilities mentioned, as do many other families from surrounding towns. Our family does not travel for two hours, for the sole purpose of using your South East Leisure Centre, or its library, or to take our kids skating. While in your city, we purchase groceries, have lunch, purchase gas, clothing and numerous other items. An estimated 85 per cent to 90 per cent of our monthly income is spent in Regina, so I think letting outsiders swhm in your pool, sit in your library reading your books, would be more beneficial to the economy of the city than not. ln Quotes? UTt costs a million dollars to train a new pilot; $75,000 is a lot cheaper than a million.

The fact is, if we want to keep pilots, were going to have to provide for a system of incentives to do that. 1 Defence Minister Art Eggleton, commenting on why the Defence Department will offer bonuses in order to keep pilots for heading to higher-paying jobs in the private sector. 1 Associate Editor, John Swan. Phone 565-8244 or fax 565-2588.