August 24, 1987

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CANADA/COVER

SAYING NO

It was a request that has become almost routine. As passengers from KLM Flight 697 from Amsterdam trooped past Calgary customs agents on Aug. 8, six Iranians calmly claimed refugee status in Canada. The six—a couple with their son and a woman with two teenage children —acknowledged that they had flushed their passports and visas down the aircraft’s toilets.

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

Capital developments

Among his advisers within the Toronto financial community, Paul Reichmann is known as “Mr. R” or simply “the man.” He is also recognized as the entrepreneurial genius behind the phenomenal success of Olympia & York Developments Ltd. (O&Y), the world’s largest real estate empire, which he runs with brothers Albert and Ralph.

COVER

Confronting the Red Chamber

Canada’s Senate was barely a week into its first sitting when some members of the Red Chamber began complaining that they had nothing to do. It was Nov. 15, 1867—and Liberal Senator David Christie said that the people’s nonelected representatives might as well take a week’s holiday. By PAUL GESSELL6 min

WORLD

Apartheid and diplomacy

There had been every indication that the meeting between External Affairs Minister Joe Clark and South Africa’s Foreign Minister Roelof (Pik) Botha on Aug. 14 would be both brief and confrontational. Instead, the encounter lasted an hour longer than its scheduled time of 90 minutes.

COVER

Waiting In A Cruel Limbo

For the world's estimated 12 million refugees, life can he a cruel passage. That is especially true for the 265,000 Cambodians who fled war and famine in their homeland and now languish in border camps inside Thailand. The Thai government will not take them in, fearing ethnic conflict.

MEDIA WATCH

Harsh lessons from an inquiry

The occasional lamentations in the media about the costs of the public inquiry into allegations of conflict of interest against former industry minister Sinclair Stevens, and of the government’s assuming his legal bills, are odd. Hardly anyone can have expected that an inquiry could have been held at no cost. By George Bain5 min

GUEST COLUMN

Speaking with fewer tongues

Okay, you’re Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, you’re wallowing at the bottom of the opinion polls, nothing your government does seems to win favor, and within 18 months or so you have an appointment with the voters. You’ve tried everything—sometimes even both sides of everything— and the pollsters tell you it’s all been in vain. By Stewart MacLeod5 min

COLUMN

The message in the NDP’s book

During the darkest hours of the Watergate coverup, the running joke was that Nixon’s secretary was hired on the basis of how many words per minute she could erase from tapes. Such skills would be useful for Ed Broadbent and his popular New Democrats. By Diane Francis5 min

COVER

Facing A Future With Fewer People

In the current furore over the growing number of illegal immigrants arriving on Canadian shores, a prime minister who echoed Mackenzie King’s unequivocal postwar call for more immigration would certainly be taking a considerable political risk. By MICHAEL ROSE5 min

BUSINESS WATCH

An ambitious venture in Alaska

Some of the heaviest construction equipment ever assembled north of the Arctic Circle begins moving this month into an unnamed inlet on the Chukchi Sea just south of Kivalina, halfway up the forbidding desolation of Alaska’s northwest coast. By Peter C. Newman4 min

August 171987