Battle Royal?

The only socialist government in Can ada faced the toughest fight of its young life. Big business, which had seethed in silence for 15 months while Saskatchewan's CCFers adopted a batch of socialist laws, suddenly struck back. The Canadian Pacific Railway, the Dominion Loan & Mortgage Association and the Hudson's Bay Co. appealed to the Federal Government to void three key Saskatchewan laws :

P: A Farm Security Act, prohibiting mortgage foreclosures in bad crop years.

P: A Mineral Taxation Act (and its amending Act of 1945), which imposes a flat annual 3ٕ-an-acre tax on mineral rights, a tax of up to ten mills per dollar on the assessed value of minerals.

P: An Act amending the Local Government Board Act, enabling a municipality to readjust its bonded debt without asking its bondholders' permission.

To the Canadian Pacific and the Hud son's Bay Co., both holders of vast mineral rights in Saskatchewan, the mineral-tax law was virtually "confiscatory." The Dominion Loan & Mortgage challenge was almost surely a direct result of the fact that this year Saskatchewan's crop is poor.

At Ottawa, Justice Minister Louis Stephen St. Laurent set Oct. 11 and Oct. 15 as hearing days, appointed a com mittee of three Liberals (himself, Mines and Resources Minister James A. Glen, Solicitor General Joseph Jean) to hear the oral arguments. From the Federal verdict there would be no appeal.

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