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EDITORIAL

Summitry and sovereignty

The Quebec City meeting between Prime Minister
Brian Mulroney and U.S. President Ronald Reagan
on Mar. 17 promises to be more than an embarrass-
ment for Canada. It has the prospect of cloaking a
large-scale sellout of Canadian interests to the U.S.

It comes on the heels of the announcement of a new
pact on arming our north at an initial cost to Canada
of half a billion dollars. Defence Minister Erik Neilsen
revealed the tip of the iceberg Mar. 13, claiming nomi-
nal sovereignty over a string of radar bases. What
other military installations and U.S. rights are
included? The minister should tell the rest of the story.

One purpose of the Quebec meeting is to use Can-
ada as an obedient model in efforts to line up other
U.S. allies who are balking at U.S. domination. Brian
Mulroney is ideal for the purpose.

The “summit” (some call it shamrock with empha-
sis on the sham), agonized over free trade amid hints
that the Macdonald Royal Commission has been
enlisted to bugle this sellout.

With the huge U.S. trade deficit ($123.3 billion) is

one to suppose that the U.S. wants free trade out of
compassion for Canadian producers looking for
markets, and that it will allow “our” industries, many
of them American; to worsen the trade balance? It is
more certain to even the score by cutting back the
$20.4 billion favorable trade balance Canada had with
the U.S. in 1984, It will positively cost Canadians jobs,
as U.S. goods flow in, and U.S. branch plants close.

The genuine alternative to this free trade give-away
is a made-in-Canada foreign policy, including trade
with the socialist countries, Latin America, Asia and
Africa. That would have to based on limiting the
power of the multinationals and monopolies in Can-
ada, introducing democratic nationalization in key
economic sectors — the banks, energy, natural
resources — and using our resources to build new
industry.

The Quebec meeting had-no such plans on its
agenda, but it is high time for the labor movement and
all working people to use their strength to make this
the real agenda for Canada.

_ Wages, prices, profits

The declining standard of living of Canada’s
workers has often been referred to in-these pages. Now
federal government statistics have calculated the aver-

ages and placed the decimal points.

In 1984, average wage settlements (by unionized
labor) were for increases of 3.6 per cent, while the
annual inflation rate stood at 4.4 per cent. That’s a 20

per cent lag in wages behind inflation. It disproves the |

oft-spread myth that wages cause inflation.

But that is not all the evidence; the increase for 1984
is the smallest since Labor Canada began charting
wage trends in 1967. It is also the third year in a row
when wages fell behind inflation. The average increase
in 1983 settlemetns was 4.7 per cent, with inflation at
5.8 per cent; and in 1982 while wage hikes averaged 9.9
per cent, inflation hit 10.8 per cent. Truly that has been
a steady decline in purchasing power and therefore in
living standards.

This survey is based on 552 major collective agree-
ments involving 1.2 million workers, but Canada’s
labor force is over 12 million, which means that many
of those outside the major agreements did worse than
the figures above indicate.

Some of the unionized workers who fell below the
average were in the public sector where some 530,000
workers averaged increases of only 3.2 per cent. Need-
less to say they were hit by the same inflation rate as
everyone else.

Back at the end of last century Karl Marx wrote in
Wages, Price and Profit: ““The value of the laboring
power is determined by the quantity of labor necessary

to maintain or reproduce it, but the use of that labor- .

ing power is only limited by the active energies and
physical strength of the laborer.” In other words, as
Marx pointed out, a worker may earn the value of his
laboring power in a few hours, but the capitalist, to use
Marx’s word, will make him work longer to produce
surplus value — profit. :

As if to illustrate the point, publication of the fig-
ures on wages increases was followed in less than 10
days by a detailed report on corporate profits in Can-
ada in 1984. The survey by Report on Business
showed a 45 per cent rise in profit for 1984 (to $10.4
billion from $7.2 billion for 1983) in 150 companies
polled.

Next time sombody accuses workers of causing
high costs and declining living standards, slap him
with a statistic.

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John Labatt Ltd., London, Ont., is into everything from beer t0
Blue Jays, wines to wheat germ, milk to milling. Don’t let them tell
you it doesn’t pay handsomely, especially the suds. Nine-month
after-tax profit for the period ended Jan. 31 was $69,800,000. That$
up from $66,000,000 in the same period a year earlier.

