o.<.
heads i win. tails you lose.
you're on.
CANADIAN NEGOTIATING TEAM
GOOD NEIGHBOR SAM
OCEANDUMPING
FACED with protests from Brazil and Argentina, the Finnish government on March 23 ordered a supertanker to return home with the 690 barrels of poisonous waste it was planning to dump into the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Brazil lodged a formal protest with Finland when it learned that Neste, the Finnish state owned oil company, was planning to dump the poisonous waste in mid-Atlantic.
The waste contained more than 15,000 pounds of arsenic trioxide and some potassium oxide.
"Brazil is not a garbage can," Paulo Nogueira Neto, the Brazilian government's environmental chief, declared.
The Brazilian government announced that it intended to formulate a joint protest with Argentina and Uruguay for
Finland backs down in face of protests
presentation at the Law of the Sea Conference in session at Geneva.
The controversy over Neste's plans was touched off in mid-March when the supertanker Enskeri left port with its cargo of poisonous waste.
A company spokesman announced that the waste would be dumped in international waters under a 1972 agreement which Finland has not yet ratified.
The spokesman said the dumping would take place around the beginning of April "just south of the Equator," 622 miles off the African shore and at a depth of more than 15,000 feet.
Brazil feared ocean currents
eventually would bring the poisonous matter toward its coasts.
The Finnish cabinet, after receiving the formal protests from Brazil and Argentina, met on March 23 and turned down Neste's application for the dumping, ordering the company to bring the supertanker and its poisonous cargo back to Finland.
"The decision apparently means a few hundred thousand marks extra costs to the company," Finnish traffic minister Pekka Tarjanne said in a radio interview explaining the government's decision, "but the international damage would have been much greater had the planned dumping been allowed."
Experiment a "snow job7
Editor, The Fisherman,
It burns me when I figure I am being "used", and I think that is what is taking place when The Fisherman prints a half page story on "underwater greenhouses" in a recent issue.
Any scientist involved in pollution experiments to the extent of this $10 million experiment taking place in Saanich Inlet who "rebuts emphatically the doomsday school of thought which maintains that the oceans are sorely polluted" must be questioned. Here this $10 million dollar experiment is to find out if or to what extent the oceans are polluted, but the people responsible for it have already come
to the conclusion that the oceans of the world are not polluted.
These same scientists further state, "There are certain types of ocean pollution and examples of local pollution spread fairly wide areas — such as the Baltic Sea — but there is no large scale ocean pollution as such." This last statement proves to me that this "underwater greenhouse experiment in Saanich Inlet" is now producing a $10 million made-in U.S. "snow job" — and this is the first phase of it.
The Law of the Sea Conference in Caracas assembled the largest group of ocean scientists ever brought together in one conference and reports tabled before that conference clearly
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pointed to the fact that the greatest danger before humanity today is that the oceans of the world are polluted and that the threshold where plankton can be killed by chain reaction of this pollution and never be regenerated is not known.
If this threshold is crossed and the ocean plankton dies, then life on this earth as we know it will also die because it is the plankton in the oceans of the world that provide the major part of the oxygen needed to sustain life.
On the basis of this story I can already forecast what the result of this $10 million experiment is going to be . . .an assurance that we have no need to worry about the pollution being dumped into the ocean by Hooker Chemical, MacMillan-Bloedel, Standard Oil, of California, Utah Mining.
In fact this scientist believes it is possible that these lethal doses of heavy metals can be reserved and become a boom to humanity.
I say, let's not be sucked in by these multi-million experiments paid for by Yankee dollars in order to allow them to continue to use the world's oceans as the dumping grounds for multinational corporations which are prepared to sacrifice the whole of mankind on the altar of superprofits.
ELGIN NEISH
Victoria, B.C.
THERE is an ambivalence about the U.S. airlift of orphans from South Vietnam which reflects at once the traditional open-heartedness of the American people and the vast hypocrisy of U.S. society.
For years the U.S. waged war against the Vietnamese people in a futile attempt to deny them the independence they twice won on the battlefield against the Japanese invaders and the French colonialists.
It bombed their cities, killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of their people, poured napalm on their villages, used the war as a proving ground for such fiendish new weapons as needle bombs, poisoned their land and water.
To justify squandering an estimated $150 billion on this undeclared war, successive U.S. governments lied_ to their own people, imposed' corrupt and venal politicians on South Vietnam to carry out U.S. policies and frustrated every peace accord . . . until finally the U.S. people, sickened by the economic and social consequences to themselves, compelled withdrawal of U.S. troops. And still the fighting dragged on as the U.S. directors of Nguyen Van Thieu's policy in South Vietnam encouraged him to continue a course which only prolonged the suffering of the Vietnamese people.
