Peace Arch rally Sun.
to protest U.S. action

The United Church issued the following statement Wednesday
and told the PT that the rally is open to the public, but that they were
not able to make arrangements for public transportation in the short
time available:

At its annual meeting at Naramata May Ist to 5th the B.C.
Conference of the United Church of Canada was deeply concerned
about the escalation of the war in S.E. Asia by the éntry of American
forces into Cambodia.

As an expression of United Church concern, ‘STAND FOR
PEACE” is being made at the Peace Arch this Sunday afternoon,
May 10 at 3 p.m. We hope that as many United Church people as
possible will show their concern by being present.

We will meet at the Canadian parking lot before 3 p.m. and will
march together to the Peace Arch. We do this to show our support to
the growing numbers of U.S. citizens who are also working for peace
in this troubled time. ‘

There is no more appropriate way to observe Mother’s Day than
to recognize that each of our families belongs to and is responsible
for the ‘‘family of man’’. .

May Day Rally Hears
U.S. union leader

Millions of American workers
have to moonlight on two jobs to
make ends meet. Millions of
American workers risk being
fired if they refuse to work
overtime in a war industry.
Millions of American workers
are employed at the minimum
rate set by Congress of $1.60 an
hour. ‘‘We don’t even have an
honest 8 hour day yet in the
U.S.A.”

Donald Tormey of the U.S.
United Electrical Workers Union
revealed these facts during a
May Day address which was out-
standing in its broad approach to
the tasks facing labor today.

Tormey said that a New
Fascism was growing in the
USA, the outgrowth of the
imperialist drive to dominate the
world. Thus the struggle of the
workers today to be more than a
demand for dollars and cents
benefits. Political and social
understanding of the forces at
work in the capitalist system
must be part and parcel of the
struggle waged by the worker
against companies, reactionary
governments, and the vicious
spread of imperialist wars.

The American capitalist
system cannot -supply decent
jobs without war; it requires the
destruction of whole countries to
provide jobs, he said. And the
wars are used as an excuse to
depress the rights of the people.

In an exciting recitation of
events, Tormey described how
the cold war period, from 1947 on
had been used by the military-in-
dustrial complex to divide the
workers; how it had been used to
corrupt trade union leadership,
and to nullify the natural
militancy of the working people.
He told how his union, the VEW,
had been expelled from the CIO
during this period because it was
led by left-wing progressives.

Because of the split, and
because of the intimidation of
that period, the workers in the
vast General Electrical plants
suffered. ‘“‘We took what they
threw at us’, he said, “A 4
percent increase in wages during
an intense increase in the cost of
living.”’

Eventually the very conditions
under which men and women had
to work in the G.E. plants
dictated the necessity for action
on the part of the various unions
in the industry. One union could
not take on the giant GE without
the other, and thus unity was
born.

This past February the
electrical workers, united for the
first time in two decades, and
with the backing of the AFL-
—CIO, won a signal victory in the
General Electric plants.

Tormey stressed that the
larger picture — the fact that
workers in the USA are in the
business of manufacturing
napalm and arms for the
imperialist armies in Vietnam
and Cambodia; that black people
in the U.S. are being murdered
and oppressed; that millions live
in sub-standard conditions, must
become the concern of organized
labor.

It is no longer simply a dollar
and cents, hours of work, and
holiday pay struggle. The issues
today are much larger and more
vital than ever before, when the
threat of a ‘‘New Fascism”’
hangs over us all, he warned.

B.C. unions are faced this
summer with the sharpest
struggle in many years, said Syd
Thompéon, president of the VCL,
and Local 1-217 IWA head, in his
address to the May Day crowd.

‘‘We are no longer living in an
economy where supply and
demand determines prices’’, he
said. ‘“‘The owners of production
set the prices and you take it or
leave it.”’

- He noted that if production had

anything to do with prices, we
should have the cheapest food-
stuffs in the world = as
exemplified by the fact that
today our farmers do not know
what to do with the foodstuffs
they produce.

He listed the unions which
were this summer involved in
negotiations with the bosses, and-
stressed that the boss was not
having his own way by any
stretch of the imagination. The
towboat industry, now on strike,
could lead to a halt in many
phases of industry on the coast,
and that the workers in pulp and
paper, mining, plywood, saw
mills and shingle mills were
faced with a real ‘‘donnybrook”’
before the summer is over.

Harry Rankin, labor
alderman, urged unionists to
stand in the forefront of the
social struggle — against the war
in Vietnam and Cambodia; for
better living standards not only
for themselves but for old-age
pensioners, and all under-
priviledged people who need
help.

“Until the war is ended in
Indochina we will have inflation.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, MAY 8, 1970—Page 2

pet (12 E VON Yea

ANUBIAL SAE:

Tax hike on homes

are not justified —

By ALD. HARRY RANKIN

There is no justification for
any increase in taxes on homes
this year. But they’re going up
all the same to the tune of $21 for
the average single family
dwelling. This amounts to an
increase of 8.6 percent over last
year, and brings the average
homeowner’s tax bill to $243.30
plus another $213.00 for school
taxes, plus $6 more for hospitals.

The boost in the mill rate from
15.1 to 15.2 mills will bring in a
revenue of $262,000. This is what
Council needs to balance its $82
million budget this year.

But there was no need for
Council to be short this amount.
It gave away many times that
sum during the past year in
concessions and cash subsidies
to various promoters.

$1.4 million was given to the
Block 42-52 promoters — Eatons,
the Bronfmans and the Toronto
Dominion Bank. We paid $8.4
million for Block 42 but are
giving it to the promoters for $7
million.

