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For a Prime Minister who boasts that he has no trouble keeping his hands off issues best delegated to the cabinet, Jean CHRÉTIEN can sometimes be a decidedly hands-on leader.

It is the the original cutbacks story. A prototype for downsizing the National Dream. Canada's AVRO ARROW, the most advanced jet fighter of its day, was a Fifties dream, a warplane forged from the giddy paranoia of the Cold War.

If omens mean anything, the members of Prime Minister Jean CHRÉTIEN's new version of Team Canada may have some cause for concern.

Divorced and living by himself in a drab Charlottetown apartment complex for the past 10 years, Roger Bell did not go out of his way to meet people. "He didn't say as much as hello," said John Acorn, Bell's next-door neighbor.

"The guy was working full time on GM's property and he was driving a Ford," Paul Tellier sputters, his native French bending vowels as he delivers the punch line to his anecdote.

With its fictional reconstruction of dinosaurs from prehistoric bits of DNA, the thrilling 1990 best-seller Jurassic Park and the spinoff blockbuster movie popularized the notion of genetic engineering.

It is a community whose job is to teach - and grade - the nation's students. So it seemed appropriate last week when public school educators across Canada received a report card of their own.

In a downtown Toronto hotel last week, 300 trustees and school board staff had gathered for the annual conference of the Ontario Public School Board Association.

In the offices of WestJet Airlines Inc., frugality is prized.

At moments during last week's Liberal nomination meeting in the provincial riding of Humber East in Corner Brook, Nfld., the spirit of the legendary Joey Smallwood seemed to permeate the room. At the microphone, a pumped-up Brian Tobin, in a pugilist's stance, was in full rhetorical flight.

The three wolves were laid out on blankets - a young 105-lb. animal with a sleek black coat, and a pair of slightly smaller, grey-flecked ones, still unconscious after being tranquillized earlier in the day.

By the standards he set during his street-brawling youth in Shawinigan, it was not much of a rout.

Wayne Gretzky has a long memory. The most prolific scorer in the history of hockey can recall the tiniest details of past games. His business life has been enhanced by his ability to remember names and faces, and he never forgets the kindness of friends.

Dumpy, balding and bespectacled, he did not look like a demonic angel of death.

When Maxine Lawson first suspected that her two-year-old son, Caden, might be picking up nasty habits from television, she was not sure what to do about it. "If he caught a glimpse of something like wrestling, he'd start kicking and pushing," the Toronto accountant recalls.

As Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's government tried to evoke a new era of Canadian team spirit in the House of Commons last week, it was no coincidence that the one premier who came to listen was Captain Canada himself.

In the end, the protest sputtered out, a victim of high seas and bad weather in the choppy Straits of Florida. The 35 boats and several private planes that set out from Key West, Fla.

Abdul Kareem Shaghnoubi was pounding dough in an Israeli bakery on March 3 when his son Raad blew himself up, along with 18 Israelis on the No. 18 bus on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road.

When David Harris, a 40-year-old Toronto elementary school teacher, arrived at the Ontario legislature last week, the ornate building was surrounded by almost 5,000 striking members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU).

The debacle began with only 31.6 seconds left in the overtime period. The University of Moncton Blue Eagles, the reigning Canadian collegiate hockey champions, were down one game to nil in their best-of-three divisional final against the University of Prince Edward Island Panthers.