Case of the Smuggling M.P.

A Liberal Member of Parliament from New Brunswick confessed to his fellow Canadian legislators last week that he had been a smuggler all his life--and intended to keep on being one. Said A. Wesley Stuart, a lean, little-known backbencher for six years: "There is a very unfair difference between the prices paid in the U.S. and. . . in Canada. . . I live on the bank of the St. Croix River and you can throw a stone across to-the other side. On [the U.S.] side an electric refrigerator sells for $225. If you walk across the little bridge to the other side, it sells, for $460. . . I never came through [the border] in my lifetime that I did not smuggle something. . . I feel it is a right."

Spectators and M.P.s alike perked up their ears as Stuart went on to charge that monopolies are rampant in Canada. He called on the government to knock down tariff walls and let competitive, low-priced U.S. goods move into the Canadian market.

During a recent U.S. trip (on which he naturally did "a little smuggling"), Stuart made a study of "unjustifiable" Canadian price spreads which ran as high as 50% on many household items (e.g., toothpaste: 95-c- v. 60-c-). Said Stuart: "Take ladies' lingerie. I have known many a woman to go across the border, put on three or four pairs of step-ins and walk back across the bridge. They save several dollars." Many Canadian manufacturers, he claimed, just take the U.S. retail price, add Canada's duty, sales and defense taxes, then trim the resulting price 2%, "just enough to make sure that people will not. . . buy in the United States."

Back in his home town of St. Andrews (22 miles from Calais, Me.), Stuart's candid comments got a laugh from many townspeople. It was not quite so amusing to local customs men and Mounties, currently engaged in trying to stop the growing traffic in cigarettes (23-c- a pack in Maine; 46-c- in N.B.). There was no chance that the government would act on Stuart's tariff-toppling recommendations. But in a week when the cost-of-living index passed 190 for the first time in Canadian history, he had dramatized the soaring prices of consumer goods as no other M.P. has yet managed to do.

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