CANADA: Red Invasion

Canadians were shocked to learn last week that Communists are in a position to cripple the country's vital uranium industry, which helps supply U.S. needs.

The Saskatchewan Labor Relations Board announced that it was certifying the Communist-led International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in two of the province's uranium mines. The federal government admitted that, under Canadian law, it had no alternative to installing the same Red union as bargaining agent at the government-owned Eldorado mines, the country's largest uranium producers. Mine-Mill, already solidly entrenched at Trail, British Columbia, where heavy water for Canadian and U.S. atomic plants is produced, has long been Canada's most slavish Communist union. Harvey Murphy, the union's boss in British Columbia, is an avowed Communist who was trained at Moscow's Lenin Institute.

The Mine-Mill invasion of the uranium fields was carried off by typical Communist methods. Last February one of Murphy's organizers, posing first as a mining official and later as a newspaper reporter, arrived in Uranium City. Living in a shack tent, he worked among the miners in the evenings and on weekends, promising them more pay, better bunks, shorter hours. An anti-Communist C.I.O. union tried to stem the Mine-Mill drive. Mine-Mill "put the case in terms of pork chops," said a government labor official. "The [other fellows] talked vaguely." Before long, the anti-Communists withdrew.

There is no Canadian law like the U.S.'s Taft-Hartley Act to ban Communists from union leadership, nothing to prevent Mine-Mill's Communist leaders from calling strikes against the country's atomic-energy program whenever they see fit.