Mr. FRASER:

The best would be pretty bad. The people who go into the ridings sell these photographs, size 8 x 10, for thirty-five cents. The paper, the developing, the flashlight bulbs and the use of other necessary materials are worth at least that much, to say nothing of travelling and hotel expenses. And those men staying in hotels for four days would spend at least $20 a day each in that time. On top of that they have their salaries and travelling expenses. Even if they sold a hundred of these pictures at thirty-five cents each it would not pay for the time they spend in the villages, towns and cities. But the money aspect of it is not as important as the fact that in doing this work they are robbing the commercial photographer of his right to make pictures. Surely that is unfair. It is the worst kind of unfairness so far as the photographers of Canada are concerned.

I have no brief for the photographers and have received no instructions from them. But they are all honest men and women. They are paying their taxes, including income taxes, in their respective municipalities. They are paying wages to their employees. They support their churches and belong to service clubs, which involves the payment of certain sums of money. On top of all this they should not be subjected to competition from the government of the kind I have described. The film board was never set up for that purpose. The sooner the Minister of National Revenue or some other cabinet minister steps in and says: Out you go; wait until we clean house, the better it will be for this country. It as the worst kind of competition these people could have.

The Address-Mr. Fraser

I hold in my hand a return made last year with respect to the film board which shows that in that year they made 170,000 stills. Of that number 79,282 were of the size 8 x 10, and were sold at thirty-five cents each. If anyone in Canada will tell me that the making and sale by the government of 79,282 stills out of a total of 170,000 does not mean unfair competition, I say that he should have his head examined.

We are told that passport pictures were made by the film board. These might have been for government officials, and if so I would have no great objection, although in the past commercial photographers have done the job satisfactorily. Why not let them do it now? It would be done a good deal cheaper than it is done by these film board people.

The film board turn out what they call official portraits. I find that 166 of them have been made. I hope that the only member of the ministry who now happens to be in the house has not had his portrait taken by the board, because they charge only $5 each. A reasonably satisfactory portrait by a commercial photographer would cost a good deal more than that. This is just one further instance of robbing the private photographer. We find that these stills cost $93,270, and we will recall that there was only about $200,000 left of the total budget. If we take the $93,270 away we can imagine what is left for the development of motion pictures for educational purposes for the young, the old, and those who think they are young. I like good motion pictures.

If the national film board has nothing to hide it should be prepared to submit to a full investigation, to have its accounts and its activities checked, to have a check made of its usefulness and of its business methods, and to have inefficient employees weeded out.

In the return I received last year the qualifications required were set out. All kinds of qualifications under the sun were given, ranging from salesmen down to a practical chiropractor.

That is the last word.

Mr. HAZEN:

How many of them are communists?

Mr. FRASER:

A little over a year ago I placed a question on the order paper on that point. The answer I received was that they did not know, or that they had not checked whether they were communists or not. In my question I referred to one particular individual, and the result was that a week after my question appeared on the order paper that man, who was a known communist, was fired from the film board. They used common sense for once.

From what I can learn here and in the United States, films made by the national film board at the present time could be made more cheaply by a commercial outfit. It would not be necessary to spend millions to make films worth only a few thousand dollars.

When the debate on the budget is before the house I shall have something more to say about these white elephants. I believe I mentioned before that it does some things in a satisfactory manner, but I still say there should be a housecleaning; and a good scrubbing brush used on the whole outfit would do a lot of good.

Before I take my seat there is just one thing more I should like to say. In later years, especially since 1940, the people of Canada and the United States have been thinking more and more of hospitalization. This is because our veterans were looked after in good hospitals-some not so good-while they were overseas and in Canada and because there has been more education along this line. Not a great deal is being put out by the national health departments both here and in the United States, but rather by women's organizations and service clubs. The people of Canada have become conscious of the fact that they should go to hospitals to be checked up when there is anything wrong. I am told that there is an increased demand for hospital beds. I understand the demand today is fifty per cent greater than it was in 1940. The average citizen, I do not care whether he is rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief, has one great fear, that he might be taken ill and have to go to a hospital and with the present shortage of hospital rooms not be able to get in.

