• BIRCH
LETTERS
Bowing out from GEB
Recently I have been asked why I am not on the General Executive Board of the union after having been elected for 27 consecutive years.
I want to say it was an honour to serve those years for a union that is sometimes referred to by foreign and eastern news media as that big powerful West Coast Fishermens Union. The first part of that media quote is not quite right, because as unions go, the UFAWU is not big. But the second part is right on.
I think the reason for that is this union's motto: every member an organizer. Therein lies the strength, as many governments and companies have found.
Yes, I was around for a long while. I was there when Steve Stavenes was president, when T "Buck" Suzuki was acting president, when Steve Stavenes and Homer Stevens went to jail. I played a major part in the 11975 strike, I managed the fish plant on River Road in Delta where my whole family took part, sometimes working around the clock. We sold fish with ' the help of other unions to many parts of Canada to help pay for some of the costs of the strike. After the strike was over one night some culprits put five shotgun blasts into the stern of my fibreglass boat at the waterline.
I was there when the union was readmitted to the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and when Canada proclaimed the 200-mile fishing zone after a lot of pressure from the union. I was there when we got the limitation on fishing licences and as poor as it turned out to be I would hate to see the industry without some control.
I was there when we got the Salmonid Enhancement Program and when we got workers' compensation for fishermen and pensions for shoreworkers and tendermen.
I also had the pleasure to represent the union on many committees, including the Salmonid Enhancement Task Force, the Fraser Panel of the Pacific Salmon Treaty and the B.C. Round Table on the Environment.
These past appointments were with the endorsement of the union. I gained a great deal of experience and pleasure from representing the union on these committees, panels and boards.
I found out that this union is held in very high esteem no matter where you go.
It is time to let younger members take over and that is happening. I will still be around for some of the committees but I would like to spend more time with my family now that I have five grandchildren.
EDGAR BIRCH,
Ladner
i JIM SINCLAIR
THE NAFTA CHALLENGE
Fighting the free trade deal vital to keeping social programs,* industry
The following is an edited text of UFAWU business agent Jim Sinclair's address to an anti-NAFTA forum in Vancouver, March 11.
We have to reflect on the sanity of a situation that says the working people in Canada can only get ahead by crushing somebody else.
That kind of thinking underlies the entire substance of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The assumption is that we're in this world economy where the only people who can have power are the corporations.
As workers, our only choice is to do what they tell us or we won't have anything. They'll pick up the resources or close the plants and relocate somewhere else where they can exploit a bunch more people. And the governments in this scheme of things have no power at all to do anything about it.
That is the wonderful vision we're being offered by the sick minds in Ottawa. If we don't do something about it, if we don't get our act together in this country and join with our sisters and brothers in the United States and in Mexico and in all of Latin America over the next few years, there won't be much of a future for anyone, and that's the real truth.
Writer Peter Newman, who is not known for being a radical said early on in the Free Trade Agreement that Canada was doing one of the most insane things possible, deindustrial-ization in the western world, when everybody else in the whole world is struggling to develop industry.
This isn't just about jobs, it's about families, communities, it's about how we make our way in the world and how we share our resources amongst each other.
Our governments, the governments we elect to represent us, don't have the ability to implement policy that reflects our needs.
There's been a lot of talk about manufacturing jobs. I think a lot of people are being misled by the illusion that somehow this is about computer factories and car plants and not about fish plants and sawmills, health workers
and a whole bunch of other people.
In British Columbia, if you look at where our laws come from, where governments get money in order to provide social services, it's from four main industries: forestry, mining, fishing and agriculture.
All of those industries are incredibly vulnerable to a free trade deal. I say that because part of the trade agreement is the ability of those companies to pick up those resources and take them out of the province to process
6If we're not producing added value, the government won't have money to provide social services and we won't have the country as we know it any more,9
them wherever they can exploit people more.
When I was in Mexico, one of the shocking sights for me — though the tour of Tiajuana was shocking enough — was the Louisiana Pacific sawmill being constructed along the coast.
It was like one of those kids' pictures where they ask: "What's wrong with this picture?" What was wrong with this picture was there were no logs or trees for 150 miles. What they were going to do was take the logs from California and Oregon to process in this mill in Mexico where workers are paid three dollars an hour.
Let's get this clear, the kinds of jobs they are creating in Mexico aren't for the people.
Are we going to continue to have the kind of economy here where we add value to our resources? It's pretty obvious that when you add those values
you have a healthy economy.
In the fishing industry, the value of the fish when it comes out of the water is a half a billion dollars. That's what the fishers are paid. By the time it comes out the plant at the other end, canned and processed, it's worth a billion, dollars. We add $500 million in value to that fish. And some of that money goes to government in taxes, and some of it goes into the community in direct value.
And if you want to look at the opposite of that in the third world, where they struggle to do that, but get ripped off for their resources all the time, that's where we're headed with the trade agreement.
The trade agreement says to the federal government: "you can't stop them from exporting our fish any more."
If we're not producing and generating added value, the governments won't have money to provide social services, and we won't have the country as we know it any more.
I don't think we have to play by those rules at all.
If you accept those rules, that you can't process your own fish, that you can't process your own logs, if governments have no power, then there is no future.
Where are we going to go? We know that the vision they have for us isn't going to work. Brian Mulroney and all of his corporate friends do not have a future for us in mind.
We have to go on a campaign to influence the politics of this country, so when people walk into the polling booth six months from now, they don't make any mistakes. They should be very clear that there is only one leader of a political party saying there will be no free trade deal if they are elected, and that is Audrey McLaughlin.
No matter what the Tories decide, there's not going to be another leader who's going to say no to NAFTA They can put whomever they want in there, they're not going to stop the deal.
How do we move forward from here? We are planning a caravan across the country to Ottawa, starting in Campbell River, leaving Vancouver on April 18, and we're going to organize a huge cavalcade of cars to head out of the city towards Hope. We have a slogan to kick it off, and that is "Ottawa is beyond Hope." The caravan will go across the country, stopping in every city and town along the way, telling people, we've had enough, this deal has got to go, and so does this government.
The caravan will arrive in Ottawa on May 15, and there will be a massive demonstration in Ottawa on that day.
If we're going to be effective, there's going to have to be hundreds of thousands of people across the country.
After that, we still have a month before they sign it. What are our options there? Think about what's happened to people in this country over the last eight years of the Mulroney government, with its agenda.
If we're going to convince Canadians of an alternative, the labour council here is proposing a national day of protest across the country. Perhaps on the day they're going to sign it, as a message to Mulroney and the government that they are an illegitimate government signing an illegitimate deal and they don't have the right to do that.
Perhaps we have to walk off the job for a day. For those 400,000 human beings and their families unemployed already by free trade, they've lost about800 million days of work already. And for working people to lose a million or two days work in one day, is a small sacrifice to make to stop another 400,000 jobs from being lost.
It's very clear to me that if we don't stop this deal, the country is heading in that direction.
THE FISHERMAN / MARCH 22,1993 • 5