~ Tom McEwen

AN I have an apple, Mom?” asked .

Johnny as he rummaged through the various packages of groceries Mom had just brought from the store. %

“J didn’t buy any apples, Johnny, Mom replied as she deposited the last of her purchases on the kitchen table. “Apples are much too expensive

“Aw, gee whiz Mom, why can’t we have apples ?”

hock ah February of this year the Pacific Tribune ran a news item from the Okanagan, heart of British Colum- bia’s appie country, which, among other things, pointed out that this year the total income to the apple growers would be around 35 cents a box for all grades. j :

Since he does all the pruning, spray- ing, cultivating, picking, and buys the boxes; and wages an endless battle against all sorts of insects, (including packers), to say nothing of the weather hazards of frost and drouth he faces, it is clear that the 35 to 40 cents the in- dividual apple grower receives for his

efforts isn’t the reason Johnny cannot °

have all the apples he can eat. x x

Some time ago a PT correspondent in Wainwright, Alberta, sent along a large advertisement from an Alberta paper, urging folks like Johnny’s Mom to buy lots of apples at “bargain prices. For a “junior box” (net weight 20 lbs.) of “Fancy Delicious Apples the price quoted was $2.69, with a

similar box of “Fancy Mackintosh |

Apples” at $2.59. (The standard box of apples has a net weight of approxl- mately 40-42 ibs.). he Our Alberta correspondent did some simple arithmetic, deducting the 35 cents the grower receives from the $2.69 the consumer has to pay, then asked us, “Who pockets the difference? Well, there is the big monopoly packer who seems to do very well on fruit growing, although, practically speaking, he probably couldn’t grow a

crop of skunk cabbage. Then there’s -

the inevitable “middle-man,” the wholesaler, who may know little or nothing about apple growing, but who manages to get a goodly sized bite from the grower’s apple crop. Then, of course, there are the transport com- panies which pile on all the traffic will bear. Paes

To Johnny it just doesn’t make sense, but then Johnny wants apples rather than statistics on the profits of apple packers, middlemen, transport com- panies and all the other agencies who put the profit bite on the apple grower, then on Johnny and his Mom. |

There’s another angle to this apple

business which would make Johnny’s and his Mom’s eyes pop, a picture often seen in the heart of B. C.’s famed fruit belt; a picture of scores of tons of apples left on the trees or on the ground be-

cause it’s not even worth the grower’s:

~ time to pick them up. Mountains of apples and other fruit are deposited at some central garbage dump by enter- prising packers as a method of keeping prices “stable’—and Johnny without apples. ;

y e e Pacific Tribune ‘Published weekly at ‘Room 6 — 426 Main Street Vancouver 4, B.C.

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

Subscription Rates One year: $4.00 Six months: $2.25 Canadian and Commonwealth countries (except Australia): $4.00 one year Australia, United States and all other countries: $5.00 one year. Authorized as second class mail by the Post Office Department, Ottawa

EDITORIAL PAGE

1867 and 1957

oes ‘NINE years ago the Canadas faced a crisis in which the very survival of this land was at stake: whether to be swallowed up by an expanding United States looking with greedy eyes to the north; or to unite all patriotic forces to assert our in dependence and fashion our nationhood.

Unity prevailed. Canada _be- came a nation, welded under the skilfull hands of Sir John A. Mac. donald. ans

In essence there is a similarity between the events of 1867 and the struggle for Canadian control of the national gas pipeline today.

For embodied in this struggle is not only the pipeline; the revela- tions of the St. Laurent govern- ment’s betrayal of this national heritage to alien hands has brought to public attention the whole treason — the yielding of sovereign control of our destiny to the U.S.

Today as in 1867 patriotic voices are being heard in every part of the land protesting this betrayal and the despicable way in which it is being done by a government riding roughshod over all opposition.

But today there are new forces

in the land that were not present

in 1867: a powerful labor move- ment united in its demand that the pipeline be owned and operated by , Canadians for Canadians; and the political parties of labor — the CCF and the LPP — fighting to de feat the government's plan. To gether with these, strong allies are coming to the fore among the farmers of the West; from scores of democratic organizations, in- cluding church bodies; and from

large sections of the capitalist class

great Mackenzie River, 70 miles south of the Arctic Ocean. Federal authorities » decided to move the settlement because it was slowly sinking into the thawing permafrost.

who see theix interests imperilled by the government’s anti-Canadian pro-American policy.

