ae siete Sills aaearie sikh Miimissame psy 4 q : ’ Shostakovitch i UVAUUURUSVURELERUOUEVHULSUHTATUOROUUOULOBHSHEUAT ELL ADICALS, socialists and com- munists have made many scathing comments about the Senate — the Red Chamber, so- called, not because there is any political red about it but because Sleep-producing drapes and the plush on the cushions that pre- vent the development of callouses are of the same color scheme as the _ (exhibition- parade of the Mounties, but no one has ever exposed the fu- tility of the Sen-~ ate as a useful inst i tu- tion so well as Prime Minister St. Laurent. : On ‘February Fae oy 2) 9, speaking on the entrance Newfoundland into the Dominion, he told the House of Commons that six new senators will be ap- pointed to represent the new pro- vince. The basis on which they will be selected has not yet been decided but they will likely be di- vided among the colony’s main religions—two Anglicans, two Catholics and two United Church. Apart from the fact that none of the three religious sects men- tioned is the main religion in Newfoundland—which is the Sal- vation Army, as any Newfound- jy? your next door neighbors have borchst for Sunday din- ner? Do you hear their radio tuned in on a Tschaikovsky or symphony when they could better be listening to the soap operas of Hollywood kul- tur? Does Bill, living with his wife and kid in the basement across the street, curse about the lack of housing, the cost of liv- ing, the uncer- tainty of tomor- row’s job, or the ‘cold war’’? They dot Then, according to the snoop ex- perts of the Chamber of Commerce, they have been “infiltrated” with Com- munism, and are thus “danger- ous people.” . _ Last week Courtenay’s school trustee, Mrs. R. P. Christie, de- scribed the Courtenay - Comox ‘Chamber of Commerce letter ‘to the local school board, ‘asking if it (the board) had any knowledge of any teacher in the district “disseminating Communistic the- ‘ries in the class rooms,” as def- Ynitely insulting. Evidently Mrs. C. isn’t aware that the C-of-C is so high-strung and near-sighted from exhaustive studies of “our way of life” that it can only see through red goggles! _ Opposed to being transformed into a Peeping Tom society for the C-of-C, the Courtenay board decided to request the _ said - C-of-C to be more specific on any: departures from the curriculum. overcome some of the difficulties See lander could have told St. Lau- rent—it is disturbing that in the middle of the Twentieth Century, when the influence of religion on on the state is being cast off by. all progressive peoples, to find such a standard being set up in our alleged up-and-coming coun- try. However, it explains the pres- ence in the Senate of such ob- Stacles to progress as Senator Farris, one of the Benchers of the Law Society here who make it their business to whittle away the civil rights of the people as in the Martin case. From contributions to the dis- cussion of the Martin case, one factor crops out which seems to put the lawyers in a class by themselves. This is the atitude of the lawyers to the oath they take before being allowed to collect retainers or other. fees. As this attitude is expressed, both by the big-wigs of the Law Society and by their lay support- ers, when a lawyer takes an oath he is in earnest about it. To him it is a whole-hog affair. He makes no mental reservations: puts no special interpretation of his own on the words or ideas involved . but accepts them in their full Norman-English meaning. Of course, anybody not burden- ed by a slave mentality, who has ever known a lawyer, or the de- vious trickery used by lawyers to Such an outline might help to experienced here and elsewhere in this business of red bogey snoop- ing. | F Take a case in point. It appears that Britain’s secret police (M.1L5 to you) addressed a circular ques- tionnaire to numerous people in many parts of Britain recently, inquiring “How many Commun- ists are there in your neighbor- hood?” One man, who lived somewhere ‘far from the madding crowd,” replied that everybody ‘in his parish ‘took Communion regularly.” Bevin’s secret police curtly informed him that they weren't asking about Communi- eants but about Communists .. .” ‘people who are always talking about the evils of poverty and the need for higher living stand- ards.” “If that’s what you mean by communists,’ said the man, “there are three Communists in our parish—the clergyman, the doctor and myself.” In our own home balliwick, in addition to the Courtenay C-of-C snoop blitz, Mines Minister R. C. MacDonald wants “communism banned from the UBC campus— and .if feasible, throughout the province”. Friday last the min- ister made one of his usual tory harangues in which he charged that the UBC, schools, churches, education centers, are being “in- filtrated” by the Communists. As a parliamentary mark of defer- ence to the B.C. hard-rock mine operators, for whom the minister is a trusty rubber stamp, he nam- ed Harvey Murphy, western or- ganizer of Mine-Mill as “Joe Sta- lin's No. 1 man in B.C.” Of course the main purpose of MacDonald's red-herring roast at i} } mg I TU gl A il ee RT i iti iit We NU til IBMEIN| i} cD BW an Mi he IN :llNarwottflinnmseatiasiseneeaill vie ill i Wie Ay andl | i ji l | | Mtnanapaneeanlll N wo ssettltvasstl tonne Published Weekly at 650 Howe ‘Street By THE TRIBUNE PUBLISHING COMPANY LTD. Telephones: Editorial, MA. OT ACIOW ONE 14 4 ss ese es Subscription Rates: 1 Year, $2.50; 5857; Businéss, MA. .5288 oat Caio ott ....+.-Editor 6 Months, $1.35. Printed by Union Printers Ltd., 650 Howe Street, Vancouver, B.C. Short Jabs UAT accomplish their ends, will not not believe that line of tripe for a moment. There are anti-Red Deans as well as Red Deans in the Angli- can Church and some of them are vociferous in their support of the Benchers of the Law Society. They also have to take an oath. George Bernard Shaw put his finger on them in a recent article which is worth repeating here since it has a direct bearing on the casé of Gordon Martin. “In the Church of England,” he writes, “no candidate for or- dination can be inducted to a living unless when catechized by the Bishop, he tells the flat lie, which the Bishop’ knows to be a lie, that he believes, with- out mental reservations, every- thing in the Bible literally. His justification is that as he will not be allowed to exercise his vocation without going through this imposture, he does it under duress and is therefore not mor- ally responsible for it.” So, don’t be swayed by talk about a lawyer’s oath for it is no different to a clergyman’s oath. It is just so much arrant hypocrisy used to deprive political oppon- ents of their civil rights, the thin end of the wedge to enable reac- tion to extend the same treatment to the masses of the people. _ Support Martin in the fight for civil rights! qt UIUC We See lt UA AAS this time wasn’t because he is overly concerned about UBC stu- dents becoming “infiltrated”, but primarily for the purpose of set- ting up a Coalition smoke-screen to obscure the issues of the Gor- don Martin case—which may crop up in the House before long in a demand to bring the Legal Pro- fessions Act in line with demo- cratic usage, so that no law stu- dent or practicing lawyer shall be deprived of the right to follow their chosen profession simply be- cause someone in authority does not like the color of their political _ labels. We note in recent days some sizzling anti-Red editorials in the Trail Times, unofficial organ of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company. These bear a striking similarity to the mental ravings of Mines Minister Mac- Donald. Sandwiched in between ~ alleged quotations from Lenin, and which are sheer forgeries, is Harvey Murphy, No. 1 bad man to the Trail Times also. What is the essence of this huge block of type in a small paper? Of all things, to ‘save” Local 480 of the Mine-Mill union from the “Reds.” Together with Dok- tor Conroy and Aaron Mosher, the. Trail Times. is. going. to “smoke them (the Communists) out.” In fact the Trail Times would go further and turn Local “480 over to Conroy to do the job the late S, G. Blaylock was in- capable of doing—smash the union, or at the very least, turn it into a pliable adjunct of the CM&S. ; The cry of ‘communism’ is a splendid cover up for every re- actionary. In the south, Senator Klaghorn can filibuster any issue‘ with a good old 100 percent Ame- rican harangue on “communism” and the corn-borer. In our coun- try we are no less adept. Our old line (and some new line) politicians press hacks and such like, bank- rupt in the “battle of ideas,” rant about the need of gag-rule, the banning of ideas, the proscribing of unions