The benchmark 10-year Canadian government bond was hit yesterday with its biggest price drop in almost eight months as the rally in stocks reduced demand for government debt.

The retreat sent the 10-year yield up 14 basis points to 5.3 per cent. Meanwhile, the two-year yield soared 24 points to 3.44 per cent, while the 30-year yield added eight points to 5.81 per cent.

Wall Street's surge yesterday sent U.S. Treasury securities prices to a seven-month low.

Trading was also affected by news that the Treasury plans to borrow a net $76-billion (U.S.) this quarter, the most in any third quarter since 1991. Analysts expect the Treasury to sell as much as $40-billion in five- and 10-year notes next week, swelling supply.

The two-year note's yield rose 17 basis points to 2.39 per cent -- after last week reaching the lowest level since the Treasury began selling the securities in the 1970s. The 10-year note's yield climbed 17 basis points to 4.55 per cent, rebounding from an eight-month low last week. The long bond gained 11 points to 5.42 per cent.
CANADIAN BONDS
Provided by RBC Capital Markets
Selected quotations, with changes since the previous day, on actively traded bond issues. Yields are calculated to full maturity. Price is the final bid-side as of 5 pm yesterday

..............Daily...Daily...MTD

              Total   Price   Total


              Return  Return  Return


Index  Level  % Chg   % Chg   % Chg


Market   394.23   -0.59   -0.64   1.05


Short   338.22   -0.42   -0.47   1.12


Intermed   403.72   -0.74   -0.78   1.32


Long   473.26   -0.74   -0.79   0.60


Govts   392.38   -0.62   -0.67   1.31


Canadas   380.80   -0.61   -0.66   1.30


Provs   422.26   -0.64   -0.69   1.33


Munis   147.13   -0.80   -0.85   1.39


Corps   416.96   -0.51   -0.56   0.24

Scotia Capital Bond Indices

He is running through the names, checking them off a list he compiled 31 years ago. They are names from the Charlottetown Islanders, a junior A hockey team that no longer exists. They are names he has never forgotten because they started it, he finished it and that's the way it had to be.

"They were older than we were and they beat us up good. So I said to them, 'With my last breath, when I become a pro hockey player I will get every one of you guys' -- and I did. I did 'em all. Kevin Devine. Garth McGregor. Al MacAdam. I fought 'em and I said, 'You tell those other guys I'm coming for them.' And when I was done, I always said, 'That's for the boys in Thunder Bay. T-bag Bay. The land of the tough guys.' "

You wait for a belly laugh, a chuckle, anything to suggest he is only kidding, that he didn't really hunt down every player from that Charlottetown team. But there is no laugh, only the stone-cold silence you'd expect from a man once dubbed the wildest, meanest, most unpredictable player in hockey.

This is the guy, people tell you, who once jumped out of a penalty box, skated after a linesman and, because the referee had grabbed his arms and pinned them back, did the next worst thing and bit the linesman on the leg. Then there was the time he jumped onto the ice and began beating up opposing players while dressed in shoes and street clothes. "I looked like a guy trying to water ski," he said. Again, no chuckle.

That he spent part of his pro career hunting down foes from his junior days is petty stuff when you consider the voice on the other end of the phone belongs to none other than Ogie Ogilthorpe. Not the actor who played the character in the 1977 movie Slap Shot, but the real Ogilthorpe -- Bill (Goldie) Goldthorpe, the impossibly Afro-haired hellion who was the inspiration for much of the film's wildest moments.

Take the scene where the hockey puck gets deflected high into the stands and KO's the organ player in the head. It's a variation on the night Goldthorpe, back in the penalty box, was so angry he picked up a water bottle and tried to toss it at a rival player except the bottle slipped out his hand and KO'd the penalty announcer standing nearby. ("San Diego penalty to No. 7, Bill Gold . . ." Thunk!)

Or how about the final scene where the actor playing Ogilthorpe skates onto the ice for the start of the championship game and the announcer says it's been a trying year for Ogie "what with the litigation, the notoriety, his subsequent deportation to Canada and that country's refusal to accept him?" Goldthorpe was arrested in Wisconsin after slugging it out with a teammate on the tarmac at the Green Bay airport. It took two Canadian immigration officials to escort him back into the country the next day.

"I tell people I played with the real Ogie Ogilthorpe and some of them don't believe me," said Marc Habscheid, the coach of Canada's national junior team, who spent a season with Goldthorpe in the American Hockey League. "We were with Moncton and I remember Halifax pounding us. The next game against them, Goldie's in the lineup and we're at our bench for the national anthem and Goldie says, 'Open the gate.' I said, 'They're playing the anthem.' He says, 'Open the gate.' So I open the gate and he goes onto the ice and stands in front of their bench and he talks to all their players. I don't think those Halifax guys threw a hit all game."

