Star-Phoenix from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada • 41

i Democracy cannot be maintained without its foundation; free public opinion and free discussion throughout the nation of all matters affecting the state within the limits set by the criminal code and the common law. TV Supreme tourt of Canada. 1931 liiZg HFffB rjrqjrmk Printed and published bv Armadale Publishers Limiied al the offu-e of the Mar Pnuemx 204 Mh Avenue. North Jwskat'mn Sask S7K 211 SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1976 1 S-P EDITORIAL A country in trouble Other opinions Pat ODwyer super service I drooled over that seen. It is my picture of the true lifestyle, the idyllic thing about which all dedicated laborites must dream.

Life in such a scenario is worth living. It has always been beyond my reach. The Avondale school district, I found, has historic links with Saskatoon. It was founded by W. P.

Bate, a homesteader in the district, and it was built on the comer of his homestead northwest of Delisle. Mr. Bate was a longtime secretary-treasurer of the Saskatoon public school system. I gleaned that reference from the book, Through The Years Delisle, Donavon, OMalley, Laura, Swanson. The cent visit to Saskatoon.

Mr. Clark felt the Trudeau government had abandoned the task of governing Canada and had turned its attention to avoiding defeat in the next general election. In this context, it is worth noting that Mr. Wilson feels the country is in serious trouble because it is at the mercy of such an incompetent government for two more years. At the same time, he detects growing dissatisfaction within the party over the leadership which could possibly result in the removal of Prime Minister Trudeau before the next general election.

As a footnote to Mr. Wilsons observations, it is instructive to look upon the careers of other great leaders. Churchill was great in war, a disaster in peace. Johnson could succeed in civil rights, but not in Vietnam. Nixon was an acknowledged giant in foreign affairs, but failed otherwise.

Perhaps Canadians should realize that Trudeaus strong suit was Confederation, his ability to placate the dissident French. In other domestic affairs, however, he has left a lot to be desired. It may be better to celebrate him for his accomplishment than to condemn him for his failure. He should be replaced as leader. lance of payments deficit, Canadians are investing more money abroad than others are investing here.

The net flow of capital for investment purposes is outwards. The balance of payments deficit is at a level far beyond the capacity of this country to sustain and the only real federal policy to meet that problem is a vague hope that the growth of the American economy will be rapid enough to pull this countrys exports up with it. The writer also found evidence Finance Minister Macdonald had become inaccessible to representatives from business and industry. The prime minister was not addressing himself to the nations underlying problems. And the antiinflation program was coming under increasing attack by business.

Organized labor never did accept it, he noted. Mr. Wilson continued with what he called an appalling catalogue and was led to the conclusion the prime minister is not publicly dealing with the great, underlying problems confronting Canada because the government has simply abdicated leadership in the last few months and is stumbling from mistake to mistake. Readers will recall a similar observation from Joe Clark, leader of the Progressive Conservative party, during his re Canadians may feel they have inflation on the run, but that by itself should not give them reason to rejoice about the state of their economy. Otherwise, things are pretty bleak.

W. A. Wilson, Ottawa columnist for the Montreal Star, recently provided a resume of problems in a column he introduced as hard economic facts about a nation with a lame-duck government, two years away from an election. Some of his observations follow: The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has been the bible of the Trudeau ministry for years and it noted of Canada in its latest report that unit labor costs in Canada have risen substantially faster than those in the United States over the last three years. Then it drives the lesson home: The problem was recognized a year back-actually, the department of finance recognized it farther back than that -but it will widen, not narrow, in future.

Mr. Wilson noted the United States economy is growing more rapidly than that of Canada, despite plenty of un-eveness, and many people are finding the United States offers better business prospects than this country. While Canada is borrowing huge amounts of money abroad to finance a just sub-critical ba i Sherbrooke La Tribune: Speculators on the future such as those of the famed Club of Rome always base their estimates on pessimistic premises. To these people, the future of the world -or of a country is less a goal to be achieved than a series of disasters to be avoided. As we move toward the 21st century, the age-old fears and superstitions become increasingly manifest, to the detriment of scientific extrapolation based on our confused present.

Scientists use the year 2000 as a launching point, a round number from which to gauge scenarios of growth or the evolution of history. The Canada Science Council recently published a study that tried to present a vision of the year 2000. The study is interesting not because it answers any questions, but because it asks them. What kind of Canada do we want to see in 25 years? What role do we want to play in the arena of world affairs. What identity do we want to give this country Thecouncil, after studying Canadas position in the global context, suggested that we affirm our identity and try to curb growth of population and consumption so as to maintain a high standard of living The study estimates we will have to keep population to a maximum of 30 million by the year 2000.

