Editorial Blacklist complicity The Canadian government will be “vigorous and forceful in upholding human rights” — so went the former Liberal government’s pronouncements on the world scene at the time of the 1976 Helsinki Accords. But apparently those human rights didn’t extend to hundreds of Canadians wanting to visit the U.S., many of whom were barred from visiting family members because they were listed on U.S. files as “‘subversives.” Canada has a “special relationship” with the U.S. in which there will be a new exchange between the two countries — so went the federal government’s line when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney took part with U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the Shamrock Summit. But apparently that special relationship precluded defending the rights of Canadians who were denied the right to travel to the U.S. because of a secret files and a cold war blacklist. That is the picture that has emerged from last week’s Southam News story — a picture already partly known by hundreds of Canadians but now given documentation by the evidence dug out of long hidden files through Freedom of Information channels. To its credit, Southam spent four years and some $10,000 working the labyrinthine maze of the law to put the parts of the picture together. It reveals that an Ottawa editor, who has been given space in dozens of newspapers across the country to denounce most of what is considered progressive in this country, supplied names of participants at a Montreal peace conference to. the U.S. justice department and is named as an “informant” in an FBI file. Who is the subversive here? But more than anything, it reveals the abject role of the Canadian government in allowing the U.S. to victimize Canadian citizens on the basis of their political beliefs — real or presumed — and never speaking out in their defence. It is a role that has become even more pathetic under the Tory government. What is worse is that successive Canadian governments, far from standing up for democratic rights, have aided the U.S. witch hunt against democracy. Until 1980, the RCMP was authorized to give its files to the FBI, enabling U.S. Immigration to make its blacklist more effective. And who can forget that Canada has the ignominious record of being the only country in the Commonwealth that disbarred a lawyer — Gordon Martin — for his political beliefs during the cold war? The sorry record has been too long hidden. Bits of it began to emerge last week — under pressure — but it’s time for the federal government to begin a little of its own “glasnost” and open up the files so that Canadians can see what role the RCMP played in blacklisting people, what lists were drawn up and why they are still being used. That being done, the government has an obligation to defend its own citizens when they are being victimized by a U.S.-imposed blacklist. It should lodge a protest against the use of that blacklist to bar Canadians from entering the U.S.and it should demand assurances from U.S. authorities that any files obtained from the RCMP have been destroyed. Canadians are waiting — to see if sovereignty and democracy really do mean anything in Ottawa. AND THIS 1S THE Loco GEOR VIA OUT- SIDE THE WINDSoR MONT REAL CoRR! PoR “Cc FIRIBUNE | EDITOR Sean Griffin ASSOCIATE EDITOR Dan Keeton BUSINESS & CIRCULATION MANAGER Mike Proniuk GRAPHICS Angela Kenyon Published weekly at 2681 East Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C.,*V5K 1Z5 Phone: (604) 251-1186 Fax: (604) 251-4232 Subscription rate: Canada: @ $20 one year @ $35 two years @ Foreign $32 one year Second class mail registration number 1560 "fhe documentary evidence about the long-standing U.S. blacklist against Canadians that was revealed by Southam News reporter Peter Calamai last week will probably come as little surprise to dozens of Tribune readers who have themselves come up against the McCarthyite list at border crossings and airports over the years. : What is particularly revealing is that it took years of applying to the U.S. Justice Department, thousands of dollars and lawsuits for Southam News to get the information — still far from complete — from both U.S. and Canadian files. And clearly, despite an undertaking that the former Liberal government was supposed to have secured from the U.S. that the lists would be purged from the files, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) continues to operate the blacklist. Tribune readers got a glimpse of that even before the Southam report with our account of Port Alberni reader Jack Gil- Ibanks encounter with U.S. Immigration and the blacklist when he was trying to board a plane for San Francisco. But the avenues open to people to get around the blacklist aren’t as straightfor- ward as Jack Gillbanks’ experience sug- gests. And another Tribune reader, Eric Waugh, showed us this week just how Orwellian the whole process can be. Waugh, a former shipyard worker, now retired, says that he first ran into the black- list in 1973 when he was returning to Van- couver from Mexico via Los Angeles airport. Although he was only changing People and Issues planes in the U.S. city, he had to check in with immigration before proceeding to his flight. “I was the last one off the plane,” he relates, “and when they checked my name on the list, they seemed to go right to the place in the book. ‘You’re a Communist,’ they said, and took me off to another room.” He was held for two hours, questioned about Communist Party membership and his political activities and finally told that he was barred from entering the U.S. in the future under threat of imprisonment. He was eventually escorted to the plane that was to take him to Vancouver but even then he was told that he was being turned over the custody of the captain of the plane. His passport was not returned to him until his arrival at Vancouver Interna- tional Airport. Confronted with the threat of jail, he didn’t even attempt to enter the US. again — until last week when he decided to see if there had been any real change following the Congressional changes in 1987. A check with the U.S. consulate indi- cated no problem with his name, but he decided to go to U.S. Immigration at Blaine, Wash. for confirmation. There, although the computer list initially brought up nothing, the officer went inside to confer with his supervisor — and came back with a whole sheaf of forms. “You’d better fill these out,” he told Waugh, “if you want to enter the U.S.” The detailed forms, one page of which contains specific instructions as to how to fill out the others, constitute an applica- tion for a waiver of the U.S. blacklist. The application demands two sets of fingerprints — one provided by a local police department or U.S. Immigration and another on an RCMP fingerprint card. It requires payment of a $35 fee — in U.S. funds — and full and detailed answers to all the questions on the applica- tions. In addition to the innumerable biogra- phical information demanded, the form instructs the applicant to outline the rea- sons why he/she may be inadmissible to the U.S (as if anyone could possibly fathom the mentality of a bureaucracy that is still frozen in the cold war) and requests a listing of any “proscribed organizations” to which the applicant may belong. Now we have a 1961 U.S. Congres- sional Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications and it goes to some 248 pages and includes virtually every organi- zation vaguely to the left of the Elks Club. For a good chunk of the population in this province, the list could get mighty long. At the end of it all, it still takes three months to process — and “‘inquiries made before that time will only delay pro- cessing,” the application warns tartly. And there are no guarantees the waiver will be granted. In Waugh’s case, it’s academic because “T have no intention of filling the applica- tion out — it’s too demeaning,” he says. But it demonstrates that the blacklist is still every much alive—despite the so-called undertaking given the Liberal government by U.S. authorities and despite the instruc- tions given to immigration authorities by Congress in 1987 not to bar anyone on the basis of beliefs or associations that for U.S. citizens would be protected under the Constitution. Waugh says he plans to write to his local MP, Vancouver-Seymour Conserva- tive Chuck Cook, and ask him to pursue the issue with the federal government and U.S. Immigration. Pk socks n noting Jack Gillbanks encounter with the blacklist, we should also report a small error in the story that we only became aware of after we went to press. As it turned out, Jack never did make his cruise — by the time he had finished with the U.S. consulate and secured the visa, he had missed his plane and was unable to make the connection for the cruise ship. It may be the longest undefended border, but in Jack’s case, the U.S. barred the door — and prevented an 86-year-old .man from joining.a cruise. 4 « Pacific Tribune, October 9, 1989