Editorial

Stifling the debate

When their perceived right to print or broadcast information without restriction is compromised, the media corporations in this country have been known to rise mightily to defend “freedom of the press.”

They have gone to court and pursued exhaustive appeals to report on trials that judges have initially closed to reporters. They have been relentless in dogging cabinet ministers who have tried to hide behind cabinet privilege in covering up scandals.

But when there is an issue that the Southams and the Thomsons, the Baton Broadcasting companies and the Pattisons want kept from the public, the silence can be thunderously deafening. And that silence has descended now that the federal government has brought down the enabling legislation to implement the Canada-U.S. trade deal.

Never in the 121-year history of this country has there been an issue so decisive to the future sovereignty of this country. Never before has public debate — by informed people, given full access to all the facts — been so vital. But the media has shut off that access, especially in this province.

Last week, leaders of some of the most broadly representative organizations in the country — the Canadian Labour Congress, the Council of Canadians, United Church, National Farmers’ Union, Native organizations and the Status of Women — were in Ottawa under the umbrella of the Pro-Canada Network to lobby the Opposition parties to do everything possible to block the legislation and force the government to call an election.

But as far as the media was concerned in this part of the country, the lobby never happened. :

At a press conference in Ottawa. the Network issued a probing analysis of the new legislation, warning that it added a new, political dimension to the sellout of Canadian sovereignty.

The media carried none of it.

There have been public meetings. debates and plans set for a National Day of Action against Free Trade.

But there hasn’t been a word from the media. And there’s good reason.

For the Tories and the multinational corporations in the Business Council on National Issues, the time for debate on the trade deal is over. And if you blank out all opposition, and give no coverage to any dissenting views — then there is no debate.

That is exactly what the Thomsons and Southams — who, after all, are among the big multinationals who have filled the boardroom chairs at the BCNI and echoed its demand for the trade deal — are doing. Freedom of the press merely means they are free to disregard all views that conflict with the agenda pursued by the corporate sector.

It should demonstrate once again to Canadians the extent of the sellout embodied in the trade deal and the anti-democratic sweep of the enabling legislation now before Parliament. The Tories secret memo warned that the more Canadians found out about the deal, the less they would like it — and the media is now following that prescription to the letter.

And that should also remind Canadians how critically important are voices like that of the Tribune's. Indeed. the future of the country is coming to depend on them.

THE POOR OF Bc.

TRIBUNE

EDITOR

Sean Griffin ASSISTANT EDITOR Dan Keeton

BUSINESS & CIRCULATION MANAGER Mike Proniuk

GRAPHICS Angela Kenyon

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t was United Fishermen and Allied

Workers Union president Jack Nichol, as we recall, who noted during the last B.C. Federation of Labour convention that the business establishment in this country is dead set against the Tory government in Ottawa calling an election before the Canada-U:S. trade agreement comes into effect Jan. 1, 1989. Fearful that this government will be a one-term wonder, groups such as the- Business Council on National Issues want to make sure that the Tories hang on until the trade deal — which is the linchpin to the neo- conservative program — is implemented.

But even business is getting into a cold sweat as the demand grows ever louder across the country for the government to put the issue before a federal election. The manoeuvreing has already begun to find some way around the fundamental issue of democracy that refuses to go away.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the pro-free trade Financial Post which last week ran an editorial piously entitled “Free Trade and Democracy.”

“And so talk grows to shouts of an election on free trade,” it states. “Trade Minister John Crosbie threatens it; oppo- sition parties demand it; independent observers urge it. No democrat would want a decision of such moment to be reached without the people having spoken. But if democracy is real and nota sham, this is not the way.

“One of two outcomes is possible,” the editorial notes. “Either free trade would be the only issue, demanding that the voters ignore all other questions, thereby mis- treating worthy candidates of all parties. Or, more likely, it would not be the voters’ sole concern but would be subsumed in their accumulated feelings on the govern- ment and all its works.”

