H ay to stop Star Wars and for an
isin € arms race will be heard in com-
Rand = all across the province April 26
"e-... 25 British Columbians take to the
8 i be the annual Walks for Peace.
i: ‘munit) activists in Northern B.C. com-
bland €s, in the Okanagan, Vancouver
fe a Vancouver are putting together
1 will plans for marches and rallies that
| un ave a special significance during the
ae ed International Year of Peace.
|, 2 Week of peace events will be launched
aNcouver April 19 at the opening
: ie of the Vancouver Centennial
1 inet €stival. The program, which
‘chil oa Mayor Michael Harcourt, a
: Phezin S choir, singers and dancers, will
at
t

: I p.m. at the Peace Tent located
-Sunse Beach. ss
, /© peace festival will culminate April
zante Walk for Peace organized by the
l Year oH Arms Race coalition which this
iam cross both the Burrard Street and
Ph Street bridges on the way to B.C.
a Th tadium for a rally.
vay valk begins at 12 noon from the the
Park &athering points of Kitsilano Beach
forth a Cornwall and Arbutus and Sea-
a ark at the south end of the Burrard
ee bridge for trade unionists. For those
§ Se the shorter walk across the Cam-
treet bridge, the marshalling point
Jonathan Rogers Park at 7th Ave.
Nitoba.
en Musicians will provide the enter-
___ “ent as people enter the stadium for

the rally, which is set to begin at 2 p.m.
featuring Harcourt and Hiroshima Mayor,
Takeshi Araki, himself a survivor of the
U.S. atomic bomb blast on his city. Others
speakers include: Gert Bastian, founder of
Generals for Peace from the Federal
Republic of Germany; Joan Ruddock,
chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disar-
mament in Britain; and the Very Reverend
Lois Wilson, president of the World
Council of Churches.

In Victoria, the Greater Victoria Dis-
armament Group is asking people to
gather for their fifth annual Walk for

’ Peace on Saturday, April 26 in Centennial
Square at 12 noon. From there the walk
will proceed through downtown to the
legislature for a rally.

The headline speaker at the rally will be
Dr. Michael Pentz, the president of Scient-
ists Against Nuclear Arms and former
vice-president of the British Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament. Local peace issues
will be addressed by Laurie McBride of the
Nanoose Conversion Campaign and
Terry Padgham, a long-time Victoria
peace activist.

Further north on the island, peace
groups in Campbell River, Courtenay and
Quadra Island have co-operated to organ-
ize a Walk for Peace in Campbell River on
April 26. The walk begins at 11:30 a.m. at
the Labor Centre in Campbell River and
ends at a rally at Foreshore Park with
speakers and entertainment.

Organizers in Campbell River say they

expect many people from Vancouver
Island will participate in their local peace
event on Saturday and then travel to Van-
couver on Sunday to be part of Canada’s
largest peace demonstration.

Peace activists in Kamloops have not
only been busy organizing their walk for
April 26, but have also been campaigning
to have the Okanagan city declared a
nuclear weapons free zone. A vote in city
council was set to take place at Tribune
press time.

Kamloops community cable TV will be
pre-empting regular programming between
7p.m. and 9 p.m. for five days prior to the
walk to run films on the theme of peace
and disarmament.

Speakers at the Kamloops peace rally,
which this year has the support of the
Kamloops and District Labor Council,
CUPE and other area unions, will be Jon-
nie Rankin of the B.C. Peace Council and
Nelson Riis, NDP MP for Kamloops-
Shuswap. :

The Kelowna Peace Group is sponsor-
ing the city’s fourth annual Walk for Peace
which begins at 1:30 p.m. at City Park.
The walk will proceed up Barnard Street
to the First United Church hall to a rally
with local speakers and musicians. The
Kelowna Peace Group will be emphasiz-
ing local initiatives to achieve the objec-
tives of the International Year of Peace as
the main theme of the event.

The province’s northern communities
will also be celebrating the International

B.C. marches mark UN peace year

Year of Peace. In Prince George the walk
will commence at the government building
on 3rd Ave. at 11 a.m. on April 26 and
move to St. Michael’s Hall at Victoria and
5th Ave. for entertainment and a fund-
raising lunch. Using the general theme of
“It’s Our World”, this year’s event has
been endorsed by the local school board
which also advised teachers to encourage
children to participate in the walk as a
positive alternative to the threat of nuclear
war.

The Prince George peace group hopes
to raise enough funds to launch an effec-
tive campaign to have the city declared a
nuclear weapons free zone.

