Farmer's Wife

The reddest rag that can be waved in front of any liberal-to-leftist Canadian is a copy of the stringent Defense of Canada Regulations, drafted to protect the Dominion from subversive activities. Under the Regulations, left-wing papers have been suppressed, more than 1,500 "Communists" and smalltime Fascists have been placed in internment camps without formal trial. Regarded by the Government-as a necessary accessory to Canada's war effort, opponents see the Regulations as a dangerous breach of civil liberties.

Thus last week when a motion to review the Regulations reached the floor of Ottawa's House of Commons, galleryites pricked up their ears, prophesied a fight. They were not disappointed. In two of the hottest sessions in recent history they saw a no-holds-barred battle between Canada's first and only woman M.P., Mrs. Dorise Nielsen, and wily oldstager Ernest Lapointe, present Minister of Justice, whose job it is to administer the Regulations.

The Regulations, Mrs. Nielsen said, are dangerous and undemocratic, have been used against labor to lock up leaders that employers wanted out of the way, in her view lead straight down the road to Fascism.

When Lapointe in an answering speech said that she kept "very bad company," implied that she was a Communist fellow traveler, Mrs. Nielsen rose on a point of privilege, made a speech that threw the House into a howling dither.

Into the record she read a letter from a constituent telling how a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman had said that she would be framed and that the Mounties had been ordered to "keep their eyes and ears open" because she would soon be interned. "I would say," she went on, "that if this Canadian version of the Gestapo continues . . . the Government will have to answer to the Canadian people."

"Gestapo" was too much for the Government benches. The whole west of the Chamber raised the roof with outraged yowls of "Order! Order!" When order finally came Mrs. Nielsen finished neatly by taking words out of Lapointe's mouth. "I will do what I think is right whatever may be the consequences."

When she appeared last year in the pleasant suavity of Ottawa, Mrs. Nielsen was an unpleasant reminder that all is not well on the farms of Canada's great West. She looked exactly like what she was, the wife of a poor farmer, tired, badly dressed, with broken nails and an ill-fitting set of store teeth. As an M.P. she has spruced up considerably, but keeps her tart oratorical ability. Typical was her maiden speech: "I feel very much qualified to speak upon this question of relief because for three years I have lived upon relief. I had to feed a family of five--listen carefully--upon $11.25 a month." The family she referred to is made up of the Saskatchewan farmer she married and their three children. English by birth, Mrs. Nielsen was trained as an art teacher, taught in Saskatchewan schools before she was married.

Through their interest in farming cooperatives, the Nielsens joined the social-democratic Canadian Cooperative Commonwealth Federation Party. But though she had become a power in the C. C. C. F., Mrs. Nielsen split from them in 1939, formed her own Unity Party, a coalition against the powerful Liberals.

The constituency that elected her is a pauperized hodgepodge of Germans, Russians, Hungarians, Poles, French Canadians and Anglo-Saxons, almost all of whom, like the Nielsens, have been trying to scrape a living from drought-ridden farms. The platform she used, and which she now repeats in speeches all over the Dominion, is simple, nonpolitical, effective: "As long as people are living in poverty Canada is not a great nation. Actually the most subversive thing in Canada is poverty."

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