LETTERS TO THE EDITOR — NDP’s `thousand cuts’ hurt

The attempts by Ontario’s Premier Bob Rae to distance himself from the numerous discredited present and former cabinet ministers and scandals within the New Democratic Party cannot be allowed to succeed.

Rae is the leader of the party and, therefore, of the government. He shapes party policies, assigns priorities and implements those he likes. He sets the moral standard of the party and of the government.

As scandals, resignations and firings deplete the ranks of his cabinet and inner circle of advisers, Rae continues to wash his hands in public. Everyone is at fault but himself. He tries to make it sound as though someone else had appointed the cabinet and had set the standard for ministerial behavior. It is Rae who must be judged for the quality of those around him. He has chosen them according to his personal judgment and political requirements. Rae is proud to call Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) President and former union head Bob White his pal, the Bob White who threatened to disregard the law of the land in the Caterpillar strike and who ran for his present position because he wants the CLC to be more militant.

There is a general contempt for the law and its processes.

The Supreme Court of Canada rules that the Bear Island Band near Temagami has no legal right to 104 townships, but Rae says he will negotiate with the aboriginals and freezes the land under a cabinet order.

Rae is dealing with people who, having lost in court, threaten Ontario if they don’t gain their way in negotiations.

The residents of the Temagami area are denied opportunities to earn a living in the mining and forestry industries in most of those townships while negotiations to turn all or most of the land over to the aboriginals drag on. No one is speaking for Northern Ontario’s more than 700,000 non-aboriginal residents in these talks, and no one seems to care that they live on and make a living off the land.

One has to suspect that Rae’s long-range plan is to reduce the North to welfare status and force people south.

Every day brings new regulations to strangle the mining industry, with the Ministry of Natural Resources spearheading efforts to keep prospectors out of the bush and mining companies from conducting exploration programs. Forestry firms are kept from cutting trees.

The NDP government claims to be strapped for cash and says taxes will go up again in April but it can find $14 million for snow-machine trails. While prospectors have trouble getting permits to enter the bush to seek mines that could employ hundreds of people, trails can be created to let thousands of people on snow machines wander about the bush.

The only way out of this recession is for Canada to remember that it is a trading nation and what it has to trade is either grown or comes out of the ground.

Ontario cannot survive without its mining and forestry industries. The NDP is dedicated to their destruction not by a formal announcement and a shot in the head, but by a thousand cuts through laws, regulations and rules. Don McKinnon

Prospector

Connaught, Ont.