CANADIAN WEST

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 62, 15 March 1933, Page 16

CANADIAN WEST

TROUBLES OF • FAR-aiERS

IN MILITANT MOOD

THE MONEY SHORTAGE

(From "The Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER, February 1.

The Canadian Prairie is the driving force in Dominion affairs just now. Ever since the stock market crash at the end of 1D29, the West, led by a growing militancy ::mong the agrarian, community, has been hammering on the doors of tho Federal and Provincial Parliaments, demanding redress. Wheat is less than half the price it brought three years ago. Credit for current activities is more difficult to obtain as mortgages get farther in arrear. Declining revenues in tho municipal, provincial, and Federal spheres have forced taxation up, and reduced tho output on public works, whether of new construction of bridges and roads, or of maintenance and repair. The purchasing price of the dollar concerns farmers but little as dollars become more scarce. School services are retrenched. Federal and provincial departments have cut, nearly to vanishing point, services they formerly rendered in agriculture, dairying, and stock raising. The ininicdiate outlook is for more taxation, more retrenchment, fewer public services. DRASTIC STEBS.' The lack of money to meet the current needs of life has led the farmers to take three drastic steps that would have been classed Utopian in the brave days of 1928-29: — 1. Scrip money is' already in circulation in Alberta, where the united farmera have urged its general use on the Provincial Government. 2. TDe farmers' conventions of the three Prairie Provinces (and Ontario) allied themselves with tho Federal Labour Party, by affiliating with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. 3. Farmers have supported the action of the Calgary City Council in refusing to pay 300,000 dollars exchange on a loan of 2,500,000 dollars which matured in New York on January 1. Scrip money, pioneered in North America a year ago, in the State of Washington, and now used in 29 States, has been pronounced successful in Raymond, Alberta, after a six-months trial. Its sponsors say they are merely walking in the footsteps of the pioneers, who opened up tho Prairie with barter, the oldest-known marketing method. The Raymond delegate, whose report swung the United Farmers of Alberta into line, recalled the scrip used by Brigham Young, who led a colony of settlers across the line from Utah to new pastures in the foothills of the Rockies. A large sum, that would have gone to banks in interest, had, he said, been saved. Barter has been an increasing incentive to carrying on routine community services since money grew scarce. Surplus wheat, held against a rise in price, exercises many of the functions of currency. Tho plumber cures his toothache by plugging the leak in the dentist's bath. CENTRAL BANK IDEA. The Central Bank, which has proven such a boon to farmers in Australia, is the goal aimed at by the farmers of Western Canada in affiliating with the C.C.F., whose policy is merely a modern interpretation of the Socialist doctrine of nationalising the means of production, distribution, and exchange. By joining it, the farmers have "gone Labour" only to the extent of securing easier credit by means of banking reform. In its refusal to pay exchange on American loans, the Calgary City Council is taking a step that scores of Canadian cities would take if they thought there was a reasonable prospect of success. The loan was floated 111 1913, when exchange, at its present calamitous rate, was undreamed of. The legal aspect notwithstanding, the vast majority of Canadians are sympathising with Calgary's dilemma. It has brought to light some astonishing facts. Nearly half of the aggregate Canadian bonded indebtedness is redeemable in the United States. Canada's debt obligations to her neighbour involve payment of a million dollars a day. With these three issues in the van buttressed by the demand for unemployment insurance, th» West is the proving ground for today's major problems in Canada.