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An "American" draft dodger sits in the office of the Toronto AntiDraft Programme, financed in part by America's National Council of Churches. It was launched by William Spira, who has been connected with the radical Communist National Guardian and Canadians for the National Liberation Front (Vietcong). When he is not promoting desertion from America's Armed Forces, Spira runs a Communist bookstore. The total of draft dodgers and deserters lured to Canada by propaganda totals nearly GO,OOO.

work as European representative of the Canadian Peace Research Institute, which the Canada Council supports with public funds - and two directors of which, at one time, were Trudeau and Pelletier. Another director, named in 1962, was Communist Jean-Louis Gagnon. It pays to have important frien'ds. And Hunnius has been a consultant - at $1,000 per month - for the Company of Young Canadians, which apparently is the Canadian version ofV.I.S.T.A., and which was established and federally financed by former Premier Lester Pearson. Dozens of other C.Y.C. revolutionaries have been caught using taxpayers' money to finance revolution, and in January, 1971, Diefenbaker demanded that the C.Y.C. be investigated too. Trudeau has also told Munro to finance the Black Power forces in Nova Scotia, despite the opposition of real Negro leaders who live there, including Arnold Johnson, Halifax County Councillor, and Ross Kinney, Moderator of the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia, the largest black outfit in the province. And the federal government awarded a large contract it was forced to withdraw, for the purchase of dairy products for the Armed Forces, to the People's Cooperative, a Winnipeg outfit which has been described as a subsidiary of the Communist Party. Trudeau is also using Crown Corporations, controlled not by Parliament but by him, to communize the economy under the guise of private enterprise. What he is organizing, an M.P. tells us, is best called "the new Fascism." The Cannon Fodder Of particular interest to Americans are the thousands of American draft dodgers and deserters in Canada. Premier "Red Mike" Pearson had already opened the door to deserters, and in May, 1969, Trudeau opened it all the way. Deserters from the American military, like draft dodgers, who ask to become "landed" immigrants, are now processed by Canadian Immigration without regard for their military status. Five years later, they can become Canadian citizens. It is impossible to know exactly how many are there, because many don't try to get "landed," but the combined total of both types is apparently between 50,000 and 60,000, most of whom are in Toronto. Most of them used to be draft dodgers, better educated and more ideological; but now, with the loosening of the draft, the majority are deserters. Some are APRIL, 1971 13

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Communists, some opportunists, some ordinary cowards. Most of them work at very badly paid jobs, a few at very good ones. A few steal. A few scrounge. A few get welfare. Half the welfare bill in Toronto is paid by the federal government, thirty percent by the Province of Ontario and the rest by the Metropolitan area. And local Welfare Commissioner John Anderson says he is not even allowed to ask whether an applicant is a citizen. "Almost nobody is sent back," he says, "even if he's mildly criminal. Immigration is very lax." Preeminent among those who agitated for Canada's new federal policy toward deserters is William Spira, a former American who apparently left at the height of the "McCarthy Era." Spira launched the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, formerly the federally-financed Student Union for Peace Action already mentioned. He has also been connected with the radical Communist National Guardian in the States, and with Canadians for the National Liberation Front (Vietcong). He was a sponsor of C.N.L.F.'s Canadian Rights Defence Committee. And he runs the Third World Information Service, a Communist bookstore in suburban Thornhill, which the Castroites decided to establish at the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana in 1966. They mail their propaganda to Comrade Spira in Toronto, who remails it to the United States. The Toronto Anti-Draft Programme (T.A.D.P.) he masterminds consists of several rooms and offices, the walls of which are covered with Communist propaganda. Various "counsellors" are sitting around, along with the clients they are helping to dodge the draft or desert. There is Lee, for instance, who is twenty, and is sitting under a picture of terrorist H. Rap Brown. Lee has a brother who spent eight years in our Marines, and who he says would "rather see me dead." From time to time, Lee sees a Toronto street that reminds him of his American home town, but he says the memory quickly fades and he is glad to be in Canada. And there is Dick, who is twenty-four and comes from EI Paso, where his father is a Presbyterian minister. Dick "had a hassle" with his parents about his decision, but he made it and now is a T.A.D.P. counsellor. His salary is $50 a week. The American people should be tried for war crimes, says Dick, who apparently endorses the idea of collective guilt. He agrees such a trial is impossible to arrange, but will settle for the trials of Presidents Johnson and Nixon. We are in Vietnam, he says, "to protect the oil." White people have always been aggressors, he explains, but there is a "social revolution" in the United States, because of which they are beginning to realize it. Dick himself is white, but apparently believes he's a "good" honky. He is grim, unsmiling, trying to make amends. He loves humanity. He can't stand hate. The Bill of Rights, he says, has always been a sham. The Bill of Rights was meant to be a sham. Our War for Independence was caused by economics. The colonists wanted to make more money. George Washington was "all lies." Benjamin Franklin was "all lies." Abraham Lincoln was "bull s**t." The United States must make a 180 degree turn, says Dick. We should have a Socialist system in a Communist type of world. And that means a psychological change is needed. Capitalism, he says rightly, is "inner directed," in sociologist David Reisman's phrase, personal, private, individual; while Socialism is "other directed" collectivized. Dick lives in a commune, in Communism, he says. He uses "grass" (marijuana), but that's all.

