Tiger by the Tail?

Ottawa's squatting veterans got rough. Led by fiery half-pint Franklyn Edward Hanratty, president of the Veterans' Housing League, 500 vets and spectators massed in Victoria Park last week, their furniture piled in 20 trucks. In the quiet of the supper hour, they tootled off in search of housing. They made a feint at the well-protected R.C.A.F barracks downtown, then headed for the Navy's wartime barracks -- H.M.C.S. Carleton -- on Ottawa's outskirts near Dow's Lake.

A patrol car of the Mounties blocked their way. The vets, 200 strong, jounced it aside, crashed through a high wooden barricade and bowled over patrol guards. They hurled aside a second car block, tangled with 30 Mounty reinforcements. The Mounties seized Hanratty, but let him go when the crowd closed in, and stood aside.

The mob surged on, piled furniture in through doors and windows, tossed out lumber from the ground floor, settled eleven families for the night. Outside, on the sign which read: "Naval recruiting daily 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. evening 7-9 p.m. Mon-Thurs" someone scrawled, "Hanratty was here."

Then the motorcade of vets went to the empty C.W.A.C. hutment at Lansdowne Park, settled another nine families. Thirty city police, standing by, did not interfere. When acting Mayor Dr. G. M. Geldert chided the vets for the invasion when housing units were being readied for them at Rockcliffe airport, they shouted him down: "Nuts to that stuff."

Retreat. But this time the squatters had blundered. Carleton barracks was not empty. It was being converted into classrooms for 700 reservists and housed an estimated half a million dollars worth of hush-hush asdic, radio and radar equipment. The worried Navy threatened to turn off the water and electricity. Hanratty admitted that Operation Carleton had been "rash," began moving the vets out of the Naval barracks to other squat houses: Kildare, Porter's Island, Argyle, Lansdowne.

Hanratty had other troubles. He was jailed by Mounties on charges of forcible entry and obstructing the police, then was released without bail. He was confident that no Ottawa jury would convict him for finding houses for vets. Cried he: "The Government will find it has a tiger by the tail." Nevertheless, the week's events had cooled him. Evicted from his own home last week, he settled with his wife and two-months-old son in a Lansdowne hut. But he called Mayor Stanley Lewis first, got an O.K. before he moved in.

In Vancouver, where 150 vets had moved into the old Vancouver Hotel last January, 13 squatter families were in their second week at Little Mountain Army barracks. They petitioned Ottawa "to quit quack-quack-quacking on housing . . . start building decent low-cost housing now."

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