ig al

. Review.

URING 1959 municipal  elec-
tions, school bylaws involving
some $614 million for badly needed
school construction, were voted
down, by the electorate in a num-

- ber of areas.

On the horns of a dilemma, the
taxpayer was faced with the
choice of urgently needed school
expansion, or to vote it down,
thereby hoping, temporarily at
least, to “hold-the-line” on sky-
rocketing municipal taxes.

In many municipalities, how-
ever, the classroom crisis with its
menace of “swing-shift” tuition
just cannot be staved off. As in
North Vancouver where contracts
for new school facilities just re-
quired the bank’s okay, and which
in turn depended upon the provin-
cial government’s go-ahead sign.
To date neither have been forth-
coming, despite strong public
demand that construction. get
under way to meet this year’s.
minimum classroom requirements.
Other municipalities are in a }ike
fix. (At press time it was an-
nounced that the Bank of Mont-
real had agreed to lend Vancouver
some money for school construc-
tion, but as yet considerably below
the school board’s requirements. )

The school problem cannot be
shoved aside much longer. Most,
if not all of these defeated school
appropriation bylaws are due to

are faced with the grim prospect
of “swing-shift” classrooms, with
parents condemned to ceaseless
worries over the education, health

and safety of their “swing-shift”
children.

Some drastic changes are called
for to remedy this situation. The
first is to compel the federal gov-
ernment to stop spending billions
of dollars on useless armaments
and hare-brained “defense”

The school crisis

.. EDITORIAL PAGE

responsibilities with respect to
education costs, rather than as at
present, leaving the harassed
municipalities to carry the load.

Secondly, the need to change
present statutory provisions under
which school costs are apportioned
on a 50-50 basis between the prov-
ince and the municipalities. The
winning of federal educational
grants to the provinces should be
passed on to the easement of muni-
cipal school costs, thereby en-
abling the municipalities to pro-
vide other long-neglected social
services in keeping with municipal
responsibility.

The present school crisis leaves
little choice on what must be done.
New schools must be built and old.
ones expanded to meet an. inevit-
able contingency. If there are big
school debts in an alleged “debt
free” province, there are also bil-
lions of dollars being squandered
on useless arms and “defense” ex-
penditures. Greater pressure must
be mounted in every municipality
for a re-distribution of the na-
tion’s tax dollar; in short, schools
before Bomarcs, classrooms before
Canada - financed - U.S.-controlled
nuclear bombs.

«"

ae

N it
HE wailing cry of “blue ruin”
is paying Off handsomely to
B.C.’s timber tycoons. Last week
it was MacMillan & Bloedel pock-
eting $13 million net profit from
the company’s 1959 operations; a
60 percent increase in the net take
over 1958.

This week it was the big Rayon-
ier Incorporated, which includes
such lumber enterprises among its
subsidiaries as Alaska Pine, Engle-
wood Logging, B.C. Pulp and
others, reporting a net profit of
$13,350,000 for 1959, and percent-
agewise, a 270 percent boost over
its 1958 operations.

All through 1959 these timber
tycoons, in cahoots with other
monopoly exploiters, carried on a
nation-wide attack upon labor’s
living standards, centred on their
“hold-the-line-on-wages” hysteria,
and howled to high heaven that
they “couldn’t afford’ to pay more
wage increases. From press, radio,
TV and other media of public mis-
information, they wailed that high
prices, inflation, unemployment,
loss of markets at home and
abroad—all were the fault of “un-
reasonable” wage demands, in this
stance the IWA and its 1959 mid-

pre

R
summer strike.

To aid the bosses in this phoney
propaganda as part of their attack
upon labor, a Socred government
obliged with restrictive ball-and-
chain legislation known as Bill 43,
aimed at spawning injunctions
against labor solidarity in strike
action. ©

Now two of B.C.’s largest tim-
ber monopolies emerge from 1959
with $13 million and over net swag
in their jeans, topping their 1958
profit boodle by 60 and 270 per-
cent respectively. ;

(Crown Zellerbach also reports

its annual net profit of slightly —

over $8 million. Not quite so good
as M & B or Rayonier Incorpor
ated, but enough to satisfy a sub-~
stantial wage hike — to bring —
IWA wages into line with mon
opoly profits.)

For a “bad” year, “plagued with :
unreasonable wage demands” aS
M & B’s legal soothsayer described
it, 1959 did much better for the”
timber monopolists and their cow
pon clippers than it did for TWA
workers. But, as the boys say
“there’s always the next time.”

