\

Incensed by B.C. Hydro rates and billing policies, Charle:

7

PSPSSSS PR ‘we

s Appleby decided to write a cheque out on the back

of his shirt and send it to the Crown corporation. He commented to the Tribune, “with all that this
government is doing, it will soon take the shirt off my back’’’-- a sentiment echoed by hundreds of people
facing cutbacks on the one hand and rate increases on the other.

—Sean Griffin photo

DEVELOPERS GIVEN FREE HAND

By ALD. HARRY RANKIN

You would think that once city
council passes a bylaw, you could
expect to see it enforced. Right?
Not so when it’s a bylaw passed
against the wishes of developers.

Here’s an example:

In 1974 the city’s charter was
amended with a bylaw providing
that all dwellings in the city,
whether single or multiple, shall
conform to standards fit for human
habitation, and further that if the
owners refuse to conform to such
standards, then the city may
“enter and effect such repairs,
renovations or alterations as are
necessary’’ and charge the cost to
the owner.

That was a good bylaw. It meant
that the city had the right to force
slum landlords in the downtown
eastside district to make their
buildings suitable for human
beings.

The slum landlords bitterly
opposed the bylaw at the time. So
did the developers who had their
eyes on certain of these properties.

The bylaw came up again in city
council on March 9 of this year.

What had happened in the
meantime was that some slum
landlords had refused to abide by
the bylaw, had allowed their

buildings to deteriorate beyond
fitness for human beings; and in
one way or another had forced
their tenants to move out. These
buildings were now standing
vacant. The owners wanted to
renovate them for commercial
uses or in some cases to tear them
down and make way for new
commer¢ial complexes.

The question facing city council
was: should these slum landlords
be compelled to renovate their
premises as required by the bylaw,
or should they be allowed to go
ahead and now use these vacant
buildings for other purposes, to
~engage in what is known as “‘block-
busting.”

Council’s housing committee
recommended that the bylaw be
enforced. J

Then the right-wing TEAM-NPA
coalition on council went into
action. Its members claimed that
for the city to enforce its own
bylaws against slum landlords
would be ‘‘a_ gross abuse of
power!,’’ “‘ridiculous,’’ and so on.

When the vote was taken the
right-wing TEAM-NPA coalition
won the day. Mayor Art Phillips
and aldermen Jack Volrich,
Warnett Kennedy, Fritz Bowers,
Ed Sweeney and Art Cowie voted

Council flouts own bylaw

developers. The vote was 6-5 not to
apply the bylaw.

The result of this vote will be to
encourage more slum landlords to
do the same thing — refuse to
make renovations to conform to
city health and fire safety laws,
find some way to kick out their

tenants, and then turn the building,

to some other use.

In the light of this vote, the action
of council in refusing a grant to the
Downtown Eastside Residents
Association (DERA) led by Bruce
Eriksen, becomes more. un-
derstandable. DERA had _ been
demanding the enforcement of this
bylaw to protect the poor people of
this area. Mayor Phillips and his
right-wing coalition want the
developers to have a free hand and
don’t want DERA raising hell and
exposing them.

When you land in a skid road
rooming house, you’re pretty well
at the bottom of the heap. There is
no place further down to go. But as
far as this council is concerned,
there is still one more place and
that is ‘out’ into the cold. This
right-wing TEAM-NPA coalition
that we have on council has about
as much compassion for people as
a hungry shark. But then, between
areal estate shark and a real shark
there isn’t that much difference

controls

The British Columbia Tenants
Organization received little more
than a polite response from the 12
Socred backbenchers present at a
meeting between the BCTO and the
government caucus in Victoria this
week. z

Bruce Yorke, president of the
BCTO, said that the MLAs present,
which included no members of the
Socred cabinet, were ‘‘polite to us’”’
but could promise little in the way
of strengthening rent control and
providing new housing policies.
Yorke said that the backbenchers
did agree to press for a meeting
between the BCTO and attorney-
general Garde Gardom to discuss
the question of rent control.

Most of the MLAs knew very
little about the province’s existing
rent control Yorke said, and
preferred to talk about housing in
terms of re-establishing free en-
terprise housing, and increasing
the supply of housing without ever
being specific as to government
plans in that area.

The BCTO has expressed con-
cern since the election of the Social
Credit government that rent
controls would disappear from
B.C. Yorke said that ‘‘already the
controls are being chipped away at
an accelerating pace,’”’ and that
several items indicate that rent
controls in B.C. “are in real
danger.” :

He cited the Socred election
platform where they spoke in
terms of ‘“‘phasing out the Rent
Review Commission’’ as one of the
major reasons for his concern, but
said that until the BCTO could
meet with Gardom or the cabinet,
they will have little positive in-
formation as to which way the
government will go.

“But there is other, very real
evidence that rent control is being
threatened,’”’ Yorke said. He drew
attention to the frequent calls for
abolition of the controls made by
Rentalsman Barrie Clarke and the
fact that the chairman of, the Rent
Review Commission, David
Brewin has resigned from that post
saying that he found his ‘‘com-
munity advocacy’’ incompatible
with the Social Credit government.

“As well, the landlords of this
province have been calling for the
abolition of rent controls over a
long period of time,’’ Yorke said.
One of the items which the BCTO

controls. ‘‘The landlord and tenal!

