1922-03-17

THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S SPEECH ADDRESS IN REPLY

[Stage Direction]
Consideration of the motion of Mr. Mc-Murray for an Address to His Excellency the Governor General in reply to his speech at the opening of the session, resumed from Thursday, March 16.
Mr. NEILL (resuming) :: When the
House rose last evening I was about to take some points in the Speech from the Throne. The first point to which I wish to draw attention is that section of the Speech which deals with unemployment. I consider the unemployment question has two phases as dealt
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with in this speech. The first is in reference to the obligation to relieve the distress caused by unemployment, and the other is the necessity to take steps to prevent unemployment. The Government claim that the matter of the relief of those absolutely destitute is fundamentally a municipal and provincial responsibility. I am not in a position to dispute that statement, and, as it has not been dealt withby the leader of the Opposition, I assume the statement is correct; but I hold the Government entirely responsible for taking steps to do away with unemployment, though they do not deal with the question of relief. In that regard I wish to quote just a few words from a debate in the British House of Commons. One of the members of the cabinet said, speaking about unemployment-
He thought the speech of the Prime Minister had denoted the fact that Parliament had concurred in the view and accepted the task of governing the people of this country by providing the masses with two conditions, employment and contentment.
Another member of the government, G. M. Barnes, said, speaking on the same subject-[DOT]
The classes who have the running of this country would be judged in proportion as they could And organized employment for the great mass of the people.
I think that is a very well-founded theory of the unemployment situation to-day, and I consider that if the Government could take such steps as would lead, so to speak, to the abolition of unemployment, it would be not only good statesmanship but good political expediency;-after all, the practical politician always keeps one eye on the ballot box. We all know that a contented voter is a Government voter. If times are good and work plentiful, the average voter will not desire a change of Government, but our experience is that when a voter becomes discontented he is ready at once to take a chance on a change of Government. Unemployment is so universal now that it has gone beyond a national question, and has become an international question. Each nation has endeavoured to solve the question for itself, generally by building up high tariff walls to keep their people employed, within the boundaries of each nation. I believe wider action will have to be taken, before world-wide unemployment will disappear. It may be that I have a fantastic idea as to the remedy, but I hold that the only way to handle the unemployment situation is for all nations, without exception, to cancel their war debts. I read a

treatise the other day by an American professor in one of the economic colleges. It is called "America and the Balance Sheets of Europe". It goes very fully into this question, taking each nation in turn, and shows that these nations are heading, not slowly but rapidly, towards bankruptcy. He shows that in many states the income is as low as 28 per cent of expenditure, and he asks where this is going to end. He states that one of two things have to be done by these nations, either they will have to add to their debt, which will make a worse budget for them, or issue more paper money, which is equally disastrous. He points out, after a very well-studied exposition of the subject, that the only solution is for the nations of the world to cancel their debts universally, and, though an American professor, he suggests that the first step should be taken by America, because she has most to gain. He points to the anomalous and almost absurd position, that every nation in the world is demanding that Germany, and every nation, should pay what they owe in money, and they refuse to accept payment in the only manner in which Germany could possibly pay, and that is in goods. Germany says: "We have not a gold reserve to pay you, and we will pay you in goods"-The other nations say: "We do not want your goods". France has to a very small extent accepted some goods as reparation in connection with the damage to the devastated area, but it is a very small and restricted amount. The other nations absolutely refuse to take the goods. Germany says: "We are willing to work long hours at low wages; our currency has depreciated; we can land our goods in your market at a very low price, if you will allow us to sell you those goods in payment for our debt." But the nations will not accept these goods, and build up tariff walls against them. If the nations were content to cancel the war debts, there would be such a demand for manufactured articles that it would go far to do away with unemployment. That is a theory it perhaps does not become me to enunciate in this House at the present time.
The next item in the Speech from the Throne is the statement that the Government has taken steps to obtain better and wider markets, and this refers particularly to trade with Australia. I am particularly interested in that branch of the subject and I hope the Minister of Trade and Commerce, when he makes the treaty with Australia, will not forget to take into consideration

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the pulp and paper industry. Australia has a preferential tariff with the Mother Country on paper. If that tariff were extended to Canada it would he of the very greatest benefit to the paper and pulp industry, especially on the Pacific coast. I think there are some six large paper mills in British Columbia, four of them are in my district, and they employ a large body of men. There are two towns associated with those mills, and there are also logging camps, in which a large number of men are employed directly and indirectly by the industry. Two of the four mills are shut down, and the other two are running at half capacity. If this arrangement with Australia be carried out, of our getting the same preferential rate on paper as is given to the Old Country, it would give a tremendous stimulus to the paper mills of British Columbia and would to a large extent help the unemployment situation there.
We come now to the question of railway rates. There is a suggestion that some measure of relief may be obtained, or will shortly be obtained, in connection with railway rates. If this is anything more than a mere vague reference to the subject, if there is any established knowledge behind that, or any certain belief that this can be accomplished, if I had been drawing up the Speech, instead of putting this in an obscure corner of a paragraph, I would have displayed it in great, big letters two inches long, right across the Speech. Reduction of freight rates is one of the most important and immediately pressing matters that can be carried out in this House at the present time.
I should like to mention an incident; it is only an incident; but it can be duplicated, no doubt, in a thousand cases. This ocurred in>
my own riding. In the valley of Al-berni, in which I live, there is a saw mill located at Port ATberni. It is not a very big mill as we in British Columbia regard saw mills; but it has a capacity that allowed it to send, not three cars, but three great trains a week of lumber into the prairies. This lumber was all consigned to the prairies, going out regularly three trains a week, with occasionally an extra train. In the fall of 1920, increased freight rates suddenly went into effect. Inside of three weeks that mill was shut down-that was about October-and it was not opened again until the following June. When it did begin to ship again, not one stick of lumber went over that railroad en route to the
prairies; it is all going by water route to the Orient. That condition of affairs can be duplicated in, not one mill, but hundreds of mills in British Columbia. That gives an illustration of what high freight rates do as regards promoting or preventing trade. It contains a moral also for the railway company. That railway company are still running freight trains into that district, two trains a week; but for the most part they bring in empty cars and for the most part they take empty cars out. There is a little local freight, a few carloads of fish and so on; but for the most part those railway trains are running nearly as regularly as before, and they are carrying practically nothing. Would it not be far better to carry the lumber that was available for carrying, even at reduced freight rates? It is a matter of fact that any business or any railway can always secure a certain quantity of what might be called the irreducible minimum of traffic. If the corner grocery sells a loaf of bread at double the price at which it can be obtained at another grocer's store six blocks down town, it will always catch a certain trade, those who are in a hurry or in certain circumstances. That is the irreducible minimum. The railway that holds up its rates to a high extent will always catch that measure of trade that it is absolutely imperative must go over the road, and any railway will get that; but no industry or no railway ever paid its way on the irreducible minimum of trade or traffic; it is only the extra business, after the overhead is paid, that makes it profitable either to a business or a railway. When they cut down their freight rates and get the extra business, they get beyond the irreducible minimum and down to a profitable basis.
Some hon. members may be familiar with the London and Brighton railway which is a fairly large railway in the Old Country. In its report of last year it says that, owing to the high fares, nine million fewer passengers were carried. That is, not that nine million passengers were carried, but that nine million fewer were carried1 owing to the high passenger fares, and that is on a little railway running between London and Brighton. That is a specimen of what business one is likely to lose by increasing freight or passenger rates above what the traffic will stand.


Mr. MACLEAN (York) :: Is there not an agreement now in existence in conection with the Crow's Nest Pass that expires in
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a short time, and that is responsible for the increase given a short time ago causing those high rates of which my hon. friend complains? When does that agreement expire?


Alan Webster Neill: So far as my memory goes, I think it expires some time this year-in June or July; and I earnestly hope the Government will take such steps as not to perpetuate it.
We now come to that much vexed and-wearisome subject of the tariff. I will, however, promise hon. members that I will try to attack it from a somewhat different angle. I have in my hand, I think, a whole compendium of a great deal of wisdom on the tariff, comprised in two short sentences, which, I think, ought to be printed and hung up in every hall, committee room and office in this building. This is not my own composition:
1.	That free trade and protection offer an interminable case for counsel on both sides.
That is one postulate.
2.	That it is perfectly easy for anyone who takes the trouble to study both sides to make out a good case for either.
If hon. members appreciated those two axiomatic propositions, what a lot of trouble and discussion would be saved! I heartily agree with the first proposition, and for that reason I do not, for one moment, propose to endeavour to convert any hon. member to my way of thinking on the tariff question. When hon. members from the prairies say that they are in favour of free trade, I am perfectly willing to accept their word;
I do not need to be convinced about the matter. I am willing to believe they know their business best and what would be best for that section. The tariff question is not a political one, but a geographical one, and you cannot change a man's belief, supposing you talked to him from now to Doomsday. The only way to change his belief would be to change his environment. If you take an Ontario manufacturer and transplant him into the district which these hon. gentlemen represent, you will see how soon he too will become a free trader. The converse holds good; put a man from the prairies into British Columbia or Quebec, and he will very soon have a change of tariff belief. But until that is done it is useless to try to convert hon. members, because they are most familiar with conditions in their part of the country, and surely they know best. Even if we could find some weakling who

allowed his opinion to be changed by any poor argument that might be advanced, that would not amount to much, because every hon. member is, I am sure, pledged to his constituents in some measure on the tariff, and he would be bound to vote in accordance with the wishes of those who elected him. I will not, therefore, give my own opinion on this question: I will only state what we in British Columbia, or at least, the section which I represent, want and as to that I will quote, if you will permit me, a very few words from a manifesto which I issued at the time of my election. It comprises my sentiments in a very few words:
The Tariff will not be settled on political but on geographical lines as each section of the country wants a different tariff. The result will be a compromise.
Will it not be that? It always has been; indeed, it always will be. The result will be a compromise and therefore:
I will join heartily with the other British Columbia members in endeavouring to get as good terms as possible for British Columbia, that is a somewhat lower tariff on the manufactured goods we buy and such a duty on live materials we sell as will enable us to live and maintain B.C. as a White Man's country.
I was speaking then to the electors of the Comox-Alberni district, and of course I had their interests at heart. We want a tariff, as the hon. member for Yale (Mr. MacKelvie) said yesterday, on fruit. I will leave him to deal with that. We want not so much a tariff as protection-I would almost call it common honesty

on eggs. I would like to explain that. There is a small tariff on eggs, and the farmers do not ask that that tariff be increased. They are making a simple, modest request that imported eggs be subject to the same laws as our eggs are subjected to. Is that an extravagant demand-free trade or protection? Surely it is protection of the right kind. Hon. gentlemen who do not understand the situation will hardly believe that the situation is this. In Canada, there is a strict Egg Inspection Act. If I ship a carload of eggs from British Columbia to Montreal, they are not allowed to leave my station until they are inspected by an inspector of the Dominion Government and passed according to a strict standard. I know a case where a carload of eggs was being shipped to Montreal. It did not come up to the Government grade and was therefore rejected. The sale fell through and the man at the other end, in Montreal, bought American eggs, ungraded and un-

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standardized, and at a lower price, with which he filled the order. All that the egg producers, those of the West at least, are asking, is that imported eggs shall be standardized the same as our eggs are. Surely that is not unreasonable. There was a meeting of egg producers and wholesale men the other day, at which, I thought, the wholesale men took a most selfish attitude. It was going to cause them some little trouble to change their system of handling eggs, and one of the arguments brought forward was the old time-honoured one that the Americans would not ship any eggs to this country if we put such horrible restrictions upon them,-horrible restrictions to which we ourselves have been subject for years. Well, we need not worry about that. Inside of four days after notice goes to the American importer here that he is to have his eggs standardized in accordance with the Canadian grade system, the regulations will be put into effect, and the eggs that enter this country will be standardized according to Canadian regulation. I do not think that this is at all unreasonable; we have a right to ask that the imported eggs should be subject to the same conditions as are imposed upon the local product.
Then we come to another brand of imported eggs, namely, Chinese eggs, from fowls fed on garbage under conditions such as I could not even mention in this House, although the records are there to be ascertained. The eggs are shipped here and consumed in this country. Some five thousand cases were imported into Montreal the other day, and it is satisfactory to me to know-seeing that we in British Columbia are suffering from the inroads of the Asiatics-that some of these eggs were consumed in Ottawa and were bought at prices paid for the best local eggs. That is a proven fact. In connection with Chinese eggs, we are not asking, as we might very well, with justification, demand, that these be prohibited as a menace to the health of the people of Canada. We simply ask that when Mrs. Housewife chooses to buy eggs,- if she wants to get Chinese eggs she shall have an opportunity of seeing just what she is getting. We can then leave it to the good sense, and, perhaps, the patriotism, of the Canadian woman to make her choice between the best fresh eggs and Chinese eggs. To come back to the question of standardization of American eggs, is it not, as one man expressed it, a matter of protection in reverse gear?
We are protecting the importer at the expense of the local man.
Now I come to the question of butter. I do not know whether there is a tariff on butter; perhaps the Minister of Agriculture (Mr. Motherwell) can tell me whether there is or not. If there is, it is a comparatively small one, and the farmer is not asking for any increase on that. What he is asking for is protection against oleomargarine. Oleomargarine was for many years prohibited in Canada because it was felt to be unfit for invalids and children. During the stressful times of the war, however, when butter was scarce and it was necessary to export as much as possible to Prance, the importation of oleomargarine was allowed. But it was never suggested that it was to be permitted to be used as a substitute for butter, for it is not such, it is only an imitation, and as that it was allowed to come in for consumption during that time. It is made from vegetable oils grown under tropical or semitropical conditions by cheap negro labour. When the war was over, the farmer in Canada naturally expected to be relieved of that competition. I saw a notice in the paper the other day that some one had said that oleomargarine ought to be allowed to be sold for the benefit of the poor; and by way of proof-a most inadequate proof I thought-it was contended that it was not hurting the butter industry in view of the fact that since 1919 more butter was being shipped to Europe than before. That only goes to. prove, if it proves anything at all, that the producers of butter in Canada are being forced to seek outside markets by reason of the unfair competition from oleomargarine in the home market. But apart altogether from the question of protecting home industries, I say that, on purely humanitarian grounds, for the safeguarding of the health of the people, the use of oleomargarine should be prohibited. And I may say, Sir, that it is a well known fact that it is not the poor people at large who use oleomargarine; they have too little money to spend on such stuff as that, they have to buy butter simply because it is the most economical. No; it is the profiteers who use it,-they feed it to their servants and dependents. In the city of Rochester-a city which, I understand, is rather prominent in the promotion of sanitary and allied questions-there is an orphan home where, during the war, they were driven, like ourselves, to use oleomargarine. It

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is the custom there to weigh the children regularly, and I have the record of one experiment. This is not an experiment that was made by the cow keepers in British Columbia or anywhere else in Canada; it was made by the city of Rochester, in the state of New York, where the people do not care two pins about our problems. They took seven children as a trial batch for experimental purposes. In the first six months these children were fed butter and1 they gained twenty-three pounds-I leave out the decimal points. During the next six months they were still fed on butter and the gain had increased to forty-four pounds. For the next six months they were fed on oleomargarine, the diet being otherwise the same. The result was a loss of nine pounds. In the next period butter was again used and the children made a gain of fifty-eight pounds. Now, that is an official report from the city of Rochester, and in view of it I say it would be only fair if we prohibited the use of oleomargarine. We believe it is detrimental to the health of young children. But apart from that important ground, I contend that, from the standpoint of the unfair competition it involves, the Minister of Agriculture should put his foot down on this manufacture and stop it. It may be said that Canadian dairymen ought to be able to compete in the markets of the world. Well, we are willing to compete in those markets, and we are prepared to pit our Canadian cow against her cousin in the United States or in New Zealand; but we do not think it is fair to compel the Canadian cow-I had almost said the Christian Canadian cow- to compete against a heathen nigger in the Central American republics or Southern states.
Now we come to another subject in connection with the tariff, and that is our coal mines. There are on Vancouver Island some five thousand men engaged in the coal mining industry, and with their dependents we must multiply this number by at least five to ascertain the total number dependent on this industry. Two of the mines are in the district represented by the hon. member for Nanaimo (Mr. Dickie) and he will no doubt deal with those. The mines in which I am interested are situated in Cumberland, where there is a population of 3,000 to 4,000. All last winter and most of last summer they were working only three days a week, and with the reduced pay now given to coal miners, and in view of the high cost of living, these men need not

worry about the price of gilt-edged securities for the investment of any surplus funds. Their situation indeed closely approximates want. If there is any extra call upon their purse for sickness or anything of that kind it means that they must go into debt. It is important therefore to know why they are working only three days a week. The reason is very obvious and cannot be denied; it is because of the competition from fuel oil. That oil is imported al most entirely from the United States Some people think that fuel oil and crude oil are synonymous terms, but they are not. Crude oil is the natural product as it comes out of the well; fuel oil is the crude oil after certain valuable elements, such as gasoline, benzine and distillate, have been extracted. There is some fuel oil made at the loco refinery, but it is a comparatively small amount and is readily absorbed in the neighbourhood. The great bulk of commercial fuel oil used in British Columbia is directly imported as such from the States, and if a sufficient duty were imposed to make it more costly to use that oil, it would give a tremendous stimulus to the coal mines of British Columbia and Vancouver Island generally. We ask that a duty of two cents a gallon be imposed on fuel oil. It is not a very heavy duty, surely, and would be amply sufficient to meet the situation. It would mean six days' work a week to these thousands of coal miners, it would mean prosperity for those depending on the mines and for the industries associated with them, and it would constitute a great measure of relief from the unemployment under which the province of British Columbia is now suffering.


