Editorial Free trade wastes | Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, a disturbing futuristic vision of life in the U.S. after ultra-reactionary fundamentalists are elected to the White House, sees vast territories turned into hazardous waste dumps where dissidents are sent to work until they drop. The author’s inspiration for the book’s scary scenario were extrapolated from actual events. Atwood placed the dumps in the U.S. Midwest. If she had written the Tale after the signing of the free trade agreement, Canada could have been a chosen as a likely spot. One of the little-mentioned facets of U.S.-Canadian trade is the 120,000 tonnes of hazardous waste Canada imports annually from our southern neighbour — three times more than we export. According to the corporations who send us their dangerous junk, it makes economic sense to ship the stuff here — it costs less. : Toxic waste isn’t the only garbage inherited from the Tories’ cozy relationship with U.S. transnationals. Acid rain, despite the Reagan administration’s denials, is caused largely by sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emanating from U.S. industry. It knows no boundar- ies and is wreaking irreparable ecological damage here. The same holds true for the toxic sludge fed into the Great Lakes system, which makes it way into Canada’s drinking water, crops and soil. Cancer-causing dioxin pumped into the environment from U.S. smokes- tacks doesn’t recognize international borders either. Without doubt, Canada has its own house to clean on all these matters but these are not issues which any one country can address alone. Certainly good neighbourliness demands that one household not dump its trash in the other’s backyard. However, instead of legitimate protests, Mulroney has donned the cap of dustman and under the free trade agreement has committed Canada to 24-hour pickup. The pact is “simply an unprecedented disaster for the environment,” as Stephen Shrybman of the Canadian Environmental Law Association put it in an interview with the Toronto Star. “Nothing in Canada’s history damages the environment in sucha profound and disturbing way.” From beginning to end, the trade deal erodes or negates existing protections, and prevents the implementation of future safeguards. Under free trade, clean-up programs are re-defined as illegal subsidies, and laws prohibiting pollution are banned as trade restric- tions. As with the other prongs of the agreement, the Mulroney government didn’t wait for legislative protocol before implementing. It has spent its past four years streamlining environmental programs and offices in preparation for the day of Royal Assent. The environment ministry’s budget has been slashed by $46 million; one thousand jobs and 59 Separate programs have been abolished. The new Environmental Protection Act abrogates federal responsibility for pollution, handing that power to the provinces. Perhaps these initiatives have such a made-in-the-U.S.-boardroom ring to them because they were. It came to light last week that the environment minister’s chief advisor, Ron Wosnow, is a gift from the U.S. giant, Exxon Corp. Atwood’s chilling fiction begins to take on the look of a documentary beside Mulroney’s “vision” of environmental protection. O GIVING IT THE(R BEST SHOT EDITOR Sean Griffin ASSISTANT 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 Subscription rate: Canada: @ $20 one year @ $35 two years @ Foreign $32 one year Second class mail registration number 1560 eo a Fo a while, it was touch and go. But F after he had spent a week in hospital and his fever was finally broken, it was clear that Colin Richard Saunders — the 15-month-old son of our typesetter and graphics worker, Angela Kenyon — was POP ee heading home with a clean bill of health, and all of us at the Tribune could breath a collective sigh of relief. It began on Friday, Sept. 2, when Colin woke in the middle of the night with a fiery fever. He was rushed to Vancouver Child- ren’s Hospital where doctors immediately performed a spinal tap to check for spinal meningitis. Thankfully, it tested negative, but his fever lasted four days while lymph nodes in his neck remained swollen at an alarming size from a still undetermined cause. It wasn’t until the fifth day when Colin was taken off medication and his fever declined and the swelling lessened that we knew the worst was over. Colin is alive thanks to advances in medicine and the sophisticated state of hospitals in Canada. But that nerve- wracking week underscored for Angela and Colin’s father, Richard Saunders, the value of the degree to which Canadians enjoy socialized medicine. For Angela, the act of fishing out her medical insurance plan card at the admis- sions desk, the witnessing of teams of experts performing spinal taps and admin- istering medication, and the ’round-the- ~ clock vigil staff maintained was a reminder that the social services we