Review

Compel action on jobs! -

HOSE who looked to the Throne

Speech last week when Parlia-
ment opened for some practical and
effective measures to cope with the
growing menace of, unemployment,
looked in vain. There was nothing
in that Tory docket of legislative
proposals which even came near
to meeting the needs of three-
quarters of a million jobless
workers.

This despite the government’s
own reckoning that the number
drawing unemployment insurance
as of November, 1958 (419,233) is
up by 30 percent over the previous
year. and that is only half of the
picture. Nothing is said of the
tens of thousands of jobless work-
ers who have exhausted their in-
surance benefits—and their patience
—looking for a non-existent job.

The absence of any effective
plans to deal with unemployment
in the Throne Speech is in keep-
ing with Prime Minister Diefen-
baker’s and his Tory ministers’ out:
look, who individually and col-
lectively cheerfully recite that the
“recession” is overt, that the “up-
turn” is here, that unemployment

*«

is not “critical”, and there’s nothing ~

to get excited about.

é 4

For the political henchmen of
big businecs that may all be quite
true, but to jobless workers con-
demned to the uncertainties of
Tory “promises” and a sub-stand-
ard “charitable” existence, the eco-
nomic crisis is a grim reality.

A government which chooses not
to “recognize” a nation of 650 mil-
lion people in China can scarcely
be expected to recognize the plight
ot close to three-quarters of a
million jobless on its own door-
step, unless compelled to do so.

The lobby organized by the
British Columbia Federation of La-
bor for February 2 to Victoria to

‘Press the case of the unemployed,

should be of such numbers and

Phone MUtual 5-5288

Editor — TOM McEWEN

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

Subscription Rates:
One Year: $4.00
Six Months: $2.25

Canadian and Commonwealth
countries (except Australia): $4.00
one year. Australia, United States

4

Pacific tebe ce |

”

and all other countries: $5.00 one |

year,

°

" governmental

EDITORIAL PAGE

*.
~

proportions that no government
can fail to “see” it — and in
doing so get a new concept of

responsibility.

-Moreover, the lobby trek to Vic-
toria should be regarded as a pre-
lude to greater demonstrations —
in Ottawa where the prime res-

ponsibility lies. It should be labor’s -

prime task to make sure that Die-
fenbaker “sees” unemployment —
instead of juggled statistics on
paper.

If the farmers of the prairie
provinces can organize an ‘On-to-
Ottawa’ trek to remind a Tory
government of its promises, how
much more cause has organized
labor and its jobless battalions to
place its case, where its destitute
ranks can be seen as well as heard?

The solution to Tory near-
sightedness is simple. Jobless dem-
cnstrations of such size that no
government can fail to “see” them.
Victoria on February 2 should b
a signal beginning! :

x

Mikoyan's visit ~

BY ALL accounts the recent visit

of Soviet vice-premier Anastas
Mikoyan to the U.S. was a signal
success, despite organized attempts

in high places to make it appear
otherwise.

Details. of » Mikoyan’s country-
wide tour and the warm and
friendly reception accorded: him by
all sections of the American people,
all attest to the fact that co-exist-
ence, friendship and peace between
the world’s two greatest ‘capitalist
and sotialist states, is not only de-
sirable ~but easily possible.

The only hostile forces aimed at

destroying vice-premier Mikoyan’s

personal ability to “win friends and

- influence people” for peace and

commerce between the U.S. and
the Soviet Union, were the Penta-
gon’s Hungarian “freedom fighter”
parades, official Washington itself

Comment

which behaved like a petulant bo
plus a handful of notorious
brass press hawks whose anti-Sovit
bias and ability to falsify new
is internationally known. Ee

Current opinion in the U.S. sine
Mikoyan’s visit is that the State
partment under its “brinkmanship’
maniac John Foster Dulles, haj
“muffed: again” in its handling 0}
the vice-premier’s tour, a
it as one of “the most wretch
blunders in that department
blunder-filled history.” ;

Question for Canadians raised
by the Mikoyan visit to the \
to promote peaceful co-existenc
and extended trade is a_simpl
one; why didn’t official Ottawa
faced with staggering NATO bud,
gets, declining trade, and mass In,
employment, invite the Soviet vice,
premier to visit Canada for thy
promotion of extended Canadian,
Soviet trade relations? :

Or did John Foster Dulles sa

“No”?

Tom
McEwen

"| PPHE TREE of Liberty” wrote
| fees Jefferson, “must be
refreshed from time to time with

the blood of patriots and tyrants. -

It ‘is its natural manure.”

Today the kept press of im-
perialist aggression, silent al-
ways, or defending the blood-lust
of its paymasters, is howling to
high heaven about the execution
of Batista terrorists and mass
killers of the Cuban people. _

One could gather from the
January 16 edition of The Pro-
vince and similar newspapers in
this and other imperialist strong-
holds, that Fidel Castro and the
‘revolutionary people of Cuba,
who are now settling accounts
“with ‘the deposed U.S.-supported
Batista gangster regime, can-
not now build democracy in
Cuba without. the aid of The
Province and the “public lead-
ers” it has enlisted to create the
necessary atmosphere for foreign
intervention and counter-revolu-

’ tion in -Cuba.

We do not like, or attempt to

justify killing, period. But neither
do we like the historical role of
right-wing social democracy and
its spokesmen who join in this- °
interventionist “appeals” as that
set out by The Province, and who
close their eyes and lips to the
monstrous crimes of imperialist
aggression against peoples who
seek to exterminate the remnants
of a ruthless dictatorship as a
preliminary to building peace, in-
dependence, and democracy as
they see it. ;

These same people who now
join with The Province, the Tor-
onto Globe and Mail and other
mouthpieces of reaction, remained
deathly silent on the wholesale
nfassacres of the Cuban people

_ by the U.S.-supported and armed

Batista regime. ‘

No protest came from their’
lips when scores of Cuban trade
unionists, socialists, democrats, in-
tellectuals, the best sons and
daughters of Cuba fell before the
firing squads and hangmen of
Fulgencio Batista.

Now they are “shocked”, “in-
dignant”, “outraged” and what-
not, because Castro and his pro--
visional government won’t adopt
the Eisenhower-Macmillan form-
ula of letting “bygones be by-
gones”. with respect to fascist

terrorists and killers of the peo-

ple. :

We have heard ne word of pro-
test from-such “public leaders’

. cel

“lution.

' Batista regime collapsed.)

at the blood - bath launched
against the people of Cyprus,
whose only “crime” is their de-
mand for freedom and independ-
ence from. British imperialism.
And nary a a peep from the same
source on the fate of tens of
thousands of African tribesmen

_in Kenya, the Belgian Congo, and —

elsewhere on the African contin-
ent, where shooting down natives
in cold blood has almost become
a sports pastime of the white
“baas.” Nor of the extermination
of countless thousands of Alger-~
ian patriots, stubbornly continu- —
ing their struggle for freedom
and independence from the talon
claws of French imperialism.
Verily the tree of Liberty has
been well “refreshed” by the
blood of patriots, striving to win ~
freedom and independence from
imperialist exploitation and ag-
gression.
When a handful of tyrants
meet a well-merited fate, a
howl goes up, a howl with a
motive — that of providing a
“moral” pretext for direct armed
intervention in the Cuban revo-

(It is known that U.S. Marines
were already en route to Cuba,
but were “detoured” when the *

At the crimes of imperialism,
right-wing ‘social democracy ~ is*
silent, but in victorious revolu-
tion and people’s democracy, they
join in chorus with imperialism
in a vain attempt to behead the
revolution. ei

‘ .

be

January 23,

1959 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE

I