April 25, 1988

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CANADA/COVER

MORE THAN A WAR OF WORDS

The charges of betrayal followed Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa as he crossed the West. On a four-day swing through British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan last week, Bourassa defended Saskatchewan’s controversial decision to repeal long-standing legislation that would have compelled the province to translate all its laws into French.

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

Gloom on Wall Street

When Nesbitt Thomson Deacon Inc. stockbroker David Doritty arrived at his office on Oct. 20, the telephone was ringing. On the previous day major stock exchanges around the world had suffered a major collapse. Wall Street’s leading Dow Jones industrial average had fallen by 22.6 per cent on Oct. 19—nearly twice the 12.8-per-cent drop of the worst day of the 1929 crash.

WORLD

The agony of Flight 422

Sitting on the tarmac at Algiers’s palm-fringed airport, an incongruously placid setting with a mountainous backdrop and sunny sky, Kuwait Airways Flight 422 settled into an odd sort of normalcy in the second week of its deadly and dangerous odyssey. By BOB LEVIN6 min

FOLLOW-UP

The President’s rogues

For Robert McFarlane, former national security adviser to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, it was a humiliating experience. His voice barely audible, McFarlane admitted in a Washington courtroom last month that in 1985 and 1986 he had repeatedly misled the congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal—the operation in which administration officials undertook to trade arms for hostages with Iran and then divert profits to the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua’s San-dinista government. By IAN AUSTEN6 min

EDUCATION

The money squeeze on universities

The University of Toronto’s John P. Robarts Library houses the largest university book collection in Canada and the seventh-largest in North America. It looks like a building that can take care of itself. Because of the intimidating angular bulk of its concrete curtain walls and futuristic pods, students have been calling it Fort Book almost from the day it opened 16 years ago.

COVER

FULL-COURSE FRENCH

When New Bruns-wicker Gail Storr, a unilingual anglophone, underwent back surgery in Montreal last summer, her nine-year-old son Peter helped her communicate with her French-speaking roommate. In nightly telephone calls, Peter, now a Grade 4 French-immersion student at Fredericton’s Priestman Street school, acted as an interpreter for his mother and her roommate at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

COLUMN

A doctor’s profitable struggle

The two-storey red-brick building is on the corner of Marmaduke Street and Roncesvalles Avenue in a working-class section of Toronto’s west end. Frann’s Fish & Chips is a few doors away, as is the storefront office of the weekly Polish Voice newspaper. By Diane Francis5 min

ANOTHER VIEW

Voices from the good old days

Earlier this month the National Archives of Canada opened an exhibition of newsreel and broadcast reports called Beyond the Printed Word. Stretching from flickering film images of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 to the color videotape of Rick Hansen completing his Man in Motion tour in Vancouver in 1987, the exhibition—on display at Ottawa’s National Museum of Science and Technology-makes most of the major stops along the way. By Charles Gordon5 min

MUSIC

Expeditions to pop’s global village

On Naked, the latest album by rock’s influential New York City-based Talking Heads, leader David Byrne sings: “’Round and ’round and we won’t let go/And where we stop no one knows.” The song is Ruby Dear, and Byrne could well be referring to the new disc’s musical tour around the world. By NICHOLAS JENNINGS5 min

April 181988