Dear Editor,
It’s budget season again. To achieve his goal of a “balanced budget”, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had to steal billions from the Employment Insurance reserves and sell Canada’s shares in General Motors (from its bailout a few years ago). Otherwise it’s the usual austerity budget.
We’re told that “Corporate profit margins are at a 27-year high and likely to stay there.” At the same time, Canada is experiencing slow growth projections, record high personal debt, stagnating wages, a multi-billion dollar infrastructure deficit, and a prime minister who says we’re doing great, so vote for him.
We’re told debt is the reason for austerity. What is the reason for debt?
In response to that question, there is a legal case by the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform (www.comer.org) approaching the Supreme Court of Canada. It would have the Bank of Canada return to its 1938 mandated role of loaning money directly to the governments of Canada, the Provinces and the Municipalities at near zero interest.
This legal policy for the Bank of Canada came in during the time William Lyon Mackenzie was Prime Minister of Canada. He said “Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation.”
Essentially, Canada can borrow money directly from its own bank rather than from foreign and/or domestic private banks which charge compound interest. By 2012, Canada had paid $1 trillion in interest to private banks. Before 1974, when the Trudeau Liberals brought in the new policy (upheld by every government since then) of borrowing from private banks, Canada had a very minimal debt, one that did not control government policies.
Between 1938 and 1974, the Bank of Canada loaned money to Canadian governments to fund the emergence out of the Depression, the costs of World War 2, programs to benefit veterans of that War, the St.Lawrence Seaway, building an industrial infrastructure, universities, hospitals, the Old Age Security Act, and more. The small amounts of interest that were building up went directly into the government’s accounts as revenue.
Milton Friedman, a radical free-market ideologist, and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) convinced many world governments to start borrowing from private banks in 1974. We’re left wondering why a country would choose to impoverish itself in the interests of international finance capital? Democracy took a dive as the International Monetary Fund could now, and does now, dictate government policies.
The lawyer for the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER), Rocco Galati, says that when the legal case comes before the Supreme Court, the Bank of Canada “will have to actually justify why they haven’t been giving interest-free loans to the government(s). They have to justify why the Minutes of these (BIS) Meetings in Zurich are kept secret. They have to justify why the Minister of Revenue is not tabling the figures of revenue coming in. They have to justify this in law.”
Mr Galati argues that not only may the Bank of Canada lend interest-free to the government(s), it is obliged to.”
Mr. Harper says this case is “frivolous”. Tossing away $1 trillion in interest to private banks that could have gone for the benefit of the people of Canada is not frivolous, in my opinion.
Mr. Harper could have filed with the Supreme Court to stop this case from proceeding by the end of March. He chose not to. I thank the people of COMER who are funding this case and who are bringing this vital information forward for Canadians to see and learn what is happening to our democracy and how it has come about.
Springing slowly forward
Robbie Anderman
Killaloe ON
