NDP stand impedes byelection victory
THE longer it holds office, the more this Social Credit government of Bennett the Younger reveals itself as a continuation of the old government of Bennett the Elder. The difference is that where Bennett the Elder wooed the voters with bribes and promises while he sold them down the Columbia River, Bennett the Younger seems bent on punishing the voters for their delinquency in turfing Social Credit out.
The fact is that this punitive policy is the only way Bennett the Younger can apply Bennett the Elder's political formula.
It was Bennett the Elder who initiated the policy of over-taxing the working people, those on whom the burden of governmental spending falls heaviest, and amassing the surplus funds from which he bribed them with their own money at election time. In a period of economic expansion and a relatively steady rate of inflation, he could do this and still maintain his false populist pose.
In a period of a contracting economy, with mass unemployment and inflation almost out of control, Bennett the Younger can attempt to create surpluses only by punitive taxation, by increased rates for everything from ICBC premiums to ferry fares under direct provincial control, and by opting into the federal government's wage-cutting program in which the Anti-Inflation Board has virtually abandoned even the pretence of holding down prices.
The Social Credit government's pretext is that it is determined to wipe off the provincial debt accumulated by its NDP predecessor — a debt it magnifies by a financial sleight of hand best known to millionaires. Its purpose, no less than that of the federal Liberal government, is to maintain monopoly profits by holding down workers' wages and reducing their living standards.
Bill King, former labor minister and now NDP House leader, exposed the Social Credit government's policy for what it is, a hypocritical posture, when he charged in the legislature on April 27 that the government is engaged in "a gigantic financial cover-up" by deliberately over-taxing in order to acquire surpluses with which "to buy the votes of the public with their own money."
At the same time, King appears to be oblivious to the contradiction in NDP policy between his exposure of this aspect of Social Credit's intent and his support in principle of the government's Bill 16 to opt into the federal wage control program.
The two cannot be separated. Punitive taxation which falls heaviest on working people, draining their income, and wage controls which hold down their income are two sides of the same coin designed to reduce their purchasing power in a period of continuing inflation.
To argue for imposition of a price freeze, as the NDP is doing in the legislature, is to evade the fundamental issue of the program itself, which the Canadian Labor Congress has declared to be totally unacceptable. At 'best, a price freeze only dulls one edge of the multi-bladed tool the monopolies use to gouge working people. At worst, it facilitates the hoax of price controls without materially affecting the intent of the program.
With the NDP engaged in the Vancouver East by-election campaign to return former premier Dave Barrett to the legislature, its support in principle of the Social Credit government's Anti-Inflation Measures Act becomes an impediment to its mobilizing the full support of labor, now threatened with new Social Credit anti-labor legislation.
Surely the NDP has learned from its defeat that its politically absurd claim to "represent all the people" at the cost of estranging labor did nothing to advance its cause.
A principled stand against the federal wage cutting program not only will contribute to a resounding by-election victory but it can serve to draw together all the forces which toppled the first Social Credit government from power.
IBeTiTherman
138 East Cordova Street™ Vancouver, B.C~ V6A 1K9       Phone 683-965S
25 CENTS A COPY $7 A YEAR $8 FOREIGN
HAL GRIFFIN, Editor RICHARD MORGAN, Assistant Editor
Second class mail registration number 1576 Published by the Fisherman Publishing Society every Second Friday Deadline: Wednesday prior to publication.
4/THE FISHERMAN — MAY 7, 1976
IT can't merely be a coindi-dence that election of a new Social Credit government has become the signal for a new generation of publicity seeking bigots to emerge as arbiters of our morals and censors of our art and literature.
Back in 1954, after the first Social Credit government came to power, Mayor Claude Harrison of Victoria gained national notoriety by firing the city's librarian and announcing that he intended to remove all "communist" books from library shelves.
Harrison admitted that he didn't know of "any specific Red books, but I've heard there are some there. I don't know how many there are, but we can get rid of them pretty quick." His personal preference was for burning them in his furnace.
His proposal was seconded enthusiastically by Aid. Brent Murdoch, who declared that "books or literature of a seditious or subversive nature will go out of the library as far as we are concerned . . . It's time many libraries throughout Canada were cleaned up."
Victoria citizens long ago disposed of Harrison instead and presumably Little Red Riding Hood is back on the shelves. But now we have Mayor Ed McKitka of Surrey who is under the delusion that one of the fringe benefits of office is an instant diploma in art criticism.