16

AMERICAN

OPINION

On the wall above his head is some Vietcong propaganda, and I ask what sort of Communism he wants. The Russian Constitution is much the same as the U.S. Constitution, he says. Perhaps that's why he opposes the Russian form of Communism. Mao, on the contrary, "has done a beautiful job in China." And Dick "has heard" that Communism "is working in Cuba." Has Dick actually read the U.S. Constitution and its Russian opposite? Is he aware that the latter promises handouts, taken originally from the people, but that ours, on the contrary, restricts the central government - the "Establishment" Dick claims to oppose? I don't know. It doesn't matter. He probably does know that Mao has already murdered more than 30 million Chinese, but as Lenin once put it, you can't make an omeletski without breaking eggs. I ask Dick why the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has let radical Communist Jerry Rubin use a tax-free foundation to avoid income tax. Dick says Rubin is "using the system," and is a "media freak." He says "Movement" people are wary of its leaders. Could it be that leaders like William Kunstler are using people like Dick? Leaders like Kunstler are using me, he says. Suddenly, Dick's elderly New Psychology produces a profound thought. Ralph Nader, the housewife's friend, is more revolutionary than Kunstler or Rubin, he says. I ask Dick why the Nixon Administration he says should be tried for war crimes is sending military supplies to Russia and its European satellites, which in turn supply almost all the Vietcong's military equipment. Dick does not answer. His face is blank. Then there is the Committee to Aid Refugees from Militarism (C.A.R.M.), one of whose counsellors is Charlie McKee. In the kitchen of the Toronto commune where he and his wife live with five other couples, some of the residents are preparing a meal. A mild, bearded, young man, straight from Turgenev, is slicing potatoes. He puts them in a pot. It will be a communal casserole. Everyone is fully clothed. "This is a pretty square commune," I say. "Where's the sex orgy?" Everyone chuckles. "You're supposed to hate us," says a girl. Mrs. McKee is twenty-one, pretty, and comes from Waldwick, New Jersey. She wants to get back to the land, she says. The residents of the commune are saving to buy a farm. "I want to live for me," she says, "and for the children I'm going to have." Let's hope she is able to do so. She does agree that the authoritarianism she dislikes in the States is possible in Canada, too. Her husband, Charlie, also opposes authoritarianism. He believes that government is necessary but that it should be restricted. I ask him about a picture of Ho chi Minh on the corridor wall. He says he doesn't like it and once took it down, but someone put it back up. Charlie gets excited when we say we oppose the Establishment and that the Establishment is using him to impose a dictatorship. That's exactly what Charlie believes. He makes a telephone call and sends us to another Toronto address, where we find a fifty ish lady named Judy Merril. Mrs. Merril, who apparently is the Mother Bloor of C.A.R.M., explains that her Committee to Aid Refugees from Militarism is the result of a merger between the Toronto American Deserters' Committee, which gave draft, immigration, job and housing advice; and Red, White & Black, which emphasized public relations. The C.A.R.M., for instance, publishes Carmmunique, the bi-monthly news of radical
APRIL, 1971

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17

activities in Toronto; Exnet, "maintaining contact among all Canadian aid programmes and between the Canadian scene and draft and military counsellors and the anti-war resistance in the States"; and, Out-post, which is "designed to serve a similar function for more American [deserters] and war-resisters all over the world - to send news of the U.S. resistance to Sweden, England, Japan, Vietnam and everywhere else that members of the A.S.U., the C.R.V. and the growing ranks of deserters are scattered and to bring back news here .... " The American Servicemen's Union and the Committee of Returned Volunteers are of course revolutionary organizations working to destroy our AImed Forces. C.A.R.M. does its "counselling" at a place on Huron Street called The Hall. Mrs. Merril naturally wore a sweatshirt and dungarees, which produced a discreet, proletarian tone. She is a science-fiction writer, who came to Toronto from Milford, Pennsylvania, two years ago. In 1968, in Chicago for the Democrat Convention, she drove for the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a revolutionary outfit which was part of the Communist attack on the police. Indeed, she told me she "hoped to see a lot of cops shot." She assures us that "all the violence after the assassination of Martin Luther King was caused by the police." Dictatorship is a necessary prerequisite to a police state, she explains, and a total police state is the only thing that can happen in the States - no matter who gets elected. Since she is so opposed to repression, I ask what she thinks of the fact that the Canadian federal government financed the Poor People's Conference; and the possibility that Trudeau is just using it. She smiles. "It's very hard to think of the government as your enemy," she says, "if the government gives you the money to say it." Pierre apparently sets Mrs. Merril all atingle. His intense masculinity leaves her no choice. The Johnson and Nixon Administrations have of course been financing Communist revolution for years, through such programs as the "war on poverty," but she doesn't explain why she thinks they are against her. The only solution, she says, is the elimination of national sovereignty. She would convene a world constitutional convention to create a World Government. Would it be possible, I ask, for Americans to participate in such a government with the Communists in Russia? Certainly, she says. "There is as much freedom of speech in Russia as there is in the United States." There isn't any freedom of speech in Russia. Mrs. Merril's daughter comes in with her boy friend, Alan Reed, of Logansport, Indiana. Mr. Reed deserted from the Medical Corps at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He is very happy in Canada. And his parents have visited him five or six times. In Carmmunique for December 14, 1970, we read of the impending visit to Toronto of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The C.A.R.M. is very enthusiastic about Clergy and Laymen Concerned which, among other such things, is discussing arrangement of trials for "war crimes" of American Prisoners of War. In the same issue, we read of a dinner for "refugees," who will be entertained by revolutionary Dick Gregory and Communist Pete Seeger. A Look At The "Life Style" Then there is a place called Rochdale College, a hi-rise commune near the University of Toronto. Rochdale isn't really a college, but a "free university" like those in the States, working to revolutionize the U.T. area. At the American Consulate 18
AMERICAN OPINION