New Jack, Old Giant

Canada's young, yeasty and frankly Socialist C.C.F. (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation) party gave Canadian financiers something more to worry about. It began to talk about nationalizing the Dominion's big life-insurance business ($7 billion in insurance in force).

The man who proposed that the state should take all this over was an ex-Y.M.C.A. worker turned economist: mild-mannered, boyish (29) Lloyd Shaw, research director of the C.C.F. He announced last week that the party is making its own investigation of the life-insurance business. More than that, he forecast its findings:

1) that Canadians are paying two or three times too much for life insurance;

2) that interlocking directorates between insurance companies and major industries have created "monopolistic controls and economic dictatorships."

These charges made most life-insurance men, who regard their companies as models of business propriety, hopping mad. But they were determined not to get into an uncontrollable brawl. They left all the talking to the president of the Canadian Life Insurance Officers' Association, staid Henry William Manning. Snorted Mr. Manning: "The investigation is farcical as well as political and needlessly disturbing to 4,000,000 policyholders. . . ."

The real significance of the C.C.F. investigation into life insurance was not that it would be political, which it most certainly would be. The fact that C.C.F. leaders were willing to attack the giant insurance companies meant they had apparently decided that the time had come to talk even louder about the party's Socialist objectives.

They were banking on a trend. The political pendulum is now definitely swinging to the left in Canada. C.C.F. was betting it must swing much farther.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.