Cash for Everyone

Canada's funny-money Social Credit Party, which was elected in the province of Alberta in the hungry '30s on a promise to pay "dividends" to all citizens, got ready at last to hand out the cash. Premier Ernest Manning's government last week set aside $11 million, about one-third of the revenue it will receive this year from the province's oil and gas boom, for direct distribution to the people of Alberta. Shares this year will amount to about $22 for every adult Canadian citizen with five years' continuous residence in the province. With oil and gas revenues growing steadily, they should be even larger in years to come.

Social Crediters freely admitted that the oil bonus is not the citizens' "dividend" promised when their party came to power 22 years ago. That scheme was to be part of a major overhaul of federal monetary policies, and is beyond the power of a provincial government. The payments now planned will help to drain off cash from an oil-enriched treasury that has already cut the province's debt to $90 million, financed large-scale grants to local schools and municipalities, and has built up a $347 million surplus. Some of the bonus money will also go to enrich the federal government, since tax authorities in Ottawa were prompt to rule that Alberta citizens will have to declare and pay federal income taxes on the money from Edmonton.

The bonus scheme brought a protest from some of the people eligible to collect it. The Senior Citizens' Club of Medicine Hat adopted a resolution declaring that the money could better go to widows, the handicapped and pensioners. Art Smith, Conservative member of the provincial legislature, declared: "So long as the infirm suffer financially, so long as there are over-burdened municipalities, so long as there is need for roads and education, there is no justification for the dividends." The antiadministration Calgary Herald indignantly advised its readers to "treat the bonus with contempt," and the Edmonton Journal denounced the plan as "a great hoax." Largely unheard from: the silent majority of ordinary citizens who will doubtless gratefully collect and happily spend the dividends.

The Social Crediters were clearly aiming to extend the party's power. In neighboring British Columbia, where Canada's second Social Credit government was re-elected with a crashing majority last year. Premier William Bennett moved ahead with his own giveaway. With no flood of oil revenue to draw upon, he had to content himself with a more modest scheme: rebating $28 of taxes to every homeowner in his province. Both British Columbia's Bennett and Alberta's Manning, having built solid political bases at home, are now planning a drive to add to the 15 seats that Social Crediters occupy in the federal Parliament at Ottawa. With a national election probable for this spring or summer, they will soon have a chance to test the appeal of giveaway government for the voters in other parts of Canada.

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