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DERA battles for funds

Vancouver city council has scheduled the Downtown Eastside Residents Association request for a civic grant for March 8.

DERA’s ongoing battle with city council for funding has already met one setback with the recent rejection of its request by the city’s standing committee on social services. Council will review the recommendations of the com- mittee on March 8, and if they refuse DERA again, that decision can be appealed to council with supporting delegations.

DERA’s outspoken vice president Bruce Eriksen warned this week that if council refuses to grant funds the numerous com- munity services provided by the organization may not continue.

“The community will go back to the taxbuyers, the liquor outlets, the social workers, the missions, souplines, slumlords and sleazy, vindictive politicians,’’ Eriksen said.

OWSEE is required to approve

The civic grant that DERA has requested is to pay wages for three

community organizers, without:

whom the organization could not

“earry on its various programs.

In spite of widespread support from community organizations, churches and businesses in the downtown eastside, city council refused funding in 1976. The decision was widely criticized as “vindictive’’ as the council had often been embarrassed by DERA for its failure to respond to the needs of the downtown eastside.

The new city council is to the right of the old council, a fact that suggests that massive pressure will have to be applied to win a grant. In addition to COPE alderman Harry Rankin, it is expected that Darlene Marzari, Michael Harcourt, Don Bellamy, Bill Gibson and May Brown can be convinced to vote in favor of DERA. A two-thirds majority

grant

civic grants, which would leave DERA two votes short of victory. Both DERA and COPE officials have suggested that the aldermen most likely to be moved by public pressure are George Puil and Bernice Gerrard.

Church leaders and other prominent individuals from the downtown eastside will be presenting DERA’s case to council members — and especially Puil and Gerrard — in the weeks until March 8. Other community organizations and individuals are urged to add to the pressure through letters and lobbies to city council members, but focusing attention on Puil and Gerrard.

Last year’s final council debate on DERA’s request for a civic saw 29 community organizations and individuals appear before council on their behalf. If an appeal is necessary, there will undoubtedly be many more delegations this year.

. |Cuthack typifies

Socred approach —

By ALD. HARRY RANKIN The interim financial statement of the human resources deépart- ment of the provincial government

§ headed by human resources

minister Bill Vander Zalm; for the nine months period endihg December 31, 1976, reveals that the department will have a surplus of over $100 million by March of this year.

This surplus has been brought about by drastic cuts in social services — cuts of approximately $14 million in services to families and children, including daycare centres; cuts of $35 million in services to senior citizens and the handicapped; cuts of $50 million in the Income Assistance Program (which provides a meagre $160 a month to single persons under 55).

On top of that, the minister has admitted that a federal increase of $22.50 per monthin pensions for the handicapped has been pocketed by the provincial government and not passed on to the people for whom it was designated by Ottawa.

According to minister Vander Zalm the cuts in social services were made to free money for “deserving people’ and the handicapped. It turns out, however, that it has been precisely the deserving people and the handicapped who have been the victims of his cuts.

At the same time the provincial government has abolished gift and succession taxes on estates worth over $150,000. This will mean a loss in revenue for the provincial government of some $30 million to $40 million a year, most of which would have come from the very wealthy. Also the government has greatly reduced royalties and taxes on the big corporations that are exploiting our mineral and other resources.

It is clear what the provincial government has done. It has cut social services to-those that need them the most by $100 million in order to give concessions worth $100 million to those that need them the least — the wealthy and the big corporations.

That pretty well sums up the basic philosophy and practice of this government — take from the poor and give to the rich.

The Downtown’ Eastside © Residents’ Association has bitterly protested this action of the provincial government. In a letter ~ to premier Bill Bennett, signed by president Libby Davies, vice- president Bruce Eriksen and

secretary Jean Swanson, DERA

has put forwarda counter program ~ based on the following points:

@ Use the $100 million surplus to — increase

single persons to $230.

e Reinstate the gift and suc-

cession duties and use the revenues to restore income assistance rates for the handicapped. (Rates have been cut as much as 28 percent for families where one person is handicapped).

e Tie all income assistance rates to the Consumer Price Index.

e@ Make all persons in receipt of

‘income assistance eligible for 100

percent shelter overages.

e Restore the cuts of $1.4 million in community grants programs. .

I like the little stamp which DERA put on the bottom of its letter to the premier. It aptly describes government policy, and especially that of big-mouth Vander Zalm:

Tf.

You can’t dazzle brilliance

Then. .~ Baffle ’em with bullshit’.

