Your July 5th edition showed a photo of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s mobile debt clock.
It indicated that B.C.’s provincial government debt stood at $57.5 billion. Confusingly, the photo’s caption refers to it as the federal debt clock.
I’d like to clarify a few issues that arise from that error.
B.C.’s debt is indeed $57.5 billion and it costs B.C. taxpayers well over $2 billion to service that debt every year, even at today’s record-low interest rates.
The federal government’s debt is now $616 billion and, according to StatsCan, costs Canadian taxpayers $160 million a day.
Add the $600 billion owed collectively by the provinces and the $1.6 trillion of domestic debt – mortgages, business loans, credit card debt, student loans, etc. and you will see that it’s nearly three times Canada’s $1.3 trillion GDP – the value of our entire economy.
And we still haven’t accounted for municipal government debt or $1 trillion in unfunded liabilities like CPP, EU and Medicare for which no funding has been set aside.
We are in deep trouble and the subject should be top of every government agenda.
Governments are not telling us the truth about the seriousness of our debt problem and are doing taxpayers a great disservice when they suggest that what we are facing is merely a slow-down in the world economy.
We are in fact facing a debt tsunami of global proportions and harsh solutions like raising taxes even further, cutting social programs or selling off public assets are but Band-Aid attempts to delay the inevitable bankruptcy that stems from a debt curve now going ballistic, largely because of compounding interest.
How do we ever get out of such a mess? Well, in biblical times, when lending at usury was considered a heinous crime, the simple solution to un-repayable debt caused by money-lenders’ interest lay in declaring a Jubilee. Every 50 years, all debt was forgiven. Leviticus: 25 spells it out pretty clearly.
The constitutionally based policies that guided Canada from the time of Confederation in 1867 to 1934 kept the nation on a virtual flat-line of debt.
It was only after the right to create the nation’s money was usurped by the publicly owned but privately controlled Bank of Canada in 1935 that our debts started their meteoric rise.
The answer looks pretty simple – return to government-created money administered and controlled by an accountable Minister of Finance and thus recover from the international banks the sovereign right bestowed upon our elected government by Section 91 of the Constitution Act.
It’s time to face the simple fact that government debts are now absolutely un-repayable under our present fatally flawed debt money system and that our debt clock is somebody’s profit clock.
With all 122 nations of the world in debt who do we owe it all to if not a faceless and flawed private banking system? It would be totally unconscionable to pass this burden on to our children unaddressed.
Dennis Milligan
Vernon
