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Speaking directly to United

THE EDUCATION OF EVERETT

their choice to win better earnings

Telling the story of an epic strike

Fishermen and Allied Workers’
Union past president Homer
Stevens and president Jack Nichol
where they sat among delegates to
the recent B.C. Federation of
Labor convention in Penticton,
Gerald Yetman, president of the
Nova Scotia Federation of Labor,
drew resounding applause with
this. remark:

“T want to say to you, Homer,
and you, Jack, that some of the
seeds you sowed in 1970 are coming
to fruition and pretty soon we’ll
have the fishermen of Atlantic
Canada organized.”

Stevens himself predicted this
outcome six years ago in sum-
marizing the achievements of the
UFAWU organizing campaign in
Nova Scotia which reached its high
point in the bitter Canso Strait
strike of 1970.

In his article, “The Strike that
Shook Nova Scotia,” published in
the 1970 annual issue of The
Fisherman, he wrote:

“When the strike began at the
end of March, no one could have
predicted every turn of event. In
writing about seven months of
constant activity, it is hard to
explain everything that happened
without writing a book.

“There is no doubt that the strike
left an indelible imprint. It opened
up the right of fishermen to
organize, to have a union to ad-
vance their best interests.

“The fishermen’s courage, their
loyalty ‘to the UFAWU, amazed
both friends and enemies .. .”

“In that sense, it is also true to
say the UFAWU provided the
spark of determination. It is a
spark which will lead to greater
gains in future years for all the
fishermen of the Atlantic coast.’

ToStevens, only a book could tell
the full story. And the Cape Breton
Highlander too, was impelled to
observe editorially in 1970, ““When
this thing is finally over somebody
should write a book about it. It
deserves to be remembered as an
epic struggle by Nova Scotia
workers.””

Now the book has been written —
and it’s a good book indeed — by
Silver Donald Cameron, a writer
reared in British Columbia and
long resident in Nova Scotia.

While its title is The Education of
Everett Richardson, its sub-title,
The Nova Scotia Fishermen’s
Strike 1970-71, more accurately
defines its content.

What Cameron has done with
consummate skill is to follow the
single thread of Everett Richard-
son’s own experiences — he was
sentenced to nine months’ im-
prisonment for contempt
through the complicated pattern of
the strike.

Against the historical
background of the fishing industry,
he depicts the harsh working and

RICHARDSON: The Nova Scotia Fish-
ermen’s Strike, 1970-71. By Silver
Donald Cameron. McClelland and
Stewart, 1977. Paper $4.95.

living conditions of the fishermen
(“When Everett Richardson and
Edison Lumsden fall to
reminiscing, they identify their
friends by the places they were
drowned”’), traces the connections
of the elitist old families in ‘‘the
most class structured part of
English Canada,” the government
and the multinationals, and picks
out the multifarious strands of a
conflict that ranged everyone in
the community for or against the
striking fishermen.

As Cameron notes
prologue:

“This is not just the Story of the
Richardsons; each of the 235 union
fishermen has a similar story. But
to understand the meaning of the
strike, one has to move close to the
fishermen, and the Richardsons’
story can stand for the others.

“In the end, this is not a story of
the fishermen alone, or even of the
labor movement. Itis a story about
privilege and poverty and injustice
inthis country and about the social
and political arrangements which
cheat and oppress most Canadians,
which stunt our humanity and
distort our environment .

‘And Cameron spares no one.
Neither the fishing companies so
devoid of justification for their
cheating of the fishermen and

in his

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plundering of the public purse that
their only resort was the thread-
bare propaganda of _§anti-
communism. Nor the cold warriors
of the trade union movement ad-
vancing the same arguments to
camouflage their betrayal of men
and women suffering the hardships
of the picket line for the right to
belong to the union of their choice.

Rightly, Homer Stevens appears
prominently in the book, for the
strike called for those qualities of
courage and determination, for-
tified by 30 years of experience in
fishermen’sstruggles, which made
him its natural leader.

Cameron points out though, -that
“the fishermen were the collective
heroes and martyrs, who lost the

battle for themselves but won it for »

their brothers.”
He quotes with approval poet-
historian George Woodcock’s

observation that Canada’s epic.

TTT wires
literature is composed of ‘‘epics of
endurance, epics of imagination,
not in any true sense epics of
heroism,’’ accepting poet-novelist
Margaret Atwood’s argument that
“such heroism as does appear in
our epics is also mainly collective
heroism.”’

“When, therefore, it is a question
of investigating the driving powers

which — consciously or un- -

consciously, and indeed very often
unconsciously — lie behind the
motives of men who act in history
and which constitute the real
ultimate driving forces of history,
thenit is not so,much a question of
the motives which set in motion
great masses, whole peoples, and
again whole classes of the people
within each people.’’

The conscious motive of the
Canso Strait fishermen was to
establish their right to. the union of

and living conditions for them-
selves.

But as the strike developed they
found themselves demonstrating,
in Cameron’s words, ‘‘the real
relationships between Nova
Scotia’s most powerful institutions
with startling clarity, while ©
revealing that a handful of people,
strengthened by their insistence of
justice, could bring an entire
province to a halt...

