EDITORIAL

Exactly the policies being flung at us by the grinning
and high-paid Minister of Finance, Marc Lalonde, are
the policies which have produced 1,321,000 (officially)
unemployed in Canada. In fact there are hundreds of
thousands more. The capitalist system clearly intends to
squeeze out of the working people the last ounce of
exploitation, and if it can, the last vestige of hope.

Lalonde’s message is that you have no choice, you
subjects of monopoly capitalism — you’ll take it and
you'll shut up.

The working-class message to him should be: what
we'll take is something quite different. We'll take jobs
and if necessary the plants with them; we'll take rising
living standards and job security however hard we have
to fight for them; we’ll take back all the social benefits

stolen from us; and in due course we'll take the govern-

ment as well.

The capitalist system works day in and day out
against the working people. And while its propaganda
works relentlessly to tell us otherwise, it is only the
corporate elite for which it works.

The 1983 jobless rate was the highest in Canada since
the capitalist depression of the 1930s (with the exception
of Dec. 1982’s 12.8 per cent). It has to be called the
capitalist depression because the year 1930 was when

. the Soviet Union, the only socialist country at the time,

eliminated unemployment for all time.
The record number of Canadians denied jobs in 1983
coincides with the year when profits soared to an extra

_ Job policies challenged

74 per cent on top of the previous year.

The statistics demonstrate the price this system has
exacted:

© The annual average jobless rate in 1983 was 11.9
per cent of the work force;

© The unemployment rate in December for men
15-24 was 21.1 per cent.

© The rate for women 15-24 showed that 16 per cent
were unable to get jobs — despite the nerve-wracking
hours of slogging and knocking on doors;

© There are 103,000 hidden undemployed who know
there are no jobs, refuse to go through the useless
motions of searching, and, receive no unemployment
insurance,

The government’s answer is to provide “incentives”
for employers, paid for by the taxpayers, while the
corporations skim off the rich profits. And so Canada
shares the capitalist swamp with all its allies, the U.S.
where some nine million are denied work, and Britain
where more than three million breadwinners have no
jobs. £

The Communist Party has challenged the ruling class
to an economic and political duel. It demands jobs or
incomes for all; benefits from the scientific and techno-
logical revolution; defence of the trade unions and
democracy; joint economic and political struggle;
extension of social programs; a struggle against racism
and for equality for women; and the building of forces
to carry through these struggles.

Armaments and acid rain

Canadians are becoming ever more impatient with
the continued U.S. pollution of the waters and atmos-
phere of Canada, and with Washington’s unwillingness
to accept responsibility and clean up its mess.

This is not to excuse corporate polluters on this side
of the border, or foot-dragging governments who let
them get away with it. They are guilty of the destruction
of life and cannot be allowed any peace until they
change the damaging course they are on which preys on
both people and environment.

The ultimate pollution would be nuclear war —
irreversible and inexorable in its ability to destroy life.

And, it is not without relevance to the human need to -

prevent suffering and death by chemical means that the
USSR, on Jan. 10 this year, proposed a ban on chemical
weapons, beginning with such a ban on the European
continent. The world has witnessed the atrocities
wrought by the U.S. mass use of chemical killers in
Vietnam, which boomeranged on many unsuspecting
USS. draftees.

Canada’s Environment Minister Charles Caccia
made another connection between the U.S. plans for
world military domination and the choking, poisoning,
cancerous environment to which U.S. and Canadian
citizens are subjected as a consequence of the generation
of super-profits. ;

While attending a meeting of the Canada-US. Inter-
national Joint Commission on boundary waters last
November, Caccia told the Indianapolis media that the
U.S. could clean up acid rain — one of the persistent

and growing forms of pollution — by building “‘one
nuclear submarine less a year”.

The U.S. administration did not send a representa-
tive to a recent three-day conference in Toronto on acid
rain, although invited, whereas the Canadian govern-
ment did. And although William Ruckelhaus, adminis-
trator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
promised three months ago that more money would be
spent to “study” toxic wastes, there are no results.

