Oceans apart, common struggle.
Interview with two Canadian communists

Paul and Anna Bjarnason are from British Columbia (BC), on the West 
coast of Canada. Paul is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist 
Party of Canada and Anna a club organiser of the Barnaby Group in BC. 
During a recent visit to Australia, they were struck by the many 
similarities between the struggles of the working people in Australia and 
Canada. They spoke to The Guardian about the situation in 
Canada.

Anna: From what we've seen, particularly up in Queensland, — the 
history of mining, logging and the building of railways by hand — we had a 
very similar kind of experience in British Colombia (BC). In Canada we 
imported Chinese labour, Chinese died on the railway.

Paul: Here, apparently it was Irish and Italian workers who came in 
and built the railway and gave their lives."

Anna: One of the interesting things for me was the logging in 
Queensland, the logging of the really big trees, I think it was the kauri 
pine trees, that are hundreds and hundreds of years old.

There is a similarity there. Going in and chopping all those trees and 
literally devastating the forests. The huge profits and the huge amounts of 
money to be made from doing that is probably the same kind of history as 
British Colombia.

In BC the workers went in, they probably paid for all this with their 
lives, such very dangerous work. The landscape completely changed.

In BC it was the cedar and the Douglas fir and here it was the big pines, 
and similarly in the 1970s and the '80s, the huge thrust to start logging 
every single tree down to the last.

And then the conflicts between the working people and the "greenies" as you 
call them here, to preserve some of the last forested areas like up in the 
Daintree. There is a big push to stop the logging of those last few trees.

We had a similar experience in Vancouver, particularly Vancouver Island, 
almost at exactly the same time. The conflicts with the working communities 
there were based around the timber and the logging in British Columbia. 
Those communities that were based on sawmills and all that kind of thing in 
BC are all shutting down, all gone.

And similarly in Queensland it is going to be the last logger turn out the 
light because the forests are all gone if things don't stop.

Guardian: You may have heard on the news here that doctors are 
threatening to strike over the question of insurance. Has this happened in 
Canada too?

Paul: We've seen that, but for the last five or six years when we 
had a social democratic government (NDP) because the doctors were objecting 
to the NDP policies on social care.

The doctors were negotiating with the government for increased fees and the 
government was trying to hold the line on the cost of Medicare. It was a 
huge contradiction because people say "we want the best".

About 30 years ago in Canada, under the Pierre Trudeau Liberal Government 
they brought in the Canada Health Act which sort of sets health standards 
for the whole country.

Individually, the provinces have been chipping away trying to set up user 
fees, trying to set up private clinics, which are forbidden by the Canada 
Health Act.

It was a totally public system. That's just starting to break down — a 
little at a time, place by place, pushing towards privatisation. And the 
doctors one way or another are in the leadership of this by threatening 
strikes against provincial governments over the fee schedules.

One of the things they are doing is to set up their own private little 
clinics. But it's only a day clinic to do day surgery, not in hospital but 
at a doctor's office.

Then they say, "well, if we can do day clinics we can do overnight 
procedures too". And that's forbidden by the Canada Health Act. But they 
say, "We'll do it. We'll buy these MRI machines and we'll charge you $1200 
to do it privately, and we'll do it tomorrow. Whereas if you go to a 
hospital you'll have to wait about two months to have the same procedure."

So gradually, step by step they are breaking down the whole system. As long 
as it's public there is no profit to be made. Once it becomes privatised, 
as it is in the US, it becomes a source of profit for some.

The governments are shutting down services and introducing user fees.

Guardian: And what is the situation regarding public education.

Anna: The governments say that they are not reducing the amount of 
money to public education. But what they are doing is increasing the 
availability of money to private schools and they are constantly laying off 
the support workers.

Librarians, ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers, the counselors, 
teachers' aids in the classroom — all those are being laid off.

The teacher is in the classroom with students with lots of needs because 
they are putting kids who have lots of special needs in the regular 
classroom. There are no support workers to go in there and help.

I think that education in public schools is getting worse and worse. The 
standards must be because teachers can't possibly cope with increased class 
sizes and huge diversity of students.

In Vancouver you can have a classroom with 12 different languages spoken 
and 20 students. And none of it is English. And the teachers have to cope 
with fewer and fewer resources. Just more and more students and problems.

And they are trying to set up private universities in Canada.

Once again education in theory is a public right. And once again it's that 
drive to change the system from public to private.

Guardian: Are they corporate ventures, church-based or what?

Paul: Eastern Canada has a lot of church-based schools and hospitals 
too. In Newfoundland, in Brunswick in the East Coast of Canada, the school 
boards are all religious. There are no secular school boards at all.

In the West it is quite different. They are all secular but there are a few 
Catholic schools, although the two biggest ones in Vancouver are facing 
bankruptcy right now because of the relationships of former staff with 
"inmates" and the law suits that are coming down now.

They face having to sell off lots of properties in order to pay for the law 
suits.

Guardian: What are the prospects for workers?

Anna: The government is closing down apprenticeship programs. They 
seem to be wanting to de-skill the society.

Instead of having tradespeople who know a job — carpenters, electricians, 
hairdressers etc, you are going to have people who know one little tiny 
aspect.

They will go to school, they'll get a module on a computer and learn that 
and then get a piece of paper which says that they know how to wire some 
kind of light switch.

