$ |e
“THESE DAYS WHEN SOMEONE ASKS: ‘WHAT'S

UP?'...YOU CAN SAY: COFFEE, OIL, GAS, WATER,
CLOTHES, MEDICAL CARE, HOUSING..."

©1977 Universal Press Syndicate

The failure of the Social Credit
government to pass the Rent
Stabilization Act — setting the
maximum allowable rent increase
at seven per cent — is a “‘sleazy
deal’? which has already resulted
in thousands of tenants being
forced to pay increases at the old
rate of 10.6 per cent.

That was the message voiced by
several speakers including Van-
couver alderman Harry Rankin
and Vancouver Centre NDP MLAs
Emery Barnes and Gary Lauk who
addressed some 200 tenants in a
rally Sunday called by the West
End Tenants Association to press
the campaign for the maintenance
of rent controls and for
strengthening of the Landlord and
Tenant Act.

Although the new rent increase

~ ceiling of seven per cent was an-

Gardom’s ‘grandstand play’ hit

By ALD. HARRY RANKIN

Attorney-general Garde Gar-
dom’s recént announcement that
drinking drivers may get roadside
suspensions if they have
breathalyzer readings of .05 was
more a political grandstand play
than a serious effort to cope with a
growing social problem.

The fact is, and I’m sure the
attorney-general knows it, that a
breathalyzer reading of .08 is
defined in the Criminal Code of
Canada as a criminal offense. The
province has no constitutional
authority to override a federal
statute. So the attorney-general is
whistling in the wind when he
makes noises about .08 readings.

Secondly, the attorney-general is
ignoring a main source of the
problem, the abuse of liquor laws
in beer parlors and cocktail
lounges. He wants to put all the

Most impaired drivers get that
way by over imbibing in beer
parlors and bars. They are allowed
to continue buying and drinking
liquor long after they are obviously
drunk, because it’s good for
business and good for profits. I
think that those who oversell liquor
to the public should be held
responsible for their actions. A
condition of their liquor license
should be that they don’t abuse it.

I am in full agreement with the
idea of more road blocks by the
police; in fact I think road blocks
should be ‘practiced 365 days a
year. Then every driver will know
what he has to face if he gets
behind the wheel when he has been
drinking.

Mobile breathalyzer stations are
good and breathalyzers in beer
parlors and cocktail lounges could
also help.

It’s difficult to overestimate the

social costs of drinking and driving
drivers in our society. Families are
deprived because one or both
parents are alcoholics, lives are
wrecked, accidents occur on the
job as well as on the road. The
costs resulting from property

damage, court costs, medical costs’

andsuch, areenormous. The list is
almost endless.

It’s a problem that can’t be
solved by just prosecuting or
treating the victims or by the at-
torney-general’s so-called “all-out
war’ on drinking drivers. To make
more liquor available in more
places and then get tough with
people who over imbibe solves
nothing and at best is rather
hypocritical.

Effective action must include
some get tough policies against
those who sell liquor as well as a
much better campaign of public
education about the use of alcohol,
paid for by a tax on the alcohol.

| Tenants protest Socred
‘sleazy deal’ on rents

nounced by the government in
January, the Act was never passed

into law. Passage is expected_

during the current session but the
effective date has been moved up
to May 1, with the result that
tenants whose anniversary. dates
fell between January and May, will
have to pay increases at 10.6 per
cent.

“The government decided to
bring in a new date convenient to
itself and its friends the landlords
— and to hell with the tenants,”
Vancouver Centre MLA Emery
Barnes charged. ‘‘A lot of tenants
are going to be victimized.”

Valerie Barrett, acting president
of the West End _ Tenants
Association, had earlier addressed
a letter to Social Credit consumer
and corporate affairs minister
Rafe Mair expressing ‘‘deep
concern” over the government’s
failure to pass the new rent ceiling
and pointing out that many lan-
dlords were continuing to impose
the 10.6 per cent increase.

“But we have had no reply from
the minister,” she said.

The failureto enact the seven per
cent ceiling coupled with recent

Who controls
housing lots?

The Socred housing report put
before the legislature in March
maintained that there was no
evidence that any private
company controlled enough
|_ land for housing to influence the
price of lots.

This is contradicted by the
Dennis and Fish Report (1971)
undertaken by the CMHC,
which concluded that six de-
velopment corporations control
enough land to meet 85 per cent
of Vancouver’s housing needs
over the next 10 years.

. emasculated.

announcements that rent controls
will be phased out and the Lan-
dlord and Tenant Act amended in
favor of landlords have sparked
new fear that what little protective
legislation now exists will be

Tenants at Sunday’s rally heard
B.C. Tenants Organization
secretary Margaret De Wees
outline plans for the tenants lobby —
to Victoria called for June 21 to
demand maintenance of present
legislation and improved rights of
tenants.

. Participants will board the 8
a.m. bus scheduled for the 9 a.m.
ferry from Tsawwassen. The cost
is approximately $11.75 and $5.50
for senior citizens.

“The time has come to act,” De
Wees told the meeting. ‘“‘We need
strengthened rent controls and a
strengthened Landlord and Tenant
act, tailored to the needs of
tenants.

“The landlords are already
getting a pretty good deal,’’ she
stated.

Both Barnes and Lauk pledged to
support the tenants’ movement in
the Legislature when the proposed
legislation is introduced.

“We will not sit by and watch the
whit tling away-of the Landlord and
Tenant Act,’’ Lauk declared,
adding that the present Act
“clearly is not adequate to protect
tenants.”

“We intend to press, no matter
how long it takes, for greater .
protection for tenants.”