Instead of serving as a receptacle for immigration, Canada would play a more useful role by exporting foodstuffs and other basic materials to the rest of the world, the report suggests But the Third World crisis puts Canada in a bad light because this country, like so many other industrialized nations, derives no small measure of its wealth from the Third World It is impossible to chart a course for a country without taking external matters into consideration. Yet one gets the impression that the council has assumed Canada to be a house with closed doors: the only problem in this organization's opinion is how to move the furniture around in this closed house without damaging it. We are beginning to have serious doubts about progress and promises of material plenty. Opposition to our systems often runs afoul of the ill-conceived social projects we promise ourselves projects without soul or idealism. In this era of disillusionment, the council study only confirms the impending downfall of a way of thought that makes mankind subservient to mere numbers.

Toronto Star: A hot prospect for this year's top award for "silly season statements is John Simonds, executive secretary of the Canadian Labor Congress. He says that when workers stay home Oct. 14 a national holiday is the way he describes it to protest the governments anti-inflation program, employers should take "the adult approach and not prosecute employees for breach of contract. It's instructive to examine just how adult the congress is being in calling the general strike in the first place. The decision came after the country's highest court had ruled the anti-inflation control program legal.

It came in the face of statements from the government that the program with all its rough justice, would be steadfastly pursued to its end. The labor congress is sticking with its plan in spite of the fact that the Public Service Alliance of Canada, Saskatchewan provincial employees, airline pilots and air controllers railway engineers, teamsters and Ontario teachers have either voted against the walkout or have refused to endorse it. Finally the congress stubborn stance ignores evidence that the rate of price increases is being slowed down, and that average negotiated wage increases are keeping ahead of the inflation rate. It also overlooks the fact that, to the extent inflation does moderate, any pay increase will be less illusory and more spendable. This is an adult approach? Somefantastic tales have been told about Americans exploits when they were building the Alaska Highway during the Second World War, and one of their bases of operation was Edmonton.

One blustery wintry night an Alberta farm couple wheeled into the U.S. Army garage, thinking it was an ordinaiy one. On finding their mistake, they said to the Yankees they would go elsewhere to get someone to repair their sputtering motor. No. said the officer-in-charge, whatever was wrong, the Yanks would fix it.

Just run along for a good hot dinner and then come back. When the Albertans returned, the owner found a shiny, new motor under the hood! Row much, he asked, fearing a skyhigh bill. Aw, forget it, and Uncle Sams soldier nephew sent them happily on their way. I cannot say why I thought of that fabulous yam when I was touring the Avondale district with Delbert J. Summach.

Likely it was because I found the big machinery outfits pursue a similar technique when they serve big farm operators in the rich grain country. International and Case virtually babysit their best customers, among them the Summach brothers, Manley and Fred. If a repair part is needed during the threshing epidemic, its routine for someone in the Saskatoon branch to pick up the part elsewhere, if it is not available here. All this is done by airflight, and little time is lost in the action. This super-service is understandable when a self-propelled combine, retailing at $42,000, is involved; or when a $50,000 tractor kicks up a fuss because it gets temperamental about the fuel spilled down its gullet.

The great competitive companies dont bicker with their cash-on-the-barrel-head customers if a tractor or combine doesn't play ball. They simply deliver another machine and haul away the inefficient one. The big farm operators, Del Summach says, trade in their tractors and combines every two years. I assume, though, those second hand units find a ready market among the less affluent farmers. The term, less, is academic, because even a second hand tractor, two-years-old on average, costs an awful pile of peanuts.

When Del and I went out to the farm of his brother Fred, we came upon a combine threshing rapeseed. Operating it was Colleen, Freds daughter, ensconced in the cab, fit for a farm princess. She was completely relaxed, listening, I suppose, to a cassette rendition. I was under the impression she was reading a movie magazine, too. publication was a Centennial project produced by Marge Bentley, Margaret Seymour, and Beth Chizek.

It is an omnibus record, an altogether great achievement. We looked at the crops, including Neepawa wheat, a star performer. Still, as it turned out, the stories I found most fascinating were Dels recollections of George H. Rutledge. Rutledge, he said, came up from Iowa, and he broke up the country with a Reeves steamer a double compound two cylinders).

