| — poe Bat l Lie tea: | i r Sta | Future of the ! The application of the Teheran Agreement is removing the political barriers to Canadian- i) Soviet-American cooperation in the north- > west. Development of wartime projects can us) remove physical barriers. @ 7 HE planes bearing the Red Star insignia of the Soviet = Union have become a familiar sight in the Yukon mies. The story of the American-built planes being flown. 4 ross the Yukon and Alaska to Siberia that Yukon folk a tpt to themselves for so long is now the property of the orld. But it has served, perhaps more than any other emctor, to create in the territory a new awareness of the ture and the part the Yukon can play. “ig The war has brought great lafeanges to the Yukon and its ighboring territory, the Mac- pzie District—the Alaska | chway, the Catel project, the % nol project, the new chain of } ports stretching from EHd- Iynton to Nome. Hundreds of lL @llions of dollars have been aient® on these permanent de- **lopments which inevitably il shape the future of the mritory. Now the issue, an separable part of the funda- ; sntal issues the Canadian peo- > will decide in the coming ietion, is whether these pro- Bets shall be abandoned or iether they shall be adapted Ee on 7s interests in the postwar 4. So strongly has the idea of ening up the North seized the ‘pular imagination that even ln Bracken, the national 2der of the Progressive-Con- tyative Party, in Vancouver =3t August took up the fashion- fe talk of opening up the Sreat undeveloped northern apire’—the area where Can- 4, the United States and the a) tyiet Union share a common undary, as though this im it- if were a profound discovery- irs. Black, the wife of George @eack, the Progressive-Conser- “itive member for the Yukon, Has well aware of it in Decem- © 1939, when in a press inter— Bw in Winnipeg she envisaged fivaet planes flying not west, Nt east in “a combined Russo- “@ipanese attack on Alaska” for @@hich, she warned, Canadians Must be prepared. Ls oe e RS. BLACK’S political ob- rvations have proved as irmful to the interests of the sreitory as the policies she and 4) husband have pursued dur- 42 the long.years they have "Visrepresented it to parliament id the people. As member for © Yukon during her husband’s m@ness, Mrs. Black was indulg- f= in another political pastime ishionable at the time, that of Miurne up a “Red menace” Canada. Yet when the attack hd extended to serve the coun-- did come, from Japan, where farsighted individuals like Tom MecHwen, the present Labor candidate, as far back as 1937 had warned it would come, George Black was loudest among the critics of the Alaska Highway. “Tt was a good job,” he con- descendingely told the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association at Toronto in June 1943. “But con- sidering what they had to work with, notwithstanding all the fanfare and boasting, it was no miracle. “T don’t want to belittle the highway, but over 40 years ago, Canada in one summer built as good a road from Whitehorse to Dawson with horse- drawn plows and about 800 men equip- ped with picks and shovels— a road that has carried thou- sands of tons of merchandise, thousands of passengers, and is in use today.” George Black had far more in mind than belittling the high- way of which he had not been an advocate, the splendid ac- complishments of the American troops who built it, and by im- plication, the government which had coneluded the agreement for its construction. He had in mind the breaking of the transportation monopoly whose interests he has never neglected, even. though they ran counter to the welfare of the people. He saw the hun- dreds of men flocking into the Yukon with the intention of settling there, and the thou- sands who would presently fol- low them—men who would bring new progressive ideas with them, who would organize and sweep away the shackles he and his kind have imposed on the territory. Already the citizens of Whitehorse were de- manding the representative government and civic services he had done nothing to obtain for them. George Black sees the pat- tern of the future all to clearly. And like adl reactionaries who find their position threatened, he seeks refuge in detraction and obstruction. His observa- tions before the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association were at once shrewdly calcu- Part of the crew of a twin-engined bomber that flew from Moscow to Ottawa stand beside the door of their plane shortly after arrival wtih a Soutet Parchasing Commius- sion. Left. to right are: Jumior Lieut. A. A. Malychev, Senior Flight Technician LL. A. Deribin and Senior Lieut. V. W. T ereknov. lated to- create doubts about the value of the highway and to appeal te the oldtimers, to whom, as an oldtimer himself, he looks for support. UT there are oldtimers in the Yukon, men and women who have clung to their dreams through three decades and more of the isolation and stagnation enforced by the policies of men like George Black, who now see the opportunity to realize their dreams of developing the ter- _ritory’s rich resources. They know, those of them who have not become irretriev- ably lost in the past, that the Yukon must have roads and railroads, industries and agri- eulture. And it must have peo- ple, men and women from the ~ “outside” who share the old- timers’ faith in the future of the Yukon. That future cannot be rea- lized by following the policies with which George Black is identified. Nor can it be rea- lized by following the policies of the GCF, which, in the Yukon as elsewhere, is posing what it pleases to call socialism as the only “alternative to a collapse of the wartime boom. No one who has seen or knows anything of the tremen- dous development of the Soviet North will deny the achieve- ments of socialism. But this is not the socialism proposed by the CCF, whose anti-Soviet at- titude is revealed in statement of its leaders and whose principal anti - Soviet spokesman in British Columbia, Mrs. Dorothy Steves, MLA, re- cently visited the Yukon. And what was Mrs. Steeves’ main point? It was an attack on the waste involved in push- ing through the wartime pro- jects to meet a national emer- gency, an attack coinciding with similar attacks made by the Progressive - Conservatives. Such attacks that emphasize the obvious shortcomings to the detriment of the achievements can only assist those who want to prevent the development of the Yukon or, at best, to con- fine any development within the narrow limits of the past. (pete immediate questions fac-— i ng the people of the Yukon are those of obtaining from Canada’s next government a comprehensive, progressive pro- gram for development of the ‘ territory as part of a greater program of development of the North as a whole, and of se- curing democratic local govern- ment. Promises are cheap in an election and it costs only the effort to make slowing refer- ences to the common future of Canada, the United States and the Soviet Union in the North. The test of such promises lies every . in the attitude towards the war- time projects. Both political and physical barriers have pre= vented the cooperation of Can- ada and the Soviet Union in the past. The application of the Teheran agreement is removing the political barriers. And the adaption and development of the wartime projects can re- move the physical barriers. Perhaps nowhere else in Can- ada is the issue between re- action and progress so sharply defined as in the Yukon. And nowhere else have the progres- sive voters, those who stand for the new Yukon against the old, a greater opportunity of unit- ing to elect a man who will voice their demands and hopes in parliament—Tom McEwen, the Labor candidate. ® Harold Griffin has lived in the Y akon and knows tts problems well. Author of Alaska and the Canadian Northwest: Our New Frontier, -which was published earlier this — year, he is now writing a second work on the North, Canada and the USSR: Neighbors in the North, to be published by Contemporary Puab- lishers.