THE CANADIAN SCENE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 56, 4 September 1939, Page 13

THE CANADIAN SCENE

———♦ TORONTO BANQUET MR. MACKENZIE KING TRANSATLANTIC AIR MAIL i (From "The Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER, August 15. The nine provinces of Canada were : represented at a banquet in Toronto, i tendered to the Prime Minister* Mr. Mackenzie King, on the twentieth an- | niversary of his assuming the leader- ! ship* of the Liberal Party. In 1919, when the party met to elect a successor to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the selec- | tion narrowed down to two candidates, the second being Mr. W. S. Fielding, who presented thirteen Budgets before he retired from public life. Mr. Mackenzie King's selection was due mainly to two causes: the convention knew that he would have been Laurier's personal choice if Sir Wilfrid were alive, and Fielding had the "taint of UnionI ism," having. been a member of Sir Robert Borden's National Government ■ during the Great War years. So great was the interest in last week's function at Toronto that four ! halls had to be hired, and linked up with "loud speakers." The temperai ture was 90 degrees when the guests sat down to dinner. They had to listen ■ to twenty speeches before the Prime ! Minister arose to address them. ■ BACK FROM THE ARCTIC. ; The Rev. rf. R. Rokeby-Thomas, ! Anglican missionary at Cambridge Bay, ' Victoria Island, North-west Territories, [ is "outside" on furlough, after five ■ years spent in tending the spiritual ; needs of Eskimos. During the past three years, he had the assistance of ; his wife; she went north from her 1 [-native Ontario, and they were married ; at Coppermine. During her three years ; on the shore of the Polar Sea, seven ; white people signed her visitors' book, but she missed two of them, as she i was at an outlying part of the "parish" when they arrived. The only ' other white woman at the settlement • is Mrs. Milne, wife of the Hudson's Bay Company Factor. Mr. RokebyThomas says that diseases of the white man, notably tuberculosis, have brought a definite and serious downl ward trend in the Eskimo population. I CAPE TO VANCOUVER AIR MAIL. Your correspondent, last we§k, re- " ceived a letter twelve days after it had been mailed at Cape Town. Travel--1 ling by air mail to London for l£d !, postage, it carried an extra mail charge . of Is 3d for the Imperial Airways » Transatlantic and the Trans-Canada i Air Mail. The 24-ton flying-boat Caribou ■ passed the 42-ton Yankee Clipper, of • the Pan-American Airways, flying \ eastward over the same route. They I went through the airman's equivalent of dipping their flags, while' the" Ameri- . can captain chuckled at having the • benfit of a strong tail wind, which ■ his British vis-a-vis had to fight. I The Caribou's mails arrived in Van- ; cauver four days after being posted in London. Letters carry the words \ "Air Mail" in English, French, arid ' Portuguese, the last-named because of i provision for using the Azores-Lisbon , route when the' weather conditions i smake the northern route impracticable.