Thank you very much. I'm here as an individual, but at the request of a Canadian senator who spent two or three hours listening to me rampage over what I have learned in the last few years about Canada's economy and the history of it, and further, what I started writing about the bad base of our taxation policy in Canada, on which I started ranting about 50 years ago.
Looking at the history of Canada, I look back at when I was born at the beginning of the Great Depression, and it appears that the Great Depression had a lot to do with the creation of money by the financial sector, which caused the excesses of the 1920s, which we now see being repeated again.
I go back and look at the history of the golden years of Canada, the years when everybody seemed to be working. We did all the great things. We built the Trans-Canada Highway, seaways, hospitals, and everything. These were the golden years, but they stopped. When did they stop? They stopped when the financial interests again took control of the finances and the economy of Canada.
What's happened since then? Our manufacturing sector has diminished. We look at economic growth and see it has been up and down. We've had bubbles grow and burst, and we have seen a decrease in the distributive justice of our country.
We've seen a death spiral start. We've seen the growth of debt for Canadian homes and people and workers. We've seen personal savings go down and debts go up. All of these things have happened in the last half of my lifetime.
In the first half of my lifetime we got out of a depression, we paid for a war, and we did all these great things in Canada, but then the policies changed around the 1970s, and this wasn't just the policy of Canada.
I have been studying some of these things and hoping that the rest of the Government of Canada, the members of Parliament, would look at these various ideas and debate them and learn them, just as this senator suggested they should.
If I look back at the study and the rational thought that I've applied to these matters, I think that if MPs do not even make the effort to understand them, then I believe they will be negligent, and I would think that I would deem them as being traitors to our society.