The Hawera Star. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1925. CANADA’S PROBLEMS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 10 September 1925, Page 4

The Hawera Star.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1925. CANADA’S PROBLEMS.

Delivered e<ery evening by 5 o'clock ti Hawera, Manaia, Normanby, Okaiawa, Eltliam, Mangatoki, Kaponga, Alton, Hurleyvilie, Patea, Waverley. Mokoia, Wbakamara, Ohaogai. Mereniere, Eraser Road, an Ararat*.

Because ho can see no solution to the problems of taxation and finding means of materially reducing the public debt, tht?s Prime Minister of Canada is dissolving Parliament. We may take it that Air Mackenzie King, since he is seeking from the country a renewed confidence, has painted the blackest possible jiieture of the circumstances attending the Government’s present slender majority, and that the outlook for our sister Dominion is not quite so dreary as the Prime Minister’s words suggest. But Canada’s position is not one to be envied, for all that. Her overwhelming problem is economic, and its power is well stated in the current number of the Round Table: “The struggle to build a Canadian nation is not only a struggle with Nature in a land of vast spaces and harsh climate; it is a struggle to keep up with the wealthiest nation in the world, and at the same time to keep distinct from it.” That was the issue emphasised, too, by Canadian delegates with the Empire Press party which passed through New Zealand recently. Wages and salaries are lower in Canada than in the United States, yet the cost of- living is no less and taxation is higher. As the Englishman views things—basing his calculations on present conditions at Home —Canada, is prosperous; however, the Canadian does not measure his position by the British standard, but by the American. To quote again from the Round Table: “Each of the Dominions has its own type of national life'; its unique problems, its peculiar civilisation; in Canada alone does the added complexity occur of a thousand ties of intimacy with a. great foreign Power. . . . Canada is the only important part of the British Empire to have an. open land frontier across which a heavy international traffic; is conducted without intermission. . . Canada, geographically a ribbon-like strip 3000 miles long with an average effective width of not more than 200

utiles, of necessity has its economic life, and in many ■ respects its social life as well, related to and conditioned by the 114,000,000 people of the United States.” For every six dollars worth of Canadian exports to the United Kingdom last financial year, seven dollars worth went over the. border to IRS.A., while Canadian, imports from the neighbouring nation were four times those from Great Britain. This intimacy of economic intercourse inevitably has profound results. The United States sets the standard of living for Canada, and there is a constant drift of the best brains and the most skilful hands to the better labour markets over the border. Add to this that the natural Alantie winter port for Canada —Portland, Maine —is on American' soil, and the handicap under which the Dominion suffers may be appreciated. Canadian social life, already largely influenced by American magazines, is now further menaced by radio. It is estimated that a hundred thousand Canadians are listening-in nightly to the big broadcasting stations of the States. The best concert programmes on the American continent are broadcast from New York and Chicago, and, as a Canadian pressman put it in Taranaki the other week, “They usually end up with some johnny making a speech about the Statue of Liberty and the ‘grand old flag.’ ” Always in times of dullness and reaction there has been a tendency in Canada, to look to the south, and to wonder whether the maintenance of a separate national life will not prove too great a risk. But that mood has passed before, and will pass again. The fact is that maintenance of his status within the British Empire costs every individual Canadian a tangible sum, yet Canadians pay willingly. That of itself puts their patriotism on a somewhat higher plane than that of those in other Dominions who wave the Union Jack, pass loyal resolutions and toast the King, 'but invariably think first of their pocket when they go shopping. The appeal of economic profit has never been the final argument with Canadians. All honour to them for that!