RAR Bas Soa. = ARS uRSPewar®. >) _ a Review EDITORIAL PAGE «x TOM McEWEN, Editor — HAL'GRIFFIN, Associa te Editor — RITA WHYTE, Business Manager. Comment Published weekly by the Tribune Publishing Company Ltd. at Room 6, 426 Main Street, Vancouver 4, B.C. — MArine 5288 Canada and British Commonwealth countries (exce pt Australia), Printed by Union Printers Ltd., 550 Powell Street, Vancouver.4, B.C. 1 year $3.00, 6 months $1.60. Australia, U.S., and all other countries, 1 year $4.00, 6 months $2.50. Authorized as second class mail, Post Office Department, Ottawa T= weather was admittedly hot but — Tory tempers much hotter. The old Party of privilege, pelf and graft was “S888ing in the middle and drooping at ends, Old Tory wheel-horses or- ated and sweated with such feeling that “Aeir women folks periodically broke ie) tears, ‘but it was all to no avail. An Yerdose of Drewdrips, coupled with a Stowing awareness of the people of B.C. that the Progressive-Conservative party % mas a dead duck made its Vernon prov- ‘eial convention look like an Irish wake, with the ‘mourners’ itching to jump on the Corpse. Not even in Vernon with § taditional Tory atmosphere could the Sry Humpty-Dumpty be put together ain. It was a one-ring circus with a “drop Tew” motif. A\Mr. Patch, who was definitely in no as fo patch anything up with respect ® “Gorgeous George,” made a stirring Peal to the convention to get rid of t der Drew, and duly moved a motion © Put the boots to that “national cala- he as A. A. MacLeod once described That started the fireworks. Davie Fulton, Tory MP for Kamloops, ae a fine show of indignation arose to tend Leader Drew, and, in reply to fuPlaints from goed Tory henchmen ‘ at letters to Drew invariably went un- yewered, pointed’ out that “Mr. Drew sg much too busy a4 man to reply to Yery lunatic in the party.” § At this high point of “‘unity” the ques- 10n was called for on Mr. Patch’s motion ey the lunatics carried the day by 2 Ote of 40 to 23; thereupon the three Rusketeers of British Columbia toryism, eee Fulton, Dean Finlayson and How- a Green stalked from the convention "high dundgeon. This brought on more feping in the female section of the h Qvention. Altogether it was a hot and me day for the old party on its last a his speech to the convention Dean Mlayson, B.C. leader, predicted “a Steat future” for the party and pledged ‘uself to keep on “building.” é gy fost of the lunatic fringe, (as describ- to by Davie Fulton), were all hopped up draft Diefenbaker” to lead them out AES political wilderness, forgetting t only a few short years back they shouted themselves blue in the face ‘or Drew, for Bracken, for Manion, for ; On’ Heel” Bennett ad infinitum ad i Seum,. which eans, in plain English, tterminably, and with a very foul politi al odor. T € noted just prior to the Vernon thee circus that another old stalwart ese many years, Mrs. Buda Brown of les ncouver, announced that she was "aving the Tory fold and scurrying into ial Credit. Buda, who prides herself eing a sort of female Joe McCarthy, is ld have sure added zest to the Ver- a Wake. But it is clear that'this Tory- brat Social Credit female hasn’t the same ay of “optimism” as Dean Finlayson BR €n it comes to “a great future. “Ge Buda used to cheer loudly for wine ous” when the two of them got ‘thin hailing distance. Tate © Vernon Tory convention illust- ates above. anything else a corrupt Political party in its deaththroes, its 88s base gone, overtaken by the inex- stable facts of History — and the pork Dav’! where it has rooted so well in the Bs Pow happily and definitely out of \ JOUNI.CLOY ea U.S. HIGH COMNR.™ GERMANY SHOW QUALIFICATIONS rer PREC Signing up the new German MURDERER Ae O JEWS | per SRE Ari my No release for Meyer Na Major General Kurt Meyer, sentenced to death (later changed to life imprison: ment) by a Canadian court for murdering Canadian war prison: ‘ers in Normandy, will be released from Werl prison in the British Tone of Germany in September. Meyer, who commanded the SS Panzer Division <‘‘Hitler Youth,” is the only Nazi General still held in confinement. Release of Meyer comes at a time when United States efforts to dragoon support for the re- arming of Germany under the guise of the European Defense Community are meeting increas ed resistance. The shocking news that Meyer is to be released should stir a wave of angry protest in Canada. It is an® insult to every war veteran who fought to crush Naziism. Yet just a few days ago a Vancouver real estate man, H. P _ And now OBLESS workers will welcome the announcement that the Frobisher interests have applied to the British Columbia and Can- adian governments for permission to go ahead with the development of the huge water power and in dustrial project on the British Col- umbia-Yukon border. Any news that means more jobs is good news. The fight to keep the power plants and the industries inside Canada seems to have been won. Much of the credit for this vic tory can go to the labor move ment of the province which -rais- ed a strong opposition to the proposals of the U.S. aluminum monopoly. Spokesmen for the - Bell-Irving, former brigadier com- manding the 10th Canadian ‘In- fantry Brigade, Fourth Canadian Armored Division, told a daily newspaper that he feels the re- lease of Meyer is ‘“‘entirely proper.’ ; Bell-Irving sat on the court which sentenced Meyer in 1945 to be shot. Today he describes this Nazi murderer as “a very brave man and a great leader... it may be that his type will be useful in Germany today under different auspices.”’ BellIrving does not speak for the Canadian people. The Can’ adian people do not want any more gas death ovens, concentra- © tion camps, or Nazi ‘‘supermen.”’ Meyer must not be freed. War veterans and their families, and all progressive Canadians, should write to Minister of Justice Stuart Garson, House of Commons, Ot- tawa, demanding that Canada act to stop the release of Kurt Meyer. the pipeline Labor-Progressive party and a number of trade unions led the campaign for the alternative Can- adian scheme. Next on the agenda is the gas “pipeline from the Peace River. Out of the confusion and uncer: tainty following the refusal of the U.S. Federal Power Commission to let gas be exported to the Paci- fic Coast States; the demand has been growing for an all-Canadian pipeline to the Vancouver area. A pipeline to serve only British Columbia can be built if the Ben- nett government will back it. The demand for a publicly- owned pipeline ‘must become the battle cry of every interested organiza’ tion in the province. PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JULY 30, 1954 — PAGE 5 6,000,000 | QXE saying which has passed into wide popular usage is that: about “the great Canadian novel.” Usually it is employed in a derisive or depreciative sense — “Oh, he’s writing the great - Canadian novel,” or, “It’s a good story, well told, but it isn’t the great Cana- dian novel.” It reflects at once a self- deprecatory attitude towards our ac- _complishments in this field of literature _and an awareness of our shortcomings. Of course, the U.S. influence has left its imprint on Canadian novelists, both published and unpublished, as in every other field of writing. The big publish- ing houses are in the U.S., and too often Canadian publishing houses are little more than sales agents for their Ameri- can counterparts. The big reading pub- lic too, is in the U.S. The inevitable effect for Canadian writers publishing their work in the U.S. is for them to think first in terms’ of their Ameriean audience ,often to shape their stories and depict their characters to conform to U.S. concepts. In the past this has distorted the de- velopment of Canadian literature. Today it makes Canadian realist writing impcs- sible. ee Progressive American novelists are no longer able to get their works pub- lished by any of the big American pub- lishing houses. Many of them are com- pelled to publish their own work. How then, can it be expected that a Canadian novelist, honestly reflecting the Canadian scene, will find an estab- lished -U.S. publisher to accept his work? For what is the growing feature of the Canadian scene if not. our conscious- ness of ourselves. as‘Canadians express- ed through our antagonism to every aspect of U.S. domination of our coun- Ree ‘ By the same token, it is inevitable that there will be a growing reading public in this country for novels that re- flect our growing consciousness, of our- selves as Canadians. The impression that there is a limited sale for Canadian novels or other liter- ature works in this country is not true now nor has it been true in the past. Too often it is used to justify the limited publishing policies of Canadian pub- lishers who find it more profitable to push the sale of American novels. | t % 5° 3 The fact is that over the past quarter of a century Canadian novelists have produced~a number of works in which Canadians can justifiably take pride. Beginning with Frederick Philip Grove’s Our Daily Bread and Master of the Mill, there are Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage, Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute, Roger Lemelin’s The Town Below and The Plouffe Family, Hugh Maclennan’s. Two Solitudes and Barometér Rising, Henry Kreisel’s The Rich Man, Violet King’s Better Harvest, Dyson Carter’s Tomorow Is With Us. ; All of these deserve to be read by everyone to whom the creation of a Can- adian literature is not an empty phrase but a living thing, to be argued over, de- bated and created out of the lives of the people themselves. True, we have not yet produced a novel with the compelling power of Power Without Glory, by the Austral- ian writer, Frank Hardy, or the matur- ity and understanding of The Water Tower, by the French writer, Andre Stil. But inevitably, the same true love of country, the same necesssity of struggle, will give us not one but many great Canadian novels. irae eles :