Canada: ONTARIO: Operation Kildare

In jampacked Ottawa last week the disbanding Canadian Women’s Army Corps moved out of Kildare Barracks, left the two roomy brick houses invitingly vacant. This was just what 150 war vets, who had formed the Veterans’ Housing League, had been waiting for. They had failed in all the usual approaches to the Government to find adequate housing. The day after the CWACs cleared out, V.H.L. Leader Franklyn Edward Hanratty, a pint-sized pepper pot who flew 48 R.C.A.F. missions, handed an ultimatum to Ottawa’s Mayor Stanley Lewis to do something about housing or else. The Mayor sat tight. At dusk eleven vets, their wives and 18 children rumbled out to Kildare Barracks in trucks. They unloaded beds, stoves, washing machines, etc., and set up house. By midnight, the children were tucked in bed, the parents tuckered out but determined to stay put. Soon another 14 vets followed.* The V.H.L. served notice that it planned to move into other empty Government buildings. Then Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who lives just a few blocks from Kildare Barracks, set up a special committee, told it to turn over empty Government buildings to families in need of housing.

The 25 veterans’ families, sharing 40 rooms (and 15 bathrooms) in Kildare Barracks, settled down to spend the winter. They chipped in $25-a-month rent a family, will use it to clean and paint up the place, called in exterminators to get rid of swarms of cockroaches. Said V.H.L. Leader Hanratty: “What we did was illegal. But . . . these places belonged to the Government. Who’s the Government but us? . . . We took what was ours.”

*For news of “squatting” in Britain, see FOREIGN NEWS.