Mr. CARROLL:: Is this fuel oil used in British Columbia for domestic or for manufacturing purposes?


Alan Webster Neill: It is used, as far as I know, almost entirely for heating apartment houses and running locomotives. A great deal is also consumed, I regret to say, on our steamboats. Very little of this oil is used for domestic purposes. The imposition of this duty would not hurt any other industry, and it would not raise the price of gasoline or distillate, the volume of fuel oil manufactured in British Columbia being comparatively trivial.
In that connection I should like to remind the House that the hon. member for Vancouver Centre (Mr. Stevens), the late Minister of Trade and Commerce, toured my riding during the recent campaign in

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the interests of Mr. Clements, the then Government candidate, and naturally in the course of his tour he showered jewels of promise wherever he went. He was the most promising man I ever saw in that connection, promises fell from him like water from a watering cart in our streets on a dusty day-and, I might add, the effects were about as ephemeral. Perhaps it is more appropriate that I should say promises fell around like manna from Heaven, and in the course of his tour through the district this bountiful Santa Claus I have been told-I would not guarantee the accuracy of my information -promised at one place an aeroplane postal service. Does the hon. member recollect making that promise?


Mr. STEVENS:: No, indeed, I do not.


Alan Webster Neill: I thought that was what
the hon. gentleman would say. I am reminded by this incident how often we find in our course through life that the problems of human life can best be solved by resorting to the wisdom of the prophets of old. I think it was Solomon who said that in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom. And in the multiplicity of promises is there forgetfulness! I leave it to you, Sir, and to the House to judge what a profligacy of promises he must have pledged himself to when he has forgotten such an extravagant promise as this. But, Sir, I must be frank-and I am always frank, especially when I cannot be otherwise-I will admit that the hon. member for Vancouver Centre did make a hit in one part of my constituency. In the city of Cumberland Mr. Clements, the government candidate, secured a majority of 181 out of a total vote of some 700 or 800, and for that result he was largely indebted to the actions of my hon. friend from Vancouver Centre. I may mention incidentally that outside of places with votes of not more than 50 that was the only place in the whole vast riding in which Mr. Clements did secure a majority. In places where there were only a few votes, composed mostly of government henchmen, he did get a majority, more particularly in some of the northern parts of the riding where I was not able to go because my campaign was very short; in those places where his cannery friends were located he invariably secured a majority. In this connection I should like to tell the hon. Minister of Marine and Fisheries (Mr. Lapointe) that those same cannery men who worked so hard and gave their time,
influence and money in support of the then government candidates throughout British Columbia, are the self-same gentlemen who are besieging his office to-day asking for favours that they are not entitled to, favours which their then government friends on this side, to their credit be it stated, continually refused them. The voice may be a little different, it may be the voice of Esau, but the soul is the soul of Jacob. If you wish any concrete evidence of the way in which the hon. Minister of Marine and Fisheries is being persecuted by this vicious lobby, you have only to look at his shrunken, wasted appearance to realize that the importunity he is subjected to hardly permits him to get his meals.
Coming back to the Cumberland vote, I should like to offer an analysis of the nature of that vote, because the hon. leader of the Government (Mr. Mackenzie King) might call Cumberland a Tory stronghold-a term which I would not use- and account for the result in that way; but the facts are very different. As a matter of fact, Cumberland is the last place, to my mind, for a Tory to expect favors from because it is composed of very intelligent electors. The class of men there, are miners and, as I said before, mostly Scotch miners. A great many of them are Socialists, and I may say that a large number of those that formed my committee in Cumberland were Socialists. I have the very greatest respect for the Socialism those men talk. Their brand of Socialism is nothing to be laughed at; on the contrary, it is a well thought out theory of economic laws which we perhaps sooner or later will have to consider. At any rate, I want to emphasize that they are a fine type of intelligent men. Why did such intelligent men vote for my opponent? There must have been a reason. Was it because the hon. member for Vancouver Centre assured them on his knightly honour that the hon. leader of the Opposition (Mr. Meighen) was going to be returned to power? I do not think so, because they did not believe it. Well then, was it because he assured them in the most positive terms that he bad been here and found that the main support of the Conservative government would be withdrawn if Mr. Clements were not returned from the district of Comox-Alberni? I do not know whether that was the reason, or whether it was because he pledged his assurance that he had positive information that Mr. Clements would be elected on the 6th day of December-he was very nearly elected, had he got only 1,300
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*votes more he would have been returned. I do not think it was any of those reasons. I think it was primarily and directly because the hon. member for Vancouver Centre, speaking as a Cabinet Minister, pledged himself and the government that if they were returned to power they would put an increased duty on fuel oil. That was the inducement that caused those intelligent men to vote the way they did, and I for one am not inclined to blame them. Hon. gentlemen, after what I have said of these intelligent voters of Cumberland, will recognize the kind of economic pressure that must have been put on them before they would have voted contrary to their inclinations, and I believe that it was in order to get this necessary boon of an increased duty on fuel oil. I might say that Mr. Clements was persona non grata with them; it certainly was not a question of voting for the man but of voting for the promise made by a prominent member of the Government. I earnestly hope that he will from his place in the House uphold the stand he took in that riding and see that the increase is granted. So well do I know him to be a man of his word that I feel-indeed, I almost fear- that if the Finance Minister does not grant that increase, of duty the hon. member will deem it his duty to resign his seat as a protest against the policy of the Government-the only protest he can make because of the failure of the Government to carry out the pledges which he made on behalf of the government to be.
By the way, they gave me a banquet in Cumberland after the election, which was attended by many of my friends as well as by some of those who were against me. Among other things I asked a man who was there why they did not take my word for it rather than the word of the hon. gentleman, because I, too, promised that if elected I would press for an increased duty, and they might just as well have put their money on me as on my hon. friend. The explanation I got was something like this-I do not guarantee it, because it was only one man's opinion: "Well, we were in a hole economically; we were up against it; we had to help ourselves, and I am afraid the boys thought they would play a sort of safe game. We felt that if the Conservatives got into power, and we had supported them in Cumberland, for shame's sake they would give us what they had promised; but we feared that if they got into power and we had thrown them down, they have such a crude conception of statesman-

ship they would not deliver the goods; on the other hand, we felt that if you were elected personally and the Liberals got into power you would be decent enough to assist us and that the Liberal Government, having a wider conception of true statesmanship, would give us justice." So that after that striking tribute to the belief of these men in the traditions of the Liberal party I feel that I cannot do better than leave the case in the hands of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, with the assumption that they will give us justice- that is, if justice means an increase of two cents a gallon in the duty.
Now, Sir, we come to the question of railways. I note that the Government are going to make an honest trial of government ownership. Well, I do not deny them that right; I suppose under the circumstances it is the best thing they can do, the only line of policy they can follow. But for myself, Sir, I must confess to having no very hopeful anticipation as to what the result will be. The government is a body designed primarily for the administration of the country's affairs, not for the conducting of a business. The governmental body is unwieldy in itself and is poorly equipped for carrying on these business enterprises. Moreover, there is a constant change of personnel which makes a continuous policy very difficult to carry out. Members of government are too prone to respond to waves of popular feeling, and there is the ever present danger involved in political interest. Does any hon. member within the sound of my voice think that if there was an election to-morrow and the fate or even the prestige of the Government hung in the balance, and it was thought necessary in order to carry the election to promise a railway into some particular district, or a few additional stations, or a lower rate on wheat or potatoes [DOT]-does any hon. gentleman think that these promises would not be made? If there is anybody in this House who thinks that such promises would not be promptly made under those conditions, he has my sympathy, and I think his friends should consult an alienist.
Just as a little instance of how these things work out, I may say that those hon. members who have come here for the first time must all be struck by the manner in which the government offices are scattered around this town. You go down to see a Cabinet minister, and after much prayer and fasting you are admitted; then you find

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that the matter in which you are interested necessitates a visit to one of his deputies. You go to see the deputy, who is anywhere from half a mile to a mile and a half away, and the chances are that the other one is just as far off in another direction. One cannot help reflecting upon the impossibility of a corporation like the Canadian Pacific or a large steel trust conducting their business with their offices so distributed. It is not the fault of the present government, I know, or probably of the last. We heard a great deal from the right hon. leader of the Opposition the other day about the word " co-ordination." He wanted to know what it meant and how it could be carried out. There seems to be a good deal of doubt in the minds of hon. members as to just what co-ordination means. It is true that the Government themselves have not been in the co-ordinating business very long, but before they try their prentice hand at the co-ordination of the railways I suggest that it would be a good experiment to co-ordinate the government buildings in this city.
The word "co-ordination" has a fine sound; it reminds me of the experiences of my boyhood days in connection with the Shorter Catechism. Some of the phrases I still have in mind; "justification by faith; sanctification by grace; justification by works," and so on. All these sonorous phrases come back to us in times like these. As regards government ownership of railways, it may be that their state operation is justified by faith, but I very much doubt whether they will ever be justified by works.
There is another circumstance which makes me prone to doubt the advisability of plunging into a scheme of government ownership. As a young man I spent a number of years in New Zealand. There they had an even bigger white elephant than we have here, because their railways were not only government-owned-but,- Lord help them-politically constructed. A more disastrous condition it would be hard for the human mind to conceive. Well, they borrowed millions of pounds from the Old Country, 'and then, human nature being the same south of the equator as north of it, every member had to grab for his district as much of that loan as he could get. It did not matter whether his district already had a railway and did not need any more funds; he had to "make good with the boys." The consequence was that railways were scattered all over the country to a far greater extent than

they are here. Not only were they put where they were not wanted, but they were laid out in a most peculiar manner. Suppose, for instance, that a railway was to be constructed from my seat to that of the hon. leader of the Government, and it had suddenly been discovered that the hon. member for Marquette (Mr. Crerar) had some political pull with the Government- indeed, perhaps that is true to-day. Well,, the railway would start off with the honest intention of going direct from my seat toward that of the hon. leader of the House, but when it got a certain distance within influence of the magnetic attraction of the hon. member for Marquette it would proceed to his residence' or estate, and then come back. It was no uncommon occurrence in that country for a man to lose the train at one station and drive on a few miles further and pick it up somewhere else. These are actual conditions, Sir; I myself have seen them. As was the case in Canada, rates were jumped when the squeal of the politicians was heard, and the farmers were actually hauling their wool in wagons-ox wagons in many cases-distances of thirty, forty or fifty miles, at the same cost as that of transporting it over the railway, as a protest against the methods employed. In fact, conditions got so bad that the people of New Zealand actually contemplated- it was advocated in the press and on the platform-the repudiation of the whole railway indebtedness. As a matter of making a fresh start they sent to the Old Country for an expert railway man and gave him full control-a ten or twenty-years' job. They said: "Go to it"-and he did go to it. He closed off the inefficient and unnecessary lines, dismissed one-third of the government officials, cut down the expense of operating, and ran it like a business man's railway; and eventually it did pay a small interest on the money invested. To my mind, only by doing something of that kind with our railways in Canada can we really accomplish anything. Go to the States and get an expert railway man. I am not decrying our railway men when I suggest that we should go to the States for an expert; I only say that because I believe it would eliminate the suspicion that would otherwise attach to any Canadian railway man, of representing a political party or association or group, who should endeavour to carry out this work. Get an expert railway man from the United States, put him in such a position that he would only be removable
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by the joint vote of Parliament, and give him a free hand to see if he can possibly make it pay. I shall be only too pleased if the Government can make this thing pay. Miracles happened eighteen hundred years ago and there is nothing in theological dogmas to forbid them happening again, but I rather fear it will be like the answer given by the Scotchman who, when asked if prohibition was likely to carry in Scotland, said, "Well it might, but it's no likely."
One honi. gentleman drew a comparison between the profits to be derived' from the railways and the profits made by selling liquor. I am afraid the two do not coordinate very well together. It is true that if you take enough of the one you will feel competent to run the other, but I do not think the comparison is otherwise a good one. As you know, the railway is a necessity, and the other thing is more or less of a luxury to mo-st people, and a very expensive one. We all know that it is a peculiar trait of human nature that we kick to the last cent about the cost of our necessaries, but never kick about the cost of our luxuries. It is for that reason we make a fuss about the price of coal, and the amount our wives burn, but very little about the consumption or the cost of the cigars we burn. It is a peculiar psychological fact in human nature that we do not mind any price for our luxuries, but are very stringent in the matter of necessaries. Now the railway is a necessity, and the other thing is a luxury.
My hon. friend from South York (Mr. Maclean), speaking the other day, said-and this fact comes home to some of us in the West-that they had had trouble in Ontario where boat and rail service met. He said that as the Railway Commission reduced the rates on the railway, the boat service put up its rates. We have somewhat similar conditions in the West. Not long ago when the people of Alberni kicked about their railway and boat service to Vancouver-it is partly by boat and partly by rail, both services being under the one company-they were told unblushingly, first of all by the railway, that they could not control the boat rates, and then they were told by the Railway Commissioners that the Commission had1 no control over the boat service. The way to remedy that is that advocated by the hon. member for South York-bring our coastal boat service under the control of the Railway Commission, and it would then be able to handle a situa-

tion of that kind where a joint service is being run in an inadequate way. In order that I may be able to obtain some support from the British Columbia members in advocating such a step, I might say that if this step were taken the railway pass given us by the Government would be good on the Canadian Pacific boats, which they are not at present-but that, of course, is only incidental.


William Findlay Maclean: Is it not a fact now that the traffic charges of all these boat services run in connection with railways are subject to revision and control by the Railway Board?


