October 30, 1978

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Cover Story

The once and future Joe

Long before last week’s byelections, Conservative leader Joe Clark assembled his Toronto candidates at a private meeting designed to clarify his policy stands for the quizzical troops. But Clark stumbled badly through his first two responses and, from the back of the room in his dulcet broadcaster’s voice, Eglinton Tory Rob Parker announced: “Us—two, Clark—nothing.” By Robert Lewis10 min

Letters

In his article on the National Film Board, Theatre of the Absurd (Sept. 18), Roy MacGregor states that our feature film, One Man, “gathers dust only in Canada” after receiving raves from Cannes and from the U.S. The facts are that One Man was made as a television film, has been purchased by the CBC and will eventually be shown on the national network.

World News

From behind the Curtain, a new Pope

Just a year ago an Italian television reporter went to interview an unknown Polish cardinal. So impressed was he by the Archbishop of Kracow’s description of the struggle of the “church of silence” in a hostile atheist state that he remarked: “It would be good to have a Polish Pope.” By Angela Ferrante, Angela Ferrante7 min

Press

All the news that’s soft enough to print

It’s increasingly true that politics are determined less by what goes on in Parliament than by what happens in public opinion polls. But few people realize as they pick up their daily papers that the same trend is happening in the newspaper business—publishers are relying on the judgment of pollsters hired to tell them what readers want rather than on the judgment of editors. By Doug Fetherling7 min

Canadian News

23,000 rebels with a dubious cause

It was a wet, cold Wednesday night in Ottawa, but a crowd was gathering outside the city’s main Post Office plant on the banks of the Rideau River. A few hours before, Parliament had passed a bill ordering the employees at the plant and others like it across the country back to work at midnight after a twoday strike. By Ian Urquhart6 min

Energy

A nuclear bombshel that is killing the industry

In 1976, 40,000 protesters gathered at the site of a proposed fast-breeder reactor near Brokdorf in West Germany. They were met by 5,000 police armed with Mace, tear gas and water cannons, and kept out by heavy barbed-wire fences. Last spring, Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky decided to call a national referendum to decide whether or not the country’s first nuclear plant should be used. By Robert Gibson6 min

Religion

Intolerance on trial, and the jury’s still out

Tad Jaworski is quietly watching the turmoil he hath wrought, and enjoying it. He is the creator of The Jesus Trial, a TV series yet to receive its first breath of air time but already shaking the religious world with apprehensions reminiscent only of those preceding broadcast of last year’s Holocaust. By Marcia Douglas5 min

Show Business

‘If you haven’t seen me, you simply don’t know’

Ginette Reno, superstar, was throwing an intimate little luncheon for the editors and star writers of Montreal’s better entertainment pages. Settled cozily around a vast, honey-colored pine table, nestled among the foot-thick fieldstone walls, and basking in the heady atmosphere of exclusivity, the journalists chattered gaily about Chinese astrology and the relative merits of the Year of the Horse, Boar or Dragon. By Wayne Grigsby5 min

People

While waiting for the critical appraisal of her soon-to-be-released movie, Slow Dancing in the Big City (directed by Rocky’s John Avildsen), ballet dancer-choreographer Anne Ditchburn is lying low in New York, living the life of “a mysterious lady.” By Jane O’Hara4 min

Cover Story

‘We began to lose our national identity when we began to seek it’

Look, when I came into the House the committee on which I was most active was Indian Affairs. We are, I trust, going to make considerably more progress resolving that serious problem than governments have so far. The most serious faults of this government have had to do with economic policy and, broadly, with unity policy.

October 231978