March 5, 1979

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World News

The thin red line

They came like other, long-forgotten armies, to haunt the dreams of peace. No one could be sure what their true purpose was, and no one knew when they would leave. But from the moment Chinese troops invaded Vietnam everyone from President Jimmy Carter downwards knew that one small miscalculation could bring the Soviet Union to the aid of its ally in Hanoi— matching two of the world’s three superpowers against each other and starting a chain of events which could lead anywhere. By William Lowther, Michael Clugston11 min

The Berton Years

The media titans are having a party. It's called the Pierre Berton Celebration Dinner. They will all be there, names as familiar to Canadians as those of movie stars are to Americans, the only celebrities we have got. Bassett and McClelland. By Judith Timson10 min

Frontlines

A man, a tree and an ocean to cross

Geordie Tocher, British Columbia’s briny perfect folk hero, has been rattling around B.C. and Alberta these days as if he were in a landlocked epilogue to his own movie. Into church halls, little theatres and school gymnasiums he takes his two cans of 16-millimetre film which tell the epic story of his high-seas odyssey last summer when he did what no other man had done for 1,400 years. By Robert Stall10 min

40d

Labor

Year of the power play

Canadian labor has arrived at the precipice: 1979 will be a turbulent year of partisan politics, strikes and confrontations. It’s the year that labor has the chance to become a potent political force in the nation. But to do so it must produce more than angry words in the coming federal election. By Warren Gerard9 min

World News

From bloom to gloom in the ‘great black hope’

As the White House last week pondered its next moves to extract oil from its not-too-willing neighbor, Mexico, U.S. energy managers, seismographs at the ready, were anxiously looking for Iranian-type tremors among the country's other oil suppliers.

12d

Letters

In Peter Newman’s editorial The Good News from Robarts and Pepin ... (Feb. 5), he describes the task force report as an “invaluable document” which should be implemented. I am afraid I cannot share his enthusiasm for a document that looks like a carbon copy of Pierre Trudeau’s own proposals.

People

In what gossip columnists would call a journalistic coup, the Washington Star last week leaked the partial contents of Margaret Trudeau’s autobiography Beyond, Reason, in which the PM comes off smelling like the rose in his lapel and Margaret comes off sounding like Reefer Madness. By Jane O’Hara5 min

Canadian News

Signs of the times in Right-Turn City

Given that Pierre Trudeau has had any number of imaginary signs hanging over him —halo to raincloud to sword—it was refreshing to find four that were actually printed last week. Finally, no more mistakes in reading them. All appeared in Toronto, and all but one perfectly suited the various versions of the prime minister that came courting that key metropolitan vote. By Roy MacGregor5 min

Column

Wacky’s formula: never whine, never complain, just pretend your critics don’t even exist

All the great ones have a certainty of purpose. It would never occur to them that they might be wrong. They press on, secure in the knowledge that the rest of the ignorant world eventually will catch up with their mental processes. William Andrew Cecil Bennett had that certainty. By Allan Fotheringham4 min

Canadian News

Playing to the galleries with sex and violence

Hostage-takings, the B.C. penitentiary at New Westminster and charismatic convict Andy Bruce go hand-in-hand to most watchers of Canada’s strife-riddled prison system. So the seven-day uprising in January, 1978—which included a snatch of 13 hostages by five inmates—seemed like business as usual at the decaying federal fortress on the Fraser River outside Vancouver. By Suzanne Fournier4 min

40b

Behavior

That which is written cannot tell a lie

There’s a clause on the back of the International Graphoanalysis Society’s membership card that exhorts its graduates never to join “any group dealing with the occult.” Today’s graphoanalysts—handwriting experts— call their work a science and are far more interested in the boardroom than in the beyond. By Constance Brissenden4 min

February 261979