NIGEL MORGAN

Bete —VICTORIA.
Highlight of the week,
and probably for the whole
oe was the invasion of
ae capital this weekend by
ee foe and eleven labor
oat S ably demonstrating the
' 4nd (of the 100,000 trade
unionists represented) for a pro-
se including a labor code
gene? instead of ‘strait-jacket’
Sor, improvements to the
Workmen's Compensation Act,
Saoblishment of the forty-hour
tie immediate enactment of
s th insurance, increased old
eh Pensions and other long
€eded social and labor legis-
tion,
ere greatest and best organ-
h annual pilgrimage labor
ever held, is hoy veteran
eee estimate the lobby.
4, 08t_ striking characteristic of
a 3-day demonstration to coa-
On and CCF forces, publicly
mown to have vigorously op-
Eee the lobby plan, was the
ve participation of 22 AFL
Bp ated unions including most
Rt their largest, such as the
*treetrailway Division 101, Car-
ee and Joiners, Pulp and
Phite, Electricians, | Fisher-
men, Seamen, Pressmen, Typo-
Sraphers, Plumbers, Restaurant
; eee and Building Service
Be oueet: Marching with the
k Onists were representatives of
oH veterans’ organizations and
'88e pensioners.
ain target of the union del-
peationa was the draft labor bill
ntroduced last week, and specif-
Cally the severe penalty clauses,
Which are considered an im-
Portant step toward trade union

incorporation — a most danger-
3a 8nd cripling move against |

fe trade unionism; secondly,

he new proposal for govern-

Ment supervision of the taking
and counting of employees votes
Becore a strike can be called,
H Sorously condemned aS gov-
™mment interference in union
ee The lobby demanded
aeeda Of labor to select union
€sentatives on the Board of
oe ustrial Relations; reduction
f the minimum 79-day period
°r completion of mediation and
©onciliation of grievances;
amendment of sections which if
Reece will encourage craft or
, n-splitting within those in-
Custries already organized on an
py vstrial basis; and elimination
; authority to recognize so-
eae ‘employee associations’
Ng used by certain unscrupu-
ae bosses to out-manoeuver
8itimate trade unions.
At 10 o'clock Monday morn-

ing, lobbyists carrying colorful

amners. and slogans marched

Uptown, parading across the
Causeway to the ' Parliament
Buildings, On arrival at the
legislature, they broke up into
_8roups each organized under

® team captain to patrol the
legislative corridors interview-
ing members in their offices,
°r on their way to and from,
Each group buttonholed the
’s assigned to them, im-

Pressing on them labor’s de-

_™ands, amplifying and explain-
ing labor’s viewpoint and ques-
_ toning them on their policies
In relation to the program of
Social and labor legislation.
Most striking impression’ of
Many lobbyists interviewed after
their first encounter with the

FRIDAY, MARCH 21, 1947

‘

~ election.

~ King looks anxiously
to Cartier for omen

By ROBERT M. LAXER

—OTTAWA.

Recent voting in the House on the tory non-confidence
motion and the amendments by the CCF and Social Credit
have revealed the far-from-secure position of the King

government,

On the main non-confidence ,
motion where Tories and CCF
lined up against the Liberals
and Social Credit, ‘the score was
134 to 84. Analysis of the House
division however indicates that
the 13 Social Credit votes shift-
ed to the opposition would have
changed the tally to 121 vs. 97.
Then too, five CCF members
disappeared from the House for
the main division. Their vote
for the opposition could have
sent the anti-King tally to 102.

On the opposition benches all
five ‘independents’ of various
shades did not answer the roll
call, nor did the two members
of the Bloc Populaire. These
seven members might some day
line up against the government.
When to these you add the six
or seven ‘independents’ who sit
on the government benches, who
might reverse their stand in a
crisis, and the possible defeat of
the government in Cartier and
Halifax you see why the King
administration is more insecure
today than at any time since its
sweep to power in 1935.

Line-up of Social Credit with
the government against the tory
motion does not appear to in-
dicate the end of the Conserva-
tive—Social Credit alliance. In
fact the public wooing of Brac-
ken when he spent half an hour
praising nearly all that Solon
Low had said, was never more
passionate. It is very likely that
-opposition leader Bracken him-
self encouraged Solon Low to
vote as he did. In Alberta the
Manning government’s stock is
understood to have been declin-
-ing sharply since it opposed the
big farm strike.

