ba

pa Ate EA LS A oa AN RARE

Millions of dollars worth

Vanconvers
Gity Council refuses to conceds
taat it should take the initiatives

in refusing building permits for
non-essential construction, main-

| Non-partisan council passes buck

on non-essential building issue

ef limber, cement and other materials needed for homes

essential buildings — theaters, stores, warehouses,
Westminster and adjacent municipalities, but—

tiining that allocation of builds
ing supplies for home construc-
tion is a federal responsibility.
@| The federai government
CUBEs to the claim, advanced

Youth gathering plans
new coordinating body

A ‘young adults conference’

Sponsored by the Commun-
Nov. 2 in the Brock Me-

morial Hall at the UBC. Thirty-six youth organizations

from the greater Vancouver area

e@mong these were the National
Federation of Labor Youth, the
BEEP and ‘Ginger Goodwin’ clubs
of the GPP, the Y’s and church
youth, and other community youth
organizations.

Aznoid Webster, member of the
Wencouver Parks Board opened
the conference with an address in
which he emphasized the need for
a central youth organization. In
the afternoon sessions the youth
delegates formed into five panels
—sducational and cultural, sociai
and recreational, leadership, ath-
letic and service When panel
teports were complete, each panei
eiecteq three representatives to a
committee of the conference,
charsed with the preparation of
a summary of the entire proceed-
ing.

Were represented. Included

Full agreement was Feached by
the conference on the following
points;

@| That a permanent young
atiults coordinating council be
fermed as sson as possible;

@| That this council direct its
attentien, not only on matters
ef internal organization, but on
such matters as adequate hous-
ing, slum Clearance, community
centres, and youth representa-
ion on boards that deal wath
youth problems.

A wider representation of youth
organizations is expected at a
coming convention because as one
delegate put it, this is the big-
gest and mest important step that
Vancouver youth have taken in a
long while!’

by Finance Minister J. L. Usley
in a recent letter to Vancouver
City Council, that building ma-
terials “are being produced in
Canada at peak levels and dis-
tribution is being carried out
fairly and equitably imsofar as
I am aware.”

fhe result of this buck-passing
between city and federal sovern=
ments is that home-builders are
still unable to get materials,
caught as they are in the arti-
ficial shortage created by mon-
opoly interests seeking to break
price controls and the immediate
shortage of available materials
produced by big contractors strip-
Ding the market for non-essential
construction.

This week H. W. Purcell and
G. V. Spencer, for the Canadian
Legion Zone One Council’s” hous-
ing action committee asked Van-
couver City Council to deny build-
ing permits for non-essential con-
struction, listing theaters, chur
ches, hot dog stands, modernized
Store fronts and signboards under
this heading.

Vancouver City Council refused
the Canadian Tegion’s plea, as
earlier it had evaded a similar
request made by Bruce Mickle-
burgh, city director of the Labor-
Progressive Party, on the ground
that federal government should
take responsibility for directing
the supply of building materials
into housing and other essential
construction:

British women visit Franco jails,

old and young held without trial

LONDON —The secretary of the British Internatio

nal Brigade Association has visited a

Madrid jail and interviewed women political Priseners who have been there for nearly twe

yeats without trial, Her identity was unknown to Franc

She is Mrs. Nancy Brake (better known as Nan Green)

British women’s delegation head-
ed by Mrs. Leah Manning, MP. The
other member of the delegation
was Miss Monica Whately.

Among the prisoners were a girl
ef 16 and a woman of 70 who had
been jailed on charges of giving
feed to the members of the Re-
publican Resistance Movement.
Some of them had been brutally
beaten by the police at the time of
their arrest.

Yesterday the delegation told me
how for 19 months Maria Teresa
Teral, research worker in a Mad-
rid laboratory, has been awaiting

‘Get out’,

‘Quit China’; that was the de-
Mand of General Evans F. Cari-
son, U.S. Marines (retired), as he
Urged withdrawal of U-S. troops
from China in a statement to the
recent National Conference en
Ching and the Far East, mesting
2 San Francisco. é

PACIKIG TRIBUNE — PAGE &

o’s police and spies.

and she was a member of a

trial on a charge of “Communist
activity.”

One day in the laboratory Maria
learned from an old worker that
his family was destitute.

She helped the man with a lit-
tle food and found herself arrest-
ed and beaten up by the police.

The delezation also saw Isabel
Sanz Toledano, a young woman
in her twenties, who is to be tried
with 32 other people at Alcala de
Henares on charges of “Commun-
ist activity.”

At the fime of the interview,
she did not know when she was
to bs tried, though she had
been in prisen for 11 months.

Isabel’s crime consisted of giv-
ing a few articles of clothing to
people who knocked at her door
gathering clothes for political
prisoners. She too, had been
beaten and severely ill-treated.

Questioned by a member of the
delegation about this police bru-

tality, a prison official admitted:
‘Maybe the police do that sort of
but in the jails nobody is

thing,
eyer beaten.”
The women prisoners agreed

that they had not been beaten in
prison, but all of them complain-
ed of insufficient food. ;
Prisoners are never told the
day of trial, nor are they allowed

[WA organization
heads CIO drive

The International Woodworkers
of America is making the great
est headway of all CIO unions
involved in the current drive to
organize workers in the southern
United States, according to Ern-
est Dalskog, TWA international
board member for B.C, Thus far
the. TWA has won bargaining
rights in 35 operations.

to choose their cwn counsel. Re-
latives are told the date and they
pass on the information.