$500,000 was given to Project
200— the CPR — for an extension
of Cordova Street, an extension
made necessary by the
construction of Project 200 and
the cost of which should have
been borne entirely by these
promoters.

$900,000 was given to the PNE
for an artificial turf, an
expenditure that should have
come out of the profits of the
privately operated PNE or the
lessees, the Lions.

$1 million was given to the
Four Seasons promoters in the
form of a water lot at the
entrance of Stanley Park worth
$1 million which these promoters
will now get for exactly $1.00!

Had all or even some of these
monies not been given away to
private promoters, your taxes
could have gone down a
substantial amount this year.

On top of that, it should be said
that the whole system of
compelling homeowners and
tenants to pay the bill for
running the city is unfair. Non
revenue producing property such
as homes should pay only for
those services supplied directly
to it such as street mantenance,

sewers, water, lights, fire and
police protection.

The cost of running the city
should be met through other
sources.

One of them should be greatly
increased grants from the provin-

cial government. ‘Dynamic
Bill” in Victoria who now spends
over a billion dollars a year,
could easily afford to increase
the per capita grant for
Vancouver from $30 to $100.

Secondly, the big commercial
and industrial properties in

~ their fair share of taxes. As |!

have pointed out many times,
they are assessed at far below
their market value and so in
practice their real rate of
taxation is far less than that of
homeowners.

You may be interested to learn
that one third of your tax dollars
goes to pay interest and
principal on debts, which is 4
compelling argument for the
provision of higher grants and
low interest loans by the provin-
cial government to the municl
palities.

Vancouver are today not paying

It Pays To Sell

THE PACIFIC
TRIBUNE

Contact:
E. CRIST, Circulation Mgr.
at 685-5288

We are on the side of the people
in those countries, and we are on
the side of the working people of
the whole world. We must not
fail them.”

Jack Nichol, of the
Fishermen’s Union, who chaired
the meeting, introduced a
resolution condemning the U.S.
invasion of Cambodia which was
unanimously adopted by the
meeting.

The resolution condemned the
invasion of neutral Cambodia by
combat troops of the USA and
the puppet regime of South
Vietnam.

| n these hectic times as reflected in sharp fluctuations

on the stock exchange, anti-Soviet ‘‘securities’” could
be said to be experiencing something of an ‘‘up-turn’’. This is
evidenced by the literary bilge we receive in the mail,
sometimes just a trickle, sometimes a deluge, depending on
the ‘‘market”’ trends.

Needless to say with our-way-of-life in crisis, and getting
worse every day, more literary hacks are being dug up every
day to grind out the old anti-Soviet political cud of stale
pablum. Two such chunks came our way this week.

One, a most heartening book for the war-mad genocists of
Washington and elsewhere, by one Andrei -Amalrik, his .
material smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the .
USA entitled, ‘‘Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?’’.

Since the Nixon Establishment with a long sustained
“credibility gap’’ and their own people showing unmistakable
signs of revolt at both domestic and foreign policies are not too
sure the USA as it now stands will last that long, it is indeed a
comforting thought (for them) that the Soviet Union may go
kaput by 1984.

Even if the idea is repeated by a confirmed “‘parasite,”’ as
the Soviet people describe their Amalriks. Misery, they say,
likes company, and in this capsule form, possibly the best tonic
capitalism anywhere can swallow as a quack remedy for what
ails it. Churchill took this ‘‘cure’’ with his brandy for a.
lifetime, and died with it. :

“Historian and playwright’? Amalrik was’ educated at
Moscow University we are told, repaying his Socialist
benefactors with a series of notorious anti-Soviet books, all
made available to the outside world by ‘‘the efforts of an
unusual non-profit organization called the Alexander Hertzen
Foundation’, located in Amsterdam. This publishing house
“‘specializes in the dissimenation of writings of dissident Soviet
authors’.

That ‘‘non-profit’’ touch has a CIA flavor and fits well in
the capitalist credibility gap. It’s like a U.S. (or Canadian) war
profiteer saying that killing Vietnamese mothers and babies, ~
broadly listed as ‘‘the enemy” is strictly a non-profit venture.

The other piece of well-masticated literary bilge comes:
from our own St. Francis. Xavier University by one A.
Balawyder. Whether the author is a student with an assign-
ment which has led his to numerous garbage dumps to paw
over the storage material there, or a Prof doing a paper on the
“perils of Bolshevism” the end result adds nothing to the sum
total of human knowledge. All it proves, if anything, is that
there’s still a market for anti-Soviet refuse, extracted from
content, and assembled as a literary (?) whole, no matter how

stale the contents may be.
In the high-sounding title of the Balawyder dithyramb,

“The Impact of the Comintern and the Communist Party of
Canada on Canadian-Soviet Relations’ one could assume — if
any assumptions are possible, that the author was diligently —
searching for some sort of an excuse to justify an era of anti-
Soviet coldwar, launched two decades ago by Messrs. Churchill-
Truman-King et al, and all that has followed since in the ‘‘free
world”’ arena of anti-Sovietism.

In his ‘‘footnotes’’ on sources of his researches, the author
has drawn most heavily on the RCMP, Scotland Yard, British
and Canadian politicos, prime ministers, etc., most of them not
a very good source of factual information on Canadian-Soviet— -
or any other “‘relations’’, our modern credibility gap being
what it is. : a

But as the man said, one shouldn’t expect silk purses from
the manufacturers of sow’s ears.

— «