which do not conform, and the turning of our educational institutional, big and little, into thought-control factories for the production of mental robots. This they call “democracy”! | “Our way of life’ HEN Non-Partisan Mayor Thompson was campaigning last November one of his most allurmg “‘planks’” was a new Granville Street bridge. Everything ,according to Mayor Thompson, was all set to remove the present Granville Street structure, long a menace to public safety, and replace it with a work of engineering art. It was just a matter of electing the right man! Now Mayor Thompson has let it be known that a new Granville Street bridge is out of the question: “‘No money, and the provincial government. . .°.” The same old story. It is dawning upon a growing number of Vancouver’s taxpayers that they are being made the victims of another not-so-smart Coalition hoax through the familiar method of graridiose pre-election promises and elaborate post-election excuses. Early in 1948, Coalition Public Workers Minister E. C. Carson announced that the contractors who had undertaken to build the John Hart Highway into the Peace River country, had folded “up their tents without finishing the job, but not before they had pocketed a goodly portion of the fat contract price of their labors. Little explanation was given, other than the general idea that the said contractors had taken*on the job at too low a figure and there- fore faced the choice of invalidating the contract or going “‘broke.”” It is alleged they found a lot of “‘costly problems” on the road job which were “‘not included in the government’s original plans.” A special legislative committee has now been set up to “investigate” the contractor’s claims. % Meanwhile, B.C. taxpayers are being rooked additional millions on a job estimated to cost approximately six or seven millions. There is a chance that the public will be mulcted of twice that amount be- fore the job is finished, if the present dip-and-run-pork-barrel tech- nique of the Coalition government in surveying and awarding con- tracts is continued. The John Hart Highway project begins to look more and more like a second edition of the PGE—from which the contractors rolled up millions in graft, while the people got an uncompleted railway, which has served for 30 years or more, down to February of 1949, as a good “‘come-on”’ electioneering vote-getter. Perhaps the blue ribbon in Coalition pork-barrel contracts should be awarded the engineers, contractors and departmental heads who achieved the magnificent job of building the new Glen Valley dyke project to save life and property from the raging torrents of the Fraser River. This week the whole new dyke collapsed of its own accord without waiting for the flood! Last year’s flood victims—to say nothing of the taxpayers generally—may well wonder how much of the new dyking undertaken by the Coalition during the past year is founded on sand, peat and graft rather than upon solid flood- resistant material. It would seem from these few cases that a full-dress public in- quiry into government financing and contracting should be placed on the taxpayers’ order paper. St 4 ‘ * <" “.,. and dear Lord, sustain our brother Anscomb in his gales tax collections and keep him safe from more flood propaganda.” J Looking backward (From the files of The Pacific Advocate, February 24, 1989) It might have been just a coincidence, but a number of observers at City Hall Monday noticed how quiet a group of aldermen were regarding proposals made by the B.C. Federation on Unemployment for improvement in. the relief situation, then how voluble they be- came immediately after over one of their own proposals to deny married women jobs, ek ie: It seems to be a custom of long standing “on the hill” to get worked up to a fever pitch over matters that don’t touch the pocket- books of the city’s ruling families, then emulate the famed Saanich clam when it comes to questions affecting the lives of thousands of people. : The secretary of the B.C. Federation on Unemployment suggested the nature of the works program should be along the lines already proposed by Labor Minister Norman Rogers—development of parks, | Playgrounds, youth recreational centers, improvement of beaches, — and clearance of city lots for gardens to those in need, PACIFIC TRIBUNE — FEBRUARY 25, 1949 — PAGE 8