ke New Westminster, Alderman
Sullivan tells a delegation from
the Relief Project Workers Union
that “all recipients should eat qice
and more rice.’ In Viclorify a

woman, charged with breaking _

windows in the relief office, makes
a statement to the Canadian
Labor Defense League thai not
only are ithe windows in the
house her family is forced to live
in broken, but the water is cut
of and “‘the only fuel we have
had for two weeks is bits of
board, an old table. . . .” In
Vancouver, an unemployed veter-
an, facing eviction from his home,
is advised by officials at Shaugh-
nessy hospital that he should be
sterilized ‘‘because the unemploy-
ed cannot afford to have children.”

And all across Canada, from
homes where men and women
have become worn in a struggle
to feed themselves and their fam-
ilies, from relief camps where the
ambitions of young men rust with
frustration, rises the demand for
work and wages —— the demand
that will topple the Tory govern-
ment of Prime Minister R. B.
Bennett who boasted that he

would “cure unemployment in six
months.”

But wait! There is another
side to the story; in fact there
are many sides, all part of the
ugly pattern of living—if you can
call it living—into which capital-
ism has impressed the people.

So it is that a telephone worher,
_4uPRon whom anonymity has been
forced by the fear of dismissal,
complains of the speedup which
has “destroyed the health of many
girls.” So it is that a young
miner in Cumberland pays with
his life because safety precautions
are neglected. Soit is that mem-
bers of the Shingle Weavers
Union, picketing Boundary mill
in Vancouver to enforce a wage
- Scale of 22 cents an hour, are
Set_upon by police, and one man
lies in hospital with a fractured
seull, —

1

PeRHars you remember
these things because you

lived them and they are woven
ito the very fabric of you. You
see perhaps in the lengthening
lines of unemployed, the speedup
in industry, the attempts to de-
Stroy the trade unions, a return
to those things that the govern-
ment, creating the postwar illu-
Stons people were so eager to ac-
cept, promised should never be”
again, \

_ But it should also be remember-
€d that history does not repeat it-
Self, only that capitalism, which
has now become “free enterprise,”
must constantly adapt the old
Means its very contradictions im-
Pose upon it so that it may sur-
Vive a little longer.

The people's movement that
will fight a new depression and
the drive: to war, the labor organ-
zations that are its heart, is
vastly different from the move-
ment of the thirties. It is strong-
er in membership, more mature in
leadership, richer by its own and
the experience of others. ~° The
World in which it moves and ©
&rows has changed and is chang-
heya aan

Nothing offers greater proof of
this than the files of fhe journal
Which ‘has, in this corner of the
» Yast country that is Canada, re-
Corded, and more than recorded,
helped to make the record. of peo-
‘ple struggling towards, progress.
®

The first issue of the B.C. Work-
“rs, News appeared on January

“18, 1935, at the depth of the de-_

pression. A modest four-page Pa-
ber, it was, I remember, derided
by newspapermen on the Vancou-
ver dalies, many of whom were
_ Working for $15 or less a week

*

The paper that
marches with |
the people |

By HAL GRIFFIN

and yet could not see where the
things it wrote of—things they
could not write of+touched their
own lives. They sneered at its
makeup becaues it did not, and
with its meager technical re-
sources could not, correspond to
their conception of what a paper
should be. They measured it by
the modern techniques and huge
resources Of the papers for which
they were the blinded eyes and
trained echoes and when it could
not be fitted into this comfort-
able pattern they dismissed it.

And in dismissing it, they made

the same mistake that Jack Scott,
a latter day aspirant for journal-
istic fame, made only a few
months ago when he dismissed
the Pacific Tribune as unimport-
ant because it views could never
command wide popular support—
hence its small circulation.

Scott, as many of his contem-

poraries, overlooked the fact 'that
the Pacific Tribune, the most re-
cent of a line of left-wing week-
lies that began with the B. C.
Workers’ News, appears only be-
cause its readers feel that they
need it as they do not need the
Vancouver Sun.

The proof of that is the fact ©

that it exists, and grows steadily,
alongside the Vancouver Sun and
other B.C. dailies. Its modest 12
pages cannot compare with the
Sun’s 48, which is itself an an-
swer to those who confuse form
and size with content. As a pur-
veyor of news it cannot, nor does
it try to challenge the Sun, for it
pits: the postage stamp against
the radio, the cable and the tele-
graph, Yet readers of the Sun
must sometimes turn to the Pa-
cific Tribune for news of events
of world significance that the Sun
omits entirely.

The Sun is a profitable institu-
tion, but readers of the Pacific
Tribune are asked and invariably
oversubscribe its annual operat-
ing deficit—in the last two years
$15,000. The Sun has a large edit-
orial staff and scores of trained
correspondents, while the Pacific
Tribune must: rély on untrained
volunteer correspondents to sup-
plement the work of a staff of
three, c 3 :

All the Pacific Tribune has to
offer are its views, that and the
fact that it speaks and fights for
the needs of the people far beyond
its list of subscribers,

That is what made the B. C..

Workers’ News a ‘paper different
to any other which had appeared
in this province, in the best tra-
dition of but still different even
to the. Socialist Western Clarion

and similar papers.

The men and women who be-

Soviet statement on Atlantic Pact

mits U.S. ruling circles to enter
into any groupings and to em-
bark on any adventures, which
fully corresponds to the present-
day aggressive tendencies of the
U.S. ruling circles.