In his prime, Goldthorpe was as volatile as nitroglycerin. He'd blow up and fight if someone so much as looked at him funny, even if the game hadn't started, even if it meant going into the stands. It was all part of the rough-and-rumble 1970s, the golden era of bare-knuckle hockey.

Just the mention of Goldthorpe's name in the World Hockey Association was enough to scare the stripes off a referee's sweater and it was the same in the North American Hockey League, where he played against the Johnstown Jets and the likes of Dave Hanson and the Carlson brothers, Steve, Jeff and Jack, the Big Bopper.

The strange thing was Hanson and two of the Carlsons got to play characters similar to themselves in Slap Shot. They became the height of horn-rimmed hilarity. Twenty-five years later, they're still working their shtick in countless public appearances and in Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice, the sequel released this year. In fact, most everyone associated with the movie, including the star, Paul Newman, has benefited from its enduring popularity and can look back fondly -- but not Goldthorpe.

Instead, the movie that not just glorified hockey violence but made us laugh at it left Goldthorpe bitter. It took his game, his name, his blonde Afro, then asked Johnstown goal scorer Ned Dowd to play the part of Ogilthorpe. Why?

"First of all, my character, Ogie Ogilthorpe, was a compilation of several kinds of people, not Bill Goldthorpe per se," said Dowd, who served as a sounding board for his sister, who wrote the screenplay, and is now a Hollywood producer.

"I knew Bill. He's quite nice, a lovely guy. Is Bill Goldthorpe a part of that compilation? Yes. But to the best of my knowledge, there was never an offer made. I think the thing was we couldn't get a hold of Bill."

"Ned Dowd's full of crap," Goldthorpe snorts. "You want to know why I wasn't in the movie? They thought I was too wild and I'd beat up Paul Newman."

Would he have?

"No, but here's what happened: Newman's brother came and saw us play. I was with Binghamton. That night, there had been a fight in the stands in Johnstown and I got charged with assault. In the dressing room, I had a coke bottle and I was so angry I threw it at Paul Stewart [a teammate turned NHL referee] because he wouldn't shut up. The bottle hit the wall, and at that moment Newman's brother walked into the room and got Coke all over him. That was it. They thought I was an undesirable."

"A real criminal element," Newman says in the movie.

It was just the tip of the rap sheet. As rough as he was on the ice, off the ice Goldthorpe was like a bull on the streets of Pamplona. He wouldn't back down from a challenge because that's not how you do it if you're from the land of the tough guys, T-bag Bay.

"I think Goldie's proud of the role he played. He took care of his teammates and he was fiercely loyal," said George Gwozdecky, now the University of Denver hockey coach and a former teammate. "But there's no question he's not proud of some of the things he did off the ice. He'll admit he screwed up."

Eighteen of those screwups landed Goldthorpe in jail. A couple nearly scared the life out of him. One tore up his stomach, cost him chunks of his small intestine and left the real Ogie Ogilthorpe close to death.

He is telling you stories, enough to fill a book. In many cases he tells "the real story" instead of the much-rumoured version and in many cases he comes out looking worse. Eighteen years after he played his last pro hockey game, Goldie Goldthorpe is not about to turtle.

"Do I regret any of those off-ice incidents? All of them. I'm not going to whine. I did it because I didn't have discipline. I should never have drank. I wasn't a drunk but I drank and that didn't help. I didn't start every fight. I'd be in a town and someone would say, 'You're not that tough.' I was only 173 pounds and people couldn't believe I was Ogie Ogilthorpe. That's how a lot of things got started."

Many of them ended badly. In 1980 in San Diego, he was shot in the stomach while trying to rescue an ex-girlfriend. It was the ex-girlfriend's drug dealer who didn't like the way Goldthorpe got involved. So, bang! The bullet rearranged Goldthorpe's entrails and just missed his kidney. The paramedics who treated Goldthorpe said if he hadn't had such strong abdominal muscles he would have died.

Being a tough guy through and through came naturally to Goldthorpe. He was born in northern Ontario, in the railway town of Hornepayne. His father Alfred was as big as a boxcar and worked as an engineer for the CNR. His mother Pearl was a nurse's aide. When Alfred and Pearl got married their best man was Leo Boivin, an NHL tough guy in his day.

