CANADA: Aberhart Dollars

In the prairie Province of Alberta, unctuous Premier William (“Bible Bill”) Aberhart, who was elected on a promise to pay every Albertan $25 per month, finally last week started presses printing “prosperity certificates.” These Alberta folk promptly named “velocity dollars.”

Anxious adherents of the so-called “Social Credit” theory, which William Aberhart was elected to apply (TIME, Sept. 2), hotly protested: “Velocity dollars have nothing whatever in common with Social Credit, and Premier Aberhart has enacted not one single genuine Social Credit statute in Alberta.” The great thing “Bible Bill” has done for mortgage-ridden Alberta farmers is to decree arbitrarily that no interest rate in the Province can exceed 2½%.

Each velocity dollar is dated with the week of its issue and has 104 spaces to each of which a stamp is to be affixed. Whoever holds the bill for more than a week must buy a 1¢ stamp from the Alberta Government for each week the certificate is out of circulation and stick it onto his dollar to keep it up-to-date. After two years, when all 104 stamps have been affixed at a total cost of $1.04, the velocity dollar can be turned in at the Alberta Treasury and exchanged for a regular Canadian dollar.

All this Aberhart mummery so vexed the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association that its Alberta branch announced that it flatly refused to accept a single prosperity certificate. Local manufacturers, wholesalers and large retailers loudly protested, but issued no such ultimatum. Small shopkeepers, many of them pious adherents of the Premier’s Prophetic Bible Institute, declared they were ready to take as many velocity dollars as they could without going insolvent “to give the plan a chance.” Premier Aberhart and Cabinet decided to accept part of their salaries in prosperity certificates. First Alberta community approached by the Premier to put his scheme into action was Medicine Hat, to whose civic treasury he offered, 2,800 blank velocity dollars for $1.900 cash.

“If the plan succeeds we will have Social Credit before we know it!” cried an Aberhart spokesman, while the Premier himself warned: “Acceptance of our prosperity certificates by tradesmen will be purely voluntary but they will have no alternative except to take them or lose their trade.”

First Alberta citizens to be faced in a big way with velocity dollars were the unemployed. Their dole hereafter will be paid in prosperity certificates and, unless they are able to spend these within the first week after they get them, they will have to worry about money to buy stamps. This haste to spend is counted on by Premier Aberhart to increase the speed and number of transactions in Alberta to such an extent that the terrific turnover will bring Prosperity, as everyone tries to spend his Aberhart dollars before he has to buy more stamps for them. At latest reports the Premier had just received from the printer 200,000 prosperity certificates which he proposed to put into circulation this week.