I think the dominion government should clean up the national film board. They would save at least a million dollars, and perhaps two million dollars. They could use that money to make grants to hospitals being built throughout the country on the basis of the beds provided.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr. Golding):

I must remind the hon. member that his time has expired.

Mr. FRASER:

I have just one thing more to say. At the present time we have very few modern streamlined hospitals in Canada, although some are being built. Many of our hospitals are antiquated, they belong to the horse and buggy days. The Drew government in Ontario is making a grant of $1,000 per room to any non profit hospital that is being built.

How much have they given?

The Address-Mr. Bowerman

Mr. FRASER:

For a great many rooms.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr. Golding):

I would again remind the hon. member that his time has expired.

Mr. FRASER:

I do hope that the minister of national health will see that the Minister of National Revenue hands over some money from the film board to be applied for additional hospitalization throughout Canada.

Mr. E. L. BOWERMAN (Prince Albert):

Mr. Speaker, I desire to avail myself of the opportunity afforded by this debate to give expression to what I know is the desire of by far the great majority of my constituents. I know from personal contact and from correspondence which I have received that if they were able to speak personally to this house, particularly to the government, they would do so in the sense of the amendment moved by the leader of the C.C.F. group (Mr. Cold-well). They would no doubt do it in this way:

We the people regret that Your Excellency's advisers have failed to use the powers provided by parliament to control prices, and by their actions have caused alarming increases in the cost of living -and a dangerous lowering of the living standards of the Canadian people.

That Mr. Speaker, is why I am speaking to the amendment moved by my leader, and also because every housewives' league, every women's auxiliary, every labour union, every farm forum, every wheat pool committee and every individual who has written to me from the Prince Albert riding, along with many others from elsewhere, has one and all demanded the reimposition of price controls, the resumption of subsidies and the immediate reapplication of the excess profits tax.

One letter which is typical of the many received contained a copy of a letter addressed to the Prime Minister by the Prince Albert local of the Canadian brotherhood of railway trainmen. The writer states that he was instructed by the brotherhood of his local to inform the Prime Minister that his group were unanimous in their end'orsation of the brief submitted to him by the Canadian congress of labour regarding the reimposition of price controls. They state further that in giving consideration to this brief they would like to remind him that during the war they were repeatedly informed by his government that there would be no inflation this time. They particularly wanted to call the Prime Minister's attention to the many Canadian National Railways pensioners who have given the government railways fifteen to twenty-five years of faithful service and who are now

faced with the absolutely impossible task of trying to exist on $25 per month. They close with these words:

Trusting you will consider the wish of the majority of the people and make every effort to improve their standard of living . . .

Before now they, will have learned once again that their trust has been misplaced. They, along with Canadians everywhere, will have learned that instead of recognizing and implementing the wishes of the majority, the Prime Minister's government has told this house and the country that so far as the government of the day is concerned sooner or later the type of subsidies that have been paid in the past will be removed, that the remaining subsidies that are now paid on different things will in the course of time be removed and that the policy of the government is the removal of price controlling subsidies. The truth as I see it is that this government, because of pressure brought to bear by self-styled free enterprisers, have turned their back on the system of planned price controlling subsidies which they themselves admitted saved us from ourselves and all others in the most critical period of our nation's history.

They have turned away from the principle of each for all and all for each, the principle of planned economic controls, which gave, in a measure at least, to the humblest citizen the right to share in the needs and necessities of life in a period of great crisis. They have turned from the petition of the majority to the cry of materialistic capitalism.

Capitalism is materialistic. It places a premium on greed1, competition, inequality and privilege. It denies the religious concept of the equality of man before God. It rejects the Christian principles of brotherhood and co-operation. It makes a virtue of the amassing of wealth and privilege at other people's expense. Capitalism is un-Christian in its ethics and inhuman in its practice. On the other hand, a democratically planned and democratically controlled society would guarantee and safeguard full economic, religious and political liberty for all.

