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Editorial ©

- Peace dividend owing

‘Lhe anticipated “peace dividend,” as 45 years of cold war becomes less
defensible, may take some time in arriving if the new U.S. budget is any
indication.

Allowing for the fact that it will be amended, President George Bush’s
budget nevertheless shows some hard realities: $303 billion in military
spending is more (up by $3.7 billion), not less, than last year. Big-ticket,
new high-tech weapons’ systems will go ahead. These include the Stealth
bomber, a new generation of submarines and missiles and Reagan’s pet
Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars).

Indeed, closing some redundant military bases, mothballing old battle-
ships and other weapons and cutting the army by two divisions, one may
argue, would normally proceed apace with the U.S.’s modernization

‘program. Hence no cuts projected in future weapons spending — and no
“peace dividend” evident in Bush’s budget.

Clearly there’s much left to do before the people of this planet can turn
this wasteful, immoral and dangerous arms drive around.

If peace forces are casting about for issues, we might start by wondering
where the “peace dividend” went, and what happened.

This is not in the least to downplay the dramatic and important steps
toward disarmament — including Bush’s own European troop reduc-
tion proposal made last week.

But his budget shows the depth of cold war thinking, the degree to
which military spending is woven into the very fabric of capitalist society,
and how much more effort will:be needed to change this.

Canadians should carefully follow the Washington budget debate, tied
as we are into U.S. military and economic fortunes. Increased calls for
Canada to re-evaluate and revamp our foreign and defence policy are
being heard. Bush’s intention not to slacken the funding of America’s
war-fighting preparations should give added impetus to the need for
Ottawa to begin a serious examination.

Unhitching our country from the U.S. in this area offers a multitude of
benefits as the cold war recedes and new challenges arise. An entirely
updated and positive foreign and defence policy based on the 1990s and
beyond is required.

Canadians have definite views about this, and Ottawa should start to
listen.

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TRIBUNE |

EDITOR
Sean Griffin

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Dan Keeton

BUSINESS & CIRCULATION MANAGER
Mike Proniuk
GRAPHICS

Angela Kenyon

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t's been said again and again, with

complete justification: the Canada-U.S.
Free Trade Agreement has turned out to
be as bad as its opponents said it would be,
before it was implemented Jan. 1, 1989.

We’ve seen evaporate-almost before the
ink was dry on the agreement. But this did
not come as a surprise to the millions of
Canadians — trade unionists, women,

Specifically, the latest sale from the U.S.
to the USSR was at $18.73 per tonne. By

church people — who warned that such
would be the result of signing such an
inequitable pact.

Now we're starting to hear from those
who initially accepted the Tory govern-
ment’s line that the deal was a fast ticket to
paradise. A case in point is the complaint
of Peace River country farmer Hartmann
Nagel, quoted in a recent issue of the Peace
Country Extra, a supplement to the Daily
Herald-Tribune of Grande Prairie, Alta.

Nagel, the paper reports, toured the
Peace River area arguing for the free trade
pact. But nowadays, his sentiments are: “I
wish now that I had not believed what I
read.”

Nagel’s complaint, and that of many
other prairie wheat-growers, is that while
the United States has demanded (success-
fully, in the case of B.C.’s fishing industry)
the removal of Canadian federal laws and
subsidies protecting Canadian industry
and jobs, that country goes right on ahead
with its subsidy programs. To wit, it main-
tains its Export Enhancement Program,
under which it recently sold 525,000
tonnes of wheat to the Soviet Union at
fire-sale prices.

comparison, Canada charges $20 per
tonne.

Under an seven-year-old agreement
with the Soviet Union, the U.S. allows its
private exporters to sell wheat at reduced
prices, and compensates them with free
grain surpluses. It effectively undercuts
other prices such as those charged by Can-
ada, and drags down the overall world
price for wheat. —

Meanwhile, Ottawa has eliminated sub-
sidies to Canadian farmers, while not rais-
ing a peep about the continuing EEP,
which farmers like Nagel believed would
be eliminated under the Free Trade
Agreement. ‘

“They like to compare it to a mouse
trying to move an elephant — but evena
mouse could squeak a little bit,” the now-
converted Nagel says of the government.

Not everyone in the Peace country was
taken in by Tory blandishments. Another
farmer, Norm Dyck, notes that the contin-
uing U.S. subsidy shows the hypocrisy of
the agreement. He urges others to follow
the lead of the National Farmers Union and

write protests to Agriculture Minister Don ©

Mazankowski.

People and Issues

sing sarcasm to make a point is valid. _

But trotting out tired old red-baiting
cliches in an attempt to discredit the oppo-
sition is another ball of metaphors alto-
gether.

Columnist Peter Corcoran of the Globe
and Mail’s Report on Business doesn’t
seem to mind using them, however. After
employing his wit to, we admit, telling
effect to demolish opponents of the Tories’
Goods and Services Tax — slamming
groups like the Society of Ontario
Veterinarians — he just couldn’t resist
crossing the boundaries of taste in his
attack on the Canadian Restaurant and
Food Services Association.

“Vets, pets and Maoist guerrillas form
fatuous lineup against GST,” reads the
headline on Corcoran’s Feb. 2 column.
Maoist guerrillas?

In truth, these mythical wild-eyed fig-
ures touting AK-47s and brandishing
Mao’s little red book are nowhere to be
found in Corcoran’s column. The stereo-
type is merely trotted out to defame the
anti-GST fight of Canada’s restaurateurs,
who are understandably upset at facing a
seven-per-cent charge on their services,
while food dispensed through super-
markets gets off scot-free. Mind you, the

association is not so much seeking aboli-
tion of the tax as it is pressing for an
expanded definition of what constitutes.
food that is ready for “immediate con-
sumption.” In short, applying the tax to
foods such as frozen pizzas sold in grocery
stores.

Corcoran writes: “...if the definition
can be made to work, the government will
rid itself of the restaurant association and -
its Maoist guerrilla war on the GST.”

What constitutes a “Maoist guerrilla
war?” The columnist answers: “For
months, the association has been spread-
ing deceptive and misleading propaganda
among the population at large, fomenting
general dissent against the GST, while
quietly pressing the government to extend
the tax to include as many basic groceries
as possible.”

It seems that to be a Maoist
guerrilla — or by extension, anyone asso-
ciated with socialist oriented liberation
movements — one has to be two-faced
and have a hidden agenda. But we think
those attributes have been readily dis-
played by the party holding power in
Ottawa — the one Corcoran believes
“has taken a daring and necessary step to
reform the sales tax system.” In its first
term, it imposed a Free Trade Agreement
it claimed to oppose during the election. In
its second term, it seems hell-bent to
implement a ruinous, inequitable tax that
it also did not campaign for, and one that
is so obviously opposed by the vast major-
ity of Canadians. ;

4 ¢ Pacific Tribune, February 12, 1990