EDITORIAL _ Canada-USSR. relations The visit to the Soviet Union by Minister of External Affairs, Joe Clark, has a potential for the positive which will be welcomed by a broad spectrum of Canadians. Improved relations between our two countries can have only bene- ficial results for Canadians, and clearly the Soviet Union believes the benefits are mutual. One agenda item is trade: the USSR is an important market for this country. Last year Canada sold them $2.1 billion worth of goods but bought only $25 million worth from them. Obviously, since trade is a two-way street, the USSR will want a better balance than that. The importance to us of grain sales alone is noteworthy — not only for the farmers and the agricultural industry, but in the many ancillary jobs created for Canadians. Clark and his counterpart, Andrei Gro- myko, foreign minister of the USSR, will dis- cuss other substantial matters including scientific and cultural exchanges, again mutu- ally beneficial, and certainly, as Canadian scientists and artists have attested, of great benefit to Canada. And, it should be noted that on these good relations or lack of them rest at least a few of the supports for world peace and nuclear disar- mament. When Clark left on Mar. 29, complaints arose over the inclusion on the 21-member delegation of seven Tory MPs but none from the opposition parties. The explanation that it’s a government, not a parliamentary, delegation may or may not enhance the Mulroney government’s growing reputation as the most undemocratic government in memory. But look at it another way. There is an ele- ment of fence-mending connected with the trip, and Joe Clark is the man to do it. Isn’t there just a touch of irony in the fact that it was Prime Minister Joe Clark who, in January 1980, cut off scientific exchanges, and cut off cultural exchanges? At that time, following the fickle lead of U.S. president Carter, the Clark government put a ceiling of wheat sales to the USSR, reduced the number of Aeroflot flights to Canada and took other technological and financial measures which badly damaged rela- tions between the two countries. That’s when Canada decided to mimic the Americans and boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. All this was done in the name of interference in Soviet affairs which are no business of Canada — the relations between the USSR and Afghanistan, the assistance given Afghan- istan against the counter-revolutionary bandits financed then and now by U.S. and Pakistan, both working with the CIA. Now the Mulroney government has sent none other than Joe Clark to the Soviet Union to seek improved relations. That is what the press statements say the trip is for, and it is to be hoped they are accurate. It should be remembered that it was by tail- ing after the U.S. regime and interfering in what was the business of the USSR that relations were severely hurt before. If Clark has on his, shopping list matters of Soviet internal affairs, or its relations with other countries, the visit will lose the fine opportunity it had to take a step forward in Canadian-Soviet relations. It would be in the interests of Canada for those in the peace movements, in the scientific and cultural communities, in fact, in all walks of life, to let the Mulroney government know that positive steps in those relations are what are needed, and the sooner they are taken the better. HOW CAN CANADIAN INDUSTRY COMPETE WHH OTHER COUNTRIES WHEN OUR WORKERS ARE 50 GREEDY a || CY MeRRIs UAS Wa RIBUNE ~ Editor — SEAN GRIFFIN Assistant Editor — DAN KEETON Business & Circulation Manager — PAT O'CONNOR Graphics — ANGELA KENYON Published weekly at 2681 East Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C. V5K 1Z5 Phone (604) 251-1186 Subscription Rate: Canada — $14 one year; $8 six months Foreign — $20 one year; Second class mail registration number 1560 ccording to the puffed-up prose of the Socred government’s propaganda sheet, the B.C. Government News, the unequivocally that the unions were right when they slammed the AMCA Interna- tional deal last summer as a cut-price sweeping tax cuts for business laid out in the Mar. 14 budget are to be “key elements in the government’s program. ..of eco- nomic renewal. ..the budget measures provide a powerful incentive for business and indus- try to undertake job-creating investments in new economic activity,” the News pro- claims. That’s the theory of Reaganomics, of course — get the government off the backs of business by cutting taxes and it will spur the corporations to use the money to open new plants and create new jobs. It’s the same line that MacMillan Bloedel and others peddled before Curtis’ travelling tax reform road show last year. But the plain fact is that tax cuts don’t result in companies investing in new plants and equipment — and now there’s a U.S. study that refutes the corporate myth. Prepared by the union and community- group-based Coalition for Tax Justice, the study is synopsized in a recent