Alan Webster Neill: I think they are so subjecl on the Great Lakes, but not in British Co lumbia, where they run a coastal service; I am sure as to British Columbia, where we have this coastal service.
I now come to the question of immigration. I must confess at once I am not much in favor of increased immigration at this time. It seems to me it is a good deal like the man who thought he 4 p.m. would benefit by following the advice that is given by some newspapers as to what shares to buy-there are people like that. He was advised to buy a thousand shares of a certain oil company at one dollar per share. He bought in the expectation of a rise, but in a few weeks he wrote to the editor that the shares had gone down until they were worth only a cent apiece and he wanted advice. The editor wrote back and said, "Buy one hundred thousand shares at a cent, and then the average price of your shares will be reduced accordingly." The case is somewhat the same with immigration. We have two hundred thousand men idle in Canada now, and are seeking to relieve the situation by bringing in a whole lot mote. There is one thing I would ask the Government to do, and that is to keep away from the idea of having settlers from different countries establish a colony by themselves in Canada. That has always proved a mistake in the past. If you bring in a body of men from England1 or Scotland1 or elsewhere in Europe, and dump them on the prairies by themselves, they will become not a piece of Canada, but a piece of England or Bohemia or Austria. That is not a desirable way to build up Canada. Mix them up amongst our own people, and then they will become assimilated. I take this position : that the Government will spend a lot of money in bring-

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ing these men out, possibly money will be paid by the Old Country, and another large sum, no doubt, for putting these settlers on the land'; a further sum will have to be forthcoming to provide them with implements and stock until they are on their feet. All I ask is that the Government take this land scheme and offer it to our unemployed. I am sure they would be surprised to find how many would take advantage of it. I know it is popular to say that the unemployed are all idle bums, and so on. I know that a great many of them would not care to go on the land, but a great many people in work to-day would' be glad to go on the land, and if they had the opportunity, they would make way for some of the unemployed to take their positions in the city. Times are changing, and have changed, in that regard. I know the case of a man who has been on the land for three years. He was a carpenter working at $7 a day, but he foresaw the depression that was coming, and that he would be out of work, so he took up a piece of land, and to-day he is doing well; he is not making a fortune, but he is keeping his family and himself, and he makes one less in the ranks of the unemployed. If the Government will not postpone their immigration policy for a year, at least let them make the same offer of assistance to our own unemployed. Surely the men who have come here at their own expense are entitled to the same advantages as the men living in Galicia or somewhere in that neighbourhood. Let me remind the Government that a contented settler is the finest advertising agency you can have. Though his contentment may only be expressed in a badly written letter with a dirty thumb mark, it will have more drawing power in his little home village than all the flamboyant advertisements got up by the agents of the Government. That has proved to be true time and again. By the way, if any of them are coming to British Columbia, I hope that they at least will be told the truth. Tell them that they will have to compete with Asiatics; that if they are going in for fruit farming, Asiatics have a hold on that; if they are going in for strawberries, whole sections are absolutely in the hands of the Japs, who will take steps to see that no White Man intrudes upon them; if they are going in for small fruits, they will find the same situation there; if they go in for market gardening around any of our big cities, they will find the same situation there. There is what is known as a ring in connection with market gardening, at least around the city of Vancouver. A friend of Aline was out at a farm and admired the potatoes on the table, and his farmer friend gave him a few pounds to take home with him. As you know, the great majority of domestic servants in Vancouver are Asiatics, and next day when this gentleman tried these potatoes his Chinese servant had cooked, he found them very poor, wet, watery, very unsatisfactory things. He thought there had been some accident with them until the same thing happened again the next day, so he asked his Chinese servant about it, and the Chinaman said, "Those potatoes are bad; they are no good. Let me get you potatoes that will be all right." There is a ring among these Chinese servants, and they will never buy produce from white market gardens. If their employer insists upon it, they will find the stuff unsuitable or it will be made to appear so, and eventually he will have to buy from the Chinese. That is an absolute fact that anybody in Vancouver can verify for himself. Let these people who are to come in be told that this is the competition they will be up against in British Columbia. Tell them also-and I wonder what British people will think of this-that their children will have to go to the same school as Asiatics. One of these the other day lost his temper at school, and instead of hitting his playmate on the nose he drew a knife and stabbed him in the back. Tell them that if conditions get had their daughters will have to work in Chinese restaurants under conditions which I will leave to your imagination rather than describe. Tell them these things, and say that they must live according to the same standard as the others, which means that everyone down to a six-year-old child must be ready in fruit picking time to work sixteen hours a day. That is the only way to compete successfully with the Chinese and Japanese in British Columbia. But I hope we see the dawn of better days with this Government, and that we will be able to tell these people that the Government have taken steps to permit the white people to grow up under a white standard.
With regard to the provision as to the soldiers' stock and land, I will only endorse the way it was put by one of the members who spoke the other day. He advocated the revaluing of the land and stock and an extension of time to pay for it. I am heartily in sympathy with that idea, because it is good business. We
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are going to lose the money and the settlers as well if we do not do that. Better keep the soldier settlers, and give them an extension. It is coming to them, and it is not their fault that they have not succeeded. We induced them to go on the land under big prices created by the war. They did enough for us during the war and let us shoulder the responsibility. I read an item in my platform last night asking for more considered treatment for the wounded soldier. That question crops up in the West. There are a lot of wounded men in the West, and we think they were not well treated. Their pensions were cut down to a minimum, and they have been at considerable expense. It has been suggested that these men are malingerers. These men who have served at the front and been wounded cannot be accused of malingering, and they ought to receive consideration.
The answer of the Government is that it means increased expenditure. Well there are ways of effecting economy without making the destitute soldiers suffer. I suggest that we cut off some of the ceremonial connected with this House. This is a democratic nation, and we might well forego, for a time at least, all these ceremonies. We have a beautiful restaurant upstairs, and it is a pleasure to take our friends up there, but it is run at a tremendous loss.
I am willing, and I think other members are, to pay for our meals in future and save that expense. There are many ways in which economy could be effected without loss of efficiency.
Referring to the inheritance tax. Is the hon. Minister of Finance (Mr. Fielding) aware that in New Zealand and in Great Britain they have an inheritance tax, or death duties which we do not have in Canada at all? We have a provincial inheritance tax, but no Dominion tax, and if we had such a duty in Canada as they have in New Zealand and Britain, the revenue would receive something like $30,000,000 a year, and it would come out of the pockets of the people best able to afford it, people who have built up large fortunes during the war and could well afford to contribute to the state after they have gone;-it might be better for them in the place where they have gone if they gave the country back some of their wealth.
I would also suggest that they might remove the Northwest Mounted Police from British Columbia. They were put there in a crisis in special emergency. They are no longer needed. We have an efficient

provincial police force, and by removing this force we would save expense.
I mentioned last night that the eight-hour law was a part of the platform on which I was elected. I see no mention of it in the Speech from the Throne. The Trades and Labour council took it up with the Government, and I hope to see the Government, in the course of the session at least, make some pronouncement as to their attitude in the matter. If they are not prepared to assume the responsibility for enacting it, then they ought to call the provinces together, if it is decided that it is a provincial matter. It is a duty we owe, under the Treaty of Versailles, to carry this out as speedily as we can, in accordance with our pledges in that treaty. The same might be said of the old-age pension. In November, 1921, the British Columbia House passed a resolution unanimously calling attention to the fact that this government had assumed responsibility for the old-age pension and suggesting that it was time for them to take action. I do not expect the Government to take action on that matter this session, but I commend it for their consideration in a future session.
I wish to call attention to a further point and I am surprised that no other hon. member has taken it up. I am heartily in accord with the member for North Winnipeg (Mr. McMurray) when he expressed the opinion that the Dominion Elections' Act should be removed from the statutes. I go further and state it should be removed as speedily as possible, that we may remove the stigma from our public life, that we have had an act on the statute which lends itself to almost every form of corruption. If we must retain the act let us change the name of it. It is now known as the Dominion Elections' Act, let it be known as the Dominion Elections' Corruption Possibilities Act. It may be said that I am using too strong words when I say that it encourages every form of political corruption. I think the statement is well-advised, because those of us who are lawyers know that if a man carelessly leaves his money lying around his premises he is as much to blame as the poor boy or girl who picks it up. You have often heard the judge in court say " You are encouraging theft by leaving your money around," and an act which is passed for the avowed purpose of preserving purity of elections should not permit or allow the gross abuses which are possible under that act. I speak from somewhat bitter experience in my own case. I have the data all here, but

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have not time to go into it. I will only mention a few of the instances where this act, to put it mildly, lends itself to abuses. I am talking about the rural ridings where, I believe, a different system prevails from that in the cities. It lends itself to a great deal of illegal voting on election day. A man who is bad enough to vote illegally is not going to worry about signing his name to an oath, and he will come to the poll on election day from nowhere, take the oath and vote illegally. Further than that the act allows if it does not encourage, the disfranchisement of large numbers of people. I do not refer to two or three votes in some remote place, but I am talking about absolutely blotting out the votes of fifty or sixty electors. And why? Because it was known they were going to vote what is known as " wrong." I could point to half a dozen instances in the riding I represent where that was deliberately arranged, places that had voting booths for years and years, with perhaps a hundred votes. They voted " wrong " last time, and this year were not allowed a polling place. In other cases, they had to undergo considerable hardship to get to the booth, by travelling in an open boat. Do hon. members expect that women are going to do that for the sake of a vote? One old lady told me frankly that she would have to travel in an open boat, exposed to the weather for ten miles, and she did not think any one of the three candidates was worth the trouble, and I agreed with her. However she said her prayers were with us, and I think that helped. I was speaking to a man at eleven o'clock at night a few days before polling, and he told me, " You need not worry about the election, you are going to be elected." I said, " I am glad to hear that, now how do you know?" He replied, " I got it on the ouija board." There is another feature which perhaps is one of the worst features, and that is the fact that the legally nominated candidate cannot find out within four or five days of the election where the polls are to be. The thing was deliberately suppressed. I did not know, until five days before the election, where the various polls in the vast, scattered region up in the north end of my riding were to be. How could I, with the means of travel that prevailed there secure scrutineers for those various polling stations unless I employed an aeroplane? I wonder what the people of Ottawa would think if, four days before an election, they did not know where the polling
booths were to be, and if they then found they would have to vote in a hamlet ten miles away. Yet that is what happened in Comox-Alberni, where we cannot get around easily to secure scrutineers. Perhaps the Government candidate's vote would not have been as large as it was had I been able to get scrutineers at those polling stations.
Another feature of that beautiful act was that it lent itself to registrars, some of whom were not too scrupulous, padding the lists. I know of one case where one of these gentlemen put 215 names on the list, almost the entire number of whom did not live in the riding at all, and some of whom had been dead for at least three years. Something should be done about that. I think three years is too long; when a man has been dead for two years, I think he should not be compelled to come back to this wretched sphere to vote. I firmly believe, if a man has been dead for two years, he would have too much sense to come back and vote Conservative, anyway. In that particular instance where 215 names were put on the list,-after the registrar had been arrested,-out of those 215 names, only 8 voted. This is an indication of what was going on. Another feature of the act allows the Government, on the advice of the candidate, to appoint his-the candidate's-own business partner as returning officer. Moreover, this returning officer did not have the decency to go out and take up an office elsewhere. This allowed the election to be held, to all intents and purposes, in the private office of the Government candidate, because the returning officer was not even a resident of the riding, he lived a hundred miles away practically, and he paid only one brief visit to the riding and that on nomination day. The rest of the election was conducted in the private inside office of the Government candidate. Do you wonder, Sir, when I say that 1,300 ballots were either taken out or given out of the returning officer's office illegally? These are some only of the practices which this act allows, if it does not encourage them. But like most of these things, it will come back like a boomerang upon itself. Some of these things I found out too late, only after the election; others I was aware of beforehand. I told the electors that we had got beyond any personal ambition of mine; that the world would still turn around; that Canada would still be in the North American continent, if I were defeated at
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the polls; that it was a question of their rights and priviliges, more important far than my personal election or non-election. You remember the Apostle Paul, when he was brought before the Jewish Judge and he claimed that he was a Roman citizen and demanded to be taken to Rome. The Jewish Judge said "With a great sum obtained I this freedom." But Paul answered, "But I was free born." We were free born; but our forebears were not, and many of them for generations fought and struggled and shed their blood, and died, to get this simple common everyday right of the ballot. I told the people that in the election, and I think they appreciated the situation and responded on election day.
I surely can be absolved of any charge of endeavouring to make a stump speech or of theatrical action when I state, simply and quietly, that surely, if it is not the fundamental right, it is a fundamental right of the Constitution under which we live to-day that a qualified voter shall have a free and untrammelled opportunity to exercise his franchise on election day, without such an unreasonable objection as having to lose his job or to lose the day's work being involved, and that the election should be held in such a way that every body of men, no matter whom they intended to vote for, should be allowed fully and freely to exercise that right. I do not think I am going beyond reason and-modesty, I was going to say-when I say that is a fundamental right. If that fact is conceded, then the Liberal party who are in power here, if they are conscious or even pretend to be conscious of their responsibility to maintain those rights for us, must surely realize that it is their bounden duty to strike this act off the statute books as soon as possible.


Mr. E. M. MACDONALD (Pictou):: 
Mr. MEIGHEN:: I made no such statement, but I am not surprised that the hon. gentleman attributes it to me.


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: I am quoting from the report of an address delivered by the right hon. gentleman before the Conservative ladies of Toronto, in which he said, speaking of Quebec:
In it had taken the form of Nationalism, a blight which masquerading under the banner of Liberalism had cried wildly for revenge because that part of the Dominion had been asked to submit to the same laws that bound the rest of Canada. That particular form of the expression of the spirit of revolt, the speaker felt, should be characterized as "the acme of infamy."


Arthur Meighen: I did not make the statement as quoted by the hon. gentleman. What I said was that the conduct of the campaign in that province had reached, in its depths, the acme of infamy.


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: Well, perhaps my right hon. friend has not recalled that one of those ministers whom he brought into being for a few short weeks was perfectly willing to deal with the situation down there which he condemned by the use of this phrase, and was perfectly willing to adopt as a candidate a gentleman who declared that the chief plank of his platform would be never to support England in any war in which she might be engaged. Let me remind him that when first he came into this House, in 1911, the government he supported owed its existence to the fact that there had been elected in the province of Quebec twenty-six or twenty-seven men called Nationalists, men who were returned on the principle that Canada should not embark in any of England's wars or participate in her affairs. He enjoyed his position as a member of that government, from 1911 to 1917, as a result of support from that quarter. Let me tell him. if he chooses to characterize in the same way the men and women of any province, in regard to the expression of their opinion upon him or his government in the last contest, that speaking for the province of Nova Scotia, I declare that we shall share the epithet he has applied to Quebec in this case. We will take these words as describing our own unanimity. My right hon. friend paid a visit to our province, and, in association with his Minister of Public Works, he made a tour, the progress of which might be compared to the famous march of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our province has had a distinctive position in regard to the Conservative party. It has given to Canada three Prime Ministers who led that party: I refer to Sir Charles Tupper, Sir Robert Borden and Sir John Thompson. Now, the people of Nova Scotia heard my right hon.
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friend; they listened to his weary wail on the tariff and his persistent declaration that there was no other issue before the Canadian electorate. He did not want to discuss railway problems, or unemployment, or anything except this theory that a tariff should be maintained-he ran away from everything else. The good people of Nova Scotia, including those who had supported these three Conservative Prime Ministers, having heard the right hon. gentlemen and his colleagues, decided that they did not wish him to be entrusted further with the control of affairs in Canada, and the majorities of the hon. gentlemen who sit in this House to-day representing Nova Scotia were materially increased as a result of the visit of the leader of the Opposition. I say, therefore, that if my right hon. friend regards the position of the province of Quebec as being the acme of infamy, we in Nova Scotia are not at all concerned about that term; we share with Quebec the blame it implies.
My right hon. friend does not seem to appreciate his position as fully as he should. Beneath the surface there is an indication of a desire on his part to resuscitate the old sectional feeling, as evidenced by his attack on the Minister of Justice (Sir Lomer Gouin) and the member for St. Antoine (Mr. Mitchell) because they pointed out that the condition of affairs in this country was so serious. They said nothing more than what has been said all over the country in "hundreds of constituencies. My right hon. friend, however, singled these gentlemen out as special objects of attack, suggesting that they were allied with some special interest. The leader of the Opposition received his answer very well from the Minister of Justice yesterday, but it does seem to me that in the opening of a new Parliament, with the great problems that face us, he might well have applied himself in his address to a consideration of the difficult task that lies before us and have dealt with some of the questions which have been raised in so many quarters of the House by hon. gentlemen.
Now, as I said before, the task before the Government is a very heavy one, but already there has come from all parts of Canada evidence of an optimism and a belief that responsible government has once more been restored, and that the days of War-time Elections Acts and the putting through of Canadian Northern Railway deals under closure have passed. The

people look with optimism and confidence to the administration which has been formed by the hon. gentleman who leads the Government (Mr. Mackenzie King) and the galaxy of able men surrounding him who represent all parts of the Dominion. The choice of the Liberal party in 1919, when the present leader of the House was selected to lead that party, has been more than justified by the people of the country. The splendid political tour which he made during the course of the election contest, the high standard on which he appealed to the people on all the questions that were before them, won the confidence not only of the members of the Liberal party but of a very large number of electors throughout the country who in the past had not given allegiance to that party.
Associated with him is the man who guided Canada from 1896 to 1911 through many financial difficulties, and to hon. Mr. Fielding-if I may use his name, Mr. Speaker-I think that this House and the country look with confidence to deal with the pressing financial questions which now confront us in the same successful manner in which he handled our national finances during his former term of office.
We also feel very proud, on this side of the House, of the hon. gentleman who for fifteen years so wisely guided the destinies of the province of Quebec with the result that her position to-day is admired and envied by all her sister provinces. We are very glad indeed that the hon. member representing the historic constituency of Laurier-Outremont (Sir Lomer Gouin) has become a member of the Government.
I do not propose, Mr. Speaker, to deal with all the subject matters of the Speech from the Throne. Rather I desire to confine myself to what I conceive to be for the moment the most important question therein referred to-our national railways. We have heard a good many speeches from hon. gentlemen upon this subject and many arguments in favour of public ownership. To my mind public ownership need not be argued at all. The country owns these railways, and I propose to show that, having regard to their financial position to-day, there could not be found anywhere in the world a corporation or body of men who would undertake to buy and operate the railways. The country owns the Canadian Northern railway, as it was formerly called; it owns the Grand Trunk railway; owns the Transcontinental railway; and it owns the Grand Trunk Pacific and the In-

