SAVE THE
SAMSON V

The Public Service Alliance of Canada
has launched a petition in an effort to have
the federal Department of Public Works
keep in operation, the Samson V, the last
working sternwheel steamer in Canada.

The Public Works Department claims the
steamer is too costly to operate. Officers of
the PSAC state that the annual cost of
operating the Samson V, which tends the
navigation buoys and removes snags and
deadheads from the Fraser River, is only
$300,000.

The union claims that the steamer that
has worked the Fraser River for the past
forty-three years, and employed fourteen
people, has saved the general economy
millions of dollars by keeping New
Westminster harbour and the Lower Fraser

safe for marine traffic by preventing
accidents.

MEDICARE
IN TROUBLE

Canada’s health care system is in deep
trouble and could go down the drain unless
Canadians take positive action now to
prevent it.

So grave is the situation that Mr. Justice
Emmett Hall, father of medicare, is conduct-
ing a six-month study to examine the
problems in an effort to salvage the plan.

The Canadian Labour Congress, a
number of churches and other organiza-
tions have joined together to make known to
the federal government their concern over
the erosion of health care services.

The IWA Regional Council has also
voiced its concern. Regional President Jack
Munro in a letter to Mr. Justice Hall stated
that the Union upholds the original concept
of medicare which was to provide Canadi-
ans with free comprehensive medical
coverage.

The Regional Council, Munro stated, was
violently opposed to any system of
“balance-billing”, “user charge’, or “direct
charge”, and if such a system were adopted
in Western Canada, the IWA would strongly
urge its members to ignore such bills.

The root cause of the present medicare
problem is the greed of the provincial
government and the doctors. Prior to medi-
care, the federal government paid half the
cost of provincial health insurance plans.
When medicare was implemented the fed-
eral government followed the same
procedure.

However, because of a number of factors it
was discovered that this cost-sharing arran-
gement wouldn’t work. Finally in 1975, a
federal proposal for a system of Established
Programs Financing (EPF), a combination
of tax point transfers and block funding,
was accepted by the provinces.

The new financial arrangement entirely
replaced cost-sharing in the health and
post-secondary education fields and yielded
ten to twenty percent more revenue for the
provinces.

And this was the mistake. Before EPF, a
dollar’s reduction in health services saved a
province only fifty cents. Under the new
system, its incentive to cut costs were
doubled.

It was only a matter of weeks before one
province was stating that too many patients
were aousing medicare through over-
utilization and that they would have to
reimburse the provincial medicare commis-
sion for services “deemed unnecessary”.

Prince Edward Island went so far as to
announce that annual checkups would no
longer be allowed. However, the provinces

backed off when the implications of what
they were doing was pointed out.

Everything looked rosy for medicare until
two years later when the doctors started
demanding major hikes in medicare fee
schedules. Confronted with Ottawa’s wage
control program, they had to settle for fee
increases of eight and nine percent.

Following the end of wage controls the
doctors demanded the right in a number of
the provinces to bill patients as much as
forty percent above the medicare limit.

A number opted out of the plan but the
majority wanted to have their cake and eat
it too by extra billing.

The provinces, who were now getting
more money than ever from Ottawa for
medical payments, started to erode the
health services in their greed to use the
money for other purposes.

And Ottawa appears powerless to act. For
years the most effective way of encouraging
the development of health and other social
services on a Canada-wide basis was for the
federal government to offer to share in the
cost.

Because of EPF, that route would appear
to no longer be available in the case of
health services. The extra money which
could have been used to match provincial
spending on new services is already flowing
to the provinces — and in an abundance far
beyond Ottawa’s expectations of three years
ago.

Unless the provinces and the doctors are
brought to heel by an aroused public,

medicare as we know it, will be dead as a
dodo.

INFLATION
IN SWEDEN

Inflation in Sweden is in the process of
annihilating the major supplementary
pensions reform which the unions fought so
hard for at the end of the fifties.

The general pensions funds (known as the
AP funds) which have been in existence in
Sweden since the beginning of the sixties
and which provide pensions for all Swedes
who have been in paid employment, lost
almost 36,000 million kroner over six years
during the seventies through inflation
alone.

Those who gained from the fact that the
pensions funds have been undermined are

the State, the banks and companies who
have borrowed money from them.

All this has emerged from calculations
made by the LO paper, LO-Tidningen,
during the winter of 1980.

When the pensions reform was introduced
at the beginning of the sixties, it was
assumed that the economy would continue

to expand. Further, if employees saved
through the pensions funds, productive
investments could be made, which in their
turn would lay the foundations for further
growth. All went well during the prosperous
sixties. But in the seventies the situation
deteriorated radically. Today, pensions
fund loans are being used to an increasing
extent to pay the interest on funds borrowed
by the State from foreign sources.

It is only since 1974 that this trend has
been really noticeable in Sweden.

Things do not look much brighter for the
eighties either. The economy is threatened
by a zero growth rate, while itis feared that
inflation will be extremely high.

If this trend continues, the pensions funds
major losses can only be counterbalanced
by higher contributions to the schemes
in the future. The employees will thus have
to give up the idea of possible pay increases
because the pensions funds are having their
value undermined by inflation.

This will mean a great deal of pressure on
employees, since they risk being hit by
marked declines in real wages as a result of
inflation.

ACTION
DEMANDED ON
REPORT

Jim Kinnaird, president of the B.C. Feder-
ation of Labour called for immediate action
on a United Way of British Columbia report
released in Feb. The report, called ‘Measur-
ing the Gap’ points out the inadequacies of
the social assistance system in the province.

“This is not the first report to document
the total inadequacies of social assistance
payments,” said Kinnaird.

“This report indicates the immediate need
for a rate increase of $230.00 per month for
families. These increases, if granted today,
would do nothing more than catch up on
inflation,” he said.

“Social assistance rates are at incredibly
low and unacceptable levels, and have been
for 20 years. It is obvious that no one in
Victoria is listening to what most social
service agencies have been saying.”

Kinnaird made it clear that arguments
that stress an increase in social assistance
rates would encourage people to leave the
work force are “nonsense.”

“Over 50% of those collecting social
assistance are children, and a large portion
of the remainder are mothers, or are unem-
ployable. No one wants to be on social
assistance, and certainly no one in this day
and age should be made to suffer because

they lack the resources to care for
themselves.”

Lumber Worker/April, 1980/3