A Look Behind The Iron Curtain

COLONEL ROYCE:

Honourable members, Reverend Sir, distinguished guests and gentlemen.

Before I introduce our distinguished guest, I have a little story I would like to tell. An American tourist visiting Scotland for the first time observed as he passed through the streets of a small village an almost complete absence of men. He halted an elderly gentleman in the street and asked the old gentleman, "How can this be?" and the old Scot replied, "Oh, they're all away governing the world."

It's not surprising that our distinguished speaker today was born in that old historic City of Falkirk. The Douglas family according to some research I have been doing seem to have been leading minorities for approximately 1,000 years, and causing a fantastic amount of alarm and despondency among the English majority in the process.

In the early 1300's there was a wide difference of opinion regarding Sir James Douglas. Scotland referred to him as Douglas the Good, and the English referred to him as Black Douglas. He managed to get himself killed in Spain while endeavouring to return the heart of his friend Robert Bruce to the Holy Land, and there are those that probably felt that fellow should have spent more time on Crusades preferably in Spain.

Our Speaker today may know of an episode in the past in which powerful friends in high places proved somewhat unreliable. In 1452 King James invited a Douglas for a friendly talk. They hoped for an alliance, and when the talks proved unsatisfactory King James had his guest liquidated by some of his troops and no more was heard of that Douglas. In those days politics were conducted in a more direct manner.

Our distinguished speaker, the Honourable T. C. Douglas came to Canada permanently when he was 14 years old. For a time he was a printer and still carries a printer's card. While in his teens he came under the guidance of a man who was later the leader of the CCF Party and with the guidance of that great man our speaker completed his schooling, obtaining a B.A. at Brandon University and an M.A. at McMaster, and later did postgraduate work at the University of Chicago.

In 1930 two important things occurred. He married his present wife, the only one he has ever had, and was called to a Church in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. I looked for the definition of a clergyman and found he is a man who is invisible six days of the week and incomprehensible on the seventh. I have had some difficulty to relate the definition to the occasion because I am quite sure that our speaker would not choose to be invisible on difficult days and no one can suggest he is incomprehensible unless he chooses to be so.

The drought and the depression of the 30's had a lasting effect on his political philosophy and subsequent career. He was defeated in '34 for a Provincial seat which was a lucky thing for him because he was elected to the House and remained there until '44 when he assumed the leadership of the CCF party in Saskatchewan, and during the next 17 years he led the party through five successful elections. It was on his recommended measure that a number of the medical schemes were finally passed by his administration in the field of private industry. In 1961, Mr. Douglas was elected Federal leader of the party and resigned his Provincial premiership. Although his party was elected he was defeated in his riding, and when the press asked him how he felt when he was defeated he said, "I will just lie down and bleed a while and get up and fight again." I don't know how much he bled but he was elected immediately afterwards again and he has represented that riding without defeat ever since. With 21 constituents in the present House and a minority Government in office his position is one of more power and responsibility. I might say a number of his most able lieutenants are Toronto men, and his posture in the coming sessions will be observed with the most intense and anxious interest. From time to time in the heat of the campaign one might have felt Mr. Douglas was not entirely enthusiastic about Bay Street and even that more sanctified area St. James Street. However, after the events of last summer and when he gets to know us he will find we are not as bad as we are painted, we couldn't be.

Now, may I introduce the Honourable T. C. Douglas, leader of the New Democratic Party and a dedicated servant of the Canadian people within the British Commonwealth of Nations.

MR. DOUGLAS:

Gentlemen, head table guests, and members of the Empire Club of Canada, may I first thank you for your very kind invitation to be here and to say how much I have enjoyed my visit up to now. I wish especially to thank your President for his witty and informative introduction, but he missed one part of the history of my family. Apparently I had another ancestor who was also a James Douglas, who was a member of the Edinburgh City Council. He was noted for being a wit, most of my ancestors were just half wits. He was the only one on record noted for being a whole wit. He was already noted for having a rather sarcastic way. The story concerns an American millionaire who was coming to Edinburgh. They were going to give him the freedom of the City and following the ceremony they were going to have a banquet which the American was going to pay for. When he saw Douglas was going to be present the American said, "If Douglas is going to be there I won't go, he'll have some wisecrack to make." The Lord Mayor went to see Sir James and asked him to confine himself to one remark. A Douglas would do anything for a free meal including going to the Empire Club and he agreed. The meal was a great success. The main dish on the menu was a chicken pot pie of which the American consumed large quantities. After the meal was over the American turned to the Lord Mayor and said, "I must apologize for eating so many of those chicken pot pies." "I ate almost as much as Sampson did when he slew the Phillistine," and Sir James replied, "And with the same weapon, the jawbone of an ass."

