Rabble Rout

British Columbia is Canada's California. Like California, this westernmost province welcomes visitors with full purses, turns a cold shoulder on the many jobless who immigrate in hope of work and of enjoying a comparatively mild climate. Unlike the U. S., Canada has no unified federal system of unemployment relief. Although from the Dominion capital at Ottawa come periodic donations, relief administration is left largely to the provinces and localities.

Last winter British Columbia maintained with federal funds a few "concentration camps" for unemployed. This spring the camps were closed, the men told to care for themselves, and offered transportation home. Instead of leaving, they made common cause with British Columbia's "native" unemployed, agitated for a public works program. Their demands unheeded, late in May 1,200 men-- all single--moved into three Vancouver buildings.

In the swank Georgia Hotel 500 men made themselves at home on the hotel lobby's soft, upholstered furniture. They left there after one night when a $500 bribe was raised by the city. Another 500 occupied the general post office, 200 moved into the Civic Art Gallery and there they stayed one month. Organized in orderly "military" squads, the men interfered as little as possible with business routine, were careful to clean up every morning, took exercise by marching in relays on the streets.

Civic, provincial, federal officials "passed the buck" to each other while Vancouver's liberal societies demanded work for the men, the Y. M. C. A. provided daily "delousings," women's organizations fed the sit-downers, most of Vancouver showed sympathy.

Apple-cheeked Premier Thomas Dufferin Pattullo had journeyed to Washington to chat with President Roosevelt about his cherished dream of a road to Alaska. Returning to find his newly finished post office occupied by a noisy rabble, he failed to impress them by announcing that "this sort of thing must stop." The Dominion Government asked Vancouver city authorities to take action, lent a detachment of red-tunicked Royal Canadian Mounted Police to assist the khaki-clad provincial police and blue-coated city constables in an evacuation. Premier Pattullo gave the sit-downers until 4 a.m. June 19 to move out.

At the zero hour the sit-downers were still sitting. Police threw tear gas bombs into the two buildings, charged with swinging batons, swung their fists, used stinging riding whips on squatters who showed fight. As the rabble army fled toward Vancouver's poor but sympathetic East End, they picked up post office inkwells and pieces of metalwork, hurled them at department-store windows. Damage was estimated at $50,000, 40 sit-downers and police had to be hospitalized. Among the most seriously hurt was a former Communist leader, Steve Brodie, now styled as secretary of the Single Unemployed Protective Association. Vancouver's Mayor George Clark Mille promised an investigation of Leader Brodie's beating.

While Premier Pattullo was challenged to resign and stand in a by-election on the unemployment issue, the sit-downers crossed Burrard Inlet by boat, hitchhiked or rode the rods to descend on the dignified, heavily policed little capital city of Victoria, on the southeast tip of Vancouver Island.

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