Now the headlines are full of frantic efforts being made by humanitarian organizations in the U.S. to snatch a few hundreds of the thousands of Vietnamese children orphaned by U.S. troops. No doubt there are American families eager to provide homes for these victims of the U.S. government's inhumanity. But, by what right do they assume that the Vietnamese, once they have secured peace in their own country, will not bend every effort to give these children a secure and happy future among their own people, just as North Vietnam protected its children from the relentless bombing of U.S. planes?
And who is Ed Daley, the man who initiated the airlift? He is the multi-millionaire president of World Airways, who amassed part of his huge fortune from transporting war materials to South Vietnam. Some humanitarian!
Nothing more vividly illustrates the ambivalence of U.S. society, still caught up in the deceits of the cold war, its humanitarianism perverted to serve propaganda ends.
X- * *
We have been asked by UFAWU assistant welfare director Barry Robbinsto advise the families of those lost in the tragic rash of sinkings during the roe herring fishery that he will be glad to assist them in making Workers Compensation and Canada Pension claims.
They should get in touch with him at the UFAWU Welfare Office, 138 East Hastings Street, Vancouver — phone 684-0713.
* * x
Fishermen have lost a good friend by the death on March 4 of Gunnar Kenudson. He was a man who took a pride in the jobs he did for them, although his approach to sending out bills and collecting his accounts would not have won him any plaudits for business efficiency.
Now we have a note from his widow, Mrs. Ethel Kenudson, informing us that he had done jobs for a number of fishermen over the past year of which she has no record.
"I shall appreciate it if those who owe him for work completed but not billed will contact me so that I can clean up his affairs," she writes.
Her address is 4544 Slocan Street, Vancouver, and her phone number is 434-5557.
As we go to press, we have a report that Bert Ogden, UFAWU Vancouver Island organizer, has entered Nanaimo General Hospital for x-rays and tests to determine the cause of a nerve ailment wHich is affecting the use of his arm. That's the reason he has not been out organizing aboard the Chiquita 3 during the roe herring season.
CARL LIDEN, MLA
Before he left for Geneva on March 27 to attend the Law of the Sea Conference as an observer for the provincial government, Carl Liden, New Democratic MLA for Delta and former UFAWU organizer, told this department he was most concerned with acceptance of the 200-mile fishing limit and salmon rights of origin.
"We want to see the conference adopt the principle that salmon belong to the country of origin. No country should be allowed to harvest salmon spawned in another country's rivers," he declared.
Liden, who represented his government at the Law of the Sea Conference at Caracas, Venezuela, last year, will also visit the Netherlands to inspect what he describes as one of the world's most modern oil refineries before he returns on April 17. His purpose, influenced by possible oil refinery developments in this province, is to study the effect of the Dutch oil refinery on the environment.
• * * x
From John Daly at Garden Bay we have word that he and Ray Phillips spoke to grade 12 students at the high school recently on the implications of the federal government's steady capitulation to U.S. demands in Canadian-U.S. salmon talks which will be resumed next month.
We gather that the idea of conceding the U.S. rights to the salmon resources of the Fraser River didn't sit any better with the students than it does with their elders, particularly after lands, forests and water resources minister Bob Williams revived in the legislature the betrayal of this country's national interests in the Columbia River deal engineered by Social Credit.
The UFAWU Pender Harbor Local, Daly tells us, has mailed out or distributed through its members 1,900 "Stop the Sellout of Our Salmon" folders and protest cards.
* X *
We have been asked by crew members of the Pacific Venture, which sank off Estevan Point on March 21, to thank the crew of the Wind Song 8 for providing them with clothing, food and refreshments after picking them up.
The Wind Song 8, a new seiner-longliner being skippered by her owner, Stan Gran, on her maiden trip, responded to flares sent up by the crew of the Pacific Venture an hour or so after they had taken to the life raft.
* * *
One person who narrowly escaped death in the storm which struck the coast in the early morning hours of Easter Sunday was 20-year old Teresa Wojcihowicz, daughter of Joe Wojcihowicz, gillnet member of the UFAWU Steveston Fishermen's Local familiarly known among the fleet as Alphabet Joe.
Teresa Wojchihowicz and a companion, 19-year old Deirdre Jacques of Ottawa, were camping on Mayne Island when a tree crashed down on their tent. Miss Jacques, an employee of the federal environment department in Vancouver, died on the spot. Miss Wojcihowicz suffered severe injuries and an Armed Forces helicopter made an emergency flight to take her to Vancouver General Hospital, where her condition, initially reported as poor, is now improving.