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Editorial

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Turning up the heat

All around the province last week, the Coalition Against “Free” Trade was
distributing clip-out cards calling on the Senate to “do everything possible to
stop the GST and to ensure the rich people and corporations pay their fair share
of taxes.”

It’s part of the country-wide campaign by the Pro-Canada Network to
continue the fight against the regressive sales tax and to halt passage of the
enabling legislation that would put the GST into effect on Jan. 1, 1991 — adate
that’s looming closer both for the Tories and for Canadians.

Predictably, the government issued its stern warnings to the Liberal senators
in the upper house not to hold up the bill. Harvie Andre, in a statement that
reverberated with hypocrisy, lectured Canadians about how they should not

“accept an unelected body interfering with the right of a democratically-elected

government to pass legislation.

Of course, Andre has no time for the 80 percent of Canadians who vehe-
mently oppose the tax — including (now former) members of his own caucus
and provincial governments. Democracy for Tories means getting
elected — and then using their majority to impose taxation and dismantle
social programs without regard for the wishes of Canadians until the next
election rolls around.

So far, the Senate has not indicated how it will deal with the GST legislation.
But that should only be a message, particularly for the labour movement, to
follow the lead of the Pro-Canada Network and step up the pressure on the
Senate — and on the government to scrap the bill.

Across the country, on April 7 and 9, more than two million signed cards
against the tax. That was only a sampling of the extent of the opposition, since
organizers could not expect to reach more than a fraction of Canadians on those
two days.

The protest continues against the tax across the country — and there is a
potential for more. As many in the Pro-Canada Network have emphasized,
April 7 and 9 should be seen as only a beginning of an escalating campaign
against the tax.

It can be waged,-and imaginative ways can be found to do it. It requires the
determination of the labour movement to make it work and to put all its
resources into it. And it is more than just a fight against an unjust, unfair
tax — the campaign for a new, progressive tax system can be the beginning ofa
new alternative program for working people.

On the legislative front, the fight has shifted to the Senate. But there’s no
reason that the campaign to scrap the GST, on the streets, in shopping malls
and workplaces, should let up one bit. In the process, Canadians should remind
Ottawa that a government which has the support of only 18 per cent of
Canadians, and which rams legislation through Parliament on behalf of the
corporate sector over the opposition of four out of five Canadians does not meet
anyone’s measure of democracy.

TN Ge A

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TRIBUNE

EDITOR

Sean Griffin

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Dan Keeton

BUSINESS & CIRCULATION MANAGER
Mike Proniuk
GRAPHICS

Angela Kenyon

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ribune readers will undoubtedly miss
Moscow correspondent Fred Weir's
perceptive coverage of Soviet events over
the next several weeks — but unfortu-
nately, he can’t be on two continents at
once. Until early June, he’ll be on tour

across Canada — he was in B.C. last
week — meeting
Tribune readers
face to face and
bringing his know-
ledge of the Soviet
Union to audien-
ces in dozens of
centres across the
country.

But if you can’t
get his current com- ‘ S
mentary for a few WEIR
weeks, you can
look back oversome of his pastarticles, written
over the last four years. Progress Publish-
ers in Toronto has just brought out a selec-
tion of some 46 of his Tribune pieces,
under the title The Soviet Union: Shaking
the World Again.

Covering issues as diverse as the lan-
guage of perestroika and the “Yeltsin
affair’, the ecological disaster of the Aral
Sea and problems of economic reform, the
book provides a glimpse of the changes
that are transforming the country. And its
all in Weir’s engaging and highly readable
style.

Priced at $14.95, it’s available from the
Tribune office or People’s Co-op Book-
store.

our years ago, in her revealing book

Controlling Interest, financial writer
Diane Francis wrote: “Canada’s 32 wealth-
iest families, along with five conglomer-
ates, already control about one-third of
the country’s financial assets, nearly dou-
ble what they controlled just four years
ago.”

That was in 1986. Now, according to
Francis, who was commenting earlier this
month in the Financial Post, “the situation
has worsened since I wrote Controlling
Interest about the extent and the evils of
concentration of power.”

Also four years ago, Canadians heard
the confident, if ominous, prediction: “In
a number of years, there will be six groups
running the country.” That was from Ber-
nie Ghert, president of Cadillac-Fairview,
which, incidentally owns the Cedarbrae
mall in Toronto where police were called
to arrest those collecting protest cards
against the GST on April 7.

If Ghert’s prediction hasn’t yet been
fulfilled, it’s coming dangerously close,
according to the new Statistics Canada
study that’s just been published.

Unfortunately, Ottawa isn’t about to
hand out copies the way it has eagerly
sought to do with the GST brochures and
it will cost you $325 to get a copy — which
will likely keep it out of even a lot of public

People and Issues

ES

libraries.

But a few of Francis’ excerpts from the
report provide a glimpse of where this
country is going and just who is really
running the show (not that there was
much doubt).

At the top of the pile is the Peter Bronf-
man group which controls 360 companies
— each one of which has assets over $10
million. And the 10 largest of those com-
panies posted sales in 1989 of $41.9 mil-
lion, about half of the total revenue taken

_ in by the federal government.

In addition, Francis notes, whereas 20
of the top 100 corporations were con-
trolled by a large number of shareholders
in 1986, that number had shrunk to 12 by
the time of the StatsCan study. The board-
room barons who control the other 88 are
the ones, as she notes, “who host and
attend the $1,000-a-plate dinners for poli-
ticians (and) ... bankroll leadership cam-
paigns without disclosure.”

Fe old Fleetwood Hall in Surrey was
filled April 22 as family and friends

‘from four generations gathered to pay

their last respects to. Viola Swann who
passed away April 13 after a long battle
with cancer.

In paying tribune, her niece Bey Gidora
noted that she was an environmentalist

long before it was
in vogue to be one.
“And _ it’s fitting
that we’re holding
her memorial on
Earth Day,” she
said, “because she
was truly a woman
of the earth — she
cared for it, respect-
ed it and she enjoy-
eduit.4

Born Viola Dew-
hurst Feb. 7, 1919, she grew up in Harri-
son Mills. She was orphaned at five, leav-
ing an older sister to raise the younger
children.

Although she left school at grade eight,
“she never lost her thirst for knowledge,”
another niece Judy Hamilton noted. A few
years later, her education took a different —
turn as she took out membership in the
Communist Party, beginning a lifelong
commitment to progressive politics and
socialism.

As the mother of three sons, she was
also drawn into community activism, —
gathering a wealth of experience in Parent- —
Teacher Associations as well as minor
sports groups and other organizations.
She later put it to use in municipal elec-
tions, running as a candidate for the Sur-
rey Alternative Movement, which contested
elections ona progressive platform during
the 1970s and early 1980s.

She also ran as a candidate for the
Communist Party in Surrey in the 1984
and 1988 federal elections.

SWANN

16 « Pacific Tribune, April 30, 1990

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