When eventually trials do take
place—always by Military tri-
bunals—they are held behind clos-
€d doors. The press and public
with the exception of immediate
relatives, are frequently excluded.

In Madrid, the delegation were
given an estimate of 38,000 pris-
oners in jails, alone; they were
unable to get any estimate of the
many -thousands incarcerated in
concentration camps.

One of the “underground,” a
member of the Spanish Socialist
Party contacted by the delegation,
described life outside as being as
bad as inside the prisons.

Should a worker through ill-
ness or any other reason be away.
from work for half a day the
employer immediately informs the
police.

‘Despite the brutal terror, the
underground resistance move-
ment, in which the Socialist
and Communist Parties are the
driving force, carries on bravely.

Mrs. Manning said that the lack
of realization of the hope enter-
tained by the underground that
the Labor Government in Britain
would assist the democratic forces
had caused keen disappointment
in Madrid.

Herself
Catholic,

a prominent Roman
Miss Whately declared
that even in Catholic circles in
Spain there is considerable op-
position to Franco.

She mentioned the case of a
pastoral letter by the Archbishop
of Seville, which was suppressed
by the Military Governor.

Later, when the letter was pub-
lished in the news bulletin issued

by the British Embassy, priests
queued outside the EHmbassy
building, to make sure of getting
a copy.

Even possession of a British
Embassy news bulletin is re-
garded as a dangerous crime in
Spain.

A few of the 12,000,000

effected by the Nazi leaders,

B55

12,000.000 men, women and children died as a’ result of policies
a few of whom were hanged in

Nuernberg recently The above scene at Belsen concentration
camp shows a small fragment of the tetal. Standing amigq the
bodies in the pit is one of the nazi commandants who has since

been hanged.
for them it means profits.

Qur atomic imperialists want more of this, since

Ruddell turns spotlight
on city council neglect

A ‘sight’-seeing tour of the city, covering much of the
ground traversed by the B.C. Electric’s sight-seeing car, but
with young, alert Elgin Ruddell, Civic Reform candidate in
the aldermanic byelection, giving a far different -commen-
tary, drew a bus load of interested citizens and an accom-
panying cavalcade of private cars last Saturday.

The tour, which included the
B.C. Hlectric tracks among the
more obvious ‘sights,’ had already
received considerable. publicity as
a result of Police Chief McNeill’s
refusal to grant a permit on the
gS=ound that it would constitute a

parade. This

was circum-
vented by the
Civic Reform

Committee’s de-
cision to hire a
bus and use
less than the
10 cars held to

be a parade
under the civic
bylaw.

At the Van-
couver General
Hospital, Rud-
dell quoted Dr.
A. K. Haywood,
hospital superintendent, as stating
that “we have the biggest hospi-
tal in Canada, but if we had an
epidemic of any proportions we

Elgin Ruddell -

would be faced with a catastro-
phe,” and advocated erection of a
new hospital in South Vancouver.

A road-widening project at -
Point Grey Road and Trafalgar
drew his scathmg comment
“many persons have been
killed at this point, but the city
council did nothing about it
until the B.C. Electric wanted
to start a2 new bus route.”

At the old Cambie Street
grounds, jatterly Known as Lar—_
will Park and now the site of
Pacific Stages’ new bus depot,
Ruddell dealt critically with the
deal whereby the BCER obtains
the valuable area from the city -
for a $10,000 a year rental to
erect a $300,000 temporary bus
depot.

Other ‘sights’ included the old
dumps on False Creek Flats and
some of the more glaring ex=
amples of non-essential construc—
tion now in progress in the same
area.

Courtenay women demand
Hart renew milk subsidy

COURTENAY, B.C.—A conference of Island women—
wives of farmers, loggers and miners, meeting last Saturday,
wired Premier Hart demanding that the provincial govern-
ment establish a democratic board of enquiry composed of
producer, consumer, distributor and labor to investigate the
enormous spread between what the producer receives for
milk and the price the consumer pays.

The wire also demanded that
the government reinstitute the
milk subsidy that was discontinu-
ed last October first pending the
results of the board of enquiry.
The wire pointed out that the
cost of the subsidy could well be
met out of a small portion of the
eight millions of last year’s liquor
profits.

A wife of a Courtenay farmer
pointed out that milk sold by
her husband to the Comox
Creamery only brought 27c per
gallon while the consumer buy-
ing milk from the same cream-
ery. paid G64e per galion.

The women, who formulated

the above demand, had met to-
gether to hear Mrs. Eifie Jones,
candidate for school trustees in the
Vancouver civic elections, explain
what the removal of the milk
subsidy meant to the health of
our young people and to the old
age pensioners striving to make
ends meet on their miserly pit-
tance of $30.00 per month.

Public meetings in Port Al
berni and Ladysmith, addressed
by Mrs. Jones and Alf Dewhurst,
LPP organizer, endorsed the
stand taken by the women of
Courtenay and forwarded ‘wires
to Premier Hart along similar
lines.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1946