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tercolonial railways. Those railways could not be sold to-morrow for the debts that are against them. Therefore, public ownership is here for the time being and must be given a fair trial, as the Government has decided. For the moment public ownership is not in issue.
In this connection I would submit that the Government should let the country know exactly t"he present financial position of all the roads composing the National system, because it is not at present very well known either to the country or to this House. We should understand exactly what their present financial position is, because if the Government's policy of giving these railways a fair trial under public ownership is to be carried into effect, as I am sure it will be, in order to determine whether or not Government direction and control is to bring to these railways the advantages and benefits which we would like to see accrue to them, we must know beforehand the exact position in which these railways stand financially. Operating accounts for the last three years in the fullest detail should be laid before Parliament. I am aware the position was taken last year that these operating accounts should not be made public, and I gather that the House was told at that time that such accounts should not be laid on the table for fear the Canadian Pacific Railway Company should find something in connection with those accounts which would enable its management to take advantage of our National system. That seemed to me to be a very flimsy reason. The time has not arrived in this or any other country enjoying British parliamentary institutions when you can lay down the doctrine that hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds are to be spent without the people or their representatives having the right to know the disposition of every single dollar. If we are going to give a fair trial to public ownership, then a most essential element is to have these financial statements laid down upon the table of the House. Only in this way can you know where you are going to begin under public ownership.
Let me say, I do not regard the operation of the Canadian Northern Railway, or the so-called Canadian National Railway, since 1918 as being operation under public ownership. What is the use of talking about public ownership of these railways when you have Mackenzie and Mann's officials operating them? What is the good of talking about the failure of private ownership rendering public ownership necessary if you take the gentlemen who could not operate these railways successfully under private ownership and put them in charge under government ownership? You have got to start square with this thing. We upon this side of the House do not want to be responsible for the peculiar policies that characterized our railway administration under the direction of the right hon. leader of the Opposition and his friends. We want to start fair.
Allow me to digress for a moment, Mr. Speaker. My right hon. friend and his associates have been very fond of asserting that they were not responsible for this railway problem at all. That has been reiterated time and again in that form of propaganda which my right hon. friend and his colleagues so well know how to use, and which he is so afraid somebody else might use, though nobody has any intention of following his lead in that direction. By his propaganda he has declared continually during the last two years that the Liberal party was responsible for the railway situation. Let us examine the facts. As I have already said, I had the pleasure of sitting in this House in three Parliaments, and I was here in 1911 when the right hon. gentleman and his friends took charge. What was the railway situation then? The government owned the Intercolonial, as it had owned it for forty-five years. It owned the Transcontinental, stretching from Moncton to Winnipeg. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway Company had title to the Grand Trunk Pacific railway from Winnipeg westward. That was the position. Those were all the railways that the government of Canada had anything to do with when my right hon. friend and his associates took charge in 1911. The Transcontinental was under lease to the Grand Trunk Railway Company with respect to operation on terms which would have freed this country from any responsibility financially. But what did my right hon. friend and his associates do immediately after 1911? They appointed a commission with a view to discrediting the construction of that railway and of playing into the hands of the Grand Trunk Railway Company, who wanted to get rid of the contract. Eventually, after a couple of years, having laid the ground-work, they proceeded to let the Grand Trunk Railway Company escape responsibility, and the government took the Transcontinental over. Were we responsible for their action? Then, in 1913,
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Mackenzie and Mann came to this House and asked the government of the day to loan them $15,000,000. My right hon. friend supported that request and the money was handed over. At that time Mackenzie and Mann, or the Canadian Northern Railway Company, assured the House that with this money all their obligations would be attended to and they would not come back for any further loans. But they came back next year for $45,000,000, and my right hon. friend was the gentleman who piloted the Bill for that loan through Parliament. On our side of the House at that time we moved the six months' hoist to that proposal and took direct issue with him and his associates. We have no responsibility whatever for the giving of that money. Let me remind the House, Mr. Speaker, that it was upon that occasion that the gentleman whom my right hon. friend took into his Cabinet as Minister of Justice just before the election-I refer to Hon. R. B. Bennett-told the House of Commons that the right hon. gentleman was nothing but the "megaphone of Mackenzie and Man." That was in 1914. Mark you, assurance was given to the House at that time that security for the loan had been given; that a mortgage would be taken; and that upon default, foreclosure would not be necessary, as it would in any other case-the whole property would revert to the people of Canada.
But that is not the whole of the story. My right hon. friend came to the House of Commons in 1917 and introduced legislation to take over the Canadian Northern Railway, which he put through under closure. A certain hon. gentleman who went to the Senate this session and who came here from the West to join the Union Government, save the country and win the war, might give us some of the reasons which contributed to that legislation. I know this: certain provinces of this Dominion were relieved of $110,000,000 of obligations which they had incurred for local railways, including the province of British Columbia, and that amount was made part of the debt of the country and charged against the Canadian Northern Railway. My right hon. friend went further and provided that there should be a reference to arbitration for the purpose of ascertaining how much Mackenzie and Mann were entitled to for the equity of redemption. The award was $10,000,000, and I will show you, as having a bearing on the present financial position of the

country, that that was simply $10,000,000 thrown away.
Now, what is the situation to-day? A reference to the railway blue book which has been laid on the Table of the House shows that the mortgage and bonded indebtedness of the Canadian Northern Railway is $626,000,000, in round figures, and that the estimated value of the. road-bed, tracks and terminals is only $632,000,000, a margin simply of $6,000,000. That is a pure question of bookkeeping. In order to get at the real position in regard to the matter, an actual valuation would be necessary, made by proper valuators, and that valuation would disclose whether or not the Canadian Northern is mortgaged for moi'e than it is actually worth.
This, then, is what my right hon. friend did. And he has the audacity to come to this House and say that these conditions were created by hie opponents, although all along he was the chief actor in the drama. Now, what did he do further? He was not content with taking over the railways mentioned, but in 1919 he asked the House to authorize bis Government to make an agreement for the acquisition of the Grand Trunk. That agreement was made and the road was taken over. Then there were arbitrations as to values, all the dealings with complicated stock, and so on. He it was who took over the Grand Trunk. These are the railways which belong to the Canadian people and which this Government has to deal with. Would it, then, not be a most desirable thing, before we embark upon any enterprise of Government operation involving the expenditure of large sums of money, to inquire fully into the matter as suggested in the Speech from the Throne? The member for South York (Mr. Maclean) has been talking public ownership in this House for a great many years, but able as he is I would not say that he is an expert on railway transportation. Nor would I say that the former mayor of Toronto, who represents North Toronto (Mr. Church) and who spoke yesterday very lengtaily and very glibly about "co-operation" and "co-ordination," is an expert on transportation, even though he did say that he could effect this co-ordination in twenty-four hours. The transportation question involves the most important considerations in the life of a country; men are trained from boyhood in its technicalities, in its details, in matters connected with administration. Would it not therefore, be prudent to seek the advice of those

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who give their lives to the perfecting of their knowledge in regard to railway matters? Surely, ordinary common prudence should prompt us to say that the Government would have been right in suggesting that there should be an inquiry. Do you not think that instead of dealing in generalities we ought to have a statement before the House-and the Government, no doubt, will have it before them-as to just what the financial position of the Grand Trunk is? I am told that the deficit on the Grand Trunk last year was $15,000,000, Last year the deficit on the Canadian Northern was $70,000,000, of which amount $33,000,000 went to pay interest upon mortgage and bonds. It has been said that this deficit is due to the increased wages of employes, but the blue book shows that the increase in wages amounted to only $12,000,000, so that the deficit cannot be due to that alone; there must be other important reasons for it. I submit, therefore, that this House should know the exact financial position of all these railways before we embark upon any new policy or lay down any new lines.
We have to deal with most serious prob-elms in regard to this matter. As I have mentioned, the hon. member for North Toronto would co-ordinate this system in twenty-four hours, but I would direct the hon. gentleman's attention to the fact that the Grand Trunk railway, which is proposed to be the subject of co-ordination, does not operate only in Canada; sixteen hundred miles of it are in United States territory. Forty-one per cent of the total tonnage carried by the Grand Trunk comes from the United States; seventy per cent of its freight traffic receipts is obtained in that country. The proposal is that this Government become a competitor in the United States, a foreign country, with American railways operating there. Grave international difficulties surround, this question. There is no precedent in the world's history for one government operating a public utility within the territory of another without first making with that country a proper agreement or arriving at an understanding in regard to the matter. Take the case of the Suez canal; when the contract for that work was arranged, France and England had to obtain from the Khedive of Egypt his permission to proceed, although at the time the Khedive had very little authority. Take the case of the Panama Canal; when the United States undertook to construct that work they obtained from the newly-created Republic of Panama the
concession which was necessary before actual operations were commenced. We are in this position with regard to the United States, that this Government, owning the Grand Trunk railway in that territory, would be dependent on the federal United States Government for all the laws they might pass with regard to the road, including liability for any taxation they might impose, and liable also to taxation and legislative interference by the six or seven states through which the railway runs. What would we think in this country of such a proposition as the American Government purchasing the stock of the Canadian Pacific railway? It is not inconceivable that that might not occur. All that they would need to do would be to purchase the stock as it was offered on the exchanges. What would we in Canada say if the American Government owned all the stock of the Canadian Pacific Railway and wanted to operate that road in this country?


William Findlay Maclean: Did not Sir Wilfrid Laurier know when he made this deal that the Grand Trunk owned this railway in the United States?


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: My hon. friend has not caught my point. Sir Wilfrid Laurier made no agreement with the Grand Trunk to operate any railway in the United States.


William Findlay Maclean: The Grand Trunk was operating both sections.


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: Not as
the property of this Government. I am calling the attention of the House to the fact that a decision on this proposal that the Canadian Government should own and operate this 1,600 miles of railway in the United States is no twenty-four hour affair, it demands inquiry and careful consideration; and as an illustration of the necessity for that deliberation I am suggesting the situation that might arise at any time if the American Government purchased all the stock of the Canadian Pacific railway and wanted to operate that railway in Canada. We would certainly think carefully over such a proposition as that. And I submit from my short study of this question that our problem is a very serious one. It is not brought into Canadian public life as a result of anything done by the Liberal party, but is another of the many problems that my right hon. friend the leader of the Opposition has laid at
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the door of this Government. Let me give another illustration.


Mr. HANSON:: Is there anything in the comity of nations to prevent such a thing happening? Does the hon. gentleman know of any precedent against it?


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: I can find no precedent in history nor any international law whereby one country attempted to operate a railway in the territory of another country. I pointed out that in the case of the Suez canal and the Panama canal, concessions were obtained from the countries through which they ran.


Sir HENRY DRAYTON:: Has my hon. friend forgotten that the United States has operated railways in Canada?


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: The
United States Government?


Henry Lumley Drayton: Yes.


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: In war time, perhaps; but my hon. friends know very well that that is no answer to the contention I am making. Many things were done in war time, as my hon. friend knows, by agreement and consent. Will my hon. friend, who wrote a report on the railway question, tell me if he knows of any case in the history of the world where in peace time one country operated a road in the territory of another without having the consent of that other country? No, my hon. friend cannot do it; it is impossible for him to do it. I am only submitting these as reasons why we should give due thought to this matter. The problem is not one that can be solved overnight.
My hon. friend from Cumberland (Mr. Logan) has called the attention of the House to the situation with re-
5 p.m. gard to the railway that runs through the Maritime provinces, and he proved conclusively, I submit, that that was a railroad which was built, not under any legislation of this Parliament, but under legislation passed by the Imperial Parliament, providing for the construction of that railroad and providing also, as a matter of law, I submit, for its operation. Anyway, both political parties have for forty years proceeded to operate that railway in the light of what is claimed to be the intent of the British North America Act. From 1878 down to 1918 that railway was operated on the lines which, we say, the Imperial Act demanded. My right hon. friend's (Mr. Meighen) propensity for Orders in Council is very well

known, and when Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann were given charge of the railways in the western part of Canada he passed an Order in Council on the 20th of November, 1918, providing in part as follows:
His Excellency the Governor General in Council is further pleased to order and declare that the persons from time to time comprising the Board of Directors of the Canadian Northern Railway Company, shall be and they are hereby appointed a Board of Management of the Canadian Government Railways and are hereby given the powers vested in the General Manager under the general regulations of the Canadian Government Railways adopted by Order In Council of the 22nd January, 1914.
That meant that Mr. Hanna and his co-directors of the Canadian Northern Railway were given the powers which are declared and set out in the general Railway Act of the Dominion Government, which are no more than the powers which were exercised by Mr. Gutelius when he was General Manager, and by Mr. Pot-tinger who was also General Manager for many years. But, notwithstanding that their powers were limited, these gentlemen, the directors of the Canadian Northern Railway, proceeded to treat the road as if it were part and parcel of the Canadian Northern Railway. They proceeded to remove all responsibility and authority for matters connected with the road from the Maritime provinces, where it had always been, to the city of Toronto; and the result of that change, for which the right hon. leader of the Opposition was responsible, was that a situation was created which became absolutely intolerable in a business way and every other way-a situation which those of us representing constituencies along the line of the Intercolonial railway have been sent here to tell this House and the Government must be remedied. My right hon. friend is well aware of the feeling that existed in regard to this matter. My opponent in the county of Pictou in the last election was one of the directors that my right hon. friend appointed for the Canadian National Railway, and realizing the feeling that existed in the constituency he issued a statement. Referring to the proposal that the management of the railway should be removed from Toronto back to the Maritime provinces, he said:
This proposal was some considerable time ago placed before the Minister of Railways and the Premier and approved. I have assurance of the Premier that just as soon as the necessary departmental changes are made, and this policy can be arranged, transfer of departmental work will be made from Montreal to Moncton; and the people of the Maritime

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Provinces may expect this within a very short time; I expect before the end of the year to see arrangements above referred to in full actual effect.
My hon. friend who represents Royal in the province of New Brunswick went on record as follows:
I am in favour of restoration of Maritime rights in connection with C.N.R. In fact, it is in my platform which I have put before this constituency.
And the present Solicitor General (Mr. McKenzie) also put the case very well in the public press just before the election.
He said:
In reply to your telegram asking my opinion on Maritime management of C.N.R. let me state that section 145 B.N.A. contemplates Maritime control of operation and freight rates On Intercolonial under control of competent men in sympathy and touch with local conditions.
I could read statements from other supporters of my right hon. friend pledging themselves to do-what? To have an Order in Council passed-and this is what we ask Mr. Speaker, cancelling this Order in Council which appointed Mr Hanna and his co-directors, the general managers of the Intercolonial Railway, and providing for the appointment of men who will be in sympathy with our local conditions, and who will attempt to understand the operation of the road.


Mr. CRERAR:: Would the hon. member
allow me to ask a question?


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: All right, my lord.


Thomas Alexander Crerar: I desire to thank my
hon. friend for the compliment he has paid me. As a matter of information, will my hon. friend state what advantage would accrue in the operation of a system under his proposals which do not exist at the present time?


