NDP PROPOSALS FOR
B.C. ECONOMIC RECOVERY

The New Democratic Party believes it is
vital — to the hopes of our citizens and to the
health of our provincial economy — that
this overdue legislative session get to work
urgently on a program of economic
recovery.

British Columbians are justifiably angry
and tired of waiting for a stumbling govern-
ment to finally come to grips with our
serious problems, instead of continually
worsening them. In 1981, we put forward
useful proposals for stimulating the hous-
ing, forestry and small business sectors,
before they began collapsing. Yet the
Socreds did nothing.

Legislative and fiscal initiatives are
crucial to putting this province on the road
to recovery. We must roll up our legislative
sleeves because, everywhere we look in our
province today, we see a spiral of record
unemployment, cutbacks, taxincreases,
bankruptcies and growing anxiety. So, let’s
get to work!

There is much to be done. Since July,
when the last session adjourned, the
Socreds have sat idle while 52,000 British
Columbians have lost their jobs. They did
nothing, except throw many of them out of
work and threaten even more with cutbacks
and tax increases that further harm the
economy. February’s 130,000 “official”
unemployment total is about 10 per cent of
the entire labour force. One in five of our
young people is without a job. Add the
“hidden” unemployed — who have given up
all hope of finding work — and the rate
exceeds 14 per cent, for a post-depression
record of 197,000 jobless.

Similarly, since July, monthly bank-
ruptcy rates have skyrocketed 215 per cent,
from 81 to last month’s level of 174. The
number of new companies incorporating in
British Columbia has plummeted 60 per
cent, to only 942 in the past year. Yet, the
Socreds have ignored the economic plight of
small business enterprises in our province,
even though they generate the largest
proportion of job opportunities.

This diastrous trend has not come out of
the blue. For the past six years, unemploy-
ment in British Columbia has consistently
been the worst of every province west of
Quebec. Since 1975, our jobless rate has
exceeded 9 per cent at least once every year.
Throughout 1981, the 40 per cent increase in
the number of unemployed British Columbi-
ans was the highest of any province in
Canada and four times the national average
increase, partly due to Socred neglect and ad
hoc responses, which worsened the
situation.

In the past, the Socreds have turned over
productive public assets to BCRIC, sold
ferries to eastern financiers for lease-back at
double the ultimate cost and converted
government departments into crown corpo-
rations to hide overruns and deficits. They
have doubled the debt of the province and its
agencies in six short years, so that the per
capita interest burden alone on a family of
four has risen to $1,400 a year. They have
imposed massive cost-escalating increases
in virtually every tax and licence category,
even though British Columbia suffered the
worst inflation on the continent.

The troubled cries of taxpayers, wage
earners and consumers have been joined by
business representatives and economists
warning that these ill-timed and ill-advised
actions would deepen the recession and
shatter hopes of generating an upturn.

of reversing these failures with a
positive and co-ordinated recovery strategy,
the Socreds — in recent weeks — have

ordered further cutbacks, which make more
jobless. And a heedless Socred cabinet has
raised levies even higher on citizens’ costs
for services like medicare, by an average of
20 per cent (and for senior citizens by 35 per
cent) in the current year. This will siphon
even more millions of dollars of purchasing
power out of our economy. Recovery momen-
tum is being thwarted by a Socred govern-
ment cannibalising a weakened provincial
economy merely to balance its own chaotic
political bookkeeping.

It is time for changes offering hope in
place of dismay, recovery in place of
retrenchment. They can be achieved by
co-operative leadership involving labour,
business and community interests. Let’s
plan to use our human, financial and
material resources to speed recovery and
expand our opportunities. It will take sensi-
tive leadership, co-operative economic plan-
ning and practical legislative initiatives to
develop and carry through the recovery
programs we need — to create jobs as wellas
ensure our citizens are trained to fill them.
Let’s get to work!

Leadership is the crucial element in
reviving public hope. Almost half a century
ago, a great Democrat showed the leader-
ship that began to get the United States off
its economic knees. Franklin Delano Roose-
velt’s first inaugural speech is best remem-
bered for the then-electrifying declaration,
“The only thing we have to fear is fear
itself”. But he was more than a phrase-
maker.

