HOMER STEVENS
Who is betraying Canada's interests?
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IN the March 29 issue of the weekly Nanaimo Times, this statement appears in a letter signed "A Short Tack," the pseudonym of Harold (Sonny) Jones, president of the Pacific Trollers Association:
"In the U.S.-Canada catch sharing negotiations, the troller is faced with the demand by the United States that Canada reduce its troll effort on the lower west coast and the Washington coast. At the same time we have the UFAWU representing the gillnet fleet and the Vessel Owners representing the seine fleet, both going along with the U.S. position. The only people trying to keep us in the ball game are the department of fisheries and the Pacific Trollers Association."
Considering the fact that Jones is president of the PTA and that Bill Edwards, PTA secretary, is the association's representative on the sub-committee of the advisory committee to the Canadian Government, it could very well be that Edwards, the day following the recent meeting of the sub-committee, phoned him how to write that particular statement.
In any case, not only is the statement false, not only is it a distortion, but it destroys the so-called confidence that is supposed to be expressed among advisory committee members serving on the sub-committee.
If the only people trying to keep Canada in the ball game are representatives of the fisheries department and the Pacific Trollers Association then the rest of the advisory committee are simply traitors to Canada. If it is true that the representatives of the UFAWU and the Fishing Vessel Owners Association of B.C. are going along with the U.S. position, then they're not only traitors to Canada but they're traitors to the organizations they represent and should be removed from office immediately.
If, on the other hand, Jones and Edwards are lying, then they are traitors to Canada, to the handful of trollers they really represent and all Canadian fishermen.
The serious negotiations in which Canada is now engaged with the United States really go back to 1957. That year meetings of Canadian and American fishermen were held on the Canadian-U.S. border at the Peace Arch demanding that both governments sit down and work out a solution to the rat race then developing — a rat race that was taking both Canadian and American fishermen ever farther into the Pacific to see who could get the most salmon regardless of conservation and the best interests of the fishermen of both countries.
That campaign, waged by the UFAWU and by various segments of organized fishermen across the border, did result in negotiations between Canada and the U.S.
The first round of those negotiations resulted in a new section being added to the international agreement which provided for a sharing of the Canadian pink salmon runs bound for the Fraser which previously had been harvested by American fishermen without any consideration for Canadian fishermen or conservation needs.
The next agreement, written at Seattle in 1957, basically provided that Canadian net fishermen operating for salmon would draw back inside a surf line which kept them on the beach in many areas of the west coast of Vancouver Island and upcoast to the Alaska border and generally confined them within the limits established. Likewise, American fishermen from Cape Flattery to Sacramento, California, were kept inside this surf line.
But Alaska representatives pulled a fast one by stating they didn't have with them the charts of the line within which they would finally withdraw their fisheries in order to prevent interception of Canadian salmon.
At least a year later we learned that the U.S. fisheries at Noyes Island and Cape Fox were harvesting millions of Canadian salmon bound for the Skeena and Nass and various other spawning grounds in the north because their line extended three miles outside a headland to headland baseline when the line should have been drawn in as Canadian fishermen and their government had agreed, and as American fishermen south of the 49th parallel had agreed.
That provides the basis of new negotiations begun in 1959 and extending to this day.
The main issue has been the American claim of "historic" rights. This has been changed to read "traditional" rights, but it has the same meaning both in the U.S. and Canada.
Canadian fishermen and their government have taken the position that we do not go along with any historic or traditional rights claimed by one country to rob another of its resources.
Time and again, negotiations have started only to be broken off because the Canadian government was not prepared to take the necessary steps to bring the Americans to the bargaining table on the basis of equity, recognition of equal rights; and on the right of Canadians and Americans each to harvest their own salmon and so reduce as rapidly as economic and technical changes allow the interception of the other country's salmon.
The position of the UFAWU throughout these negotiations has been quite clear. It has stated publicly and in conference the specific steps that need to be taken to see that the U.S. bargains in good faith.
The U.S. politicians who dominate the negotiating team instead have fostered the idea among American fishermen that somehow or another Canadian fishermen or the Canadian government or both are attempting to deny the Americans something that is rightfully theirs, or that the Canadian position would rob them of the opportunity to make a reasonable livelihood or would dislocate communities, fisheries and perhaps their whole industry.
Nothing can be farther from the truth and the falsity of this argument has been exposed time and again by representatives of the UFAWU. We have no serious quarrel with our American fellow fishermen nor do we want to see a situation where the workers of two countries are being misled by politicians who seek only to maintain the ability of international corporations to exploit workers in both countries.
I don't propose to deal here with the full scope of the discussions held on March 28, the day before Jones' letter appeared. But if there were any betrayal, it was not on the part of the representatives of the UFAWU or the Fishing Vessel Owners Association but rather by the representative of the Pacific Trollers Association, for whom the line to follow was that stated by the representative of the Fisheries Association, spokesman for the foreign fishing monopolies.
I challenge Jones and Edwards to debate this issue before fishermen or the general public! Let them verify the scurrilous charge they have made or retract it!
Clearance sale
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H. BOtTINOfF
''No, no! That sign was supposed to go across the street!"
