Liu iT ma} aan ia | | EDITORIAL a The Senate-Commons Commitee on Canada’s International Relations should have rejected Star Wars with finality. Overloaded with Tories, as it was, the 17-member body did not do so. The best the majority (Tory members’) report could do was not tush to endorse Star Wars, and leave the decision to the cabinet. (Both the Liberal and New Democratic groups on the commitee issued their own reports.) The Tory committee members did endorse Cana- dian participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organ- ization by which the mnilitarists can keep a stranglehold on Ottawa and milk the public treasury for vast sums to escalate the arms race. They also want Canada to continue as a puppet in the North Ameri- can Aerospace Defence command, which is being _ re-shaped to Star Wars needs. _ The urgent point is that the prime minister, in a _ display of bravado aimed at shedding the public image of evasiveness, rashly said Aug. 22, that he will decide for the committee, and he'll do it before Parliament _ has a chance to meet Sept. 9. That is a dangerous threat. It should be headed off through protests by trade unions, labor councils, the Canadian Labor Congress and provincial federations of labor. All democratic and peace organizations are challenged by __ this hasty, prime ministerial adventurism. The time to stop such a dictatorial course is now. “There’s nothing ‘free’ in free trade,” Dennis McDermott warns in a Labor Day message, and _ that’s a fact, unless you want to talk about the “free- dom” it would give U.S. corporations to “discard” Canadian jobs and to close down Canadian enter- prises. “If we blunder into it,” the Canadian Labor Con- gress president says, “it may cost us what’s left of our economic, social, cultural and national sovereignty.” The Mulroney government, on the other hand, has - always behaved as though opening our trade borders ‘to U.S. mercies had been part of its oath of office. McDermott quotes a federal government discus- sion paper which estimates free trade with the U.S. could cause “inter-sectoral employment shifts of up to seven per cent of the labor force” — a cost of one _ million Canadian jobs. _. Industries threatened are clothing and textiles, brewing, meat packing and processing, electrical _ goods, machinery and equipment, furniture, foot- wear, high-tech goods, and others. _ Free trade would also threaten our existing social _ programs, services and legislation which currently _ benefit working people, seniors and others. _ The fact is that free trade, or freer trade, or whatever other euphemism is used, is part of the process of Seen: oF Ganate into string the U'S.. just as Star Wars is. No to Reagan Star Wars Who can ignore the fact that his or her own life is on the line if Canada submits to Star Wars — and the lives of our children and grandchildren? It would be unspeakable to bargain away these lives on the false pretext that Star Wars would provide jobs. Never mind that the Senate-Commons committee found vir- tually no evidence of jobs from Star Wars. (A few highly-trained scientists and technicians, already employed in the civilian sphere would be yanked out of that to fill the Star Wars “jobs’’.) The Mulroney government faces the huge moral responsibility in colluding with Reagan’s Star Wars program that this program escalates the nuclear _danger and threatens to end the human race. Immediate corporate riches for the U.S. military- industrial complex, and the hallucination of destroy- ing socialism, are behind Reagan’s obsessive preaching of hatred of the Soviet Union and the social- ist countries. But those spurious purposes will put nothing on the tables of Canadian workers — or anyone else. Prime Minister Mulroney must be constrained by the demands of the majority in Canada — in the first place the great labor movement. Stop him before he signs away our sovereignty, our independence and our lives. Free trade: nothing free Labor is not alone in opposing it. An Ontario Federation of Agriculture delegation told an Ontario Legislature committee Aug. 26, that free trade with the U.S. risks destroying the family farm and watching the takeover of food production by enormous corpo- rations. ; More voices need to be heard, enough to compel the Mulroney government to rid itself of the ruinous idea of free trade with the U.S. so that it can get on with a genuine trade policy based on mutual benefits to the partners. Obviously, the Committee of Canada’s Interna- tional Relations didn’t venture far into the interna- tional arena in its search for more beneficial trade relations. There is a whole world of potential out there which does not involve indenturing Canada to the U.S. military-industrial complex. Instead of forcing Canadians “‘to complete with sub-standard wages and working conditions in the right-to-work states with heavy concentration of manufacturing,” as Ontario Federation of Labor president Cliff Pilkey notes in a Labor Day message, workers have to protect what they have won, from the free trade threat. It will take plenty‘of pressure from organized labor to fight the free trade fixation of the Mulroney Tories, and sections of the Canadian corporate elite. The time for such pressure is now. 4 THE MARXIST Govt” of NICARAGYVA 15 IMPORTING SOVIET AND WARSAW GLOC - cows To FEED KYOouNG TERRORISTS iT Se