Mr. W.B. George, Past-President of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, came to see me this afternoon. I was anxious to talk with him about the forthcoming Olympic ice hockey matches at which Canada will, of course, be represented by the Kitchener-Waterloo team.

I told him that I hoped the Government would be able to keep out of international sport, and that it was far from our intention in this Department to do anything to lessen that hope. However, and unfortunately, certain international sporting competitions have become as political as they were sporting, and questions of prestige were often more important than the game itself. This presented a problem for Canada as well as for other countries, especially in the field of ice hockey where we were supposed to be supreme. That problem, as the World Hockey Championships in Germany last year showed, has been accentuated by the participation of communist teams. Therefore, Government intervention was sometimes inevitable when difficulties occurred, as we learned particularly from our experience in Stockholm two years ago. Also, especially as our team would be travelling behind the iron curtain, our missions abroad could be of some assistance to them. It was assistance and not interference that was in our minds. If, however, we were going to be of any help, we would have to know the itinerary of the team and their plans. Mr. George said that he had previously asked that information on this score should be sent to us, but I told him we had not received it.

It appears that the team is leaving by plane on Saturday and will be in Prague next Wednesday. I told him that if we were to be of any help - and help and advice might certainly be required in Prague - we would have to get the necessary information at once. He said he would try to secure this.

Mr. George seemed to agree entirely with my view that international sport has now become too closely connected with international politics. He also agreed that it was of first importance that any Canadian hockey team abroad should be a credit to Canada, both off and on the ice, and he had high hopes for the present Canadian Olympic team in this regard. He himself wondered whether it was worth while sending Canadian hockey teams abroad, where conditions are so different than they are at home and where difficulties and misunderstandings occurred. These, he said, were not due so much to the players as to the press representatives who accompany them and to the hangers-on. He instanced their experiences in Germany last winter to support this contention, where the search seemed to be not so much for news as for headlines, especially those which indicated conflict not only between teams, but between nations.

The World Hockey Championships next year will be in Moscow, and I gave Mr. George my own opinion that it would be difficult to avoid participation now that Canada had taken the championship from Russia in Germany. I hoped that the Canadian team next year would be of outstanding ability, would win the championship convincingly, would show the Russians what we could do, both on and off the ice, and then that serious consideration would be given to the desirability of withdrawing from such competitions in the future.

L.B. PEARSON