January 25, 1988

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SPECIAL REPORT

CRIME IN THE COMPUTER AGE

During the 1930s and 1940s, at the height of a criminal career that spanned 35 years, the famed U.S. robber Willie Sutton used a gun and a mask to steal a fortune from banks because, he said, “that’s where the money is.” Now, master criminals are targetting computer systems to achieve the same results with nothing more dramatic than a few strokes on a keyboard. By CHRIS WOOD8 min

BUSINESS/SPECIAL REPORT

THE NEW REVOLUTION IN COMPUTERS

John Anderson was there when Toronto-based Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada became one of the first Canadian companies to acquire a mainframe computer. Anderson was a 21-year-old computer operator for Sun Life, then based in Montreal, when the mammoth Univac II arrived on May 30, 1958.

CANADA

Shoring up the Mulroney majority

Like the staffs of three armies preparing for war, Canada’s political leaders are getting ready for an election battle. In Ottawa, party power brokers gather each week to pore over electoral maps, review training films for their field workers and plan strategy.

COVER

A NATIONAL CELEBRATION

The proposal came from snowbound Edmonton to inclemently cool Columbia, S.C., on Jan. 10. It was her 27th birthday. Coming from Canada’s most eligible bachelor, it was one she did not refuse. Two days later their international agreement was the big story across Canada.

SPORTS/COVER

THE BEST IN THE WORLD

You can play it over and over in your mind’s eye, and it is still just as pretty as it was last September. With a minute and a half left on the clock, the Canadians line up for what could be the final faceoff of the series. They are deep in their own end, tied 5-5, and the crowd in Copps Coliseum in Hamilton is throbbing. By PETER GZOWSKI7 min

WORLD

The guerrilla campaign of Gary Hart

CAMPAIGN ’88 On the outskirts of Milford, a snow-covered mill town in the southeastern corner of New Hampshire, Gary Hart was strolling through the Hendrix Wire and Cable factory last week, intent on waging his grassroots charm offensive. By MARCI McDONALD7 min

COVER

HOCKEY’S RENAISSANCE

For hockey fans around the world, the familiar image was indelibly minted last September. Twentyone times in nine games during the gripping Canada Cup tournament, millions of television viewers in six countries and tens of thousands of spectators in arenas across Canada watched Wayne Gretzky raise his arms triumphantly after scoring or orchestrating Canadian goals.

THE WINTER OLYMPICS

Haunting relics from the native land

The showpiece of Calgary’s Olympic Arts Festival, an astonishing curatorial achievement, celebrates the rich artistry of Canada’s aboriginal people at the time of their early contact with Europeans. But ironically, some native Indians are using the historic exhibition, which inaugurates the festival, to draw attention to a bitter dispute over a long-unsettled land claim. By JOHN HOWSE5 min

CANADA

An all-news showdown

It is a cause that has gathered the support of Albertans like a snowball rolling down a Rocky Mountain slope. First, 17 of Alberta’s 21 MPs attacked the decision of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to award a licence for an all-news network to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

MEDIA WATCH

A bitter parting on the Hill

Key Porter Books, publishers of Friends in High Places, by former Toronto Sun columnist Claire Hoy, has a file of about 500 newspaper clippings, half of them variations on the theme of Brian Mulroney, in the late 1970s, having thrown up at a Desmarais family wedding reception in Montreal—a story, incidentally, denied in a letter to the Montreal Gazette by Paul Desmarais, head of the family (and of the many-sided Power Corp. of Canada). By George Bain5 min

January 181988