MOOR Moore direct gas fired kiln with portable aluminum building at David Martens Mill at Vanderhoof B C LUMBER HANDLING EQUIPMENT Try Sorters Belt Sorters Hoists Unstackers Kiln Trucks OFFICE AND WAREHOUSE Unit No 9 1969 First Ave Prince George BC affairs Crown lands hospitals and welfare all matters that were then considered secon dary and purelj local The four original provinces financed between one half and two thirds of their bud gets with federal grants The balance of their revenues came mostly In licence fees from lumber barons mines and saloons The provinces taxing powers were restricted to direct taxes on sales and real estate which were highly unpopular and rarely used The Fathers of Confederation hoped direct taxes would be levied only as a last resort This d 1 v i s 1 o n of taxing powers proved wholly inade inadequate ¬ quate when education health and welfare became major fields of provincial activity and federal aid to the prov provinces ¬ inces was increased repeat repeatedly ¬ edly In a succession of agree agreements ¬ ments The federal government dominated the scene In the first two or three decades after Confederation with its big railway projects and Its crucial trade discussions with Britain and the United States IN CANADAS HISTORY 6ilS FIRED WASTE FIRED PORTABLE ALUMINUM But the pendulum of power soon swung back toward the provinces The economic de presslon that followed the erection of tariff walls be tween Canada and the U S led to widespread discontent aggressive antl Ottawa drives by various provinces and nu merous court battles over lurisdiction In the first 20 jears after Confederation Ottawa used Its power of disallowance nearly 100 times to throw out provincial laws it considered contrary to national policy or unfair to property owners This power became highly unpopular and was used rarely after 1888 The last disallowance was in 1943 when an Alberta financial measure was thrown out SUSPICIOUS In the 1880s and 1890s the battlefield for constitutional disputes gradually shifted to the Supreme Court of Canada and the judicial committee of the British Privy Council which remained the court of final resort for Canadians un til 1949 Thursday June 29 1967 The law lords of the Privy Council viewed the fed federal ¬ eral government with suspi suspicion ¬ cion and generally ruled In favor of the provinces In the Hodge tavern keeper case of 1883 the lords established the principle that provincial legls latures are supreme within their fields of Jurisdiction enumerated In section 92 of the BNA Act In the decades that fol followed ¬ lowed the property and civil rights clause of section 92 was stretched greatly by the lords who were accused of rewriting the constitution bj many Canadian historians and political science professors In a typical assessment Professor J R Mallory of McGill University wrote in 1954 This judicial Interpreting away of the federal power continued steadily and reached its peak in a sharp curtailment of Dominion legis legislation ¬ lation which had attempted to deal with the complex econo mlc and social problems created by the First World War and by the Depression of the 1930s At the end of the first 70 TEAM OR HOT WATER HEATED Y KILN BUILDIN FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT J St W Tft BfiKaLil jit Suit iHF OverallvSew from Moore Setxer Sorter Tower through Stacking Equipment showing heavy unit construction Note support steel extended for roof trusses Chargers Lathes Feeders -Dryers-Moisture Detectors THE CITIZEN 37A BNA Act Had To Grow With The Times System of Government is Hardly Recognizable After 100 Years OTTAWA CP - If the Fathers of Confederation could join the present centen nial celebrations the would hardly recognize the si stem of government they estab established ¬ lished 100 ears ago The product of their state craft the British North Amer ica Act remains essentially intact today but the whole political context has changed When the DNA Act is read in Isolation It describes Can ada as a backward colony ruled by a British autocrat called the Governor General Parliament has the power to legislate on all national issues and the provinces amount to glorified municipalities This picture of Canadian government distorted reality from the start and It grad ually evolved into a mere caricature In short the core of the constitution Is 100 years old and looks its age If the BNA Act did not stunt the countrys develop ment It was only because It grew with the times Layer upon layer of constitutional provisions was added by leg legislators ¬ islators unwritten customs Judicial Interpretations and federal provincial arrange ments Now a new band of Fathers of Confederation searches for a new or revised basic docu ment SEEKS MEETING The federal government hopes to announce its const tutional proposals by the end of Centennial Year after a year long study by a commit tee of senior officials On tarlo plans to call a federal provincial or interprovincial conference on Confederation later this year A committee of the Quebec legislature pushes ahead with a detailed inquiry Into pro posals for a new constitution Opposition parties In Parlla ment clamor for a similar federal inquiry but the Pear Pearson ¬ son government says there is no rush The royal commission on bilinguallsm and bicultural Ism is expected to recom mend several constitutional amendments next fall to ac cord equal status to English and French speaking Cana dlans All this activity likely will culminate in a federal provincial conference next j ear on constitutional amend ment One of the major embar rassments plaguing centennial functions springs from the absence of an agreed formula to amend the BNA Act Due to historic disagree ments between Canadian poll ticians Canada has the quaint distinction of being the only independent country in the world that has to submit its major constitutional amend ments to the parliament of another country Since 18G7 the British Par Parliament ¬ liament has passed 16 formal amendments to the BNA Act at the Canadian governments request The last came in 1964 when the federal govern ment was authorized to in elude disability and survivor benefits in the Canada Pen sion Plan Nearly every time this cum cumbersome ¬ bersome machinery was used some provinces criticized Ot tawa for acting alone or without proper consultations and British MPs and lords grumbled that they were tired of wasting their time on Canadian legislation Many more modifications of the constitution were carried out by other means acts of the Canadian Parliament and of the provincial legislatures cabinet orders decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada and the Privy Council in Lon don and international treaties Most constitutional authori authorities ¬ ties agree that the crucial division of powers set out in the -BNA Act of 1867 was weighed heavily in Ottawas favor OTTAWA HAS VETO The central government got the powers to veto provincial laws to levy customs and excise duties which ac accounted ¬ counted for more than 80 per cent of government revenues In that period to appoint the lieutenant governors and most Judges and to occupy the main spheres of government activity in the Victorian lals sez falre era defence trans port and communications banking trade and com merce currency and criminal law The provinces were as signed education municipal years after Confederation the courts had accomplished a major shift in the balance of power between the Dominion and the provinces AIRWAVES ARE FEDERAL The pendulum swung back toward centralization in the late 1930s and 1940s however under the deep social strains resulting from the Depression the decline of the lalssez falie phllosoph of govern government ¬ ment and the Second World War and post war leconstruc tion In 1932 the Privj Council ruled that the federal govern ment had exclusive jurisdic jurisdiction ¬ tion over aviation and broad casting paving the wa for the creation of the CBC and Trans Canada Air Lines a few j ears later In the late 1930s and early 1940s about 20 Alberta bills seeking to Implement Social Credit monetary theories to cancel debts and to compel newspapers to print govern ment statements verbatim were either disallowed by the federal cabinet or thrown out by the courts on the grounds they went beyond provincial powers MOORE DRY KILN CO OF CANADA LTD OFFICE AND MANUFACTURING PLANT 190 No 6 Road Richmond BC