Editorial

Lessons from Ontario

The election may have been 4,000 kilometres and half a country away but the
headlines that told of the dramatic vote results from Ontario last week reverberated
loudly across this province.

Despite generations of Tory domination and the dark warnings about “dead
socialism” from the incumbent Liberal government, Ontario voters turned out in
solid numbers to give the NDP 74 seats and a majority in the Ontario legislature.

What was crucial, as the story elsewhere in this issue shows, was the prominent
role played by the province’s social movements, symbolized by the upset victory
over Premier David Peterson scored by Marion Boyd, the director of a centre for
battered women. Anti-poverty activists, environmental organizations, labour
council representatives and others were everywhere in the province, dogging
politicians, targeting issues and highlighting the policies that NDP candidates
should promote.

For British Columbians, there were echoes of the B.C. 1972 election. The NDP
took advantage of the divisions in the old-line parties to turn a less than majority
popular vote into a legislative majority. But more important, NDP candidates,
many of them new and freshly involved in local issues, were elected to the office
on the basis of policies that addressed immediate issues.

The Ontario election campaign underscored the inequities aggravated by a
decade of neo-conservative policies. In that province, the so-called boom town of
the country, the focal point of business activity and wealth, there are still nearly
100,000 people using food banks, a continuing dearth of social services for the
poor and chronic underfunding for health and education.

The social movements and the grassroots coalitions that have sprung up to
address those inequities have become a key feature of political life in this country
and a vital democratic force for change. Without their involvement — and without
NDP policies responsive to the issues that they had raised — the vote result in
Ontario might have been substantially different.

There’s an obvious lesson in that for British Columbia as the dropping of the
election writ moves up on the political agenda.

Here the harsh legacy of neo-conservatism is felt even more acutely in health
and education underfunding and continuing food bank lineups, in anti-labour
legislation and environmental degradation that is the direct result of government
concessions to business. Here, too, coalitions and movements have sprung up
across the province, and are working and organizing for change.

Involving all the people that make up those movements — including the trade
union movement — intensely in the election campaign could well be decisive to
the outcome.

For the New Democrats that means devising policies that are responsive to the
issues raised by those movements and identifying the party closely with them. It
means going beyond merely exposing Socred scandals and declaring support for
business-labour co-operation.

The coalition politics of the 1990s have demonstrated that there are new
democratic winds blowing in Canada. In Ontario, they have helped change the
political landscape. It should happen in this province as well.

Kes.

EDITOR
Sean Griffin

ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Dan Keeton

BUSINESS & CIRCULATION MANAGER
Mike Proniuk

GRAPHICS
Angela Kenyon

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S$ we write, the enabling legislation

for the Goods and Services Tax is
still, mercifully, tied up in the Senate (al-
though it is a realigned Senate, manipu-
lated by Mulroney’s new Tory appoint-
ments) and the opposition to the hated tax
continues unabated across the country.

one-year, two-year and three-year sub-
scriptions which are paid before Dec. 31,

The new premier-elect in Ontario, NDP
leader Bob Rae, has also vowed not to
co-operate with the federal government
in the collection of the tax, putting
another wrench in the Tories’ plans to
impose the levy Jan. 1, 1991.

Much depends on the Senate which has a
number of options, including asking Parlia-
ment for amendments to the GST legislation,
delaying ratification or even voting the bill
down entirely. There’s even the possibility of
an election call, although that’s an unlikely
scenario given the Tories’ current standing in
the polls and the fate that befell the Peterson
govemment in Ontario.

But whatever the outcome of the efforts
to stop the GST before its becomes law,
readers of the Tribune — as well as other
subscription papers and magazines —
should note that they can always beat the
imposition of the GST on a Trib sub by
getting in a long-term subscription renewal
early.

nal for the magazine industry, the federal
Department of Finance granted a special
dispensation to magazine publishers, allow-
ing them to omit GST collection on all sub-
scriptions paid by Dec. 31, 1990, even if the
subscription continues past the supposed
GST implementation date of Jan. 1, 1990.
For Tribune readers, that would apply to

According to Masthead, the trade jour-

1990. So when the annual readership drive
opens Oct. 1, you should consider a long-
term renewal — or if you’re buying a new
sub, get a two or three-year subscription —
to avoid the possible payment of GST next
year.

A footnote to the tax issue: lest anyone
think that the Tories weren’t revamping tax
legislation to favour the corporate set, con-
sider the latest statistics from Revenue
Canada.

As a. result of the “clawback”
provisions in the 1989 budget, which taxed
back old age pension and family allowance
payments from higher income families,
personal income tax revenues going to
federal coffers in the first quarter of this
year rose over 34 per cent, from $12 mil-
lion to $16 million, compared to the same
period in 1989.

At the same time, corporate income
taxes fell by 4.4 per cent, from $2.5 billion
to only $2.3 billion.

%*

n 1978, when her book, Ten Times
More Beautiful: The Rebuilding of
Vietnam, came out, the southeast Asian
nation that had fought off U.S. im-
perialism for more than a decade was
being quietly ignored by the established

news media. Kathleen Gough Aberle .

People and Issues

put the record right by reporting on
Vietnam’s efforts to shake off the war
years and build itself out of the ruins. The ~
book was simply one more effort by the
renowned anthropologist in a struggle for
social justice that marked her life — a life
that, sadly, came to an end at age 65 on
Sept. 8.

Aberle died in Lions Gate Hospital in
North Vancouver after a five-month illness.

She was born in the village of Hunsin-
gore, in Yorkshire, England, on Aug. 19,
1925. In 1953, while at Harvard on a re-
search fellowship, she met her future hus-
band, anthropologist David Aberle. The
couple lived briefly to England before
moving to California.

Kathleen Aberle taught at several
universities in England, the United States
and Canada during her career. Her out-
spokenness and political commitment
were the reasons for brief tenures at some
institutions. In 1963 she left a position at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor,
having opposed U.S. military actions
during the “Cuban missile crisis” of 1962.
Her early opposition to the Vietnam war
and the repercussions it generated in the
United States was the telling point, and the
family moved to Canada in 1967. “She
viewed it as a terribly unjust war,” her son,
Stephen, recalled.

In Canada, Aberle’s life was not free of
controversy. She was among those faculty

members fired by the administration of
Simon Fraser University during a purge of
the innovative political science, sociology
and anthropology department in the late
Sixties.

Having met many Vietnamese as a
result of her anti-Vietnam-war activities,
Aberle was anxious to visit the country,
and found an opportunity to do so— along
with a stop in Kampuchea (Cambodia) —
after travelling to India in the late Seven-
ties. Shortly after, she wrote Ten Times
More Beautiful, one of the early titles of
New Star Books of Vancouver.

Other books include Matrilineal Kin-
ship (1961), Rural Society in Southeast
India (1981) and Rural Change in
Southeast India (1989), the latter two the
result of field notes written during visits in
the Forties and early Fifties, and sub-
sequent research in the Seventies. Her last
book, Political Economy of Vietnam
(Folklore Institute Press, Berkeley, Calif.,
co-edited by David M. Schneider), was
published this year.

Aberle was active, until illness struck
last May, on a major research project on
Vietnam — she was slated to visit the
country in August — along with Univer-
sity of B.C. professor Peter Boothroyd, for
UBC’s Centre for Human Settlement.

In paying tribute, her son recalled
Aberle’s “passionate commitment to
moral integrity and social justice. She was
not afraid to struggle against oppression
and did so at risk and cost to her academic
career. She put herself on the line.”

She is survived by Stephen and her
husband. A service was held Sept. 13.

4 + Pacific Tribune, September 17, 1990