Review

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EDITORIAL PAGE

TOM McEWEN, Editor — HAL GRIFFIN, Associate Editor — RITA WHYTE, Business Manager.

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Tom
[AST week, when the. Labor-Progressive
. Party serenaded the provincial legis-
lature with a wide variety of banners
and slogans protesting the ‘grab of our
natural resources by the Yankee trusts,

everything was calm — on the surface
at least!

The weather was wet, sleety and cold
a8 the big LPP picket moved back and
forth in front of the legislative )build-
ings. Inside everything was cosy and
Undisturbed. Clerks and stenographers
left their desks and pressed their noses
to the windows with commendable
Curiosity, The Victoria press reported
that ‘there were no disturbances.”

Very few MLAs ventured outside to.

See or talk to the picketers. No doubt
* lot of these gentlemen figure it is still
4 long time before election day, so why
Worry?

A few of the Victoria Junior Chamber
of Commerce boys drifted around to
Stare at the LPP picket line with a glassy
Sort of a gaze, very much like a rooky
“op trying to look “official.”

One, Hector Crombie, got his picture
on the front page of the Victoria Times,
tearing down an LPP anti-US grab
Poster. We never learned whether he
Was for the U.S. grab or just didn’t
like the poster design!

When a handful of the same Junior
hamber of Commerce boys attended a
Public meeting a couple of nights later
on the same U.S. grab issue, they re-
Mained (sensibly so) silent!
Bos 0 seis © =
Inside the House while the anti-US
Stab picket was on, all was reported
qually tranquil, Premier W. A. C.
Bennett, surrounded by his majority of
Social Credit yesmen, wearing a cherub-
‘¢ smile and with hissunelectable fin-
nial adviser Einar Gunderson directing
the Ship of banking and finance, sat tight
°n his undisclosed deal with the Yankee
_ ‘Tusts for British Columbia’s natural gas.

dene brief on every member's
Utcult to preserve this atmosphere
: i Socred cabinet ministers and their
Platoon of back-benchers put on a good

Show of being unperturbed.
Bh ah ge :
Premier Bennett, Attorney-General

fobert Bonner and Lands and Resources

is ister R. E. Sommers may feel secure
ave the moment. But promising the
‘ tone everything on the hustings and
cus ly ignoring them when once safely
is eet the seats of the mighty is,
Poli ht jong run, highly disastrous for the
3 a lcians — and particularly when they
Wh © busied themselves giving away
at belongs to the people!

Pre Tiodically it would be good for

follow. Bennett and his Social Credit
fery os in their moments of quiet con-
; a een to recall what happened to
They escomb-Johnson gold-dust twins.
Gis. might also reflect that the total

Pse of these stalwarts of “free enter-
Was brought about by just such
as Bennett is sitting on now like a
y hen, determined, despite public
on, to hatch out another giveaway
S time the people’s natural gas.

Brisa?
deals
brood
ODini
thi

€sk, like the picket outside, made it

beds in this hemisphere. .

STIRRING IT UP ’

- Prevent atomic war or perish

O matter what its source,
Novae statement on atomic
warfare leads to the inescapable
conclusion that humanity must
either renounce the H-bomb or
stand in imminent peril of destroy-
ing itself utterly.

The very contradictions in the
statements made by Canadian and
American authorities emphasize
the fact that the people have only
one defense and that is to compel
abandonment of all preparations
for atomic war.

Last year, for instance, Val
Peterson, director of the U.S. Civil
Defense Administration, maintain-
ed that the one “‘practical ap-
proach’’ to defense against the H-
bomb was mass evacuation of
cities. Now he recommends a
cyclone shelter ‘‘with three feet of
earth cover and a filtering device
to provide air and keep out radio-
active dust.”

It is no coincidence that Dr.

_ Gordon Shrum of UBC, member

of the Canadian Defense Research
Board, has also come out against
mass evacuation of Vancouver,
maintaining that citizens “‘would
be better off to stay in their own
cellars.’”

Peterson says, ‘There is nothing

hopeless about the situation.’ But
the grim facts he himself gives and
. those added by Dr. Shrum and Ad-

miral Strauss, chairman of the
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission,
make it clear that the only hope
lies in preventing atomic war.

Peterson himself says that there
could be 22 million casualties, in-
cluding 9 million dead, in the U.S...
“There are not enough hospital
. . How
do you bury nine million corpses?”
he asks.

‘Dr. Shrum, evading any direct
reference to casualties, points out

that that if an H-bomb were drop-

(

ped on Vancouver its consequences
would be radioactive poisoning of
the atmosphere, deadly to all life,
spreading downwind over a few
thousand miles.