As yet the alliance of these patri- otic forces is loose and unwieldly. What is needed, what can defeat the government and change the direction of national policy, is the unity of all these forces.

For from being a ‘‘dead duck”’ now that the government has used dictatorial power to run its bill through ‘parliament, the battle will go on, as will the battle for sovereign control of parliament by the people, so outraged by Trade Minister C. D. Howe and his col- leagues. The issue of the pipeline is the issue of national policy.

Unity of all patriotic forces as in 1867 can in the months to come unhorse this government of betrayal

- and elect a new House of Commons

that will assert the demand so splendidly put to the Gordon Com- mission by the united trade unions

/ —for a “‘free independent Cana-

dian nation.”

‘

The man’s mad

Tz VISIT to these parts of

Field Marshal Viscount Mont- gomery was undoubtedly staged to bolster a sagging NATO with a bit of heavy sabre-rattling.

Monty would drop H-bombs ‘‘on anybody,’ anywhere, any time, all under the specious pretext of ‘stopping aggression.”’

Aware that his sabre-rattling is not exactly popular in this coun- try, Monty was loud in his de- mand for a “‘national newspaper” in times of emergency ‘to “‘keep the morale high . . . and to make the people think that the situation is under control.”

Psychiatrists should find these professional militarists who yearn to blow everything and everybody to hell, then lie about it, an inter- esting object for study. The aver- age layman thinks they are just plain nuts, requiring strong re- straint.

Hal Griffin

yeast weekend, after being held up

for a year, the bulldozers went to work in the Great Fraser Midden at Marpole. Now all that remains of the greatest archeological site of its kind in the world is the small section excavated by Dr. Charles E. Borden of UBC last summer and an equally small uncleared section adjoining it. ‘

have a new suburban hotel — and its citizens will have lost an oppor- tunity to add to their scanty knowl- edge of the ancient people who pre- ceded them in the Fraser River Delta 2,000 years ago. With a less mercenary approach by Vancouver City Council and an attitude worthy of a province preparing to celebrate its centenary, this city could have preserved a cultural heritage and still have added an hotel to its tax rolls.

' In a few months Vancouver will -

The day that the bulldozers went into the.Fraser Midden the Koerner Foundation announced its grants, the smallest of them $500 to the UBC department of anthropology to sur- vey archeological sites. Yet $5,000 might have enabled the department to excavate all that the bulldozers have uprooted and destroyed. And

when the scientists had read the story buried deep in the clamshell the hotel could still have been built. 5 5°3 a

Last summer there was a public outery. Liberals like Elmore Phil- pott, MP, CCFers and Labor-Pro- gressives all demanded that some- thing be done to save this one re- maining unexcavated stretch of the midden. But what? é

The city council was not interested in saving it. With the post-war ex- pansion of the city the land had become valuable. The _ council’s only concern was to get it back on to the tax rolls. Aldermen com- plained that the Vancouver City Museum had held the land for years © without doing anything with it, ignoring the fact that the city’s $18,000 annual grant is inadequate to run even the present attic museum, let alone finance field excavations.

The land was placed on the mar- ket and one lot was bulldozed. The resultant public protest was suffici- ent, had it been united, to have re- versed the decision. But some

' came interested and went around

wanted to preserve the site and erect on it a replica of an Indian house in which artifacts taken from the midden might be displayed. Others opposed this because they felt the city’s first need was a good central museum. And while they argued the opportunity to conduct a public campaign was lost. Now it is too late.

It seems that for all our 70 years as a city we are still short of cul- tural maturity. But not the people of Vancouver as individuals.

The day the bulldozers began work I went to watch while they un- covered the centuries-old floors where once houses stood and to help retrieve a few of the things turn up before they were buried again beneath concrete foundations.

_There were some university and high school students, a cement work- er, a garage mechanic, a gardener. Dr. Borden wandered disconsolately over the flattened ash-black earth. Even the building superintendent be-

with his eyes to the ground.

Passersby stopped to watch and vent their indignation. “It’s a crime,” exclaimed a doctor who pulled up in his car. “Can’t something be done to stop it?”

The answer was obvious. The bulldozer pushed inexorably ahead, erasing the story of an ancient people with every sweep of its blade.

June 8, 1956 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 5