“Why all this fuss about being unemployed —— ? | haven‘t worked a day in the last 20 years!” Campbell River rally urges action on jobs By HAROLD MALYEA CAMPBELL RIVER — A meeting called by the Campbell River, Courtenay and_ District Labor Council was attended by 100 unemployed workers Thursday, Feb. 13 determined to get answers from UIC and Manpower managers as to what is being done to solve their problem. Also in attendance was Liberal member for Comox-Alberni derson, M.P. Unemployed workers, who had unjustly been denied benefits by the UIC, repeatedly attacked both the administration and federal policy on questions ranging from inefficiency to bureaucratic management. Liberal Hugh Anderson failed to convince those in attendance that no conspiracy exists to disqualify applicants for UIC benefits. An- derson did state that certain changes are in the offing which would simplify application forms and for making records more handily available in local areas. By far the majority of people in attendance at the meeting were under 35, which demonstrates that this age group has been hard hit by Hugh An-° woman reported on her experience in job hunting here, she told the meeting that when she refused to work for $2.10 per hour in local stores she had been disqualified for UIC. If the meeting can be taken as any indication of the temper of unemployed across Canada, our federal government will soon learn that the old answers and promises are going over like lead balloons. Demands were voiced at the meeting for realistic housing programs that would use up a lot of surplus building materials and at the same time provides jobs for unemployed people. While the likes of Hugh Anderson and other Liberal politicians parade about the land telling all who will listen what a_ great progressive administration we have in Ottawa the situation for the unemployed grows more desperate by the hour. Questions like how do I feed my family? How do I pay my rent? How do I meet my mortgage payments? remain unanswered by the Liberal politicians, little wonder that Campbell River unemployed are putting the pressure on irresponsible political authorities and demanding action. ‘Need action on housing, not another task force’ By ALD. HARRY RANKIN If there’s any one thing we don’t need as a proposed solution to our serious housing shortage, it’s another housing study. Yet that’s precisely what the provincial government has undertaken. A 12 to 15 member task force has been appointed by the provincial government, headed by a Toronto Lawyer Karl D. Jaffary, who for five years was a member of Toronto City Council. The task force will study housing and rental matters and submit its report by September 1 to the Rent Review Commission. We have already had- in- numerable studies of housing, by the federal government, by the provincial. government, by the Greater Vancouver Regional District and by the City of Van- couver. I think if they were all assembled we’d have enough to fill at least one large room, and if their cost were added together we'd have enough to build at least a seven storey apartment block. All of these studies ‘‘discovered”’ that we have a serious housing shortage. They all declared that something should be done. They all made recommendations of one sort or another. Then they were filed away in the appropriate filing cabinets and forgotten. They may have made us wiser in some of the statistical information they ac- cumulated, but they made us poorer in the money they wasted. Worst of all, the studies were an excuse for inaction. Invariably we were told to wait until the studies were completed and then the government would decide what te do. It doesn’t take a lawyer or a The Tribune is grateful to correspondent Harold Malyea for sending us the above story from Campbell River. We are anxious to carry more stories from provincial centres in B.C. and hope others will . follow his example. With the addition ofa sixth B.C. page starting with the March 7 edition our hope is that we will be able to extend our coverage of provincial news. We would like to hear from your area. Please send us a news story, letter, or even clippings from local papers, on events which would be of interest to our readers. — Editor. cng a a ae ie ae a a el research expert or a task force or a commission to tell us we have a housing shortage. Any tenant, anyone being evicted to make room for commercial develop- ments, any young married couple can tell us that. : Nor do we need any experts to tell us what should be done. The answer to that is so simple that any man in the street can come up with it. All we need is for the govern- ment — any or all levels of government — to go into the housing business. Private en- terprise isn’t going to build housing at rents ordinary working people: can afford. Private enterprise stopped doing that years ago, long before the rent freeze went into effect in this province. Private enterprise isn’t building such housing in other provinces where no rent freeze is in effect. The obvious fact is that private enterprise cannot and will not do the job. It’s the kind of project that only a government can undertake. The Vancouver and District ‘Labor Council placed the issue very well in a recent pamphlet entitled ‘‘Toward Permanent Solutions to the Housing Crisis in the Lower Mainland.” + It points out that we had a housing shortage of over 60,000 units as. of the end of 1974, which is growing worse every month. It called for a large scale public housing program, iniitiated by the provincial government and ‘sup- ported by Ottawa and the municipalities, aimed at building 20,000 new units a year over the next five years. It proves that: (a) N.H.A. mortgages at 6% interest for individual homes on leased Crown land will make new homes available for $200 a month. | (b) Public rental housing in medium density multiple dwellings can be provided with rents for family accommodation as low as $150 per month. It’s as simple as that. As the Vancouver and District Labor Council says: “There is plenty of land in the Lower Mainland that can be used for new housing