Then they can be hired at a minimum wage which has also been lowered, and 
they can just wire light switches all day.

If you want to know the overall job — forget it. We see it as an on-going 
de-skilling of society, getting rid of trade unions. It's making BC open 
for business, and I mean business in the worst sense of the word.

Paul: The government has changed the Employment Standards Act. There 
is a two-tiered minimum wage. For the first 600 hours of a person's work 
experience they get $6 [A$7.50] an hour. After that they have to pay $8 
dollars an hour (which was the old minimum wage).

All that means is that some young person will go to McDonalds or whatever, 
and the employer will ask them, "Do you have any working experience?".

They'll lie about it. They'll say they don't so that at least they'll get 
$6 an hour rather than admit to having experience and not get the job 
because the employer will have to pay them $8 an hour.

They are changing the Labour Code itself. For the last ten years, if you 
could sign up 55 per cent of the employees on a site, you had automatic 
certification to represent them.

Now you have to get 45 or 50 per cent signing up and then it goes to a 
vote. If you have 45 per cent and it goes to a vote, 50 per cent would have 
to vote in favour of it. All employees have the right to vote on 
certification.

They've slowed the process up. The employer now has ten days to go and 
intimidate employees. Before it was an unfair labour practice for the 
employer to say anything other than to give his profit-and-loss sheet as 
part of the discussion.

They are also having serious discussions about privatising the Labour 
Relations Board [the equivalent to the Australian Industrial Relations 
Commission]. It will become a fee for service. So if you wanted mediation 
services or conciliation services that you didn't have to pay the union 
for, it was provided free. Now they are talking about having to pay for it.

At present the vice-chairs at the Labour Relations Board have term 
contracts. They are hired for three years, at the end of which the contract 
might be extended. They are talking about making them "on call". So that 
they would call them up for a specific case, hear the case, make a decision 
and basically be off again.

If the government does not like the tone of the decision of a particular 
officer they just won't recall them because they have no tenure. It's 
another move to a) privatisation; and b) undercut the independence of the 
labour movement by making vice-chairs of the Labour Board subservient to 
government policy.

Guardian: Are any other rights threatened?

Paul: In the municipalities of the cities they are starting to 
charge for police services for demonstrations. If the Vancouver District 
Labour Council wants to put on a May Day parade, it now faces raising some 
$5,000 or $6,000 for a permit to get the police to do the policing and 
close up the streets.

Anna: Even just the regular International Women's Day march — it 
would be a short march — they'd be charging $6,000 to the women's movement 
which is just a group of women who come together. They actually don't have 
an organisation, they have an International Women's Day Committee. It may 
be raises enough money to hire the PA system but now it has to find 
thousands of dollars.

It becomes almost impossible to hold even a march, when you are not even 
really doing a demonstration about anything, it's a celebration.

Paul: The charge becomes an impediment on democracy and we see that 
as huge set-back, to have cities charging to use the public streets. It's a 
limitation of democracy, it's an abysmal affair.

Guardian: You've no doubt heard about our government's treatment of 
asylum seekers?

Paul: We have exactly the same problem in BC because we have a 
coastline that's thousands of miles long with all these isolated fiords and 
with a zero population.

When the coastguard finds people they do not put them into prison camps, 
they go straight into the prison system. They've opened up all the banned 
prisons and stuck them in there. Some have been there for up to two-three 
years with no rights of habeas corpus or anything else.

The little bit of news we see from here is absolutely parallel.

Guardian: Are there also similarities with our terrorist 
legislation?

Anna: We have, I believe, similar legislation. I believe that 
recently it has been modified a little bit because there has been quite a 
huge outcry against certain aspects of it that will just allow the police 
to shut down trade unions.

It gives them carte blanche to go into any organisation that might in any 
way oppose the government of the day and shut it down, take its assets and 
so on.

Paul: In fact, in the reading of the first draft of the "anti-
terrorism" legislation, it would have been illegal for a union to conduct a 
strike, it would have been an act of terrorism. They'd probably jail 
leaders and sue them out of existence.

The civil rights movement, civil libertarians, have raised these issues and 
so they have been replaced. They didn't proclaim all aspects of the 
legislation. It was on a temporary basis for six months and when the six-
months' renewal came up they cut out some of the worst elements.

It has enabled them to cut a huge dent into civil liberties. We haven't 
seen the final legislation but it's going to be a huge backward step in 
terms of civil rights.

Guardian: What is the response in Canada to Bush's "war on 
terrorism"?

Paul: We were in there like dirty shirts. It took us six months to 
find enough soldiers to make a crew that could go over. Their equipment was 
for jungle warfare not for desert conditions. It was a bit of a national 
farce getting these guys over there.

But we got them there and got a few of them killed — with headlines like 
"our heroes".

Anna: It was the Americans who killed the Canadian soldiers, not the 
Taliban. Since the war against Afghanistan started there has been a vigil 
at the American Embassy, almost constantly.

There are people in Vancouver and BC who are definitely opposed to this on-
going war. The general public — it's just happening and they don't think 
about it one way or the other.

 We've noticed that the Americans haven't talked about Osama bin Laden for 
a good number of months. He seems to have disappeared into the woodwork. 
They are just staying in Afghanistan and they are just extending their 
military might as far as they can go. That's the whole purpose and that's 
what they are doing.