"Montreal's Credit is Excellent"

AND CO IS THE COMMUNITY'S REAL CREDIT EVERYWHERE IN CANADA

"The city's credit is excellent", said Mr. Pierre Des Marais after a first loan of 35 million on the New York financial market. He repeated this after another loan of 13 million, subscribed in a few hours, and he attributed the merits of the situation to the good administration of the city.

When is the credit of a city or any organized community excellent for the financiers? When there are administrators who are able to tax and citizens able to pay. And the more money the administrators can extract from the citizens, the better the reception they get in financial quarters when they apply there to put the people in debt.

But what is the real basis of the credit of a city, of a province or a country? The real basis is the production capacity of the city, province or country.

A people stripped of natural resources, or lazy, or incompetent in production, will never constitute good taxation material and the financiers will close their wickets to them.

The real credit of a city, of a country, takes its origin right in the city, in the country. It is due to the natural riches dispensed by Providence, and to the industry and the ingenuity of the people. Why go and place this credit at the feet of the financiers and put the people in debt for something that is the ownership of the people themselves.

The credit of the city of Montreal is excellent. Certainly. Keep it, then, in and for the city of Montreal. It is a source of riches for the city and should bring dividends to the citizens and not to the financiers of New York or elsewhere.

While the president of the executive committee recognizes that the credit of the city is excellent, he taxes the authentic owners of this credit and uses the first slice of their taxes as a gift for the financiers.

It is the people of the city, of the country, who produce the real riches. The financial credit which is the numerical expression of these riches, belongs by right to the people. To attribute to others the financial credit based on the real credit of the people, means giving them the right to tax people in proportion to their productivity in riches.

And isn't that what is happening? If you build a new house you are enriching the city by so much; it will immediately add to taxation by the city to feed the debt-money system. If you improve your property you improve your city; you might well expect some gratitude for this: you know the story! At the next assessment you will simply be taxed extra.

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This system is obviously a contradiction of reality.

The appropriation of the real credit of the people by money controllers and credit controllers, is a monumental theft. That the financiers should then lend, at interest, the fruits of their theft to the people they have robbed, is simply mockery added to theft. That the administrators, elected by the people to guard their interests, should then boast of having succeeded in such business deals, is the last straw.

Mr. Des Marais is not the only one, however, to sing that tune. From the bottom to the top of the administrative ladder, the facility with which one can put the people in debt seems to be considered as the criterion of a good administration.

While he was governor of the Bank of Canada, Mr. Graham Towers stated very succinctly that an increase in public debt is the barometer of prosperity. In proof he added: "The backward tribes of central Africa have no public debt."

Evidently backward people, not having developed the capacity for production, possess very little real credit. When there is nothing to steal, robbers, go out of business.

If one should be robbed in proportion to the progress one makes, it seems all right to say that the rhythm of stealing is an expression of the rhythm of progress.

But why is it thus? Why should dividends go to the robber while the taxes remain the lot of those who build up? Why? Because the financial system is nonsensical. President Roosevelt called it "financial nonsense". He didn't want financial nonsense during the war. But he agreed that his country, like ours, like all civilized countries, come out of the war with financial nonsense more solidly than ever established and holding the reins.

This deceit was imposed on the people gradually. They will have to de-mesmerize themselves, de-hypnotize themselves, to shake it off.

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Social Credit wants finance to reflect reality with exactitude. All new production should be financed, not by indebtedness, but by new credits which would disappear only to the rhythm of the disappearance of wealth. As no wealth over and above what is produced, can disappear, a public debt would be unthinkable, apart from the case where the wealth of a country would be produced by strangers. If the Americans or the Mexicans came to build our highways, build our waterworks, pave our streets, without getting from us anything in return, then we could justify our going into debt. Until such time public indebtedness, as we know it, is a hoax.

Social Credit would put an end to such hoaxes and change tax-payers into dividend-receivers in proportion to the wealth creation of their country.

In Halifax also

In Halifax, as in Montreal, as in a thousand other cities, towns and rural villages, the evaluation roll has been substantially increased, and so will be the charges to be met by ratepayers. This is part of the universal conspiration to destroy private property.

A body of 'experts' from the United States have been paid $105,000 by the city of Halifax to establish the new roll, which is nearly double that of 1955.

More than 2,500 contestations have been filed by homeowners of the city. So far 134 have been heard and 120 of the plaintiffs have obtained rebates, some as much as 50 per cent.

The Mayor of the City, Mr. Leonard A. Kitz, states that the protests have created an urging problem, and the city Council have asked from the provincial Government an authorization to reduce the new roll by 15 per cent for all, in order to give some satisfaction to those who did not contest individually.

The ratepayers of Halifax pay $3.50 per $100 of evaluation. The average payment before this year has been $300 per houseowner. How can they support to see the bill mount higher with the new roll?... And they had to disburse $ 105,000 to pay the roll-up experts!...

It is high time to cast out this "legalized robbery", and turn to Social Credit.