December 16, 1996

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CANADA

Canada NOTES

An “astonishing” 40 per cent of women over 75 live in poverty and are in such frail health they are unable to properly care for themselves, says a report based on Statistics Canada data from the 1991 census. That finding, and others, “should give pause to [budget cutters who assume] there is no longer an economically vulnerable elderly population,” adds the study, written by two professors at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

World

The trouble with aid

Luxury four-wheel drives are standard issue in the international aid game, so it is no surprise to see dozens of white Land Cruisers parked bumper to bumper in front of Gisenyi’s Meridien hotel like horses tethered to a hitching post in some postmodern western. By BRUCE WALLACE12 min

The Mail

Dr. John Teskey has taken an excellent low-cost education with him to a highpaying job in the United States (“Radical surgery,” Cover, Dec. 2). When we have, without his help, wrested Canadian medicare back from the short-sighted politicians, and when he tires of the high-pressure, low-service atmosphere of medicine as practised in the United States and wishes to come home, what contribution will he bring? Will he return some of his new wealth, with thanks, to our benevolent society? Kelly Borrowman, Calgary HI As a faithful reader of the magazine, I stumbled on the sentence “as well as anglophone suspicions that cutbacks are hitting their hospitals disproportionately.

Books

Great plays and glory days

A few years back, when the Toronto Blue Jays owned the best bunch of hurlers and hitters in the world, sportscasters and pundits took to predicting that baseball was destined to replace hockey as Canada’s national pastime. And when four million people a year were jamming Toronto’s Skydome to watch the Jays, when a minor-league team was drawing full houses in Ottawa, and when parents were lining up to register their kids in local baseball leagues, who could argue with the wise guys up in the press box? But the country’s book publishers knew better. By D’ARCY JENISH7 min

POP MOVIES

Director Tim Burton unleashes an allstar cast in Mars Attacks! to battle little green invaders. Jack Nicholson, Michael J. Fox and others act up in the film inspired by old Cold War paranoia. Invader, Nicholson: Cold War fun Top movies in Canada, ranked according to box-office receipts during the seven days that ended on Dec.

COVER

Big bad Buzz

The presidential suite of the downtown Toronto hotel is not looking terribly presidential. Glossy mahogany surfaces are littered with papers and empty pop cans. There is a constant flow of denim-clad people and a perpetual hum of fax machines. By DEIRDRE McMURDY, LUKE FISHER6 min

CANADA

Breaking the silence on Osborne

The parallels are striking. Helen Betty Osborne, a 19-year-old native woman, was abducted from the streets of The Pas in 1971 by a group of young men, driven outside the northern Manitoba community, sexually assaulted and brutally murdered.

December 91996