That engineering description was lost on me, but I got the picture a little more clearly when Del said the Reeves was bigger than anything at the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon. Dels father, Fred Summach, had a Case steam engine, and a 44-inch separator. Both Rutledge and Dad threshed the whole area, Del remembered. Big cook cars, big bunk cars, big crews, two water tanks to quench the thirst of that powerful steamer. Those were halcyon days.

Rutledge and Summach came to the district about the same time, in 1906. Summach brought his own lumber with him from Rockingham (Geulph), Ontario, and with it built his home. It's still there as the core of the home where Fred Jr. and his family live. It has been extended from the original.

Yet. there it is, a fulfillment of the promise it held out to its builders 70 years ago. Del took me over to the Rutledge homestead, and what memories it stirred in him. Rutledge pioneered in the use of machinery in the horse-and-buggy era and he took young Del Summach under his wing and taught him the mechanics of the tractor, the thresher, their operation and repair. -Del and I found one young fellow communicating from his cab perch with a young woman operating a combine in a neighboring field.

Although they were threshing bumpers, that was not the topic they were kicking about. necessity Long-term food policy a By Richard Gvsyn Toronto Star SndJcate OTTAWA Man, a higher authority tells us, doesnot live by bread alone. But without bread, he, or she. cannot live at all We all know this: What we dont know, but we are just beginning to learn, is that Canada before long may not have enough bread, and other foods, for all of us. The prospect is frightening.

It isnt easy to believe, even on the basis of three, just-published government studies. Except that its happened before. Until a few years ago we had, we all believed, limitless supplies of energy. Now the experts compete to frighten us; the other day. Shell Oil declared that, because of exorbitant costs, no new tar sands plants could be built within the next 20 years, while Imperial Oil forecast that by the early 80s well have to reverse the new pipeline built to carry our Western crude to Montreal and use it instead to pump imported oil into Ontario.

To measure food production potential is much more difficult. Around the world, for example, widely-predicted mass starvation wasaverted by the green revolution which now, because of the high cost of fertilizers has exhausted itself and left hunger endemic in perhaps a third of the world. Of the three government reports, only one is factual the other two are essen tially speculative, argumentative rather than analytical and designed more to predict the future than to start us thinking about it. The studies in summary: It is now a distinct possibility that Canadian exports of food will have to decline in the future just as her oil exports have, writes British economist Alice Coleman in a report for the urban affairs ministry. Assuming no change in Canadian eating habits, Coleman calculates that the country can produce enough food only for 30 million people, or about the number there will be in the year 2000.

Itisacomfortingand popular myth that these resources are virtually unlimited pressures on both arable land and food production may impose severe limitations, declares the science council in its study, Population, Technology and Resources. Even with effective land use control, continues the report, Canada will have to use food more frugally if it is to maintain its position as a major food exporter. To preserve our ability to export foodstuffs and so pay off our energy imports and help feed the worlds hungry, the council recommends Canadian population growth should be slow, and that the countiy must become, "a conserver society, using food, energy and resources frugally, The substance to these two studies is provided by the third report, the environment departments just-published Canada Land Inventory, and we are squandering what little we have far more quickly than we thought. Of Canadas 250 million acres, only 10.3 per cent can support any type of agriculture, only five per cent can support some type of crop, and only one-tenth of one per cent is Class One soil. In Ontario, where, outside of British Columbias Oakanagan Valley, almost all of the Class One soil is to be found, farmland is being asphalted over for urban develope-ment at the rate of 26 acres an hour.

The only findings that are undebatable are those of the inventory. By contrast, the science councils report already has been critized for proposing a doubling of food production through the intensive use of high technology and of economic incentives that would push us, willy-nilly, into a grey world of agri-business before we have examined alternative approaches such as the small-scale and high-production soft technologies being developed by the New Alchemists Ark project in Prince Edward Island. The facts still are too unclear for irrevocable choices to be taken. All thats certain is that wemust start now deciding whatever it is we finally decide. We lack, for one thing, any credible estimate of our long-range agricultural potential.

Forecasts range all the way from those of the climatologists who warn that each year increasing cold will shrivel the graingrowing region of the Palliser Triangle to the optimism of a Ryerson Polyteehnical Institute study that by the end of the century we could have 100 million beef cattle iasted of 7.7 million head today, 40 million hogs compared to 6.5 million now and 20 million sheep instead of less than a million or enough meat for 250 million people. We lack also, as proposed by Beryl Plumptre in the final report of the food prices review board published last February, a long-term national food policy to replace, the luxury of our traditional muddling-through approach. The last resource with which we tried to muddle-through without a long-range policy and a long-range forecast of supply and demand was energy. One resource fiasco is one too many..