The donors

Wasagaming (CP) -- A record 120 delegates registered here Wednesday for the annual meeting of the National Council of Women of Canada, opening today.

    The council, a non-sectarian, non-political organization formed in 1983 by the Countess of Aberdeen, is one of many throughout the world designed for women interested in public affairs.
    Highlight of the 1959 meeting will be a Friday address by President Fraudena Eaton of Dollarton, B.C. She met in Vienna Saturday with council representatives from 27 nations. At an International meeting here, she will report on the Vienna meeting.

    Delegates from 56 local councils are expected to participate on discussions ranging from abolition of capital punishment to safeguards radioactive waste. Reports are scheduled on trades and professions, arts and letters, vocational training, housing design, public safety and economics.

    The six-day meeting ends Tuesday, June 16.
    The year’s meeting is the first in several years to be help in a summer resort. Wasagaming, 66 miles north of Brandon, is located on the shores of Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park.

Halifax, June 12 (CP) -- The National Council of Women moved Tuesday to get more women appointed to the Board of Broadcast Governors.
    The council passed a resolution at its annual meeting here asking that at least four women sit on the 15-member board. It now has one.

    It based the resolution on these grounds:

1. “A very large segment of the listening and viewing audience” of Canada radio and television is women.

2. The listening and viewing of children “is controlled generally by their mothers.”

3. The board is the regulatory body for Canadian radio and television.

    The council asked the government to “refrain” from re-appointing male members to the board after current terms of office expire “until such time as at least four women have been so appointed.”
    It asked that at least one woman be French-speaking and one be from a rural area. It also requested that one woman be appointed to the board on a permanent basis.
    The resolution drew lengthy discussion, but it centred on procedural points. It was among 11 resolutions passed Tuesday.

    To encourage the establishment and growth of small businesses, the NCW will urge the repeal of income tax act sections which make it impossible for a wife employed by her husband to file a separate tax return.
    At present, the income of a wife working as bookkeeper, stenographer, clerk or telephone attendant for her husband, is added to the husband’s taxable income bracket.

    The Federal Government will be urged to remove the 11 per cent sales tax on margarine which the NCW regards as “unjust to Canadian consumers.”
    The council also believes this tax works against the diversification of agriculture and no longer serves the purpose for which it was instituted.
    The NCW will urge provincial and local councils to encourage bilingualism of every Canadian by supporting student exchanges, use of language laboratories, linguistic specialists and other means to facilitate language instruction.

Nearly all the Delegates Have Arrived and Public Sessions open Tomorrow Afternoon. -- Programme of the Different Meetings.

    The sessions of the annual meeting here of the National Council, which are to be held in the Assembly Hall of the N. S. Technical College, open tomorrow afternoon, but the delegates are now nearly all in the City and today are hard at Committee work at the college building, the different committees being scheduled as follows:

    10 to 11 o’clock--Agriculture for women, Vacation schools and playgrounds, Peace and arbitration.
    11 to 12--Public health, Laws for better protection of women and children.
    12 to 1--Education, Custodial case of feeble-minded women.
    2 to 3--Citizenship, Spread of objectionable printed matter.
    3 to 4-- Press, Immigration
    4 to 5-- Care of Aged and Infirm poor, Suppression of White Slave traffic.

    This evening the delegates will be guests of Mrs. Fraser, wife of the Lieutenant Governor, at a reception and musicale at Government House. Tomorrow morning the Executive Committee meets, and at 2:30 the first session of the Council meeting is as below, and all members of the Council, of the affiliated societies, of any local Council or National Society can take part in the discussions, but only delegates may (Continued on Page Three.)

Social and Industrial Reform Is Planned By Women.

    Mrs. H. A. Boomer, president of the London Local Council of Women, has received from the National Council a report and draft of a possible women’s platform, which she is anxious to commend to the earnest consideration of members of the local council and, indeed, to all women who are eager to exercise their franchise for the benefit and welfare of the community in which they live and of the country at large.

    The report addresses the women of Canada in these urgent terms:
    “You are now citizens. You have the privilege and opportunity of expressing yourselves indirectly by your vote; you have a duty and an obligation to so express yourselves. If the women of Canada should merely fall into line behind certain political parties their partisan vote would not help the country. While is it not desirable to form a women’s party it is obvious that there are certain principles which should demand the support of the women of both parties.”

COMMITTEE NAMED.

    A committee, therefore, has been appointed, with representatives from each province, to draft what may be termed a Canadian Women’s platform, which shall have at its basis truth, justice, righteousness and loyalty. The preliminary plan lays down some excellent political, social and industrial standards, and an effort has been made to sum up the most urgent and fundamental reforms in the hope of bringing some at least of these to a happy fruition. The committee urges women to put their united efforts behind the man or woman in the House or in the Legislature who carries their banner of reform, irrespective of politics, and states that by justice [sic; just as] much as they did or did not do this would they be a lever to raise the standards of Canadian life and living.

    The proposed platform includes such measures as political equality for men and women; the practise of thrift in the administration of public and private affairs; the addition of a child welfare section in the Federal department of public health; uniform Dominion marriage laws; equal pay for work of equal value in quantity and quality; segregation of the feeble-minded; mother’s pensions; physical training for all boys and girls in the schools; medical inspection of the schools with dental clinics where possible; adequate salaries for school teachers, and industrial standards that bring in an eight-hour day and a minimum wage.

    As a whole, the platform suggested covers every branch of public interest, and includes all the reforms and social improvements that idealistic citizens have long had in mind, with the difference that these reforms and improvements are now being introduced on a sound businesslike basis, backed by the will and service of the leading women of the Dominion.