EDITORIAL

Comment

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‘The NPA False ‘Canada First’ look

an be ousted

HE KEY to success at the polls
is to get out the voters. It
st be said that in last week's
ancouver aldermanic byelec-
n labor and progressive forces
led lamentably in this respect.

nt
+7
y

The trouble is not that the
n-Partisan Association is so
ong — there is plenty of evi
ce that a majority of citizens
e disgusted with NPA domina-
n of civic administration—but
at the labor and progressive
ters fail to turn out to vote,
d fail to achieve unity around
ndidates with the best chance
success,

| Between August 8 and August

citizens will have an oppor
nity to register at city hall,
us ensuring a vote in Decem-
r. See that YOUR name gets
the list.

Pacific Tribune

Published weekly at
Room 6 — 426 Main Street
Vancouver 4, B.C.

Phone: MArine 5288
Editor — TOM McEWEN
ssociate Editor — HAL GRIFFIN
usiness Manager — RITA WHYTE
Subscription Rates

One Year: $4.00
Six months: $2.25
Canadian and Commonwealth
untries (except Australia): $4.00
he year. Australia, United States
iy all other countries: $5.09 one
year,

Al A PRESS conference in Vic-
toria this week, Premier W.
A. C. Bennett said he was ready
to take a “‘second look’’ at his
proposals for Columbia River
power development at his meet-
ing this week with federal Re
sources Minister Jean Lesage.
Events have already compelled
Bennett to take more than a
second look at his various pro-
posals for Columbia develop-

, ment, but his guiding principle

(or lack of it) remains his deter-
mination to hand over to the

U.S. the rights that belong to

Canada.

The working people of this
province will be satisfied with
nothing less than a “Canada
First’’ look which assures them
of jobs in B. C.-industry created
by power generated in this prov-
ince.

What Eden
really meant

A HEADLINE in the Vancow

ver Sun this week over a re-
port from London on the Com-
monwealth prime ministers con-
ference reads: ‘Eden warns
Russia, “We'll fight for oil.”
And the report opens: “Britain
has warned the Soviet Union it
will go to war to protect its oil
lifeline from the Middle East.”’

But if Britain must have oil
for its highly industrialized econ-
omy, it is hardly consistent in
its policy.

The same government which
belligerently declares its willing-
ness to fight for oil in the Middle
East, ignores public opinion in
Britain and Trinidad alike to
agree to sale of the Trinidad Oil
Company to Texas oil interests.

What Eden really told the
Commonwealth prime ministers
is that his government will use
force if necessary to prevent the
people of any dependent country
from obtaining control of their
own resources but that it will
readily sell these same resources
to the United States.

It’s a policy Prime Minister
Louis St. Laurent will find easy
to accept and one equally re-
pellant to the British and Cana-
dian people.

Tom
McEwen

barbaric custom.

most -shameful

; SPECIAL. parliamentary
A committee has been making
an exhaustive study on the ef-
ficacy ‘or otherwise of capital
punishment — to wit, hanging.
During the past several years
similar committees in various
countries of the Commonwealth,
including Britain itself, have
been conducting similar studies.
In the parliaments of all civiliz-
ed countries and among the great
mass ‘of public opinion every-
where, there is-a mounting de-
mand for the abolition of this

In view of this widespread
sentiment, shared, it is said, by
committee members themselves,
for abolition of capital punish-
ment in Canada this committee
has brought down one of the
reports ever

tabled by any Canadian body.

Contending that the “public
is not ready for the abolition of
hanging” the committee recom-
mends the “humanising” of le-
galised murder by discarding the
hempen rope and introducing a
“Made-in-the-USA” electric
chair. This debasing concession
to Yankee “efficiency” is an out-
rage upon Canadian conscience,
a cowardly and ill-adVised sub-
stitute for the abolition of a
form of punishment which flouts
all decency.

As an excuse for its action the
committee outrages its own in-
tegrity by grasping at the moth-
eaten cliche that capital punish-
ment “is a deterrent” to murder
and so must be retained, in a
new “integrated” form with
Yankee knowhow. Now we will
roast the victim rather than de-
capitate him.

It is possible, of course, that
the world ‘of such poets as Oscar
Wilde and his Ballad of Reading
Gaol have little effect upon such
committees. Nor does it appear
that the opinions of such authori-
ties as the late Warden E. Lawes
of Sing Sing penitentiary have
fared any better, despite the fact

that Warden Lawes probably
conducted more condemned men
to the electric chair than any
man before or since, and him-
self spoke out boldly against its
barbarism and its futility.

were sitting in Headingly jail
because we held certain political
opinions not in keeping with
Liberal orthodoxy, two unfor-
tunate youths were hanged there.
(To show his appreciation of my
political views one of the
“screws” presented me with the
“black cap” from. one of these
legal murders.)

ecution every man is awake,
tense, resentful, while _ Death
walks the corridor with measur-
ed step in ceremonial routine.

darkness of their cell, some
curse, and all hate an act that
is symbolic of barbarism — and
revenge; archaic obstruction to
civilised behavior.

graceful report should be re-
jected without reservations by
the parliament and the people!

mt es $e
Back in the forties, while M.
. Sago of Winnipeg and myself

At that midnight hour of ex-

Some men weep silently in the

This committee and its dis-

July 6, 1956 —PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 7