Paying off the national debt will trigger the worst depression ever

We congratulate, and thank Mr. St-Julien for having so carried out his mission of representative of the people, by making himself the voice of the electors before the Government. When all the Members of Parliament will act like that, the laws of our nation will truly be at the service of the common good.

When close to 50,000 citizens put their signatures on a petition asking the Government to cancel the national debt, they know what they are asking. To cancel means to write off, erase the debt, make it disappear. It doesn't mean to pay it off, as Finance Minister Paul Martin sillily wrote in his reply to our petitions presented last year. An idiot wouldn't have answered differently.

The truth is that Paul Martin knows very well what our petitions demand. He knows that cancelling the national debt is the only way to solve the problem of the interest charges to be paid every year, that take away a large part of the purchasing power of the citizens. Mr. Martin also knows that the original debt of Canada has been paid off many times with the interest charges paid every year. A few years ago, in a meeting with top Canadian bankers, Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien had even harshly criticized them for being responsible for the bankruptcies and unemployment in the country.

However, instead of creating money and lending it to businesses, as they had threaten the Bankers to do, Martin and Chrétien submitted to the Bankers' orders, started making cuts in social programs, and hit the poorest, in order eliminate federal deficits and reduce the national debt, but said nothing about the huge deficit these cuts created in the budgets of families, businesses, and lower levels of governments. Someone told me that on a TV program a few weeks ago, experts and economists were discussing the national debt problem. They pointed out that every time the Government decided to pay off the debt, it triggered a depression in the nation, and slowed down business...

You don't need to be an financial expert nor an economist to understand that. When the Government withdraws money from the population in order to pay back the Bankers' loans, business and trade cannot continue to work properly, because people have no money to buy their products. As Pope Pius XI wrote in his encyclical letter Quadragesimo Anno, money is the lifeblood of economic life, so when it is withdrawn from circulation, the economy begins to die, just like the human body.

A honest money system, at the service of the common good, will guarantee every nation and individual security, freedom, and prosperity.

Dear subscribers to "Michael", please read all the articles in this issue on the money system. Make the falsities of the present money system known to all those you meet, by asking them to subscribe to the "Michael" Journal. Invite neighbours, relatives, friends to your place one evening, to pray and read the articles of "Michael". Attend our monthly meetings in your area, and come to our meetings in Rougemont every fourth Sunday. May St. Michael crush Mammon, the devil of money, and convert our statesmen!

You can order from us petition sheets asking the Federal Government to cancel the national, debt. Circulate these petitions to have the residents of your town sign them. Once they are filled, send them back to us. To be valid, the signatures must be genuine, otherwise they won't be accepted to be presented in the House of Commons in Ottawa.