The Pro-Canada Network has launched
a campaign against the federal govern-
ment’s proposed Goods and Services Tax,
which the organization says is part of the
Tory agenda to make working and poor
Canadians pay for the Free Trade Agree-
ment.

“The effect on the Canadian economy
will be catastrophic. When it hits, we’re
going to have severe inflation,” said net-

work political education co-ordinator
Randy Robinson in an interview.

The campaign, set at the network’s con-
vention in Ottawa Oct. 21-22, will aim at
educating the members of the network’s
participating organizations, and later be
broadened to include the general public,
Robinson said.

“The positive and discouraging thing
about this convention was that everyone

| Local control of forests urged

~

John Tabak displays sign at demonstration outside Ministry of Forests office in Burnaby.

Overcutting of forests is causing
erosion of valuable soils and lessening
the ability of the world’s forests to
cleanse the air, rallies for community
control of the forests were told across
British Columbia Oct. 24.

Some 50 people gathered to hear

|  environmentalists and Native leaders

| outside the regional Ministry of Forests
office in Burnaby, while in Victoria,
Campbell River, Port Alberni and

| _ several other centres actions were

| staged in an effort initiated by the

| Slocan Valley Watershed Alliance.

| The rallies called for regional control
| of forests by local committees to help

|

put an end to the plunder by the large
forest corporations that has resulted in
the province having at best only a few
decades of harvestable forest left.

In Burnaby, forester Mark Wareing
of the Western Canada Wilderness
Committee warned: “Overcutting is a
reality and it can be documented here
in our own back yard, and it’s
something that everybody should be
aware of.”

Wareing said he has documented
four cases of erosion in the Greater
Vancouver Water District, which
encompasses three watersheds where
logging goes on with the resultant

fouling of the area’s drinking water.
And in the adjacent Fraser Valley
Timber Supply Area, an annual
allowable cut of 1.7 cubic metres per
year means there is less than 20 years
old-growth forest remaining, he said.

Harvard University professor Tara
Cullis said the rainforest in Brazil
decreases by 100 acres per minute. Yet
when she accompanied Chief Piaikan
of Brazil’s Kayapo Indians on a recent
tour of B.C., the chief remarked after
seeing clear-cuts here, “It’s you here in
British Columbia who need help to
save your forest.”

see FOREST page 3

October 30, 1989
SOS

Vol. 52, No.39
eau

could sit back and say they were right about
the free trade deal,” Larry Kuehn of the
B.C. Coalition Against “Free” Trade said.

“Tt’s an unfair tax that will affect and hurt
in every deep ways working people,
farmers, women, the working poor, the wel-
fare poor and consumers in general,” net-
work chair Tony Clarke said following the
convention.

The network plans to mail fact sheets out
to its 35 labour, Native and community
member organizations. Union head offices
will receive bulk mailings and ensure the
sheets are distributed “down to the plant
floor,” Robinson said.

The fact sheets will be written individu-
ally to appeal to the various groups in
society: farmers, women, seniors, and so on,
he reported.

Meanwhile the provincial anti-free trade
coalitions will be setting their own pro-
grams, Robinson added.

A recent poll commissioned by the Globe
and Mail-CBC News showed 80 per cent of
Canadians opposed to the GST.

But some of that opposition is engen-
dered by right-wing forces, which want to
cut social spending.

“We want to make it clear: our opposi-
tion to the tax is not the same as that of the
right-wing populists,” Robinson stressed.

Robinson said the network in fact calls
for greater social spending, while “both the
Tories and their right-wing opposition have
the same goal — cut social spending.”

The network opposes consumer taxes in
principle, Robinson said. Instead, it will
stress revamping the income tax system to
make it more progressive, he said, noting
that currently taxes are calculated on the
basis of only three income brackets, instead
of the previous 10.

But the biggest point stressed at the week-
end convention was the need to make big
corporations pay on an accumulated $30
billion in deferred taxes, Robinson said.

The network’s alternative program calls
for closing corporate tax loopholes and
imposing a wealth tax on the most affluent
members of society, he said.

The tax is expected to generate some $24
billion in revenue in the first year of its
operation, set to begin Jan. 1, 1991. While it
is supposed to apply to both consumers and
corporations, the latter will reap an esti-
mated $9 billion in tax credits on capital
expenditures, said Robinson.

“That means consumers will pay the
GST bill for corporations,” he said.

Federal Finance Minister Michael Wil-
son has promised tax credits for Canadians
earning less than $30,000 per year. But the
rate of credit is not indexed, meaning that
inflation estimated at three per cent annu-
ally will eat into the amount of rebate paid
to the poorer consumers, Robinson related.

The network says there is no doubt the
tax is linked to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade
Agreement, which the organization was
initially founded to fight. The elimination of
trade barriers has cost the government

see NETWORK page 12