Wairarapa Daily Times (Established Over 60 Years.) TUESDAY, 6th OCTOBER, 1936. ALBERTA FINANCE.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 6 October 1936, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times (Established Over 60 Years.) TUESDAY, 6th OCTOBER, 1936. ALBERTA FINANCE.

The western province of Alberta, where the Social Credit Ministry of Premier William Aberhart is about to conclude its first year of office, continues at intervals to occupy the national spotlight, and developments in its monetary and financial policies are followed with anxious interest by the banking fraternity and the politicians at Ottawa and in other provinces. The Aberhart Ministry, having rejected the Loan Council scheme, which the Federal Government insisted must be accepted as a condition precedent to any further financial succour, is now paying only 2| per cent interest on the outstanding bonds of the province, which have a face value of 160 million dollars, and Ottawa has resisted the pressure of the bandholders to interfere with this action. The latter have organised a protective committee, which has advised them not to accept the reduced payments, and a substantial proportion of them are following this counsel. Mr Aberhart has still six months’ leeway for the fulfilment of his pledge to have in operation a system of social credit within 18 months of assuming office, and he continues to assert that he will live up to it. Meanwhile he has launched an experiment in the creation of public credit by the agency of the printing press, which has been tried in some places in the United States and in Canada before. An issue of what he describes as “Alberta

Prosperity Certificates” to the tune” of 250,000 dollars lias been made, and this scrip, which is in denomination of one dollar, is to be used in payment for labour and material on a number of public works like highways, on which the unemployed are to be set to work. The holders of this scrip must every week affix to it a one cent stamp which they.will buy from the Government, and the proceeds of the sale of these stamps will be kept in a special trust fund for the redemption of the certificate at the end of two years. By that time they should carry on their face -.04 dollars’ worth of stamps, and the Government, after it redeems them will, according to plan, have 4 per cent over for the expenses of administration, which will be handled through special clearing houses. Mr Aberhart argues that this “prosperity scrip” is a legitimate method of using the province’s own credit to stimulate prosperity, and he has blithely predicted that the 250,000 dollars’ worth of scrip will be the basis for about two million dollars’ worth of new business.