May 11, 1987

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PUBLISHING

A CASE AGAINST THE CROWN

Crown corporations touch us every day, all day. We awake in the morning to the news brought to us, in many cases, by a federal Crown. The electricity to beam it through our radios is the product of a provincial Crown working hand in hand with a municipal Crown. By Walter Stewart15 min

SPECIAL REPORT

AN EPIC ARCTIC JOURNEY

Pitched alongside a sheltering cliff, the tiny campsite on the frozen sea of Maxwell Bay in the Canadian Arctic was only a speck in the seemingly endless expanse of polar ice. Inside a pair of tents on the southern edge of Devon Island, five Canadian adventurers paused at the halfway mark of an 1,800-mile northern trek to await the arrival of a Twin Otter aircraft bringing supplies of seal meat for their 44 sled dogs. By BRUCE WALLACE11 min

CANADA/COVER

BREAKTHROUGH

The reaction, after more than nine hours of sometimes heated debate, was at once spontaneous and unanimous. While other first ministers and aides beamed, Quebec’s Robert Bourassa clasped Brian Mulroney in a hearty handshake. Then, as Mulroney prepared to leave the closed-door meeting on constitutional reform with the country’s 10 provincial premiers last week, the Prime Minister suddenly looked around the room, smiled and declared, “Now, gentlemen, we can go out there and tell Canadians their federation works.”

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

A personal tax touch

Every year the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based think-tank, calculates from Jan. 1 the date on which an average Canadian taxpayer has earned enough money to pay all direct, indirect and hidden federal, provincial and municipal taxes.

WORLD

A war between friends

They call each other Ron and Yasu, and consider themselves personal friends. But last week Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone learned—like Brian Mulroney before him—that friendship with President Ronald Reagan can prove a double-edged sword.

Q&A

An uncensored view

Novelist Josef Skvorecký, winner of the Neustadt International Prize for literature and a Nobel Prize nominee, has lived in Canada since leaving his native Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of 1968. In his homeland the author labored under the repressive Czech regime that banned his novel The Cowards— about a Czech youth in the years after the Second World War—following its 1958 release.

SPECIAL REPORT

DISPUTED CLAIMS IN THE NORTH

Seventy-five years ago, when vast areas of Canada’s Arctic remained unmapped and only loosely claimed, explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson began raising money in the United States to finance a major expedition to the Canadian Arctic. Stefansson, an American born of Icelandic parents near Gimli, Man., was following a familiar pattern in 1912.

DATELINE

Decline of a military strongman

He loves to play chess. In fact, Paraguayan President Gen. Alfredo Stroessner is such a fanatic about the game that according to local gossip, some of his political associates must advise him of where they are at all times in case he needs a partner. By KATHRYN LEGER5 min

AN AMERICAN VIEW

A new activism in the streets

The President of the United States is not obligated to remain in town every time a band of aggrieved Americans comes marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, but had Ronald Reagan stayed close to home on the last weekend in April, he might have found the experience illuminating. By Fred Bruning5 min

FILMS

Hollywood’s new vision

David Denby, New York magazine’s influential film critic, sent a shock wave through Hollywood last summer with a damning indictment of American cinema headlined “Can the movies be saved?” Denby lamented that marquees across North America were offering an increasingly bleak range of options—violent revenge pictures in the Rambo mould, crass comedies about spoiled teenagers and special-effects extravaganzas. By Brian D. Johnson4 min

May 41987