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Shape of things to come

"Be political pattern of Senator-Mayor Gerald Gratton
McGeer’s police shake-up is beginning to unfold. The
appointment of Lieut.-Col. C. H. Hill, former assistant com-
missioner of the RCMP, and officer in charge of the force
which tear-gassed and clubbed the postoffice sitdowners on
a Sunday morning in June, 1938, throws the pattern into
bolder relief. '

After McGeer paid a hurried trip to Victoria for con-
sultations with Attorney-General Gordon Wismer last week,
the latter’s office issued an announcement to the effect that

seriously ill” and had therefore “tendered his resignation.”
. Magistrate Matheson promptly cracked back that his health
was okay, and added that “the affairs of the past two weeks
should be reason enough for tendering his resignation,’
which, it is interesting to note, had not been tendered at
the time of the attorney-general’s announcement.

Lieut.-Col. C. H. Hill has been appointed to fill Magis-
trate Matheson’s seat on the Vancouver Police Commis-
sion. To overcome technical difficulties in qualifications for
the job, Col. Hill was named “an honorary deputy magis-
trate” by the attorney-general. Meanwhile, Senator-Mayor
McGeer had ‘ordered’ Police Chief A. G. McNeill to wind
up the vice squads, and put this branch of the service

“under the direction of Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB)
head Walter Mulligan, who it would seem possesses the ne-
cessary political standards McGeer requires of a_ police
chief. To date Chief McNeill has presumably ignored
these ‘orders’ and senatorial snorts have been emanating
from the City: Hall. and: St. Paul’s Hospital, where the
ageing senator has been undergoing another medical check-
up. :

Recently, the City Committee of the Labor-Progressive
Party addressed a letter to Mayor McGeer declaring that
if the police were lax in their duties in dealing with vice
and crime, the public should be made aware of the fact and
steps taken to. strengthen the efficiency and integrity of the
force. If, on the other hand, the reshuffle was being carried
through for the political expediency of a Tammany-type
machine, not only was a grave injustice being done to Van-
couver’s police force, but the public was being hoodwinked,
in which case both the Police Association and the public
should have a voice in the matter. His Worship’s office
acknowledged the letter but pointedly abstained from giving
any reasons for the ‘reorganization.’

The arbitrary dismissal of Magistrate Matheson and
the appointment of Col. C. H. Hill gives a cue to what
is afoot in McGeer’s police reshuffle. The appeal of the
postoffice sitdowners on the evening of June 18, 1938, to
Postmaster Clarke, City Police Inspector Donald McKay
and RCMP Assistant-Comlissioner Hill, “that all be arrest-
ed and placed in jail since they had nowhere to go” fell on
deaf ears. Hill already had his solution to the “work and
wages” demands of the sitdowners—tear gas, clubs, viol-
ence, against jobless, homeless men and youths. Mayor
McGeer gave them the Riot Act instead of bread and
work. Col. Hill gave them tear gas. and clubs in lieu of a
job and a roof. Such teamwork is highly essential to big
business whose ideas for the postwar period are lifted from
the ‘hungry thirties’ wages based on relief standards, and
a ‘get-tough-with-labor’ policy. Both Senator-Mayor Mc-
Geer and Col. Hill have ‘proven’ themselves in the line of
‘duty’. The election of McGeer by big business was a
recognition of that fact. The appointment of Hill supple-
ments what many labor men now believe—that the police
reshuffle is not warranted because of police inefficiency,
but to consolidate a political machine which can be relied
to crack down hard on labor when the time is considered

opportune.
* * *

Opening of the Hope-Princeton Highway, expected in
September this year, has now been set back to the fall of
1948 because “someone located part of the road in the wrong
place.” One conclusion is that the Liberal and Conservative
politicians who for years have been getting themselves elec-
ted on a promise to complete the highway feel that they
have nothing else to nee once the job is done.

* *

Captain Howard Coulter is reported as having told Di-
vision 1 of the Liberal Association in Vancouver that “the
Liberal Party is a pitiful thing today compared to the times
a century ago when there were men in this country prepared
to suffer and die if necessary for their convictions.” Now
the Liberal Party is headed by men who are equally pre-
pared to let others suffer for their convictions.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 4

Deputy, Police Magistrate Mackenzie Matheson “has been.

.ture of Canadian

,

ins satel el Oo os

AUR

As we see it —

UCHR By Tom McEwen

URING recent weeks an old
familiar cry has been mak-
ing the welkin ring. The ‘more
immigration’ boys have been
whooping it up for larger doses
of this quack medicine for Can-
ada’s growing economic ills. Two
weeks ago agriculture minister
James Gardiner—who has now
become a ‘right honorable’ in
recognition of his services to the
liberal party, advanced the pro-
posal that Canada needs an im-
migrant influx of at least 10
million during the next decade
in crder to become ‘a great na-
tlon’, Premier George Drew has
also been loud in his demands
for ‘more immigration of good
selected British stock.’

