Legislative Assembly been published time and time again. "A fiasco in Prince Edward Island ," and, "How to blow ten million in a few easy steps" is the entitlement. "I'm horribly aware that almost anything I write about the great and painful farce that recently has been going on in Prince Edward Island is going to infuriate a lot of Islanders for I am from away, as they say over there, in a land where even a man from Moncton may be called a foreigner. Very little good can be expected from a Toronto jour¬ nalist. Moreover, I am neither a Tory nor a Grit, neither a church-going Protestant nor a Catholic and. on the Island, if you do not know what a man is. you can at least be sure he is not entirely trustworthy. Occasionally, however, the Islanders get fooled. They only think they know who a man is and, in the most recent case of this kind, their mistake turned out to be so stupendous that virtually everyone on the Island will pay for it for years to come. The man they thought they knew was Jens Moe , a Norwegian-born promoter from Montreal. Part of the story of Mr. Moe 's disasterous affair with Prince Edward Island became clear in January and February at the hearings of a Royal Commission in Charlottetown . The Commission produced enough testimony to provide case histories for a text book on how not to employ the taxpayer's money to encourage private industry. Mr. Moe , who had owned a small shipyard in Bathurst, New Brunswick , came to P.E.I , some time in the middle of 1963. He proposed to the Conservative Government that they help him set up a marine yard, a fleet of fishing trawlers, and the biggest food processing plant on the Island which the Island had ever seen. The yard would be called Bathurst Marine. The processing plant would be Foods and both would be built at the extreme eastern end of the Island in the little port of Georgetown . Moe was in his mid-thirties, a strapping, good looking chap, a family man. an extrovert, enthus¬ iast. He came, originally, from a respected Lutheran family and, once, after he became better known on the Island, he demonstrated to several locals that he was masterful as playing a church organ." To digress for a moment, I can readily see him going from the church organ to the hand organ and grinding away and a chain running from his waist and a group of monkeys dancing on the end of the chain and they were seeking the money that was in the pot that was all the tax payers. "In fairness to the Tories, he struck virtually everyone who met him for the first time as utterly charming and utterly convincing. An elderly resident of Charlotte- town told me, 'Why, he just told those fellers how much money the Georgetown thing was going to make, and their ears grew as big as elephants.' Those 'fellers' were Walter Shaw 's Cabinet. Shaw is an old-style, glad-handing, up-the-island type of politician. He regarded the Oeorgetown development as the white plume among his various efforts to establish the secondary industries that many Islanders feel the Province needs desperately." Now, this goes on along the same line until he comes down to, "Even the Royal Commission is not very likely to figure out exactly where all this money went. The story involves incredibly carefree business practices by Mr. Moe : strange laxities on the part of Tory Cabinet Ministers; direct pressure, by former Fisheries Minister, Leo Rossiter , to influence senior civil servants to loan Government money against their strongest objections; the financial suffering of doz¬ ens of small Island businessmen; trips by Moe to Norway , Germany and Switzerland; his liberal use of Cyrus Eaton 's name; payments by one Moe company to another Moe company for such mysterious duties as "service to the economy"; the sudden transferral of specified Government funds from one Moe company to another; and the existence of Moe enterprises that, at times, Government officials did not even know how they had been formed. Whatever the final judgment of the Commission, most Islanders seem pretty well agreed that, as Campbell said, and I suppose that refers to our Premier and I don't think he'd take any objection to his name being mentioned here, "that, as Campbell said about some of the ten million, 'We know where it is, and it isn't on the Island'. Shaw, and his fellow ex-cabinet ministers, refused to attend the Commission. He was spending the winter in a corner suite on the second floor of the elderly Charlottetown Hotel. 'That commission', he growled, 'it isn't going to do anyone any good. You can appoint a Royal Commission to in¬ vestigate anything. You could appoint one to investigate a church and what would they find? They would find the janitor stole a few light bulbs and an elder got drunk one night, and maybe the minister said the wrong thing, or something.' "And Moe ? Well, the Georgetown fiasco led to his being petitioned into bank¬ ruptcy in Montreal last fall but the fish business is still in his blood. Thus, while the Charlottetown hearings were under way, he was involved in something called Shrimps, Limited, which has an office on the waterfront in St. John, New —260—