Tom

jected to scientific sanity tests.

CHOOLS, or the lack of them,
S “are not the only urgent need
of which the people of this pro-
vince, old and young, are being
deprived. In fact it is getting so
that one sometimes wonders how
the rating would show, were a
' majority of those elected to gov-
‘ern in Victoria and Ottawa, sub-

urgency of their hospital’s needs,
but because of the old story, “no
money”; municipal tax burdens al-
ready at the breaking point, with

his Socred philosophies with scrip-
ture and hymn singing, but ex-
tended hospital facilities, that’s a
horse of a different color.

In many B.C. municipalities the
hospital needs are on a par with
Kamloops. Even in metropolitan
centres like Vancouver the chronic
“bed shortage” periodically breaks
out, politicians launch into an ‘‘ex-
planing” bout, and all is quiet
again, save in overcrowded hos-
pital wards, where too many beds

taxpayers money annua lly.
Coyne’s main worry seemed to be
with “capital” spending on things
which might do the people some

aoe no sign of any help from Victoria good, such as new _ industries
m = 3 2. ?
H oe a ee ae ane or Ottawa. Minister of Highways, schools, homes, hospitals, and the
i enbeteschool this ene od 5 M C F wen “Flying Phil” Gaglardi can wangle like. On such spending, “tight
* x ee e le i hich to lard ” :
gether with their teaching staffs, a new tabernacle in whi money” Coyne wants things a

whole lot tighter, otherwise comes
the big ‘‘bang.”

A sure-fire antidote for this
Coyne-d “spending spree” was well
set down in the letters column of
the Vancouver Province (Jan. 22
edition) by an old age pensioner.
Seems the letter writer had attend-
ed a Socred political rally at which
the matter of “spending”? came up,
and to which the main speaker
posed the question in characteristic
Coyne coinage; ‘‘Why should we

| schemes, and the diversion of a

' a large portion of such monies to-
wards provincial grants, thus en-

abling the provinces to meet their

This banner province with its and too few nurses tell its own
“debt free’ halo and its high ratio story.
of monopoly profits, is just about g * *
in as bad a: fix for hospital facil-
ities as it is for class rooms for
our children.

give OAP’s an increase? They'll
only spend it...’ To which the
OAP writer replied with another
poser: “What else would an OAP
want a raise for but to get enough
to eat and pay the rent?”

James Coyne, governor of the
Bank of Canada, says the ‘“‘spend-
ing spree’”’ we’ve been on for some
time now, has got to stop. We’ve
got to begin to ‘live within: our
means” warns the B-of-C pundit,
otherwise we're liable to pile up
a huge debt which may go “bang”
on us any day.

Pacific Tribune

Editor — TOM McEWEN
Managing Editor — BERT. WHYTE
Published weekly at
Boom 6 — 426 Main Street
Vancouver 4, B.C.

Printed in a Union Shop
Subscription Rates:

One Year: $4.00
Six. Months: $2.25
Canadian and Commonwealth
’ countries (except Australia): $4.00
one year. Australia, United States and
all other couniries: $5.00 one year.
Phone MUtual 5-5288

Take the case of the Kamloops
municipally-owned hospital as an
example. Recently its administra-
tor J. M. Morrison reported serious
overcrowding, the need to cancel
scheduled daily operations, «and
the turning of patients away be-
cause of lack of hospital beds.

Similarly with half-a-million or
~ so jobless workers. To give them
increased and extended insurance
benefits, would simply send them
into a Coyne-d ‘‘spending spree.”
Better to leave the jobless, the
OAPs and citizens generally on a
‘‘within-their-means” rating, there-
by avoiding a Coyne-d Bank of
Canada ‘“‘disaster.”’

In his “tight”? money plug for
more austerity, Coyne didn’t utter .
one teeny-weeny peep on our
“spending spree’ on SBomarcs,
DEW-lines, Avro-Arrows or other
so-called ‘‘defense’” nick-nacks on
which the Diefenbaker government
blows some $1.7 billion of the

Ironically enough, in last year’s
municipal elections, a plebiscite
calling for a new hospital wing
and nursing home was defeated,
not because the electorate of Kam-
loops are not keenly aware of the

What Canadians need today is
less Coyne and more coin; to live
equal to rather than “within”
their means. f

4 4
January 29, 1960—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 4