Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor,
The March 22 edition was a particularly interesting one – great activities in the area by quilters, students, Maplepalooza, and others. Even some grant money from Queens Park.
The grant announcement gave me a warm and woozy feeling deep inside… somebody at QP actually cared… then reality set in and I wondered… It is provided by the MTO “Connecting Links Program”… for the Sykes Street bridge. Sykes Street on the east side of town is Ontario’s Highway 26, and on the west side it is also Highway 26, truly a connecting link. A major Ontario highway going through our town. This bridge is a vital part of the provincial highway system and is built to provincial standards to carry heavy transport since our masters at QP tore out the railway. This indicates to me that it should be a total provincial responsibility to maintain. Why should our town staff have to spend expensive time and effort filling out grant applications?
In the editorial the editor asks residents to ask candidates in the upcoming provincial and federal elections about the lack of infrastructure funding for municipalities.
I would like to give the residents some background information to make their questions a little more pointed.
After the Great Depression of 1929, a Royal Commission on Banking and Currency, chaired by Lord Macmillan, recommended the setting up of a central bank. In 1934 Parliament passed the Bank of Canada Act and the Bank itself was founded a year later.
The preamble to the Act empowers the Bank “to regulate credit and currency in the best interests of the economic life of the nation, to protect and control the external value of the national monetary unit and to mitigate by its influence fluctuations in the general level of production, trade, prices and employment, so far as may be possible within the scope of monetary action, and generally to promote the economic and financial welfare of the Dominion.” This mandate was followed from 1938 to the mid-1970s, during which time infrastructure, housing, and all our proud social programs came into being.
This space does not permit to go into detail why successive governments, starting with Brian Mulroney, changed from funding for public infrastructure and public programs through the Bank of Canada, OWNED by us, to financing our needs through private banks and foreign financial institutions.
Interest paid by provinces and municipalities to the Bank of Canada remains in our country and reduces our foreign indebtedness.
Interest paid to foreign entities is money thrown away.
We must ask our candidates WHERE their allegiance is, to our citizens or foreigners?
Sincerely,
Karl Braeker, Meaford
