|
|
I
}
{
}
|

Labour

mh

CAW rallies locals against trade deal

By MIKE PHILLIPS

TORONTO — Far from being a debate
about reducing tariffs, the battle raging
across Canada over free trade is a fight to
stop big business from imposing its corpo-
rate agenda on this country.

That was the message CAW leader Bob
White brought last week to more than 200
local leaders of the auto union in Toronto,
when he warned that ratification of a free
trade deal between Canada and the U.S.
‘would imply “a fundamental change in our
society”, a change that would shackle Can-
adians to a “dog-eat-dog”, “‘survival-of-the-
fittest” economy. .

Promising his union members “a hell of a
campaign over the next few months”,
White said the key to defeating free trade
and the big business agenda behind it was
defeating the Tories in the next federal bal-
lot.

Recalling Brian Mulroney’s fervent
opposition to free trade leading up to his
victory first as Tory leader then as prime
minister, White said the Tories weren’t
elected on a mandate for free trade or a
neo-conservative platform.

“No government has the right to take
Canada down this road unless they go to the
people, and the people give them the right to
do so”, White said.

“If we go to the people’, he added later,
““we can turn the tide on the issue and turn
the Mulroney government out of office.”

BOB WHITE ... taking on free trade deal
in Vancouver meeting.

The Feb. 24 meeting of local CA W lead-
ers was part of a effort by the union to gear
up the entire membership for the battle
against free trade and to bring down the
Tories.

The CAW campaign is the latest initia-
tive on the free trade issue in a series that
began in June 1985, when White joined with
others in trying to foster a country-wide
debate on the issue and its implications for
Canada’s future economic sovereignty and
political independence.

The latest effort was launched at a meet-
ing of some 800 Windsor-area autoworkers
Feb. 16, and to date has brought the CA W
president and other officers and staff to
Vancouver, St. Catherines, Ontario, Lon-
don and Montreal. In total, the union
expects to speak to similar large groups of
local leaders in close to a dozen centres
throughout the country by March 3.

The meetings are to be followed up with
an on-the-job canvass of the entire member-
ship and a series of in-plant leaflets on free
trade addressed to all CAW members.

Bob Nickerson, the union’s secretary-
treasurer, urged the local leaders to rally
their communities into action by linking up
with community coalitions against free
trade and helping to sponsor them where
they don’t exist.

The CAW has contributed $50,000 to the
Ontario Federation of Labour’s program to
fight free trade, he added, and asked the
participants to support the petition circu-
lated by the federation demanding an elec-
tion on the free trade issue.

Like White, he stressed the importance of
the local leadership understanding the full
impact free trade will have on jobs, living
standards and the future of their towns and
communities.

“The whole issue of whether we’re going
to continue to have a country is important
in regard to free trade”, Nickerson said.

He warned of the reality behind corpo-
rate slogans for greater competitiveness that
free trade will allegedly bring to the Cana-
dian economy.

“You can’t be competitive on that so-
called level playing field ... without giving
up social benefits and taking concessions in
your collective agreements,” he warned.

Comments from the floor reflected the
deep-running concern Canadian workers
have over the future of their country and
their apprehensions about what free trade
will do to their living standards.

Pointing to the pressure on the Canadian
government by U.S. textile manufacturers
to get rid of tax breaks for our domestic
textile industry, one delegate declared:
“TIsn’t this already political, industrial and
economic dominance?

“Isn’t this what free trade is after... how
many of us are standing on guard for Can-
ada?”

Air Canada worker Charlotte Davis
called for Canada to develop multilateral
trading relationships, including trade with
the socialist and developing countries, in the
context of pursuing an independent Cana-
dian foreign policy. “The defeat of this Mul-
roney government should be the priority of
all trade unionists,” she declared.

The centrepiece of the CAW leadership
briefings is the slide presentation prepared
by the union’s research department analyz-
ing what’s at stake in a free trade agreement
with the U.S., why it is on the agenda,
arguments for and against it, descriptions of
alternatives to free trade and details of the

CAW’s contribution to the country-wide

campaign against it.

Lurking behind the corporate drive for
free trade, research director Sam Gindin
explained, is a struggle over who will con-
trol our energy resources and the invest-
ment decisions shaping Canada’s economic
structure, and whether Canadians will be
able, through popular pressure, to force our
governments to intervene in the economy
on our behalf, or leave it in the hands of free
market forces and big business.

In addition to eroding Canadian sover-
eignty through increased economic integra-
tion, free trade locks us into a neo-conser-
vative agenda that blocks the path to
developing other alternatives for Canadian
economic and social development, Gindin
said, It’s a means of sneaking the corporate
agenda through the back door.

Quoting Laurent Thibault, president of
the Canadian Manufacturers Association,
in a 1980 brief to a Senate committee, Gin-
din said the corporate game plan is clear.

“It is simply a fact that, as we ask our
industries to compete toe-to-toe with Amer-
ican industry ... we in Canada are obviously
forced to create the same conditions in
Canada that exist in the U.S., whether it is
the unemployment insurance scheme,
workers’ compensation, the cost of govern-
ment, the level of taxation, or whatever,”
Thibault said then.