development. There is plenty of lumber, and other building materials to be — used. All that is needed is housing action. We don’t need another task force. We need more action on housing. : Sorry for inconvenience Due to the Public Service Alliance strike which is affecting the postal service, delivery of your PT will. likely be delayed. We ask our readers to bear with us. The best way to restore the postal service is to back the PSAC - workers in their just demands. It is also likely that plane service from Toronto will be affected, which means we may not get our ~ national pages in time. If that should happen we will appear in reduced size, with three pages of features from the U.S. Daily World added to our five to make an eight page paper. Sorry for the inconvenience. Spanish speakers coming Considerable public interest centres on the coming visit to B.C. of two delegates from Spain from March 20-24 following reports of growing unrest under the dic- tatorship of Francisco Franco. Bae ge Reports from Spain indicate that growing political unrest has created one of the most serious crisis in the 36-year history of Franco’s regime in Spain. Last week police detained 57 persons during a demonstration to protest against imprisonment of the Carabanchel 10. In Vancouver an ad hoc com- mittee was set up last Sunday to. organize the tour of the two Spanish delegates. Details will be announced shortly. FRANCISCO FRANCO — lack of employment. One young TOM ~ McEWEN hen the slaves become unruly” said the Caesars of ancient Rome, “give them a circus.” Our modern monopoly-government Caesars operate in much the same way, changing the performance to suit the times, but never the motive. In a boom-and-bust economy it is standard practice of these Caesars to sluff off the evil effects of their frequent busts upon the working people, either through trick legislation, or by other means, all aimed at taking the minds of the common people off their legitimate grievances. The art of a make-believe ‘‘affluence’’ or giving away one dollar with one hand and taking two back _ with the other, didn’t end with old Caesar. Our own breed, home-grown or foreign, is pretty good at it! Back in the 30’s we had frequent doses of this political therapy. To ease the hunger of a whole generation and in lieu of jobs or wages, our Caesars imported a “professor” Cuie from France no less, who taught the hungry to recite morning, noon and night, ‘“‘every day in every way things are getting better and better.’ Added to the ‘‘Cuie Cure’ we had a profusion of “evangels” and “‘evangelists’”’, the Billy Sunday types from the Sawdust — Chataqua trails with the jargon of the baseball gridiron ‘“‘strike-one-for-Jesus” and the morals PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1975—Page 2 of a big league hijacker. This together with the curvacious and cooing specie of the Aimee Semple MacPherson gospel brand, was supposed to banish hunger overnight. True, there were times when Aimee’s more select bourgeois audiences were inclined to let their thoughts wander to other modes of rapture, but they paid the shot willingly, (with taxpayer’s dollars) and opined that all such evangels had a soothing effect upon the dispossessed. Then our Caesars gave us other plans for free: the “‘Bideau Plan”, the‘‘Baltimore and Ohio Plan’’, no end of plans — to cut wages and increase the speed-up of the lucky enough to be working — and increase the hunger of the many, stripped of that opportunity. M. Bideau, also from France, a close friend of a defecting English king, was an ardent exponent of the corporate fascist state. Such ‘‘benefits” would cut down on wage demands, abolish union negotiations, and make . trade unionism a subordinate of the state. It would also “rationalize”? war costs — by loading all these onto the backs of the people. And like doktor Cuie, Herr Bideau didn’t work for peanuts! When William Aberhart and Social Credit come to power in sunny Alberta during the 30’s, that food- producing and oil-begrimed province often looked like an extension of the U.S. bible belt, the home of crooks, cranks and every variety of evangelists. Tub-thumping Abie kept the welkin ringing with pious homilies, and to question his economic ‘‘cures”’ for all ills, was to question a Divine Providence itself, ° 3 And who hasn’t heard of the Frank Buchman? Frank spiced his ‘“‘moral re-armament religion” with an extra- heavy mixture of anti-Communism, somewhat resem- bling the old ‘‘one-horse-one-rabbit”’ recipe for rabbit pie residence’; _ — a ten percent helping of religion mixed with ninety percent of rabid anti-Red guff .. . and always at the boil to keep the mess hot. What it did for the hungry may never be known, but the millions demanded by the Buchmans ~ were paid by the monopoly-government Caesars of the — savaananke to a long-suffering taxpayer, and without lemur! Today of course with a new crisis cropping up almost daily, new saviours, new tub-thumpers are greatly in — demand: to divert the minds of the people from their numerous ills and help them swallow the excuses and panaceas of their misleaders! And then there is the new anti-Soviet gospel — ac- cording to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn wants to return to the Soviet Union, there to become the high priest of a new Buchman brigade; to foment a new moral re-armament revolution. He imagines himself in the role of a sort of “‘conscience-in- starring in any anti-Soviet production directed by reaction abroad. What an asset that would be to our Caesars, always on the lookout for new explanations and new évangelists! To have a Russian Buchman on tap just in case the North American supply runs short or in case the masses won’t swallow the “‘official’’ stories. The Christian Science Monitor, that one-time staid journal of all bloodless revolutions is sounding the trumpet for their own brand of moral rearmament. Isn’t that what our Caesars and their well-trained legions have always longed for? — to talk peace while announcing a new and just society? f We might well say to the Monitor . . . et tu, Brute!