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VE Sipe nn co pu saw eae TSE TELE TET IEE PELY TENE OEP PP IIS Page 4, News, Tuesday, November 20, 1990 --_----E 'Editorial: ene a ae A Ss NE RE EE Pee ee eee ee ce i Aig aa Si ie SP Se SESS SS SS ee van, "0+ 825-3747 soe LEE The Terrace Bay - Schreiber News is published every Tuesday by Laurentian Publishing Limited, Box 579, 13 Simcoe Plaza, Terrace Bay, Ont., POT-2w0 Tel.: 807-825-3747. Second class mailing permit 2264. Member of the Ontario Community Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspaper Association. pe oa = on Publisher.............-. A. Sandy Harbinson G CNA ubscription rates: per ts : : : year / seniors $10 (local); Advertising Mgr...... Linda R Harbinson 4 457 per year (out of 40 mile News Editor..............---- Robert Cotton : { oa] radius); $36 in U.S. Admin. Asst.............-.-5 Gayle Fournier -- e a Break the silence It can begin with a slap and end with a murder. It is against the law - a crime that is going on behind closed doors. It is wife assault. One woman in ten in Ontario is being beaten or threatened by her husband or partner. It is happening in families both rich and poor and in families from every cultural and educational background. The bruises resulting from this crime show up on all of us. Women are bruised - the bruises are physical, sometimes requiring medical attention. The bruises are not always immediately seen, showing up later as alcohol or drug pg cae: and as suicidal tendencies. ometimes the bruises result in death. Children are bruised. Seeing their mothers slapped or belittled can frighten and confuse children causing them to lose trust in people. Children learn from their parents behavior and grow up to become batterers or victims themselves. Society is bruised. Wife assault threatens the basic unit of our communities - the family. It is the leading cause of homicide in the country and it tends to continue from one generation to another. For to long the crime of wife assault has been hiding behind one of the sacred ideals of our society - the privacy of the family. We all agree that it is a shameful occurrence but we then we all ask ourselves "It is any of my business?" We turn a blind eye when we see or hear a situation in the home of a friend or neighbor that may be a case of as wife assault. Well closed doors and silence have not stopped this crime from spreading. Break the silence! Talk to friend or neighbor. Tell her that inaction, when it comes to violence, is dangerous. Tell that to yourself. Her safety, the safety other children and the safety of their children is at stake. Tell her that doctors, shelter workers, police officers and other professionals are there to help and they will help. . Tell her she cannot stop her husband's or partner's violence. He is responsible for his own behavior. q EAST- WEST FINAL If you know an abusive man tell him he responsible for his Constituency behavior and that without change, without help, he risks losing H his family and his freedom. offi ce' p en Stop the violence. Call the police. Police in Ontario, when given reason to believe a crime has been committed, will lay charges. It is not the responsibility of the victim to lay charges but the duty of the police. Wife abuse is not a private family matter - it is a crime and, as members of the community, we must show that we will not accept it, anymore than we accept assault on the public street. The profound physical and psychological damage being done to women by wife assault no longer allows a man's home to be his castle. : As you are well aware, we are continuing the process of forming a new government. The process entails several changes including physically moving 'our Constituency Office. However, we are back in business with our toll free telephone num- ber 1 - 800 -268 --7192 fully oper- ational and our Fax machine 416 - 963 -1568 in service. We apologize for the inconve- nience. Robert Cotton Gilles Pouliot, MPP Then there's the real Canada I had occasion to visit Morden, Manitoba last week. As lead sentences go, that one couldn't be counted on to bulge eyeballs, cause constrictions of the gullet or cause, say, the Prime Minister to choke on his morning croissant and gasp "Good God, Mila! Wouldja look at this!" Morden is Morden. It is not Mecca or Memphis or Moscow or even Minneapolis. Just a small prairie town stuck in the middle of an ocean of wheat and canola about an hour and a half's drive south and west of Winnipeg. It boasts no waterfalls, no mountain ranges, no trophy muskies and no NHL franchise. It's an unhosannahed hard-working burg hard-hit by the R-word that's battering the bejeepers out of most Canadians and that our Finance Minister has such a tough time pronouncing. The people of Morden go about their daily See ee Be BO en Soe Eee eS | price of grain will get real. They grouse about the hated GST and wonder if there's any future at all for their kids when they grow up. Just like the rest of us. You don't go to Morden to experience gut-wrenching adventure or to sniff the bracing breeze of high-stakes finance finagling. But you can learn a lot about your country in Morden. A stopover in Morden is especially instructive for a columnist who spends more time than is good for the soul in Toronto. Working in Hogtown, it's easy to forget about the other 3,851,700 square miles of this country, much of it made up of towns like Morden. "Canada? That's what you see from the top of the CN Tower on a Clear day" a slightly bitter Morden lawyer told me. Two other townsfolk repeated the same bromide. What's interesting about the nearcention is that it shows Toronto think of people who do. Torontonians never actually come out and say that their city is the centre of the universe. They just take it for granted. Which is to say they seldom give a passing thought Arthur Black to towns like Morden. I admit it -- I'd have been embarrassed if someone had asked me what I knew about Morden before I went there. _ My answer would have been placed it in Manitoba, but I wouldn't have known if it was bigger than Nanaimo or more industrial than Saskatoon or prettier than Fredericton. The truth is it's been a town almost as long as Canada's been a country. Sieur de La Verendrye passed through there. So did the explorer Alexander Henry. It once was called Fort Pinanceway- winning and came within a hair of being known to the world as Dead Horse Creek. Go back far enough and you would have found Morden under water -- water teeming with giant tortoises, aquatic dinosaurs and fish the size of city buses. Centuries later, after the sea dried up the Indians came and lived and died and left huge mounds for us to ponder over. I came to Morden to make a speech in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the town's library service. In the process I met councilors and farmers and artists and scientists and that makes a place like Morden live. Morden has an exciting and spectacular story to tell, but you'll never hear about it on The Journal or read about in The Globe and Mail, Canada's "National" newspaper. It's a pity that our national newsmakers find the Mordens of Canada so unnewsworthy, preferring to fill our eyes and ears with junk food snippets about feuding film stars, the flatulent maunderings of politicians and the score of the latest Jersey Devils-Buffalo Sabres game. I never was a fan of Mao's China, but one idea the Chairman had was brilliant. Each fall he ordered the Chinese intelligentsia out in the fields to assist with the harvest. Wouldn't it be wonderful if every fall Toronto's news editors and TV producers were parachuted into Morden to help bring in the crops? Maybe not. Probably take Pete OP = eee ae ees