CANADA: Pere de Famille

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Bitter Choice. Overshadowing this historic problem is the urgently pressing one of Canada's trade crisis. If the Washington talks do not produce healing prescriptions, St. Laurent must administer some bitter doses from his own medicine closet. He might even have to stop all but the most essential U.S. imports to Canada and let Canada live as best she could on her own production and high-priced overseas imports. That course for years to come would deny to Canadians such items as U.S.-made cars and clothes, U.S.-grown citrus fruit, Hollywood movies. Canada would save U.S. dollars, but it would undoubtedly place a heavy strain on the Canadian confederation, especially on the Western Prairies and the Maritime Provinces, where the facts of geography exert an extra pull toward trade with the U.S.

Another remedy might be reciprocity with the U.S., and, if the U.S. is willing, free trade across the border. Canadians rejected wide reciprocity when U.S. President William Howard Taft proposed it in 1911. They feared it would lead to a customs union, the destruction of Canadian industries and the ultimate loss of Canadian independence. They would be wary of it today for the same reasons.

As he sat in his green-carpeted office in the East Block last week, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent pondered the extremes that faced him and his country. The fine legal mind, famed in Canadian courts for its ability to arrive at sense-making compromises, was at work trying to find middle way. St. Laurent was confident that it could be found. "We have been up against tough situations before," he said. "The Western World has always managed somehow."

^{* Today, with $15,000 as Prime Minister, plus the M.P. salary
and car allowance, he about breaks even.}