Delphi complete works of.., p.677
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 677
But in Canada, unless we readjust, the whole thing is a misfit. In the East there are ever so many people interested directly or indirectly in maintaining protective duties, huge industries such as the automobile and implement industries: whole towns that are tariff towns like Oshawa and Windsor: farming areas around them interested in the “home market” of their own centre more than in selling to the foreigner. And most of all the great cities are the home of what the Bolsheviks call the “parasitic classes”, — i.e., the professors, the clergy, the actors and the lawyers. All these people need for their jobs the big crowded city, and as the tariff fosters the big city, they are all for the tariff. Not for them the big open spaces. No minister wants to be alone under God’s sky: the professor needs his class, the lawyer his criminals and the actor his gallery.
* * * * *
Take it in the most selfish way you like, with no appeal to general patriotism, most of the East favours the tariff, take it the same way and all the West is against it.
I do not think that the situation can be remedied by violent changes of policy, now this way now that, in response to a changing popular vote. I think that we have got to start, not with theory but at the other end. We have got to indicate a goal of fixed policy to be achieved and then find how to achieve it: this is the new method of administration, — find something impossible to do and then do it.
The object to gain is that the Western farmer in Canada need pay no more (minor fluctuations disregarded) than the United States farmer across the line for his motor car (on the prairie not a luxury but a necessity), for his agricultural implements and for such primary needs as shirts and boots and shoes. Till that is achieved there can never be political peace in Canada. Do it with free trade and you kill the cities of the East. But it can be done otherwise, by general subsidizing of the industry to equalize home and foreign costs. We have in Canada sometimes made steps in the direction of this system of bounties (the iron bounty of fifty years ago), etc., but we never went far. At first sight it seems to make all the people pay money on behalf of some of the people: the people with no cars pay for the cars of other people. But the objection loses weight when the commodities concerned are as universal as motor cars, or implements used to raise bread and meat. The principle of “distributing the burden” is one of the newest and best of our economic doctrines; we apply it wholesale to debt, to poor relief, to medicine: there is no reason why it should not apply to production.
To what extent this applies to boots and shoes and clothes and prime necessities, I do not pretend to say: there perhaps, a large extension of the nux vomica list might be effected. Taxing a man’s shirt and pants is a dangerous process; tax his hat and his gloves and his necktie if you will, — but his shirt and pants, — risky.
In any case there are signs that the problem will soon solve itself. Prices on the two sides of the frontier will tend to be equalized by the rise in the manufacturing costs under the labour protection of the New Deal in the United States. This reorganization of industry is admirable in its general outline. It is at present hopelessly entangled in the confusion created by the appeal to the Supreme Court, a senile survival of legislative method, admirable for George Washington, fatal now when a nation must have economic unity or crash. We too shall adopt it later: but in our country, newer industrially and with less of a submerged labour class, the effect on costs will be far less and will be more than offset by the increasing scale of manufacture.
* * * * *
But let it pass at that. There are lots of other grievances as well. I turn to the vast burden of debt, — provincial, municipal and private, under which the West has been in the last year or two literally crushed. It is my reasoned opinion that the debt as it stands cannot be carried, that a lot of it is unjust in its origin, some of it usurious to the verge of criminality and the whole burden of it intolerable. If it couldn’t be brought down in any other way, it should be brought down with an axe like Jack in the Beanstalk’s beanstalk. But I think it can be brought down, to within tolerable limits, by means that are not extraordinary or revolutionary but reasonable and, if the word is not offensive, conservative. Here are the large broad facts about debt in the West.
The situation just before the repudiation and readjustment begun in 1935 was like this. The bonded public debt of Manitoba just after the War (1919) stood at $36,000,000; in the year 1934 it had reached $90,000,000. In Saskatchewan the provincial debt during the same period moved from $29,000,000 to $112,000,000, and that of Alberta from $34,000,000 to $129,000,000. Meantime the municipal debts of the provinces rose on a similar, if smaller, scale, — those of the Manitoba municipalities from $55,000,000 (in 1933) to $96,000,000; for Saskatchewan the rise was from $39,000,000 to $57,000,000; and for Alberta from $57,000,000 in 1920 to $78,000,000 in 1931 with a reduction after that till 1933.
