Mayworks, Vancouver’s new Festival of
Culture and Working life, promises a revi-
talization of the area’s rich history of pro-
gressive culture. Supported by several
labour organizations and community and
arts groups, it takes place May | to May 8.

Two events focus on labour history: a
panel on the province’s labour arts move-
ments of the 1930s and 1940s, and a photo-
graphy exhibition from the Women’s
Labour History Project. These pay tribute
to the organizing efforts of labour’s cultural
activists who created a dynamic workers’
press, a theatre movement, and literature,
music and visual arts venues.

By 1935, Vancouver was developing an
activist cultural milieu involving profes-
sional artists as well as the unemployed.
Theatre and publishing groups provided the
training to those wishing to enter the arts.

Vancouver's Progressive Art Players, a
theatre group founded by Dan Glover and
Garfield King, produced the critically suc-
cessful play Waiting for Lefty, which even-
tually won top honours at the Dominion
Drama Festival. But prior to that the play
was almost shut down by the Vancouver
police because of its political content. These
censors finally settled for cuts in the script
and allowed the production to continue.

The Progressive’ Art Players brought
theatre to the community, performing The
Hostage, And the Answer Is, Bury the
Dead and other works for unemployed,
youth and anti-fascist groups. The group’s
Success inspired theatre companies within
the Co-operative Commonwealth Federa-
tion to form a branch in Victoria.

The B.C. Workers News (later the Pacific

Advocate and forerunner to the Pacific .

Tribune) developed a system of worker cor-
respondents who contributed news and
analysis, poetry, prose, reviews, cartoons,
prints and humour pieces. Ethnic commun-

ities had their own Papers, such as the >

Ukrainian community’s Borba (Struggle).

World War II brought rapid cultural
advances to Vancouver as communication
media expanded along with the population
and potential new audiences. Unions such
as the International Woodworkers made
use of radio with programs like ‘Green
Gold.” Movie houses, concerts and dance
halls catered to working people, many earn-
ing their first dollars after years of depres-
sion hardship.

By 1943, a union-based organization
called the Labour Arts Guild, led by John
Goss, emerged. It included progressive
artists of various disciplines, many of whom
were sympathetic to the Labour Progressive
Party.

The Guild encouraged unions to intro-
duce cultural activities into workplaces to
build solidarity and promote the war effort.
It offered working people an excellent range
of classes on such media as painting, sculp-
ture and music.

One of the Guild’s key achievements was
the B.C. Art Work exhibition, which paid
tribute to industrial war workers and
“worker-artists” and awarded prizes with
money contributed by trade unions. The
first exhibition took place in 1943, followed
by another two years later.

The shows were housed first in the Van-
couver Art Gallery and then in the Boiler-
makers Hall, to attract both the art world
and labour audiences. Paintings and sculp-
tures depicted riveters, mill workers,
foundry workers, dairymen and union
events such as Fraser Wilson’s detailed

10 « Pacific Tribune, April 13, 1988

Cultural show depicts
women’s contribution

painting of organizing in the shipyards.

More than 40 years later, Mayworks has
emerged to build on this now little-known
tradition. On Sunday, May 8 there will be a
panel discussion in the auditorium of the
Maritime Labour Centre with former par-
ticipants in the labour arts movement.
Included are renowned poet Dorothy Live-
say and Hal Griffin, a poet and former
editor of the Pacific Tribune and The
Fisherman.

An additional historical feature of May-
works if the Working Image show at
Women In Focus, 456 W. Broadway, Suite
204. This extensive display of photographs
centres on images of women in the work-
place from the mid-19th century onwards.

The final Mayworks celebration — on
Sunday, May 8 at 7 p.m. — will include
readings by Dorothy Livesay, the Industrial
Writers Union, Helen Potrobenko and oth-
ers, as well as music.

The finale will also feature the premier of
Keeping the Home Fires Burning: Women
War Work and Unions in B.C. — a new
video by the Women’s Labour History Pro-
ject that chronicles the contribution of B.C.
women to the war effort and early union-
ism. Jonnie Rankin, Betty Griffin, Alice
Person, Gladys Hilland, Emily Nutall and
Ruth Bullock are interviewed.

Award-winning tenor saxophonist Fraser McPherson is one of the Vancouver musi-
cians playing Mayworks: A Festival of Culture and Working Life next month.
McPherson, whose approach to jazz has been acclaimed in Great Britain, Australia,

the United States and the Soviet Union — which he’s toured four times since
1978 — will play at the Mayworks Cabaret on Monday, May 2 at the International

Woodworkers hall in Vancouver. The Juno Award winning member of the Interna-
tional Federation of Musicians, Local 145, McPherson will appear with guitarist
Oliver Gannon, vocalist Pat Hervey, trombonist Jack Fulton, bassist Paul Ruhland

— Sara Diamond

and drummer Blaine Wikjord. Admission is $4 and $2.

