Kingfish Weasels

Sitting in the darkened projection room of the Ontario Censor Board last week, Provincial Premier Mitchell F. Hepburn watched a new MARCH OF TIME film release, "Canada at War." Mitch had precipitated a Dominion general election by telling Canada and the world at large that Canada's war effort as organized by the Mackenzie King Government was a fizzle.

But across the screen marched battalions of snappy, young soldiers in new khaki uniforms with new Lee-Enfield rifles.

Training schools of the Royal Canadian Air Force hummed with activity. Here was a nation depicted as it went to war in a big way. Mitch shifted uneasily in his chair, growing more annoyed every minute. Suddenly the features of William Lyon Mackenzie King flashed upon the screen as the Prime Minister outlined the Government's large-scale war measures.

That was too much for Mitch. He rushed out, and instructed the Board to ban the film in Ontario until after the election.

"Pure political propaganda for the Mackenzie King Government," fumed Ontario's Kingfish, who would like to make noise enough to grab the Liberal party leadership away from Mackenzie King.* "No party ... is going to get away with that sort of thing. If they want to show the extent of Canada's war effort, let them show the hundreds of thousands of unemployed who are walking the streets looking for a chance to enlist or find work in industry at a time when the very security of the country is at stake."

Mitch realized that with the Dominion parliamentary elections coming on March 26, "Canada at War" would do his Cassandra crusade little good. While he continued to rage against the film, accusing MARCH OF TIME of conniving with the Government, Canada at large lost patience with noisy Mitch, and his ban. "Arrant nonsense," snapped the Montreal Star. "It would be difficult to imagine any more puerile or childish action." Actually every country in the world except Soviet Russia and Germany would see the film, and Toronto newspapers republished its dialogue.

Fighting mad over this reaction, Mitch fairly outdid himself by "exposing" on the very next day "a violent disturbance" at the air training centre near St. Thomas, Ont., where he declared several hundred fed-up and disgusted recruits had gone A. W. O. L. The New York Post gave the story front-page prominence, headlining it "Mutiny," and the German radio broadcast it as evidence of disunion in Canada. "I did not mention the word mutiny or the word riot," hedged Mitch. "I said there was a violent disturbance and there was." Norman Rogers, Canadian Minister of Defense, promptly and emphatically denied each point of the Hepburn accusation, invited Mitch and the press to visit the St. Thomas centre and see for themselves. But Mitch weaseled, refused to visit the camp, complained, "You might go to a house the day after a murder was committed there and find no evidence of a disturbance at all." In protest against the Kingfish's undignified antics, this week his right-hand man and Provincial Secretary, Harry Nixon, resigned from the Ontario Cabinet.

*In Vancouver, the film was independently advertised as extolling the war work of Minister of National Defense Ian Mackenzie.

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