February 5, 1979

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Behavior

Despair that breeds despair

The poster shows a teen-age girl staring dreamily out the window. She is unmistakably pregnant. The caption reads: “What are you doing Saturday night? When you become a parent you make a date for twenty years. 1,050 teenagers became pregnant in Canada this week.” By Brenda Rabkin8 min

Canadian News

The man who won’t sellout

Bill Bennett was mad and getting madder. The day before, two days after Christmas, he had been skiing with his family at Big White Mountain outside Kelowna, in south central British Columbia. The skies were cobalt blue, the air was steel-cold enough to brighten the natural ruddiness of his face, when Bennett heard on a squawking radio that Montreal-based Canadian Pacific Investments was attempting to make a corporate snatch of B.C.’s huge forest company, MacMillan Bloedel. By Thomas Hopkins7 min

Canadian News

The latest offer Quebec can refuse

For Joe Clark, January was a bleak season to have been anywhere. After stumbling over his “stimulative deficit” proposal and bombing abroad, Clark’s first public act* on arriving home was to disavow talk of negotiating sovereignty association with René Lévesque. By Robert Lewis6 min

World News

Ayatollah Khomeini: new man at the gate

He is the unlikeliest of political strongmen. He controls no army— his troops are an enormous ragtag amalgam of unarmed citizens brandishing bricks and a quarter-century of pent-up rage. He cannot boast of any foreign alliances. His policy pronouncements have been laughed at as unrealistic and anachronistic; his view of the world has been dismissed as just slightly more up-to-date than that of Genghis Khan.

People

It was a press agent’s dream and although most institutions with a publicity bent would welcome a visit from movie stars such as Geneviève Bujold, Christopher Plummer or Donald Sutherland, Toronto’s Metro Central Library recently nixed a planned stunt as being “too gimmicky.” By Jane O’Hara4 min

Column

‘Even if prints are all I can afford, on my walls will be Tintoretto and da Vinci’

Until a relatively short time ago, maybe 150 years, art like everything else was possessed and enjoyed only by an infinitesimally small number of the wealthy or by the artists themselves. Then, along with land, money and consumer goods—at least in the Western societies—objects of art, especially paintings, began to be owned and collected by increasing numbers of people. By Barbara Amiel4 min

‘What do ladies from Westwell do at night in the fleshpots of Obergurgle?’

In Tokyo, the headlines screamed BRITAIN NEAR CRISIS. In New Delhi, the news warned of ENGLAND CLOSE TO COLLAPSE. In Jerusalem, it was BRITAIN PARALYSED. In Westwell, in Kent, where the sheep dot the landscape like burrs, there is naught but paralysing calm. By Allan Fotheringham4 min

Canadian News

A litany of dirt about fertilizer

Winter is the slack season for those in the agriculture game, so an Airdrie, Alberta, farmer with time on his hands dropped into the basement hearing room of the Calgary Court House for a look at the fertilizer pricefixing trial that is slowly unwinding there. By Suzanne Zwarun4 min

Travel

A flood of strangers in a not-so-strange land

Brooklyn travel agent Pearl Lazowick remembers when luxury liners docked in Hong Kong harbor resorted to raffles among their passengers to decide who would get the handful of visas available to Peking. “People were praying for a win as though they had $100,000 riding on it,” she says. By Diane Francis4 min

Education

The smooth talk that overcomes a handicap

"Trying to speak in front of l00 classmates in law school was a classic pressure situation for me," says Lloyd Sarginson, 30, a Toronto lawyer. "I'd spend more time worrying about how much I'd stutter than about what I'd say." For some 200,000 Canadians who stutter this is not an uncommon predicament. By Werner Bartsch4 min

January 291979