British Columbia

No answers in Socreds’ Garmanah plan

By GARY SWANN

The Social Cre-
dit government’s
half-baked decision
on the Carmanah
Valley doesn’t sat-
isfy workers or
environmentalists.
But worse yet, it
doesn’t begin to
address the crisis
facing the B.C.
forest industry. It’s SWANN
a piecemeal ap-
proach to a problem which requires an
overall comprehensive resolution.

Logging half the Carmanah will still
disrupt the entire ecosystem and as the
1989 report from the Parliamentary
Library pointed out, no one has any idea
what impact that will have on Canada’s
tallest trees. After mulling the issue over
for months, the Socreds have neither
seriously addressed the long-term ques-

tion of wilderness preservation nor have
they addressed the need to move the forest
industry from its cut-and-get-out approach
to job-intensive silviculture and develop-
ment of manufactured wood products.

In B.C. it is still possible to save jobs and
also to save wilderness. The study pro-
duced by earlier this year by Simon Fraser
University, entitled Wilderness and Fore-
stry: Assessing the Cost of Comprehensive
Wilderness Protection in B.C., showed
that it is possible with more intensive silvi-
culture, reduction of forest waste, and
increased value added manufacturing to
more than offset any jobs that would be
lost if the demands for wilderness preser-
vation were met.

Most IWA-Canada members are not
opposed to wilderness preservation. They
are opposed to continued job loss. After a
decade of losing 20,000 jobs due to techno-
logical change they are understandably
concerned with anything which further
reduces employment.

IWA forest policy, which demands
additional silviculture, waste reduction
and value added manufacturing can find
common ground with the environmental
movement.

The IWA-Canada also has a unique
opportunity to advance a working class
solution to the jobs and wilderness con-
flict. It could as it has in the past spearhead
the long overdue drive for a shorter work
day. (It has been over 40 years since any
widespread gains were made on the eight-
hour day.) Achieving the six-hour day
without reductions in take home pay
could break the job-loss cycle and help
solve major social problems by redistribut-
ing income. It would certainly find enthu-
siastic support from many people in the
environmental movement.

The shorter work day is affordable by
the forest industry, where over 30 per cent
of the cash flow goes for shareholders and
management while only 15 per cent goes
to pay industrial wages.

Resolving the crisis in the forest indus-
try and the jobs-wilderness conflict
requires a change in direction in the B.C.
forest industry. It must move from a
timber extracting-raw material exporting
industry and become a timber growing-
finished products manufacturing industry.

To start the change will require a full
Royal Commission with representation
from the trade union, environmental, and
Native movements. The new direction will
have to restrict the ability of the multina-
tional forest companies to exploit our
environment and workers. It will require
direct democratic control over a new
forest industry. And that control will only
be achieved wnen the trade union move-
ment, the envircnmental and other demo-
cratic movements can work together to
take on the forest companies.

Port Alberni resident Gary Swann is
chair of the Communist Party’s environ-
mental committee.

Action to stop
Bill C-43 urged

Time is running out and people will
have to take action quickly to defeat
Bill C43, pro-choice supporters
attending a rally for Dr. Henry Mor-
gentaler were told April 7.

Joy Thompson, spokesperson for
the B.C. Coalition for Abortion Clin-
ics, emphasized to the 250 supporters
at John Oliver High School that the
bill would soon go to third reading.
“Criminalization of abortion is vio-
lence against women,” she said. “It
took 20 years to defeat the last abor-
tion law. We’ve got just over 20 days
to defeat this one.”

The coalition has launched a letter
writing campaign to MPs, particu-
larly Kim Campbell, Minister of Jus-
tice, and Mary Collins, the minister
responsible for women’s programs, to
urge them to vote against Bill C-43.
Thompson pointed out that if the bill
does go into law, Kim Campbell will
- have a place in history as the first
pro-choice woman justice minister
who criminalized abortion.

Pro-choice groups Canada-wide
are sponsoring a National Day of
Action on May 12 to publicize oppo-

sition to the bill.

FOR PEACE &
PLANETARY

SURVIVAL

For details 736-2366

Abortion bill ‘slap in the face
for women, declare physicians

Calling the proposed legislation an
“insult” and an “indignity to women,”
renowned Montreal physician Dr. Henry
Morgentaler joined several B.C. physicians
April 6 in calling for the scrapping of the
government’s Bill C-43.

