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By THE TRIBUNE PUBLISHING COMPANY LTD.
Telephones: Editorial, MA. 5857; Business, MA. 5288

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Housing - and Howe

OME six weeks ago the fact was loudly trumpeted in
the daily press that the Hon. C. D. Howe, Minister of
- Reconstruction was to visit Vancouver and other key B.C.
points to ‘look into’ the housing situation, Everybody con-
cerned with a chronic housing crisis settled back in their
chairs and hoped that at long last the interminable buck-
passing on housing, for which Ottawa has become famous,
would be ended. With the Minister on the spot to see for
himself how things were, surely something could be done!
As we go to press we are regaled with the news that
the Minister is in London, having gone there to tender
Canada’s consent to the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and
Lieut. Philip Mountbatten. Mr. Howe was received by the
King on Wednesday, and
Council where official sanction of the royal nuptuals will
‘be accorded.
All this may be highly proper and necessary in the
solemnization of royal weddings, but we of the ordinary run
of humans must perforce return to the more pressing prob-
lem of sanitary shelter, Little wonder that at last week’s
Vancouver conference, on housing called by the Tenants’
Committee of the Old Hotel Vancouver, Matt McEwan,
committee chairman, should ironically declare that “for two
years we have been getting promises . . . but no houses.”
Those words express the sentiments of countless hundreds
of war veterans and their families, as well as equal numbers
of industrial workers, who are condemned to a make-shift
existance, with nothing but a slum or a prohibitive rental
_ staring them in the face.
~ It is time Ottawa dropped the useless fripperies of im-
perial palaver and got down to work on the issue of low-
rental housing for the men and women of the firing line
and factory, who, in their fight against Hitlerism, also
fought for the right to a place they could call home. Howe’s
visit to London could have been done by an ordinary civil
servant. Howe’s visit to Vancouver is a pressing govern-
ment responsibility which so far has been effectively evaded.

>

Protest Dutch aggression

& LMOST as soon as the news broke of the brutal at-

tack by the Dutch imperialist army upon the people
of Indonesia, came the more heartening news that Austra-

lian oremen and students were picketting Australian
ports—blocking the movement of supplies to the Dutch
marauders. Then came news that the trade union movement
of the Netherlands, women’s organizations, and other
peoples’ movements were actively protesting the fascist ag-
gression of their government “upon. the new Indonesian Re-
_ Aside from a few scattered protests coming from sec-
tions of the Labor-Progressive Party, a few unions, and
individual war veterans, there is no effective protest being
heard in Canada. We can hardly say, as Chamberlain said
of the Czechoslovakia which he sold down-the river at
_ Munich, that Indonesia is a little country ‘of which we
know very little about’. Since the King government is one
of the worst offenders in the Anglo-American bloc in sup-
_ plying the Dutch imperial government with the arms and
equipment which it is now using against the people of In-
_ donesia, Canadian workers can hardly remain unconcerned
that the ships, tanks, planes, guns, and other equipment,
_ which they sacrificed so much to make for the destruction
of military fascism, should now be used in a large measure
to resuscitate a similar evil. s

_ _ Dutch imperialism, which feeds upon enormous col-

onial resources and is perhaps the*most parasitic organism

of its kind, is determined to retain its control of the rich

East Indies. A formal ‘independence’ (popular in Anglo-

_ American circles) granted by the Dutch to Indonesia, pre-

Serves their actual ownership of mines and plantations. The

existence of the Dutch army, equipped with English, Can-

adian and American weapons of war, and using them with

: ce a eS en is ample proof
-

_ _ Canadian trade unions first and foremost, together with
_all workers, must protest Dutch brutalities in Indonesia.
_ Every Dutch ship in a Canadian port should be regarded
as a moral leper, and guarded by a tight picket line of
Canadians—ever mindful of the fact that their fathers, sons
and brothers liberated Holland from the Nazi yoke in order
‘that the Dutch, ourselves, and the Indonesians should be
free men.
- FRIDAY, AUGUST 1, 1947 =

will attend a session of the Privy’

L T Saturday 2 memorial to
the six Tolpuddle martyrs
was unvieled in Dorset, Eng-
land. In 1834, six farm laborers
of the little village were ar-
rested for combining to resist a
wage cut from nine to seven
‘shillings a week. Led by George
Loveless, they put up a cour-
ageous and dignified defense,
and were sentenced to transpor-
tation for life to the penal
settlements of Australia.

These six men were the foun-
ders of modern trade unionism
—six English farm laborers who
conceived the idea that only
when working men and women
banded together in common in-
terest, could their social and
economic conditions be main-
tained and improved.-More than
400,000 people of that day arose
in their defense, and their free-
dom was finally won.