Acting on the complaint of Aid. Alice Moore that a federally funded mural by Lance Austin-Olsen exhibited in the lobby of Surrey municipal hall was offensive because it contained a nude female figure, McKitka ordered it removed. Oblivious to his own mental nakedness, he holds that "the municipal hall is no place for nudity."
And to ensure that citizens are not exposed to such "vulgarity" in future, he wants Surrey to have an art committee composed of "open-minded people who think like me."
We should be grateful that Michelangelo didn't have McKitka for a patron.
* * *
Five years ago we had a visit from Doug Morton, former owner of the Hacienda, to inform us that he had opened the Hacienda Marina at Gorge Harbor on Cortes Island where years earlier he had gone with UFAWU president Homer Stevens to organize the now defunct Whaletown local.
This week he dropped in again to add a postscript: he has sold the marina.
* * *
UFAWU members in this province have a particular bond with United Electrical, Radio and
Machine Workers members in Ontario in that both refused to succumb to the cold war hysteria which divided organized labor for a quarter century and both were excluded from the central councils of labor. Throughout those years, during the combines attack, conjtempt actions, strike struggles, UE members were' the first to respond to UFAWU appeals for aid.
Last month, UE lost one of its veteran titled officers by the retirement of its director of organization, Ross Russell, who fought in the ranks of the Mack-enzie-Papineau Battalion against fascism in Spain and since has served UE for close to 35 years.
His successor is Val Bjarnason, a veteran both of the Second World War, in which he served as a captain in the Canadian Army tank corp, and the labor movement, for 12 years as organizer and Ontario organizational director of the United Textile Workers and for the past two decades   as UE organizer.
He is a brother of Dr. Emil Bjarnason, director of the Trade Union Research Bureau in Van-
couver.
Since he shaved his beard, UFAWU Vancouver Island organizer Bert Ogden has lost his incipient patriarchal air, but at the rate his family is increasing he should be able to qualify in the fullness of time.
On April 21 his daughter Judy, wife of logger Tom Nicks, presented him with a grandson, Jeffrey Alan, weight at birth — since he will grow up under the metric system and we all have to get used to it — 3.51533 kilos.
With the addition of this sixth grandchild, Bert and his wife Jill are doing well for a couple well on the sunny side of fifty.
Two members of the UFAWU general executive board are on the sick list as we write this. Sheila Graceffo, fresh fish and cannery worker at Imperial plant, where she is chief shop steward, is confined to home in Richmond, recovering from pneumonia. And in Victoria, Elgin (Scotty) Neish also is confined to home by a severe bout of 'flu and at last report was awaiting the result of tests. We wish them both a quick recovery.
'More than just a job'
FOR  Lena  Jacobs, handling fish always was more than just a job.
But it was a job she did for more than half a century. And still, with retirement after a 19-year stint at the Canadian Fishing Company's Home Plant just behind her, she looks forward to curing fish that her son, a Brackandale resident, will catch.
Raised in North Vancouver, Lena Jacobs became a cannery worker at the age of nine, helping her mother at Northern cannery in West Vancouver. She recalls her grandmother also worked there as a hand-filler — "and she was very fast."
For several summers, starting at age 17, she worked at Rivers Inlet Cannery, hand-filling, earning 45 cents an hour in 1927.
Smilingly she compares this meagre wage rate with the $5.97 an hour she was making when she left the Gore Avenue plant last Christmas.
Nearly four decades of union struggle lie between 45 cents an hour and $5.97 an hour, and she remembers most of it. Entering the Fish Cannery, Reduction Plant and Allied Workers Union in 1944, she later was a UFAWU shop steward at the Home Plant for some 15 years.
Still, she looks back with some nostalgia to the early days.
"I enjoyed hand-filling," she says. "Preferred it to working on the line. We filled half pound and
LENA JACOBS
one pound cans — 14 hours a day at Rivers Inlet."
Co-workers at Canfisco presented her a crystal bowl and matching candy dish at a retirement celebration April 10.
In retirement in North Vancouver with her husband Alfred, a former longshoreman, she plans to keep busy — maintaining touch with her seven children, 27 grandchildren and four greatgrandchildren, and "helping my son, also a longshoreman, who is allowed two days a week in the Native food fishery.
"We have a deep freeze . . . I'm not used to being idle."