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EDITORIAL PAGE

TOM McEWEN, Editor — HAL GRIFFIN, Associate Editor — RITA WHYTE, Business Manager. :
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‘ : Tom %

McEwen

HOPLE on board an ocean liner are
~ friendly and confiding. As in prison,
isolation in a world apart creates Mm
People an impelling urge for social re-
lationships. ' ;

The same people across the street in
your own home town would probably
have little more to say than the con-
Ventional exchange of greetings and a
Passing comment on the weather. On
board ship—if you are a good listener
—you will be told about innumerable
domestic worries; who married who and
Why; the price of potatoes in Atlin, oF
how Uncle George drank himself to death
in Onion Lake, Saskatchewan to avoid

_ another depfession.

If, as I said, one is a good listener
and able to piece the pattern together,
there is a wéalth of material, tragedy

and sorrows, joys and great hopes, ~

dreams of a new world-

Many old folk ‘are going “home” to-

See their birthplace and their childhood
Playmates of bygone years. “It’s been
a long time since we left him” they
Say, and, with a note of resignation,
“This will be our last trip.” :
“There is a lass from Yorkshire with
her two months old baby daughter,
born a few days after its father died
in one of Canada’s far too numerous
“industrial accidents.” “I love Canada,
Says this Yorkshire lass, “but Mother
and Dad insisted I bring the baby home:
_ (Henry Codd of Notch Hill won a sweep-
Stake of a few shillings on the ships

daily mileage and turned the total win- —
nings over to Baby Katherine, the youns-

est and best-loved lady on the ship’s dis-
tinguished passenger list.)

Recent immigrants to Canada rom
Britain are also on their way home, “for
300d” they say. They place the prob-
lem quite simply. “With all its diffi-
culties the working man still has a
better show in Britain. In Canada we
Zot the official run-around, a lot of use
less advice and fancy promises, but no
Steady jobs. At home we know where
We are at.” eee any,

Stragglers from the recent British Em-
vire Games recount with some embel
lishment their achievements in bowling
_ and drinking tourneys. Unlike the fam-
ed Admiral Sir Francis Drake who play-
ed a good game of bowls at Plymouth
Hoe just before he took on the Spanish
Armada, these latter day Babbits are a
bit disturbed at the state of the “empire
and equally alarmed at the lunacy which
dominates Washington.

Listening to their noisy chatter on the
“empire,” communism, trade perspect-
ives and such problems, one is astounded
at the colossal ignorance, short-sighted-
hess and stupidity of this class which
gravitates between the upper and nether
millstones of a class sociéty, able only
to assess human progress by their own
Concept of profit.

Then we have a group of fine young
lads and lasses, members of the “Com-
monwealth Youth Movement,” who also
attended the BEG in their tour of Can-
ada. Clean cut young Britons, infectious
in their enthusiasm for Canada,

This group is under the “guardian
Ship” of an aging down-at-the-heel
Colonel Blimp who sees the “empiah
through rose-colored glasses and insists
with painful monotony and endless lec-
tures that his youthful charges see no
more than he does. Blimp harmonizes

well with his “empire,” but not with his »

young Britons. i :
Daily this symphony of’ human Joys
‘and worries adds its lyric to the roll of
turbulent ocean. All one needs is a
sympathetic ear to hear it.

Sd

STYLES
i

See ee

“We're having a hard time selling this model.”

Minister without policy

N face of the crisis. confront
Ling farmers in most branches
of B.C. agriculture and their ap-
peals for government assistance,
provincial Agriculture Minister
Kenneth Kiernan offers the cold
consolation that “‘we will have to
tighten our belts a little bit and
look forward, to next year.

Speaking to the annual meeting
of District A Farmers; Institute
at Nanaimo, Kiernan posed a
uestion long asked by farmers,
“xy7hat’s the good of growing if
we cannot find a market which |
will give the farmer a fair return
on his investment?’ But if any
farmers expected him to come for-
ward with a policy answering the
question they were disappointed.
” Kiernan uttered a few platit-
udes — ‘‘Our ability to produce
is now better than it is to dis-
tribute,’ and ‘We have a large

market here at home and if we
can capture it, we can still have
a sound agricultural economy.”
His only advice to farmers was to
study consumers’ needs, as farm-
ers were doing in Washington
and California. This, he claimed,
was why so many B.C. whole-
salers were purchasing in the U.S.

Kiernan revealed himself to be
a minister without a constructive

policy. Not  ‘“‘belt-tightening,”
which, for Cariboo — ranchers
means slaughtering their cattle,

but government aid to provide
winter feed is needed.