The contentious bill, which last month
passed through committee stage and is
expected to go before the Commons within
days, would put abortion back into the
Criminal Code from which the Supreme
Court of Canada removed it in its historic
decision of January, 1988. Women would
be compelled to get permission for abortion
services from a doctor who would only be
allowed to grant that permission if the
women’s mental or physical health were
threatened by continuation of the preg-
nancy.

“This is a bad bill which should be
defeated,” Dr. Morgentaler told reporters
at a press conference in Vancouver.

He said that the 1988 Supreme Court
decision allowed women “to stand tall” and
“gave the impression that women were
equal citizens.

“But now the government has decided to
slap women in the face and say: no, you are
not equal citizens, you have no right to
make these important intimate decisions.
We give this right to doctors,” he said.

Morgentaler called the bill ‘ta sop to the
anti-abortion members of the Conservative
caucus,” adding that Prime Minister Brian
Mulroney “gave in to the pressure from the
media and the abortion lobby.”

He warned that women’s right to access
would be restricted even more because
many doctors providing abortion services
would be harassed by anti-choice groups
and would face the additional threat of
prosecution under the new legislation.
“Many doctors will not want to go through
what I have gone through,” he said, refer-
ring to his 15-year legal battle — including
a 10-month jail term — before an appeal
finally resulted in the 1988 Supreme Court
ruling.

The danger of stepped-up legal pressure
on doctors was also emphasized by Physi-
cians for Choice in a statement read by
Vancouver obstetrician Dr. Nelson Savein.
He noted that the legislation would place
physicians in the position “of acting judges,
under the threat and costs of litigation,
whether this be politically motivated or
simply a harassment tactic.

“We know from past experience that

TRIBUNE PHOTO — SEAN GRIFFIN

cians.

making abortions illegal and inaccessible
does not mean that they are not
performed — it simply means that women
desperate to end unwanted pregnancies, will
seek a back-alley abortion,” Savein said.
“Some 200,000 women die annually world-
wide from complications of botched back-
alley abortions and this number will only
increase with a decrease in access.”

Among the Physicians for Choice
members attending the press conference
were Dr. Robert Makaroff who was prose-
cuted and jailed for performing abortions in
Vancouver in 1970, and NDP MLA Dr.
Tom Perry who told reporters that the NDP
would be introducing a private member’s
bill into the current session of the legislature
that would prevent hospital boards from
restricting access to medical services such as
abortion “for their own private, ideological
reasons.”

Perry also noted that the Physicians for
Choice stand on Bill C-43 is backed by the
Canadian Medical Association which
opposed the bill in a Feb. 6 brief to the
Commons committee.

“Over 70 per cent of British Columbians
disagree with the government’s proposal to
put abortion back in the Criminal Code,”
said Lu Hansen, spokesperson for the B.C.
Coalition of Abortion Clinics, which called
the press conference. “This gives the lie to

DR. HENRY MORGENTALER ... at Vancouver press conference with B.C. physi-

the government’s insistence that the bill is a
compromise between two extreme posi-
tions. In fact the only extreme position in
this issue is that held by the fanatical anti-
choice minority ....”

But despite the overwhelming opposition
to the bill, Morgentaler told reporters that
he saw little hope of forcing withdrawal of
the legislation.

“I’m afraid it will pass because it is the
last chance for the anti-abortionists. But
even if it does pass, we will continue to fight
it,” he said, predicting that it would be:“‘a
few years before the Supreme Court will get
rid of this bill.”

Several women’s groups have noted that
if the bill is passed, it will almost certainly be
challenged on the basis that the new provi-
sions only replace the old three-member
abortion committee with a single doctor. In
its 1988 decision, the Supreme Court ruled
that requiring a women to go before a
committee to obtain an abortion violated
her right to security of the person under the
Charter of Rights. $

But even before any challenge, Morgen-
taler emphasized, the role of doctors should
be “to continue to provide these services
under adverse conditions.” He appealed to
“young, idealistic doctors” to come forward
and be trained to ensure that women’s right
to safe medical abortion is maintained.

Pacific Tribune, April 23, 1990 « 3