Editorial Using the Senate As Canadians call on the Senate to kill the proposed Goods and Services Tax, Tory leaders and pundits have taken to chastising the upper chamber for undermining democracy. The Senate does have the constitutional power to amend and even kill government legislation. Although it has yet to take the latter step, the Senate in exercising its power has won a considerable number of critics. Its detractors base their arguments on the assumption that democracy equals elections. Since the Senate is non-elected, they surmise, it has no right to interfere with the work of elected members of Parliament. Such arguments accept that in voting once every four years a citizen loses the right to have her/his voice heard or to affect any change in the meantime. But registering one’s vote is no guarantee of democracy. Our electoral process gave a party which received a minority number of votes a majority in Parliament. That party is now using that majority to silence all other voices but its own. Commissioned reports are ignored, submissions to parliamentary commit- tees are restricted and then dismissed, advocacy groups are silenced by funding cuts. Party dissidents are made outcasts. Even the voices of elected repre- sentatives are muzzled as closure on debate becomes an almost common practice on the Hill. With the death of Meech Lake, the door is now open to the prime minister to fill 17 outstanding vacancies with Tories, tipping the balance in the Senate in a more sympathetic direction. He must do this to preserve democracy, he claims. It is precisely because of concerns about democracy that growing number of Canadians are turning to the Senate to make their voices heard; and the Senate is responding. Those who criticize this process are saying no one, save the winners, are welcomed to participate after election day. But this elitist view is on acollision course with a growing number of Canadians who are frustrated and angry at being ignored. True, there is some irony in the relationship developing between those in the Senate chamber and activists in the labour and popular movements in particular. Socialists have always regarded the Senate as an anachronism. But the Mulroney government has set the country on such a destructive path strange alliances have developed. In the struggle for democracy people will use whatever tools or institutions that are available to them. As Parliament is blocked off as a vehicle for reform, popular pressure motivated a normally moribund Senate to take up the slack. This is democracy in action. Because the principle here isn’t that non-elected senators are responding to constituents. It’s that elected representatives are not. FREE TRADE MAGIC With BRIAN THe MAGNIFICENT EDITOR Sean Griffin ASSOCIATE EDITOR Dan Keeton BUSINESS & CIRCULATION MANAGER Mike Proniuk GRAPHICS Angela Kenyon Published weekly at 2681 East Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C. V5K 1Z5 Phone: (604) 251-1186 Fax: (604) 251-4232 Subscription rate: Canada: $20 one year; $35 two years; foreign $32 one year Second Class mail registration number 1560 t may seem incongruous politically that Ladies Home Journal, the venerable American institution that dishes up the usual consumer magazine fare of recipes, fashion and celebrities, should feature an exclusive interview with Violeta Cha- morro, the newly-inaugurated president of Nicaragua, in its July issue. But when 1990 issue of CAIB, is actually the second of two parts, the first of which ran in the you see how the piece is billed —the front cover calls on readers to “meet the woman who did what Reagan and Bush (and Ollie North) couldn’t do” — it isn’t quite as odd as it seems. The “combination of steel and silk has helped this 60-year-old widow of an assas- sinated hero do what no army could: defeat the left-wing Sandinistas after they had been in power for more than 10 years,” says the story, written by a reporter for U.S. News and World Report. In fact, it’s a straight selling job for the Nicaraguan president, typical of how the Chamorro is being marketed to the North American public at the very time that the still-current charges about the Iran-contra scandal are being relegated to the back pages and the pre-signoff television news clip. What’s never mentioned in the piece, which idolizes Chamorro as a charismatic if reluctant heroine, is the long, intense and dirty campaign of intervention that the Bush administration waged in the Nicar- aguan elections. And on that score, a recent analysis by William Robinson in Covert Action Information Bulletin sheds some revealing light on the U.S. involvement. The article,in Number 34, the Summer, previous issue. The second sentence of the lead paragraph is blunt: “U.S. intervention in the Nicaraguan electoral process, both public and ‘private,’ covert and ‘overt,’ constituted one of the most sophisticated and extensive foreign operations launched to date by the Bush administration.” According to Robinson, the U.S. spent at least $12.5 million funnelled through the right-wing National Endowment for Dem- ocracy as well as a conservatively-es- timated $11 million, channelled through the CIA, to influence the vote outcome. The money was used for direct campaign assistance to Chamorro’s National Opposition Union (UNO) —much of which involved detailed public relations operations in the U.S. — as well as to provide so-called “regional program- ming”—covert operations outside Nicar- agua’s borders intended to influence the vote. Coupled with the financial aid, says Robinson, were extensive operations, many of them at the White House level, intended to keep the contra forces intact throughout the vote as well as to obstruct Wester European aid to the Sandinistas and to ensure that UNO “harvested the People and Issues discontent” that resulted from the 10-year- old U.S. embargo against Nicaragua. In the end, Robinson emphasizes, the ~ “U.S. government’s electoral intervention strategy was equally as dangerous and mis- guided as was its military support for the contra war. Unfortunately, it has proven more palatable to Congress because of its emphasis on political and psychological operations.” Copies of the two issues — Number 33 and 34 — are available from CAIB, PO Box 34583, Washington D.C. 20043. %* kK these days, even the pundits in the financial pages are keeping their eyes riveted on the 28th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the future of perestroika will largely be shaped by that historic meeting currently underway in Moscow. It’s for that reason that the Centre for Socialist Education plans a special forum on the congress, set for Monday, July 16, 7:30 p.m. in the CSE, 1726 East Hastings in Vancouver. Tribune editor Sean Griffin, economist Dr. Emil Bjarnason and Jack Phillips from the CSE will kick off a panel discussion. * kK Bias are few of them left, and with the passing of Matti Varila on June 16, time has claimed another long-time Fin- nish-Canadian progressive activist. Matti, 88 at the time of his death in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Vancouver, was born in Kaustinen, considered the folk music capital of Finland. In that tradition, Matti played accordion and piano, and a brother played in one of the country’s leading folk orchestras. _ Matti came to Canada and B.C. during the Twenties and made his way into the forest industry, working as a logger and head loader for several years in Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island camps. After that, he worked several more years as a gillnetter in the fishing industry. For several years, he and his wife Lempi, who - predeceased him, ran a steambath in New Westminster. His involvements were broad, and in- cluded stints as an executive member of Sampola Senior Citizens of B.C., decades of activity in the Finnish Organization of Canada and work as a business agent for Vapaus, the Finnish-language progressive newspaper. He was a long-time member of the Niilo Makela club of the Communist Party of Canada. Matti is survived by several children and grandchildren. A private funeral with family and friends was held. 4 Pacific Tribune, July 9, 1990