Canadians Have Been Hoodwinked!
RE: Premier targets city poverty
"280,900 children in Canada used food banks this year -- almost double the number seen in 1989." (Nov 27/2007, Toronto Star)
There was a time in Canada where food banks to feed the poor weren’t needed and therefore did'nt exist. However the current crisis of poverty is intricately connected to the current monetary system that Canada is subject to. To put this in perspective, from 1939 to 1974 the federal government of Canada was using, its publically owned bank, The Bank of Canada, for a lot of its financing. This was, primarily, interest-free money that went into funding Canada's welfare system. But in 1974, rather than the continued intelligent use of its own bank, the Bank of Canada, the Canadian government started borrowing money from the private sector on high market interest rates which sky rocketed Canada's federal debt to a now whopping $500+ billion! Only 6 percent of that debt is due to government services; over 90 percent is interest owed to the private sector. An analogy can me made with a grocery store owner who rather than getting his personal grocery from his own store for free, he goes to another grocery store and pays for it. The Canadian government actually goes further than this by paying loads of interest on what it needlessly borrows from the market (i.e. investors, commercial banks). To make the tax money of Canadians count for something (rather than it being interest income for private investors) the Canadian government must, exclusively, use its bank, the Bank of Canada for financing and servicing the debt. This would dramatically lower national debt, guarantee more than adequate funding to Canada's crumbling social system and at the same time would keep tax rates reasonably low. If the Canadian government has the political will, they can do this right now! The Canadian federal Minister of Finance can simply give a written directive to the Governor of the Bank of Canada to change policy (see Bank of Canada’s official site: www.bankofcanada.ca). Note that up until 1974, the year that Canada changed its monetary policy (i.e. stopped using its publicly owned state bank for interest-free financing), there was not one food bank in all of Canada. Now there are hundreds of food banks and thousands of organizations feeding hungry people across Canada.
Zeshan Shahbaz |
