A sensible Sunday N the Vancouver civic elections last year the issue of Sunday sports went before the electorate in a plebiscite. In a clumsy effort to head off popular demand for a modified relaxation of Sunday “blue laws,” the Non-Partisan Association politicos cooked up a phoney ballot which placed the question in an “all-or-nothing’’ setting, a ballot specially designed to bury the issue in an avalanche of indignant “no’” votes. ~ Despite this cheap trick-ballot however, aimed at confusing the issue and sidetracking popular demand, 25,051 voters cast “‘yes” ballots, not because they wanted Sunday religious observances aban- doned but as a protest against NPA skulduggery in handling public issues. Only 34,571 electors voted “‘no’’ fer the NPA plebiscite, a figure far short of the avalanche expected by the NPA tricksters. This issue is again before the electorate in the coming civic elec- tions. Recently a group of citizens presented the NPA solons at the ed hall with.a petition, signed by over 13,000 citizens, asking for a _ modified relaxation of Sunday laws; a modification that would enable - the majority of our citizens who want it the enjoyment of schéduled ball games, concerts, or other recreations now prohibited in Vancouver —but enjoyed by Canadians in other large centres without infringing upon traditional Sabbath observances. If the people are given an opportunity to voice: an honest and straight-forward opinion on this issue, it would receive an overwhelming support. Nor would such support mean that Vancouver had abandoned paadey as the Lord’s Day. It would only mean that they wanted to be sensible about the matter—if permitted the opportunity by a gang of NPA political tricksters, whose departure from the city hall is long overdue. Let’s have a plebiscite on modified Sunday restrictions in this year’s civic elections which means what it says, and grants to the people what they want. But the crime continues ‘QT must be a comforting thought for harassed housewives to know that while the price of bread, milk, meat, and all the other things © needed to keep body and soul together are steadily going up, the big monopoly combines which do the price fixing, are treated with the utmost leniency—if and when the government does decide to act. The celebrated casejust concluded in Alberta, where three branches of McGavin's ‘Bakeries, Canadian Bakeries, Weston Bread and Cake and Edmonton City Baking, were arraigned for operating a baking combine to fix prices, should be a good reminder that the “‘equal majesty of the law’’ is still the top fiction of the ages. Clearly the law has two sets of weights and: measures, one for the ordinary people and another for the monopolists who grow fat. rooking the people. All this is alleged to have started away back in 1933-35, con- firming the old proverb that ‘‘the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.” than the smallness. Mr. Justice McBride who presided at this 99-day trial termed the baking combine “a fraudulent system . . . a system of misrepre- sentation and fraud, a system of plunder comparable to meeting a man _ on the street and robbing him of his money.”” In fact the learned judge could have been describing capitalism in toto, because his definition of one small segment of the modern monopoly -plunderbund fits the: whole. f After his blistering denunciation,Mr. Justice McBride fined each of the bread conspirators $10,000. $10,000! Compared to the ‘millions these bread snatchers have mulcted from the public as the result of the prices combine, that $10,000 is less than the cost of _ fixing a parking ticket. It doesn’t begin to fit the crime of looting from every workingman’s pay envelope the extra two, three, or five cents per loaf of bread he must have for his children. é The methods by which these combines put the pressure, not only on the public as individuals but on large chain stores, hospitals and other public institutions, ‘‘zoning’’ out the country among themselves _ to eliminate competition, and so on, reads like a chapter out of Al se gangster manual for extorting money out of innocent people. These monopoly “‘pay-triots” even carried on their ‘fraudulent system ms Sse Nee during the war when these corporations were supplying The record will show. that in his heyday, Al eee didn’t mind "paying ten, fifteen or twenty thousand dollars several times a year for “protection” or other legitimate graft levies: Nor do the bread mon- _ opolists mind the paltry $10,000 and costs handed down by Mr. Justice McBride. They can clean that up in one baking, just as they have cleaned up millions in a decade of price fixing and hi-jacking. The case