The Goldthorpes sent their son to Thunder Bay to play minor hockey and it wasn't long before he learned that he would have to fight for his respect. Goldthorpe lived with his aunt Eva Gannon in a house that still has a statue of the Virgin Mary in the attic window. The statue was placed there to keep the house holy. It didn't do much for Goldthorpe, the resident holy terror.

"Mrs. Gannon would say, 'I can see it in your eyes. You're bad,' " said Goldthorpe, whose temper once took out many of the front windows at his aunt's house and also made him a quick participant in a scrap.

Once, at a midget tournament in Dauphin, Man., Goldthorpe came to the aid of a man who was wrestling with a referee who had slugged a spectator. The man was Albert Cava, the legendary Thunder Bay coach who had travelled to Dauphin to see the young kids who would be moving up to the Port Arthur Marrs. The incident struck a chord between Goldthorpe and Cava. The coach loved the ferocity of his young forward while Goldthorpe loved the way his coach treated him.

"I was fair with him. I appreciated what he could do for our team," Cava said. "He was a helluva hockey player, the best penalty killer I've ever seen. He played every shift as if his life depended on it."

Goldthorpe was involved in dozens of donnybrooks with the Marrs, who later became the St. Paul (Minn.) Vulcans. In Smiths Falls, Ont., a fan slugged Vulcans defenceman Lee Fogolin Jr. while he was on the ice. Goldthorpe flew into the stands and, in the ensuing scuffle, broke a security officer's leg. The security man recognized Cava a month later and said not to worry, "I'm getting compensation. I've never had it so good."

"As a kid, I used to watch [Thunder Bay defenceman] John Schella and his buddies, guys who were older than me. They played poker and they played tough hockey," Goldthorpe said. "I was only 17 and I wanted to be like them."

As for needing a police escort to home games, it was sort of true. After getting into a fight one summer in Hornepayne, Goldthorpe was jailed, then allowed to finish his sentence in Thunder Bay. Gwozdecky would sign him out for practices and games, then return him at the appointed hour. (For the record: Goldthorpe had a summer job as a gravedigger.)

In 1973, two years after losing to Charlottetown and plotting his Rambo-like revenge, Goldthorpe was off to the pros. He had 20 goals and 26 assists his first season in the NAHL and that earned him a go with the WHA's Minnesota Fighting Saints. In 1977, he was invited to the Toronto Maple Leafs' training camp and played well in scrimmages and exhibition games. The coaches said they wanted Goldthorpe to stick around but the team wasn't prepared to offer him a contract. Goldthorpe walked. After a brief tryout with the Pittsburgh Penguins, the NHL was finished with the wild man from Thunder Bay. Within seven years, all of hockey was done with him.

The trouble was there was still some trouble ahead.

He is talking about his scars because he has almost as many of them as he does stories. He says he needed 300 stitches to his left arm and hand after an encounter with a knife-wielding thug who had been beating up a woman. Goldthorpe had watched the attack from across a street before rushing in like the Marines. Had a buddy not applied a tourniquet to Goldthorpe's arm, he would have bled to death.

There are also scars on Goldthorpe's stomach and heart from his 1980 shooting. Alfred Goldthorpe spent 30 days in San Diego nursing his son back to health. A week after he returned to Thunder Bay, the 58-year-old engineer climbed aboard a train and died of a heart attack. His wife Pearl had died seven years earlier, a victim of cancer at 53.

Losing his dad so soon after almost dying himself was the double whammy that pinned Goldthorpe against the wall and got his attention. He went back to school and enrolled in accounting and computer programming. He got a construction job and is now a foreman in charge of building a 340-unit condominium in downtown San Diego. To keep busy, Goldthorpe lifts weights and competes in bodybuilding competitions. Life is good, except for one thing.

"The Slap Shot business bothers him," Gwozdecky insisted. "The Carlson brothers have lived off that movie ever since they made it. On the other hand, Goldie, who had more of a reputation, more of a legacy, more toughness and was depicted in the movie that way, never received a thing -- not even an acknowledgment."

For 15 years, Goldthorpe avoided the movie until finally he watched it. He thought it was okay. Recently, a friend came up with the idea of recognizing Goldthorpe's past by designing a special T-shirt. On the front of the shirt is a picture of a big-haired, angry Goldthorpe, a guy you wouldn't want to cross unless you had a tranquilizer gun -- to use on yourself. On the back is a list of 18 cities and dates topped by the words, 'The Bill Goldthorpe North American Jail Tour.' Goldthorpe loved the T-shirt so much he's been selling them by the box load and donating the money to charity.

