March 12, 1979

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COVER STORY

Buddies Who Can Spare a Dime

King and Bay Streets in Toronto. They call it MINT corner. A coin’s throw away rise the office towers that are the latter-day obelisks of obvious wealth, home to Canada’s Big Five, hoarders of 90 per cent of the assets held by Canada’s 11 chartered banks. By Roderick McQueen11 min

FILMS

The time is right for racing in the streets

And the makers of movies looked down upon Saturday Night Fever and saw that it was good. They would descend unto the cave-places, the ghettos and the barrios and they would fashion themselves a folk-hero from among the last potent males left in North America. They would dress him in full array of tribal panoply and parade him in all manner of motor vehicle along the boulevards. By Patricia Goldstone10 min

Frontlines

Not just a Rosalynn in Jimmy’s lapel

Rosalynn Carter is not at ease with power. Her image as a steel magnolia, a tough southern belle, has wilted. Her role as first lady—a silly and saccharine title—has become ill-defined and uncertain. But after two years as a disappointment to many, she is about to reemerge as a figure of substantive influence at the top. By William Lowther8 min

Sports

The lowly hotdog turns into a movable feast

The cars, vans and campers were backed up for miles on the two-lane road leading to the Bromont ski area outside Montreal. The people abandoned their vehicles wherever they could and trekked to the base of the mountain. Overhead, multicolored manned kites soared and dipped, but the toqued, snowmobile-suited and ski-jacketed crowd of more than 9,000 ignored them, intent on scrambling up the snow-covered slopes to perch in trees, press close to retaining fences and huddle in the forest to see flyers of a different sort—the “Quebec Air Force,” the “big air” Europeans and the fly-boys of the Western world. By Hal Quinn6 min

Lifestyles

The apprentices of power

Some time ago, in the recesses of a posh Ottawa restaurant, Deputy Prime Minister Allan MacEachen and a ministerial aide sat dining together, immersed in late-night shop talk. Suddenly MacEachen slipped from his pocket a confidential document marked “For the Minister’s Eyes Only.” By Julianne Labreche6 min

Frontlines

Survival of the fittest at 32 below

Dan Tenen looked at his thumb. It was a sulky blue and not the right shape at all. He moved closer to the fireplace of the Château Montebello, where other skiers just off the trail of the 13th annual Canadian Ski Marathon were thawing out. This year, the world’s longest ski tour—a two-day, 100-mile trail divided into 10 sections, running through the Quebec countryside just northeast of Ottawa—had the added distinction of becoming the world’s coldest. By Marni Jackson6 min

Letters

On reading Brenda Rabkin’s article A Doctor Studies the Flagrantly Flatulent (Feb. 12), I came across that fine robust Anglo-Saxon word “fart.” This sent me to my copy of Aubrey’s Brief Lives, by John Aubrey (1626-1697), who wrote of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604) thus: “This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a fart, at which he was so abashed and shamed that he went to travell, 7 years.

People

Although he didn’t want to rain on her parade, actor Michael Sarrazin called Valerie Lett’s dream come true “the stupidest thing I ever heard of.” Lett, a Gormley, Ontario, interior designer who, three years ago, bid $400 in the Toronto Symphony Dream Auction to become a movie star for a day, cashed in on it last week playing an extra in Double Negative, a movie starring Anthony Perkins and Sarrazin ( They Shoot Horses Don’t They?). By Jane O’Hara5 min

World News

Greed vs. need: cashing in on an expensive Western habit

If the Western world didn’t believe there was an oil crisis before, it may now be convinced. At the end of a week that saw some of the world’s top oil producing nations cashing in on a temporary shortage of oil from Iran, the global energy outlook had turned topsy-turvy and it seemed certain that the cost of gas in the U.S. and elsewhere would rise by around 25 per cent in the next 12 months. By William Lowther4 min

Innocence is in the eye of the beholder, not the Bureau of Commercial Acceptance

It needed the government to turn a numbers game into a losing proposition. This year Loto Canada will end up costing the taxpayers $13 million. In case you’re curious about what happened, the East Side gang (the feds) is not supposed to muscle in on the territory of the West Side boys (the provinces) when it comes to running numbers. By Barbara Amiel4 min

March 51979