CANADA: Ottawa’s Cross

Grey-haired, twitchy-fingered Austin Cross, Parliamentary reporter of the Montreal Star, is a student of capital cities. He has visited Washington and the 48 U.S. State capitals (reserving Bismarck, N.Dak. for last), the ten Provincial capitals of Canada. But the capital he knows best is Ottawa, and last week he had Canadians atwitter with a rollicking book about the Ottawa scene.

In The People’s Mouths,* Reporter Cross did for Canada approximately what Robert S. Allen did twelve years ago for the U.S. in the first Washington Merry-Go-Round. Canadians flinched and chortled at the brash impertinences and superficialities of The People’s Mouths, also found many an acid tintype of their politicians. Many were aware that Cross memorized timetables and collected other useless information but few suspected the sharper side of his nature.

The Sweatshop. Of Ottawa itself, Austin Cross wrote: “This is the capital of Canada. . . . Here is democracy at work with an hour and a half off for lunch. . . . This is where they run the war. You find soldiers who can’t fight, sailors who can’t sail, and flyers who can’t fly. . . .

“This is the city of snobs. Here you find the exquisitely groomed office boy from one of our very oldest families, snubbing the shabby Cabinet minister, from the prairie, or some awful place. . . . This is the city with a new kind of tourist trade, divided equally of one part dollar-a-year men and ten parts two-dollars-a-day stenographers. . . . She is the wartime stenographer who breakfasts on ‘coke,’ skips lunch, and dines on a 10¢ sandwich. She shares a room with as many as three other girls and they live in such squalor that, if similar conditions existed elsewhere, Ottawa people would be collecting funds to help them. Meet the Government, biggest operator of sweatshop labor in Canada.”

The Gallery. Cross is tart about some of the Government bigwigs, but essentially kind to most of them: > Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King is “Wordy Willie,” but he gets full marks as a statesman and as the ablest rough-&-tumble politician on the North American Continent.

>Thin-skinned Minister of Munitions and Supply Clarence Decatur Howe “is an assembly line in pants.”

> National Defense Minister James Layton Ralston is a Baptist, a great Canadian, a hog for detail.

>Agriculture Minister James Gardiner is the Prime Minister’s hatchetman whose tongue cuts like an ax.

> Red-haired James Lorimer Ilsley, who ably runs Canada’s finances, is a social lion who snubs the snob set.

> Air Minister Charles Gavan Power is a wild Quebec Irishman who has made a zooming success of Canada’s air training scheme, and does not know how good he is.

Presumably because of the libel laws, Cross confines his harsher remarks about the House of Commons to anonymities. He noted: “One man who is alleged to have a discharge from an insane asylum, an M.P. who was tossed out of the Press Gallery for drunkenness, a fellow who once belonged to the Nazi party for some reason or other, and . . . the M.P. who is indebted to the Japanese for campaign funds.”

The peculiarities of a few M.P.s do not bother Cross. The average M.P. “is just like all the rest of us, either a little smarter or a little stupider than the mob.” In the Canadian House of Commons he becomes part of something that started “one lovely June day at Runnymede back in 1215, functioning down through the ages, and giving you its mid-20th-century version of the finest mode of government the world has yet devised.”

* From Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “The noble tribunes are the people’s mouths, And we their hands.”