The Worries of Canada.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18481, 8 September 1925, Page 8

The Worries of Canada.

The lugubrious tone in which the Prime Minister of Canada has announced the, dissolution of Parliament will have surprised those who have not been regular readers of the Canadian newspapers. For no special reason except that they assume that it must be so, most people outside Canada believe that those inside are universally prosperous and confident By comparison with the people of the Homeland they certainly are prosperous, and it would be exaggerating their anxieties far beyond the limits of truth to say that they have lost their confidence. Yet Canadians are not nearly so sanguine as we carelessly imagine, and although it may still prove true that "the "twentieth century will be Canada's," the close of the first quarter of the twentieth century finds their Prime Minister confessing sadly that he can see no solution to the problems of taxation, and many, of the people wondering whether it is not too costly a privilege to go on being Canadians instead of .Americans. It is still quite safe to say that to the vast majority political independence seems well worth

[ paying for, while the fact that It really i is paid for in hard cash every year is 1 a sufficient proof of the reality of the Dominion's attachment to the Empire. But it is just as well to recognise that Canada pays this price with an increasingly painful consciousness, season by season. It is well said in the latest issue of the " Round Table " that " the struggle to build a Canadian " nation is not only, from the economic " point of view, a struggle with Nature "in a land of vast spaces and harsh "climate; it is a struggle to keep up "with the wealthiest nation in the " world, and at the same time to keep "distinct from it" Compared with Britain, Canada, as we began by saying, is a prosperous country, with lower taxation, a better standard of living, a lower per capita debt and a higher per capita income. But as the " Economist" pointed out a few months ago in a series of articles dealing with Canada from half a dozen points of view, the Dominion is a rather poor country compared with the United States, and is very much more heavily taxed. The " Economist " found, after making allowance for the difference in income and living standards —it ranked an income of £3OOO in England with £4OOO in Canada and about £6OOO in the United States—that "in the " middle ranges" the proportion of income-tax paid in the United Kingdom would be about 20 per cent., in Canada about 10 per cent., and in the United States about 5 per cent. It found also that if six towns stretching across the continent on the Canadian side were compared with six towns on the American side the wages would vary as follows: —

Canada. America. Per Hour. Per Hour. Bricklayers .. 4s 2d to 5a '2d 5s 2d to 6s 3d Labourers . .. Is Bd to 2a 8d 2a 3d to3a Id Printers .. 3a Id to 4s 2d 3s 5d to 5s 5d

But these lower rates in Canada are not counterbalanced by a drop in the cost of living. Clothes and the staple articles of food were found to be cheaper, but manufactured foods and most household utensils were a good deal dearer, so that for the middle classes the cost of Irving is probably about the same in both countries. It is obvious therefore that Canada is constantly worried over the problem of retaining her population, for as the "Round Table" article points out, "fluidity of population, which has "largely disappeared elsewhere, re-; "mains between Canada and the "United States," and always must remain between two countries tied to each other economically, and separated politically by the ingenuity of man rather than by the facts of Nature. "No " apparatus of tariff walls or immigra- " tion restrictions can turn a fence into "a range of mountains" —unless of course there is racial antipathy on both sides. But the fact we so often forget in the other Dominions is that there are no barriers of race or religion between Canada and the United States, that both have a population made up in large part by drafts from Europe, and that a parallel of latitude cannot possibly separate men and women who speak the same tongue. Perhaps, too, it will surprise many of our readers that much of the existing pessimism has its roots in transport difficulties. The Prime Minister puts transportation first among the "four outstanding " problems" which will have to be solved before the national debt can be reduced. But this is not remarkable when we consider that the inhabited, and as some think the inhabitable, portion of Canada is "a narrow ribbon" of territory 3000 miles long and seldom more than 200 miles broad, and crossed, not from side to side but from end to end, by two independent railway systems. The Canadian Pacific Railway is a private enterprise with immense assets and paying a handsome profit, and from any point of view one of the great systems of the world. The Canadian National is a State-owned system, composed mostly of bankrupt lines to which, in varying degree, the Provinces and the Federal Government had advanced or guaranteed loans. Though the Prime Minister is satisfied that the head of this system "has " demonstrated his capacity to adminis"ter it to the satisfaction of the " public," no one has ever yet administered it to the satisfaction of the State Treasurer. Where the C J\R. last year, with gross earnings of 195 million dollars, made a net profit of 23 million dollars, as well as eleven millions from its ships, hotels .and telegraphs, the C.N.R. lost 51 million dollars on a gross revenue of 262 millions, and has only twice in its history shown a surplus over its working expenses. When to an anxiety of that kind we add the losses and anxieties of a State-owned shipping service we can hardly expect the Prime Minister to speak of the future with exuberance.