Review ook _ EDITORIAL PAGE «

TOM McEWEN, Editor — HAL GRIFFIN, Associate 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 Commonwealih countries (except Australia), 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 Bas maii, Post Office Department, Ottawa

Printed by Union Printers Ltd.,

550 Powell Street, Vancouver 4, B.C.

Tom
McEwen

A RECENT edition of: the Financial
Post, mouthpiece for Canada’s top
dividend collectors, featured an address
“by L. ‘A. Forsyth, QC, president of
Dominion Steel and Coal Company to
the Toronto Canadian Club. The key
theme of this Dosco blurb, as the speak-
er poetically put it, “is best described.
by one of the nobler four-letter words
in our language — “WORK”.

For. as long as I can remember
‘spokesmen for Dosco have always been
strong advocates of work — for others
and for as little in return as possibl :
During th past 30 years it has not been
uncommon for Dosco (assisted by
obliging Tory and Liberal govern-
ments) to have the army, the RCMP,
together with hordes of “special
police, company stools and kindred
species brought down to Cape Breton to

see to it that the Nova Scotians kept.

their minds on WORK and not on
unions and higher wages.

In his opening remarks to the Cana-
dian Club boys, whose experience in-
frequently includes anything like
WORK, Forsyth tearfully recalled
some of those “unpleasant incidents
such as jailing of union leaders and
Shooting down ‘of miners.

With these preliminaries over, For-
syth got down to the real reason for his
alarm — labor’s demand for a Guaran-
teed Annual Wage (GAW) anda short-
er working week. “Both these objec-
tives of labor,’ in his opinion are
“positively shocking.” Like every cor-
poration shyster however, Forsyth has

& counter proposal to GAW and an .

antidote to “shock” — more and more
WORK (production) for the same or
less wages, total elimination of labor’s
strike weapon, and an ironclad assur-
ance that “our trade union leaders eet
obtain from their membership the ut-
most industry and application to the
job,” so that profits and dividends will

temain untouched by GAW. A new

“philosophy of coexistence”!
be Reg at :

In Roy Wolvin’s day everything the
miners and steelworkers demanded
was “shocking”. The things which
didn’t “shock” Dosco were the things
Which added to the profit balance
sheets. :

When a miner came home with his
pay checkoff slip showing exorbitant
rentals for company shacks to house
his family, Dosco expressed no “shock”.
The same: checkoff slip would show
Prices at the company store for fuel,
food and clothing double those else-
where and checkoffs for tools and
equipment required in digging coal for
Dosco — and the only shock was that

On the faéé of the miner’s wife, won- .

dering how she was to keep her little
family alive. Beek

When the miners, determined to
“save their souls from the company
store” went on strike, that was “shock-
ing” and when the company store went
up in flames that was doubly “shock-
ing”, ; ;
The list of the “unpleasant incidents”

omitted by Forsyth is endless. Almost .

€very mining town in Cape Breton has
its monument to the memory of scores
‘of its dead miners — dead because
Company profits came before mining
Safety regulations. - Z ere

Now it is GAW that is “shocking
and the Dosco cry goes up for “more
WORK.” It was the same in Pharoah’s
_day—and Forsyth must surely recall

what happened to that brick manu-_

facturer. _

‘

High cost of N
MONG our Christmas mail
last -week was a cuckoo’s egg
in the form of a card from the city
assessor's Office, indicating that
another NPA tax hoist is in the
making.

Just where it will all end we
don’t know but if, .as the Vancou-
ver Sun says (and we fully agree),
we have an “‘oxcart administra-
tion’’ at Vancouver City Hall, the
additional cost of bringing it up to
Model T efficiency is going to be
calamitous.

Under NPA rule (and we
seem to be hogs for punishment),
the taxpayers of this city recently
got a nice bill from a firm of
Chicago “‘experts’’ amounting to. -
some $25,000 for advice to the
NPA clique on how to run things.
Now it seems Wwe are retaining the
services of these “‘experts’’ (at

A good resolut
HE first few days of the New
Year have been full of good
wishes, hopes and resolutions for
the months ahead. Trade Minis-
ter C. D. Howe has told us that
we never were so “‘prosperous”’ as

in 1955, and the same or better
will hold good for 1956..