And fruit and vegetable grow-
ers, for whom the wet summer
only aggravated an existing crisis,
need measures to halt U.S. dump
ing in this province if the advice
to study the home market is to be
any more than ,an empty sub-

- stitute for action. -

B.C. needs a law, too

3 THE public inquiry now being con-

ducted at Dresden, neat by
Judge William Schwenger has a pat-
Holst interest for all that great sah
f people in this province concerne
SHE rhe case of Mrs. Dorothy Holtz-

Hewitt. cet
Judge Schwenger is inquiring into

the defiance of Ontario’s new Fair

Accomodation Practices Act by Dres-
den cafe owners who refuse to serve

Negro citizens.

Thus far the inquiry has served
to bring to public light the shame-
ful racial prejudice which stains the
fabric of our democracy, in B.C. as
in other provinces. It also emphas-
izes the need for legislation to place
such discriminatory practices outside
the law.

Ontario has a law. British Col-
umbia has not.
our provincial statutes that must be
overcome at the next session of the
legislature.

JN Ottawa this week, Mrs. H. E.
Vautelet of Montreal, president of
the so-called Canadian Association of
Consumers, echoed an idea currently
popular in big business circles that
a recession is better than another
round of inflation.

Addressing the association’s annual
convention banquet, she observed that
a recession seemed to be inevitable,
but it should not be feared because
it meant getting down fo real as op-

needs. ‘
Posing as a champion of consumers
interests, Mrs. Vautelet is actually ad-

| Real alternative to” depressio n |

posed to artificially created consumer

vocating lower living standards for.
working people. mg

Even the question she poses is load-
ed. Inflation is not inevitable —
provided the huge amounts now being
spent on armaments are diverted to
peaceful construction. Depression is
not inevitable — provided the St.
Laurent governments anti-nationa!
policies of subordinating our coun-
try’s economy to the aggressive aims
of U.S. imperialism are replaced with
policies of trading with all countries
and on that foundation developing
Canada for her people.

Those are the real alternatives.

It is a deficiency in

Hal
Griffin

Te grey skies that have veiled a
7 weeping summer gave place to a smil-
ing blue last weekend. And all the
way from: Haney to Mission and from
Abbotsford to Newton, as I drove through
the Fraser Valley on Saturday, farm-
ers were at work trying to salvage their
grain. crops. : s

For most of them, though, summer
had smiled too late.

Strawberry growers were the first to
suffer from this greyest and wettest of
all summers. Many of them got no more
than half their normal yield.. Worse,
adverse growing conditions this year
may affect their yield next year.

The raspberry crop looked better until
growers began reckoning their losses
from mould. The price too, was lower
this year.

At Matsqui I talked with Jack Little,
a man who is known to farmers through-
out the Valley for his active work in
their. interests.

The 1948 flood destroyed all his rasp-
berry canes and since then he has been
experimenting with various new varieties
in an effort to find a better commercial
berry than the extensively grown New-
burgh variety. >

Little showed me the ‘returns from
his raspberries for this year, his~ first
full crop since the flood.

He produced 5,660 tbs. of raspberries
and sold them for $693 at prices ranging

. from 8 cents a tb. for Newburghs to 16

cents a ib for. Willamettes, a new
variety developed in. Washington’s Wil-
lamette Valley. He paid out $266 for
picking and $40 for fertilizer.

In those figures you have the story of
a small grower’s struggle to get by. Even
if you consider, as the government does,
that he made $387, it’s a poor return for
the long hours of back-breaking labor.

os 503 os
There’s another crisis developing in
.the Valley, beyond the immediate crisis
created by the wet summer, and _ it
grows year by year with every new sub-
division.

As the metropolitan area spreads it
takes fertile lands out of production,
leaving less to supply a larger popula-
tion. Acreages get smaller and more
farmers turn to part-time industrial jobs
to supplement their income.

That’s happening now in the Valley.
One 72-acre tract I know of is support-
ing 14 families, each with its own 5, 7
or 10-acre holding and its own dairy
cattle. It’s a losing struggle for all of
them. .

Just now they’re weighing the benefits
of unusually lush fall pastures against
the disadvantages of short winter hay
supplies. But their. greater problem is
how to make increasingly expensive land
pay when costs are high and returns
low.

A recent editorial in Country Life sug-
gests, “The farmers of the Fraser Valley
must make the most use of the land

’ that is left so that the acreage produc- ~
tion is increased.” But how much will
be left? The city grows and will con-

tinue to grow into the Valley.

Part of the answer lies in guarantee-
ing fair prices to farmers and in pre- ~
venting U.S. dumping. But the answer
to the larger problem is a Fraser River _

' Authority to bring all land in the lower
Valley into production by irrigation and
pumping and to provide for the future
by carrying water to the lands of central

’ B.C, which some day must supply metro-
politan Vancouver.

The same authorities that contem-
plate atomic death for other peoples’
cities might better give their attention
to the life of their own.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — OCTOBER 1, 1954 — PAGE 5