There are so many things I want to say I'm not going to spend any more time on preliminaries. Last summer with a Speaker of the House of Commons and Senator Croll we spent a month in the two countries, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, following which I met my wife in Belgrade and we spent another two weeks in Yugoslavia.

I would like to talk to you about what it is like behind the Iron Curtain. I would like to preface my remarks by saying two things; that no one on the basis of six weeks ought to pose as an authority on or speak with any definiteness about what is going on behind the Iron Curtain. This is an area too complex for anyone to speak on with any assurance. I can give you my impressions, but they may not be the same impressions that were received by other members of the delegation. The second thing is that the Soviet Union particularly is a country which is very easily misunderstood. I could speak to you for an hour about some of the good things in the Soviet Union and you would go away saying this is a Utopia, and I could speak to you about the deplorable things and you would go away saying this is a terrible country in which people have to live. The fact is both of those statements would be true. I spoke to a meeting in Westminster, British Columbia, and I said the Soviet Union was far ahead of us in economic planning, in housing and city planning, but in consumer production, services, industry and agriculture they were two or three generations behind us. The Press simply reported the first half of my statement, so I am on record as saying the Soviet Union is far in advance of us in economic planning, city planning and housing. I can understand now why different people can come back and write articles that are completely and diametrically opposite to each other about what is happening. I think the other thing as a preface to my remarks is that one can't judge these countries by comparing them with Canada or the United States or any part of the Western world. One has to judge them in the light of their own history, one has to compare them with what they were rather than with what we have.

One of the leaders of the Government in Yugoslavia, when I was telling him there were certain places I wanted to go-not the best places, I didn't want to be taken on a Cooks tour-he said, Mr. Douglas, you can go anywhere, we will take you any place you want to go. We are not ashamed of our poverty. You have to remember in Yugoslavia they have a capital income of $500.00 compared to your $2,000.00. This has to be measured in the light of the fact that in '45 it was only $150.00, and for 1970 we think it will be $800.00. You have to compare the standards today to our standards in the past.

The first thing I would say is that I was strikingly impressed with the economic planning and the city planning, and many of the health and welfare programmes we saw on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Their economic planning has been directed in the main towards increasing production, towards replacing the thousands of factories that were destroyed during the War, and the great number of homes that were demolished. Their planning has been directed to building homes to house the people who were left homeless following the War. In terms of economic planning they have made tremendous progress. I was impressed in the underemployed and under developed areas where they have deliberately moved in new industries into those areas. There is an area east of the new City of Rostovi. Rostovi had been badly bombed in the War, there is a great iron and steel and chemical complex to provide employment and to make use of the resources of that area. They have spent greater amounts of money in the under developed parts of the country and less in the highly industrial developed areas. This has resulted in a more even growth rather than having parts of the country overflowing and parts of the country depressed. Their cities are scrupulously clean, and although there is nothing like the automobile traffic we have, when they do get it they will be able to cope with it. Their cities have been well planned and well built.

I think it was Senator Croll who made the very succinct observation when he was asked what was the most impressive thing about the Soviet Union he had seen. He said he was most impressed by the number of young men and women in positions of responsibility. There was a man who was the head of a University in a city of 40,000 people who was only 40 years of age. There was a large factory headed by a young man of 35 who started as a worker in a rolling mill, who was later sent to University to become an engineer. But it is in the municipal planning field that the young people have become most apparent. Drawing on my memory we didn't meet a single male over 35, certainly not over 40. These are all young men and women planning their cities with attractiveness, imagination and great skill. There are signs of housing everywhere you go. They have tremendous problems of housing. Moscow has grown from a population of two million before the War to six and a half million. Other cities are facing the same problems. They face the same difficulties we had over the last forty years of people moving from the rural areas to the urban areas. Their housing is well planned and beautifully located, they have made homes available for hundreds of thousands of people and at rents people can afford to pay. A rouble is roughly equivalent to a dollar, maybe a little better and a kopek is equivalent to a cent. The average worker receives from 150 roubles to 250 roubles. I'm not speaking of the highly skilled worker but of the average worker. A man will pay for the rent of a small two bedroom apartment, seven roubles, and another seven or eight roubles for light and heat and services in the apartment block. So, for fourteen or fifteen roubles he has his basic living accommodation, and they are making great progress and by our standards some of the housing is fairly attractive. As one man said to me in Belgrade through the interpreter, "This may not look like a very grand house but when you realize I was born in a but with a thatched roof and a dirt floor, and half the house the family lived in and the other half the livestock lived in, this looks like a palace."

Their educational system is entirely free as far as a student has a capacity to go. I don't think there is any doubt that the secret of any success they might have in this area of the scientific revolution is due to what they are doing in the field of education. I was impressed not only with what they have done in the sciences but I was also impressed with what they are doing in the field of art and culture. We saw their ballet, their opera and their circuses, all of which are state subsidized so people can afford to see a first class ballet. We saw the Leningrad Ballet do Spartacus. The average person would pay 50 kopeks. In this way they are providing entertainment of a very high quality to ordinary people and they have managed to eliminate some of the hucksterism which has often associated itself with entertainment in our society.

