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Editorial Page= The Terrace Bay-Schreiber News is published every Wednesday by Laurentian Publishing Limited, Box 579, Terrace Bay, Ont., POT-2W0 Tel. 807-825-3747. Second class mailing permit 0867. Member of the Ontario Community Newspaper Assn. and the Canadian Community Newspaper Assn. Public's right to know comes first) z; Charges of possession of stolen property recently laid against Global T.V. reporter Doug Small have the media in an uproar. The charges are in regard to the budget leak. Small received information about the budget prior to its release by Finance Minister Michael Wilson, and went to air with the information he had. Along with the media being upset, some members of Parliament are even concerned with the charges having been laid. M.P's on occasion themselves receive information the government of the day doesn't want to be made public. Are we to assume that they should be subject to the same charges Small is now facing. It seems to me if Wilson and his cohorts had taken better precautions against a budget leak, Small wouldn't be in the position he is now in. The budget is an important document - information that is learned beforehand could lead to the unfair profiting by some individuals. So when Small received the leaked information, he did what any reporter would do under similar circumstances. He fulfilled his obligation by making the information public. : When people have the opportunity to profit unfairly from inside information, or workers are facing unsafe or even General Managet.......Paul Marcon EditOF.....+...----++-----... David Chmara Admin. Asst...........Gayle Fournier Production Asst....Carmen Dinner Editorial Asst......... Connie Sodaro Single copies 40 cents. Subscription rates: $15 per year / $25 two years (local) and $21 per year (out of town). : saying the R.C.M.P. was right in laying the charges, and in saying this, they're also saying the public does not have the right to know. The News welcomes your Ict- ters to the editor. Feel free to express comments, opinions, appreciation, or debate anything of public interest. Write to: dangerous working conditions, and the media learns of this TO me, this reeks of totalitarianism. The government does = ated Baiicneeiaes information, by whatever means, are we to keep silent? not have the right to decide what the public should and neigh DY/SCHISISEE See should not know, except in very limited circumstances. Terrace Bay, Ontario 13 Simcoe Plaza POT 2WO In order that we may verify authorship, please sign your Ict- ters. Certainly not. The public has the right to know and the government has no right whatsoever to keep such information from the public. The government has decided not to step in and have the charges dropped against Small. By taking this stand, they're New Yorkers build a monument of waste What we are talking about here is the public's right to know. Regardless of how information was obtained, this right should always come first. Three cheers for Man, the - Monument Maker! Just pause for a moment and ponder the magnificent structures this little hairless biped has built with his soft pink hands. Let's see now...there's the Pyramid of Cheops, the Sphinx, the Great Wall of China, the mighty ziggurats of Ancient Assyria... France has La Tour Eiffel, Germany the Autobahns, Britain can point to Stonehenge and the palatial splendours of Buckingham and Windsor... American stone chisels have transformed the face of Mount Rushmore into monstrous portraits of presidential heroes. And here too! We Canucks have also dared to dream on the Extra Large scale. Did we not give the world the CN Tower? The Sudbury Nickel? The Wawa Goose? But my friends, all these artifacts look positively puny when compared with 'the breathtaking grandeur of monument taking shape on Staten Iceland New York even as I type these words. The monument is not yet finished. It is rising phoenix-like out of an abandoned gravel quarry and already it has passed ground level. Twelve miles away in Manhatten, harried executives peering out the windows of their high rise office buildings can perhaps, on a clear day, just make out a faint bulge on the earth's surface. For a city that's world famous for it's cynicism, New York's commitment to this monument is heart tugging to behold. Each day, five thousand truckloads of offerings unload their contributions before the monument. Each day 25 huge barges wallow to its base, laden to the gunwhales with more material to make the monument ever higher, ever grander. And who contributes these offerings? Is it Donald Trump? Mayor Ed Koch? Some shady cabal of Wall Street power brokers? No. It is each and every average New Yorker. Joe and Josephine Citizen. Every Big Apple denizen --man, woman and child-- kicks in contributions to the new monument to the tune of one ton a year. i Arthur Black You just don't see that kind of hands-on commitment anymore. And it's long-term commitment too. The engineers in charge of the monument predict that it won't be finished in this century. They say it will take until the year 2004 to put the finishing touches on their structure. By that time it will tower 505 feet in the air, three times taller than the Statue of Liberty, bigger even than the Great Pyramid. They are special engineers, these ones in charge of the massive Staten Island monument. They are what is called "sanitary" engineers. That's because the Staten Island monument is made of a substance seldom used for massive man-made monuments. Garbage. The formation that's taking shape on Staten Island is New York's --possibly the world's-- largest garbage dump. Each New Yorker generates approximately 2,000 pounds worth of refuse annually. Trucks and barges have been dumping that trash in the old quarry near Little Fresh Kills Creek since the end of World War II. Now the quarry is filled and a mountain is beginning to rise. - Name of the mountain? Well, New Yorkers who give it even a passing thought call it The Staten Island Dump, but to folks in -the Sanitation Department it's known as Fresh Kills. Gruesomely appropriate name, eh what? And Fresh Kills is a living monument. The more than one million plastic garbage bags that get dumped on it daily eventually split open. The putrefying contents send out their siren call attracting clouds of flies and screaming gulls and crows. Then at night of course, there - are the rats. By the time Fresh Kills reaches capacity in 2004 there will be 70 million cubic yards of decomposing Gotham garbage on the site. Which makes Fresh Kills about 15 times bigger than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Yessir, those Americans sure know how to do things big. There's just one unanswered problem. What are New Yorkers going to do with their garbage. when Fresh Kills is finished? tiny,