Admiral Strauss, in a comment
upon the lethal effect of the H-
bomb exploded by the U.S. at
Bikini last year, says that death
would have come to any one in an
area of 7,000 miles downwind
from the explosion point—an area

one-third the size of Vancouver
Island. —

“About 7,000 square miles of
territory was so contaminated that
survival might have depended upon
prompt evacuation of the area or
upon taking shelter and other pro-
tective measures,’’ he states.

To this Dr. John C. Bugher, head
of the U.S. Atomic Energy Com-
mission’s biological and medical
section, adds his warning of the
effect an H-bomb explosion would
have on animal and plant life in the
contaminated area. “‘All agricul.
ture would cease,’ at least for a
time, he points out.
ee

No wonder that in London last
week, Dr. Donald Soper, former
president of the Methodist Con-
ference, declared: “‘I am driven to
the conviction that Christians who
continue to support the manufac-
ture and possible use of such
weapons are traitors to their

Gord.” *

This is the nightmare of destruc-
tion that war-bent U.S. imperial-
ists are constantly threatening to

loose upon the peoples of the:

world. Only those so warped by
hatred can contemplate it, for all
decent humanity recoils in horror
at the thought. _

It is with all decent humanity
that the answer lies. Every honest
Canadian must add his or her voice
to the ringing demand for an end

to the preparations for atomic war.

Hal
Griffin

Not since the days of the McBride
government has there been so much
talk in the legislature about corruption.

In naming J. Gordon Gibson (Liberal,

. Lillooet) for refusing to retract his

charge that “money has talked” in
awarding of forest management licenses,
the Speaker ignored the more general
charges made by two other members.

Frank Howard (CCF, Skeena) told the
government, “You’ve got your arm in
the pork-barrel right up to the armpit.”
And Tom Uphill (Labor, Fernie) observ-
‘ed that from what he had heard the gov-
ernment was “the biggest bunch of
crooks that ever sat on that side of
the House.”

It may well be that when the history
of this period is written, with the full
facts of what are now suspicions and
charges, it will compare only with that
other period at the beginning of the
century when the people’s resources
were being given away to monopoly in-
terests.

Then the Conservative government of.
Sir Richard McBride held power at Vic-
toria and the facts of its corruption can

~ be found in the records of the legisla-

ture, and the newspapers of that day.
Nowhere are they stated more forth-
rightly than in the B.C. Federationist,
which spoke for the militant labor move-
ment. :
eg xt x

Just as the present Social Credit gov-
ernment inherited its giveaway policies
from the Coalition, so the McBride gov-
ernment carried forward the policies
bequeathed by its predecessors. Ap-
propriation of the Vancouver Island coal-
fields was an accomplished fact before
McBride formed the first party govern-
ment in this province in 1903.

But when the Dunsmuirs sold their
interests to Mackenzie and Mann in 1911

‘they received $8. million and the inter-

mediaries who arranged the deal got
$11 million. As the B.C. Federationist
noted in its issue of February 27, 1914:
“Members of the B.C. government could
doubtless throw light on the difference
of $3,000,000. Into whose pockets did
this huge sum go?”

Mackenzie and Mann also got in the
McBride government’s giveaway of the
Ground Hog anthracite coalfields north-
east of Stewart. Of five syndicates which
shared 2,000 square miles of coal lands
Mackenzie and Mann got 90,000 acres,
the U.S. B & K syndicate a similar area.

In its issue of December 12, 1913, the
B.C. Federationist published the names
of land speculators and their agents who,
with the McBride government’s conniv-
ance, had seized 1,719,709 acres of pro-
vincial lands!

The B.C. Federationist’s warning to

_the people about “the vast natural re-

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sources in land, timber, coal, fisheries
and valuable water power the Bowser
confederates are scooping up wholesale
from you” could, with a change in names,
be repeated today.

But there is one essential difference
between the giveaways of yesterday and
today. Land could not be carried away.
The mining of coal created jobs, though
labor still had to struggle bitterly for
its rights.

Oil, natural gas and water resources
can and are being drained to the U.S.,
and with them the jobs of Canadian
workers, the very substance of the coun-
try’s independence and future.

The giveaway of our resources is the
most deadly corruption. Those who are
receiving the people’s wealth will go to
any length to maintain their govern-
ment benefactors in power. The record
of the McBride government is the proof

- of that.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — FEBRUARY 25, 1955 — PAGE 5