"I've never hidden from what I did. All that stuff, it's just the way it worked out. It's not like I woke up in the morning and said, 'I'm going to jail tonight.' Everything that happened in that movie, it happened to me. All those guys, they made millions of dollars. I didn't get a dime. But when I meet guys who played the game, they all call me Ogie Ogilthorpe. They all say that. They know."

He pauses. The silence is stony cold.

"A buddy told me once, 'Goldie, you're going to be a bully in an old folks home.' "

It's a joke, a poke at his own expense. You can tell because, for the first time since he started talking, the tough guy on the other end of the line is laughing long and hard.

Currently Canada's hottest playwright, Michael Healey is in a position to be honest.

On the tails of his Governor-General's Award-winning The Drawer Boy came this year's hit, Plan B. Tickets for the show, which went on to win the Dora Award for best new play, sold out faster than a clutch of WorldCom executives.

But for Healey, standing-room-only audiences weren't always the case. He wryly remembers the cross-country tour for Kicked, his acclaimed one-hander that was later made into a TV movie. Despite critical and popular success, audiences in some Canadian cities were less than enthusiastic. During one performance in Ottawa, Healey looked out into the nearly empty stalls and noticed two people slumped in their seats, fast asleep. After the curtain, he went into the audience and confronted the pair: "I told them, 'You know, the theatre is a terrible place to take a nap.'

"A play is a conversation between the actors and the audience, the people in the light who know what's going on and the people in the dark who don't know," he adds. "And if half of that conversation isn't there, you've got to pretend or manufacture it."

Sometimes that can be hard to manufacture. Veteran stage actor David Fox, who won a Dora for his work in The Drawer Boy, recalls appearing in this spring's run of the The Gwendolyn Poems, about Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, at Toronto's Factory Theatre. Despite glowing reviews, ticket sales were low some nights. The reason? It was up against Maple Leafs playoff games, competition that was simply too stiff to counter.

And as frustrating as it is for actors and production teams, low audience turnout can be frustrating for an audience, too. Take Toronto short-story writer Tasneem Jamal. She likes to go to the theatre about once a month, and aside from a competent production, the one thing she hopes for is a good-sized audience. She remembers the time a few years ago that she and a friend went to see the morality play Everyman at Toronto's Poor Alex Theatre -- and was one of maybe eight people in a space designed for 100. "The theatre was almost empty, so the whole experience fell flat," she recalls grimly. "There was no energy coming off the audience, because I think we all felt vaguely exposed and uncomfortable."

To make matters worse, one of the actors had an unfortunate lisp. "Every time she said something, my friend would pinch me to get my attention," says Jamal. "I knew if I looked over at her I would laugh out loud, and this was a very serious play, so I kept staring straight ahead. With so few people in the audience, my chuckle would make far too resounding a statement. If it's only you and maybe a handful of others there, you're suddenly aware of having some kind of authority."

But just what kind of authority does an audience really have? Aside from liking or disliking a play, does it have a role to perform in how it comes off -- a subtle, uncredited cameo?

Absolutely, say theatre insiders like Ross Manson, current artistic director of Volcano theatre company. He's also an actor, and the director behind Mortality and Building Jerusalem. "The ideal is that everyone in the room becomes part of a single thing -- a single event, a single focus -- as if everyone is breathing together," he says. "This takes a lot of craft, talent and great writing -- but when it happens, the audience responds as a single being, and this in turn reinforces what is happening on-stage. Then we all go home changed -- if even only a little -- and that's what we're all aiming for. That's the power of theatre, and yes, the audience is part of it."

Manson's notion of an alchemical relationship between performers and audience has, in fact, been pondered by social scientists, who liken it to reader-response criticism in the field of literary studies. Such criticism examines how the interpretation of a book is subjective, changing with each reader.

While University of Toronto social psychologist Patricia Pliner notes that no studies have been done on how they apply directly to theatre, both social-facilitation theory and social-impact theory appear to have some relevance in understanding how an audience can affect a performance.

Social-facilitation theory argues that, when performing a task at which you are already skilled, the very process of being observed increases your adeptness. If, for example, you're a good actor who knows your part well, you'll do even better with more eyes on you. The opposite should also hold true: If an actor doesn't know his lines, his performance will probably be that much worse with people watching.

But such social facilitation isn't all that's at play: Social-impact theory argues that the effect of any audience increases with the number of people in it, their stature, and their personal and physical proximity to the performers. "The prediction quite clearly is that -- if the actors have everything in hand -- the more people who are present, the more the arousal and the better the performance," says Prof. Pliner. If you want to see the best possible performance by a presumably talented cast, she reasons, make sure you go when the house is packed.