I want to take the time to discuss their health and welfare organizations. The one thing I admire is their success with the problem of a multi-racial society. In Czechoslovakia there are two main races, the Czechs and the Slovenes, and when you go to Yugoslavia you have 13 different nationalities, the Croats, Serbians and Macedonians being the main ones. Here is a country with the same population we have and with 13 different nationalities who have in the days gone by been sworn enemies with long histories of blood feuds and they have succeeded in ironing out their differences. Some of the old resentments are still there, but they have built an atmosphere of co-operation and a recognition of the equality of all races that has gone a long way to build up national unity. There is, as you know, in the USSR 15 republics and 4 autonomist republics. I didn't realize the amount of jurisdictional power these republics have and how different they are from one another; different as day and night between Georgia and the Ukraine and even more different when you come to Bella-Russia, but they are working it out and we can probably learn a lesson from them. I admit this is due to a large extent to the fact that you have a tightly disciplined Communist Party which runs like a steel thread through the whole structure and is able to keep them in line, but this is not the whole answer. Part of the answer lies in the fact that they have accepted the equality of all men irrespective of race, creed or colour.

So much briefly for the things I admire. I think on the other hand one must say that their consumer industries, their service industries and their agriculture are at least two or three generations behind ours, consumer goods are scarce and in some cases completely unobtainable. Goods that are obtainable lack variety and some goods by our standards would be considered shoddy. Food is atrociously expensive and in many of the stores the goods that are there are not necessarily the goods people want. Now, the thing that impresses you when you talk to people who have lived there for some time, is that here is a country that has made great strides in technology, they have put a Sputnik into orbit but you can't buy a pound of nails to repair your front doorstep. They make television sets but there is no serviceman to service it. You can't go to a store and buy a tube, there are no tubes, so your television set of which you are so proud just sits there useless because it lacks one little tube. You can either buy another set or do without television. I had a little accident while I was there, I got my finger caught in the car door. It wasn't a serious thing but they insisted I go to one of their clinics. Here was a very well equipped clinic. I was through many clinics all with excellent equipment, but when they came to bandage it up there was no adhesive tape. There was fine equipment worth thousands of dollars and you couldn't get a band aid for love or money, and the reason in my opinion is that this is a highly centralized bureaucracy which has established a state controlled corporation which buys from the factory and places orders and sends to the stores things they think the stores should have and what they think the public wants instead of allowing the store to order the things the consumer has asked for, but this is being corrected.

As you know there has been a great change since Kosygin took over. He was an outstanding economist and he was fired twice by Stalin. The first thing he did was to take 500 of their biggest factories and let them deal directly with the stores. These factories have been taken out of the control of the State controlled corporation so they are moving towards a consumer oriented economy. I said a few moments ago that their service and their maintenance is poor. These excellent housing projects are going to be useless in ten years. They have no idea of maintenance. They build a beautiful apartment block and if something goes wrong with the plumbing, and it overflows, if a piece of plaster falls, nobody fixes it. They have no idea of establishing maintenance and service. This is something we were able to give them our impressions of and they were very glad to have a frank comment and invited it, and believe me, they got it.

Another thing is their agricultural system which has not been a success mainly because their State farms and to a lesser extent the collective farms have been under too much centralized, bureaucratic control and the result is they have not always produced things they should have produced.

They had too much manpower in relation to their production, but now they are allocating specialists to their State farms. We visited a number of them which were producing everything on that farm from fruit to grain to livestock to dairy products. We suggested to them they could have a fruit farm, a grain farm, a livestock farm and use mass production methods. That is what they are going to have to do. Their food and consumer goods are expensive because their State controlled corporation buys from the State farms and sells to the State stores at a markup and that markup accounts for 85 % of their national revenue. As I pointed out to them their markup was a hidden indirect tax. There is virtually no income tax which would be a marvellous place for Bay Street, they would love it. There is very little income tax but 85% of the revenue comes from these markups which are virtually an overall hidden sales tax with no exemptions whatsoever. I think that is the most regressive form of tax and a most regressive way to finance an economy. In my discussions with their economists they were never able to give me any information that would refute that point of view.