The comment of the Canadian Year Book of 1936 on the situation thus created, runs: “As a result of accumulated borrowings to meet conditions peculiar to the depression, the relentless advance of interest charges against realizable taxation has brought about a situation in many municipalities where expenditures are out of all proportion to receipts.”
* * * * *
It must be remembered, however, that this aspect of Western debt, — the growth of provincial and municipal borrowing and the increasing pressure on ratepayers, has been parallel in all the other provinces of Canada. But there is a great difference. In the East a lot of the money has been borrowed from ourselves, in the West very little: we in the East are debtors and creditors both: in the West nearly all are debtors and hardly any creditors. In other words, — in the East we are debtors and creditors all in a heap with some lucky enough to sit up on top along with the American and British capitalist. In the West they are all in the heap and the Easterners sit on top of them along with the outsiders.
This is common knowledge. It would be hard to prove it with figures. The government of Canada officially estimated that over 62 per cent. of the debts and investments in Canada is held in Canada. This is mostly Eastern money.
But more important, more vital to the individual life and fortunes, is the piling up of private debts, and in especial of farm mortgages that reached a point where repayment of principal and interest was impossible. Accurate statistics here are difficult to obtain. Even the census of 1931, much of which must represent pre-depression information, shows a black enough picture. In Manitoba 39 per cent. of the owners of farms who reported had mortgages. The mortgages averaged $10.00 per acre and the land was worth only $21.00. Saskatchewan and Alberta had 46 and 39 per cent. of owners with mortgages, but the debt less heavy per acre, — 8 dollars out of 21, and 9 dollars out of 24.
But the rapid spread of debt, like a black cloud covering all the sky, is seen in such later documents as the questionaire answered in 1932 by 408 Saskatchewan farms that showed debts of principal and unpaid interest of $7,588 per farm or $16.88 for each acre of field crop.
A member of parliament told the House of Commons at Ottawa in 1932 that 81 per cent. of the Western farms were mortgaged and had a debt of over $4,000 per farm. The weight of the depression debt pressed in all directions. Manitoba, (as reported by the Social Service Council of Canada), lost between 1928 and 1930, no less than 36 per cent. of its rural telephone subscribers, Saskatchewan more than 40 per cent. and Alberta over one-half. School districts, villages and rural municipalities went broke. In 1932 they owed the banks over $8,000,000: the arrears of taxes impossible to collect was over $3,000,000.
This was the “glorious West” thrown open in the Jubilee year of 1897 as the “Granary of the Empire: Free Homes for Millions: God Bless the Royal Family”.
* * * * *
Now comes the Minister of Agriculture and tells us in his speech to parliament of February 11, 1937, that Saskatchewan all in all, province, town and district has a public debt of $600,000,000. One thinks back, — How did it all happen? How came such a debt?
The West is largely, overwhelmingly, a farming community. Only those who have lived on a farm know how easily a farmer gets into debt. It comes as the result of bad times: it also comes as the result of good times: it also arises from the introduction of improved machinery, better buildings, in short what is called agricultural progress.