“They struggled, in the end, to
expand people’s minds; they
succeeded brilliantly. Thousands
of Nova Scotians who had
dismissed the labor movement as
an outmoded idea, a preserve of
thugs and opportunists, suddenly
saw anew its fundamental glory,
its insistence on respect for human
labor and its resistance to the
moral squalor of exploitation.”

‘Cameron has produced a
generally accurate narrative,
marred only by such irritating
minor flaws as the misspelling of

Jack Nichol’s and Glen Mc- —

Eachern’s names which better
editing should have caught. He has
captured with a rare authenticity
the atmosphere of the struggle, the
earthy humor and the indomitable —
spirit of the fishermen and their
wives on the picket line.

Of all the books that have come

off Canadian presses this year, this —
is one that should be at the top of
the list for every progressive.

This new film is worth the

It may have been a long time in
coming but suddenly, it seems,
Canadian filmmakers are looking
homeward. Never have so many
Canadian films, produced by
Canadians and based on works by
Canadians, been available on the
first-run theatre circuit as in the
last few years. Mordecai Richler
began something of a trend three
years ago with a screen version of
his novel The Apprenticeship of
Duddy Kravitz and more recently
there has been Jan Kadar’s Lies
My Father Told Me from Ted
Allan’s original script, Why Shoot
the Teacher based on Max
Braitwaite’s book, and a new film
which opened a regular run in
Vancouver last week, Who Has
Seen the Wind from W. O. Mitch-
ell’s 1947 novel. If these last three
are any indication, there is even
greater promise for the future.

Like Why Shoot the Teacher,
Allan King’s Who Has Seen the
Wind is set in Depression-era
Saskatchewan. It focuses on a
young boy, Brian O’Connal (played
by Brian Painchaud), growing up
and striving to understand the

meaning of life and death and his
relation to others around him.
Screenwriter Patricia Watson,
while muting some of the harsher
realities of the original, retains
Mitchell’s compassion and humor
as she develops the boy’s story
through various incidents and
encounters and finally a family
crisis. Combined with the
remarkable performance of Brian
Painchaud, the result is a film that
leaves a poignant ache with the
many audiences it has already
attracted.

Above all, Who Has Seen the

Wind is rich in characterization.
Veteran Canadian actor, director
and writer Gordon Pinsent who
plays Brian’s father leads a strong
cast (many of whom are former
Vancouver actors) with each
playing a vital part in creating a
colorful composite portrait of
small-town Saskatchewan life.
There is Ed Macnamara as
Sammy, the mad prophet of the
prairie; Patricia Hamilton, Helen
Shaver and Tom Hauff as Brian’s
teachers and principal; Charmion
King as a vindictive, moralizing
battle-axe; Douglas Junor as the

‘A New Wind Blowin’

Bargain at Half the Price

Available at $6.98 from selected union halls, People’s Co-op Books, Tribune office.
Add $1.40 for sales tax, postage and packaging for mail orders from the Tribune office.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—NOVEMBER 18, 1977—Page 6 _

WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND. Screen-
play by Patricia Watson based on the
novel by W. O. Mitchell. Directed by
Allan’ King and starring Gordon Pin-
sent, Jose Ferrer and Brian Painchaud.
At the Vancouver Centre Cinema, Van-
couver.

haunting figure of The Young Ben;
and Jose Ferrer, the only

American import, as Ben’s father,

theold bootlegger who provides the
impetus for some of the film’s most
hilarious scenes.

Last, but far from least, there
are the people of Arcola, in

southern Saskatchewan, where the.

film was shot, whose performances
are equal to those of their
professional counterparts. The
town itself with its weathered,
dusty streetfront and frequent
windstorms, creates the at-
mosphere.

Yet despite its poignancy and its
evocative images of childhood. on
the Prairies, Who Has Seen the
Wind is not as striking as is an
earlier film on a similar theme,
Kadar’s Lies My Father Told Me.
King’s lengthy passage without
dialogue and his long, searching
closeups have a visual intensity but
they lack a feeling of conflict that
they are intended to convey. The
autumn colors that predominate in
Richard Leiterman’s impressive
photography add to that intensity

—Hal Griffin
ait

as does Eldon Rathburn’s music
which, although it is engaging

throughout, changes abruptly to
underscore each shift in the mood ©
of the film. And, for all its sear-
ching, Who Has Seen the Wind

doesn’t really break any new |

ground in exploring its theme.

It must be said that the tendency
to stay within certain boundaries is —
part of a larger problem facing
Canadian film as a whole. In botha
literal and a figurative sense, it is
stil in its childhood; its most
impressive accomplishments —
and some of the films listed earlier
are among them — deal, in one
sense or another, with growing up.
Most of them are set in the ’20’s or
’30’s. The formula so far has
brought box office success and
with the Canadian Film
Development Corporation casting
an. accountant’s eye over the
receipts, saleability has been a ~
major factor in determining what
will be produced. But finally films
of this kind could become
something of a cliche.

‘But whatever its shortcomings,
Who Has Seen the Wind stands far
aheadin the current list of films. It
is finely crafted, superbly acted —
and well worth the inevitable wait
in line at the theatre.

a —Sean Griffin

Fhe Carade USSR, Aueialin

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Siatieth Anniversany off the October. Revolution
Saturday, November Nencleenth, seron. to ton fom
Van Dusen Honal Gandons
Thintyserenth and Oak Se, Vancourer

Greshs will include foominent Fed artists and sovontist.
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