What that means, in plain English, is that a federal election is a no-win situation for the Tories — and big business knows it.

People and Issues |

So what is its alternative proposal? Typ- ically, the Post offers an American solution — a referendum. “Let the people speak, but let them speak plainly,” it says. “Have a referendum.”

That’s not exactly an original idea but neither is it democratic. After all it is not just the free trade agreement that’s at stake here. It is the direction that the govern- ment is taking this country, towards increased integration with the US., towards greater dependence on “market forces,” towards a U.S.-controlled re- source-dependent economy and govern- ment which would be without authority to intervene. That won’t go on a referendum

. ballot and the issue won’t be resolved

there, either.

Moreover, a referendum would be almost completely controlled by the government which could time it according to its own agenda and accompany it witha multi-million dollar advertising blitz, leav- ing the opponents to depend on their own resources and funds to speak against it. There would be no coverage of opposition views as there would be during an election.

All of which, of course, is why business now suggests a referendum at a time when the government’s electoral defeat is relent- lessly approaching. As the editorial so succinctly — and candidly — puts it: “A referendum may be the only way to save the deal from going down with the government.”

And that is yet another reason to step up the demand that Ottawa call a federal election before implementing the trade agreement.

Aw: last week was not a good time at all for business to rejoice as the tobacco conglomerates were turned back in their costly efforts to halt the passage of bills C-51 and C-204, the anti-tobacco advertising bills introduced earlier this year by Health Minister Jake Epp and NDP MP Lynn McDonald respectively. And what made the tobacco companies’ defeat even more significant was that backbench Tories ignored the cue from cabinet members and voted in favour of McDonald’s private members’ bill which was passed along with the government’s own legislation.

The response from the three tobacco multinationals and their hired gun, former Brian Mulroney confidante Bill Neville, was true to the form that the companies have maintained for years, denying all health hazards. “I’m still waiting,” Neville told a press conference following the bills’ passage, “to see a single piece of evidence to suggest that advertising has anything to do with the total consumption of tobacco products ....”

To which virtually everyone (except, of course, the tobacco industry) will want to say: “So why worry about the passage of the legislation?” If, according to the lobby- ists, advertising doesn’t increase consump- tion, and only affects the market share held by each company, then legislation banning it won’t affect company sales.

But of course, advertising does affect consumption and Neville knows that as well as anyone who reads a magazine. With cigarette smoking declining rapidly among the adult population, the tobacco

companies have shifted their advertising markedly to attract new groups to the habit. It’s no accident that young women are featured extensively in cigarette ads because they constitute a significant seg- ment of the market that is growing. And advertising has also figured heavily in the acceptance by new social groups of the various “smokeless” tobacco products. It’s been dressed up as “free speech” and every other guise but Neville’s cam- paign is beginning to be seen for what it really is: an attempt by a few multinational conglomerates to protect the profits they have made from a substance which the U.S. Surgeon-General has determined categorically to be an addictive drug.

* * *

Ace to the old adage, “history repeats itself — the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” That certainly aptly describes the recent deci- sion in the U.S. to give “national land- mark status” to the farm and pumpkin patch in Maryland owned by FBI informer Whittaker Chambers who framed Alger Hiss in the infamous McCarthyite spy case in the U.S.

As many of our readers will recall, the incident became a farce of international proportions as Chambers produced secret papers stashed in a pumpkin on his farm as evidence that Hiss, a state department employee, was a spy. Hiss’s frame-up and subsequent conviction for perjury were necessary to give substance to Senator Joe McCarthy’s claim that the U.S. govern- ment service was “riddled with Commu- nist spies.”

And now the U.S. National Park Ser- vice has decided to make the site a land- mark, thus playing out the last act of the farce.

Mind you, maybe the Reagan Adminis- tration is hoping the Great Pumpkin will come and save them all from historical oblivion.

4 Pacific Tribune, June 8, 1988