_controls for the first year of th

cited

had hoped to discuss with the fu
government caucus was the lack 0)
government action on the Rung
report which dealt with a com
prehensive study of both renta
housing and the over-all directio
of government housing policy. Tht
Runge report acknowledged tha
about 32 per cent of all rents beitl
charged in B.C. were set at a
illegal level, and that little wa
being done to enforce reli
regulations. {

Yorke said that many landloré
have found a new way to avoll
adhering to the provincial rel

act provides that if a landlof
enters into a five-year contrat
with the rent review commissiol
he will be exempt from the rel!

contract. :

u Sete!
BRUCE YORKE
“Tt’s really not a contract all; it’
merely. a loophole to avoid thf
controls,’’ Yorke charged. :
He said that the BCTO wasnt’
even aware of this loophole un
more and more landlords beg

taking advantage of it and settiN. .

rents at a much higher level tha!
what the legislation would no!
mally allow for.
A campaign against the loopho!
has already begun at a Nel
Westminster apartmell
development, Edgewater Col
plex, where some rents have be@
increased far above the 10.6 pé®
cent ceiling. Tenants have beg!
circulating a petition and ?
meeting of 150 residents this we@
outlined plans for further actio#

~~ —~ my WF Af pw len

TOM
_ McEWEN

l, is positively amazing just how cute, crafty and

sometimes ‘humorous’ the present-day anti-Sovieteer
has become. A recent blurb in the Vancouver Sun, scalped
from Britain’s weekly humor magazine Punch by one
Alan Brien illustrates the point.

Mr. Brien’s contribution to ‘knowledge’ is captioned I
have seen the future and it’s work, with all emphasis on
the ‘work.”’ He flails Alexei Stakhanov and Joseph Stalin
for the invention of this horrible creation. Naturally, of
course, Mr. Brien does not include in his humor any
references to Britain’s 10 million or so unemployed, or to
bring it closer to home, Canada’s 1-1/2 million jobless,
deprived of the elementary right to work for a livelihood.
Sufficient that a cold-war microbe should parody the
great American writer, Lincoln Steffens, who said of his
first visit to the Soviet Union, ‘‘I have seen the future, and
it works.”

A Dobnetz coal miner of the early 30’s, Alexei Stak-
hanov led in the field of coal mining by practical
demonstration of showing how coal production could be
tremendously increased by the application of good
teamwork, by new methods of collective effort, by the
introduction of technological and other factors of
productive capacity. Almost overnight he became a
symbol of Soviet labor achievement, the elevation of
Soviet labor from the hangovers of Tzarist-imposed
drudgery, indignity, exploitation and worse, to the highest

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MARCH 26, 1976—Page 2

attainment of socialist endeavor: a recognition of the pre-
eminence of man in a world which survives and has its
being only by his creative genius by hand and brain. In
short, by his labors or if you will, his work.

But according to our “‘humorist”’ scribbler, unabashed
by the millions of enforced jobless in every capitalist
country, or unmoved by the monumental poverty and
suffering such enforced idleness entails, we are supposed,
to whoop it up with unfeigned glee every time we give
work the go-by; to manifest jubilation every time we get
away from work, to invest ready-made excuses and
wisecracks every time we avoid it. Such humor provides a
moral basis for the innumerable blasts of the Vander
Zalms when they get indignant about those who must
depend on the meagre handouts of ‘‘welfare,’’ but little.
else.

Thus Alexei Stakhanov, because of his love for
productive labor is portrayed as some sort of a traitor to
his fellow Soviet citizens and all readers are urged “‘to join
the anti-Stakhanovites today — or tomorrow.”

As for J. V. Stalin, he asks, ‘chow much better for
everyone if hehad remained in bed until tea time, or taken
a few years sabbatical at the Black Sea.”

This cold-war bilge passes for humor to readers of
Punch and others, who are not noted for either their
capacity or desire for work, who specialize and grow fat
and exercise their ‘‘divine” class right by perpetuating
their parasitic brood upon the “‘sweat and toil and tears”
of others, certainly regard it as an evil plague, and avoid
itas the devel is said to avoid holy water. ~

But for the Soviet Stakhanovite of yesterday and today,
the Soviet worker whose devotion to labor has not only.
created a giant socialist state unequalled and unprece-
dented in the long history of mankind, but has also ren-

dered material aid to mankind, socialist, colonialist #
emerging state, equal to none anywhere.

Can anyone doubt that the billions of aid to suffering an
beleagered peoples everywhere, Socialist and nol
socialist alike . . . that the millions of boatloads of all thé
necessities of life, denied by a ruthless monopoly
imperialism to peoples around the world, could ever hav!
materialized had it not been for the application of i
dividual and collective labor? Or that such aid so free!)
and magnanimously given could not have been used by
the Soviet people themselves, had they been so minded:

Is anyone stupid enough or naive enough, or indee!
innocent enough, to believe that such monumental help
others would have been possible without work; without
unmatchable Soviet devotion to the honor and glory. of #
labor?

But still we have those cold-war microbes, posing 8
“humorists”’ who dig up a Stalin ora Stakhanov w!?
which to project their anti-Soviet slanders, meanti?
sneering at the plight of millions of capitalism
dispossessed wage slaves. A brand of “humor” mankil™
can well do without!

‘etl

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