Canada: Outrageous . . . Stupid!

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For a good many years, Canada's Liberal Government has clucked maternally about the joys of free trade, the selfish shortsightedness of high tariff walls. Last week Canadians discovered that the Government does not always practice what it -preaches. Buried deep in the budget, and bypassed in a 42-word, offhand way by Finance Minister James L. Ilsley in his recent budget speech (not of "major importance," said he), was a new 20% tariff wall—increased from 5%—on seamless-steel boiler tubing.

Everything about the new tariff conflicted with pious Liberal doctrines. Items:

¶It was imposed for the sole benefit of Page-Hersey Tubes, Ltd., of Welland,

Ont., Canada's only boiler-tubing producer.

¶ In effect, it was imposed solely against the half dozen or so U.S. tube companies which sent $2,414,000 worth of seamless tubing into Canada last year. Because of Empire preferences, British tube exporters would be exempt.

¶ It was imposed despite the fact that the company's pleas for tariff protection had been consistently refused, even by the warmly pro-tariff Conservative Government that ruled Canada between 1930 and

¶It even smelled of politics. Welland, site of the Page-Hersey factory, is a politically important riding represented in Parliament by Canada's Labor Minister, bumptious Humphrey Mitchell.

¶The tariff was slipped unobtrusively into the budget at the last minute, during the absence in England of Canada's most articulate champion of free trade: Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King—and wholly without his knowledge.

With righteous wrath, the Winnipeg Free Press, usually partial to Liberal Government doings, let go with both barrels: "Outrageous! ... A concession to the stupid, shortsighted and selfish interests of economic nationalism. . . . The issue is the future trade policy of Canada. . . . If the protectionists get away with this first assault, the floodgates will be breached. . . . This whole sorry business must be attacked head-on by the rank-and-file members of the House of Commons.

Unless the Government backtracked fast, it would be.