ER — THE MOST DEADLY NARCOTIC Must action again racial violence in city By ALD. HARRY RANKIN _ Incidents of racial violence against people of East Indian origin are increasing in our schools, at their temples of worship and in the streets. To fail to take action against them now is only to store up trouble for the future. There are few things in any - Society as ugly, dangerous and corrosive as racial violence, unless its extreme nationalism or religious strife which are much the same in their effects. We have all too many examples of such strife which are much the same in their effects. We have all tomany examples of such strife in the world today, in Ireland, South Africa, Cyprus, India and the United States. Nor is Canada immune. We have had our share of violence against ethnic groups such as Chinese and Native In- dians. Feelings become inflamed, passions are aroused, reason is B.C. teachers win fight Teachers in B.C. won a major fight in this year’s round”of con- tract negotiations last Thursday when education minister Eileen Dailly brought down Bill 173, the Public Schools Interim Arbitration Procedure Act, requiring local schools boards to begin negotiations with teachers. _ The government’s action broke the attempt of the B.C. School Trustees Association (BCSTA) to violate the intent of existing legislation and impose province-. wide negotiations on teachers, which the B.C. Teachers Federation strongly opposed. Prior to introduction of the new Bill, teachers in many centres took protest action against the refusal of local school boards to bargain. Book-off campaigns, work-to-rule and demonstrations’ marked teachers protests in centres such as Coquitlam, Port Alberni, Campbell River, Nanaimo, Clearwater and other centres. Teachers’ spokesmen have charged that the BCSTA attempted to impose province-wide negotiations in an attempt to precipitate a crisis to influence hearings now going on before the Legislature’s standing committee on education which is in the process of preparing a report for the Legislature on the whole question of bargaining procedures for trustees and teachers. The existing Public Schools Act, under which bargaining between teachers and trustees has been carried on for years, provides for local bargaining and regional bargaining only if both parties agree. Teachers also point out that experience has shown that when regional bargaining- is un- satisfactory it usually goes back to local negotiations and bargaining anyway. Bill 173 extends the conciliation deadline to November 29, back from November 15, after which arbitration procedures between teachers and the local school board must be completed by January 15, BY and so on is a “‘bargain” demand — and get. Like The Bill also requires that no person sit on more than two ar- bitration boards. Mrs. Dailly told the Legislature this clause was necessary to prevent all 68 school boards, or groups of them, from appointing one arbitrator and thus obtaining their goal of province- wide negotiations. She said the main purpose of the Bill is to “ensure that there will be no possibility of a further breakdown in the reaching of agreements on teachers’ contracts.”’ : Introduction of the new Bill has broken the- deadlock. On Tuesday Burnaby’s 1,300 teachers over- whelmingly accepted a new one- year agreement which provides for a 16 percent increase mostly in wages. Agreement was reached after six days of negotiations with _the local school board. Negotiations are now going ahead in a number of municipalities between teachers and local school boards and early settlements are expected in line with the Burnaby settlement. at any price the retailer may its excessive spending on war replaced by irrationality and the worst kind of bigotry. One sen- seless act of violénce feeds on and follows another. The sources of racism are the vested interests who dominate our society and who find it ad- vantageous and profitable to practice discrimination and to fester divisions. The unduly high proportion of Native Indians convicted and imprisoned in our country is an example of racism and racial violence. Bringing in cheap. im- migrant labor to work at sub- Standard wages and conditions in the garment industry sweatshops and in the service industries is a form of racism. Allowing labor contractors to supply immigrant labor — Chinese and East Indian to market gardeners (fruit, berry and vegetable) in the Lower Mainland and in the process pocketing over half of their wages is a form of racism. The point system used by the federal immigration department Tenants call — public rally The British Columbia Tenants Organization have called a public meeting for Sunday, November 17 at 2:00 p.m. at King George High School on Denman Street in Vancouver’s west end. A number of NDP MLA’s in- cluding Emery Barnes and Harold Steves have been invited to ad- dress the meeting. Main subject matter will be the new landlord and_ tenant legislation, what it means to tenants, and what changes are needed. COPE RALLY All COPE members, supporters and campaign workers are invited to the COPE office on election night — Wednesday, November 20th — to join in a party as the results come in. COPE office is at. 1308 Commercial Drive — at Charles and Commercial. — which is a sort of intelle means test to keep out grou limited education — iS 4 3 racism. So are the new regul hav requiring that immigrants job before landing here allows the well heeled ac country but discriminates vats working people who have noJ go to here — only hopes. com What can we do (0 e) racism and racial violent Vancouver? sho Well, for one thing Ww : press to make any form 0 1 Co come under the Crimin@ acti Those who advocate and PET racism must be restrailic. unished. ? 