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: I could begin by telling my hon. friend what disadvantages would he done away with. Probably that is the best way to answer. All that we are asking for is simply what we have had for forty years. Our condition is not the same as that of British Columbia. We are asking simply for the restoration of conditions which existed for forty years under both political parties, who interpreted the Imperial Act along certain lines. Situated as we are at one end of the Dominion, and to a certain extent out of the beaten track of operation of the trunk line railways in Central Canada, more particularly in the summertime, when the whole volume of
trade runs to and from the St. Lawrence, I contend that we should have intelligence and sympathetic management. The conditions of operation to which I refer have been enjoyed by us for forty years. British Columbia never had any such condition as that. There never was any operation along the lines we are asking for. Let me give an illustration. We hear about freight rates. My hon. friend told us that it . cost his constituents out west 50 per cent of the value of their oats to carry them down to Port Arthur.


Thomas Alexander Crerar: Not my constituentsfurther west, from Alberta.


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: Let me tell him that to-day, under the existing management, they charge our coal companies in Nova Scotia 60 per cent of the value of the coal to carry it to Montreal. They charge us more to carry coal to Montreal than they charge to carry coal from Lovett, Alberta down to Prince Rupert, although it is a longer distance, and they have to go over the Rockies. That is an illustration.	'


Thomas Alexander Crerar: My hon. friend proposes that the control of rates should he taken out of the hands of the Railway Commission.


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: It has never been in the hands of the Board of Railway Commissioners. That is the situation. I might explain the matter to my hon. friend. The followers of the administration of my right hon. friend (Mr. Meighen) led the people of the Maritime provinces to believe that this railway was under the Railway Commission, and when there wa: complaint about railways his friends down there always said "This is fixed by the Board of Railway Commissioners, and there is no use kicking. This man Carvel], and his associates are bad men, and they are fixing the rates." That is entirely incorrect. It never was under that board at ail. The Minister of Railways under my right hon. friend's administration approved the tariff fixed by Mr. Hanna. That is the way the rates were fixed, and it was in order to clear up the question that we attended the meeting of the board when freight rates were being investigated in the Maritime provinces.


Arthur Meighen: Does the hon. gentleman not know that all those schedules are first approved by the Railway Commission?

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Edward Mortimer Macdonald: I do not know that, but I will tell my hon. friend that I personally appeared before the Railway Commission in the province of Nova Scotia and asked them	to declare	where they stood
on this question, and whether they had any right to fix rates or any responsibility in regard to rates, and they said, "No."


Arthur Meighen: But they had final
authority.


Edward Mortimer Macdonald: My hon. friend is probably not aware of it, but they had a letter from my hon. friend the late Minister of Railways, Hon. Dr. Reid, telling them that whatever rates were fixed for the Canadian Pacific Railway from St. John would be adopted on the other road. Mr. Hanna, the general manager of the road, under the Minister of Railways and the railway department, fixed the rates, and they are responsible for the rates. It is not merely a question of rates. Nothing can be bought along the railway for any purpose whatever, unless it is purchased in Toronto or up in Ontario. Take the question of coal. Here we are in Nova Scotia, the only coal producing province in the Dominion east of the Rockies. These men in charge of the railways purchased over a million tons of coal in the United States, brought it in last year, and hauled it within a measurable distance of the city of Quebec. We could have supplied that coal from our mines, and our miners were out of work at that time. That is an indication of the utter lack of sympathy that has characterized the management of this railway, and I want to say that every man that lived along the line of that railway, whether he sits on this side of the House or on the other side, was pledged in this respect at the last election.
I wanted to put before this House these two situations, which warrant the statement that the Government was going to inquire into this matter, and that there should be due consideration given to the question of co-ordination, having regard to the situation of the Intercolonial and the Grand Trunk. I have no hesitation in saying that if by legislation this Parliament undertook to take away any rights or privileges we have under the British North America Act, it would be the duty of the local legislatures of our provinces to appeal to the Imperial Government to disallow any such legislation. There are two important things in regard to this
rMr. Macdonald.]
matter that are well worthy of the attention of the House and the Government. So far as we are concerned in the Maritime provinces, we ask no exceptional favours. The freight rate problems are general throughout the whole country, and we are perfectly willing to pay our proper share in regard to that, but we do not propose to have the management from Toronto sending down to us Canadian Northern engines and cars, and taking our locomotives away and running them on other railways. We do not propose to sit quietly down and permit that to be done. We do not propose to have these men who do not know anything about our business down there trying to dominate us and our personal interests in our province. That is true of all the Maritime provinces, and I venture to say there is not a man from New Brunswick on the other side of the House who will not support the position I am taking in regard to this matter.
We have given a great deal of care and thought to this question, and the result of all these things I have mentioned shows that the people who have been directing the government-owned railways for the last three years have not been able to produce results that have been satisfactory to the country. I think every hon. gentleman will agree with that. My hon. colleague from Nova Scotia (Mr. Fielding) has a very heavy and grave task before him in dealing with the problem, to obtain the finances necessary to meet the deficit. I do think the solution of this problem is of the greatest possible importance to the whole country. It is a most serious matter for these gentlemen who live in the West, and it interferes with us in the East as well. How to find a way out in the best interests of Canada is the problem, and I sympathize with my hon. friend the Minister of Railways (Mr. Kennedy) on account of the very heavy responsibility that has been placed upon him in dealing with the heritage that comes to him from the maladministration of the right hon. gentleman on the other side of the House. I do not think we can have in this Parliament any pretence from him or from any of his followers that this railway situation was occasioned by any act of the Liberal party. It is here purely and solely on account of the partisanship, the living-from-day-to-day policy, that characterized him and his followers in dealing with all the questions which they dealt with in the past.


Henry Lumley Drayton: Oh, oh.

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Edward Mortimer Macdonald: My hon. friend the ex-Minister of Finance laughs at that. Perhaps he will tell us the way to solve these problems, because we would be much interested to hear what he has to say on the subject. This is not a laughing matter. I have spoken very strongly on this question of the responsibility for the conditions that confront us, and this problem is not going to be got rid of by my hon. friend laughing. The right hon. gentleman (Mr. Meighen) is responsible for taking over the Canadian Northern Railway, for the loans and advances made to it, and for taking over the Grand Trunk, without any consideration of the problem which faces this Government to-day, as to where they stand in regard to international complications with the United States when they approach the question of co-ordination. The problem is before us now. The situation is such that every man of independent mind in this House, no matter on which side he sits, will join in giving the Government every possible consideration and assistance when they come to deal with this question and attempt to find a solution for the transportation problem which will not only lighten the burden imposed upon trade and industry but relieve the pressure upon the overstrained financial resources of the country. To that end, I hope there will be no dissen-tion or division between those of different positions in this country. There should be no antagonism between agriculture, commerce and industry. All should -work hand in hand in order to bring about a solution of these problems. They should not be adversaries, but rather mates and partners anxious to forget anything on which they might divide, glad only to join with every possible ardor for the interest of our common country in the solution of those questions that confront us to-day.
Hon. Sir HENRY L. DRAYTON (West York) : Mr. Speaker, I had hoped to commence my remarks in rather a different atmosphere from that created by the last speaker. I had hoped to commence with a discussion rather of things as they are to-day, than of the things of yesterday to which he referred. I wonder if my hon. friend realises that there has been an election. From the amount of spleen that he has displayed, from the attack that he has made, I rather think the hon. gentleman believes he is still languishing in the shades of opposition. He talks about large issues in the country. What was the big issue that he made in his opening remarks? Why,
the great task to which he set himself was the discrediting of the leader of the Opposition (Mr. Meighen); If it is true that there is this task and it is the most important task which his party is confronted with, we feel that we have a first rate leader, and the more sticks and stones that are thrown, the more we shall be confirmed in that opinion. I do not know whether my hon. friend desires to assume the role of the fault-finder on the Government benches. He seems to be exceedingly qualified for the post. I do not know exactly where his fault-finding is going to end; but if he will not take my advice-and I am quite sure he will not; I would not expect him to do so-I wonder if he will take the advice of the Toronto Globe in its reference to this very question which, after all, is, really t'he one underlying the hon, gentleman's remarks, the belittlement of Ontario and all that Ontario stands for, on the one hand, not, of course, for purposes of injuring Ontario, but for the purpose of Creating favourable prejudice elsewhere or the other. I shall read an editorial from the Globe of March 11, 1922, and it has to say this on the subject of my hon. friend. The article is headed:
Useless Faultfinding. Addressing women at the Montreal Reform Club, Mr. E. M. Macdonald. M.P. for Pictou, N.S., accused Ontario of narrowness of outlook.
He said: For Ontario, Canada, is hounded by the river Ottawa on one side and by Sault Ste-Marie on the other. Everything outside that territory does not count in the estimation of that province. It is an indication of a narrowness of mind unworthy of anyone living in Canada.
That is a quotation of the hon. gentleman's speech as given by the Globe. The Globe goes on:
Mr. Macdonald does not know Ontario at first hand. He is building a wide accusation on a narrow basis, the sayings of a few narrowminded men and narrow-minded newspapers. We have broad and narrow people here, as they have in Nova Scotia. In any case, nothing is to be gained by Nova Scotia making such accusations against Ontario, or Ontario against Nova Scotia. Mr. Macdonald should go up against the Philistines at home.
Again, I say that if the hon. member for Pictou is not willing to take my advice-and I do not expect him to do so-let him at least regard the voice of the chief organ in Ontario of his party; and if again he will have no conception of what that newspaper says, and thinks nothing of it, let him, at least, think of Canada and ask himself whether it would be worth while to continue, at a time like this, to attempt to set
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up provincial prejudice, the one province against the other, or whether, after all, the problems of the day are not sufficiently great and serious to invite the best efforts of a united Canada.
For a moment, I make no further reference to the lamentations of my hon. friend. I shall have, I am afraid, to deal with them in a little more detail later on; but I should like to commence now just where I would have wished to commence, had it not been for what has taken place. Mr. Speaker, here we are with a brand new Government and a brand new Speaker, and I want, in the first instance, to congratulate my hon. friends very heartily on the first-rate victory they have achieved. I cannot agree with some of the methods employed by them in the winning of that victory, but they are happy and contented and I rejoice personally in their happiness and contentment. If the Prime Minister were here I would address a few remarks of personal thanks to him. It is a great pleasure to me, for example, to be able to congratulate him on the appointment which he has made in filling the office of Speaker. The present incumbent of that office I have known for many years as a friend, and I rejoice to see the Chair of this honourable Chamber so ably filled. I should also like to congratulate the Prime Minister upon his selection of the Minister of Finance (Mr. Fielding). I am quite sure that out of the many followers of whom the Prime Minister boasts none is better fitted to fill that important position than the hon. gentleman whom he has called upon to assume file office. I am sincere in what I say in that regard.
Something, however, has happened this afternoon that compels me to qualify somewhat these remarks. The Minister of Finance deserves our sympathy as well as our congratulations, but I fear he has exhibited in the past two little failings which at this session of the House may become very important in their significance. He has too little faith in Canada and too little faith in the possibilities of the British Empire when dealing with the question of reciprocity; on the other hand, he has a great deal too much faith in railways and in the statements of railway contractors and promoters. And in view of the remarks made this afternoon I am afraid I shall have to give to the House a few brief quotations to show the misplaced greatness of his faith in the representations of railway contractors and pro-

moters. I regret that it should be necessary to refer to ancient history, but it is impossible for me to refrain from doing so on this occasion. Hansard reports my hon. friend the Minister of Finance, in dealing with the Grand Trunk Pacific matter, as follows, on May 26, 1904:
Last year my right hon. friend the Leader of the Government (Sir Wilfrid Laurier) made the statement that we could provide for the obligations entailed by this scheme out of one year's surplus. The statement which my hon. friend made in that off-hand way was absolutely and literally correct. I showed that by setting aside some $13,000,000 or $14,000,000, which was somewhat less than our surplus, we could provide for the payment of the seven years' interest which we are under obligation to give to the company. By our agreement we gave them seven years' free rental on the eastern division and seven years' free interest on the mountain sction of the western. I pointed out, upon the authority of an actuary, that by laying aside $13,000,000 or $14,000,000 we could provide for the complete payment of that obligation and that, therefore, was the measure of what we would have to pay.
Again, in the same debate, referring to the Grand Trunk Pacific project, he said:

When the project was brought down to Parliament, it was found that the scheme was so bold and comprehensive, so carefully thought out and guarded in the public interest, and entailed so small a charge, comparatively speaking, upon the public treasury, that these hon. gentlemen were amazed that the Government should have been able to negotiate such a scheme.
My hon. friend, I say, has too much faith in the figures of railway promoters. He mentions the sum of $13,000,000 or $14,000,000. Why, Sir, that line already has cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars.


William Findlay Maclean: And is still
costing the country money.


Henry Lumley Drayton: Well, I do not know what may happen in the future, but it is costing a great deal now. I think it costs now more per annum than the whole of that estimate; at any rate it is costing a very epormous sum of money. There is another question to which I wish to refer, and it gives me much pleasure to do so. I had expected that the task would fall to me of saying something about Canada's position, and establishing the fact, as it can easily be established, that of all countries that have taken part in this war, from its commencement, as Canada did, of all countries whose effort at all compares with Canada's in any one of her activities, having regard to her income and population, not one is in a better position than Canada. This is a claim I have made before, a claim that has also been very generously and free-

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ly made by the financial papers and financial authorities of foreign countries in the best position to speak on this subject. I have said before that we were in at least as good a position as any other country outside of the great United States, which, of course, entered the war a good deal later than we did; but the duty of re-asserting this fact has been removed from my shoulders by the frank admission that appears in the Speech from the Throne. My hon. friends, who a short time ago saw nothing but darkness and ruin ahead of us, and talked of annexation with the United States as a result of the country's position, just in a few brief hours discovered that not only was my claim correct, but that they could go further and say that the position of Canada is better than that of any other country. Now that they are in office they make a wider and stronger claim than I have ever done. May I congratulate my friends upon their newly found faith in their country. These conversions are splendid. It does one good to see doubting Thomases who are quivering and quaking, afraid of annexation and all kinds of bogies of this kind, turn round, when they attain the ministerial benches, and from gloomy doubters become valiant upholders of their country's position. Again I congratulate them. I admit that I was amazed, although I ought not to have been, because there were apostles and emissaries going out telling them how awfully mistaken they were in what they had been saying, and that after all the financial newspapers knew more about the question than they did and were perhaps worth heeding. And so the gospel of optimism was commenced. I should not be surprised, because I notice that on December 22, my hon. friend the then member-elect for St. Antoine (Mr. Mitchell)-and he is a financial authority, Mr. Speaker-was talking on this very question, and I find that he is reported in the Gazette of December 23, as having said:-
The time had come for turning away from the dark side of things, that it was well to look away from the sombre tints shown during the campaign and with the aid of a strong immigration policy, work together for the development of Canada as a unity, and not as a country made up of easternism and Westernism, was the message which Mr. Walter Mitchell, M.F.-elect for St. Antoine, and late provincial treasurer, gave to the Commercial Travellers at the annual meeting of the Dominion Commercial Travellers' Association, held at the Windsor Hotel last night.
"Do not believe in the dark pictures we painted for you during the election," he said amidst laughter. "I would have painted them
still darker had I not been afraid that my majority would be too big."
So it is, Mr. Speaker, and I ought not to have been surprised that my hon. friend, financial critic and authority as he is, had started this great work of conversion of the Liberal party from pessimism as far back as December 22. I congratulate him upon his success.
In the course of his speech my hon. friend the Prime Minister (Mr. Mackenzie King) ventured into a calculation as to the popular support given this party, whose defeat he was so cheerfully gloating over, and upon whose defeat-now that he is in his seat-I freely and sincerely congratulate him. Why, he said, if the majority of the votes only were considered we-the official Opposition-would be given merely 22 seats. Well, I would have thought that in the case of what I believe to be the first Canadian Premier holding office with a substantial minority vote, the hon. gentleman would have found it just as convenient to say nothing about that matter. But perhaps he is rather proud of that position. It is quite true we were not dealt with very kindly. Personally, I think we got not only the worst of the fight, but I believe we got worse- treatment than we merited. But let us see how this works out.
Of a total of 3,121,844 votes cast in the general election-I cannot vouch for these figures, but I believe they are correct- 1,296,723 were cast in favour of the Liberals, representing 41-53 per cent of the votes polled. My hon. friend talks about the minority candidates returned. Why, this is entirely a minority Government, and if his principles are correct, he should resign from office. It would be a dreadful thing, of course, to borrow some of the language used by him on a previous occasion when he talked about usurpation by a minority of the rights of the majority, but his language seems to be applicable to the present situation. The Conservative vote was 971,502, or 31-52 per cent of the total, while the Progressives with 769,387 votes polled 24.64 per cent of the whole. I should like to give my hon. friend the member from Marquette (Mr. Crerar) credit for drawing my attention to this question. I was chaffing him for not undertaking what seemed to me to be his absolute duty in this House as official leader of the Onnosition bv reason of the fact that his party had a considerably larger representation than we had. He said to me: I cannot follow you in that
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reasoning, because after all you got over 200,000 more votes than we did. Well, analysing these figures I find he was right.
The unit of representation per member for the Government supporters averages therefore 10,989; the Conservatives, 19,430 per member, and the Progressives 11,836. We have 118 members supporting the Government, 50 Liberal-Conservative members, 65 Progressives, and 2 Independents. If we were to take the basis of the vote of the Liberal-Conservatives as the basis of representation, the Government would have only 66 seats as against our 50, and the Progressives would have 39. If we take the Government unit, the Conservatives would have 88 seats as against their present 50, and the Progressives 70 seats. I think the fortunes of war have dealt pretty kindly with my hon. friend the leader of the Government, and that on reflection he will think that after all he should not perhaps gibe us too much on forming a party which can only properly count 22 members.
If there is one thing that this House ought to do during the present session it is to pass a redistribution bill. The Speech from the Throne does not indicate any very extensive legislative programme. My. hon. friend is the head of a minority government. I do not know what the future holds in store for him or for his party; nobody knows; he himself does not know,. In order, therefore, to ensure something like fair and proper representation of the people in the next Parliament, the necessary steps to effect redistribution should be taken at once.
We have heard a good deal about campaign literature. Definite pledges, platforms and statements have been referred to by my leader and brought to the attention of the Prime Minister. Am I unfair in saying that the Prime Minister's reception of this recapitulation of campaign promises was, to say the least, cynical? The Prime Minister tells us not to take seriously this campaign literature; not to take seriously the pledges given to the people during the election campaign by the different parties. The hon. gentleman reminded my leader of a certain poster which contained the statement that Canada needed a certain very eminent gentleman, and went on to remark that the country did not think so. But if the cartoonist was wrong; if that idea was for the moment mistaken, is that any reason why the plighted word and solemn pledges of gentlemen returned to office should not be observed?

