Commonwealth's Keystone?

CANADA: AMERICA'S PROBLEM -John MocCormoc-Viking ($2.75).

"She is gigantically framed and wildly clad," writes Irish Canadian John Mac-Cormac about his heroine, Canada. This sentence is one of the few in his book that will not come as news to a majority of U. S. readers. For Mr. MacCormac, longtime New York Times correspondent in Canada, elsewhere writes neither in such brogue nor in platitudes but with a keen sense of U. S. ignorance about Canada, a brimming ability to fill in that ignorance.

The cold, massive reality that U. S.

isolationists have never faced, as MacCormac sees it, is that modern Canada makes U. S. neutrality a fiction. What is modern Canada? Not merely a source of wheat and man power to Britain, as it was in World War I, but strategically and industrially the Empire's second line of defense, potentially the keystone of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Facts: >Canada is a more logical shipping centre than the United Kingdom. About 50% of Britain's foreign trade is with countries that could be as well or better served, even in peacetime, from Canadian ports. London to Brisbane: 11,700 miles; Vancouver to Brisbane: 6,780.

>Canada's resources of water power and metal ores promise industrial greatness in an age of electricity and alloys, just as England's resources of coal and iron made for greatness in the eightCentury. Canadians are already the world's second largest users of hydroelectric power, yet the energy available is only 19% developed.

In the past 15 years, Canada has become the producer of 88% of the world's nickel, 50% of its asbestos, 50% of its platinum, 12% of its copper.

> Canada today carries more freight by air than any other country, may well become "the air crossroads of the world." From London to Shanghai via Newfoundland, Edmonton, Alaska, the Bering Straits and Siberia is 4,000 miles shorter than via the route now flown from New York across the Pacific.

Despite these potentialities, Canadians have shown a notable reluctance to aspire.

To explain what he calls Canada's "Oedipus complex" toward her mother country, Correspondent MacCormac writes a clearrunning story of the Canadian past which U. S. citizens know so little about (e.g., that in the War of 1812 all the burning was not done by the British; U. S. invaders burned Government buildings at York, now Toronto). Incidentally drawing an entertaining portrait of Canada's vague, unsinkable Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, he shows how Canada's "no commitments" policy between wars weakened British foreign policy at certain crucial moments: the Manchurian and Ethiopian crises particularly.

For Canada's failure to give her destiny a rush, MacCormac finds other reasons in the old-fashioned solidarity of her 3,500,-ooo French-speaking people, the magnet of her powerful neighbor (10% of Canadian university graduates make their living in the U. S.). For her greatest domestic problem, the French minority, he sees a solution in the close union of England and France officially announced as a war aim and whichever way the war breaks, John MacCormac believes Canada is on her way to becoming a first-class power-either as the refuge of a beaten Britain or the central unit of a renewed British Commonwealth.

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