Let’s hear it for Bank of Montreal. Oblivious of mass unemploy- ment, runaway layoffs, rising living costs, it grabbed a nine-month after-tax profit as of July 31, of $247.5-million. In the same period a year earlier it netted a mere $210.8-million. The $247.5 is after tucking away $311.7-million in case of bad debts. , ___IRIBUNE ’ Editor — SEAN GRIFFIN Assistant Editor — DAN KEETON Business & Circulation Manager — DONALDA VIAUD Graphics — ANGELA KENYON Published weekly at 2681 East Hastings Stre- Vancouver, B.C. V5K 1Z5 Phone (604) 251-1186 Subscription Rate: Canada — $14 one year, $8 six months Foreign — $20 one year; Second class mail registration number 1560 eaders will recall the account of hard- employer vindictiveness, faced by Britain’s coal miners in the letter we printed from National Union of Mineworkers branch People and Issues and would welcome any visitors there. He’s on the 4th floor of the West Wing, Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria. Cards and letters can be sent to Walter Tickson, 4th Floor West Wing, Royal Jubilee Hos- _ president Frank Clarke, three weeks ago. | Yet the eight-month battle to prevent the closure of several coal pits and to pre- _ Serve thousands of jobs claimed far more casualties than mineworkers. As a recent ‘issue of the Financial Post states, the fight against Thatcherism also cost the British - economy plenty. Citing the annual report of the National Coal Board, the Post article reports the cost of the strike at $3.3 billion, for an average $19,000 in lost wages for miners. ‘The board's deficit was calculated to be $4.3 billion. _ Butthe total cost of the miner’s battle to preserve jobs — and the Thatcher govern- | ment’s fanatical determination to close the pits — came to moe than $11 billion. _ Added to the coal boarc’s losses are those ] of British Steel ($777 million), British Rail ($760 million) and the electricity industry _ (some $3 billion). - Having already cost the country those billions of dollars, the Tory government _ is now closing, or considering closing 20 _ pits at a cost of more than 24,000 jobs, the article states. Disappointing to many, midguts in his letter, is the lack of support for the miners from Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, who has rejected NUM president Arthur Scargill’s call for a Labour government to pardon strikers convicted of offenses. Kinnock’s excuse is that he could not overturn the verdicts arrived at “properly” by the courts. An indication of just how proper those verdicts were may be gleaned from a letter to the Manchester Guardian Weekly from Bernard Jackson, president of NUM’s Wath Main Branch. Jackson, one of 15 miners charged with “rioting,” pointed the finger directly at the Yorkshire police as the cause of violence on the picket lines. Bernard explained that charges against the miners were suddenly dropped by the prosecution, although the miners had rejected an offer “to be bound over to keep the peace” and had in fact requested videos of the picket line strife recorded by the police themselves. “It was we who revealed that police horses charged repeatedly into the crowd of pickets that inevitably some of the People in that crowd reacted,” the miner’s president wrote. “It was we who revealed that units of police officers. ..were trained and oper- ated in accordance with a manual. . .which told them to commit assaults on demon- strators doing nothing, to disperse them.” During the proceedings the prosecution was also forced to acknowledge that one of the police witness’ signatures “appeared to be a forgery,” Bernard stated. The other falsehood is the claim by the Thatcher government that wholesale clo- sures, privatizations and layoffs will bring England economic recovery. That claim is now in disrepute among British voters, who deserve a real alternative in the upcoming national elections — a govern- ment solidly behind its working-class con- stituents. AE Pe rom Nanaimo last week, we received the unfortuante news that Walter Tick- son, the secretary of the Nanaimo, Duncan and District Labor Council and a long time supporter of the Tribune, was hospi- talized in Victoria where he is expected to begin treatments in a battle with cancer. Although he will be returning home on weekends, he will be undergoing treat- ments several days a week at the hospital - pital, 1900 Fort Street, Victoria, V8R 1J8. With him go all our best wishes for a successful course of treatment. oS ay e Tribune lost a staunch supporter with the passing Aug. 28 in Surrey Memorial Hospital of Vern Brown who, together with his wife Monique, had hosted Tribune fund-raisers at their home for as many years back as we can remember. Born in Ontario, May 19, 1902, he fol- lowed the pattern set by many among the working class in this country, working var- iously as a gold miner in the Yukon, a seaman and finally as a carpenter in Van- couver where he was a member of the union’s Local 452 until his retirement. He also served during World War II in Europe where he first met his wife. Return- ing to Canada, he became active in the CCF but finding its policies out of step with his own, he joined the Communist Party in 1947 and remained a member of the Surrey branch until his death. Carpenters Provincial Council presi- dent Bill Zander paid tribute at a funeral service at Avalon Funeral Home Aug. 31.