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Minister for Everything. Among these men, the one who has contributed most to Canada's recent progress is U.S.-born Clarence Decatur Howe, 66. Officially, Howe is Canada's Minister of Trade & Commerce and Minister of Defense Production. Canadians, with good reason, call him "Minister for Everything."
An engineer who made his million before he was 40, Howe entered the Canadian cabinet as a political novice in 1935. Ever since, he has been its hardest-driving member. He reorganized the government-owned Canadian National Railways, North America's biggest railroad, and saved it from bankruptcy. He built the country's national airline (TransCanada) and its countrywide, government-owned radio system (CBC). In World War II, he took command of Canada's industrial effort and transformed the largely agrarian Canadian economy into a high-powered industrial unit. After V-J day, he presided over the return to a well-balanced peacetime economy. He runs Canada's atomic-energy program, directs its national scientific research, sells its billion-dollar grain crop. As boss of all foreign trade, he has helped make Canada the fourth largest of the world's trading nations, surpassed only by the U.S., Britain and France. Since the Korean war, he has also been bossing the country's defense production.
With all these responsibilities—and all these accomplishments—it is not unnatural that Howe should occasionally betray a consciousness of his own worth. Once, when one of his government projects was under discussion in Parliament he snapped: "That's not a public enterprise, that's my enterprise." An impatient man of few words, he has sometimes enraged or alarmed his opponents into calling him "fascist" and "dictator."
He has also been called (by Socialists) "the greatest Socialist in Canada." Although he has made public ownership pay, Howe is no Socialist, but a member of Canada's Liberal Party. The party has been in uninterrupted power for 16 years, and its ideology, except in fiscal policy, is roughly akin to that of the Democrats in the U.S. Says Howe: "I'm all for private enterprise, but you can't go without something just because private enterprise won't build it."
Howe is a restless man of great administrative ability who wants to get things done. But he has none of the air of haste and bustle that surrounds some U.S. businessmen. He is deliberate in manner, though quick in judgment. There is little fat on his chunky (5 ft. 10 in., 200 Ibs.) frame. He has what New Englanders call a "down-East memory," and uses phonetic spelling, e.g., his lunch chit at Ottawa's Rideau Club once read: "plane omelet and rasin pie." He is an optimist, especially about Canada. Of his first view of Canada in 1908, he says: "I knew right away that I wanted to be a Canadian. I liked the people, the atmosphere, the possibilities of a thinly settled country."