March 4, 1987
40°

Vol. 50, No. 8
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The Socreds

and choice
— page 3

World Congress
— page 7

Equal Pay
— page 6

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ouver Saturday to protest decision by Social Credit cabinet to lift

Demonstrators march through Downtown Vanc
Moratorium on uranium mining.

Doctors, church officials, trade union-
ists, environmentalists and Native repre-
sentatives warned in public demonstra-
tions in Victoria Feb. 27 and Vancouver
on Saturday that the provincial govern-
ment’s lifting of the uranium mining
moratorium spells disaster for British
Columbians.

‘‘We feel that the moratorium should
be made permanent,” declared Cathy
Walker, vice-president of the B.C.
Council of the Confederation of Cana-
dian Unions, to the Vancouver demon-
stration,

Some 200 people marched through
downtown Vancouver, past the office of
the B.C. Mining Association, before ral-
lying at Robson Square. In Victoria one
day earlier, more than 200 people
gathered outside the B.C. legislature to
oppose uranium mining.

Public pressure forced the government

to impose a seven-year moratorium in

1980, cutting short a royal commission
into uranium mining and processing
then in progress. Known as the Bates
Inquiry — after University of B.C. pro-
fessor and commission chair David
Bates — it heard statistics showing that
workers involved in uranium mining,
exploration and processing face double
the risk of contracting lung cancer.

The B.C. Medical Association has
also warned of that hazard, and has
sounded the alarm over the environmen-
tal effects as well. In a brief to a provin-
cial cabinet committee Feb. 26, the chair
of the BCMA’s environmental health
committee, Dr. Ian Gummeson, said
mining and milling uranium increases
“natural background” radiation in a 10-
kilometre area around the site. Dr.
Gummeson warned that decaying by-
products from the mining will emit
radon gas into the atmosphere for thou-
sands of years.

But the cabinet decided to lift the
moratorium, claiming its new regula-
tions were the most stringent of all those
imposed by governments in Canada.

But those regulations are ‘“inade-
quate,” Walker charged.
“The overwhelming weight of scien-

see URANIUM page 2

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