Maclean's

Canada

The dark at the top of the hierarchy

It seems Ottawa hasn’t always been the Sleepy Hollow of popular mythology. Spies, double-agents and counter-spooks stalk the cheerless Sparks Street Mall along with ministerial aides and sombre bureaucrats. Your friendly local mail sorter, unless he’s a Marxist or on strike, can be an agent for the Mounties, slipping from his sack letters he suspects might carry microdots with miniaturized coded messages. By ROBERT LEWIS6 min

18

Closeup/Music

Sound Of Symphonies

More concerts to hear, more ears are listening By Kaspars Dzeguze15 min

2

Interview

With television violence expert Dr. Gregory Fouts

28

A cue for success

Cliff Thorburn and snooker are good for each other By Michael Posner14 min

24

Blakeney’s mission

Dogged? Tenacious? Well, he has a country to save By Suzanne Zwarun12 min

46

Films

Close encounters of the absurd kind

Columbia Pictures’ preview screening of its Close Encounters Of The Third Kind at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was over, and the young actress, deeply moved, was plainly in the grip of emotions over which she had to exercise the tightest rein. By DAVID COBB7 min

8

Letters

All the news that's unfit to print Has Maclean’s become another National Enquirer? Certainly in publishing the picture of black leader Steven Biko lying in his casket in A Nation Of Murders (November 14), Maclean’s has paralleled the muckraking exploits of the Enquirer.

12

Canada

The sky’s the limit

They can fly at more than twice the speed of sound and as high as 19 miles. They are armed with heat-seeking and radar-controlled missiles, 1,000-pound bombs and machine guns that can fire up to 100 rounds a second. They can spot and destroy an enemy more than 100 miles away.

48

Hey, man, have you read Hansard? No...but I saw the show!

There is a new spot of honor for the big console television set in the National Press Club on the second floor of the Norlite Building at 150 Wellington Street in Ottawa. It sits in pride of place on a table in the corner of the lounge and there is now a daily coterie of shrewd observers—the veteran Mark McClung, the elegant former diplomat Charles Ritchie and a few others—at strange afternoon hours usually reserved for the electronic versions of Ma Perkins and the bathos-sphere. By Allan Fotheringham4 min

If Confederation is indeed doomed, blame those who perverted its meaning

6

The Referendum Debate

If Confederation is indeed doomed, blame those who perverted its meaning

When the Parti Québécois first achieved its election victory, many of us in the West— and many people in the Maritimes as well—were elated. Not that we wanted to see Quebec separate from Canada. Far to the contrary. But we did hope—over optimistically as it turned out—that such an event would force the pseudo-federalists in Ottawa to recognize at last that Canada is historically and geographically incapable of being molded into a centralized nation-state of the kind that is now proving unviable even in Europe, its place of origin. By George Woodcock4 min