GRAFT IN CANADA

Taranaki Daily News, 16 October 1934, Page 8

GRAFT IN CANADA

SENSATIONAL CHARGES. COMMERCE MINISTER SPEAKS. A charge that “unscrupulous financiers and business men had exploited Canada’s consuming public, starved her producers, sweated her workmen, “gouged’ her pulp and paper and other industries, and had left the. country faced with a choice of reform, dictatorship or revolution,” has been made in a pamphlet issued by Mr. Harry Stevens, Minister of Trade and Commerce in the Dominion Cabinet, says the New York Times. Mr. Stevens’ statement mentioned personal friends and business associates of his party chief, Mr. R. B. Bennett, and many other leaders of the Conservative Party, and declared that, no matter what happened, he would not rest until conditions were remedied. His statement is regarded at Ottawa as possibly the opening gun of a “New Deal” campaign in Canada, and as perhaps leading to a Cabinet shake-up. The circumstances of its issue seem to have been dramatic. A speech urging reform of Canadian business methods delivered by Mr. Stevens at Toronto last January excited such comment that Mr. Bennett decided to favour an inquiry. Revelations of sweating, business racketeering and other unethical practices made during this investigation seemed to uphold the stand Mr. Stevens had taken, and the investigating body was continued as a Royal Commission. The revelations were ultimately reflected in Cabinet disagreements. CONFISCATED COPIES. Mr. Stevens’ statement was printed in his own department. He issued some copies to a selected mailing list and departed westward on a holiday trip with 2000 other copies. Its frankness brought upon the Cabinet threats of libel suits from concerns and persons it criticised. Some thousands of copies still remaining in the Department of Trade and Commerce were confiscated by Mr. Bennett. “There are those,” Mr. Stevens wrote in commenting on the Parliamentary inquiry, “who hold the view that it would be better to keep this thing in the dark. “I would not remain in that position any longer. Real conservatism, in my mind, does not consist of being allied with or dictated to by large financial influences.” The Minister wrote of “outrageous” and “scandalous” prices paid to Western beef producers by a Canadian packing concern while it was having the most prosperous four years of its existence.” He declared that 40,000. employees of the needle trades are getting from four dollars to nine dollars a week. “I did not think it possible in Canada, but I found it is lamentably true,” he said. Charging an “incomprehensible disregard for ethics that has characterised some of the leaders of finance and industry in this country,” Mr. Stevens said that the Canadian Combines Act “has been evaded by concerns pooling their resources into a merger.” Hence, he declared, 120 mergers had been completed in two years. MILLIONS GOUGED. Of the Canadian pulp and paper trade, the Minster said that “something like 30,000,000 dollars had been gouged out of that industry.” Financiers, he wrote, had taken a healthy, prosperous industry which if left alone could have survived the depression without difficulty, brought about mergers which left the public' holding the bag, loading tire industry down with debt, and put 20,000,000 dollars into the pockets of the promoters. “In the needle, boot and shoe and furniture trades,” Mr. Stevens wrote, “men and women are living on a basis that is a disgrace to Canada. “I will never rest until something is done to remedy it. I do not care what happens. No economic or political system can survive that will tolerate things like that except in one of two ways. “Either you must have a dictator to impose these conditions with an iron hand, or you are going to have an uprising that will destroy the system. “There is the alternative—reform. The Conservative Party must base its policies on the well-being of the farmer first, and of the large body of industrial workers in the second place. “The real health of the nation depends upon the success of those two groups.”