Canada's "Saboteur"

Last week U. S. editors, pondering the various shapes that censorship might take if it comes to the U. S., were jolted from their guessing game by an actual example --from Canada. Canada's Minister of Munitions abruptly announced in the Canadian Parliament that "the No. 1 saboteur in Canada since the beginning of this war is the Financial Post of Toronto." The Post--as pro-British as any publication going--is Canada's top business weekly. Munitions Minister Clarence Decatur Howe is one of Canada's most powerful men. Behind the Post-Howe feud is a story.

The feud began in 1938, when MacLeod's Magazine--sister publication of the Post --published an article called "Canada's Armament Mystery." Written by Lieut. Colonel George Drew, it exposed a deal wherein the Government financed a private company to manufacture Bren guns for Britain at over-lush profits. Two days later the Post led a press crusade for a Royal Commission investigation. The Government denounced the article as "scurrilous and irresponsible." But two and a half years later, with Canada at war, the Winnipeg Free Press broke the story that the old Bren gun contract had been canceled and relet on a management-fee basis. The Post loudly recalled that it had been right and the Government wrong. Thereafter it constituted itself No. 1 unofficial critic of Canada's fumbling war effort.

Last November, the Post editorialized on "increasing restiveness" among Minister Howe's top-flight dollar-a-year men. They agreed, said the Post, that he had weaknesses (a "slop-over of his strengths"), such as his offhand way of tossing around millions, his tendency to place a war order and simultaneously speak of the goods as already delivered. Last year, while Minister Howe was in England, the Financial Post exposed the botched situation in Federal Aircraft Ltd., Government-formed company to coordinate aircraft production. (Source of the Post's well documented expose was plane manufacturers themselves.) In Parliament last week Opposition Leader Richard Burpee Hanson attacked Federal Aircraft, taking his charge almost word for word from the Post. It was then that Minister Howe damned the Post as No. 1 Canadian saboteur.

But last week also, for the first time since the war began, the Munitions Minister gave out a few facts and figures about armaments production. Still more significant was the fact that the Canadian press generally opened up a bit on the Government. Not only critical of armament production, they demanded that Mackenzie King strengthen his Cabinet, asked for fuller explanations of where all the millions were going. Until the Post stuck its neck out, the Canadian press had been the most "patriotically" docile in the free world.

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