Now, with election time approaching in the U.S. —
and glimpsed by some in Canada -— big business poli-
ticians are beginning to pay lip service to a clean-up.
Even Reagan can be expected to put away his execu-
tioner’s tools and start purring about his concern for the
environment and its effect on human and other life.

It requires more than electioneering. At the recent
Toronto conference (organized by the United Church
of Canada and the National Council of Churches in the
U.S.) the Inco nickel and copper monopoly of Sudbury,
Ontario, pleaded poverty as its reason for not installing
a smelting process that would reduce the company’s

acid gas emission by 50 per cent. (Acid rain, created by —

sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides is held responsible
for the already achieved death of every living thing in
hundreds of Canadian lakes.) Inco is involved; and
huge emissions come from the U.S.

It’s time governments enforced a clean-up — but
not at the taxpayer’s expense as the corporations
demand between fits of weeping over their profit losses.
Corporate wealth should be put to work to make the
environment fit to live in, not to enrich the war machine
of Reagan and his Canadian apologists.

| Seymour Joseph in the Daily World.

Profiteer of the week

Crown Life Insurance Co., had an after-tax profit for the nine
months ended Sept. 30, of $24,000,000. Ranked eighth by assets in
Financial Post's 15 top life insurers, Crown is 92 per cent owned by
Extendicare Ltd., soon to be known. as Crownx — along with —
Crowntek, and Crown Financial Services.

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Ar who has heard various representatives of Social

‘

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People and Issues

e’re always on the lookout for cartoonists but when

the cartoon shown here came across the desk it was
especially interesting—the artist is 11 years old. His name is
Daniel Jackson and if the work here is any indication, we're
likely to see much more in the future. According to his
father, well-known civic activist and candidate for the
Committee of Progressive Electors, Sol Jackson, “he gets
the benefit of all the discussion that goes on at home but
the ideas are all his own. He sits at the table with the rest of
us, listening — and then he’ll head off to his room and
come back later with a cartoon.He has also joined us on
peace marches including the Walk for Peace Apr. 23.

* * *

#*°\ Credit denounce socialism and accuse it of “crushing
individual initiative” and “creating vast economic ineffi-
ciency” would marvel at the comments that Socred Tour-
ism Minister Claude Richmond made when the Soviet
Union announced its decision two weeks ago to mount a
display at Expo 86.

Expo 86 officials announced Jan. 5 that the USSR
would be taking part in the international exposition on
transportation, an addition that is expected to add consid-
erable prestige to the event. The Soviet Union will appar-
ently have the largest pavilion it has ever mounted since its
renowned pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal.

But Richmond’s comments were particularly interesting
coming from one of the free enterprise gang in Victoria.
“The Soviet Union is among the world’s most advanced
nations in the area of transportation and communica-
tions,” he said, “‘and their participation will be of immense
benefit to the Exposition.” —

According to the release, he also noted that the Soviets, ~
with their history of space exploration, “has an impressive

‘
inst STRIFE OERE sade

ith the new year came the sad news that long time :
Tribune supporter Fred Kowaluk had passed away in : o Ses ; |
Vancouver Dec. 26 after a lengthy illness. he continued his political activity in the progressive com-
Born Sept. 14, 1909 in the Ukraine, he originally immi- munity, taking out membership in the Communist Party.
grated to Winnipeg where he joined many others in help- He was also a member of the Steelworkers, having worked
display of historical space technology which willundoubt- ing to build the Ukrainian Labor-Farmer Temple for many years at eee Trucks in Burnaby. a
edly be exhibited at Expo 86.” ~ Association — now the Association of United Ukrainian memorial service was he Dec. 30 at which representatives
All of which goes to show: international exchanges can Canadians — established by an earlier generation of of the AUUC, the Workers Benevolent Association, the 7
promote cooperation — even for the Socreds. immigrants. He came to this province in the 1940s where Peace Council and the Communist Party paid final tribute.

4 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JANUARY 18, 1984