Adoption of this resolution by
the American Senate shows that
not only have the U.S. ruling
circles discarded all their main
obligations toward tie United Na-
tions organization, but that they
have also taken a new course in
their foreign policy, which will
be aimed hereafter at establish-
ment by force of Anglo-American
world domination. It follows from
this, that the resolution adopted
by the American Senate signifies
that U.S. ruling circles favor a
policy of aggression, a policy of
unleashing a new war.

In view of this new orientation
of the foreign policy of the USS.
and Britain it is no wonder that
the spearhead of this yee is
directed against the Soviet Union
and the people's democracies.

Main Conclusions

FIRST CONCLUSION,.—The So-
viet Union is compelled to reckon
with the fact that the ruling
circles of the U.S.. and Britain
have adopted an openly aggres-
sive political course,
aim of which is to establish by
force Anglo-American domination

over the world, a course which |

‘is fully in accord with the policy
of aggression, the policy of un-
leashing a new war pursued by
them.

In view of this situation the
Soviet Union has to wage an even
more vigorous and more consis-
tent struggle against each and
every warmonger, against the
policy of aggression and unleash-
ing of a new war, for a world-
wide, lasting, democratic peace.

In this struggle for the consoli-

_ dation of universal peace and in-

ternational security the Soviet
Union regards as its allies all
other peace-loving states and all
those numberless supporters of
universal democratic peace who

voice the genuine sentiments and

the final .

aspirations of the peoples who
bore on their shoulders the un-
believable burden of the last world
war and who with every justifi-
cation reject each and every ag-
gressor and instigator of a new
war.

SECOND CONCLUSION. —
Everyone sees that the United
Nations organization is now being
undermined, since this organiza-
tion, at least to a certain extent,
hampers. and curbs the aggres-
sive circles in their policy of ag-
gression and unleashing of a new
war.

In view of this situation the
Soviet Union has to struggie, with
even more firmness and _ persis-
tence, against the undermining
and destruction of the United
Nations organization by aggres-
sive elements and their accom-
plices, and must see to it that
the United Nations organization
does not connive with such ele-
ments as is often the case now,
that it values its authority more
highly when the matter consists
in giving a rebuff to those pur-
suing a policy of aggression and
unleashing of a new war.

came its readers made real sac-
rifices to raise, from meager re-
lief allowances and slim wages,

‘the few hundred dollars that

iaunched the paper. The men who
edited it and the contributors who
furnished much of the material
that indicted governments in the
courts of public opinion were part
of the movement for which the
paper spoke, not merely aloof ob-
servers content to record.

That is why the views of the
B.C. Workers’ News — and i4
years later the Pacific Tribune—
became policies around which the
people could agitate and organize
because the paper was a leader,
an inseparable part, of the peo-
ple’s movement. That is also why
the Pacific Tribune lives and
grows, why it cannot be killed by
suspensions or bans any more
than the people's movement to-
ward socialism. Its future is that
of the people themselves.

T is June 1940. For the

past nine months an inspired
campaign has been conducted
against those very few papers
which have dared to speak out
against the “phoney war,” against
the men of Munich who have
suddenly become such ardent anti-
Nazis. In
has already been banned and in
Winnipeg, ils sister paper, the
Mid-West Clarion,, has also been
suppressed. Only in Vancouver
is the lone voice of the Advocate,
successor to the People’s Advocate
and the B.C. Workers’ News
still heard. Here attempts to
silence the one consistently anti-
fascist journal are more indirect.
The printers are warned and the
vigilante “sixth column’ speaks
threateningly about fire hazards
in old frame buildings such as
that housing the printshop. Finally,
the printers refuse to print the
paper, but it continues to appear
from an_ out-of-town printshop.
Then the RCMP ‘moves directly.
The Advocate’s offices are raided
and a curt announcement appears
that the paper has been “‘suspend-
ed indefinitely.”

But among the dailies, which
have so much to say about free-
dom of the press when they feel
their own privilege infringed, not
an editorial pen is lifted in’ de-
fense of the paper named afier
William Lyon Mackenzie's Col-
onial Advocate, fighting, as his
paper fought, against ihe com-
pact of reaction that mocks the
very meaning of freedom of the
press.

"TODAY, the’ old voices. that
found words of praise for Hit-
ler bave been joined by* new
in their anti-communist crusade
agains: peace. In Quebec, Premier
Maurice Duplessis has suppressed
Combat and closed the Monrtrea!
office of the Canadian Tribune
under his infamous Padlock Law,
and the St. Laurent government
is content to have him do so.
Col. George Drew makes it plain
that his grand alliance with Du-
plessis includes the adoption of
such measures against the left
wing, all labor, throughout Can-
ada should the Tories come to
power.

Toronto the Clarion °

'

And in the meantime, the in-_
direct methods of the Chambers |

of Commerce, pressure on adver-

tisers and printers, intimidation of |

subscribers, are used to hamper
and obstruct the Pacific Tribune.
But the men and women who
have built the Pacific Tribune will
face the challenge and fight for
their paper as it fights for them.
For, alone amid the clamor of the
warmongers’ red-baiting press, the
Pacific Tribune’s voice is that of
the people themselves, stumbling,
struggling, and presently march-
ing in their organized tens of
thousands towards the bright and
peaceful horizons of socialism.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — MARCH 4, 1949 — PAGE 5