Maclean's

The YUKON A dream province

Winter brings a hard, cold, analytical light to the Yukon. It is a period of enforced isolation and introspection after the activity that fills the almost continuous summer sunlight. In the summer, helicopters buzz busily over the bushland, staking out mineral claims; heavy construction gets started and, with luck, finished; and sportsmen go fishing in broad daylight at 11 o’clock at night. By Paul Koring11 min

14

COVER STORY

HERE WE GO AGAIN

"Canada,” the English poet Rupert Brooke once opined, “is a live country, live, but not, like the States, kicking.” Wyndham Lewis snorted about “a sanctimonious icebox,” Voltaire “a few arpents of snow,” and Andrei Gromyko “the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.” By Robert Lewis7 min

6

This Canada

New life for a grand old lady

Today it’s tough to find anybody in town who was against it. Most people remember it as a contentious issue that had neighbors slamming doors and shouting over the back fence at one another. But opponents now are extraordinarily hard to pin down. By Ken Becker7 min

34

People

At the Munich Olympics in 1972 the image of Canada’s high-jumping sweetheart Debbie Brill was tainted by rumors that the inventor of the “Brill Bend” was doing drugs. Brill placed eighth, and dropped out of sports. “I started experimenting, trying all the things kids try,” says Brill, “like getting drunk, different drugs, going out with guys, sex and everything.” By Marsha Boulton5 min

22

Canada

The good life —or the pits

It was billed simply as a public hearing, but to the people of Makkovik it was a life and death trial—and to many of them it did not appear to be a fair trial. Makkovik, a village of about 350, consists of a few dozen houses stretched along the north shore of a narrow wooded bay halfway up the coast of Labrador. By Robert Plaskin5 min

26

World

Rumors of a ring of terror

At first they were billed as religious fanatics, led by a local dropout from Mecca’s religious establishment. But they always seemed too numerous and well organized—several hundred strong, armed with hand grenades, sub-machine-guns and food for a long siege—to justify that label.

4

Podium

For love but not for money

If I were to advise young Canadian writers I’d tell them: Leave Canada. Move to New York or Paris. Get out, and write about subjects with international appeal. Since before the invention of Jack McClelland or even of the typewriter, budding authors have been told, “Write about what you know.” By Jack McLeod5 min

38

The ever-smaller minority share

For 30,000 years, longer than any other human inhabitants of the Americas, the Yukon’s Indians lived a traditional, seminomadic lifestyle—hunting, trapping and fishing. And ever since the arrival in the 1830s of Hudson’s Bay Company explorer Robert Campbell, Indians have helped and sometimes saved the white man. By Paul Koring4 min

‘Is it too much to ask that they learn the rudiments?’

36

Sports Column

‘Is it too much to ask that they learn the rudiments?’

Carl Brewer, 41 but spry, tottered off to the farm club at Moncton, New Brunswick, last week—the first brave steps in a comeback attempt with his old team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Brewer’s trek had a deep effect upon the current Leaf general manager, Punch Imlach, Brewer’s coach in a time, 15 years ago and more, when the Leafs were actually a Stanley Cup threat. By Trent Frayne4 min

Some delicious justice and Crosbie’s artful con job

48

Column

Some delicious justice and Crosbie’s artful con job

It is the most droll irony of all that the Liberals, whose wisdom emanates from the boardrooms of the nation, have been muckered into an election they do not want by a living Newfie joke. John Crosbie, who is as rich as half of Bay Street but affects the rustic drawl of an educated Li’l Abner, is the real architect of the hilarious scenario of Canadians going to the polls in midwinter, with the trapdoors of their minds still frozen open. By Allan Fotheringham4 min