Canadian M.P.s challenge secrecy of Govt cartel

Press, 30 August 1977, Page 8

Canadian M.P.s challenge secrecy of Govt cartel

NZPA Ottawa Six prominent Opposition members of the Canadian Parliament have filed an action in the Ontario Supreme Court challenging the legality of a Government order prohibiting the disclosure of information on an international uranium cartel sponsored by Canada. The impending legal test, besides having ramifications o' concern at the international uranium industry, and a direct involvement with relations between Canada and the United States, also deeply affects the growing controversy in Canada over secrecy in the Canadian [Government. Different points of view on cartels, with Canada defending a practice that Americans consider wrong, and Canadian sensitivity to i the application of United States law against Canadian- ( based subsidiaries of American companies have produced sharp exchanges between Ottawa and Washing- . ton in the uranium case. The cartel, which is said to have helped drive up the price of a pound of the

metal from $8 to $4O between 1972 and 1976, is the subject of antitrust investigations by a Congressional committee and the Department of Justice in the United States, as well as figuring in a corporate lawsuit. Last September, as details on the workings of the cartel began to emerge from the proceedings in the United States and American authorities called on Canadian official and corporate sources for further information, the Prime Minister (Mr 'Pierre Trudeau) and his Cab-

inet adopted an Order-in-Council, which in effect made it a crime for a Canadian not only to give out such information but even to discuss it. This gag order, as critics called it, had attracted scant public attention until it became a political issue this month as members of the Progressive Conservative Party, the principal Opposition group, began a Parliamentary inquiry into Canadian official controls on uranium, the source of nuclear power. Canada is a leading producer of uranium. Mr Trudeau, under pressure from the House of Commons, asserted that the order had been meant to protect sensitive information against Americans who, according to the Prime Minister, were wrongfully trying to enforce United States laws in Canada in the course of the antitrust procedures. The Prime Minister maintained that the cartel was necessary to keep the Canadian uranium industry viable in the face of a United States ban on imports of the mineral into that country.

Opposition members, pursuing inquiries as to ■ • whether the uranium cont trols might be violating the > Canadian version of an antitrust law, found that infor- - mation denied them here t under the Cabinet order was . easily obtainable in the . United States. But their > anger was aroused by the > discovery that their legal ' counsel were prohibited by . the order, under threat of _ prosecution, from advising , the legislators on the use of r the information in Parlia- , ment. Mr Trudeau, insisting that . the uranium cartel was legal f under Canadian law, chale lenged his Parliamentary 0 critics to take their case to court. i, Mr Joseph Clark, the offii- cial leader of the Parlia- ? mentary Opposition, and five s colleagues in the Progressive e Conservative caucus decided t instead to challenge the Cabinet order on information. i- Accordingly, they filed a s suit on Thursday asking the i- Ontario Supreme Court to e hold the order in violation d of the Canadian Civil Rights e Act of 1960 and therefore invalid. f