August 5, 1985

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MUSIC

The master of rock ’n’ roll romance

Bryan Adams bounded onstage in Chicago looking like the boy next door: short hair, faded jeans, a clean white shirt with the tail hanging out. But when his four-man band cranked up and Adams strapped on his cordless electric guitar, he became more like the boy who broke in next door—a delinquent with a fan club.

WORLD/COVER

South Africa Under Siege

The arrests, the death toll and the counterdemonstrations mounted steadily last week —and so did the world’s outrage. But the South African government of President Pieter W. Botha pressed ahead relentlessly with its crackdown on black dissidents.

CANADA

A new challenge to medicare

Since its inception in 1968, Canada’s federally backed medicare system has been considered a centerpiece of the nation’s social security net, a guarantee that people need not forgo treatment or go into debt when sickness strikes. But it has often been a controversial and divisive issue as well.

COVER

The world reacts to the crackdown

Since the outside world became aware of apartheid almost four decades ago and learned to abhor the practice of constitutional government based on race, each fresh assault by South African white rulers on the lives and civil rights of their nonwhite subjects has drawn censure from the community of nations.

CANADA

Devine confronts his party’s troubles

During the last Saskatchewan election campaign in April, 1982, Conservative Leader Grant Devine ridiculed then-premier Allan Blakeney’s New Democratic Party government—which claimed that the province was riding almost unscathed through the recession of that year—by asking voters: “Where’s the prosperity? By DALE EISLER5 min

COLUMN

The dangerous cost of equal pay

Of all the concepts that the totalitarian instinct of our times has bequeathed to society—including racial and gender job quotas and laws against free speech—the seemingly harmless slogan “equal pay for work of equal value” is potentially the most destructive to a free society. By Barbara Amiel5 min

CLOSE-UP

A crusader for convicts

A lifetime of crusading for unpopular causes has taught Claire Culhane, 66, how to deal with her critics. This spring, when the silverhaired grandmother took her latest campaign to Parliament Hill with a handful of other penal reform activists, she confronted an increasingly law-and-order-minded public mood with a demand that prisoners receive more civil rights; predictably, hecklers objected.

GREAT BRITAIN

Thatcher’s policies under attack

Two years ago Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party won the most impressive electoral victory recorded by any British party since Labour’s 1945 landslide, taking 397 seats in the 650-member House of Commons. But as it nears the midpoint of its current five-year mandate, the once seemingly impregnable Thatcher government is now showing unexpected and potentially fatal signs of vulnerability. By DAVID NORTH5 min

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

A long-shot hunt for oil

Francis (Franc) Joubin takes great delight in proving his detractors wrong. In the early 1950s, when he was prospecting in Northern Ontario, the maverick geologist found few backers. “It took me four years to raise a lousy $35,000,” he says ruefully. By MARC CLARK5 min

CITIES

Public use of private space

Partially paralysed after suffering two strokes, 74-year-old Harry Lefstein used to spend most of his time at the St. Catharines, Ont., shopping mall known as The Pen (The Niagara Pen Centre). But last fall Bramalea Ltd., the company that owns the mall, banned the crippled pensioner from The Pen.

July 291985