‘Vancouver
apartheid
link must

end:’ COST

April 25, 1987
40°

Vol. 50, No. 12

Tribune’s 1987 financial drive opens

— details, page 2

One of British Columbia’s major
seniors organizations has launched a
petition campaign calling for the scrap-
ping of the Socreds’ new medical services
user fees — and it already has the sup-
port of a popular drug store chain.

With the support of Pharmasave,
which plans to carry the petition in its
stores and launch its own advertising
campaign, the B.C. Old Age Pensioners
is approaching other pharmaceutical
chains to carry the petition.

It demands the provincial government
cancel planned legislation which will cost
seniors up to $125 annually in drug dis-
pensing fees, and cost all British Colum-
bians $5 per visit to physiotherapists,
chiropractors and other specialists, said
BCOAP first vice-president, Jo Arland.

see SENIORS page 2

“End all trade with apartheid,”

demonstrators in Vancouver say

during a picket of International

Trade Minister Pat Carney’s consti-

tuency office March 26. The dem-
onstration was staged by Call Off
the Sulphur Trade (COST), a coali-
tion which opposes the export of
sulphur to South Africa by Van-
couver-based Cansulex Ltd., a
company owned in part by the fed-
eral government through the Can-
ada Development Corporation.
COST had earlier staged a demon-
stration outside Cansulex offices at
the World Trade Centre March 20.
In a letter to Carney, the organiza-
tion demanded “‘an end to the sul-
phur trade with South Africa as
well as bilateral and mandatory
sanctions on all Canadian-South
African trade.”

—

| Employers push anti-union case to top court

B.C. employers gave a clear signal of
their disdain for co-operation with the
labor movement in fostering good labor
telations last week, announcing that they
Would take their previously rejected
appeal of a bitterly contentious Labor
Relations Board decision to the highest
Court in Canada.

B.C. Business Council president Jim
Matkin confirmed March 27 that the
Major employers in the forest industry
“and others” would be taking the now
infamous “Paccar case” to the Supreme
Court of Canada in an effort to get back
an anti-union ruling first given them by the
LRB in 1985 but subsequently overturned

On appeal.

The contentious ruling, delivered in a
LRB full board decision Oct. 2, 1985,
upheld the right of Paccar of Canada and

B.C. Hydro to change unilaterally the
terms and conditions of employment once
the collective agreements with their respec-
tive unions had expired.

Condemned by the labor movement,
the decision gave employers a new weapon
in an already bristling anti-union arsenal.
Several employers attempted to use the
new provision before it was overturned by
B.C. Supreme Court. The court’s ruling
was subsequently confirmed by the B.C.
Court of Appeals. ‘

But now the member companies of
Forest Industrial Relations and the Pulp
and Paper Industrial Relations Bureau,
backed by the Business Council, will be
pursuing the case to the Supreme Court of
Canada, which announced March 26 that

i Id hear the appeal.
: Matin stated that the Business Council

was not directly involved but would be
supporting the appeal. “The business
community wants to try and repair the
decision,” he said.

Vancouver labor lawyer Ian Donald,
who will argue the case for the Canadian
Association of Industrial, Mechanical and
Allied Workers (CAIMAW), said that the
Supreme Court had agreed to hear the
case because of its critical importance to
labor legal jurisprudence across the coun-
try.

He also noted that B.C. Hydro, which
was a party to the LRB decision, was not
involved in the appeal.

Significantly, Paccar, a division of Can-
adian Kenworth, also took no part in the
Previous appeals. However, Matkin noted
that they would involved in the appeal
going to the Supreme Court.

But Roger Crowther, regional vice-

‘president for CAIMAW, which represents

Paccar workers, said that Paccar man-
agement told the union that the Business
Council was the main push behind the
appeal.

“There are only 12 workers at Paccar
and we asked the company: why are you
pursuing this appeal when you claim you
don’t have money to. meet contract
demands? They said, ‘we’re not pursuing
it. The Business Council is’,’ Crowther
told the Tribune.

The business community’s relentless
pursuit of a court ruling that would
uphold the LRB decision has taken on
particular significance now because of the
new “spirit of labor-business co-operation”
being touted by both the B.C. Federation
of Labor and the Business Council.

see EMPLOYERS page 12