take for granted, such as the medical plan, are all threatened by the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agree- ment. Angela says it “made me wonder what happens to families just like mine in a similar situation in the United States. Families that live from paycheque to pay- cheque, never having enough to save for that rainy day. Families that can’t afford to buy coverage under the private medical insurance schemes. “What happens when their children get suddenly sick? Do they get turned away at the door of the hospital? Do they go in anyway and then are burdened for life with an overwhelming debt? The treat- ment that Colin had received in just the -first few hours of his illness must have cost hundreds of dollars. We couldn’t have paid for it. “T thought about the free trade deal and how it threatens our system of universally accessible health care. All of Canada’s superior social programs could be consi- dered “unfair subsidies” under the deal and governments would be pressured to cutback or eliminate these programs. “And suddenly I wanted to scream. I wanted Brian Mulroney and all his right wing friends to stand with me there in the emergency department and tell those kids that maybe some day soon they won’t get the medical treatment they need, espe- cially if their parents are working class people.” For Angela, there is a new resolve “‘to do more in the fight to stop the free trade deal, because Canadian working people fought and won the battle for universal medicare and it was too important a vic- tory for it to be lost by default with the signing of the free trade deal.” * * * ith Native land claims making the headlines these days — as Cana- da’s aboriginal peoples seek to undo more than a century of wrongs — it can be dif- ID SUES ficult for the average reader to distinguish the various cases. At least one group has come up with a novel way to publicize its claim and raise some much-needed funds — and provide a way for potential supporters to help out. It’s called the Run for Justice, and it’s in support of the claim by the Gitksan- Wet’suwet’en Tribal Council on some 50,000 square kilometres of land around the Skeena and Bulkley river valleys in northwestern B.C. That claim is in its second year in the B.C. Supreme Court. The case resumed Sept. 12, with witnesses called to corroborate through carbon dat- ing and anthropological studies the his- tory of commerce and trade dating back to the “pre-contact” days in the region. The Gitksan council is not seeking expropriation of lands owned by non- Natives, but compensation for those lands from the government. The court decision will be precedent-setting, and council vice- president Herb George notes what is at stake: “We will protect it from being: stripped bare by corporate interests.” The Run for Justice commences Sept. 29 when Richard Joseph, a Gitksan- Wet’suwet’en university student, leaves the site of the council’s headquarters in Hazelton. He’ll be supported by several other runners on the way to Smithers. From there Jack Thornburgh, a family counsellor from Sidney, and Tsawout band member Steve Underwood, will travel the remaining 1,200 kilometres — with the assistance of volunteer runners — to the run the Vancouver courthouse, where the case is being heard, on Oct. 28. The run will continue to the legislature in Victoria on Oct. 30. (A celebration rally and concert will be held in Vancouver.) - The sponsors, an ecumenical group called Project North, seek assistance for 55-kilometre per day, 24-stop run. They need money, volunteer runners, billeters, drivers and even a physiotherapist. Project North can be reached in Vancouver at 736-5189, and in Victoria at 479-7876. The tribal council can be reached at P.O. Box 229, Hazelton, B.C., VOJ 1Y0, phone 842-6511. * * * hen we ran the piece on Palestinian autonomy two weeks back (“Jor- dan’s King Hussein: advancing the pro- cess to Palestinian freedom”) by freelance journalist Maureen Eason, we didn’t have room for an additional item on Israelis who are resisting their government’s call to aid in the repression of the occupied territories. We include the information here. Some 500 army reservists have refused to participate in the campaign of repres- sion in the West Bank and Gaza. Yesh Gbul (“There is a limit”) is a support group ae aids Israeli dissenters and their fami- ies. Since the uprising, 30 Israeli soldiers have been imprisoned for refusing to serve in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. The imprisoned soldiers are — denied “official dependent” allowances. They and their families need financial support. Contributions to Yesh Gbul may be sent to P.O. Box 4172, Tel Aviv, Israel 61041. Those wishing to contribute to medical relief for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank may send donations ,to Medical Aid for Palestine, Box 3255, Van- couver, B.C. V6B 3X9. a 4 Pacific Tribune, September 21, 1988