June 5, 1989

50°
ye
. oe Vol. 52, No. 21
.)

Air, water testing ‘in chaos’

a Report confirms
scientist's stand

British Columbians were effectively
ripped off and several months of valuable
data on air and water pollution were lost
when the provincial government privatized
its environment laboratory, a former lab
employee told a Burnaby environment con-
ference May 27.

Doug Sandberg, a Richmond alderman
and for 20 years a scientist employed by the
provincial environment lab, said the release
of a recent report by Environment Canada,
and a University of B.C. study, validate the
claims he made about privatizing the pro-
vince’s air and water testing facilities when
he resigned from government service last
November.

Environmentalist cites
political will, page 3

Sandberg told a workshop of the Bur-
naby Environmental Action Conference
that the sale of the lab’s equipment and its
auditing function has led to loss of expertise
through staff resignations, loss of impartial-
ity, loss of quality, and “sweatshop” work-
ing conditions and has raised the potential
of a “massive conflict of interest.”

1 conditions led Sandberg to resign
his position on the six-member Data Stand- : |
ards Group to which he was transferred
following the sale of the lab facilities to
Zenon Environmental Inc., and the transfer
of auditing duties to the formerly non-profit
B.C. Research Corporation, located at
UBC.
see DATA page 3

| It took nearly five hours for the last truck
to go from the 5.a.m. marshalling site in
Surrey to Vancouver's Pacific National
| Exhibition grounds Monday as several
hundred owner-operators staged a truck
Cavalcade and mass rally to protest low
rates. Deregulation and the actions of
big corporate shippers in forcing drivers
to haul for less have pushed rates down
| to 1982 levels despite increases in fuel,
| insurance and maintenance costs over
those years. Speakers at the rally urged
truckers to act together to press shipping
companies for increased rates and to
Consider forming a chapter of COMCAR,
an Ontario-based owner-operators assoc-
lation.

The mass rally against the federal
budget cuts has been set for June 8 at
6 p.m. at the Vancouver Trade and
Convention Centre where Prime Min-
ister Brian Mulroney is addressing a
Tory fund-raiser. Organized by the
Coalition against “Free” Trade, the
rally is also endorsed by the Van-
couver and District Labour Council,
the B.C. Federation of Labour and
the Building Trades Council.

ee

Political change missing from China’s reform
i Day by day, as the television cameras
| Pan across the thousands of students in
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, two images
_ | keep recurring in my mind from a brief
_ | trip I made to China in September, 1988.
During the long flight from Shanghai to
__ | Vancouver, several students who were
coming to Canadian universities to study,
Stopped by to bombard me with questions

Ma Wenpu, the deputy bureau chief of the
international liaison department of the
Communist Party of China. In a discus-

sion with him at a hotel in Beijing, he told @
us that the Chinese reform program dif- q
fered fundamentally from that in the
USSR, since the Soviet reform program
had been launched first with political

reform.

Sean Griffin —

BACKGROUNDER

after my seatmate — also a Chinese
Student — passed the word around that I
had attended the University of B.C. As I
attempted to fill them in on how to apply
for student housing and part-time work,
they answered my questions about work-
ing and studying in China.

They were attending various universities
in Canada, either on study programs
financed by relatives abroad or sponsored
by organizations in China. Most were:

planning to return to their country to
work and emphasized China’s need for
technical expertise to develgp as an indus-
trial power. :

But in all of their comments, there was
an unmistakable discontent. After several
years of professional training, they said,
their wages will be little more than those of
an average labourer because the economic

reform program has not really touched the
wage levelling and egalitarianism that pre-
vailed in China under Mao.

Only if they went into private business,
they told me, or if they had connections
with someone in the bureaucracy would
there be opportunities for advancement
and better pay.

The other image that remains is that of

“In China, the economic reform comes

first and we will adjust the political reform
as it becomes necessary,” he said.

If there was a single message echoed by

the students in Tiananmen Square over
the past few weeks, it is that the time for
that adjustment in political reform is
overdue — although the events of the last
few days suggest that it may be passed by
again.

see PROTESTS page 8