In Ontario Colonel Drew, who
turned down 75 millions from
the federal government and
who has become stamped in la-
bor opinion as public enemy No.
1, has weakened toryism’s main
base. The tories are doubtful
whether they would hold all
their Ontario seats.

The CCF too is thought to
be anxious to avoid a general
There can hardly be
any other explanation for the
disappearance of. MP’s Bentley,
Gillis, Irvine, Jaenicke and Mc-
Cullough who had just. fifteen

minutes previously finished vot-
ing against! the Social Credit
sub-amendment when it came to
the crucial balloting. No one
knew until the last minute
wher Seocial Credit would throw
its support. Withdrawing of five
CCF members seems to have
done a double barrelled job. It
enabled the CCF to claim that
it was not supporting the gov-
_ernment on all measures and it
also guaranteed that the gov-
ernment would stay in power.

Last week’s vote was a record
for recent years. On one di-
vision 224 votes were cast in
spite of the abstention of the
four independents and the two
Bloc Populaire members. The
liberals and the tories brought
all the invalids to the House to
roll up maximum support.

Despite official cabinet denials
liberal back-benchers are talk-
ing elections, Since the govern-
ment is always in the best posi-
tion for timing an election it
is hardly to be expected that
liberal chiefs would admit that
they have been considering the
possibility. But some of the Grit
strategists reason that Drew has
worked himself into a cul-de-
sac on Dominion-Provincial re-
lations, and believe that the gov-
ernment may have won farm
support through its wheat policy.
They claim too that they could
successfully pin the blame for
price rises on tory pressure for
decontrol. Since Quebec is gain-
ing eight seats by redistribution
and since Grits bank on the
_ growing unpopularity of Duples-
sis they hope to boost their
strength by added seats from
that liberal stronghold.

In private conversation as in
St. Laurent’s radio speech the
strategists stress the Cartier
bye-election. So decisive for the
foreign and domestice prestige

of the government do they con-
sider the ballotting of March $81
in Cartier that they believe a
general election hangs on the
outcome. Labor and progressive
voters of that constituency have
apparently never had such an
opportunity to play a determin-
ing role in Canada’s history.

AA UUOTATAAT
parliamentarians, was the seem- tures of the act to the people.
ing general lack of knowledge “Support of all men and wom-
of labor’s proposals. Highly re- en in B.C., regardless of politi-

grettable, yet understandable’ cal, trade union or other affilia-
with so few actual labor repre- tion, to demand the bill be not
sentatives! passed in its present form, but

that it be amended in line with
labor’s proposals so that we may
all look forward to an era of
industrial peace, and that bet-
ter world we have all talked so
much -about and looked for-
ward to in the last decade” was

the final appeal of the lobby.

Difficult to interview and
evasive at first, MLA’s gener-
ally were found much more re-
ceptive the second day of the
loby. Enthusiastic over the pro-
gress made, and the decided
shift in opinion toward labor’s
fight against the repressive fea-

GREETINGS to
Pacific Tribune

DR. W. J. CURRY

JOHN STANTON

Barrister - Solicitor
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Short Jabs 1 or ain

Res the sessions of the foreign secretaries have their humorous
interludes and the present one is no different in that respect
from those that preceeded it. The humor in this instance, like in
most of the others, is being injected

Lesson in by the representative of the least
x humorous of the nations involved—
democracy the United States.

There is, however, a note of tragedy in the amusement created
no matter how loug the laughter might be, in finding state secre-
tary Marshall attempting to give Molotov a lesson in what “democ-
racy” is. As his definition reads, he may have learned something
about it in China; he certainly never did in the United States. .

Says Marshall: “To us a society is not free if law-abiding
citizens have a fear of being denied the right to work or deprived
of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

If Marshall was not equipped with a supreme attribute of gall
as great, if not greater than that of his predecessor in office,
Byrnes, he could not possibly have the effrontery to speak to Mol
otov in such terms, for Molotoy represents the only country in the
whole world (although there are a few headeg in that direction)
where the right to work is embodied in the constitution and is en-
joyed by the whole population. :

But for the advent of a world war that brought death, suffer-
ing and misery to hundreds of millions of people, the 15 millions
of unemployed in the United States who had no “right. to work,”
and no work either except such as was provided by “relief projects,”
woulq have grown to many more millions by now. :

And as for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” tell it
to the massacred miners of Ludlow, Cripple Creek and Herrin
County, Illinois; to the lumberworkers of Everett and Centralia; |
to the steel workers of Homestead and South Chicago; tell it to
all those American workers who saw their fellows mowed down
on the picket lines of the nation by state troopers, militiamen and
federal soldiers. ;

For Marshall, and the class for whom he speaks, this form of
democracy, capitalist democracy, fills the bill very well. They, like
the “democrats” of ancient Greece, are the only ones to whom
these “rights” mean anything. The chattel-slaves of ancient Greece
had no “rights” and the wage-slaves of capitalist democracy have
no “rights” either.

