CANADA: Defensive Back-Scratching

In Canada, as in the U.S., almost everybody has talked a lot about civil defense, but nobody has done much about it. Last week in Washington’s old State Department building, in the balconied room where President Truman holds his press conferences, twelve Canadian and U.S. civil defense planners got together to translate some of the talk into action. Led by Canada’s bristly Coordinator of Civil Defense, Major General Frederick Franklin Worthington (ret.), and U.S. Acting Civil Defense Director James Wadsworth, the delegates started to work out a unified program.

In one quick, harmonious meeting, the conference drafted a scheme (still to be ratified by both governments) setting up a permanent civil defense planning group for the two countries. Air-raid signals will be the same in Canada and the U.S. Ambulances, fire engines, civil defense workers and doctors will travel freely from one country to another to render assistance after an enemy attack. Explained U.S. Civil Defense Boss Wadsworth: “We’re going to scratch each other’s backs in every way we know.”

Canadians welcomed close U.S.-Canadian cooperation on defense—but there was such a thing as getting too close. The Ottawa Citizen last week indignantly reported that a U.S. defense map showed Newfoundland and a large hunk of northeastern Canada as part of the U.S. Northeast Command.

At his weekly press conference, External Affairs Chief Lester B. Pearson announced with a smile that Canada’s ambassador in Washington had been asked to present a note to the U.S. State Department calling for “no further fantasies” of this kind. The U.S. Air Force blamed the inadvertent annexation of 1,929,600 square miles of Canadian territory on an overeager mapmaker who had merely tried to indicate U.S. bases in Newfoundland and U.S. weather and communications units stationed in northern Canada. Said the Air Force ponderously: “Any indication on maps or otherwise that the U.S. has jurisdiction over the area is incorrect.”