_ The B.C. Tenants Organization
has long sought provincial
legislation which would relate
rents to floor space and the ability
of tenants to pay and would compel
landlords to justify rent increases
on the basis of increased costs.

It has also urged inclusion of
rooming house residents under the _
Act and the establishment of -

blame on the victims of alcohol.

Yes,

By MAURICE RUSH

Pow Thursday night I rushed home from a meeting to
get to my TV set by 10 o’clock to watch the widely
publicized television interview of Barbara Walters with
Fidel Castro. I had been frustrated once before two weeks
earlier when at the last minute the program was cancelled
with an announcement that it would be rescheduled and
would run an hour instead of the half hour originally in-
tended.

At 10 o’clock sharp I was seated in front of my TV
wait ing for the program. Sharply at ten they announced
the program ‘Fidel Castro Speaks’ would come on im-
mediately after a commercial. A series of six com-
mercials followed, and then without any explanation a
cops and robbers program of the Serpico series began. My
wife and I were furious as we watched about 20 minutes of
this typical U.S. television fare, and we were just about to
turn it off when all of a sudden Castro and Barbara
Walters appeared on the screen. No introduction, no
explanation — nor has there been one to this moment as
far as I can find out. The first 20 minutes of the interview

were effectively killed. Why? Certainly some explanation

should be made.

It was clear from the outset of the interview that the
million-dollar-a-year TV personality was outclassed and
very uncomfortable. She was not the confident and self-
assured interviewer she has been on previous occasions.
What made her look bad was not so much the inane and
cold-war questions she asked, but her inability to cope
with Castro’s replies which caused her to shift subjects
quickly to avoid further embarrassment.

At the conclusion of the interview Barbara Walters had
to set the thinking of her viewers straight in case they
might have got some wrong impressions from what
Castro had said. She told her viewers that Castro suffered
from paranoia when it came to the CIA and that he saw
the CIA everywhere and behind everything. Secondly, she
wanted her viewers to believe that Castro was naive about
the Soviet Union, and believed the Soviets were really
good guys and not the terrible ogres she and her media
buddies had been making out for so many years.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JUNE 17, 1977—Page 2

‘Barbara, the CIA is still at it

Barbara Walters may have got away with her attempt
to salvage something out of her interview to bolster the
U.S. anti-Soviet and anti-Castro line if it had not been for
the fact that the very next night CBS commentator Bill
Moyer presented a two-hour program entitled The CIA’s
Secret Army. I wonder if Barbara Walters was watching
that program which in effect presented two hours of proof
that what Castro had said about the CIA and USS.
presidents was not an exaggeration. I’m sure if Castro
had been watching it he would have found out a few more
details of the dirty tricks of the CIA and the role of
president Jack Kennedy and his brother Bobby and other
high U.S. officials during the peak of the anti-Cuba
campaign.

The CBS program was a frightening and shocking ex-
posure of the CIA and U.S. policy makers. And it dealt not
only with history, but showed that after the missile crisis,
when the U.S. had undertaken in an agreement with the
Soviet Union not to invade Cuba, that a special 2,000-man
army of exiled Cubans led by 600 CIA personnel was
established in Florida to wage sabotage and guerrilla war
against Cuba, including plans to assassinate Castro and
other Cuban leaders.

The program demonstrated the hypocrisy of president
Kennedy as it showed him speaking in Seattle about how
leaders in a free society cannot resort to methods of
terror and assassination that dictators can, while at the
same time he had issued orders to do exactly that against
Cuba. The program also details the role of top Mafia dons
who were recruited to plan and carry out the
assassinations. CIA officials interviewed admitted that
the ‘‘word’”’ came from the top of the U.S. government,
much like the Mafia don would give it: ““‘We want him
removed’’ which to the CIA heads meant eliminated or
murdered.

The problem, the CIA men in charge of the operation
said, was to assassinate Castro and other Cuban leaders

“but todo it ina way that the president could deny he had

anything todo with it. The program pointed out that on the
very day that Kennedy was assassinated talks were being
held in Paris between a U.S. representative and a man

who the CIA thought could get close enough to Castro to
murder him. The instrument chosen was a pen with a —
poisoned tip from which one prick of the skin would have
meant certain death.

In case anyone thought all these dirty tricks were in the

_ past, Moyer’s program soon removed any doubt. The title

of the program The CIA’s Secret Army, did not only apply
to the past. Moyer showed pictures and evidence to
support the charge that a secret army today operates out
of Florida, in violation of U.S. law, to carry out bombings,
assassinations, sabotage and other clandestine activities
against Cuba, and that this secret army admits to having
been responsible for the recent destruction of a Cuban
commercial flight in which more than many people were
killed.

The program shows members of the secret army with
modern, automatic weapons undoubtedly provided by the
CIA. It also shows the president of the U.S. banana
republic, Nicaragua, Gen. Samosa, long connected with
the CIA, pledging the terrorist army full support in their
activities. The U.S. has denied any responsibility for the
terrorist activities of the CIA’s secret army, but it permits
them to operate from U.S. territory and allows one of its
puppets in Central America, who wouldn’t last a day
without U.S. support, to pledge public support to this
secret army.

Yes, Barbara, Castro wasn’t exaggerating. His charges
were all true. And as long as president Carter allows these
activities against Cuba to continue his own credibility is

brought very much into question. -

~~ TRIBUNE

Editor —- MAURICE RUSH
Assistant Editor SEAN GRIFFIN
Business and Circulation Manager — FRED WILSON
Published weekly at Suite 101 — 1416 Commercial Drive,
Vancouver, B.C. V5L 3X9. Phone 251-1186

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