Molotov needs no instruction from Marshall about democracy,
for in his country there are no slaves, and there democracy—pro-
letarian democracy—guarantees to every worker the things that
Marshall refers to, but only to the workers, not to a parasite class
like the one state secretary Marshall represents.

T= Cathdlic archbishop of Halifax, the Most Rev, J. T. McNally,
is annoyed. He is not only annoyed, he is boiling over. It has been
reported that Franco has bought a castle in Ireland and in a recent

2 cartoon by the English artist,
“Crude, bigoted Low, is seen being welcomed by
insults”

a delegation composed mostly of

priests. McNally has’ got his
“Irish up.” He feels that the cartoon’ is an insult to Ireland and
worse still to his church. He writes of it as being “a crude, bigoted
insult.” :

At the same time that he claims to be insulted by being asso-
ciated in this cartoon with Franco, he makes haste to justify Low’s-
political conception of the relationship of his church and the fascist
#ranco. :

In his letter to the Halifax Chronicle, he writes that he holds
no brief for Franco, but “it would appear that he has done a good
job. for his country since the burning of churches and killers of |
bishops and priests and nuns were driven out of it.”

So the archbishop betrays himself, exposing the hopes and long-
ings he is afraid to proclaim openly, of his political unity with
the butcher Franco. He makes the devil into a gentleman or as
Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet, “With devotion’s visage and pious
action we do sugar oer the devil himself.”

Besides which, the unwarranted assertion is “a crude bigoted
insult” to the Spanish people and their legally electeq government.
Who destroyed Guernica, the holy city of the Basques? Not the
Spanish people but the hell-hounds of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco,
And it was the same all over Spain in the bloody days of that
civil war when Franco unleashed his Moorish legions side by side
with the fascist hordes to loot, rape and murder the Catholic Spanish.
people. :

The ideas embodied in Low’s cartoon are fully justified in view
of the attitude of the Irish government of that period, an attitude
inspired by the hierarchy of the church. Ireland was the only Euro-
pean country, besides Germany and Italy, to send a brigade to support
the rebellion of Franco against the Spanish government. ;

In putting in “the good word” for Franco, archbishop McNally
places himself in the same class with archbishop Joseph Charbon-
neau of Montreal, who in 1942, a couple of weeks after 3350 brave
Canadian soldiers were killed) wounded or captured at Dieppe,
hailed the scoundrelly, senile, fascist Marshall Petain as “his coun-
try’s good Samaritan,” and was proug to accept money from him
for furthering his ideas here in Canada.

The hatred of democracy expressed in the words of the arch-
bishop. are in line with the pronouncements .,of the church. Not a
word of denunciation of the fascist aggressors or of the bestiality
of their methods came from the spiritual father of these two arch-

‘bishops when the non-Catholic democracies were fighting to save

civilization from destruction, but when Mussolini had been over-
thrown, the Pope immediately announced that, “The great democ-
racies must show greater concern for Italy if she is not to plunge
from one dictatorship to another.” : ;

the people mentioned above were helping Franco and

fascism, the pick of Canadiar youth broke the Canadian laws

to get to Spain to take their places in the anti-fascist battle line.
; They got no medals, no pensions, but

Notice to they suffered all the hardships of war
and now are suffering the conse-
Mac-Paps quences. The Mac-Paps are now en-

gaged in collecting enough to finance an operation to save the
eyesight of Harry McGregor one of the members of the Interna-
tional Brigade whose plight is traced to glandular trouble con-

tracted while in Spain. All Mac-Paps and friends, wherever they

may be, are asked to help in this. Donations may be sent to Bill
Kallin, 430 Princess Ave. Don’t let Harry McGregor lose his eye-
sight! ae ;

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 5

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