Salute to Canada
There is something profoundly impressive in the statistics quoted by Mr. Mackenzie King in the broadcast speech in which on Monday he outlined the plans whose fulfilment will make Canada the greatest aviation-training-centre in the world. Sixty-seven training-schools are to be established, requiring staffs of 40,000 men ; 6o new airfields to be built, and zo existing ones enlarged. The majority of the men trained will be Canadians, but recruits are to come also from Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, and some, with some instructors, from Great Britain. There is not neces- sarily any greatness in mere magnitude. The greatness here lies in the new demonstration of the meaning and effect of Empire partnership, a demonstration enhanced, so far as Canada is concerned, by the fact that even while the Prime Minister was speaking the first contingent of the Canadian forces for the Western Front, convoyed in safety across the Atlantic by British warships, and disembarked at British ports, was settling down in its training-camps. Geographically Canada may make some claim to be the centre, or at least the most convenient rendezvous, of the Empire, and after the conspicuous example recently provided by the Quebec elec- tion of the single-minded patriotism that animates her bilingual population she commands in the Commonwealth a moral and material influence to which none of her fellow- members will grudge the fullest recognition.
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