A co-operative commonwealth federation, a Christian democratic socialist state, if you please, would assure to every citizen that there would be no economic, political or social discrimination because of race, creed, religion, colour or ethnic or national origin. A conservative commonwealth would rebuild society along co-operative principles, appealing not as capitalism does to the greed in men but rather to their desire to work together for the common good. It would rebuild society, national and international, upon the principle that all

The Address-Mr. Bowerman

men are brothers the world over and that all have an equal right to share in the good things that a kind and beneficent nature has created for the use of all men. Going still deeper to the root of the matter this is also why leading church bodies have considered it their duty to condemn the evils of capitalism and favour the reorganization of society upon principles similar to those of a co-operative commonwealth federation.

Through you, Mr. Speaker, I would like to recall to the mind and heart of those members of this house whose religious convictions are deeply rooted in the Catholic faith a papal encyclical of 1931 wherein Pope PiusXI states:

You assuredly know and lament the ultimate consequence of this individualistic spirit in economic affairs. Free competition is dead; economic dictatorship has taken its place. Unbridled ambition for domination has succeeded the desire for gain. The whole economic life has become hard, cruel and relentless in a ghastly measure. It is rightly contended that certain forms of property must be reserved to the state since they carry with them an opportunity for domination too great to be left to private individuals without injury to the community at large.

A pronouncement of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of my own, province states:

It is abundantly clear why the church condemns and abhors the abuses of the materialistic capitalism of our industrial age, with its consequent unemployment for the masses and huge fortunes for the few. These evils are so well known that we are saved the trouble of listing them here. Suffice it to say that materialistic capitalism is so un-Christian in its philosophy and evil consequence that it must give way to a reconstructed social order based on Christian principles.

Mr. BERTRAND (Laurier):

Who wrote that, please?

Mr. BOWERMAN:

This comes from the

hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church in the province of Saskatchewan.

Mr. BERTRAND (Laurier):

What is his name?

Mr. BOWERMAN:

Continuing, I wish to place before this house another pronouncement which was made at a World-wide conference of Anglican bishops at Lambeth, England, in 1930. It reads in part as follows:

An outstanding and pressing duty of the church is to convince its members of the necessity of nothing less than a fundamental change in our economic life. This change can only be effected by accepting as a basis of individual relationships the principle of co-operation in service for the common good, in place of unrestricted competition for profits and sectional advantages.

Furthermore the late Archbishop of York, William Temple, declared:

The vast system of beliefs, practices and policies which may roughly be called western civilization . . . was admirably adapted to the production of wealth and power. But its motives were non-Christian, self-interest, competition, the struggle of rival forces. If it is to be a blessing, not a blight, its motives must be transformed.

Still further, in 1939, the report of the committee on social service of the United Church of Canada stated:

We are driven to the conclusion that the only thing that will solve our present day social and economic problems will be the absolute Christian socialization of the means of production and distribution of all the necessities of life.

The twenty-first annual report of the board of evangelism and social service of the United Church of Canada for 1946 said:

This board recommends the control by the federal government of any industry in Canada whose degree of concentration or monopoly is such that it can enter or has entered into cartel agreements, believing that the holding of such concentrated economic power in private hands is contrary to the interests of the Canadian people.

Your Honour, what an indictment-the world's great spiritual leaders both at home and abroad condemning in no uncertain terms uncontrolled materialistic capitalism, an "ism'' that all down through its history has brought war and rumours of war, famine and pestilence to those peoples who adhere to its system of uncontrolled rent, interest and profit. Is it any wonder, sir, that these great church bodies to whom vast multitudes look for guidance in spiritual and temporal affairs, seeing and knowing the distress that so-called free enterprise has wrought, have cried out: we condemn and abhor the abuses of capitalism? Free enterprise is dead. Dictatorship has taken its place. Our duty before God and man is to convince all people everywhere of the necessity of nothing less than a fundamental change in our economic life. We are driven to this conclusion-the only thing that will solve our present social and economic problems is absolute Christian socialization of the means of production and distribution of all the necessities of life.

Mr. GRAYDON:

Does that include the farmers?

Mr. BOWERMAN:

That would include everybody.

Mr. GRAYDON:

It is interesting to hear that.

The Address-Mr. Bowerman

Mr. BOWERMAN:

Mr. RINFRET:

Will the hon. member for Prince Albert permit a question?