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p 4 the tribune tuesday august 19 1997 st tuesday august 19 1997 vol 109 no 49 the tribune comment send your letters to the editor to the address below no one wins in a protracted strike york region high schools teachers hit the bricks on monday potentially giving 28000 students an extended summer break and while that may not seem bad to the teens the impact of a draggedout strike is enormous teachers and the board have been tugging back and forth on the issues at stake in this dispute namely con cessions and staffing levels for a year now the board is bemoaning a 30 million cut to their coffers by the provincial government and wants to axe 190 teaching positions the teachers have charged back that the staffing levels would be ludicrously low and education will suffer class sizes they maintain must be kept small both sides as of press time were not even looking to talk before the labor day weekend it is obvious why the teachers have picked this time of year two weeks before the resumption of classes to put the thumbscrews to the board and while it may be a successful negotiating tactic it is smallminded when the parents and guardians of 28000 young people are forced to make alternate arrangements in their daily routines its also not fair to the students they are always the ones who suffer most in a labor dispute especially at the senior level fortunately the government can force the two sides to sit down and resume negotiations an act it should implement with all good speed news item maiming says french lessons paying off golly yes i qh already say takeit0rlewlt vx needs ya quvty0urwhinin6 and stick it in your ear u1cien y si pli o0m vvwvvv m n w tfe n emergency crews not paid nearly enough every once in a while the job gets me last week while covering a serious accident at kennedy road and stouf- fville road i asked the age old ques tion will i ever get used to it i admit to being an ambulance chaser also ill do just about anything to bring the story in still despite lots of experi ence ive never gotten used to the sights and the sounds of human suffering each and every time i attend a bad acci dent or a murder scene i get sick my stomach does somersaults and as a cap per a feeling of sadness takes over some times this is one of them my accident hang over lasts for days i didnt need a police scanner to tell me that this one was a bad one as soon as i heard the sirens my gut knew my gut told me to go when work colleague jordan green and i arrived at the scene a full comple ment of emergency service was in place i watched in awe as police fire fighters and ambulance attendants did theirjobs i dont know how much police officers off the record joan ransberry the fire fighters or the uxbridge-stouf- fville ambulance and air ambulance paramedics earn but its not enough if i was in charge id pay the police chiefs the fire chiefs the land and air ambu lance bosses less and the handson peo- alls quiet on the pasta front for the past three weeks chateau gilderdale has been doing summer duty as a hotel granny pat and my brother were vis iting from across the pond my daugh ters boyfriend was staying and a con stant stream of visitors stopped by for sustenance my son who left home for his own apartment in the city while i was galli vanting around france also arrived on a regular basis bearing laundry and chanting his new mantra anything but pasta this in reply to the ageold question which springs unbidden to a mothers lips what would you like for dinner pasta of course is what mothers sup ply in bulk to their offspring as part of the housewarming gift the rationale for this is that anyone including your children can cook it and it goes with a multitude of sauces many of which are available in pow dered form in a package with explicit instructions even your correspondent can follow and although it is a staple component of the family diet for this very reason i didnt cook it once in france this was because 1 my stomach was unaccountably full after three kilos of kates corner kate gilderdale cheese a large baguette and a massive slab o cake 2 when i turned the pack age over from the french side to the english side it was in french this wasnt a misprint but sprung from the fact that there is only one official lan guage in france and its not english 3 when in france dont do as the romans do there is enough delec table locally produced food over there for a person never to have to ingest a single noodle in an entire lifetime never mind a three week vacation back to the original plot my sons cri de coeur about pasta also encompasses pizza his apartment is located over a pizza parlor and the smell of pepperoni cheese substitute and other exotic com ponents of the north american version of this delicacy permeates every square inch furthermore the temperature hovers around 50 degrees celsius on account of the considerable heat generated from the ovens one of the first things you learn at school is that heat rises stu dents wishing to prove this at the sci ence fair are welcome to contact me at the tribune office last week having had my fill of cooking at le chateau i invited myself and assorted relations to dinner at my sons apartment naturally it was a bring your own dinner party and the challenge was to produce something which did not have any affiliation with pasta or pizza i settled on chicken pie baked pota toes and a cake from which the calo ries and fat ingested were quickly sweated away in the saunalike warmth of malcolms piedaterre the next day my son returned home for a final farewelltotherelatives dinner which consisted of hamburgers and pastafree salad today the place is like a ghost town our extended family has recrossed the pond my son is back in toronto breathing in lungsfull of exhaust and pizza fumes and my daughter has gone camping mr wallethead is bashing balls at a local golf course leaving poc spasm and myself to our own devices and im having uncle bens riga- toni with garlic and herbs for dinner pie more i admit ive police bashed ive laughed at the donutmunching cop jokes as much as any one on the odd occasion ive been on the receiving end of rudeness and indifference from the police yet when i see police officers in the real line of duty im not bashing laughing or getting annoyed rather im just impressed at this wreck the police fire fighters and ambulance attendants using the jaws of life and their bare hands worked diligently for about an hour to free three trapped women from a mercedes benz the car hit by a truck in the intersec tion was tboned on the passenger side and careened into the northwest ditch the first victim to be freed was the dri ver her pain made me cringe she was taken to whitchurchstouffville hospi tal her two passengers guests from hong kong are in sunnybrook health science centre the emergency crews carefully lifted the back seat passenger out of the wreckage she cried in pain i cringed the emergency crews meanwhile continued to tend to the third woman trapped underneath the dash board and pinned by twisted medal it was evident she was in very bad shape recognizing that she needed immedi ate and specialized medical care ban dage one was summoned traffic was blocked in all directions to let the air ambulance land on kennedy road once down bandage ones medical team gave the woman more medical care i cringed while she was loaded into the helicopter to make the seven- minute trip to sunnybrook there more underpaid underappreciated and over worked people are doing everything they can to keep her alive every once in a while we should stop and simply say thank you to the people who really do care about us so to our police our fire fighters and our ambu lance attendants thank you stouffvexe tribune a metroland community newspaper patricia pappas publisher andrew mair editorinchief julie caspersen editor debra weller director of advertising mike rogerson retail advertising manager stacey allen classified 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