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DERA battles for funds

Vancouver city council has
scheduled the Downtown Eastside
Residents Association request for a
civic grant for March 8.

DERA’s ongoing battle with city
council for funding has already
met one setback with the recent
rejection of its request by the city’s
standing committee on social
services. Council will review the
recommendations of the com-
mittee on March 8, and if they
refuse DERA again, that decision
can be appealed to council with
supporting delegations.

DERA’s outspoken vice
president Bruce Eriksen warned
this week that if council refuses to
grant funds the numerous com-
munity services provided by the
organization may not continue.

“The community will go back to
the taxbuyers, the liquor outlets,
the social workers, the missions,
souplines, slumlords and sleazy,
vindictive politicians,’’ Eriksen
said.

OWSEE is required to approve

The civic grant that DERA has
requested is to pay wages for three

community organizers, without:

whom the organization could not

“earry on its various programs.

In spite of widespread support
from community organizations,
churches and businesses in the
downtown eastside, city council
refused funding in 1976. The
decision was widely criticized as
“vindictive’’ as the council had
often been embarrassed by DERA
for its failure to respond to the
needs of the downtown eastside.

The new city council is to the
right of the old council, a fact that
suggests that massive pressure
will have to be applied to win a
grant. In addition to COPE
alderman Harry Rankin, it is
expected that Darlene Marzari,
Michael Harcourt, Don Bellamy,
Bill Gibson and May Brown can be
convinced to vote in favor of
DERA. A two-thirds majority

grant

civic grants, which would leave
DERA two votes short of victory.
Both DERA and COPE officials
have suggested that the aldermen
most likely to be moved by public
pressure are George Puil and
Bernice Gerrard.

Church leaders and other
prominent individuals from the
downtown eastside will be
presenting DERA’s case to council
members — and especially Puil
and Gerrard — in the weeks until
March 8. Other community
organizations and individuals are
urged to add to the pressure
through letters and lobbies to city
council members, but focusing
attention on Puil and Gerrard.

Last year’s final council debate
on DERA’s request for a civic
saw 29 community
organizations and individuals
appear before council on their
behalf. If an appeal is necessary,
there will undoubtedly be many
more delegations this year.

. |Cuthack typifies

Socred approach —

By ALD. HARRY RANKIN
The interim financial statement
of the human resources deépart-
ment of the provincial government

§ headed by human resources

minister Bill Vander Zalm; for the
nine months period endihg
December 31, 1976, reveals that the
department will have a surplus of
over $100 million by March of this
year.

This surplus has been brought
about by drastic cuts in social
services — cuts of approximately
$14 million in services to families
and children, including daycare
centres; cuts of $35 million in
services to senior citizens and the
handicapped; cuts of $50 million in
the Income Assistance Program
(which provides a meagre $160 a
month to single persons under 55).

On top of that, the minister has
admitted that a federal increase of
$22.50 per monthin pensions for the
handicapped has been pocketed by
the provincial government and not
passed on to the people for whom it
was designated by Ottawa.

According to minister Vander
Zalm the cuts in social services
were made to free money for
“deserving people’ and the
handicapped. It turns out,
however, that it has been precisely
the deserving people and the
handicapped who have been the
victims of his cuts.

At the same time the provincial
government has abolished gift and
succession taxes on estates worth
over $150,000. This will mean a loss
in revenue for the provincial
government of some $30 million to
$40 million a year, most of which
would have come from the very
wealthy. Also the government has
greatly reduced royalties and
taxes on the big corporations that
are exploiting our mineral and
other resources.

It is clear what the provincial
government has done. It has cut
social services to-those that need
them the most by $100 million in
order to give concessions worth
$100 million to those that need them
the least — the wealthy and the big
corporations.

That pretty well sums up the
basic philosophy and practice of
this government — take from the
poor and give to the rich.

The Downtown’ Eastside ©
Residents’ Association has bitterly
protested this action of the
provincial government. In a letter ~
to premier Bill Bennett, signed by
president Libby Davies, vice-
president Bruce Eriksen and

secretary Jean Swanson, DERA

has put forwarda counter program ~
based on the following points:

@ Use the $100 million surplus to —
increase

single persons to $230.

e Reinstate the gift and suc-

cession duties and use the revenues
to restore income assistance rates
for the handicapped. (Rates have
been cut as much as 28 percent for
families where one person is
handicapped).

e Tie all income assistance rates
to the Consumer Price Index.

e@ Make all persons in receipt of

‘income assistance eligible for 100

percent shelter overages.

e Restore the cuts of $1.4 million
in community grants programs. .

I like the little stamp which
DERA put on the bottom of its
letter to the premier. It aptly
describes government policy, and
especially that of big-mouth
Vander Zalm:

Tf.

You can’t dazzle
brilliance

Then. .~
Baffle ’em with bullshit’.

