The NOW sat down with Burnaby's Mae Burrows to chat about her decades of environmental work. Burrows founded the Labour Environmental Alliance Society (now known as Toxic Free Canada) and campaigned to eradicate harmful chemicals from the workplace. She is also wellknown for producing the CancerSmart Consumer Guide, a handbook on common carcinogens found in food and household cleaners. Burrows was recently honoured with a YWCA Women of Distinction award.
Question: How do you describe what you do?
Answer: Definitely challenging a lot of the status quo, doing education work and gathering people together to make social change, sometimes directed at the environment, but other times directed at poverty or social justice issues.
Q: How long have you been doing this kind of work?
A: I was doing work with the Canadian Farmworkers' Union on pesticides in the '80s, so really since then, (and) doing official environmental work since the '90s.
Q: There is a connection between the labour movement and protecting the environment in your work. Can you tell me a bit about that?
A: In 1990, I started working for the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union as their environmental director and the executive director of the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation, which is their environmental organization.
Fishermen are naturally environmentalists, because if you don't have healthy fish habitat, you don't have an income. .
But it was a real problem for them to be called either workers or environmentalists, because they were both. So what we did through the Vancouver and District Labour Council environment committee was to try to break down this fight.
Q: You've also referred to that era as a "war in the woods," with environmentalists attacking loggers. Greenpeace was attacking fishing boats on the Fraser - there was a lot of animosity there. How did you bridge that gap?
A: Our strategy was to work with labour people and environmentalists who wanted to communicate, and if people on the edges wanted to continue to fight, they could do that. But, we tried to start building relationships, so we became a much bigger movement than them, so they were pushed to the outside. We started holding monthly forums, where people thought they'd just go in there and fight all the time, but we always had food in the beginning, and we'd have really good presentations - and not contained or controlled presentations - really civil discussions. And people would find oftentimes they would have 95 per cent in common.
There might be just small areas they didn't have in common, and they had to agree to disagree or go find some more science to explore that part, and they'd have lunch together. . So that was the first phase of the Labour Environmental Alliance Society - finding forums.
Q: You also worked on issues around trade, privatizing seniors' care and water and what you call the "passive privatization" by the way tree farm licences were given out . and then you got involved in sewage?
A: I started looking at who the big polluters in the Fraser were, and you'd think it's industry, . but it wasn't. Municipal sewage was always on the top. . And it was raw sewage. . We worked with Sierra Legal Defence and used the federal fisheries act. In those days, there was a clause that said any corporation or agent of the corporation putting substances deleterious to fish in the water could be charged in criminal court.
So we would charge the Greater Regional Vancouver District and the province with sewage charges. We took them to court several times.
Q: Also, you were saying, most of the GVRD mayors at the time voted against upgrading Richmond's sewage treatment plant?
A: We put a press release out . saying we would take each one of the mayors individually (who voted against it) to court, because that's what we could do under the fisheries act.
Our campaign was really about asking people to think about how much it was going to cost to upgrade the sewage treatment, which in those days it would have meant the price of one large pizza per family in the GVRD for each year of three years to do the upgrade. . People will give up a large pizza once a year to get the sewage out of the water, and (the mayors) turned around and voted by Saturday of the same week to do the upgrade.
Q: How did you get into the campaign against harmful toxins in the workplace?
A: At a fisherman's convention, we had one every year, it was mostly women that came to the environment committee, and we had ones that worked up in Port Rupert and Port Hardy - aboriginal women, immigrant women, who were working in the canneries. . The cleaners would come through with really harsh cleaners, and some of (the women) would have real respiratory problems . or rashes from coming into contact with the cleaners, some were really abrasive. . What was being used in the workplace was going directly into the ocean untreated, so that would affect the fish population. So if you eliminated the cleaning products from the workplace, you would have a healthier workplace for the workers, and you'd have a healthier ocean, and that's what started the whole cleaners and toxins project.
Q: What projects or accomplishments do you think you're best known for?
A: The early environmental stuff, the sewage and (stopping) the Kemano (dam Alcan wanted to build in northwest B.C.), and I think also occupational exposures, because we expanded the toxins program to asbestos and so on. So cleaners and toxins, that sort of thing, . and the CancerSmart Consumer Guide, and the breast cancer guide and the right-to-know labelling.
Q: What's next for you?
A: I'm moving into another field. Partly I'm working in child poverty and the living-wage campaign with First Call. . and I'm also starting to do a fair amount of work in addictions and mental health. [email protected]
