Sense in Canada

Canada's home front seems to work with much less fuss than the U.S.'s. Louis M. Lyons, reporter for the Boston Globe, went to Canada to find out why. His findings:

Canadians are horrified at the red-tape complexity of OPA forms. Canadians merely signed their names for ration books, didn't have to account for how many pounds of groceries they owned last November. Canada's fixed price on used tires is simply 40% of what a new tire costs; OPA defines price differences down to one-sixteenth inch of tire thickness.

Canadian motorists get the equivalent of 160 U.S. gallons of gas a year, can save them up or use them when they please. Thus they avoid all bickering over pleasure driving, the employment of armies of snoopers and police, and above all, know how much gas they can count on.

Canadian consumers believe in subsidies. Although farm prices are up 56%, their own living costs have gone up only 17%. A Canadian official told Lyons: "We have only 11 1/2 million people to your 130 million. Our subsidies run to $130 million a year. Yours have to run into billions. Billions sound bad."

Canadians have their own gripes: the wood-fuel situation is a mess; some believe beer rationing is a temperance plot by the somewhat arid Mackenzie King Government; the much-heralded "cost of living bonus" to peg wages to prices hasn't satisfied labor; the Canadian farm bloc--as in the U.S.--is on the loose to boost farm prices.

Wrote Lyons: "Canadian officials aren't trying to reform their economic system. They are just keeping prices down." Key industrialists run price control: "The Government always has a businessman to take the rap when his industry howls . . . and the Government is tough to business. Their excess-profits tax is 100%."

Workers told Lyons that 35% of their salaries are drained off by income taxes and almost-mandatory war bond purchases. "You don't have to be told how they draw off purchasing power after you have paid 33-c- for a package of cigarets that costs 15-c- in Boston."

Canadian officials watch U.S. price controls carefully, know it affects them also. "They recall Leon Henderson as a type of official they admire. They are generally great admirers of Roosevelt too. . . . They make more allowances than Americans do for loose [U.S.] administration. They excuse it by the size of the job. . . .

"And we never had Prohibition to corrupt our attitude toward law."

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