EDITORIAL

Finance Minister Michael Wilson will bring down
the Tories’ first federal budget in late April or early
May. Amid the wreckage of Tory ministerial indiscre-
tions, patronage revelations and high spending, the
unfulfilled election promise which looms largest is
Prime Minister Mulroney’s promise of jobs, jobs, jobs.

Wilson has already warned that the budget will be
tough. Who will it be tough on? Our guess is, the
unemployed, the youth, the elderly and on the work-
ing people whose living standards are steadily declin-
ing.

Jobs are the number one need, but the prime minis-
ter is satisfed to let Labor Minister Flora Macdonald
doa juggling act with left-over Liberal budget
dollars — and still there are no jobs. The direction
taken by the Tories in the spending estimates of Feb.
26, indicate declining opportunities for jobs.

The Tory purification process by which crown

Media’s own

The trial and conviction of Ernst Zundel for know-
ingly publishing faise statements “likely to Cause
injury or mischief to a public interest,” revealed the
horrific gap in Canadian laws for dealing with racism,
naziism and fascism.

In denying the systematic mass murder of Jews,
Zundel implies that neither did others perish at the
hands of the Nazis — Soviet people, Poles and Gyp-
sies among them. But the volumes of evidence expose
him. The monopoly media.who know this evidence
well, nevertheless played a despicable role during the
trial, digging up hoary arguments for never taking
action against fascists, racists and those who incite
genocide.

For example, the Star, and the Globe and Mail of
Toronto agonized editorially over the threat to free-
dom of speech they saw embodied in Zundel’s convic-
tion. The Globe claimed Canada’s Charter of Rights
and Freedoms is meaningless unless it protects “the
right to publish false staements. . .”

The Star compared Zundel to Galileo in the 17th
century and to John Scopes who was tried for teaching
evolution in the U.S. in 1925, as if allowing Nazis to
spew their poison is part of the struggle for enlighten-
ment.

Need pre-budget fightback

companies are to be dismantled or “sold” to corporate
friends, slashes more jobs as do the cutbacks in
government-sponsored research and ecological pro-
tection, as does the sabotage of the Foreign Invest-
ment Review Agency.

Meanwhile, as pointed out here earlier, the military |

budget got a 6.8 per cent boost to $9.4 billion for
1985-86. Apart from the fact that the military is the
least job intensive per dollar investment, a lot of the
dollars are going to the U.S. — Mulroney’s spiritual
homeland — to buy a further new batch of jet figh-
ters.

Mulroney and his minister should be challenged by
all who want policies for peace, jobs and Canadian
sovereignty, through their own MPs, and organiza-
tions, through the labor movement — along the road
to a people’s majority outside parliament to counter
the Tory majority inside.

Zundel trial

It might be noted that neither Galileo nor Scopes
brought on a world-wide scourge like World War II
which brought death to 40 million humans, including
32,000 Canadians. .

The protestations that ideas are sacred in them-
selves and that therefore even the most anti-human
ideas must be respected, are as false as Zundel’s
claims. How did the Holocaust itself, or the Nazi
attempt to annihilate socialism, its plan to rule the
world arise, if not from ideas given practical aid by
imperialism? The Allied authorities at the Nuremburg
Trials recognized that fascist ideas deserve nothing but
to be outlawed. :

In the case of Zundel, a citizen of a foreign country
using Canada as a base to distribute his racist filth, no
convincing argument can be made against his depor-
tation.

During the trial the very media which rushed into
headlines with the words of this pedlar of race hatred,
went on to lament the publicity he gained. They trans-
lated the latter into a conclusion that he should not
have been tried.

What is needed is legislation with teeth in it to deal
with the spread of race hatred, and to deal with fas-
cism in whatever form.

WAS-2-49-NC

Lots of differences between a workers’ paper and a boss paper.
One tells the workers’ side of the story; the other, you know.
Another way they’re different. For example, Thomson News-
papers Ltd., Toronto had an after-tax profit for the year ended Dec.
31/84 of $153,819,000 (previous year $126,090,000). The Tribune,
on the other hand calls upon readers to keep us rolling with their

donations.

IRIBUNE

Editor — SEAN GRIFFIN
Assistant Editor — DAN KEETON
Business & Circulation Manager — PAT O'CONNOR
Graphics — ANGELA KENYON

Published weekly at 2681 East Hastings Street
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

eace activists from every part of the
world — including this province —
applauded when New Zealand Prime Min-
ister David Lange told the U.S. that its
warship USS Buchanan would not be wel-

People and Issues

most of his adult life up until his death,
Gerry is remembered for his outstanding
generosity to several organizations, includ-
ing the Tribune, support he continued until
ill health forced him to stop a few months

come in a New Zealand port without a
declaration that it was not~ carrying
nuclear weapons or running under nuclear
power — a declaration the U.S. flatly
refuses to give.