What is the use of an election if those who have voted for the victorious party find that the pledges on the strength of which they voted never existed? Does my hon. friend intend during the present session to bring down a bill to amend the Criminal Code? In that code there are laws dealing with misrepresentation,- and I may point out to my hon. friend that the crime of misrepresentation is only complete when the offender charged gets the goods. My hon. friend has the goods here; he is in office. Anyone who by false pretences, or misrepresentation, obtains property, even of infinitesimal value, is guilty of a crime and liable to a long term of imprisonment. Does my hon. friend think it is a small thing to say that faith with the people may be broken, that representations made for the purpose of obtaining office may cynically be disallowed? I am disappointed, more than disappointed, in the attitude of my hon. friend. I have had a high opinion of his character, and I am sure that upon reflection he will admit that such a serious matter cannot be disposed of by an easy gibe.
I am disappointed in my hon. friend for another reason. You know, Mr. Speaker, something happened during the last election-the Liberals discovered something during the campaign. Why, they discovered Toronto, and they proclaimed their discovery in their pre-election literature. Here is another of those things to which the Prime Minister thinks we should not pay attention. I was in hopes that what I am about to read was a distinct conversion of the great Liberal party to the just claims of Toronto. What do they say? Here is a campaign advertisement graced by my hon, friend's picture. I use the word "graced" advisedly; it is a very good portrait.


Mr. CHISHOLM:: We cannot hear a word of what my hon. friend is saying.


Henry Lumley Drayton: I am very sorry. Among other things I was observing that this campaign document is graced by a fair picture of the Prime Minister.


Mr. McMASTER:: That is good so far.


Henry Lumley Drayton: First rate; it is all good, but apparently it is not to be "taken seriously." It reads:
Is Toronto, which produces over twenty-three per cent of the total revenue of the Dominion, entitled to adequate custom house facilities, and a post office worthy of a city of the size and importance of Toronto?

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Was it not the duty of the representatives of this city to secure, long ago, the construction of the viaduct, the custom house and post office? These great public works that Toronto needs and is entitled to should be commenced immediately, in order to relieve the present unemployment in this city.
I was sure, Mr. Speaker, until my hon. friend made the answer that he did to my leader, that in the Estimates there would be provision for these much-needed works.
I am glad to see the hon. Minister of Labour (Mr. Murdock) in his seat; I congratulate him upon his most recent successes. I am particularly glad to see him here, because I wish to draw his attention to these words in the advertisement which I have just read: "in order to relieve the present unemployment in this city." I wish to point out to him further that for the period ending January 31, 1921, the percentage of employment in the trades reporting, was 90 1, and the percentage of unemployment, therefore, 9-9. For the period ending January 15, 1922, the figure was 80-6, unemployment, 19.4. For the last week that I have been able to get information, January 31 of this year-my hon. friend will have more recent information-the figure was 78.9, with an unemployment ratio of 21.1. I would like to point out to my hon. friend the Minister of Labour that compared with the same week of last year, at a time when he was disturbed by the spectre of unemployment, we have to-day nearly three times the amount of unemployment, and I would ask him whether, in view of that unemployment, which he professed himself concerned about, and sincerely I believe, he does not think these public works should be proceeded with immediately, as the candidate's advertisement says.
At six o'clock the House took recess.
After Recess
The House resumed at eight o'clock.


Henry Lumley Drayton: When the House took recess at six o'clock, I was discussing the advertisement published in the city of Toronto, in the interests, among others, of my hon. friend the Minister of Labour, and dealing with the unemployment situation. I still hope that that is not to be included in the list of discarded pledges by my hon. friend the Prime Minister. I would be very loath to think that the underlying motive of that advertisement was to signalize the direct return to what is vulgarly known as porkbarrel politics in Canada. That the only idea was that it should be a bait and a bribe to Toronto to elect the Minister of Labour, and that, as a penalty for his
non-election-that the admitted measure of justice should not be extended to that municipality. It was either one thing or the other. I sincerely hope it was not the latter proposition, but I am afraid we may expect disappointment.	Mr. Speaker, I
do not see the hon. senior member for Halifax (Mr. Maclean) in his seat, but it is within the memory of all of us how insistently he fought for Civil Service reform, how he piloted through this House the Civil Service Act,	how
the very name of	patronage was
something most distasteful to him, but I notice little kites up in the air already, and some newspapers, very close to the administration are drawing attention to and making attacks on the Civil Service Commission, and most startling of all, I see one of these kites now being flown by the senior member for Halifax. I read from a Halifax paper, I think the Chronicle, this note, which appeared in the issue of February 9:
Name Patronage Board
At a meeting of the Liberals in Halifax yesterday, the following were named on what is said to he a patronage committee; Alderman Findlay, Harry Murphy, B. W. Russell, Ralph Hendry, Mayor J. S. Parker, and C. H. Bennett. These men were selected by the Hon. A. K. Maclean and Dr. Edward Blackadder.
I could not commence to in any way vie with the hon. gentleman in the tremendous claims that he made for the total abolition of patronage. It was his long suit. We find that that long suit was played when he was in the Union Government, to make sure that no patronage could be indulged in by the Union administration, the Liberal-Conservative administration, but patronage of the oldest and worst type can be indulged in just as soon as the Liberal administration takes office. We all know what the idea of the kite is, how these things are thrown out for the purpose of seeing just how they are going to be received. The hon. gentleman still has time to say that he does not intend to stultify himself, that he meant what he said, that he believed, and still continues to believe, in reform-and I may tell him that there was more reform granted to the people of this country in the last five years than in the preceding twenty-five years-ax'd that now, simply because his political friends occupy the treasury benches, he is not going to throw into the
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discard the principles which he affected to hold most dearly. I do not know what advice the hon. gentleman is getting as the result of the publicity given to this proposed change. I hope that he will take advantage of the present situation to deny that he has any intention of proceeding further and by disbanding that committee.
We have had lota of misrepresentation, and I think many of the misrepresentations -and I want to be fair about it-were made in the heat of conflict, as they are . often made, without proper information as to the facts. But I would like to impress upon the gentlemen who now form part of the administration that misrepresentations cap no longer be indulged in, that we are entitled to facts and that the business of the country should be conducted on a basis of facts. Let me illustrate what I mean by this, and I am going to address myself again to the Minister of Labour. I do not know whether many of the gentlemen in the House have had the privilege of hearing the Minister of Labour talk. He is a most eloquent and convincing talker. I think sometimes he gets carried away by his own eloquence, and says a great many things which he never intended to say. I may be wrong, but at any rate I would' like to approach the discussion of one or two matters to which I am going to call the attention of the House, in that spirit.
Oh, Mr. Speaker, you should have heard the eloquence of my friend in the last campaign. You should have heard his denunciation of trusts and combines. He left nothing to be desired. These denunciations were delivered with the greatest force and eloquence and there were some peculiarly bad combines which he directed special attention to. He did me the honour of coming to my constituency and delivering a tremendous address denouncing anything and everything in his endeavour to make a hit. I have notes of his address taken at the time. He picked out for a very special part of his attack these iniquitous trusts and combines. He fastened all this upon the back of the late government. They were the protectors of the trusts; they created them; they fathered them; they aided them; the trusts were their children. He quoted Biblical phrases in connection with them; he found new decalogues in connection with them, and he was going to do tremendous things with them. Why, you should have heard him speak of Sir Charles Gordon

of that iniquitous concern, the Dominion Textile Company, the concern that he had been waiting for two long years for an opportunity to hale before a proper investigating committee and to exhibit in all its nakedness and frightfulness to the Canadian people!
There was another concern that he said a great deal about, the Canada Cement Company. He disposed of the Dominion Textile Company and the Canada Cement Company to his complete satisfaction, but he never told the people that both those companies were incorporated under the Liberal regime. His charge was that they were Conservative creations. The fact is that the merger of the Canada Cement Company took place in 1909, and the merger of the Dominion Textile Company took place on January 4, 1905. I am making no charges against those companies. The charges were made by the Minister of Labour. He has been in power for some time; he has had an opportunity of considering the case of that awful man, Sir Charles Gordon. He has passed upon his case; he has sentenced him for his crimes and iniquities by sending him over to Genoa for the purpose of representing this country at that great conference. The minister (Mr. Murdock) laughs. Oh, the election is over! He charged us with having the support of these companies; and if he did not know, he ought to have known that, at the very time those charges were made the name of Sir Charles Gordon was to be found upon the nomination papers of the Minister of Justice (Sir Lomer Gouin). That was the sort of thing that we took uncomplainingly.
The hon. member had a bigger complaint than that. Sir, the most monstrous, the most dreadful octopus, the worst of all the companies in the world, the one that surpassed all others in frightfulness, according to his way of putting it, was that dreadful organization known as the British Empire Steel Company. Why, my hon. friend waxed eloquent even for him; he rose to a height of superlative eloquence when he was denouncing that concern, and he went on to tell the people how he had investigated it and had found that, in the capitalization of the company there was no less than $230,000,000 represented by water or by good will. He went on to draw such a harrowing picture that it would bring tears to the eyes of the most hardened, as to the tremendous, awful burden that was cast upon the unfortunate people of Canada who would have to pay for all time

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dividends on watered stock, dividends on values that did not exist, simply because the wicked government that was, countenanced such things. And he stopped there, for if he had told the truth his purpose would not have been served. If he had told the truth, it would have been known that the minister and his friends were responsible for that incorporation. If he had told the truth to the people of Ontario, he would have said:	"This is the investigation that I made. I found this tremendous amount of water. These incorporators came to Ottawa with their petition for incorporation. They went away without it and they took practically the first train to my political friends, the Liberal government of Nova Scotia and they got their incorporation." If he had gone further, he could have said; "Why, Mr. Macdonald, K.C."-he was not then member for Pictou; he has since been elected-"Mr. Macdonald, one of my political friends is general counsel for, or at least very high up in the councils of that company, representing them, working for them. Ah, yes, here I am also, walking the goose-step with Ned Macdonald in our nondescript army." But he did not tell us anything of that kind. Oh, no, there was nothing that was said about the facts. After all, it is all ancient history now; I hope it has gone not to return; I hope that, with office, my hon. friend will stick to facts. I wish him every success in his department. The country needs success in the administration of the Department of Labour; and as regards those who sit around me, my hon. friend can take no proper step to help labour, no proper step to help unemployment, but his hands will be upheld by those sitting on this side of the House.
Are we very much better off to-day? I am hoping we are, but are we? Look at the discrepancy that we have between the Prime Minister and the hon. member for Marquette. It is not a discrepancy as to a mere matter of form; it is a discrepancy that is vital. It goes to the question of establishing fairness and loyalty to his friends on the part of the member for Marquette (Mr. Crerar) or else a willingness to desert them and to scrap his party. He has taken his position and the leader of the House has taken his. They are diametrically opposed, the one to the other, and I am afraid we cannot do anything to help solve this question except to point out that, in view of all the circumstances, in view of the fact that a meeting was held of the members of this
House supporting the leader of the Progressives, and that these matters were favourably considered, the great probability is that the leader of that party was correct in what he said. But, as I say, we cannot do much one way or the other to solve the question. It is a pity that we have so early in the session, such a sharp divergence on a matter of fact involving a question of veracity as we have between these two hon. gentlemen.
Well, we are attacked rather severely in connection with our railway policy. All the troubles of the railways, according to the hon. member for Pictou (Mr. Macdonald) are attributable to the one man of whom, for some particular reason, he seems to try to make a Machiavelli. The Prime Minister dealt with the same question and did me the honour of referring to a report which I made to this House some years ago. I wonder whether he will put the rest of the report into effect, or whether he is going to confine his en-dorsation to just a few lines of it, because those lines serve, for the moment, a useful purpose. I wonder whether he believes what that report shows as to the woeful waste, the reckless extravagance, and the manifest impropriety of the whole Grand Trunk Pacific and Transcontinental venture; or is his endorsation applicable merely to these few lines? Well, it is quite true that the figures quoted by my hon. friend are correct. It is equally true that at that time the mileage of railways in operation was nothing like what it is today. It is perfectly true, for example, that in 1911, although the lines had been very largely completed, neither the Grand Trunk Pacific nor the Transcontinental was reported as an operating railway in Canada. But to adopt the argument based on the figures of the mileage of railways in operation would lead to the result of charging the Liberal-Conservative party with the responsibility of it all, the party that did its very best and fought its hardest to stop that iniquitous scheme. Why, hon. gentlemen know that railways are not operated immediately on their completion. Those gentlemen who come from the West know that long after construction has been completed much time elapses before any application is made to the Railway Board to open the lines for operation, and there have been brought to the board, time and again, cases which could not be dealt with simply because the lines concerned, although completed, had not been declared by the company to be ready for operation and the
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operation was carried on by the contractor. Furthermore, I think the House knows very well that, in connection with the right to charge operating expenses to capital account, there was a very special reason for a great delay on the part of the officials of the Grand Trunk Pacific in making the necessary application to the Railway Board, although the lines had been completed. To such an extent was this the case that the question was considered as to whether or not Parliament should take to itself power to declare the lines open and ready for operation although the companies themselves had not done so.
Now, I desire, in the plainest possible terms, to take issue both with the Prime Minister and with the member for Pictou as to who is responsible for the overbuilding of railways in this country, and who is responsible for this mess. Did any gentleman in this House, Mr. Speaker, ever hear the suggestion, until made by the Prime Minister in this debate, that it was open to this country to cancel all the charters that had been given and to set aside all the bond issues that had been made? Not only were these bond issues made, but the moneys had been provided and were in the hands of the trustees of the issues; and these moneys could be applied only to the one purpose. The fact is, as is very well known, that the great part of these undertaking's had been completed at that time, that the right of way had been bought throughout, that a large proportion of the steel had been laid, and that the companies and the Government that had endorsed their bonds were absolutely committed to the undertakings and had to go on with them. I say that every charter, which is responsible for the overbuilding of lines in Canada, where that overbuilding to-day is burdensome upon the public, was authorized by the Liberal Government. Why, during the whole long term of the Liberal administration, during fifteen years, there were only two years in which there was not some Canadian Northern legislation giving charters or guarantee charters, guarantees, and the like. My hon. friends will find a great number of them, and they will further find only two years when none was granted. I do not want to weary the House by giving a list of all these, but I should like to specify some of the main charters,-charters which have resulted in unnecessary mileage, and consequent financial embarrassment.
Hon. gentlemen know that the invasion of Ontario by the Canadian Northern has

proved very, very expensive, and is now demonstrated to have been for the most part entirely unnecessary. The charter for the line from Montreal to French River was granted on July 20th, 1905, but if you count the railway as in operation you will find that in 1911, according to the Prime Minister, we became liable for it. For the line from the township of Chisholm to Capreol, their divisional point in Ontario, the charter was granted on the 19th May, 1909. For the line from North Bay to Port Arthur, linking up the system with the West, and committing the country absolutely to the project, the charter was granted on the 15th May, 1902. When you get out farther west you will find that the charters for the lines from Dauphin to Battleford and thence to Edmonton were granted on the 29th June, 1897, and the 15th May, 1902, respectively. There is no doubt of one thing, Sir, and that is that, generally speaking the prairie lines of the Canadian Northern are good lines. If the Canadian Northern had been left where the Laurier administration found it, on the prairies, and allowed to expand there, and had devoted the hundreds of millions of dollars which were sunk in the building of unnecessary lines in the East towards giving absolutely necessary lines to the western farmers, its prairie system would indeed have been a great asset to this country. I repeat, those lines were good and necessary lines.
But the Canadian Northern system was not to stop there; that bold administration was determined to continue extension to the Coast, and it granted a charter for the line from Edmonton to Vancouver on the 11th August, 1899.


