C.P.R.'sYear

The "world's greatest travel system" was back on a dividend-paying basis last week. The disbursement was small -50-c- a share. But it was the first the Canadian Pacific Railway has paid since 1932, when stockholders were lucky to collect a paltry 31 1/4-c-out of dwindling profits.

C.P.R. is much more than a railway; it operates on land, sea and in the air. Last year was the best in its history. Wall Street and Toronto brokers estimate that 1943 net will be better than the $2.63 a share earned, but not paid to shareholders, in 1942. The 12,000-mile Canadian Pacific Air Line, which blankets most of the Dominion with vital north-south routes, but is barred from the lucrative transcontinental service by the Government-owned Trans-Canada Air Lines, carried 71,000 passengers and 11.5 million Ib. of mail and cargo. Earnings from C.P.-owned telegraph and express services, hotels, grain-and ore-carrying ships on the Great Lakes, and grain elevators scattered across the prairies, were high.

But scholarly, 64-year-old President D'Alton Corry Coleman, who joined C.P. as a clerk 44 years ago, is not being stampeded into generous sharing of these profits. He wisely has used net to pay off large chunks of funded debt, and has hoarded cash for postwar rehabilitation. New trains and tracks will be needed by the railway. The ocean fleet, now acknowledged to have lost the 42,348-ton world-cruise liner Empress of Britain in the North Atlantic and the plucky 21,517-ton Empress of Canada in the shark-infested waters off West Africa, must be rebuilt to restore prewar transatlantic and Pacific services. The airline, providing Ottawa does not choke it off entirely in favor of Canada's "chosen instrument" T.C.A., will need new planes and bases for routes extending from the U.S. border to the Arctic Circle. These improvements will cost millions, and will go far toward keeping Canadian industry busy when war orders are canceled.

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