I think their failures are due to three things. The first failure is due to the fact that they have spent the last twenty years trying to rehabilitate the country. One has no idea of the terrible havoc which the Nazi invasion caused in those countries, and it has taken them years to rebuild the towns and cities and their factories and homes. The second reason is the type of centralized bureaucracy which has taken from the private individual and the local community the decision making power which they ought to have. I am speaking now of the Soviet Union. In Czechoslovakia they have gradually moved some distance toward more private initiative and control. When you get to Yugoslavia, after Tito broke with Stalin in '48, they have moved almost completely away. There is a middle class growing up in Yugoslavia and they have a very large degree of private control and co-operative management and ownership free from any centralized bureaucracy. The third reason they have had difficulty in these fields is because in a one party Government you don't have the opportunities for criticism and debate, so that when the bureaucracies make blunders there is nobody to point out the blunders at the time they are making the blunders and nobody to attack them after the blunders have been made. It has to be done behind closed doors. Yet it is happening. One of the top officials in the Soviet Union, when I was pointing out to him we used a tiller, combines and have different methods of tilling the soil from what we had 40 years ago, said, "I know that if Khrushchov had spent one million roubles studying how you North Americans coped with semi arid areas we could have saved the five hundred million roubles we threw away on the virgin land project." One of the officials said, "We have a story our farmers tell to one another, in which they say that the Government of the Soviet Union should get together with the Canadian Government. We should get from your people some of your agricultural technology and in exchange we will give you our agricultural plan. The result is we will have more food and you will get rid of your surplus." I said to him, "What would happen if you told me that story ten years ago, and he said, "I would be on my way to Siberia." This is how the control is relaxing. In the Soviet Union it is relaxing a bit. In Czechoslovakia it has relaxed a lot, and in Yugoslavia it has relaxed almost completely. So that you have both State and Federal Parliaments who have changed Government legislation and amended Government legislation so that this great centralization has disappeared to a very large extent in Yugoslavia and great changes are going on in both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. But I think the one thing you have to remember is whenever you suppress discussion and criticism not only does society lose but even the Government loses something because it has no way of measuring its own success and being made aware of its own mistakes.

May I say one thing in closing because I don't want to keep you too long. I think Senator Croll would agree with me in what I'm going to say. The one thing that impressed me more than any other thing is that these people have a very deep longing for peace. When you realize in Czechoslovakia one and three quarter million people were killed, three and a half million in Yugoslavia, a country of only twenty million people; twenty-two million killed in the Soviet Union. There are one million in Prague. In the synagogue there were row after row of names of 73,000 Jews in the City of Prague alone who were put to death in the gas chambers. This has left deep wounds. These people have everything to lose and nothing to gain by another War. I'm not talking about the Government propagandists, I'm talking about the farmers, the workers and the students and the professors. These people want peace. They have two fears, the first is fear of a remilitarized and nuclearized Germany. They are terribly afraid. Two things happened that made them afraid. One was an unfortunate television speech by Herr Schroeder. He wound up his speech by saying we would be prepared to forego our demand for nuclear arms if we were given back our pre-war territories. You can imagine what that did to the Czechs and Yugoslavs. The other thing is that a new stamp was put out in Germany, not East Germany, and on the new stamp was a map of Germany with all its former territories restored to it. It sent a cold shiver through the other countries. They are terribly afraid of the military forces in Germany; that the Prussian spirit will return if given nuclear arms.

The other thing they are afraid of is China. They are afraid that if they become embroiled in a war on the western front China will seize that opportunity to take Outer Mongolia and Siberia. They are afraid of a war on two fronts. They want peace. One of the things that stands between the West and the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain is the situation in Viet Nam. The question of Viet Nam was raised again and again. I had a little altercation with Mr. Mikoyan because he was twitting us about the fact we hadn't been aggressive enough about bringing peace in Viet Nam. I pointed out to him they had just cold-shouldered the Commonwealth Prime Minister who had offered to send a delegation to seek a modus operandi between the disputants. But the fact does remain that the Soviet Union has not put forth all its efforts to solve the problem in Viet Nam any more than we have, largely because they are afraid China will accuse them of being lackeys of the Imperialists. Our reply to them and to the Chinese was that we and they should be partners together in trying to bring the disputants together. I think we must do that. I think this is the greatest obstacle standing between a better understanding with the Chinese people on the other side of the Iron Curtain and on our side. I think I shall carry with me the rest of my life that one scene at the airport when Senator Croll had to catch a plane. It was at night, we were at Kiev and he had to catch the plane for Leningrad. The plane didn't arrive on time and they stayed there with us and refused to leave until the plane came. It was one o'clock before the plane arrived. We stayed on the tarmac, each of us making speeches. I found a Ukrainian poet who had translated the poems of Bobby Burns. I shall always remember these several hundred Ukrainians who were deeply moved by this farewell. I quoted my favourite poet to them and it was translated by the Ukrainian poet. They were the words of Bobby Burns, the words of a Scottish plowman that are as appropriate today as they were when he wrote them.

The let us pray that come it may As come it will for all that That Sense and Worth o'er a' the earth Shall bear the gree and a' that For a' that and a' that It's coming yet for a' that That man to man the world o'er Shall brothers be for a' that.

Thanks to the meeting will be expressed by Mr. Allan F. Lawrence, Q.C.