Price War

Skyrocketing food prices had made Canadians good & sore. There had been no organized buyers' strikes, but there was plenty of buyer resistance, and it was having some effect. In Vancouver, sales of beef, bacon and fresh pork were down, even after retailers shaved prices a little. It was the same in Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. In Halifax, the City Council took up a resolution urging provincial and federal governments to "do something immediately about the constantly rising cost of foods," and passed it unanimously.

By midweek the pressure was so great that the government had to do something. Finance Minister Douglas Abbott announced the remedy: a partial return of price controls. There would be price ceilings on meats, to be fixed in a week or two; controls on butter, to peg it around 73-c- a lb.; controls on certain types of fertilizers and a rollback of the price of chemical ingredients; extension of the government's price-control powers for another year. The government might even import butter from New Zealand. Rent controls would continue.

The remedies satisfied nobody. Top government planners recognized them as half measures. To be effective, they argued, price controls had to be total, as in wartime. Consumers were just as unhappy for different reasons. The cost of meats and butter was not going back to the levels of two months ago, but was to be frozen--about 25% higher for pork products, 10% to 15% higher for beef, veal and lamb, 7 1/2% higher for butter.

For the inflated prices of fresh fruits & vegetables (normally imported from the U.S., now largely banned) there was no remedy yet. Abbott did a little muscle-flexing and told the Prices Board to start "exemplary prosecutions" where prices are "higher than is reasonable and just." While government leaders talked of scaring the daylights out of the profiteers, housewives in Montreal still paid 59-c- a head for lettuce.

Farmers were furious. Cried John Walters of the Western Stock Growers' Association: "The government should put a ceiling on what we have to buy as well as on what we have to sell." The political opposition was scornful. The government's move, scoffed Tory Leader John Bracken, is "an empty gesture in an almost pathetic attempt to satisfy public opinion. . . . Neither fish nor fowl."

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