Let me explain. A farmer gets into debt owing to bad times, local and general. His crops fail and he has to borrow money: or prices fall and he has to borrow money. That’s obvious. But he also gets into debt through good times. Good crops and rising prices mean that he can now build a new barn, with cowstables in a stone basement, build a brick house, put in a windmill, buy a motor car. These things tempt a farmer as a silk dress tempts a debutante. And naturally he builds even beyond his immediate ready cash: on goes a mortgage that at first sits as lightly as a straw hat. Then came the hard times and the mortgage crushes down like an iron extinguisher. There it is, and there it stays, with its annual call for a hundred dollars interest spelling the difference between ease and anxiety. Drive along any well worn highway in older Ontario and look about you at the brick houses in the homesteads behind the spruce trees. What are those? Those are the mortgages left over from the Crimean War, when wheat sold at two dollars and a half a bushel. Or see the big tin barns with the “hip” roof of corrugated iron and under it the cattle stable, a real one, not the filthy unventilated shed that the mortgage drove away. A farmer in his stone basement with his cattle all end to end, feels as comfortable as I do in my library with all my books in a row. So arose the mortgages of the middle eighties and beside them the windmill mortgages, and the electrical mortgages for getting debt out of electricity. Of course if the farmer built only what he could pay cash for, — but then he knows that, as well as you do. And in any case you can’t go backwards. Farmers who drive in motor cars and listen to radio, live under electric light and turn on a tap to water a cow, can never go back to the dim effulgence of coal oil, the jolt of the backboard, and the slopping water of the barnyard pails freezing on both his legs at once. The clock won’t turn back. It is machinery or nothing.
Nor do people always understand the brutal conditions under which farmers often have to borrow. Interest when it is really interest is fair enough: when it passes into usury it is criminal. And it belongs among those criminal acts, like poisoning and child kidnapping, as distinguished from the violent blow of sudden anger, that excites the peculiar loathing of mankind. Interest in the real sense corresponds to the fair return upon money, the physical return on goods, the “growth” of all animate nature. Usury is just the turn of the screw of necessity.
The West had its share of debt, debt fairly incurred in what seemed an open market: and usury all the more hateful in that it hid behind companies and agents and lawyers: not Shylock but the Venetian Benevolent Association. Show me a rich man who draws his money from the second-mortgage of the poor and I’ll show you a first class skunk.
But quite apart from usury, the debt situation in the West was intensified by the continuous fall in prices, as oil is fed to a flame. Farm product prices as between the normal year 1926 and the deep depression year 1932 fell from 100 to 48, including a fall in grain prices from 100 to 41. This doubled the burden of mortgage interest. “On a farm loan of $2,000 made at 8 per cent. in 1928,” — the words were those to the House of Commons at Ottawa on April 11, 1932,— “the interest would be $160.00 payable in 133 bushels of wheat: in 1931 it would still be $160.00 but payable with 266 bushels of wheat.”
Incidentally one notices the “8 per cent.” quietly quoted as regular and common interest. A rate that would give a shudder to an Eastern debtor, and make an Eastern shareholder smack his lips, taken by the Western farmer, as Eli Perkins said he took the strokes of lightning, “on his bare back without a whimper.”
So that is how debt came to Western Canada, at first with a touch so light and soothing it seemed like a healing hand; later like a dead weight that pressed everything down, sunk it deeper and deeper in the shifting miasma of the hollows of the depression.
The exultation of the West turned to a cry of despair. “As far as our Western agriculture is concerned,” so pleaded to our House of Commons one of its prairie members, “unless some drastic measures are taken very soon, we shall have the bulk of our farmers in such an insolvent state that even under better conditions they can never hope to recover their title of ownership of their farms.”
That was on February 9th, 1932. It was already too late. We in the East had no ears to hear it: we too were sinking into the abyss, with everywhere unemployment, loss of salary, vanishing capital. We could do nothing. But now we must: and we must do it together.
