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~ North-Central

OR seven years ndw

everybody in north-,.
central British Colum-
bia, from Prince Rupert to
Prince George, has been
working. The war, and two
years of peace, have brought
the longest period of ‘prosper-
ity’ known to this area since
the feverish boom when the
Grand Trunk Pacific Railway
was built well over a genera-
tion ago.

But if you talk to the peo-
ple up here—loggers, farmers,
railroaders, fishermen, small
businesSmen—they’ll tell you in
their own way of their fears
for the future.

These fears and worries are
Surface reflections of approach-
ing economic crisis. Seven years
have not erased the memories
of the last postwar period and
the last depression. No more
have they erased the traditions
of great people’s struggles for a
decent living.

Every part of Canada has its
own story of the last depression.
B.C. has its spe-
cial story too. Two things are
«Special about it. First of all, the
depression came on top of a
Gecade when the people here
felt the full effects of the sell-
out of the north that followed
the first world war. Secondly
the last depression had a par-
ticular effect here—the effect it

has on all “marginal” areas of
the economy.

o
HERE’S plenty of lessons

from that period. Some old-
line party politicians and the in-
terests they represent are anx-
ious to hide these lessons.

For example, a fable is told
that the reason northern B.C.
Collapsed after the last war is
because Sir Charles Hays went

down with the Titanic in 1912.
Hays was the chief promoter
of the Grand Trunk Pacific

Railway, Canada’s last trans-con-
tinental railway system, built to
Prince Rupert prior to the first
world war and absorbed by thea
CNR after that war due to bank-
ruptcy. He is supposed to have
been the one man with the
“vision” and “power” to have
kept the country throbbing with
development.

It was not the accidental
drowning of one finance-capital-
ist that throttled the north.
There was 42 coast-to-coast eco-
homic crisis after the first world
war. During that crisis and
afterwards the big business
groupings who squeezed out their
rivals to. become economic and
Political “top dogs” in Canada

*made it their business, among
other things, to see that there
was no development in this area,
Their servants in government,
Such as Mackenzie King, betray-
ed all their solemn promises to
the eager settlers and simply
wrote the north off the books so
far as government aid was con-
cerned.

The CPR, then as now, want-
ed no competition with its own
trade arteries through Vancou-
ver. Hence, the CNR, which has
not yet been known to do any-
thing to offend the CPR, sacri-
ficed the north after the first
war and again in the last two
years. :

After each war, train service

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“Highways to link and develop the country, .
access to the Alaska Highway and the north, but for
peaceful trade, not war, are needed.”

was slashed to three a week.
After each war, the CNR closed
its shipyard at Prince Rupert.
After each war, the CNR con-
tributed nothing to northern de-
velopment but rather has done
everything possible to block de-
velopment, Now the CNR, along
with the CPR and Union Steam-
ships, has boosted coast freight
rates 30 percent and seeks a 30
percent increase in rail freight
rates.

At this moment the CNR is
seeking to ban commercial truck-
ing from the Skeena highway
which was built during the war
along considerable lengths of

CNR right-of-way between Prince

Rupert and Terrace. Interior pro-
ducers, to many of whom the
difference in rates may spell
and Rupert
marketers, are fighting the move.

LL these are parts of a con-

sistent CNR-government pol-
icy. The simpering “good rela-
tions with the CNR” methods
pursued by certain elements in
the north have bolstered that
policy.
- The black record of betrayal
of the north does not end with
the CNR. The load line regula-
tions have blocked deepsea trade
through Rupert. In this and the

fi ae ir it

BUN

Mascrsath Fee it (pa pect

ce

Friday, October 17,1947. \

@ The farmers discuss a program

by Minerva Miller

®@ The speech the dailies didn’t print
A second instalment of an address to the UN by

Andrei Vishinsky, Soviet deputy foreign min-

-

ister

ii Meee” Seance ee Page 11

aeRO II! Ke

) IE i : ;

long failure to complete the

PGE to both its terminals, can

be seen the influence of the
CPR and similar interests.
The Lord Rhonnda group of

coal monopolists staked the
Groundhog coalfields (which are
reliably reported to compare

with those of Pennsylvania), not
to develop, but to sew up, so
as not to disturb the equilibrium
of existing coal marjets.

Such are a few of the facts
that fables like the oné about
Sir Charles Hays are designed
to hide.
@

HE war broke the isolation of

the north. Things that were
“Impossible” before became ac-
complished facts. Freighters were
built at Prince Rupert. The
Skeena Highway was pushed
through. Mercury was mined at
Pinch Lake. Strings of airports
were built. Markets were unlim-
ited. Such happenings testified to
the hypocrisy of politicians who
had been wont to howl,. “Where’s
the money going to come from?”