While theatre companies may not be aware of social-impact theory, they are certainly aware of its effects. For opening night -- the performance to which the critics are invited -- publicists generally work hard to ensure the theatre is packed with friends, family and other well-wishers by blanketing the desired community with free tickets. It's standard industry practice, the goal being a critical mass that will subtly influence those who have come to render a professional judgment.

Of course, most reviewers keep such boosterism in mind when evaluating a show. After all, the reader who attends next Tuesday's performance may be puzzled when the four-star production tanks thanks to its sluggish reception by the 12 people watching.

With all that in mind, some theatre companies work hard to ensure attendance stays high no matter what. With an annual marketing-and-promotion budget of $20-million, musical overlord Mirvish Productions of Toronto is among them. Because of its subscription base, Mirvish -- whose theatres include the Princess of Wales and the Royal Alexandra -- can identify low-selling shows months in advance. Just prior to a play's opening, Mirvish will launch a campaign to bump up seat sales for selected performances.

And it's not just an effort to hit that magic break-even profit point -- roughly 70 per cent of a full house at Mirvish, typically between 40 and 50 per cent at smaller companies. "When people go to the theatre and see that there are only 500 people in a theatre that holds 1,000, they think they've made a mistake -- they've been misled," says John Karastamatis, Mirvish's director of communications.

But what about those moments at bad plays in small venues? Does a smaller audience make things better or worse? Certainly it doesn't always feel better. Instead of being caught up in the illusion of the show, members of a small audience can develop a sickening sensation when they realize they're going to be called on to perform the laugh track. It's like catching the audience equivalent of stage fright: The comedy feels less funny; the drama, less enthralling; the tragedy -- well, the hubris and bloody murder on-stage run a pale second to the decline and fall of your mood as your initial interest in watching a kabuki version of the collected works of Susanna Moodie turns to mind-numbing ennui.

"At a comedy, if there are only a few brave souls, they tend not to laugh out loud," says Manson. "We on-stage can hear the silence, and it feels a lot more like hard work." But he adds that there are no hard and fast rules. "If the house is full, the laughs can be buoyant; but sometimes a small house can give back more energy than a large house -- it depends on who those people are."

Numbers aren't everything, agrees actor Fox, pointing out that people who might flock to see a blockbuster musical at a major venue might also be the type to leave 10 minutes before the final bow, to beat the traffic. After performances for The Gwendolyn Poems, by contrast, Fox says he would often talk to the people who lingered in the small theatre's foyer, eager to know more about the show or the life of the Canadian poet. "Sometimes," he observes, "a small audience can help you discover things you've been missing, and it's the response of the audience that is important.

"During a workshop run," says Manson, "the amount of information I gain, as a director, simply by being in an audience at one of my shows, is enormous, and very useful. The fact that we don't usually have such test drives, or long periods of previews, means that we in English Canada seldom take advantage of what an audience can teach, and instead produce unfinished work, which we unfortunately call finished. It's one of the major systemic problems in English-Canadian theatre."

So, assuming the play you want to see is decent, what's a good night to go to the theatre? The answer is anything but straightforward. Aside from opening night, it depends on the time of year, says Karastamatis. Friday and Saturday nights are the hot tickets during the regular, fall-to-spring season. In summer, when smaller theatres put away their playbills, longer-haul productions such as The Lion King and Mamma Mia! see some of their busiest performances on weekdays and during matinees.

And the emptiest time of year? According to Karastamatis, January is the darkest month at the theatre, thanks to cold weather and postholiday resting up. But there are no safe bets: Spring shows, too, can be sparsely attended, because people can finally go out and enjoy the sunshine.

And if these sunny summer months find you sitting in a near-empty theatre, take heart in this story from the Reuters news wire in the mid-eighties from Carlisle, England: "Actor David Gooderson wrote a one-man play called The Castaway, and when he opened at the repertory theatre of this northern town, he might just as well have been performing on an uninhabited desert island. Nobody turned up to see 33-year-old Gooderson's dramatization of the life of 18th-century poet William Cowper. The only people watching were two usherettes, who applauded loudly at the end of the 90-minute performance."

For some, the show will always go on.

Aloof, distant, self-absorbed, remote -- all these words describe children with autism. "He's in his own universe -- it breaks my heart," says the mother of a six-year-old autistic child. "Much of the time I can't reach him."

Living in a hidden world, an autistic child has weak verbal, social and intellectual skills. Many avoid eye contact, and cannot comprehend an angry tone of voice, or facial gestures such as frowns or smiles. And the number of children being diagnosed with autistic disorders is rising.