of the missing loaf is solved—but the prices gouge goes on. The bread racketeers have had a dainty slap on the wnist, but _ nothing more. Under socialism, people who steal the nation’s bread are shot! oe ml i ING al i) 4! fi) Nf il NGESEUIN, My AL tessetliane a un i a " published Weekly at Room 6 - 426 Main Street, Vancouver, B.C. i By THE TRIBUNE PUBLISHING COMPANY LTD. Telephone MA. 5288 Tom McEwen i Subscription Rates: 1 Year, $2.50; 6 Months, $1.35. Sakae re by Union Printers Ltd., 650 Howe Street, Vancouver, B.C. _ Authorized as second class*mail, Post Office Dept., Ottawa The slowness in this case is no less apparent! COLA A RAT ~ by TOM McEWEN VMUUHiHj«Tt IT TkRLTLTTTTITTTKTtttTTiKTnTtiKKiKKNNENKAHnAKKKminKuRNEy Was the ‘commercial press dopesters hand out hot tips on horse races and general elections, it is always advisable for John Q. Public to apply a little of his own grey matter before jumping to any definite decision on the matter. Or, if he must bet, he should try the reverse of what the dopesters advise. Thus, when the ponies romp in or the: bal- lots are counted, he may have earned the ‘rating of* a good Gallup pollster... the clairvoyant status of a Vancouver weatherman. The Vancouver Sun has two of these political forecasters over in the Old Country at the moment sizing up the October 25 general election currents. What they have sent back so far leaves plenty of margin for serious doubts about their qualifications as political weathercocks, Take Elmore Philpott’s analysis in the issue of October 3. Elmore is pretty sure it’s the bag” for Clement Attlee, a “safe man,” although Elmore doesn’t say what he’s safe for. “The. answer I think,” says Philpott, “could be sized up in six letters—Attlee.” The captivating sub-head on his article reads, “Party Differences Healed at Scar- borough. ” The sub-head not only belies the con- tent of Elmore’s analysis, but also the vitally im- portant political factors he omitted entirely. Sun ‘in In this Scarborough conference of the British Labor party, Attlee (and his policies) sustained a smashing defeat ifi the elections to the national executive of the party, and this despite the full backing accorded him by the powerful bureaucratic trade union machine of Transport House. Aneurin Bevan and his supporters topped the vote for the national executive. Bevan’s “leftism” is well known to the Attlee- Morrison-Transport House wing; it is also well known to the old guard of the Tory party and its warmongering chieftain, Churchill. the top social-democrats and Tories alike, is not the “leftism” of Bevan, but the wide-spread dis- appointment, chagrin, and even disgust, ‘with the - Yankee-dominated policies of an alleged “Socialist” government. That sentiment, strong in the rank- and-file local Labor parties, and among the mem- bership of the powerful British trade unions, bothers Attlee as much as it does Churchill. That is why this crafty old warmongering politician is handing out such placatory promises in his election bally- hoo, He has. almost swiped the original platform that swept. Labor to power in 1945. These are only a few items which the Sun’s forecasters seem to have: passed up as unimportant. Attlee is making peace the canttet issue >of this election; a very vital and sacred issue, not only to the people of Britain, but of the whole world. But it must be, in accordance with the phoney concept of “fair play,” a very gentlemanly peace. We mustn’t call Churchill a warmonger. That isn’t cricket. We'll just say the danger of war is greater with Churchill up, than it would be with Attlee, who was described by a leading churchman recently as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing,” and who Philpott de- scribes as a phlei: carbon copy of “our own late - the Bevan “break.” or at the very worst, _ fore of the abandonment of “nationalization”; What disturbs | great Mackenzie King.” (A pause, while We Heabh for the smelling salts.) / f Attlee’s “nationalization of heavy industry” plank in his Socialist program, is the very core and kernel of this election, \the issue that brought on Attlee, despite his “clear ideas ‘very crisply expressed” ‘cannot talk a peace that will be acceptable to a rationed and austerity-stricken electorate, without explaining the why and where- his tremendous arms budget, the rising profits levels of theBritish capitalists, and the declining British ‘ standards of life for the workers. The British peo- ~pla already know that basic British foreign and domestic policies are determined in Washington, It Attlee is for a genuine peace, then he must break clear and clean of Yankee imperialism and the dictates id Wall Street. ©