The Dominion MONDAY, JUNE 15, 1931. CANADA UNDER DEPRESSION

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 221, 15 June 1931, Page 8

The Dominion MONDAY, JUNE 15, 1931. CANADA UNDER DEPRESSION

In a cable message published on Saturday it was stated that Canadian farmers in Southern Saskatchewan were abandoning their farms, and their debts, and trekking north with their stock from a drought-ridden region in which no crops have been raised since 19Zo. Recent reports from the Canadian Dominion show that the depression is much more acute than is generally realised, and is not confined to the drought-stricken areas. Until March last the Canadian depression had been almost wholly an agricultural question. The banking institutions and other investment corporations held the opinion that this latest economic was merely temporary, like others previously experienced. Yhc Royal Bank of Canada, for example, in a published review of the situation, considered that against a background of world-wide depression conditions in the Dominion seemed, “relatively favourable. It would be interesting to hear from this and other institutions their estimate of the situation as it stands to-day, for the agricultural depression instead of improving, has steadily become worse. Present.y there will be another harvest of farm products to swell the huge accumulation of stocks which remain to be sold into consumption. Produce prices have slumped woefully. One farmer sent 60 bushels of barley to the elevator. When his man returned with a cheque for 60 cents he sent it back and told the man to bring back the barley. This he did, bringing back also an account for 60 cents, storage rates at 2 cents per bushel for barley worth only 1 cent. In some districts the price of butter has fallen from 30 cents to 10 cents a pound, and eggs from 50 cents to 15 cents a dozen. The story is told of a collector of an agricultural machinery company who called for an over-due instalment, but all he received was the information that there was no money in the house, and an invitation to dinner, the sole item of which was a pot of soup made from Russian thistles, a common weed. There was not even flour in the house. When he left he presented the farmer with five dollars and told him to buy groceries with it. In some localities farmers are grinding their own wheat for porridge meal, and families have taken to trapping gophers (a large burrowing field rat), and roasting them for food.

In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that the Canadian agricultural producers have turned to protective tariffs on food imports as one possible method of easing their situation, and pressed the Government hard in this direction. The latter has to deal not only with a very trying economic situation, but also with a secessionist movement founded upon the rivalry and jealousy between the industrial Provinces in the East and the agricultural regions in the West. Secession is an old bogey, but when times are good is let lie like a sleeping dog. Depression revives old grievances and fqns the discontent of the secessionists.

Northern Saskatchewan, the objective of the reported trek from the south, recently organised a convention and presented the Canadian Government with an ultimatum that, failing compliance with certain demands, the signatories would at once proceed to the political conquest of the province with the object o~f forming a Co-operative Commonwealth within the British Empire, trading directly with Great Britain on a basis of free trade. The demands included the fixing of a temporary basic price for wheat to cover the average cost of production, the abolition of all grain exchanges and speculation in grain, the formation of a compulsory 100 per cent, pool, the socialisation of currency, credit and national resources, crop insurance guarantees, and a board of standards to determine the relationship between the price of commodities bought and that received for produce sold. There is a savour of the Socialist agitator about all this, but responsible opinion in Canada declares that it would be wise to take this so-called “Charter of Liberty” seriously. With this picture before us it is not so difficult to comprehend the problems of the Government in dealing with inter-Dominion trading relationships.