CANADIAN ARTS STILL AID AFRICA

It’s been one year to the day since a group of Canada’s top entertainers launched a major assault on the country’s sense of compassion for Africa’s famine victims. Almost $3 million later, “people haven’t stopped caring,” a spokesman for the relief effort says.

Maureen Jack, executive director for the Vancouver-based Northern Lights for Africa Society, says the nonprofit charity still receives “$5,000 to $6,000 a month in private contributions, and some of this is coming from people who have already made donations.

“It doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that’s here today and gone tomorrow,” Jack said in an interview. “There is a burnout factor as far as how much compassion you can feel and how much giving you can do, I suppose. But, in fact, I think that eyes have been opened and people really aren’t willing to turn around and ignore it.”

On Feb. 10, 1985, prompted by famine relief projects in Britain and the United States, more than 50 of Canada’s top recording artists and entertainers gathered at a Toronto studio to record “Tears Are Not Enough,” a rousing ballad that was to become the year’s top-selling single with more more than 300,000 copies purchased nationally.