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25 years ago...

LABOR DEMANDS

RENT CONTROLS
Dropping of reni contro!s by
the Ontario goverment on
March 2, 1954 was protested by
the Toronto and Lakeshore
Council (CIO-CCL) in a resolu-
tion adopted April 13. In
Windsor United Auto Workers

_ local have also condemned the

move in a resolution to the Frost

government. It urged that the

administration im-

mediately prepare adequate
control machinery on rents.

Tribune.

April 20, 1953

ULLAL Sie; f

50 years ago...

QUEBEC WOMEN AGAIN
REFUSED FRANCHISE

MONTREAL — Last week
the women of the province of
Quebec were refused the munic-
ipal vote and the week before
they were refused the provincial
vote, leaving them the only
women in the British Empire
who don’t have the franchise.
This province has the highest in-

fant death rate and the highest .

maternity death rate in the
Dominion. We have no mothers

- pensions, no old age pension.

The minimum wage for women
is lower for women working at
the same kind of work than it is

in the other provinces.

The Worker,
March 31, 1928.

IDITOIRILA IL
COMIMUSINT

Budget or real solutions?

The Liberal federal budget fails dis-
mally to meet any needs of the majority
of Canadians. The Tories yap at it, but
reveal they too would shove politics
dangerously to the right, if they held
power, delivering us all more completely
into the hands of the corporate
monopolies. :

But Canada’s crises can be solved.

The government does nothing about
the crisis of unemployment, the crisis of
inflation, the monetary crisis. Chretien’s
lopping off of a few percentage points of
sales taxex (until the polls close election
night — oh, sorry, until September) are
meaningless in the monumental crisis
eroding our lives. Chretien trims the
hedge while the house burns down.

The Communist Party of Canada, ina

‘letter to the federal-provincial ministers,

Jan. 20, made six major proposals for
meeting and ending the crisis, including
setting up a Canadian Development In-
vestment Fund to carry out Canada-wide
construction projects. In March, the
Communist Party Central Committee
laid out practical ways to put Canada
back to work, build the country,
strengthen its independence, come to

grips with inflation, and deal with the :

crisis of Confederation.

Why are 1,045,000 Canadians, nearly
10% of the labor force, jobless? (These
official figures leave out about half a
million.)

Why did the cost of living jump by
1.1% in March to 8.8% over a year ago?
That means we pay $1.71 for what we got
for a dollar in 1971.

The Chretien budget, if not an elec-
tion ploy, is just as cynical. It will not
stimulate working people to spend their
savings because it does nothing to end
the crisis of confidence, and show the
system bringing something better next
year.

The ruination of the country and the
downgrading of millions of working
people is the stock-in-trade of monopoly
capitalism and its governments. But that
pattern can be broken by workers assert-
ing political determination to be free of
monopoly’s strait jacket.

The Liberal budget proves valid the
Communist Party’s solutions to the crisis,
as well as its timely call for election of a
progressive majority, including Com-
munists in the coming election.

Around new policies aimed at real
change, such a majority is the alternative
to the crushing weight of Liberal-Tory
crisis policies.

U.S. neutron hypocrisy

President Carter’s decision to “defer”

production of the neutron bomb should >

deceive no one. He was motivated not by
a desire to rein in the arms corporations

and extend détente, but to try to keep the.

upper hand among his allies, and to
weaken the anti-neutron mqvement.

True, Carter was prevented, ata given

moment from ordering production of
the weapon which kills and maims to-

day’s and future generations, but leaves _

real estate intact. He and the NATO and

Pentagon generals were prevented by: |
e millions of people in organizations, °

world-wide, pressuring their govern-
ments and the USA to stop the neutron
bomb; :

e the Soviet Union’s dual declaration
favoring mutual agreement not to pro-
duce a neutron bomb, but asserting that
in face of a U.S. neutron bomb, it would
take steps to meet the challenge to its
own safety;

e growing abhorrence of the neutron
weapon among west European and even
NATO governments.

The full hypocrisy of Carter’s defer-
ment is in his simultaneous order that
alterations to the Lance missile, range 80
miles, and to howitzers with a 12-mile

range, be rushed ahead to adapt them
| for neutron warheads! aks

This action has the effect of bringing
closer the actual deployment. If neutron
producution had been ordered now, re-
ports say, delays of 14 and 30 months
would have ensued in preparing the two
delivery methods. And a storm of pro-
test would have mounted throughout
that period.

Now, unless the anti-neutron bomb

movement acts quickly and forces a ban _

on the neutron bomb, the time between

beginning its production and its readi-
ness for use will be shortened. In these
circumstances can Carter be seen as tak-
ing steps toward stopping the neutron’s
development?

He is pushing the world toward arms
escalation, which enhances the wealth
and power of the military-industrial
complex, but offers security to none. In
this drive toward war — a symptom of
monopoly capitalism’s chronic illness —
big media strews the approaches to dis-
armament negotiations with a mine field
of propaganda. It is propaganda de-
signed to blow the legs off the anti-
neutron stance already taken by thou-
sands of Canadians.

Carter suggests Soviet “restraint” as
the way to banish such horror weapons,
while he hypocritically refuses all offers
of mutual arms reductions. In time with
this the system’s press drums into the
minds of Canadians again and again var-
iants of the big lie of a Soviet “threat”,
“massed tanks” from the USSR, a “huge
army poised on the border,” “if the Rus-
sians tried to seize western Europe.”
Poisonous ideas invented to stupify those
who gain nothing from Canada’s
$4.128-billion a year arms squandering,
who genuinely want peace and peaceful
co-existence of different social systems.

The neutron bomb, currently hidden
behind White House stage scenery, if al-
lowed, will set off a new arms escalation
and open the greater possibility of all-out

’ nuclear war.

_“No to the neutron bomb!” is still the
most urgent of calls. It is urgent that each
individual, independently, but more im-
portantly by activating organizations,
shower our government with the instruc-
tion that its stand must be for the ban-
ning of the neutron weapon.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—April 22, 1978—Page 3

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