2 But that isn’t enough. On! most effective ways of tac problem is through a WI eof ~ campaign of public educaliof school board, for example; see to it that the increas™ cidence of racial violence a East Indians in our on becomes the subject of enlié Fei discussions in every class? the city. The media alt a heavy responsibility — to Bik for reason and not to sense incidents or inflame pass!® i Ethnic minorities shy F given special assistance W™ come to Canada to acquair j with their rights and to PP, their victimization scrupulous employers. Finally, I think the trae movement, one of the § wot democratic forces in our ol can play a decisive | speaking up still more ag4 and all forms of racism, ers organizing immigrant wor” defence of their rights. z Vancouver doesn’t ne become a centre of uélY ‘ riots, but the problems Me: away by itself. It has to be * forcefully by all levels of gi ment including city counc! school board. Renew your PT sub today he had to sell in order to survive. The twin bile ; “scissors” are always far apart, held tha ers n a recent report the chairman of the so-called Food | Prices Review Board Mrs. Beryl Plumptre says “there is no evidence to indicate that consumers are paying too much,” and at current prices ‘‘beef is a bargain.” _ While this $40,000-a-year plus emoluments-of-office recipient sits down to ‘her filet mignon after a “hard” day’s chairing a totally useless board, we of the common herd must needs be content with our fancy-packed hamburger at 98 cents per lb., microbes and all. She has got a Liberal Establishment off the hook, which is precisely what she pockets a handsome salary for. Coincident with the current Plumptre blurbs comes a horde of food ‘‘experts’’, food “‘authorities’’ on how what and where to buy, a sort of a subhuman bric-a-brac, aimed primarily at bringing consumer thinking into line with that of the versatile Beryl. The disparity of course is that while Beryl may enjoy her “‘pate de foi gras”’ wholly at the taxpayer’s expense and then some, we of the “rabble” _ who are also the taxpayer, must get by on considerably less, hence the penchant for hamburger. And “it’s a bargain”, coos Beryl. A while back Beryl would have been hooted off. the platform and sent packing, bag and baggage. Now she draws a fat salary for doing nothing except conning the Canadian housewife that inflationary-priced foods, meat PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1974_Page 2 — pacts, its appointments of flocks of bureaucrats of the Plumptre vintage, its endless “commissions’’, ‘“‘in- vestigations” and so forth, all to do what it itself should be doing, old-line governments of today become (and are) the top producers of inflation, which ultimately places an ever-increasing burden upon the Canadian consumer. In other words, our well-groomed legislators rock, con and diddle the public until both “agree” that-as far as skyrocketing prices are concerned, ‘‘nothing can be done about it.” That’s when, in the Plumptre jargon, it becomes ‘‘a bargain.” Side by side with this Sorry state of affairs new thousands of wage workers are being thrown onto the unemployed scrap pile almost daily. Again plenty of windy wordage from those “‘in authority” and respon- sibility, but damn little action to remedy the evil Like the old days of the Hungry ’30’s we had quack doctors and ‘“‘buckpassers” in abundance, but deplorably few statesmen who recognized the right of a human being to a job (at contract union rates for his toil) if he so desired. With slight variations, we almost stand in exactly the same spot as we did then. Plenty to offer panaceas and rake in profits, but all too few to change a social order which incubates misery and hunger for the common ~ people — but little else. And in the broader sphere the picture is no different. A hungry world looks on aghast, while farm husbandmen wilfully and needlessly slaughter young cattle because the prices for feed they are compelled to pay are far in excess of what they receive for the finished product. The “scissors’’ we used to call it in the early days — the disparity between what the farmer had to buy, and what monopoly and its horde of “middlemen”, brok other species of human leeches. So we'll pate “investigation”, another “board” another “BPPO 00st J on the public payroll, to give inflation another ward — and the consumer another ‘bargain. When Charles Darwin wrote his classical re ou Species he took into careful consideration that W} industrious honey bee there would be no beautify fields waving in Merrie England, and with no clo there would be no fat and healthy cattle for which k was once famous. Between all natural and liv "Ke Darwin traced a chain of sequence which, if } _heglected, could mean disaster for mankind. Yet we manage to break it every day, every be hour, be it the slaughter of young cattle SWty poisoning of a great river or forest, the hiding ° lands below blacktop, the structure of hie’ b dwellings without regard to human health, or by of “H you? And all for profit, the ‘‘Alpha and Omega 2 enterprise’ monopoly exploitation and the © governments it elects year after year as a guaran” robbery. ' ~ Perhaps we should have done with such “bargains ask with the Irish poet Goldsmith: wae “Ye friends of truth, ye statesmen who oe The rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s de Tis yours to judge how, where the limit stands, Between a splendid — and a happy shee Or should we just be content to remain at the counter of a Trudeau charisma, or a tattered a Tory broker and take what we get? Survival mé we must decide — and soon.