The Canadian Forum/Editorial/1920-11

The Canadian Forum/Editorial 1920-11 written by [[|]]

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The Tariff Commission is now completing its labours and the cry for "adequate protection" is heard in the land. It is one of the least happy features in our political life that a catchword of this kind can be bandied about freely by political leaders. For, whatever may be judged wisest with regard to tariff revision, the term "adequate protection" has itself no meaning. Where protection against foreign competition is needed for a firm, it is needed because for some reason that firm has not yet been able to reach the degree of efficiency of its foreign competitors. It is given on the supposition that if this firm is protected it will at some time in the future reach a degree of efficiency which will enable it to stand on its own merits without protection. But in practice it is seldom that any two firms in the same industry have reached the same level of efficiency. The question with regard to the protection of any industry stated in the crudest terms is this: What degree of present inefficiency is compatible with a promise for the future which warrants on grounds of public policy the protection (meanwhile) of individual interests against the interests of the consuming public? Any tariff which is devised will provide "adequate protection" for certain firms, at the same time that it fails to provide "adequate protection" for others in the industry. The use of such language has a definite meaning only in relation to the affairs of a particular firm and not to those of a whole industry; and the sooner our politicians can be induced to refrain from confusing issues in this way the sooner shall we have a tariff which will serve the general interest.

The Canadian press has had much to say about sugar in recent weeks and justly so. In the discussion of the situation, however, one fact of importance was generally overlooked. For some time previous to the order of the Board of Commerce, sugar had not been allowed to enter Canada except under difficulties. No doubt some wholesalers and large users of sugar were bound by contract to Canadian refiners. In making these contracts they may or may not have acted as entirely free agents. At any rate having made the engagements they could not pass by the home refiner in order to secure cheaper sugar abroad. But those who were free to import found themselves hampered by vexatious rulings on the part of customs ofificials. Now dumping was suspected and the shipment held at the border; now adulteration was suspected while samples were sent to Ottawa. For some time such rulings by the customs department have not been uncommon. A recent and flagrant example was that which placed a fictitious value on foreign currency and charged duty on this value, thereby adding to the protection given the Canadian manufacturer. As a result of the customs rulings in the case of sugar, and as a result of the valiant aid of the Board of Commerce, the Canadian refiners gained considerable time in which to empty storehouses and contemplate a highly speculative figure for their stock in the lists. But public protest was universal. It is well for the public to remember also that experimenting with the Customs preceded the fatal performance of the Board of Commerce, and it is well for a government devoted to stability to reflect that no stability is possible where it is never certain whether claims to special treatment will be countenanced or disallowed.

The part played in these transactions by the Board of Commerce has precipitated its doom. The handwriting on the wall has been fulfilled. The futility of an improvised Board of civil servants was too evident. The sugar control order was of a piece with the rest of the modern mercantilist policy. It has been well summarized by the author of "Polly Masson": "You have taken from one and given to another, and you have done it in the name of the State. You have first wronged the man from whom you have taken, then you have undermined the independence of the man to whom you have given, and finally — the State! All has been done in the name of, and presumably for, the State! Yet the State is sick." One laughs at the eagerness with which the government repudiated its erring child. Ministers were closeted with the Board the day before the promulgation of the order. The order aroused an unprecedented storm. Ministers knew nothing at all about the order. The members of the Board resigned at once and protested loudly that they alone were responsible. Querulously, one member assured a credulous public that he had [p.36] often asked to be relieved but was driven on, willy nilly, to this latest naughtiness. The Minister of Justice, who is said to have been a party to the conference before the sugar order, at once discovered that it was ultra vires. The Cabinet is at least resourceful. Its retreat was as precipitate as its advance was rash. The Prime Minister staged a pretty scene to end the business. Being unable to prove the jurisdiction to sustain prices the sugar refiners were summarily dismissed, and with them went the Board, bag and baggage, with one swift wave of the hand. Well may we say with Antony, "I came to bury Caesar, not to praise him."