7em_ with

COPE meeting

The Committee of Progressive Electors has scheduled its annual

‘meeting for Sunday, February 27, 2

p.m. in the Britannia Community Services Centre, Napier and Commercial Drive in Vancouver.

In addition to outlining a program for the next year, the meeting will be electing a new executive board and table officers.

John Vorster finds a place in the Sun

the $160 a month maximum income assistance for —

By SEAN GRIFFIN

Some two years ago, as readers. may. remember, I -

stumbled over the limits of journalistic .decorum. and accused.a Vancouver Sun columnist of making.a mockery of human rights by the comments in his column. Not-that the accusation — levelled during a special forum on “Human Rights and the Media’’ — was off-base; it was just that I had the wrong man. But I did have the right paper and the point that I was making at the time — that the Sun was allowing certain writers to use the columns of the paper to vilify those who demanded basic human rights insuchcountries as Chile, or South Africa — was no less valid.

But I obviously hadn’t seen anything ‘yet.

There was little that I could have cited at the time that would equal, for sheer -jackboot thinking, the column penned by McKenzie Porter which appeared in the Sun February 11, 1977.

In language reminiscent of such journals as the Thunderbolt, Porter opens with this broadside:

“Ever since the end of the Second World War, liberal academics, bureaucrats and politicians have worked like termites to undermine the defences of the Western democracies. *Palpable proof of this misguided idealism or deliberate treachery lies on the continent of Africa.”

But this is only the beginning. From here on, Porter dispenses with any concern, feigned or real, that he may have for “‘Western democracy.”

“By urging Western European colonial goverhments to withdraw from Africa .at least 100 years before the native peoples were fit for political independence,” he tells us, “the liberals exposed the territories involved to a Russian takeover.”

Having got to the real point of his piece, he presses the attack, buttressing his argument with such pronoun- cements as “The masses of Africa, who still consult witch

S

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FEBRUARY 25, 1977—Page 2

Re ge ee a: eam Aa aha * Sepst-VtSt @S YHAUASAA—SAUEIAT OIAIDAS

doctors and rely on donkey power; are exploited by a handful of their half-educated compatriots.”

These are some other excerpts:

“Only the republic of South Africa defies the Russian determination to control the great land mass between the Cape of Good Hopeand the STraits of Gibraltar ... °

“Through their continued hostility toward South Africa, Western liberals might bring about a situation in which the Soviet Union becomes capable of an economic strangling of the democracies. During the impending struggle for Rhodesia and Southwest Africa, the last

_ bastions of democracy before the ramparts of South

Africa, we should listen carefully to what the Western liberals have to say. In the interests of North American security, some of them may have to be locked up.”’

Primitive as they are, Porter’s opinions are scarcely original, however. John Vorster, prime minister of the white racist regime of South Africa, has said much the same, adding the warning that if the U.S. is not prepared to stand with South Africa in the battle against Com- munism, then South Africa ‘‘will have to stand alone in that:holy crusade.”

But Vorster, of course, doesn’t have access to the columns of the Vancouver Sun to make his apologies for apartheid or to justify locking up its detractors — which brings us back to that newspaper. The publishers of the Vancouver Sun, for all the well-orchestrated trumpeting about human rights in the Soviet Union, are doing no more to uphold human rights than they were at the time of the forum on that issue two years ago. If they were, few of Porter’s scribblings would ever find their way into print.

Unfortunately, there is more to this man’s apocalyptic views than the question of ‘the Sun’s approach to human rights or the scoring of debating points in a public forum. His is an extreme position; but in official circles in this country, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the ‘‘Western’”’

world, the 30-year-old myths of ‘‘a Soviet threat”, of “Russian aggression” and of ‘‘an imminent Russian takeover” are being recreated on an epic scale-as im- perialism prepares itself for enormous increases in military spending and strives to stem the tide of national liberation.

In this country, the Trudeau government has embarked on-a military spending program which, if not reversed, will result by 1980 in a doubling of expenditures expressed as a percentage of the Gross National Product. Increases on asimilarly alarming scale are scheduled in the U.S., in West Germany, in Britain and elsewhere in the NATO orbit.

In order to justify the huge expenditures, in order to provide the pretext for an escalation of the arms race and renewed cold war belligerence, the myth must be created of a Soviet military buildup and of threatened Soviet takeovers.

In that campaign, McKenzie Porter is playing his part along witha host of others in the monopoly media. He may be going at it with a greater reactionary zeal than most, but his views are probably ominously close to those ex- pressed in the boardrooms of the NATO command.

JIeiBUNE

Editor —- MAURICE RUSH Assistant Editor SEAN GRIFFIN Business and Circulation Manager — FRED WILSON

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