As anyone who has given even a cur-
sory glance to a newspaper has no doubt
noticed, the U.S. didn’t view the issue too
charitably. Actually, the Reagan adminis-
tration reacted with a barrage of diplo-
matic threats, its traditional bullying
response to an ally that dares to question
U.S. policy. But not to appear as the dicta-
tors, U.S. officials have insisted that joint
security was the objective. By taking the
action it did, New Zea!and was throwing
the ANZUS treaty into jeopardy and put-
ting its own security at risk. As Reagan’s
Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger put
it: “At the moment, they are following a
course that can only be of great harm to
themselves.”

In fact, the only harm that’s likely to
come to New Zealand from its present
course will be as a result of U.S. reprisals.
For according to a recent story in the New
Zealand Herald, the U.S. administration’s
main purpose in drafting the ANZUS pact
had little to do with common security and
a lot to do with making New Zealand and
Australia atomic decoys in the South
Pacific.

Basing its story on recently declassified
U.S. military documents, the paper noted

Feb. 14...“‘one of the main reasons the
United States set up bases in other coun-
tries was to draw nuclear fire away from
the American mainland in a major war.”

According to the paper, the documents
were drawn up by the U.S. joint chiefs of
staff betrween 1945 and 1950 when the
ANZUS pact was being negotiated.

The researcher who studied the mat-
erial, Arjin Makhijani, found that the mil-
itary planners “began to reformulate ‘an
offensive-defence’ strategy — with nuclear
weapons in a central role — right after the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Naga-
saki.

“The documents call for ‘well-advanced’
bases in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans
and in the Arctic ‘to keep the enemy at a
distance,’ ” the Herald story said.

Given that purpose for the ANZUS
pact, one can only speculate what plans
the U.S. had in mind in its treaties with
other countries — NORAD for one.

* * *

i € was always known, affectionately,
as somewhat of a “character” to this
friends and co-workers. But Gerry Delaney
was also a Mac-Pap fighting in Spain and
a long-time Tribune supporter and volun-
teer worker, until he passed away in hospi-
tal Feb. 27.

In his later years Gerry had been a regu-
lar during mailing day at the Tribune, in
line with his traditional support for the

progressive movement and the paper. He
had been single for many years, with no
immediate relatives in the movement, so
many of the details of a life dedicated to his
fellow workers are missing. But his friend
and fellow member of the MacKenzie-
Papineau Batallion, Len Norris, recalls
some of the events in Gerry’s life.

Born in the Montreal area to Irish-
French parents, Gerry arrived in B.C., as
with so many others, during the Hungry
30s. He became involved in the unem-
ployment fight of the relief camp workers
and their organization, the Relief Project
Workers Union. In the later 30s the fascist
threat to Spain impelled him to join the
Mac-Paps, Canada’s contribution to the
International Brigades in aid of the repub-
lican government.

Gerry fought in several battles in the
Spanish Civil War, including the “Belchite
Retreat,” in 1938, during which he was
captured by Franco’s forces. He spent two
years in a concentration camp, before
being released and returned to Canada in
1940.

Norris recalls that one of Gerry’s
proudest moments was when he attended
as a delegate the 40th anniversary of the
International Brigades in Italy in 1976.

Always a bit of a loner, Gerry served as
a ranger in the B.C. Forest Service for
several years, doing solitary duty in the
province’s firetowers.

A member of the Communist Party for

ago.
* * *

nother long-time supporter of the

Tribune — and its predecessors — as

well as of the labor and progressive
movements generally was ex-seaman Tom

_ Diggins, who died after a lengthy illness

Feb. 24.

Born in England in 1916, Tom was six
years old when his family moved to Can-
ada.

Linking up with the labor movement in
the 30s, Tom became an aggressive prom-
oter of the Tribune’s forerunners, includ-
ing the B.C. Workers’ News following its
founding in 1935. At one time he sold 70
new subscriptions to his fellow seamen,
and he continued that commitment
throughout his life, donating some $200

~yearly to the paper’s financial drive.

During that time, through World War
Two and after — until its death at the
hands of the federal government — Tom
served in Canada’s merchant marine. Asa
member, business agent and organizer of
the militant Canadian Seaman’s Union,
Tom was in the thick of the fight against
the SIU raids, going to jail several times in
defence of his union during the late 40s
and early 50s.

He was later to become a member of the
Operating Engineers and continued as a
stationary engineer until ill health forced
his retirement 10 years ago.

4 PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MARCH 13, 1985