A program
to save the
B.C. fishing

industry

The Communist Party's

proposals to defeat

the crisis threatening

the very survival

of a rich resource

dustry is in the grip of the worst crisis in its
brief history. For thousands of years, the
marine resources of this province nurtured the
economy and culture of the province’s aboriginal
‘peoples. With the beginning of the intensive com-
mercial harvest, those resources became engines of
wealth for generations of cannery owners and pro-
cessors. Frantic expansion, superprofits, collapse,
and increased concentration — these have been the
features of industrial development in the B.C.
fishing industry. Unemployment, exploitation and
poverty have too often been the lot of those who re-
ly on the industry. Resistance through organization
has been their response.

The waters on which marine life relies are being
polluted, dammed and diverted, destroyed by
resource extraction projects that mortgage our
future by selling non-renewable resources to the
highest bidder. Federal government subordination
of fishing industry interests to a U.S.-dominated
foreign policy is resulting in the surrender of our
salmon and maritime boundaries to meet American
military and economic objectives. In short, a
systematic surrender to corporate interests 1s
destroying the fishing industry and the coastal
economy it sustains. :

Today, our apparently bountiful, marine
resources are threatened with destruction. The
relentless drive for profit, now by transnationals

Tes the British Columbia fishing in

with world-wide operations, has thrown hundreds
of industry workers onto the unemployment lines.
Those that remain can barely survive on their reduc-
ed incomes.

This is a profound structural crisis in the industry
which concerns all Canadians. Obviously, the
potential exists for a stable, wealth-producing in-
dustry that feeds Canadians, employs thousands of
British Columbians and exports food to world
markets.

Unemployment, loss of sovereignty, destruction
of fish habitat — all these ultimately are problems
that can only be solved-by making the interests of
Canada’s working people the first priority. The
Communist Party of Canada believes they can be
tackled if all those who are linked to the fishing in-
dustry by culture, job or community unite around a
program of action to put the fishing industry under
democratic, public control. In the first place, such a
program must put national interests foremost. It
must be an anti-monopoly program. The power of
the corporations deciding the fate of the industry
must be broken. Federal and provincial policies
that subordinate marine resources to the interests of
the multinationals must be reversed. Above all, the
struggle to save the fishing industry must be linked
with the struggle of all Canadian workers to build a
society in which crisis, unemployment and poverty
are replaced by stability, economic security and
democracy.