The Geneva Centre for Autism in Toronto estimates that 30,000 Canadian children -- one in 200 -- suffer from some form of the disorder, an increase of 600 per cent over the past decade. Part of the increase is explained by the loosening of diagnostic criteria and changing terminology; many children are being labelled with PDD, pervasive developmental disorder, a softer version of autism.

But the increase is real, and doctors have no firm explanation. "We don't know why we're seeing this explosion, but we do know that it's a dramatic one," says Dr. Ari Zaretsky, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

Autism is a group of brain disorders of varying severity, which cause a spectrum of difficult and erratic behaviours. But autistic individuals share one quality: They have difficulty making sense of the world, as they live in a milieu of their own creation -- hence the word autism (auto-ism), a withdrawal into self.

Organizations such as the Geneva Centre cater to a child's whole support network, as autism affects the victim's whole family.

Parents of newly diagnosed autistic children go through a period of adjustment, the first step of which is bereavement.

"Allow yourself to feel bad [initially]. . . . Scream. Grieve," says Dr. Marlene Brill, a psychologist and author of Keys to Parenting the Child With Autism.

"I was devastated when I found out my sons had autism," says the father of five-year-old twins. "They had empty expressions, and no amount of cuddling helped."

Many parents go through a stage of self-recrimination. Searching for a cause, parents begin a blame-game: Was there a problem during pregnancy? Was it the husband's smoking? The mother's social drinking? For example, for years there was a myth that cold and distant parenting -- "refrigerator mothers" -- caused the disorder. Autism is a neurological condition, not the parents' fault.

Confronting such a disabling condition in their child, parents also go into denial, often spending considerable sums of money on tests and unproven cures.

"Thirty-thousand dollars worth of testing later," says the father of 10-year-old autistic triplets Chris, Justin and Michael, "I accepted my sons for who they are -- and I love them even more now that I know they're special."

Through support groups, parents are also taught to deal with embarrassing situations, especially violent flare-ups. "When my daughter gets flustered in public," confides the mother of an 11-year-old, "she bangs her head, screams and bites her own fist, sometimes even drawing blood." Tantrum management is a skill parents of autistic children acquire early.

Some families will engage in heroic measures, even hiring friends for their child. One father admits: "My 10-year-old [autistic] daughter doesn't have any close pals, and that burns me. So I 'rented some kids' for her birthday, which was a mistake." On reflection, he sees he did it more for himself than his daughter.

Having an autistic child has innumerable implications. Families face a "long and painful process of coming to terms with their child's disability," says Dr. Lorna Wing of the British National Autistic Society. But with an involved caregiving network, families can progress from grieving to acceptance to education to advocacy.

Physicians must also educate themselves about the nuances of autism management. There is no single autism test. One useful diagnostic approach is to watch the child at play, and then make a behavioural assessment.

Though intense medical research is underway, no single cause of autism has been identified. The usual suspects are blamed: birth trauma, genes, viral brain infections, food allergies, environmental toxins, the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine -- but there's no proof any of them are responsible for autism. One research goal is to create a prenatal diagnostic test, as is now available for Down syndrome.

Yet medical science is yielding some remarkable insights into a number of brain defects, which directly explain autistic behaviours. "Autism is the result of an abnormality in the structure and function of the brain," says Dr. Bryna Siegel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of The World of the Autistic Child: Understanding and Treating Autistic Spectrum Disorders.

High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging, for example, shows some autistic children have abnormal frontal lobes, the areas of the brain responsible for planning and control. Abnormalities have also been found in the limbic system, the centre of emotional control and tantrum regulation.

Measurements of brain electrical activity, known as EEGs (electroencephalograms), show that autistic children have excessive brain waves, too much background noise, leading to sensory overload.

Even crunchy foods such as chips and nuts can sound "like a raging forest fire," as one autistic adult comments. Remarkably, if an autistic child feels frightened, he may begin head-banging or biting himself, not to injure himself, but to block his fear, focusing his attention on a known stimulus.

The brain wave activity can be so excessive, in fact, that 30 per cent of autistic patients have epileptic seizures. Oversensitive autistic children will insist on maintaining a routine, which they find comforting. It's as if their brains, which are always firing, are too tired to make new connections. That's why autistic children, for example, are distressed if family members don't all sit in the same spots at mealtimes.

On occasion, this excessive brain activity can lead to genius-level skills in a narrow area. Hollywood aside, most gifted autistics, known as autistic savants, do not have the casino-worthy mathematical card-counting abilities of Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man.