7em_ with

COPE meeting

The Committee of Progressive
Electors has scheduled its annual

‘meeting for Sunday, February 27, 2

p.m. in the Britannia Community
Services Centre, Napier and
Commercial Drive in Vancouver.

In addition to outlining a
program for the next year, the
meeting will be electing a new
executive board and table officers.

John Vorster finds a place in the Sun

the $160 a month
maximum income assistance for —

By SEAN GRIFFIN

Some two years ago, as readers. may. remember, I -

stumbled over the limits of journalistic .decorum. and
accused.a Vancouver Sun columnist of making.a mockery
of human rights by the comments in his column. Not-that
the accusation — levelled during a special forum on
“Human Rights and the Media’’ — was off-base; it was
just that I had the wrong man. But I did have the right
paper and the point that I was making at the time — that
the Sun was allowing certain writers to use the columns of
the paper to vilify those who demanded basic human
rights insuchcountries as Chile, or South Africa — was no
less valid.

But I obviously hadn’t seen anything ‘yet.

There was little that I could have cited at the time that
would equal, for sheer -jackboot thinking, the column
penned by McKenzie Porter which appeared in the Sun
February 11, 1977.

In language reminiscent of such journals as the
Thunderbolt, Porter opens with this broadside:

“Ever since the end of the Second World War, liberal
academics, bureaucrats and politicians have worked like
termites to undermine the defences of the Western
democracies. *Palpable proof of this misguided idealism
or deliberate treachery lies on the continent of Africa.”

But this is only the beginning. From here on, Porter
dispenses with any concern, feigned or real, that he may
have for “‘Western democracy.”

“By urging Western European colonial goverhments to
withdraw from Africa .at least 100 years before the native
peoples were fit for political independence,” he tells us,
“the liberals exposed the territories involved to a Russian
takeover.”

Having got to the real point of his piece, he presses the
attack, buttressing his argument with such pronoun-
cements as “The masses of Africa, who still consult witch

S

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FEBRUARY 25, 1977—Page 2

Re ge ee a: eam Aa aha *
Sepst-VtSt @S YHAUASAA—SAUEIAT OIAIDAS

doctors and rely on donkey power; are exploited by a
handful of their half-educated compatriots.”

These are some other excerpts:

“Only the republic of South Africa defies the Russian
determination to control the great land mass between the
Cape of Good Hopeand the STraits of Gibraltar ... °

“Through their continued hostility toward South Africa,
Western liberals might bring about a situation in which
the Soviet Union becomes capable of an economic
strangling of the democracies. During the impending
struggle for Rhodesia and Southwest Africa, the last

_ bastions of democracy before the ramparts of South

Africa, we should listen carefully to what the Western
liberals have to say. In the interests of North American
security, some of them may have to be locked up.”’

Primitive as they are, Porter’s opinions are scarcely
original, however. John Vorster, prime minister of the
white racist regime of South Africa, has said much the
same, adding the warning that if the U.S. is not prepared
to stand with South Africa in the battle against Com-
munism, then South Africa ‘‘will have to stand alone in
that:holy crusade.”

But Vorster, of course, doesn’t have access to the
columns of the Vancouver Sun to make his apologies for
apartheid or to justify locking up its detractors — which
brings us back to that newspaper. The publishers of the
Vancouver Sun, for all the well-orchestrated trumpeting
about human rights in the Soviet Union, are doing no more
to uphold human rights than they were at the time of the
forum on that issue two years ago. If they were, few of
Porter’s scribblings would ever find their way into print.

Unfortunately, there is more to this man’s apocalyptic
views than the question of ‘the Sun’s approach to human
rights or the scoring of debating points in a public forum.
His is an extreme position; but in official circles in this
country, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the ‘‘Western’”’

world, the 30-year-old myths of ‘‘a Soviet threat”, of
“Russian aggression” and of ‘‘an imminent Russian
takeover” are being recreated on an epic scale-as im-
perialism prepares itself for enormous increases in
military spending and strives to stem the tide of national
liberation.

In this country, the Trudeau government has embarked
on-a military spending program which, if not reversed,
will result by 1980 in a doubling of expenditures expressed
as a percentage of the Gross National Product. Increases
on asimilarly alarming scale are scheduled in the U.S., in
West Germany, in Britain and elsewhere in the NATO
orbit.

In order to justify the huge expenditures, in order to
provide the pretext for an escalation of the arms race and
renewed cold war belligerence, the myth must be created
of a Soviet military buildup and of threatened Soviet
takeovers.

In that campaign, McKenzie Porter is playing his part
along witha host of others in the monopoly media. He may
be going at it with a greater reactionary zeal than most,
but his views are probably ominously close to those ex-
pressed in the boardrooms of the NATO command.

 JIeiBUNE

Editor —- MAURICE RUSH
Assistant Editor SEAN GRIFFIN
Business and Circulation Manager — FRED WILSON

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