Editorial

sham democracy

If Premier Bill Vander Zalm thought he could fly with the notion that his new
referendum legislation is “simply good democracy,” British Columbians should
shoot that idea down right away. His new Referendum Act is nothing but a
hijacking of the democratic process and the growing public demand for more local
decision-making power.

The bill, introduced into the legislature earlier this month by Provincial Sec-
retary Howard Dirks, was hailed in the April Throne Speech as legislation which
would provide for a “public consultation process in virtually every area of public
policy.”

In fact, there will be no public consultation at all — except for a trip to the
ballot box for a vote the outcome of which would be virtually pre-determined by
the provincial cabinet.

The new bill gives sweeping powers to the cabinet to determine what issues
would be put to referendum, how the referendum would be worded, what voters
would be included on the voters’ list, what areas of the province would be covered
by the referendum—even whether the results of the referendum would be binding.

Only perhaps in El Salvador could a government more closely control the
outcome of a vote than the process proposed by the Socreds. As NDP leader Mike
Harcourt noted, the “potential for tampering is immense.” °

There is certainly a role to be played by referendums in this province—if they
are genuine votes on issues of key public concem and are prompted by public
initiatives, as was the case with the referendums on nuclear disarmament in the
mid-1980s. But it’s significant that the government opposed the holding of those
referendums and Vander Zalm even took the municipality of Oak Bay to court —
unsuccessfully — to challenge its right to hold a referendum.

There has also been a growing demand from local municipalities and regions
for more control over the economic management of their areas, for more say in
overall decision-making. But this bill would hijack that demand and turn it into a
meaningless ballot box exercise while the real power and control remained in
cabinet in Victoria.

Remember, this is the government that fired a school board for challenging the
government, which usurped for the cabinet the final authority over the Agricultural
Land Reserve, which arbitrarily changed voting rules and thwarted Vancouver’s
efforts to obtain a ward system. This is a government which has either blocked
citizen initiative at every level or has sought to manipulate it, as it did with the
public information hearings on forestry tenure, deliberately set up by the govern-
ment to avoid calling a royal commission. And as those hearings demonstrated,
the government doesn’t listen when it doesn’t like the message it’s getting from
the public.

Democracy means genuine public participation in the consultative process and
a genuinely public role in the final decision-making. The Referendum Act doesn’t
make it on either score. It should be scrapped.

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LAWYERS

EDITOR
Sean Griffin

ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Dan Keeton

BUSINESS & CIRCULATION MANAGER -

Mike Proniuk

GRAPHICS
Angela Kenyon

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t was more than 40 years ago, when the
McCarthyite witch-hunters were stalk-
ing the corridors of American universities
that Toronto mathematics professor Lee
Lorch was fired from City College in
New York for his political views. But on

May 29, he retumed to the university, his
ideals of four decades earlier now vindi-
cated as City College’s board of gover-
nors awarded him an honourary degree.

Although not as well known in aca-
demic circles in this province as in Ontario,
Lorch is probably known to many readers
as the former national chair of the Canada-
USSR Association. But four generations
ago, his activism and that of his wife,
Grace, who died in 1974, thrust him into
the headlines in the U.S. — and into the
full view of the infamous House Commit-
tee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

The ’40s and ’50s were the time when
institutionalized racism and political per-
secution went hand in hand in the U.S. and
it was the Lorch’s participation in the cam-
paign to desegregate an apartment com-
plex that got him fired in 1949 from City
College, his first academic posting. A year
later, his continued opposition to the legal-
ized practice of segregation prompted
another firing, this time from Penn State.

In 1954, in a landmark civil rights de-
cision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
segregation was unconstitutional, al-
though it would be years before civil rights
activists would end the racist practice of
busing which white parents used to ensure
their children were taken to predominantly

white schools. That same year, as a protest
against busing, and in support of the court
decision, the Lorches decided to enrol their
10-year-old daughter in a nearby Black
school. By this time, Lee was chair of the
mathematics department at Fisk Univer-
sity, a Black college in Nashville.

The school board refused and the furore
caught the attention of HUAC which sub-
poenaed Lee and ordered him to appear in
Ohio, several states distant from his home
base of Nashville. He was indicted for
contempt of Congress after his refusal to
co-operate with the committee but the in-
dictment was later thrown out when the
HUAC chair failed to explain why Lorch
had been summoned from another state.

Still, the incident again cost Lorch his

job as Fisk University’s white-dominated
board of trustees removed him from his
post. They moved this time to Smith Col-
lege at Little Rock, Arkansas, the town
which was to become the scene of a tense
confrontation between U.S. federal auth-
ority and the state government as the gov-
ernor called out the National Guard troops
to keep nine Black students away from
Little Rock State Central High where they
were to enrol as part of the U.S. Federal
Court order.

As Lee now recounts it, his wife was on

People and Issues

a passing bus when she saw one of the nine
students, who had been inadvertently sep-
arated from the others, being accosted by
an angry mob of racists, her path to the
school blocked by soldiers. Grace Lorch
got off the bus and led the girl past the mob
into a drugstore. After failing to get a taxi,
she led her on to a bus under a barrage of
racist abuse.

As aresult of her actions, Grace became

-the focus of international media attention.

But it also brought her an order to appear
before the Senate Internal Security Com-
mittee, as well as dynamite under the porch
of the family home and a beating for their
daughter at school. By 1959, the Lorches
found it impossible to find work in the
academic field and made the decision to
immigrate to Canada.

“There can be no return to those days,”
Lorch said in his address to the commen-
cement exercise at City College, now the
third largest university in the U.S. But he
also wamed that racism has taken a new
hold as a result of a decade of Reaganite
policies and urged renewed vigilance
against it.

That there have been major changes
since those days was evidenced in the res-
ponse to those receiving degrees. Among
those honoured along with Lorch were

Harry Belafonte; poet, feminist and gay
activist Adrienne Rich; Miriam Colon,
founder of the Puerto Rican Travelling
Theatre; and Colin Powell, the first-ever
Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Powell was not present to receive his
degree—which was probably just as well
since his name was loudly booed when the
announcement was made.

OK

herever it has played over the last

three years, No’ Xya (Our Foot-
prints), the joint production of Head-
lines Theatre and the Hereditary Chiefs
of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en, has
gamered acclaim for its dramatic presen-
tation of the issues of Native land owner-
ship and industrial development in north-
western B.C., site of the historic
Gitksan-Wet’suwet’en land claim.

Last month, Headlines mounted a new
production of the play, adding new mat-
erial and changing several parts, and took
it on a brief northwest tour of the province
before heading off to the other side of the
world. For a month during late June and
early July, the theatre company took its mix
of music, drama, dance and satire to
several New Zealand Maori communities
where, despite the geographic distance, the
Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en found a com-
mon bond in their connection to the land.

No’ Xya is set to return to this province
July 23 and those wanting to catch the
show can see it at Burnaby’s James Cowan
Theatre July 25-29.

4 + Pacific Tribune, July 16, 1990