issue of the Guild Reporter, published by The News- paper Guild. Covering the period 1981-83 — the period over which Reagan’s wide array of 1981 business tax cuts became effective — it examines the annual reports of 238 major U.S. companies. — The results are revealing: @ Those- 238 companies accumulated among them $90 billion in federal tax incentives over the two-year period. Yet they reduced new investment by 15.5 per cent. In fact, they paid tax at an average ra~« of only 4.3 per cent of earnings, less than one-tenth of the U.S. statutory corporate tax rate of 46 per cent. @ Those corporations which benefited People and Issues the most from the Reagan tax cuts — those which paid no taxes or got back tax rebates — reduced investment by the most. Fifteen companies which paid zero taxes on their incomes in fact reduced new investment by 29.3 per cent. @ The greatest beneficiary of all, Gen- eral Electric which got back $283 million in tax rebates despite profits of $6.5 billion over the three years reduced investment by 15 per cent over the same period. @ In contrast, the 50 companies in the survey which paid the highest tax rates (and according to Reaganomics should invest the least) in fact increased capital investment by 4.3 per cent. Where did all the money go? According ~ to the study, in two directions: into corpo- rate profits, disbursed through dividends to shareholders, and into corporate mergers and takeovers. What’s worse is that in the U.S., as in B.C., the tax breaks to business are being paid for at the expense of higher taxes for wage earners and reduced social pro- grams. We’ve said before that the tax breaks will be nothing but a gift to big business paid for out of our pockets. But the dimension of it is startling indeed. * * * t’s not often that a paper like the Nanaimo Free Press turns a critical eye on itself and acknowledges that a cam- paign by the trade union movement was absolutely right. But that’s just what Free Press managing editor Frank Phillips did Mar. 28 in a lengthy follow-up article on the AMCA deal. That deal, as readers may recall, was a plan concocted by AMCA International, in conjunction with Socred Small Business Development Minister Don Phillips, to assemble oil rig modules intended for use in the Beaufort Sea, on an industrial site in Nanaimo. The deal involved a sweetheart contract with the business manager of Local 712 of the Ironworkers -which reduced wage levels by 25 per cent and cut various other conditions. The opposition to the contract mounted by the B.C. Federation of Labor and the B.C. and Yukon Building Trades Council culminated in two votes being taken by the Local 712 membership, both overwhelm- ingly rejecting the pact. The response of the business commun- ity, echoed loudly by the Free Press, was to condemn the trade union movement for the loss of jobs. There was an orchestrated clamor of voices all attacking trade union wages and conditions. That was last September. Last month, Free Press editor Phillips, Nanaimo mayor Graeme Roberts and logging contractor Jim Kemp took a trip to Everett, Washington to see another oil module fabrication project. What they _ found out when they went there was obviously revealing to Phillips for he began his story this way: “The ‘Great AMCA Myth’ has been blown. “But it took a flying visit last week to the blossoming deepsea port of Everett, Washington to do it. “Now it has to be said clearly and wages ripoff of the B.C. labor market.” The three discovered that the company fabricating the modules, Fluor Construc- tors, far from working at cut-rate wages as AMCA claimed its competitors were doing, is paying rates that are “based on existing area wages for those unions.’ Seven unions have a collective agreement with Fluor for the site work. “The conclusion to be drawn,” said Phillips, ‘is that although many in this atea acted in good faith believing there really was a workable deal, it may never been designed to be a successful project bid. In short, the labor market in B.C. and the determination of many of us to get jobs for our unemployed was exploited in a game of ‘corporate chess.’ ” That’s just about what the B.C. Fed. and the Building Trades said — six months ago. * * * t’s almost inevitable when you are gathering lists of names of people who took part in campaigns 50 years ago that there will be some omissions. And so it was when we were honoring those who took part in the historic fund drive in 1934 to launch the B.C. Workers’ News in 1935. Although we did send the request for names out through the paper, some assumed that we would know, perhaps forgetting that none of the paper’s staff even came into the world until the name had already changed to the Pacific Tribune in 1946. We know now that Sylvia Lowe and Vi Dewhurst were among those who helped bring the paper into being. And like many others, their support for the paper con- tinues with the 1985 drive. 4 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, APRIL 15, 1985.