Long after, recalling that speech, FDR
wrote: ‘““For many months, people had
looked to government to help, but govern-
ment had looked away. I promised a pro-
gram of action: first, to put people to work;
and second, to correct [government failures]
which had, in great measure, contributed to
the crisis.”

The New Democratic Party believes a
two-part prescription is the medicine British
Columbia’s ailing economy needs, without
further delay. My NDP colleagues, there-
fore, will offer 26 proposals for recovery
initiatives, in eight sectors, at this session
and will take every opportunity to demand
government action both to get British
Columbians back to work now, and to
permanently strengthen future economic
performance.

The first measure, proclamation of the
British Columbia Savings and Trust Act,
would accomplish both endsin the financial
sector. It would revive needed activity in
the key house-building sector, with a ripple
effect spreading through the supply and
service sectors to the forestry sector, to put
some of the laid-off back to work this
summer. It would help put many families
into homes at affordable mortgage rates
and, thereby, help reduce the soaring cost of
living in our province. It would release
some money now in the grasp of mortgage
firms, so that consumers could return to
buying goods they need and help regenerate
production. The act also could be used to
help hard-pressed small businesses in our
communities get back on their feet. The
“Going-Out-Of-Business” signs of Socred
policies could start coming down along our
main streets and our domestic enterprises
could begin hiring back their employees.

By establishing a publicly-owned “near
bank”, British Columbia’s economy would
be forever strengthened with a powerful
insrument that would use our own financial
resources — and those available elsewhere
in the world — to build and maintain a more
diversified economy and smooth out the
boom-bust cycle here.

DAVE BARRETT

B.C. Savings and Trust could invest
revolving government deposits, of at least
$200 million initially and $1 billion or more
eventually, in such economic programs asa
mortgage stabilisation fund, to enable
many citizens to buy a home at 12 or 13 per
cent interest, as well as providing additional
financing options for small domestic indus-
tries and businesses throughout our
communities.

Only a stroke of a pen is needed. Legisla-
tion to establish B.C. Savings and Trust was
passed in 1975 by the NDP government; a
special government-credit union task force
was created to develop an implementation
plan. It was delivered in February, 1976, to
the present Socred government, which
promptly sat on it and did nothing, even
though seven of the present Socred cabinet
voted for it. It is a priority measure in our
recovery program because of its importance
and because it only needs long-withheld
signatures to begin working immediately
for British Columbians’ benefit. And it
would provide the leadership our province
desperately needs to regain hope and
confidence.

One of our chief problems lies in our
almost total dependence on primary
resource exports.

As the Columbia River Treaty’s sale of
downstream benefits amply demonstrated,
mega-projects can boomerang if our resour-
ces are undersold and the job benefits are
essentially exported. Even construction and
maintenance work on mega-projects havea
sad history of being too frequently filled by
people brought into the province. It is
imperative that the terms of the north east
coal and other projects be improved, so that
the next generation isn’t saddled with the
same bitter results of a brief boom followed
by long term economic disadvantages, lost
revenues and lost job opportunities in
secondary industries. Already, hundreds of
thousands of man-hours of work, and mil-
lions of dollars of contracts, are being
farmed out of the province that could be
filled here. There is an overwhelming need
for provincial job training programs, if most
of the skills in the coal fields are not to be
filled by imports while our own citizens are
unemployed. Co-ordinated and determined
efforts to use the coal exports as leverage to
create job opportunities for our workers and
to provide training to fill them should be
undertaken at this session, if we are to avoid
the unhappy legacy of the Columbia River
downstream hydro resource sell out.

The New Democratic Party government
of 1972-1975 foresaw the critical need to
diversify the economy with more manufac-
turing jobs. It succeeded in attracting the
Afton Mine Smelter, first in half a century
for British Columbia. In 1974, it established
the Railwest manufacturing plant and

SEE “RECOVERY” PAGE TEN

Lumber Worker/April, 1982/9