Gindin also cited the need to counter
massive Tory propaganda trying to paint
free trade as a boon to Canada, including
claims that it will create 120,000 new jobs
over the next half decade and will spur eco-
nomic development in the poorer regions of
the country.

Even some economists backing free trade
question the assumptions underlying the
government’s job claims, Gindin added,
noting how the government estimates have
been revised steadily downward from
500,000 to 350,000 to 120,000. At any rate,

other more effective job creation alterna-

tives have been proposed and are available
if the government was serious about job
creation, he added, citing a recent proposal
by the organization representing municipal
councils for federal funds to implement a
massive, and needed renewal of physical
infrastructure in the towns and _ cities
throughout the county.

That proposal alone, Gindin said, would
create an estimated 285,000 jobs.

As to free trade stimulating regional
development, the CAW research director
dismissed the claims as “dishonest non-
sense’”’. In fact it will strengthen the existing
trends to regional underdevelopment by
taking away government regulatory tools
that can address the problem of disparities
and will strengthen the advantage already
possessed by the more developed regions of
the country.

As the debate on the Mulroney trade
agreement heats up, those in favour of
the deal may be lumped into two broad
categories: those who fully comprehend
the agreement and its implications and
those who largely support it on faith
alone. ;

Those Canadians who understand the
full implications of the agreement and
still fully support it are few in number.
They may be found mainly among the
corporate hierarchy, and their hangers-
on.

Among the rest, (and these are, or
should be, the targets of the anti-trade
deal campaigners), are those opposed to
the status quo, and/or those who have
purchased the bill of goods sold by the
prime minister and his corporate friends.

The latter folks have embraced in
blind, often desperate, faith the promises
of jobs, prosperity, lower consumer pri-
ces, and the rest of the window dressing
which advertises the otherwise unsalable
package. Nagging doubts about Cana-
dian independence are swept beneath
prime ministerial assurances that the
agreement will not affect Canadian soy-
ereignty. :

But a professor at the University of
Western Ontario School of Business
Administration in London, Ontario is
among those trade deal advocates who
are far more forthright on the matter of
Canada’s future than Mr. Mulroney.

Professor ‘Harold Crockell, in a fea-
ture article published in the Globe and
Mail Feb. 4, rhetorically asks: ‘‘ Will free
trade end up constraining Canada’s sov-
ereignty by limiting its power to pursue
independent economic policies?” His
answer: “Yes, our economic policy
options will be limited, especially in the
field of tariffs, quotas, subsidies and dis-
crimination against U.S. firms.”

The good professor argues that Can-
ada exists in an increasingly interde-
pendent world in which the reality is
changing rapidly. “Adapting to these
new global realities is not going to be
easy for Canada. They require us to con-
centrate on competitiveness rather than
sovereignty, on wealth creation rather
than distribution and on co-operation
rather than conflict. Free trade with the
United States will start us precisely down
this path.”

This then should be the real ideologi-
cal target of the labour movement. This
does not mean that the Mulroney “pap”
about jobs and everlasting’ prosperity
must not be taken on and thrashed. But
it does mean that opponents of free trade
must draw a bead on, and be prepared to
argue, the real motives behind the
agreement. All of this will have to be
done without in any way narrowing the
base of the opposition to the agreement.

This agreement is not just a bad
agreement for Canada — which it is —
but rather it is a logical extension in inter-

Lifting the curtains
on free trade motives

state terms of the social, economic and
political strategy of the largest of the cor-
porations.

It is a strategy for maximizing profits
for a handful. It is a strategy of chasten-
ing Canada’s working people, the unions
in the first place. It is a strategy of social
revenge, of take-back of social gains of
the people of this country won over
decades of struggle, all in the name of the
“level playing field”. It is a strategy to
limit the power of future governments
and generations to take another path
away from: domination by big interna-
tional capital, or, as professor Crockell
puts it, “a step many other nations have
taken to limit the powers of their politi-
cians through international agreements.”

In the battle to defeat the Mulroney
trade agreement, and the Tories in the
next federal election, mobilization will be
key. And one of the keys to that mobili-
zation will be a deep understanding on
the part of Canada’s working people as
to what this agreement does and does not
mean.

Such an understanding will also be an
important factor even after this particu-
lar deal, and the Tories, are defeated.
Without racing ahead too far and too
fast, or crossing bridges before they are
reached, it is important to know the ter-
rain upon which the labour movement
fights.

It fights on the ground of the deepen-
ing crisis of the capitalist system. The
attack on the working people, on the
unions, ‘on living standards and social
services and on our sovereignty sprouts
from this same ground.

Professor Crockell is perfectly correct
in citing the growing economic intercon-
nectedness of the globe. However. it is his
conclusion to grant more power to inter-
national capital and less power to the
people to control this capital in face of
this new reality which is faulty.

This is why arguing for the status quo
or for the “good old days” actually adds
to the confusion, and plays into the
hands of the Yankee Trader and his
Canadian proxies.

By understanding its role as the leader
of the anti-free trade and anti- Mulroney
forces, labour (particularly its organized
section), will be able to give more timely
leadership in the fight against neo-
conservatism and for Canadian inde-
pendence.

rae Tih a iS