British Columbia

GREATER VANCOUVER
Target Achieved

Aubrey Burton 700 ===
Bill Bennett 500 460
Burnaby 6,000 17753
Coquitlam 2,500 100
Effie Jones 1,500 295
Kingsway. 5,000 1,248
New West. 2,000 5
Nigel Morgan 600 100
North Van. 2,500 805
Richmond 1,500 145
Stan Lowe 250 230
Van. East 6,800 822
Westside 4,800 {PRL
FRASER VALLEY

Delta 600 20
Fraser Valley 1,000 6
Maple Ridge 2,200 332
Surrey/

White Rock 3,100 1,885

OKANAGAN
Kamloops 1,100 300
Okanagan 600 575
Vernon 1,600 - 685

N. COAST/INTERIOR
Correspondence 1,500 1,080
Creston 200 200
Fernie 250 320
L. Similkameen 500 oo
Powell River 500 605
Prince George 200 -==
Prince Rupert 300 ae
Sunshine Coast 500 200
Trail 700 35

VANCOUVER ISLAND
Campbell River 2,000 1,026
Comox Valley 1,400 55
Nanaimo 3,000 ° 2,286
Port Alberni 1,500 ms
Victoria 3,300 1,728
Miscellaneous 2,500 1,815
TOTAL: 63,200 20,457

Four weeks left |
to reach $82,000

Our future is in your hands

Concerts take fisheries issues coastwide

By KIM GOLDBERG

NANAIMO — Plagued by an. unsightly
environmental crisis or social injustice?
Who you gonna call? The bullshit
Busters — otherwise known as the Artists
Response Team (ART).

The United Fishermen and Allied
Workers Union did. And the result is the
Wild Salmon/Clean Water concert tour,
which visited various B.C. coastal commun-
ities throughout May to raise public aware-
ness about the uncertain future of the
Pacific fisheries and the federal govern-
ment’s plan to privatize the resource.

Headlining the four-hour show, which
kicked off April 28 at the Maritime Labour
Centre in Vancouver, are Vancouver singer/
songwriter Holly Arntzen and guitarist
David Sinclair. .

““We’ve got one of the best fisheries left
on the planet. But if the public doesn’t start
getting more involved in making decisions
about it, we stand to go the way of the east
coast,” says Arntzen, whose grandfather
was a commercial fisherman in Vancouver
and Port Hardy until he retired at age 82.

Arntzen and other cultural workers
formed ART last year to tackle issues in
need of public attention and rapid action,
such as the federal government’s disman-
tling of Via Rail, which prompted Arntzen’s
Last Spike: Great Canadian Whistlestop
tour in January.

“The ART is a cultural SWAT team,”
Arntzen says. “If you’ve got a cause, we’ve
got the music.”

The UFAWU knew it had a cause back
in February when a leaked copy of Vision
2000, the federal government’s 10-year
management plan for Pacific fisheries, fell
into its hands.

The union swiftly condemned the docu-
ment as “‘a blueprint for the privatization of
a common property resource” and said the
increased concentration of licences and
profits in corporate hands would destroy

FISHERMAN PHOTO

coastal communities dependent on fishing.

Some of the Vision 2000 recommenda-
tions include decreasing the size of the west
coast commercial fleet, increasing licence
fees and royalties, transferring all resource
management costs from government to pri-
vate industry, increasing allocations for
sport fishing and increasing allocations to
native Indians in lieu of comprehensive set-
tlements of Native claims.

“Their vision of 2000 should: more cor-
rectly be called astigmatism or myopia of
1990,” UFAWU environmental co-ordin-
ator Arnie Thomlinson told a Nanaimo
audience on the concert tour.

HOLLY ARNTZEN .. . at kick-off concert in Vancouver, Maritime Centre April 28.

“More and more the fishery is something
that can only be indulged in by the rich,”
Thomlinson said. “The federal government
seems to think that’s a good thing. . . Vision
2000 will make the licenses something you
and I cannot afford.”

Among the evening’s musical highlights,
Arntzen got the whole audience singing on
a moving rendition of Stan Rogers’
“Northwest Passage” and later stunned the
crowd with her voice of raw energy and
Sinclair’s ultra-electric, Hendrix-style licks
ona highly revised version of “O Canada.”

Adding to the delight of what Arntzen
describes as “some killer fish songs” (and

few would contest her claim), was comedi-
an/writer Des Kennedy performing in a
genre of his own invention: “eco-satire.”

Transforming the audience into a con-
gregation of feverish evangelical followers
with arms outstretched, palms waving and
voices chanting “Almighty dollar,” Kennedy
delivered his sermon in thunderous tones:
“« .. the name of that vision, children, is
Vision 2000 ... Behold, a huge boat with
nets the whole length of the coast. And that
name of that boast is ‘Greed’... Blessed are
the wealthy for they shall inherit it all and
send it to Japan for processing.”

Bill Green of the Tin-Wis Coalition was
on hand for the Nanaimo engagement and
urged the audience to look to Tin-Wis as a
model for collective organizing among
groups working for social environmental
and economic justice.

“We can’t let the. government and the
multinationals divide workers from Native
people and others working for peace,”
Green told the crowd.

“We're going into the Nineties with some
tremendous forces against us — forces ded-
icated to the centralization of political
power. And we better be very clear about
what that agenda is.”

The UFA WU agrees and is sponsoring a

three-day conference at UBC June 1-3 open
to all groups and individuals concerned
about the future of the Pacific fisheries.
_ Conference organizers hope the partici-
pants will map out a joint response and
alternative management strategy to the
government’s Vision 2000.

“We hope to build a united front of res-
istance to the document to convince (Prime
Minister Brian) Mulroney and his hench-
men they can’t get away with it,” Thomlin-
son says. ,

For conference details and registration
information contact Dennis Brown at the
UFAWU, 255-1336.

Pacific Tribune, May 28, 1990 « 3

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