Questions, Answers

For days the Prime Minister of Canada ducked a peppering of questions on foreign policy. Last week he was peppered some more. Members of Parliament wanted to know what Canada was doing about the Council of Foreign Ministers in London (see INTERNATIONAL), at which Canada was not represented. They wondered what share Canada would have in the writing of the peace.

This time William Lyon Mackenzie King, obviously sniffing with anticipation, was ready. He rose in the House of Commons to define clearly his Government's (i.e., Canada's) views.

An End to By-Passing. Said King: Canada will not permit herself to be by passed in the general organization for world security. "It is important that Can ada should not merely be consulted, but that there should be clear recognition of Canada's right to effective participation in the great [peace] decisions. . . .

"During the war, for military reasons, it was necessary [for Canada] to acquiesce in the operation of wartime arrangements under which responsibility for major decisions on the direction of the Allied war effort was concentrated in a very few hands. . . . The wartime pattern [must not be] perpetuated. . . ."

Canada is not half so much interested, said King, in such things as national boundaries as in the underlying causes of war.

"The big questions, the worry questions, are questions of attitudes and objectives. . . . What kind of a world do we really wish to live in? What sort of an effort are we ready to make to realize it? . . . How can we help each other to make our world a free world? . . .

"It is the answers to these questions which will determine what we should do about defense and how far, as a country, we can go in attempting to assist the economic recovery of our allies and the restoration of world trade."

A Beginning of Influence. The world should find working answers to these questions without delay, said King. In the framing of the answers, Canada--whose contributions to the Allied war effort were greater than any other nation's outside the Big Three--was determined to have a voice.

To get it, King announced that he was going to Washington for brief talks with President Truman over the weekend; then he would sail from New York for London. Because he would take time to visit Canadian troops and battlefields, because he would "see for myself something of the changed world in which Canada must make her way," he would probably be gone a month and a half.

This week he was on his way.

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