The future of the farmers' party is thrown into curious relief by the campaign in North-East Toronto. On the one hand we see the Labour forces appealing for the definite sanction of the farmer Premier for the Soldier-Labour candidate. On the other hand The Globe warns the farmers of the terrible designs which the labour people led by socialists harbor in their breasts against all private property including the fertile farms of Ontario. Inferentially The Globe suggests that the farmers would find the Liberals a more natural ally. This view the federal leader of the Liberal party persists in advancing in Ontario and throughout the West. Mr. King is too well informed on labour questions to argue that the working man if he were given power could find pleasure in confiscatmg all private property except a few paltry things such as tooth-brushes. In fact he has very little, if anything, to say about the possibilities of permanence in the farmer-labour coalition which has endured in Ontario for a year, and which has shown signs of spreading to other provinces. To be sure in Manitoba the workers of the country were not able to unite with the workers of the city. Had they done so the Norris Government might have been compelled to resign. The Manitoba labour members could not easily forget that three of their number were detained in the penetentiary because juries of farmers had condemned them of seditious intent. To this extent conditions in Manitoba are exceptional. In the federal elections the question will arise as to whether the farmers with free-trade leanings can consort with the city workman whose employment is popularly supposed to profit by protection. It is significant that the independent labour convention meeting at Lontion, Ontario, in the spring of this year passed a tariff resolution almost identical with that of the farmers' platform. For the moment the farmer through his tan shows embarrassment at his popularity.

The coal strike in England is about to be settled. One wonders why it need ever have begun. Public Opinion, that nebulous creature which every man finds on his doorstep every morning ready made for him, has been almost uniformly hostile. The why of its hostility is not far to seek. Since 1912 there have been few intervals when the English public could be certain of its coal. Miners, with a strong Marxian bias in some districts, have had to be placated at all stages since the war began. The disturbances of 1919 have been repeated in 1920. Labour felt it had been betrayed over the Sankey Report and Nationalization has been the underlying ambition of all the faithful ever since. A curious chain of events seems to have led directly to the strike. Early in the summer the purely academic assent of the Triple Alliance to Nationalization left little hope of a successful struggle on that issue. The unexpected solidarity of all groups of labour in the Council of Action organized to meet the Polish situation seems to have persuaded the Miners' Executive that the time was ripe for a forcing of the issue. At once there sprang to life the demand for an increase of wages and a reduction in the price of coal that could be counted on to make mining no longer a source of profit. It is fairly clear that the wage question was of secondary importance. The stubborn resistance of miners to the principle of wages based on output is a sufficient indication. At this date it would seem that the miners have secured an exceedingly low output datum line for the wage basis. Class consciousness among rich and poor costs England hundreds of millions a year. There is a limit to public patience and that limit has now been reached.