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the fisherman — april 7, 1972
ROY Atkinson, the big unassuming man who is president of the National Farmers Union, shambles through an audience after a meeting much like any farmer making his way through market square, greeting this one and that and listening before he speaks. But when he makes a speech, with all its homespun idiom, you gradually become aware of how much he can put into a few words.
Here are some examples we culled from our notes on his speech to the UFAWU convention last month:
"The more food farmers produce, the less they get for it."
"Agricultural specialists in universities counsel farmers to organize along commodity lines — but you don't find university professors organizing along faculty lines."
"The biggest recipients of social welfare are the big corporations like Imperial Oil, which got a $5 million social welfare cheque for building a fertilizer plant we don't need. But let a poor man be forced on to welfare and he's no good — he's lazy and won't work."
"Workers have a real interest in helping farmers to remain on the land. If farmers can't make a living on the farm, they will come to the cities to compete for jobs; and if they can't get jobs, they will have to go on welfare. Last year alone 8,000 dairy farmers went bankrupt. Remember that when we ask you not to buy Kraft products so long as Kraft refuses to negotiate milk prices with the farmers."
Last week we had a visit from Toiva Wais of Sointula and his wife Anna, a gillnetter in her own right and one of the few fisher-women members of the UFAWU.
They have sold their property in Sointula — "two-bedroom dwelling on foreshore, centre of village, close to breakwater, ideal for fisherman" — that they advertised in the classified section of The Fisherman and have hung up their gear for the last time.
Toiva, who transferred to the UFAWU from the IWA in 1948, said they were planning to make a trip to Finland this spring. On their return, they expect to make their home on the lower mainland.
We owe our apologies and hereby tender them to three young fishermen, all members of Vancouver Fishermen's Local.
Last summer, Dave Mcintosh, John Radosevich Jr. and John Sutcliffe were engaged for some weeks in a community radio project and, not surprisingly, they selected the fishing, industry as their topic.
With Liora Salter as their technical adviser, they produced a one hour radio program, which was presented by the CBC on its "Between Ourselves" program on March 29.
You didn't read about it in this column as you should have done because we completely overlooked it and we can only console ourselves with the knowledge that many fishermen, as inveterate radio listeners, probably heard the program anyway. We're told it was good.
The death in Prince George on March 24 of John Mclnnes was like a footnote to a page of British Columbia's labor history. At the age of 92, the man who was a pioneer of the old Socialist Party of Canada had long outlived all those who shared with him the political campaigns of the first decade of this century.
Premier W. A. C. (Wacky) Bennett, in seeking to stampede voters with the false cry of socialism, is merely adapting the technique of his long dead Conservative mentor, Premier Richard (Tricky Dicky) Mc-Bride, who dominated the stage at Victoria when Mclnnes won his first election.
McBride, at least, was shrewd enough to hand over the premiership before his government was overwhelmed by scandal and corruption. And Robert Bonner, once described by Bennett as "the most brilliant attorney general since W. J. Bowser," can congratulate himself on having escaped the ignominious fate of his predecessor who led the Conservatives to defeat in 1916.
Eftit in the first years of this century, the success of the Socialist Party in electing three candidates to the legislature at Victoria in 1907 sent a ripple of alarm through the Establishment. Newspapers across the continent ran sensational stories about the "socialist menace" and McBride made the most of it.
Two of the Socialist candidates were J. H. Hawthornthwaite in Nanaimo and Parker Williams in Newcastle, both reelected for a second term. The third was John Mclnnes, who won Grand Forks from the Conservatives. Their major' campaign in the legislature, incidentally, was to get the eight-hour day written in law, but the Conservative majority frustrated all their efforts.
John Mclnnes, who was a carpenter, lost his seat in the 1909 election and moved to Prince George, where he became a builder. But he retained his early convictions, was a founding member of the CCF and in 1945, almost four decades after his first election to the legislature, he won the Fort George riding, holding it until 1949, the year he celebrated his 70th birthday.
UFAWU members, particularly those whose memories go back to the union's earlier days, will share our regret in learning of the death in White Rock last month of 57-year old Stan Boshier, who was the union's northern representative in Prince Rupert for a time in the forties.
From Harry Allison and Tom Parkin we gleaned the information that the former shoreworker and staff representative left the industry around 1950. He later completed his education and had been teaching in the Surrey area for the past several years. Survivors include his wife, Bessie, and three sons.
We have word this week from business agent Glenn McEachern of two longtime UFAWU members currently in hospital.
Gillnetter Albert Waite of Powell River Local is in Vancouver General Hospital, Heather Pavilion B-5, where he expects to be laid up until the middle of the month.
And Everett Teague of Vic-toria-Sidney-Sooke Local, a veteran longliner who recently bought a salmon troller to fish with this season, is in Room 314 at Queen Victoria Hospital in Victoria where he already has undergone surgery.
A casualty from the shore-workers section is Sachiko Maeda of Steveston who was employed in the herring roe operation at B.C. Packers' Imperial plant before entering Richmond General Hospital for surgery on March 20.
Also hospitalized is Milan Aleksich, owner of the seiner Westview, who was forced by illness to cut short his participation in the herring fishery.
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Published by the Fisherman Publishing Society every second Friday Deadline: Wednesday prior to publication.