Space does not permit our go-
ing into the whole sorry pic-
immigration
during the last three-quarters
of a century, but only to touch
upon a few the disastrous re-
sults which have stemmed from
an immigration policy based
upon a formula out of which the
CPR, mortgage, land sharks,
and other such ‘colonizers’ coin-
ed millions of dollars.

Since the ‘great colonizers’ be-
gan boosting immigration to
Canada nearly a century ago,
some 6% million immigrants
came to Canada. In the same
period considerably more than
that number left Canada to seek
a livelihood and homes else-
where, chiefly to the United
States. Among that 6% million
there was plenty of “good select-
ed British stock.” :

Data gathered by the organ-
ize® labor movement over a long
period of time shows that Can-
ada not only lost her total im-
migration during those years,
but a great portion of her natur-
al growth in population. Then
as now, the emphasis of the
‘more immigration’ quack doctors
was on the need of agricul-
tural workers.

Jobs galore—a land of oppor-
tunity. Who doesn’t remember

the colorful booklets handed out -
by the ‘colonizers’

to lure the
unwary to our shores. Avail-
able statistics on the ‘home-

‘steading’ period of Canadian de-

velopment is a story of stark
poverty, hardship and exploita-
tion that staggers the imagina
tion. But to the ‘colonizers’ and
their political barkers in gov-
ernment, the immigration racket

paid handsome dividends
Why did Canada lose all and
more than she gained in popu-
lation during this period?
answer is simple. Because Cana-
dian immigration was _ based
upon a policy of low standards
—ruthless exploitation of an im-
migrant agricultural population
—low wage standards in indus-
try.
Orr
EDICINE man Drew cackles
about the ‘superiority’ of
British stock.’ Let us see how
this ‘superiori-
ty’ has been ap-
preciated. For
a decade after
the turn of the
century, one
could read inj
the ‘help want-
ed’ columns of
the Winnipeg
Free Press and
other western
journals of the day, that a black-
smith, machinist, bricklayer,
farm hand, or what have you,
was ‘wanted,’ with the added
qualification that ‘no English-
man need apply.’ This wasn’t
because the English immigrant
was an inferior worker to men
of other nationality, but because
he had come to Canada in the
firm belief that he could im-
prove his economic and _ social
status, and was quite outspoken
when he found Canadian stan-
dards below that of ‘back ’ome.’

Of course there were other .

English ‘immigrants,’ the kind
that the late Bob Edwards of
the ‘Calgary Eyeopener’ used to
write about — the ‘remittance’
men, parasites and cast-offs of
the English aristocracy, who had
packed their black sheep off
to Canada in order that their
peccadillos might not soil the
family escutcheon at home. But
they were an insignificant min-
ority.

Across Canada during the pe-
riod of the hungry 30's, the high-
est deportation for labor activi-
ties—or to put it more simply,
for refusing to accept starva-

tion quietly, were men and boys.

of ‘select British stock.’ Good
lads, they came with high hopes,
they saw that Big Business re-
garded them merely as a new
source of cheap labor; and when
they went, the manner of their

The

going spotlighted the rottenness
of an immigration formula,
which the Gardiners and Drews
of today are again trying to ram
down our throats.

Tom Lawrence, the sturdy Bri-
tish lad who organized the min-
ers of Vancouver Island, who
built unions in Nova Scotia and
New Brunswick; who rotted in
Dorchester Penitentiary for two
years for his labor activities—
and from there to deportation
ship. Sam Langley, who helped
unemployed workers to fight for
bread in a dozen Canadian cit-
ies; scores of British miners,
inveigled to Canada under the
Ramsay McDonald regime, and
herded out of Canada by the

‘immigration authorities and the

RCMP because they had the
temerity to think they were en-
titled to a job and a decent
wage.

The type of immigrant wanted
by leaders of government and
industry is neatly illustrated in
a classical bourgeois observation

. Made by Sydney Dobson, presi-

dent of the Royal Bank of Can-
ada in his recent spiel to the
bank shareholders:

“True satisfaction can be
found only when the worke:
values mainly the work he does,
and not how much he is able
to compel” his employer. to pay.
I believe in a high standard of
living for everyone” (?) “but X
am sorry to say that too many
our our people make high wages
and plentiful leisure the great-
est aim of their lives.” i

Now isn’t that just too ducky
for words? Keep your minds off

‘high wages and vacations with

pay and your backs well bent,
in order that you may enjoy to
the full the true rhythm of
toil, as it is (never) experienced
by the money, changers. This,
coupled with the classical hom-
ily of tory Senator Arthur
Meighen, that what Canada.
needs is people fired with the
zeal of ‘hard work and thrift,’
makes the perfect type of immi-
grant desired.

The history of Canadian im-
migration is a history of Gar-
diners and Drews seeking to
augment a cheap labor market
by ‘selling Canada short.’ They
began the racket in 1851 and
their ‘more immigration’ bally-
hoo of 1947 follows a single pat-
tern, the urge to secure an
abundance of cheap labor.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 1947