But there are individuals who bridge the mysterious divide between autism and genius. Having "islands of ability," autistic savants have been able to memorize things such as perpetual calendars, phone books, messages in Morse code, baseball scoring histories or complex musical pieces.

One of the most famous high-functioning autistics is Dr. Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, who credits her success to being an autistic who "thinks in pictures." She writes, "I can accurately visualize the piece of equipment I designed because my . . . visual image of [a livestock facility] contains all its details, and it can be rotated and made to move like a movie."

High-functioning, successful autistics such as Dr. Grandin believe that starting special educational programs early, and forming lasting rapport with trusted teachers, is critical to an autistic child's future success. And finding such programs, caregivers and institutions becomes the vocation of many families with autistic children.

But the diversity of available therapies matches the spectrum of autism itself -- the array of behavioural modifications, approaches and philosophies is intimidating and vast. Deciding on an educational program for their child, parents must undergo rigorous self-appraisal, and answer several questions, such as:

How mentally limited is their child?

What is the highest level of function that might be expected?

Is the child disabled enough to warrant institutionalization?

Is the child a danger to himself or others?

Should the child be on medication?

Some of these emotionally charged questions are not easily addressed, and the answers may change with time, financial resources, housing and the family's ability to cope. With the assistance of caseworkers, parents must realistically assess their child's needs and then decide how best to teach social skills, interaction, language, possibly job placement, even mainstream integration.

The Son-Rise Program, for example, is an expensive American therapeutic regimen that combines home-based play-centred approaches: Therapists spend most of their time with the child in the child's home, and the instruction is individually tailored.

Other therapists make liberal use of picture-word cards, music therapy, drawing as a means of communication and escorted outings. For the severely language-impaired, caregivers even teach autistic children sign language.

Most therapists are also specially trained to engage children, intruding into their world as necessary, befriending them in the process. "If an autistic child is allowed to withdraw into his own world, his brain will not fully develop," says caseworker Roberta Sklar. And parents learn to savour small milestones. One couple said: "We were delighted that our [autistic] son has started to share toys with his younger brother."

But accessing such multidisciplinary care is expensive, and parents of autistic children become reluctant political activists.

Parents must contend with governments, which are hesitant to pay thousands of dollars in therapy costs annually. From the world of the autistic child, parents move to the domain of bureaucracy, which they say can be similarly confusing, slow-moving and frustrating.

Autism is on the rise, and will increasingly tax the patience of parents and society. But if the mark of a civilized society is how it cares for its less fortunate members, multidisciplinary solutions and adequate resources must be found.
Dr. Shafiq Qaadri is a Toronto family physician with a special interest in medical education.
Autism primer

SYMPTOMS

Does not point to objects

Avoids eye-to-eye contact

Lacks facial expression

Lacks make-believe play

Emotionally unavailable

Not seeking to share
enjoyment

Poor language development

Problems focusing attention

Overly repetitive mannerisms

Resistant to change

Significant multiple allergies

Oversensitivity to sound, light and touch

Tantrums and outbursts

Self-abusive behaviour

MANAGEMENT OPTIONS

Early diagnosis

Art therapy

Language therapy

Social-skills therapy

Music therapy

Controlling allergy and toxin exposure

Structured educational routines

Intensive Behavioural
Intervention (IBI)

Group-home living

Medications such as antidepressants and tranquilizers

Seminars and workshops for family members

VANCOUVER -- George Campbell, who instilled in Kim Campbell the conservative values that helped make his youngest daughter prime minister, has died in Vancouver. He was 82.

He became ill on July 16 and died the next day. The cause of death is not yet known.

Mr. Campbell was a well-known lawyer and prosecutor who was grievously wounded in action as an infantryman fighting in Italy in 1944.

After a slow and painful recovery, he pledged himself as an advocate for veterans. He helped build housing for destitute veterans on skid row in Vancouver and was long active with the Last Post Fund, which ensures that old soldiers are given proper burials.

He was president of the Dominion Unit of the Army, Navy and Air Force Veterans in Canada from 1988 to 1990. "I'm a Conservative in that I believe in free enterprise and in people taking some measure of responsibility for their own development," he said in 1993, the year his daughter became prime minister. "Kim was brought up, like I was, on the ethic that you only got out of life what you worked for."

His influence on his daughters was such that both, to their surprise, pursued the law.

Known for his quick wit and optimistic spirit, Mr. Campbell was at first forthcoming about the family history as journalists prepared biographies of Kim Campbell when she suddenly became a contender for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1993. "Kimmy was never what you would call finger-in-the-mouth shy," he said in a quote typical for its honesty and colour.