Other crystal gazers have
looked long if not profoundly at
the future and come up with the .
happy discovery that the Marxist8

* are all wrong; that capitalist crises,
depressions, recessions, or what-
ever you want to call them are
nowhere in sight, and that 1955
“‘proved’’ it was the socialist and _
not the capitalist states which are
“collapsing.”

Be that is it may, we think
the shape of things to come in 1956

‘ administration.

PA ‘economies’

another nice fat stipend) to help
put our police force in order.

Last summer the NPA clique
set out to “‘economize’’ on police

For weeks they
boasted about such ‘‘economies’’
and their ‘“‘confidence’’ in the
Mulligan stew they had cooked.
Now they pay “‘fired-by-request”’
Mulligan a pension equivalent to
six or more OAP pittances, and
boost his successor’s salary from
ten to twenty thouand dollars an-
nually—with other salary boosts
and administrative expenditures
coming up — all by way of stim-
ulating “‘morale’’ at the taxpayers’
expense.

A few more months of this
kind of NPA ‘‘economy’’ and the
home-owning taxpayer can con-
sider himself fortunate if the NPA

allows him to live in his own home

at standard rental charges.

ion for 1956.

will: be considerably improved for
the individual, the family, and the
community by a sweeping increase
in the circulation of the Pacific
Tribune.

The PT keeps events in focus .

—a very desirable condition for
the times we are living in; to be
able to see prosperity as it should
be seen, rather than as Howe sees
it.

A doubling of Pacific Trib-
une circulation in 1956 is not only
a good New Year resolution, but
an added guarantee that progress
and peace will hold the centre of
the stage for the next twelve

months.

Let’s talk this resolution over
with our neighbors — often and
convincingly throughout 1956.

_ PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JANUARY 6, 1956 — PAGES __

~ Hal
Griffin

LILLOOET
Ts town is buzzing with rumors
about the proposed Moran Dam.

When I was last here most people : 1
just shrugged their shoulders when I a
mentioned the project and said, “May-
be some day .. .” That was after Prof.

Harry V. Warren had given his paper
to the Fifth British Columbia Natural :
Resources Conference in 1952. |

No one disputed his claim that a
series of dams at Lillooet, Moran and
Cottonwood, the highest of them 720
feet,at Moran, would develop between
three and four million horsepower. But ig
few thought that anything would be me | |
done about the proposal. The people of : '
Lillooet have heard so many Fraser

_ River power and irrigation schemes ex-

pounded over the years... and nothing
came of any of them until the B.C.
Electric ‘started its power project on
Seton Creek two years ago.

Then the town started to grow, slow-
ly, as though awakening to new life
after a century of stagnation.

Few towns in this province have
changed less over the years than Lil-
looet. Time seems almost to have pas-
sed it by in the long decades since the
Cariboo gold rush of the eighteen-six-
ties brought it into being. Other towns,
Hope, Ashcroft, Kamloops, have grown,
but Lillooet remains the straggling one-
street town it has always been.

Now big changes are in the wind,
changes that could transform the in-
terior of this province and give Lillooet
and Pavilion an importance beyond
even the dreams of the pioneers.

xt bos xt :
Mention of the Moran Dam is enough , : ;

to start a lively discussion anywhere in
Lillooet today. E

Within a few hours I was assured by
a dozen people that construction would
start over the next two or three years.
They pointed to the trucks marked
Moran Power Development Ltd. run-
ning around the town—no one seem-
ed. to know exactly what they were
doing — as evidence that the newly
formed company intends to proceed
with the project. They told me that the
site for the cement plant has already
been selected at Pavilion on the PGE
line. And they asked me why the Ben-
nett government would have placed
a reserve on land required for the pro-
ject, much of it owned by the Spencer .
interests, if negotiations were not far

advanced.

When I spoke about the problem of
getting salmon over the Moran Dam
and the even greater problem of get-
ting the fingerlings back over the more
than 700 foot drop, I was assured with
far more confidence than fact that this- L
had already been solved by a scheme oi '
involving the use of fish locks. ; tf

Whatever is in the wind, it foresha-
dows a major political struggle. The
issue is not power or fish—it is power
and fish. It is also much more than
that. It is part of the central issue of
power development in Canada or use
of Canadian water for U.S. develop-
ment as variously expressed in the
Moran, the Columbia-Fraser diversion
and Kaiser schemes. 76 58 ee

What is happening here — and at
Victoria — can profoundly affect the —
whole future of this country. sages