The struggle of the Tolpuddle
martyrs is not ended. At this
moment Kent Rowley, Canadian
Director of the United Textile
Workers (AFL) is in a Quebec
prison for precisely the same
cause for which Loveless was
transported for life—organizing
a trade union to defend the in-
terests of Valleyfield and La-
chute textile workers. :

In British Columbia, members
and officers of a CCL Laundry
Workers’ Union face imprison-
ment and fines under a vicious
CMA-inspired statute known as
Bill 39 because they struck
against discrimination of their
fellow workers. Just as the ris-
ing capitalist class of England
had to go back to 1796 to find
an act to persecute the Tol-
puddle martyrs in 1834, so. also
did the CMA Coalition in Vic-
toria go back to an 1834 mental-
ity to produce a Bill 39, with
which they hamstring labor's in-
alienable rights in 1947.

In th USA the Taft-Hartley
Bill is similarly designed—to re-
turn labor to the jungle of cap-
italist exploitation, a defenseless
and impotent. CIO President
Philip Murray’s ringing call to
action against the unconstitu-

_ umbia’s

we see it

tional fascist provisions of the
Taft-Hartley bill, brings Tol-
puddie and all it means to the
common people into clearer per-

é spective.
Clearly the battle waged by ~

the Tolpuddle martyrs is not yet
won. The trade unions of North
America still have to fight for
_ their very ex-

stance. The

in Canada

establish
to the memory
of our English
he-

E we

our un-
ions against all
and every at-
tack. -Kent
Rowley in a
Quebec prison
must be a con-
stant reminder of that task. The
continued persecution of union
men and women at the hands of
the Anscomb-Hart Coalition and
their ‘Kenney courts’ must serve
to spur working men and women
on—in the deathless spirit of
Tolpuddle.

Tom McEwen

IG Business disgorges with ill
grace. The current issue of
‘Western Business and Industry’
editorializing on the recent wage
increases won by the Interna-
tional Woodworkers of America,)
puts it this way: “British Col-
lumber industry has
‘stood and delivered’ again, this
time without being sand-bagged.
It has been relieved by the Com-

munist-led IWA of. about $8--

000,000 to $9,000,000 a year in a
12%-and-hour wage increase and
a cut-back of the work week
to a standard 40-hours. Without
much doubt, the productivity of
the lumber industry is going to
suffer as a result of the new
wage agreement in B.C.”

So, the poor boss-loggers had
to ‘stand and deliver’ or face
being ‘sand-bagged.’ Nice lan-

'guage in a journal that lays

claim to respectability and de-

HAT ae)

By Tom McEwen —

corum, and sometimes even ad-
mits that trade unions have 4 —
right to exist—‘if properly con-
ducted’, But like what some of
the Hollywood crooners call 2
‘hit’, the scribes for the boss
loggers are just
comes naturally’, In any cas€,_
every B.C. community from the
corner grocery store down,
benefit much more from $9,000,
000 in the pockets of the loggers
than they would if it was !
in the pockets of the lumber
barons. - :
As for the productivity of thé
industry ‘suffering’, figures aré

already available from goverD-

ment and other sources, showiD£
that in 1946-47, (even with #
six-week strike included) lumber —
production in B.C. set a new
all-time high. Tabulated profits
ef big concerns like the H. R-
MacMillan Company tell a simi-
lar tale. But then the editor
‘Western Business and Indus
draws his salary for giving bié
business the kid of literary Pa?
it wants. :
©e :
ESSRS. Attlee and Bevin, hav
ing placed Britain’s future
in the hands of Wall Street
pawnbrokers, are now finding it
increasingly difficult to redee™
its pledges — socialism to tbe

British electorate who gave it #

whacking mandate for :
in 1945, and trade preference?
in favor of the pawnbrokers:

Lowering standards of life
(austerity), difficulties in a
taining domestic productio®s
trade with other countries 82° —
within the British Commom
wealth—shut off as per the COR”
ditions laid down by the US —
imperialist pawnbrokers; all this
adds up to a major crisis in the
Attlee government. — ‘ :

Already there is talk of tbe
reed of ‘firm’ government ‘
ating from certain ‘labor’ and
tery circles. ‘Firm’ governme® :
to curb the labor ‘rebels’ 2?
discard socialist shibboleths. 2%
it be that Britain is neaded
for another ‘coalition’ of
Baldwin-MacDonald brand? +
coming weeks will tell.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE

‘doing what