Mr. GRAHAM:: Might I ask the hon. gentleman a question? Is it not a fact that the line from the Rockies to Vancouver, known as the Canadian Northern railway, was built under a provincial charter granted by the Government of Sir Richard McBride?


Henry Lumley Drayton: I will deal with that in a moment.


George Perry Graham: Why not now?


Henry Lumley Drayton: We will get to it in proper order. Why this anxiety?


George Perry Graham: There was never a line built under that charter.


Henry Lumley Drayton: I am pointing out that so far as the corporate administration was concerned, these rights

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were given. The whole of that expensive Ontario-Quebec system was constructed under legislation of the former Liberal Government. It is absolutely true that, having got their charter from the Laurier administration, the promoters of the Canadian Northern system went to the British Columbia government and, for the purpose, as I think, of evading Dominion regulation, constructed that remaining link through that province under legislation granted by the provincial government. There is no question about that.


George Perry Graham: Hear, hear.


Henry Lumley Drayton: There is also no question about the bond guarantees and the construction grants which these sections of the system got.


George Perry Graham: Not in British Columbia.


Henry Lumley Drayton: Oh, they were appalling. I do not know whether my hon. friend is responsible for them.


George Perry Graham: I say not in British Columbia.


Henry Lumley Drayton: I believe they got that chiefly from the local government.


George Perry Graham: Not chiefly, but wholly until the Conservative Government came into power.


Henry Lumley Drayton: My hon. friend is entitled to that bit of encouragement.


George Perry Graham: That is a very important distinction.


Henry Lumley Drayton: Let him have it. But what does he say about the Government that with this line arranged for, with the charters standing, chooses deliberately to build a third line, paralleling the two existing lines, at its own cost in part and entirely on its own authority. Why, Mr. Speaker, there may be some room for argument that this country could support, and would support, two transcontinental lines; but when the Laurier administration embarked upon the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific they embarked upon a project which committed this country to three transcontinental lines, and I cannot find appropriate parliamentary language to properly describe such an act.
Let us see if that is an over-statement. The charter for the line from Edmonton to Vancouver was granted four years prior to the Grand Trunk Pacific project. It is true it was built under another charter;
but the right to build was there. From Dauphin, Manitoba, to Edmonton, the charter was granted one year prior to the Grand Trunk Pacific project. From North Bay to Port Arthur the charter was also granted one year prior to the Grand Trunk Pacific project. There is another very extraordinary circumstance which shows that the administration of that time had a belief in the idea that three transcontinental railways could be supported by this country, because the charter for the line from Montreal to French river was given by that administration after the Grand Trunk Pacific project had been launched.
Well, construction goes on, guarantees are given, and millions of dollars of public money are placed at the disposal of the promoters of these railways. Then 1911 comes along, and with construction largely carried out, governments everywhere committed, the moneys in the hands of trustees-all this done, it is now suggested that we ought to have stopped. If ever there was something which goes beyond eleventh-hour repentance, something which occurs just before the end of everything, you have it in that suggestion.
I wonder if some of the eminent legal gentlemen on the other side will later give us the benefit of their views. If they do, we shall perhaps be told in what manner the Dominion could legally have interfered with a matter directly involving property and civil rights; involving the issue of bonds, the placing of money in the hands of trustees, the liabilities of provinces and even of the Dominion itself. But the suggestion could not have been intended to be taken seriously. The hon. member for Pic-tou says that because we did these things we are responsible for everything. But what would he have had us do? Did he want the settlers who had been induced to come to this country left without the transportation service which they were assured they would have, left without any way of getting out their crops or getting in their food supplies? What would he do with regard to the many villages and communities which would be without railway communication? What would he do with the commitments here and there and everywhere? What would he do with the large government guarantees, Dominion and provincial? He knows very well that there was just one thing to do: to carry on as best we could; to make the best of the exceedingly bad situation that had been created for us.

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The ho:n. member says that we were responsible for the loan to the Canadian Northern. Every cent of the loan of 1911 went into the property, and the same is true of the loan of 1914. We did not want to take the baby; the government did everything it could to get rid of it. Not until everybody in Canada was sick and tired of putting up funds for private companies were the lines taken over. Is it not better, if we have to spend money in connection with foolish and improper undertakings, that we should at least know where every cent is going? Is it not better that if they are a success the country should get the benefit of it? Is it not better that the Canadian taxpayer should, to use a commonplace expression, get a "run for his money"?
Well, we are to blame for another thing, the hon. member says; we are to blame because the government consented to arbitration. I will tell the House very frankly that my own view as expressed in the report to which reference has been made was that there was no equity in the Canadian Northern. I took that view, and I still hold it. But the government were in this position: they were entering into possession of a property, and the usual thing when governments in civilized countries enter into possession of somebody else's phoperty is to have a free and independent arbitration for the purpose of finding out what that property is worth. The usual course, therefore, was followed in this case: three independent arbitrators were appointed. I have not heard any attack made by hon. gentlemen opposite upon the character, the standing, or the ability of any one of these arbitrators; nevertheless we are blamed because we carried out an award made by a board composed of men of the highest standing.
Then, we are frightfully to blame, the hon. member suggests, because we did not know that the Grand Trunk had an American mileage. Is it not a tremendous discovery which the hon. gentleman has just made-that the Grand Trunk has an American mileage? Well, my hon. friends will have no difficulty in carrying out the project if they approach it along the lines of the report which has been made. That does not call for government operation as talked about by the hon. member for Pic-tou. It does not mean that this Government will report to or take orders from the Washington government. It simply means that company operation will be carried on

in respect of the lines in American territory and reports made to the Washington authorities with regard' thereto by that company. The only difference is that company would be owned not by private, English shareholders but by the people of Canada generally. I do not see anything sinister in this. I am sure that so far all the trouble in this regard has been manufactured by my hon. friends. If they stick to it long enough; if they talk about it loud enough, I dare say they may find a sympathetic reception on the part of some across the border, but if there is trouble, the country will know how and whence it came. Is there any trouble in connection with the ownership of the Soo line by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company? Why, the Soo line gets along just as well to-day, owned by Canadians, as it did when owned by Americans. It is the same old company; reports are made in the ordinary course, and there is no trouble. The Michigan Central running through Ontario has no trouble in Canada, nor have I heard of any difficulities arising in connection with Mr. Hill's lines in the West. I have never heard any civilized country say that simply because the whole of a people of a very friendly neighbouring country are interested in an enterprise operating partly in their territory, the people of that neighbouring country shall do no business with them. But in the minds of these gentlemen who approach the subject with so much sympathy, this circumstance is a terrible bugaboo. I only hope that what I have heard is true: that a fair chance will be given national ownership.
But I wonder who is reading the situation most correctly? The Montreal Star has had an editorial upon the subject,- and the Montreal Star and Montreal Gazette are two papers referred to by my hon. friend from Marquette as being strangely sympathetic with the new administration. As to these papers we have the suggestion coming from governmental benches- yes, from an old member of standing-the suggestion of loaves and fishes. It is certainly a suggestion I would not make. Yet one hon. gentleman made it. I wonder why. I wonder what kind of a loaf and what kind of a fish that is. I wonder what kind of a monogram it would have upon it. I do not think any hon. gentleman on this side of the House at any rate, yes, or on the other, would have much difficulty in guessing what cabalistic lettering would appear upon them. Well, the idea of the Montreal

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Star, in its editorials, was plainly that the opportunity was an opportunity to prove the absolute impossibility of governmental ownership in this country, and if my friends are sincere in what they are about to undertake I would counsel them not to have very many gentlemen speak along the lines followed by the hon. member for Pictou, unless they want to be put in the position that they' are absolutely and entirely sure that trouble will be made in the United States, so that they will have some excuse for getting out of the obligation which they owe to the people of this country.
There was another thing said by my hon. friend, the Prime Minister. He blamed us on this side of the House for our unsympathetic handling of the- Grand Trunk Pacific. I wonder what on earth he meant by "unsympathetic" handling of the Grand Trunk Pacific. Good heavens, Mr. Speaker, this country was being bled white to look after that baby! Did he want millions more thrown away to keep it going? How much more ought we to have given it? Mr. Speaker, there are some projects so far removed from reason that the most reckless expenditure would be insufficient to save them. Some day perhaps we may have an asset in the Grand Trunk Pacific; but we have not to-day. Yet we are charged with being unsympathetic. We here are only interested, and I think I can speak in this connection for every member on this side of the House, in seeing that the property of the people of Canada gets a fair chance. We know that it is so easy to stifle and kill the project that frankly we are afraid a good deal will be made of the remarks of the hon. member for Pictou. In answer to his remarks to-day I read calculations given to the House by the Minister of Finance at the inception of the Grand Trunk Pacific project Now our vote last year on that account, if I remember rightly, was $26,000,000. Yet the whole cost of the undertaking, according to the figures given by the Minister of Finance at its inception-I am sure they were not his own figures but were supplied him by the railway-was to be $13,000,000, just half the necessary vote taken in the 9 p.m. House last year. It is wonderful what railway people can do with figures. I wonder, Mr. Speaker, if you have read the award in the present Grand Trunk arbitration. If you have read it you will have some idea of what railway officials can do with figures. As to
the question of figures used by the Grand Trunk, some very harsh things have been said, but I prefer to take what their own arbitrator-not the arbitrator appointed by the Government or the third arbitrator- but what their own arbitrator says. On page 58 of the Award-I will cut the reading down as much as possible-he says:
In 1913 the operating revenues were improperly increased apparently in order to justify the declaration of a dividend on the three series of preferred stocks, a full dividend on. the first and second, and half on the third. Then came a period in which the London management waa anxious to induce the Canadian Government to take the burden of the Grand Trunck Pacific off its back, on the ground that obligation to run and finance the Pacific Road might lead to the bankruptcy of the Grand Trunk. That led the London management to understate their operating revenues and charge the Audit Office Fund during the years 1915, 1916 and 1917 with an aggregate of nearly eight million dollars that should have appeared as additional revenue.
In 1919 and 1920, when the sale of the road to the Government was being faced as the best course, manipulation of the accounts was directed to making the financial condition of the road seem better than it was.
Yes, Mr. Speaker, wonderful things can be done by people who juggle figures and who do not seem to care very much as to the accuracy of the reports they sign.


George Perry Graham: Hear, hear.


Henry Lumley Drayton: The hon. gentleman says "hear, hear." I take it that he agrees entirely with my remarks.


George Perry Graham: Oh, certainly.


Henry Lumley Drayton: I take it that he has not in view, perhaps has never heard of, the statement that was made use of in the campaign in West York in connection with the Grand Trunk employees, a statement that was used well in the interests of my hon. friend's party. It was to the effect that a promise had been given Mr. Kelley, either that he would be left in control of the Grand Trunk system, that the Grand Trunk system would not be taken over, or else that he would be put in charge of the National roads. I wonder if that is what my hon. friend was thinking of when he said "Hear, hear,"-if he meant that so far as he was concerned he was going to see that no gentlemen that had anything to do with the deception worked on the people of this country by these reports shall have anything to do with the management of the people's roads. I take it that that is what his "Hear, hear" meant. We still hope, Mr. Speaker that the chance given will be, not a chance to make certain failure of the roads, but
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a chance which will enable the country's properties to be successfully administered by trustees on the country's behalf. .
I was very much pleased that I had the honour of being present at the impressive debut by the hon. Minister of Justice (Sir Lomer Gouin) the other day. I heartily congratulate him on his wonderful success. It is a grand thing to have heard him, the big man from Quebec, in his first deliverance. Hon. gentlemen who heard him cheered him to the echo and I agreed with them.


George Perry Graham: He may be right nevertheless.


Henry Lumley Drayton: He made a
great speech. My hon. friend says he may be right, but I am not going to tell my hon. friend what I was thinking of at that particular moment. But I really think, Mr. Speaker, that the hon. gentleman although great in admitted ability, did not cover the questions in this debate at all. Take for example, his statement that my right hon. friend insinuated improper motives to the hon. * gentleman in the last election, saying that he was influenced by the great interests of Montreal. It is quite true that he was in the same canoe with these great interests. It was quite true he was the most dexterous steersman of that canoe, and handled it beautifully, but none of us on this side of the House would, for one minute, insinuate that the hon. minister was merely a tool of any big interest. He is too big a man. He is a big interest himself. Who is there bigger in Montreal than the hon. Sir Lomer Gouin? Who is there more connected with interests in Montreal than that hon. gentleman-and nothing can be said against him on that account, on the other hand, it is very much in his favour. I think those on the other side have been very wise in having associated with them a man of the hon. minister's brilliancy, but no one on this side of the House insinuates that anyone was pulling him by the nose. We think the operation was rather reversed. However, the hon. minister was wrong in some things. He was wrong when he said that my right hon. friend's reference to him as master of the situation was simply for the malign purpose of injuring Quebec and keeping alive feelings in that province which ought to have disappeared long ago. If the hon. minister would only give my right hon. friend credit for ordinary intelligence he would see that the suggestion was ridiculous. What in the name of common sense has he to gain by keeping alive

in Quebec the present feeling against him? Would anyone but a lunatic adopt such a course? I have heard him called all sorts of names by gentlemen on the other side, but never heard him described as a lunatic. The hon. gentleman is simply wrong. Does he say that these great newspapers, the Montreal Gazette and the Montreal Star, are enemies of Quebec? Take the newspaper that worked up that roorbach about so many Montreal people losing their jobs and work being sent to Toronto-does he think that paper is inimical to Montreal?
I would hardly think so. Let him look at any of those papers and say what they think as to who is the master mind. Let us see what the Gazette, which is so friendly to the Government says about it. I read from the publication of December 26, where I find the following:-
When Mr. King Jilted Quebec, and sought a union with the West there was joy in Toronto, but the rejoicing was premature as J. J. Morrison and Henry Wise Wood forbade the acceptance of the Liberal Leader's general proposal, and now he must turn for consolation and support to Quebec, the province he discarded. Mr. Crerar is here but will not enter the cabinet. He is willing but cannot deliver any substantial support Mr. Hudson has also returned to the Independent Liberal class, and he may follow Mr. Crerar's example. Political chaos reigns here, and with the failure of Mr. King's attempt to displace Quebec by western support there threatens to be instability in federal affairs until the people have an opportunity to revise their judgment of December 6th., Mr. King cannot lead, he must be led.
This is the extract from the paper friendly to Montreal and to Quebec.


