Report from Canada
ANDRAS, A
By A. Andras Report from Canada Recession is seriously affecting her economy Ottawa The wartime prophets of postwar depression were all wrong? for quite a while. Then came a rather...
...The Tories have reacted strongly to the Government's declaration that it would stay out of a Southeast Asia pact...
...But people do talk of recession...
...The Government evidently feels that it will not last long enough to affect political prestige...
...The question, of course, is: How long...
...It has taken the position that intervention in that trouble spot should be through the UN rather than through a grouping of powers...
...As I write, wheat prices have been slashed...
...Now the dip is far worse, but there is no Korean corrective to do the trick...
...To a good many Canadians, the fall of Dienbienphu was much more than a military loss...
...Inevitably, collective bargaining has become a lot tougher, and unions are settling for what would have been considered peanuts only a couple of years ago...
...It has taken no short-term measures to make jobs...
...Since the world wheat market is a major Canadian preoccupation, the pall of gloom has spread from the Western farmlands into the cities...
...These moves do not mean that the social revolution is just around the corner, but they are well worth watching...
...It appeared for a while that Prime Minister St...
...The farmers' heyday appears to have come and gone, too...
...Then came a rather disturbing dip, only to be corrected by Korea...
...Canadian-American friendship has been somewhat strained...
...As a result, textile towns, which are frequently one-industry towns, are in a very bad way indeed...
...It raised questions concerning the ability of the free world as a whole to cope with Communism effectively or even to learn to live with it if we must...
...Refusal to share atomic know-how hasn't helped, nor have the successive hydrogenbomb explosions...
...Textiles is a prostrated industry, automobile production is way down, and iron and steel are feeling the pinch, to mention a few of the hard-hit industries...
...Add to this fairly stable farm costs and the result is a scissor squeeze which is hurting not only the farmer but the city slicker as well...
...But it will also push the moribund coal industry a little closer to the grave and leave the depressed maritime provinces, if possible, a little more depressed (and depressing...
...the seasonal upswing is later and less effective than usual, and the signs point to a slackening of the capital flow...
...It will mean jobs, of course, and new power resources...
...Oppenheimer did not go down well...
...There is no adequate price-support program to keep up farmer purchasing power...
...As for Senator McCarthy, Canadians have watched with a fascinated horror the ability of this man to get away with so much at such a cost to American prestige and selfrespect...
...It will leave the country in a troubled frame of mind...
...The CCF has also taken the British position on recognition of Red China...
...The Canadian Congress of Labor and the Trades and Labor Congress (CIO and AFL counterparts, respectively) have set up a minimum program of labor unity which has been channeled so far into efforts to get something done about unemployment and into no-raiding understandings...
...Parliament will have recessed by the time this is in print...
...The CCF has criticized the Government, too, on this policy...
...In Quebec, independent political action is being reviewed by the Canadian and Catholic Confederations of Labor...
...But it may also be setting the stage by its inconclusiveness for some new realignments...
...The fact of the matter is that there is a good deal of unemployment in Canada, worse than at any time since the war...
...Lawrence Seaway, coming at last after so many years, is the aftermath of too much anticipation...
...No one is quite willing to say that all of this spells depression...
...The St...
...Laurent had the same idea in mind during his world tour, but his enthusiasm for it waned as he got nearer home—and nearer his native, passionately anti-Communist Quebec...
...It has somehow fallen flat...
...Yet, disturbing though the domestic scene may be, it is foreign affairs which add the extra wrinkle to the Canadian brow...
...With an increase in the labor force and improved productivity, the pools of unemployed that management pined for are here at last...
...On the other hand, the Supreme Court decision on segregation in education was a faith-restorative...
...Farm prices have dropped sharply, and the bottom hasn't been reached yet...
...It has quite deliberately, it seems, decided that textiles and agricultural implements should be starved down to a smaller size, whatever the human or capital costs...
...It is probably this loss of confidence which has broken down the appreciable measure of unanimity which was a feature of foreign-policy debate in Parliament for several years...
...Tentative steps toward joint action on issues of mutual concern have been taken by the two major labor congresses with a Western farmers' organization of still somewhat unproven potential...
...The treatment accorded Dr...
...It has gone through one of the longest—and dullest—of sessions...
...it became symbolic of a greater failure...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 28
