Crisis on the Home Front

Political sunlight streamed down on pallid Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King during the conference at Quebec. Thousands of pictures in thousands of newspapers showed him basking between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The broad Prime Minister beamed, thinking perhaps that Canadians who have been showering cold criticism on his wartime administration would now see him in the proper light: as a statesman helping to make big Allied decisions with Churchill and Roosevelt.

Canadians were unimpressed.

As soon as the Quebec sunshine faded, Mackenzie King faced his gravest home-front crisis of the war. Louder than ever, Canadians asked: 1) why prices continue to climb despite numerous war controls and restrictions; 2) why Canada's manpower seems so planlessly distributed; 3) why Prime Minister Mackenzie King avoids a Federal election.

Evidence from Quebec. At its 59th annual convention in Quebec, the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, representing 1,828 local unions, demanded that Mackenzie King's Labor Minister, Humphrey Mitchell, be fired at once. The convention cheered Ernest Ingles, delegate from Vancouver, as he charged that both the Wartime Prices and Trade Board and Canada's conscription system were "anti-labor." Delegate Ingles called W.P.T.B. Chairman Donald Gordon "the strongest Nazi element in this country."

The Congress demanded full representation for labor in war control agencies and in running Canada's war effort. Otherwise, let Mackenzie King "submit his record to the people so that democracy may prevail."

Evidence from Ontario. Mackenzie King had good reason to blanch at the prospect of an election. August's Provincial election in pivotal Ontario had given the Progressive Conservatives 38 Parliament seats, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (whose backbone is organized Labor) 34, against 14 for Mackenzie King's Liberal Party.

Evidence from Ottawa. Out of his political hat Prime Minister Mackenzie King pulled something new to Canadians and the rest of the world: a foreign policy for Canada.

His Parliamentary Under Secretary, Brooke Claxton said Canada wants:

> An early Anglo-American-Russian conference.

> Membership in the Pan American Union.

> Immediate creation of postwar organizations by the United Nations.

> Close cooperation with the U.S. in defense of the American continent; inclusion of Britain as a bastion of American defenses.

> No return to trade restrictions if the U.S. will not return to high tariffs.

> Substitution of wide international trade for the Ottawa Agreements.*

In an era of enigmatic national foreign policies, these pronouncements seemed progressive, unequivocal. But by all indications, the Canadian people also want a progressive, unequivocal policy at home.

*These Agreements, suspended for the war's duration, created preferential trade prices and facilities within the British Empire.

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