And now, after two years of
peace? The north -has_ not
yet gone back to 1939 but some
heavy blows have been struck
at the hopes of the people.

In addition to the CNR poli-
cies I have already cited, there
has been a further delay in com-
pleting the PGE, the provincial-
ly owned railway which runs
from Squamish to Quesnel. The
government could and ~- should
itself have extended steel to
Vancouver and Prince George by
now, but there has been a
struggle between Canadian and
American railway interests to
get in on the deal for the sake
of lush “inducements” which
have become the tradition of
past railway steals in the west.

Canadian interests seem _ to
have won out, for Premier Hart,
who is personally president of
the PGE, is hanging on to the
premiership long enough to cut
the CPR in—and the people out
—on a 4-way deal in which the
other “partners” will be Ottawa,
Victoria and the CNR. PGE sur-

| Northern British Columbia
fights
for its

future

By BRUCE MICKELBURGH

to . give

veyors are now in the Prince
George country and it is reliab-
ly if not publicly reported that
the deal has already been made
and just awaits the documents.

The fight for industrial devel-
opment in the MRupert-Terrace
area was answered in a typical
Coalition way on the basis of
one of the biggest timber steals
of the century. In this case it
was American capital that got
the stranglehold on a_ choice
chunk of our natural resources.

The deal became possible when
Hon. E. T. Kenney, minister of
lands and forests and member
for Skeena, ushered through the
last session of the legislature
a so-called reforestation act
which is actually enabling legis-
lation for big timber interests
to alienate this province’s re-
maining forest wealth on a col-
ossal scale.

NE of the first fruits of this
act has been the Celanese
deal. The American Celanese

Corporation, a link in the no-
torious Du Pont chain, has been
granted exclusive timber rights
over a vast territory comprising
a veritable northern empire.
The prant extends from Por-
cher Island inland to the sum-
mit of the Cascades, crosses the
Skeena near Terrace, and runs
north to embrace the entire
watershed of the Nass.

The excuse for this grant of
ene of the largest and richest
pulp stands in Canada is that
it has been granted under the
act to be logged on a “perpetual
yield” basis. The joker is that
the company will be paid by
the government for what refores-
tation is accomplished out of
the very same royalties which
are paid by the corporation for
the timber logged.

The corporation has commenc-
ed construction of a $15,000,000
pulp mill at Port Edward. Now
a pulp mill had been a northern
dream for a generation. If it
commences operations before an
economic crisis (pulp is one of
the most over-capitalized of all

industries at present) it will em-
ploy several hundred men and
a greater number in the woods.

But it must be recognized that
this is part of the process where-
by Wall Street is speeding up
its penetration of the Canadian
economy. It is significant that
the pulp mill itself is being built

.on property which during the

war was leased to the Americans
for “defense” but which now is
finding other uses contrary to
the interests of the Canadian
people.
_@

S ANOTHER economic crisis

looms on the horizon in the
United States and Canada noth-
ing has happened to make the
north any less peculiarly vulner-

‘able as a marginal area of our

economy. Only a complete trans-
formation of the economy so
that it would be organized and
directed on the basis of the
people’s needs and ability to
consume could eliminate such
erises from our country.

This, of course, would spell
socialism There is no prospect
of socialism in Canada in time
to head off the crisis imme-
diately ahead but the people
ean fight for constructive meas-
ures which, within certain lim-
its, would protect them from the
chief burdens of the crisis which
monopoly seeks to place upon
the people’s backs.

On both counts this fight is
vital to the north. Peaceful trade
with the Soviet Union and the
peoples of Asia, in place of spy
scares} of buttressing Japanese
reaction and suppressing Indo-
nesian independence, can make
the northwest Pacific a high-
way of freedom and keep nor-
thern B.C. throbbing with trade.

s
HIS struggle is not helped
by local warmongers. Some
local figures, like Walter Wil-

son, of Burns Lake, who in the
past has done much useful work
in the fight for a highway from
Hazelton to Whitehorse, are now

‘beginning, in a very cheap, op-

portunist, and dangerous way to
hitch their program for northern
development to the plans of Am-
erican-Canadian big business for
aggression. For example, in a
recent statement given front-
page prominence in the Prince
Rupert Daily News, Wilson “dis-

covered” that war with Russia
might come “any day,” hence
ell the more reason for the
highway.

Such activities do not nelp
northern development, they hin-
der it. A highway built as a
dagger aimed at the peoples of
Europe and Asia would no more
aid development than did Hit-

(Continued on Page 10)