Yet he was deeply hurt and felt his trust had been breached when details of his private life became fodder for public consumption. "I don't think anybody has a right to know about my personal life," he said. "And I am resisting opening what I consider to be a closed book. It can't be reactivated."

Like many men of his generation, Mr. Campbell was wary of undue physical affection, sometimes saying to his daughters: "Consider yourself hugged." The expression was dry both in wit and emotion.

George Thomas Campbell was the youngest of three sons born in Montreal to immigrants from Glasgow. His father was a fierce disciplinarian who abandoned the family when George was 2. The boys were raised in a series of foster homes and George spent his adolescence in Saskatchewan.

He enlisted shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939. He was posted to Port Alberni on Vancouver Island with the Army Dental Corps. He became smitten with Phyllis Cook, a dentist's daughter who went by the name Lissa. She was a black-haired beauty who had returned home on leave from tracking Nazi submarines in the Atlantic

The ballad-singing, ukulele-strumming lad proved popular in Port Alberni. "A master at mimicking accents, he delighted townsfolk with his stand-up comedy routines," journalist Robert Fife wrote in his 1993 biography of Kim Campbell. One who proved immune to his charms, at least at first, was Miss Cook.

After she returned to wartime duties on the East Coast, though, Mr. Campbell deluged her with a steady stream of letters. They married in 1944 and, soon after, Mr. Campbell asked to be relieved of his sergeant's stripes as an instructor so that he could go overseas with the Seaforth Highlands. Before long, he was wounded. "A mortar bomb dropped and shrapnel caught me in the side," he once told The Globe and Mail. "I may still carry a few tiny fragments with me."

The mortar exploded during intense fighting amid farmhouses outside Bagnacavallo, Italy. His best friend, 26-year-old Leo Charbonneau of Gravelbourg, Sask., was killed on Dec. 14 and Mr. Campbell suffered perforations to his loins and midsection.

"Thanks to the wonder drug sulpha, he survived his abdominal wounds, but the experience of seeing his best friend cut in half left other scars," Kim Campbell wrote in her 1996 memoir Time and Chance. "After returning home, he would sometimes wake up screaming from nightmares about horrors my mother could only guess at."

Mr. Campbell's recovery was long and painful. He was in and out of veterans hospitals for years, seeking treatment for abscesses that formed in his wounds.

His first daughter, Alix Paula Bernadette, was two months old by the time he first saw her in May, 1945. He moved his young family to a camp on Mount Arrowsmith on Vancouver Island, where he worked as a forestry lookout.

He soon enrolled at Victoria College at Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, rejoining his family in Port Alberni on weekends. On March 10, 1947, a second daughter, Avril Phaedra Douglas, was born.

After finding a modest cottage in veterans housing in Vancouver, he completed his bachelor of arts degree at the University of British Columbia in 1949. His wife taught herself to type and held clerical jobs to finance her husband's law-school education. He was called to the bar in 1953 and opened a one-man general law practice.

The marriage, already rocky, steadily deteriorated after Lissa suffered a crippling hip injury in an accident on a rare snowy day in Vancouver. In 1959, she left the family home in the well-to-do neighbourhood of Kerrisdale to live aboard a boat in Europe with her lover. Soon after, 12-year-old Avril renamed herself Kim.

Details of the unhappy union were revived in the frenzy around their daughter's sudden success in 1993. In 1962, Mr. Campbell married Virginia (Ginny) Vessey, a woman 20 years his junior and not much older than his eldest daughter. They divorced in 1969.

By that time, he had become a well-regarded city prosecutor, his reputation built on a thorough knowledge of the law. He later served as a justice of the peace and a manager of court services.

It was at court one day that he met social worker Marguerite Parkinson. They married in 1969.

Mr. Campbell suffered many broken bones when struck by a car at the age of 72 and he endured a six-point bypass operation on his heart two years later. "He had many illnesses, yet he was always up," Mrs. Campbell said. "He was a great fellow. An optimist."

He enthusiastically supported his daughter and joined her at the Tory leadership convention in 1993. "Every time something went wrong," he said after her second-ballot victory, "she worked twice as hard." He was also on hand when she officially took office as Canada's first woman prime minister.

The following year, Mr. Campbell seemed to find solace after at last visiting the grave of his friend Private Charbonneau at Ravenna War Cemetery, not far from where he himself was injured. It had taken nearly 50 years to return to Italy.

He leaves his wife, Marguerite, and adult daughters Alix Campbell,