The Prince Rupert Organization for
Disarmament has obtained city council’s
endorsement for their second annual
Walk for Peace which begins at 10:30 a.m
at the United Fishermen and Allied
Workers’ Union hall and proceeds
through downtown to return to the hall
for lunch and entertainment.

Plans for a peace walk and rally are also
underway in Terrace but no details were
available at press time.

In Castlegar and other Kootenay com-
munities, peace groups have linked their
events to celebrations of the 100th anni-
versary of May Day. And in Vernon,
peace activists decided to participate in the
Vancouver walk and celebrate Mother’s
Day on May 11 at the Canada-U.S. border
with peace groups from the U.S.

low, continued from page 1
ae In 1984 by contractors in Alberta
hej aaucelled collective agreements on
Otke ee date, locked Building Trades
ho, . Out and then lifted the lockout 24
at .. 2!€t and called workers back to work
ay wages and conditions. The
Of those who didn’t return were

People’s
Co = op
Bookstore

“J Commercial Drive
riteouver, B.C. VSL 3X5
*_ {Phone: 253-6442

HE COLD AND THE DARK. The

B World After Nuclear War..
neg Ehrlich, Sagan, Kennedy and

| op Fa eee ere: $9.95
THE SOCIALIST POLICY
OF PEACE.
By Belov A. Karenin
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WORLD YOUTH VOTES
Re FOR PEACE
of puts of the 12th World Festival
_ ‘uth Students, Moscow, 1985.
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THE DANGERS OF NUCLEAR
WAR.
and Edited by Franklin Griffiths
John C. Polyani.............-- $10
ail Ord
5 ers add
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Mail
Order lists
"OW available.

LRA stand repudiated

reported to UIC which penalized them on
subsequent claims.

Preventing a replay of that scenario in
this province was a major factor in conduct-
ing the strike vote across the Building
Trades.

Because strike votes had not been taken
in Alberta, Building Trades workers were
not in a legal position to picket job sites
once the lockout was lifted.

As a result, most of the trades are work-
ing without collective agreements in Alberta
at rates as low as $5 and $6 an hour. And
substantial concessions have been imposed
in those few trades which hae signed agree-
ments.

A slide-tape show illustrating the prob-
lems in Alberta was commissioned by the
B.C. Provincial Council of Carpenters and
shown to several Building Trades locals in
the province. In it Alberta construction
workers warned that unless unionists in
B.C. had strong strike votes in place, they
would also be confronted by a contractors’
lockout and unilaterally imposed contracts.

Whether the contractors will alter their
strategy in the face of the overwhelming
backing given the trades’ bargaining com-
mittee is still uncertain, but there are some
indications that the formidable display of
unity has put some cracks in the employers’
front.

A lockout vote scheduled for last week
among CLRA contractors was reportedly
cancelled and several independent contrac-
tors have signed memoranda of under-
standing with Building Trades unions tying
them to the:terms of the standard contract
once it is signed with CLRA.

Negotiations, stalemated by the CLRA
position since February, were set to re-open
this week, although the question of whether
they go anywhere remained largely depend-
ent on CLRA putting aside its more than 50
concession demands.

“We hope that the employers will clearly
recognize the message which our member-
ships have sent them through their strike
vote,” Gautier said.

He added that he hoped “they will come
to the table ready to make a genuine effort
to reach a reasonable agreement as soon as

possible.”

Artist’s visit to promote
USSR-Canada friendship

Artist Laurie Steffler (with quilt squares) will be at Peace Festival tent.

Meeting Soviet citizens face to face is
one way world peace can be achieved,
Vancouver artist Laurie Steffler believes.

Steffler, an illustrator and sometime
dancer, will be heading to the Soviet
Union this summer carrying tokens of
peace and goodwill from communities
around British Columbia and the rest of
Canada.

“Soviet people display an intense
desire for peace,” said Steffler, who will
be handing the results of the “peace
quilt” project to Soviet citizens in six
cities in the USSR.

Steffler will go as part of a mainly
American delegation in the Second
Women’s Journey for Peace organized
by the U.S.-based Earthstewards Net-

work. They'll be hosted in Moscow,
Alma Ata, Odessa, Poltava, Leningrad
and Novgorod by the USSR’s Central
Council of Trade Unions.

In all, she’ll be bearing 10 quilts, most
designed through community effort
while another will be sewn together from
squares embroidered by participants
across Canada. Each square bears the
artists’ personal message of peace.

Steffler will be featuring the project
and offering the Vancouver community
a chance to design their own peace mes-
sages at a table in the tent marking the
opening of the Vancouver centennial
peace festival at Sunset Beach park,

beginning April 19.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, APRIL 16, 1986 e 3