Later on elsewhere in this volume I propose to discuss in detail the alleviation of Western debt. Much has been done in Saskatchewan already, where a reduction of $75,000,000 in farmers’ debt was effected on a basis of compromise in the autumn of 1936. Much, if not overmuch, has been done in Alberta. In all the provinces the Farmers’ Creditors Arrangement Act of the Dominion of Canada (1934), is alleviating without compulsion, many individual cases. But I think that ever so much more can be done for all debters and creditors without repudiation or compulsion by consolidating a portion of Dominion, provincial, and municipal debt, pro rata, under a national guarantee with ear-marked revenue from the province and the municipality. That would, I think, at once cut the interest on that part of the debt. Straight usury should be killed as we used to kill snakes under a brush heap; add up the usurious interest and, if it’s enough, call the debt off. The rest of the debt can be left to the effect of rising prices, renewed immigration and better times. The sunshine of prosperity will lick it up like rain in puddles.
I say renewed immigration, though I realize that the word “immigration” drives many people frantic. Labour, with only one eye, and academic understanding with only one ear, cannot see and hear properly. They think that each new immigrant takes away exactly one job from a man on the spot. That’s only true in the pit of depression. In good times each immigrant brings new jobs for those on the spot. With him comes money, capital, building, transport, — a whole apparatus of bread and work for all. If this is not so, let’s get out one by one and leave the last man with all Canada to romp in.
* * * * *
But the rest of the bill of grievances, the “money power” (if there is one), the banks, and whether people’s credit is an improvement on bank credit, I leave over till I come to deal with Sunny Alberta.
CHAPTER FIVE
SASKATCHEWAN AND WHEAT
HOW THE LORD Made Saskatchewan — And Made it a Wheat Farm — Agriculture and Machinery — The Wheat Problem — Impossibility of Restricting Production — Means of Solution.
To appreciate the present position of the Province of Saskatchewan it is necessary to understand the process by which the Lord made it. Countless ages ago the land surface of the globe came heaving up, dripping from under the universal water. Above it was the dense cloud and mist of the firmament such as still covers the planet Venus. There was a half darkness called day, and a total blackness called night. No stars shone and there was no eye to see them. As the solid land heaved up it was bent and buckled in great ridges and furrows such as the vast upheaval that we call the Rocky Mountains of America. Elsewhere, for lack of room, it tilted up at the side, and bent into slopes of rock, some this way and some that, like the great rim round the Hudson Bay. Everywhere the water poured off like rain from a roof, and it poured again in the rain flood from the firmament. There was a universal roar of water and no ear to hear it. As the water rushed in streams it cut and tore at the primeval land, broke it, pounded it from lumps to mud and spread it out wider and wider, and wore channels through it as the subsiding flood ran away. On the mountain edges the channels formed great gorges. On the broad slopes they form wide valleys through which a broad flood poured with a lessening volume till it was a little stream in a valley so wide as not to be recognizable, — such are the broad valleys, the rolling ranges about the little tributaries of the Qu’Appelle and the Assiniboine. But elsewhere all the driven soil was piled up, as the flood carried it, into thickened hills, and then the water drove a deep curving hollow through it, as a child’s finger might be drawn through a mud pie. Such is the great valley of the South Saskatchewan as seen at Saskatoon. And when the land was all drained and the main flood gone, the clouds cleared and the sun shone out, and then, in the sunshine, mile after mile, rolling to the very horizon was Saskatchewan. Here and there as the land dried out, great clouds of dust from the broken sandstone of the hills came blowing across, shifting and twisting like the sandhills of the Sahara. Such are the sandstreaks, and sandhills that outcrop and mingle with the soil that later became the black alluvium of the prairie.
Then came Life, creeping out of the water to the land, and then Nature the Seedsman, scattering in sweeping handfuls the newly evolved seeds of plants and trees. All over the rolling stretches the soil broke out into grasses and bright flowers that bloomed and withered unseen for countless ages, and with their death and putrefaction enriched and blackened the rock-dust into deep loam, dying that still more might live.
But the trees grew but little. Elsewhere, as in the country that later became Ontario, the trees, sheltered in the hollows, presently climbed the hills, like soldiers springing from a trench in a joint attack. Alone they could not start; together, each protected the other. Even now a single hemlock breaks in the wind and dies; a forest lives on its collected strength, shouldering off the storm.