Mr. LAPOINTE:: Does the hon. gentleman think that Tom Blacklock, who writes these articles, is a friend of the Government?


Henry Lumley Drayton: I do not know who writes it, but I know it is printed in the Gazette, and I db know above all things that the Gazette is loyal to Quebec.


Ernest Lapointe: It is the paper of the Tory party.


Henry Lumley Drayton: Well let us-see about that. This article continued

Mr. King was prepared to betray his party and to discard his policy to secure the Progressives, while Mr. Crerar was prepared to eliminate his party; but neither party would submit to betrayal. Sir Lomer Gouin and Senator Dandurand arrived here Friday night and "spanked" Mr. King.
I do not believe that the Minister of Justice did spank the hon. Premier, but I

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will just draw attention to this one thing, and I am only doing it for one purpose.


Ernest Lapointe: Hear, hear.


Henry Lumley Drayton: And that is that it is quite idle for hon. gentlemen to think that because any hon. gentleman happens to come from Quebec nothing can be said against him without the charge coming from that side of the House that we are endeavouring to create disunion between the provinces. The situation is an intolerable one. Was the Gazette article writen to injure Quebec? My right hon. leader in his speech on the Address merely referred to the editorial in Le Soleil and read it without comment, and, because he read an editorial of a leading French paper without comment, the Prime Minister assumed one of his severe oratorical expressions-he can be severe-and warned my hon. friend that he had better be careful how he proceeded with this kind of thing. Does it come to this, that a French newspaper cannot, loyally to Canada,1 be read west of the Ottawa river? I would not have thought so.


Ernest Lapointe: Who says so?


Henry Lumley Drayton: I will ask my hon. friend a question. What was said by my right hon. leader on this most deplorable question beyond reading that reference? That is all he did. If the mere reading of it caused that outbreak from the Prime Minister, is there any need for my hon. friend to ask that question? There ought not to be, and he knows there is none. I point to this merely for the purpose of showing that my leader can have no reason for following the course that, without the slightest possible foundation of fact, has been ascribed to him. You know, Mr. Speaker, it all started in an imaginary speech referred to in the Globe, and supposed to have been delivered by the leader of the Opposition. That was copied in all parts of Canada; and the very moment that it came to the attention of the leader of the Opposition, he denounced categorically ever having made the speech, and he asked the Globe to give the reference. He has asked for it many times; hut although that information was asked for a year and a half ago, the information has never been given. The speech was never made. There is a controversy going on in Ontario at the present time between the Globe and the Farmers' Sun. The issue seems to be as to who is the worse liar, and I do not think they have
yet settled it to their satisfaction. It may be that they both win; but I am quite sure that the Globe will make the Farmers' Sun work hard. This party has not that enmity to Quebec which is suggested. Was the campaign run upon that line? Everybody knows that it was not. But, with some people, any old thing will do, and the great problem of the Government at the present time, as disclosed by the speech made by the hon. member for Pictou (Mr. Macdonald), is to kill politically the leader of the Opposition. I would like to tell my hon. friends opposite that they cannot do it.
The Minister of Justice confuses what was said by the leader of the Opposition in his references to him. He seems to object to references to himself. Why, that was mentioned in the speech of the member for Pictou as evidence of ill-feeling, bad blood, on	the parr
of the leader of the	Opposition.
The leader of the Opposition picks out for reference the most prominent men connected with the campaign. He has referred often enough to the Prime Minister, but simply because he happened to refer to the hon. member for St. Antoine (Mr. Mitchell) and to the Minister of Justice, why, of course, it was insult to Quebec that he meant. My hon. friend knows that is ridiculous; everybody knows it is ridiculous; but I suppose it will continue. The hon. member, however, mistook the object of my right hon. friend's remarks. My right hon. friend was not attacking the Minister of Justice; he believes in the statement made by the Minister of Justice; he believes that the stand taken by the Minister of Justice is correct. He still believes, what he has always preached and preached just the same everywhere, that this country requires protection. Was that an attack made upon Quebec by the hon. member for Marquette, when he dealt with the same question and at greater length than my right hon. friend did? He was attacking a policy of the Minister of Justice. My leader is not attacking the fiscal policy of the minister. I think it may well be said that while my leader went down to defeat, the principles for which he fought were principles which were, in the large, endorsed by the majority of the people of this country. Why, what is said by the Minister of Justice might just as well appear in our platform. He believes in proper protection for the boot and shoe industry, and I think he is right in that be-
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lief. He believes in proper protection for the Quebec worker. We know that the Quebec worker requires protection, and we think the minister is right in that regard. In his final declaration, he says that he still believes in the Laurier-Fielding tariff. So do we, except that it is a little higher than ours, and except that certain changes have been made in the commerce and business of this country which to-day render certain items unnecessary. I say that it was higher than ours, and I will give my hon. friend the figures. The first complete year of the Laurier administration, 189798, the average ad valorem rate of duty on dutiable imports was 29.7 per cent, and on all imports, dutiable .and free, 17.5 per cent. In 1909-10-that was after the second revision-the duties amounted to 26.8 per cent on dutiable imports, and to 16.5 per cent on total imports. The duties collected in the years 1920-21 on dutiable imports amounted to 21.2 per cent, and on total imports to 14.5 per cent.
The truth is that the present tariff is considerably lower than the tariff to which the Minister of Justice proclaims his allegiance. Let me take items which my hon. friends to the left would be more particularly interested in. In 1910, the year before the Laurier administration went out of power, the average duty on agricultural implements was 20.2 per cent. Under the reciprocity pact if passed, that duty would have been cut to 17.3 per cent. The present average duty on agricultural implements is 14.6 per cent. So, again, my hon. friend is entirely mistaken when he thinks that there is any attack made on him because of his fiscal policy. As a matter of fact, it is entirely, in principle, consonant with our own. We think the duties are too high; some of them, we . believe, could come down. On the other hand some of them are too low. We believe that at the present time, with the tremendous amount of unemployment we have, it is little short of a crime for this country to be importing over $200,000,000 worth of goods that can just as well be produced at home.
Something is said about reciprocity. I wonder if it would not be possible some day to sit down and approach this question purely from a business standpoint. The suggestion in regard to reciprocity is that we can buy more from the United States and that they would take more from us. Well, I do not know any way in which we can compel them to take any more from us at present. I think there was a great

deal in what the hon. member for Marquette said, that, while he was pleased to see the Minister of Finance go to Washington, at the same time the visit was ill-timed. Of course it was ill-timed, but was it made for the purpose of securing reciprocity? Or was it made for the purpose of influencing gentlemen to my left? Are we not buying enough from the United States?
There is one argument made by my hon. friends to my left, an argument which I have heard more than once and which has something to recommend it if the circumstances will justify it. They say that if you do not buy you cannot sell; you can only do business if you are ready to create a credit, so that the outsiders with whom you want to do business may be in a position to trade with you. There is a good deal in that, if you have not already established credits. But you can establish credits in many ways. For example, you can establish credits by importing coupons which represent your interest payments, just as much as you can establish credits by importing American automobiles. It is just the same. I wonder if hon. gentlemen realize that this country to-day is importing coupons in the neighbourhood of two hundred millions a year. Commitments outside, moneys that have gone to build the Grand Trunk Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the like, the moneys borrowed by our municipalities, here, there and everywhere and by governments, and the moneys borrowed by industrial companies outside the country, amount to something like $200,000,000 a year. It used to be calculated at $180,000,000; but it is now said to be nearer the figure I have given. Have you considered what that means, what a tremendous amount of buying credit that represents, that is taken out of the country every year to pay- commitments in interest, profits, etc.? You must begin your calculations with that in mind.
There is another thing for my hon. friends on my left to consider. They have more than once pointed out, in referring to the great success of the United States, that they have no duty on shoes and on several other things. The United States had very large duties on everything that they sought to manufacture, until they captured the whole of that manufacturing market, and when there was no necessity for having a duty on anything it was taken off. It will be agreed that the United States has done pretty well. It is a great country with a marvellous outside trade. For the fiscal year 1869-70 the

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United States imported, per capita, $11.77; in the year 1879-80 she imported per capita $12.57; in the year 1889-90 $12.28, in the year 1900-1 she imported per capita $10.23. Then, during the war, every one got extravagant; every nation was spending lavishly, and the great United States, in the year 1920, as against $10.23 imported in 1901, imported at the rate of $47.22 per capita. At the sight of this that great financial colossus becomes alarmed and you have the Fordney Bill.


Thomas Alexander Crerar: Is not that due to the fact that the prices of goods have doubled, and in some cases trebled?


Henry Lumley Drayton: The importation has increased four times; but if my hon. friend waits, I think he will agree that the prices have not had so much to do with it.


Thomas Alexander Crerar: They certainly have.


Henry Lumley Drayton: I do not care if the prices have increased. I am saying that the financial giant of the world became alarmed at an importation per capita of $47.22, and immediately introduced the Fordney tariff. Yet the people of Canada, in the year 1920-21, bought at the rate of $145.90 per capita. Mr. Speaker, are we not buying enough? Surely any one who knows the facts will admit that we are. What is the effect of the Fordney tariff upon us? My hon. friend refers to prices. Well, that is of importance, although prices had begun to drop. I have not these figures brought down to date because I have been out of the Finance Department for some time, but for the first four months of this fiscal year as compared with the same four months of last year, or on the one hand with the Fordney tariff in operation and on the other hand before it went into operation, we have the following figures on farm products, such as butter and its substitutes, cheese and its substitutes, meats (fresh or frozen), meats (prepared), potatoes, cattle, sheep, wheat flour and semolina, wool and milk (preserved or condensed), for the four months without the Fordney tariff our exports to the United States amounted to $33,546,000; with the Fordney tariff in operation they dropped to $10,070,000.
What about their exports to us? Always it has seemed to me most absurd that we have such large importations of agricultural commodities into an agricultural country. My figures there I have had put into quantities because you cannot get a
comparison as well with prices. In butter, cheese, mutton and lamb, pork (fresh), bacon and ham, canned meats, potatoes, tomatoes, grapes, pears, peaches, eggs and honey, our importations in 1920, before the Fordney tariff was adopted, amounted in quantities to 27,499,000; with the Fordney tariff in operation our importations amounted to 45,124,000 in the like quantity of units. At a time when our sales to the United States dropped from $33,500,000 to $10,000,000, an enormous drop, we increased our purchases of these American agricultural commodities by 63 per cent. And yet some gentlemen think the tariff ought to be left just as it is!
And on this question of agricultural imports the burden thrown on the United States was not very great after ail. I read from their Agricultural Staples Report on the tariff, Series No. 20:
During the four months July to October, 1920, inclusive, imports of wheat amounted to 12,109,217 bushels, valued, at $28,146,296 ; and of flour to 222,002 barrels, valued at $2,535,182. Substantially all of these shipments came from Canada, and were shipped during the latter part of September and in October.
To show what a comparatively small part that plays in the American market, let me complete the quotation:
During the same four months the exports of wheat from the United States amounted to 117,981,296 bushels, or $339,278,520, and of flour to 6,0.55,829 barrels, valued at $70,144,803.
In other words, they exported $70,000,000 worth of flour in that period while they imported from us $2,500,000-a negligible proportion of their export business; and in wheat they exported $339,000,000 worth while we sent them $28,000,000-less than a tenth, and yet we have all this fuss and trouble about it.
One or two opinions I ought to refer to, Mr. Speaker, expressing the American standpoint on the tariff. On October 20th, Congressman John W. Summers announced that he was framing a bill for a tariff on imported wheat, with particular reference to Canada, which he expected to introduce in Congress at the opening day of the next session in December. He did not specify the tariff decided upon, but said it would be a "good stiff duty."
The New York Evening Journal of November 3rd had the following to say on the subject:
During the first two weeks of October, Canadians sent five million bushels of wheat into the United States, competing directly, of course, with American farmers. Rather a nice situa-

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tion for Canada, able to use this country and the farmers of this country as a dumping ground whenever it is convenient, and able In war to get for Canada and "the dear Old Mother Country" wheat raised by American farmers at a price limited by the American government. No wonder many emigrate from the United States into Canada.
It is hoped that Harding, during his administration, will do something to make the buying power of the United States profitable to Americans first, Canadians and other outsiders afterward.
Then let me quote from the American Economist, one of the foremost American papers supporting the Republicans:
It may be set down as final that the Canadian tariff revision will be purely with reference to Canadian interest and not that of the American exporter. That is the way Tariff revision ought to be undertaken. If the Canadian Government were to give first heed to the desires of the American exporter, it would be time for the Canadian people to put the Government on the scrap heap and to select one that could write across the papers of its legislation "Canada First."
I might state for the information of the House that that opinion was written before December 6. And yet we hear it suggested to-day that with our industrial and agricultural markets as they are, Parliament, instead of legislating for the benefit of Canada, should turn around and reduce the tariff, thus further disrupting our industrial situation and ruining the home market of the farmer. An hon. gentleman to my left said the other day that the home market was not much good, and would not be for another fifty years. What market, I wonder, does he think he is going to get under reciprocity? Why, with reciprocity [DOT]-and you have had reciprocity with the Americans-they handle your goods just as long as it pays them to do so, that is, so long as there is a ready sale for them and it merely adds to their exporting surplus and so puts them in a better position to control world trade. It is only when you have a staggered, bleeding and exhausted Europe, unable to buy goods that the United States will refuse your business. What difference has the Fordney tariff made to the price of wheat to anybody? How much higher is the price of wheat today in the United States? Why, the fact is that reciprocity has nothing to do with the price. You all know now that the price of wheat is governed by the Liverpool market. Under reciprocity you give them the business to carry over for you and let them make the profits on mill feed and everything else to the detriment of your dairy herds, or you do it yourself at a time when both you and the Americans can sell.
ISir Henry Drayton.]
But at a time when both have a difficulty in selling, reciprocity or no reciprocity, you will be left just where you were. There are some commodities which can only be marketed at home; practically the whole of the dairy market is domestic. One of the difficulties encountered by agriculture to-day is the collapse of the home market as the result of the lack of buying power and lack of employment; yet some gentlemen think that if you make that condition worse, if you further impoverish the country, you will gain something. Reciprocity with a country which is the ultimate consumer of your products is a splendid thing; reciprocity with a competitor in business very much bigger than yourself is a very dangerous thing.
Reciprocity is not a new thing. We had a reciprocity treaty from 1854 to 1866. My impression is that it was designed to run a specific time, but whether or not that is the fact is not of importance. Our total exports grew during that period from $7,000,000 to $49,000,000. The results were fully felt in the national trade of the year 1868, when our total exports fell to $27,000,000. The reciprocity proposed in more recent years was something which could be abrogated at any time; there was no obligation to maintain it. In view of the one thing which made reciprocity desirable to the American people-the profits in the handling of our goods-and in view of the subsequent collapse of the buying markets of the world, no one can honestly think that reciprocity would have stood up for two minutes against the farmers' bloc in the United States, who are now getting what they want in the way of concessions.
I am honestly and genuinely interested, Mr. Speaker, in such an arrangement of the tariff of this country as will help the people of Canada rather than the American exporter. We have a tremendous amount of unemployment and the solution of that problem ought to be the chief concern of our public men. Many of our artisans, good workmen, men entitled to a job, are out of work, and we are still importing in excessive quantities things that these men could make and ought to have the opportunity to make. It is true that as the result of a campaign carried on last year, the carnival of outside buying has diminished. What are we to say to the workers of this country when the fact is that during the past five years our purchases from the United States have been $1,700,000,000 in excess of our sales to

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them? Are we to say to them that it is our intention so to arrange our financial affairs that that enormous amount shall be still further increased? If any word of mine can have the slightest influence on behalf of the Canadian workingman or can benefit in the least degree the Canadian home, I have no apologies to offer, Mr. Speaker, for the length of my address.
On the motion of Mr. Irvine the debate was adjourned.



PRINTING, LIBRARY, AND RESTAURANT OF PARLIAMENT

[Stage Direction]
Mr. Speaker informed the House that a message had been received from the Senate communicating to the House the names of the senators appointed to act on behalf of the Senate on the Joint Committees of both Houses on the Printing of Parliament, the Library and the restaurant.
On the motion of Mr. Mackenzie King the House adjourned at 9.48 p.m.
Monday, March 20, 1922.