Canada is not Russia
David Levy
Calgary, Alberta Like Americans, Russians really know next to nothing about Canada, a country which to both super-powers is the northern neighbour. If anything, the. Russians would be ahead of the Americans in any future race (if one could imagine such a thing) to know Canada better, to show it the respect it may conceivably deserve. The Russians know Canada as 'the motherland of ice-hockey', a game at which they excel brilliantly themselves and are only too knowledgeable about. Americans, on the other hand, regard Canada simply as a source of indentured hockey players who Play in US teams, not as hockey land in its OW n right. The Russians even have a fatuous little song about Canada. Its refrain goes like this: Canada, Canada, Canada Is like Russia, But all the same, It is not Russia.
This is surely the week in which that song Must start seeming slightly less fatuous, and even an example of some Russian prescience. It is certainly the week in which Canada will begin to prove that it certainly IS not Russia in several respects. We could begin with money. Canada is known as a country of book-keepers, a nation of taxPayers who are now bad-temperedly counting the cost of having to scour a fivehundred-mile corridor running from Great Slave Lake to Baker Lake, by air and land, for that crumpled pile of radioactive tubing and sheet metal found at the remote Weather port at Warden's Grove and which is by no means regarded as the only debris that landed in the vicinity. The search continues for more pieces of Soviet property that were supposed to have disintegrated in the atmosphere but did not. The costs have been called 'rather significant' by Canada's befence Minister, Barney Danson, in con firming that the Russians, to whom he referred rather deferentially as 'the owners of the satellite', are going to be asked to Pay.
In the Soviet Union they do not really have what you and I would call taxpayers, only a woefully underpaid working population. Technically they do pay a small income tax, but this is simply one of those token gestures to normalcy so characteristic of the Soviet system. The real tax, which is Whopping, is taken away before it even reaches the workers, which is one of the more efficient features of Soviet industry.
Certainly the Soviet Union does not have to worry about its taxpayers interfering with Policy the way Canada does, unless one counts as a worry the broadcasting by fore
igners to the Soviet population, of the fact that its standard of living is being held down by the one hundred or so pieces of expensive hardware that its government puts into space every year.
And in due course, under Paragraph 5 Article 5 of the international agreement on the return of objects launched into outer space, Canada will present a bill to the Soviet Union for what the agreement calls 'expenses incurred in recovering and returning space objects or component parts.'
If Canada would accept payment in roubles — those roubles which the Soviet Union withholds from its working population because there are not the goods and services available in the USSR to absorb them — the Kremlin would gladly pay without a murmur and straight out of that great big Russian heart. But, as the song says, Canada is not Russia. It is a, country in which everything has to be paid for in real money, or convertible currency, which is Russia's scarcest commodity. At question time in the
Canadian House of Commons on Monday, Barney Danson mumbled something about the Soviet ambassador having told the Canadian Government not to worry about the money. But the speed with which Danson disposed of this statement only reinforces the suspicion that there is about to be one hell of a hassle with the Russians over the bill. It is, after all, one more expense resulting from the Soviet space programme which the ordinary Soviet citizen knew he could ill afford in the first place. If translated into roubles at their true domestic value, the two million dollars which Canada, it is guessed, may demand from the Russians would equal at least 6 million roubles, the equivalent of about 12,000 monthly salaries for Soviet space scientists, and far more than double that number for lesser workers.
However, though the Russians can be counted on in the haggling ahead to question every single cost item connected with the search, they will be quick enough to pay for the actual physical damage done, especially any damage from radiation. Indeed, the apparent good health of the bewildered band of adventurers who stumbled into the debris in the ice of the river at Warden's Grove deprived the Russians of introducing the world to the concept of socialist humanitarianism. How very much in keeping with this concept it would be for the Soviet state to compensate Eskimo caribou herders out there in the North West territories for loss of their herds from radiation poisoning when the present snow turn into babbling brooks and pollute the water reservoirs. This could still happen, of course, because no one this week is at all sure that some of the Cosmos debris did not penetrate below the ice on which it landed. But for the moment it seems that the pieces of space junk have been safely contained and will, in the fullness of time, be handed back to their embarrassed 'owners'.
And this is when the real fun will begin. According to Dr Jean-Louis Magdalene of Montreal's Institute of Air and Space Law, the Soviet Union must first ask for the pieces back before Canada is obliged under the international agreement to return them. And, before handing them back, Canada has a right to ask for more information about their origin. 'But this,' said Dr Magdalene in an interview on national radio, 'is a grey area of the convention'. Just how much information the Russians will have to give Canada before they get their junk back will be interesting to see. They are not famous for giving out information, especially about military matters, and Canada has already lodged a complaint with them over their failure to give warning that Cosmos 954 might fall on Canadian territory. According to Dr Magadalene, the agreement in fact does not require its signatories to inform other nations when any of its space hardware is in trouble. They are only required to register launchings, not landings. When you add it all up, it is not at all a bad convention from the Russian point of view. So much so that it would be an interesting exercise to examine the history of its birth; it will probably be found that the Russian drafts eventually determined the final text.
What even the Russians, however, have not been able to protect themselves against is the dawning here, through this accident, of the realisation that Canada lies directly beneath a potential battle area of space satellites in any future war. The Canadian Defence Quarterly magazine's editor, John Gellner, believes that Cosmos 954 is much more likely to have been a prototype Soviet killer satellite than simply a spy satellite, which the Americans have loosely called it. Though Gellner is perhaps the Canadian journalist least given to sensation, he considers that the whole incident has been downplayed. He disagrees with the Commander-in-Chief of the North Amen can Air Defence Command, General James Hill, who said on Monday that he did not think Cosmos 954 presented any danger, and so do a lot of people, who see the General's statement as a disingenuous effort to Oppose President Carter's call for a ban on the orbiting of space vehicles carrying nuclear material.
The Kremlin would not have chosen to contribute in this way to Canada's panoply of political crisis. These things are always supposed to come from the violence-loving Americans, not from a self-respecting socialist state devoted by its very Marxist nature to peace. But whatever other fallout it may produce, Cosmos 954 has already precipitated a critical unease in Canada over the militarisation of outer space.
Previous page