A first-rate book on free trade |

Many of Canada’s finest writers have
collaborated with economists, academics
and business people to produce a book
which sharply condemns the free trade
agreement recently initiated by Ottawa
and the United States.

If You Love This Country is not a series
of dry-as-dust lectures filled with figures
and facts, but a passionate appeal to the
common sense of the Canadian people.
Among the 47 contributors are Margaret
Atwood, David Suzuki, Peter C. New-
man, Bishop Remi De Roo, James Laxer
and equally famed personalities in varied
fields of Canadian life.

In a relatively few words, each writer
manages to put forward fresh ideas which
make one understand who we are and
what we are as Canadians, and what free
trade will mean to us.

It is difficult to choose the most pungent
passages in the book, for there are many.
One of the best, in a contribution from
Graeme Gibson, is a quote from the 19th-
century Cuban patriot Jose Marti:

“Whoever says economic union, says
political union. The people that buys gives
the orders. The people that sells, serves. . ..
The people that wants to die sells to one
people alone, and the people that wants to
save itself, sells to more than one .... The
people that wants to be free distributes its
business among equally strong peoples.”

Michele Landsberg, former editor of
Chatelaine, reminds us: “ ‘Identity’ sounds
abstract compared to the brassy gleam of
promised jobs and quick loot. Esau, his
mouth watering, lightly sold his birthright
to Jacob in return for a steaming pot of
lentils. Only later did he groan. Beans are
only worth beans, but our birthright is our
future as a people.”

Contributor Frank Stronach is. chair-

man of the board of a large company

which manufactures, designs and develops °

automotive components and systems. His
company employs 10,000 people. He says:
“This deal may be quite beneficial to
business — especially to multinational
corporations. But greater returns to busi-
ness is not necessarily in the best interests
of the country. Money has no heart, no
soul, no conscience, and it knows no
boundaries. Business is driven by short-
term gains. As a country, though, we must
look down the road at the long-term effect
.... To do this effectively we require a
national industrial strategy.”

Bob White, president of the Canadian
Auto Workers, puts the free trade agree-
ment in a nutshell: “To get this very, very
shaky deal (Prime Minister Brian) Mulro-
ney had to surrender much of Canada’s
sovereignty. We have lost the right to con-
trol our energy supply. ... to design cultu->
ral policies without reference to the U.S.
... to control foreign investment. We have
lost the ability to design national eco-
nomic strategies.

“We have restricted our abilities to
formulate independent trade policies with
other countries. We have lost the right to
determine an independent auto strategy.
These areas of decision-making are essen-
tial to even the most minimal definition of
sovereignty.”

University of Victoria history professor
Peter Baskerville, tracing Canadian-U.S.
trade relations back to 1867, suggests

“that Canada’s assets are too often given

short shrift.”

He concludes that the pronouncement
proclaiming the creation of 350,000 new
jobs “can be said to be based on highly
speculative and, in some cases, completely
incorrect assumptions as to how the Can-

adian economy works and as to what the
free trade agreement includes.”

James Laxer, in his lucid style, warns
that “the critical assumption that the
American economy will continue to func-
tion much as it has over the past five years
is almost certainly wrong. Since 1982, the
U.S. has been the world’s greatest impor-
ter. Its economic growth has been based
not on improved production but on
increased American consumption. And
that increased consumption has been
financed by borrowing from foreigners.

He continues: “Over the past five years
the United States has become the largest
net debtor nation in the world. The Amer-
ican economy is awash in a sea of red ink:
the huge American trade deficit, the U.S.
budget deficit, and the massive personal
indebtedness of American citizens ....

“Over the next few years the U.S. will be
forced to begin living within its means.
And that will result in much lower trade
surpluses for the countries that are Ameri-
ca’s major trading partners, including
Canada.”

Adds Peter C. Newman: “By entwining
our own destiny with that of the bewil-
dered Gulliver to the south of us, we
would become a hostage to its present and
future misfortunes.”

And Margaret Atwood sums it up: “If
you're going to merge your economy
totally with another one — why not a ris-
ing star instead of one that’s hovering so
close to burnout?”

If You Love This Country is a book
which is a feast of ideas, information and
inspiration. It gives the shot in the arm we
need to defeat, for all time, the opportu-
nists so busily engaged in the wholesale
selling of our country. Get the book. You
won’t be sorry.

— Mabel Richards