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

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hose of you who are reeling from the
double whammy — and an impend-
ing third whammy — levelled by the pro-

People and Issues

vincial government on Vancouver transit a a a a TS NOES: TA a

The Social Credit leader is my shepherd,
Tam in want.

He maketh me lie down on park benches,
He leadeth me beside the still factories,

funding are not likely to be comforted by
the assurance that “bus service will be

maintained.” But B.C. Transit thinks you -

should be and went so far as to send out a
press release last week to say so.

Its first paragraph is a study in Socred
deceit: “The Vancouver Regional Transit
Commission has decided to maintain
transit service at approved levels for 1985-
86 by approving a small increase in fares
and the transit levy.”

Small? An 18 per cent increase in the
basic fare (from 85 cents to $1) and a 22
per cent increase in the municipal transit
levy — from $3.25 to $3.60 per month is
not what we would call small in these days
when the average wage increase over 1984
was a mere 2.3 per cent in B.C.

But that’s not the worst of it — as read-
ers will note from the story on page two,
B.C. Transit put a gun to the head of the
Vancouver Regional Transit Authority by
reducing the provincial government share
of funding. Then the authority was given
the choice of cutting an already inade-
quate service or raising fares, the transit
levy and the non-residential property tax.

What makes the press release all the
more galling is that B.C. Transit gets it
flunkey on the transit authority, chairman
Bill Lewarne, mayor of Burnaby, to carry
the can for what are Socred government
decisions.

It is a typical Socred ploy that the
government has used repeatedly through-
out its tenure: centralize funding decisions
at the top, cut the budget and then get
some Icoal body, which has no real author-
ity, to carry out the no-choice decision.
Accordingly, the press release, although
issued by B.C. Transit on its own letter-
head, makes no reference to the B.C.
Transit funding decisions but quotes
Lewarne at length to-make it appear as if
the regional transit authority made all the
decisions on its own.

Lewarne adds insult to injury by sug-
gesting that the increases were made
necessary by the collective agreement with
the Independent Canadian Transit Union
— another little Socred twist in arith-
metic, as the page two story indicates.

But make no mistake: it is the provincial
government which made the real decision
and the provincial government which
should bear responsibility. Remember
that when you’re compelled to put a buck
in the fare box and pay $3.20 for municipal
transit on your Hydro bill.

* * *

eaders in the labor movement who
followed some of former United
Fishermen and Allied Worekrs Union
secretary George Hewison’s articles during
the Soldiarity events will be interested to

know that Hewison will be writing regu-
larly for the paper from Toronto in his
new post as industrial director of the
Communist Party. He’ll be doing the
weekly column, Labor In Action —
written for several years by William
Stewart — touching on issues in the labor
movement across the country.

His first column on the lessons of the
British miners’ strike appears this week on
page 5. ee

lancing over a column by Marjorie

Nichols in the Vancouver Sun last
week we noticed that she ran a copy of a
parody of Psalm 23 from the Prayer Book
entitled “Psalm of the People”. It’s good
that the anonymous lines (actually they’re
not really anonymous — somebody out

there wrote them) have made their way -

into the daily press, considéring the anti-
Socred sentiments that are expressed.

But when we compared her quoted ver-
sion with one that we had in our files, sent
to us last year by Tribune reader and
Nanaimo and District Labor Council
secretary Walter Tickson, it didn’t quite
jibe. It seems that someone else insinuated
himself into the folk process and changed
a few ideas, adding “mining’s enemies”
and “deficits and depression,” among
other things. So here, for the record, is the
earlier version, — known as Psalm 1984:

He disturbeth.my soul.

He leadeth me in the path of destruction,
for the party’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of depression,

. I anticipate no recovery, for he is with me.

He prepareth a reduction of my salary,
in the presence of mine enemies.
He annointeth my small income with taxes;
My expenses overflow.
Surely unemployment and poverty
shall follow me
all the days of my life.
And I shall dwell in a house
that is mortgaged
Forever and ever.

And for those who like parodies, there
is also this one, based on the standby
school prayer:

Let us prey

Our Father who art in Victoria sometimes,
Bennett by thy name

Thy Kingdom come

Thy will be done in Canada

As it is in British Columbia.

Give us this day our dividends

And forgive us our impatience

And we will forgive those who elected you.
Lead us not into the hands of the bosses
But deliver us from exploitation

For thine is the kingdom,

the power and the glory

Until the next election comes around. — 1

4 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MARCH 20, 1985

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