"LITTLE ENTENTE"

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 9, 12 January 1938, Page 6

"LITTLE ENTENTE"

A CANADIAN MUDDLE

TWO MILITANT PREMIERS

(From "The Post's" Representative) VANCOUVER, 'December $'£,

TJie senior provinces of Cuiuida, Ontario and Quebec, through their militant Premiers, Duplessis and Hepburn, have announced that they will nu longer be "run" by the Dominion lot' the benefit of the junior provinces, of Western Canada. The proclamation, defying the Federal Government, wits made jointly by the two leaders at h banquet, concluding a confavonco called to challenge tUo right of tho Dominion to control the export ol eloctrie power to the United States from Niagara and other hydro resources.

The outburst, heightened by bitter personal attacks on the Prime Minister (Mr. Mackenzie King), was further In. flamed by ex parte deductions, gratuitously conceived by the two Premiers from the opening proceedings of the Royal Commission investigating the relations between the Dominion and the Provinces with a view to revising the British North America Act, the Constitution of Canada, in line with present-day conditions.

The dispute brings together strange bed-fellows: Hepburn, traditional Liberal, who supported Mackenzie King, while a member of the House of Commons, and who, aided by the latter, captured the Ontario Provincial Government from the Conservatives, who were in power for a generation, and Duplessis, traditional Conservative, who captured Quebec, with the aid of the dissident Liberal faction which engineered the downfall of Taschereau, whose regime lasted for 34 years,

_ Water power, chief of the natural resources of the senior Provinces, has been a subject of bitter.'controversy over a period of years. Mr. Hepburn's repudiation of contracts, valued at £60,000,000, was nullified by the Supreme Court. Mr. Duplessis agrees with his Ontario colleague's contention that the ; Dominion's authority to control the export of, power could be successfully challenged, except as a war emergency, A "Little Entente" has been conceived between them, to achieve this end, When the smoke of battle shall have blown away, the status quo will not have been disturbed; the Dominion is the supreme authority on power, and will not delegate it to an individual Province, It is greatly to be regretted that the leaders of two Provinces, containing half the population of the Dominion, should have embarrassed the Royal Commission, at the outset of its lengthy deliberations, in whiqh only two of the nine Provinces have yet beenj heard. It is almost an article of faith in the West and the Maritimes that the two Central Provinces, by virtue of, their geographical position, their immense primary resources, and the vast manufacturing wealth of Ontario, have been able, in the past, to formulate and control the fiscal and economic policy of the Dominion..ln the circumstances, the minority Provinces are bewildered at the unseemly breach of peace and good-will by their elders, during the festive season of Christmas.