The University Magazine has suspended publication this fall. For twenty years — a long period in the annals of Canadian magazines — it has maintained a higher standard of literary and material excellence than — it is safe to say — any of its predecessors. Intended at the outset for a McGill University public only, it soon attracted wider attention by the excellence of its editing and its handsome form. In course of time its Editor was encouraged to invite the co-operation and support of other universities for the establishment of a review which should worthily represent the best intellectual life of the Dominion. There was a dinner and an exchange of views at Toronto. The outcome was the union of three universities in an editorial board, and not ungenerous financial backing from the authorities of the University of Toronto. But it was not perhaps easy to defend to the general public such employment of university funds; inevitably offence was given by the outspokenness on certain topics of some of the articles and the financial support was soon withdrawn. Considering how widely separated were the members of the editorial board, the arrangement was in the main merely formal and Sir Andrew MacPhail was the real editor; to him, throughout, the success of the undertaking has been due. Notwith-[p.37]standing, the combination of interests gave a position and prestige to the new venture that made it the acknowledged organ for the expression of the best thought of the country. The number of sufficiently competent contributors who rallied to its support in various parts of the Dominion was a surprise to most, and not least to the contributors themselves. The Magazine also gave an opening to one of the best of our poets, Miss Marjorie Pickthall. In its success the policy of paying its contributors respectably, was no doubt a factor. But this had in time to be abandoned. All along the weak element in this promising structure — the feet of clay — was the financial basis. What is the immediate cause of the stoppage of publication, we do not know, but the fundamental reason of its failure has been the apathy of the Canadian intellectual public. There is such a public sufficiently large to maintain a review of this character; but the subscription list was always disappointingly small. Had any considerable number for example of university graduates given the trifling assistance implied in subscribing and maintaining one subscription, The University Magazine would still be flourishing. There are perhaps other minor contributory causes. But the really discouraging factor revealed in its fate is the indifference of the public. The ordinary magazine with its stories and entertaining articles has to meet the competition of British and especially American publications with their large market and huge advertising list. Such advantages even draw many of our best writers from Toronto and Montreal to Boston and New York. One cannot wonder that it is difficult to maintain them. But there surely is a real need of such a journal as The University Magazine and we hope that it will be able to resume publication in the very near future.

The younger Canadian artists who struck out independently last spring as the "Group of Seven" has now accepted an invitation to send thirty pictures on a winter's tour in the United States. The pictures go first to Worcester, Mass., thence to the Boston Art Museum, Cleveland, and elsewhere. It is now some three years since an academic Canadian collection from Ottawa made a similar tour and some seven years since C. W. Jefferys exhibited prairie pictures along with a few other Canadians in New York. Taken together these facts suggest that Canada is growing up in ways which she did not foresee. There was a time when real artistic talent had cither to compromise for a livelihood or leave the country. Canada is proud of J. W. Morrice, but her pride in him is diminished by the reflection that it is imported from Paris. She loses Ernest Lawson to New York and many years later Halifax, his native city, tries to redress the loss by purchasing his work on a generous scale. That old time is passing though it is not yet certain that the new time has come. There is this difference, however, that Canadian artists are now clinging more resolutely to Canada in the belief that this is the place for them. The number of Canadians who take pleasure in the thought that our artists have at last staked their artistic claims on native territory is a growing one. Those who realize that art needs immediate support as well as belated approval, and who in this age of dead-levelling have not forgotten where the true aristocracy of the human race has so often been found to lie, will watch this adventure of the "Group of Seven", its efTect abroad and then its effect at home, with keen interest and perhaps with a certain confidence. The outcome of it all might be that the active interest and support which Canadian artists are beginning to find in Kingston, Sarnia, and Saskatoon might cease to be sporadic and become a characteristic national tradition.

The Little Theatre movement in Canada shows signs of spreading. We call it the Little Theatre movement because there seems no other phrase at hand to designate the non-commercial, non-professional attempts which are being made here and there in the great world to make the theatre a vital and ennobling thing. In Canada the phrase is a misnomer if it is taken to mean that plays of full stature will not be attempted. The Hart House Theatre promises this winter among other plays the Alcestis of Euripides and Shakespeare's Cymbeline. But its most interesting announcement is for next April — "Pierre, a play by Duncan Campbell Scott, and two other Canadian plays." There is no reason why this should not be tlie beginning of something distinctive. Canadians have tried their hand at lyrical poetry for more than a generation and they have tried their hand at the novel. But in neither field has there happened anything that reflects Canada like the Federal Constitution or the C.P.R. or Wilfrid Grenfell or Thomson's paintings. It is not difficult to see why this is so. There is too strong an English tradition in poetry for Canadians to be themselves in that field and the novel demands, it may be, a more fully developed society than we yet possess. But in drama, which can so much more readily seize on what is elemental in action and feeling, it is not too much to expect something of Canada's own, something rugged and terse and ineloquent. Perhaps after next April we shall know more about it.