1. Has the government assumed the road from Ottawa to Hawkesbury as part of the trans-Canada route?

2. If so, will the county continue to pay 29 per cent to the government as in the past?

1. Who is the acting superintendent of the Chambly canal?

2. Who is the official superintendent of the above-named canal?

3. Where is the latter's office located and what work does he perform?

4. What salary is paid to the official superintendent and to the acting superintendent?

Mr. GOULET:

I was paired with the hon. member for Carleton (Mr. Garland). Had I voted I would have voted against the motion.

Mr. GOULET (Translation):

Mr. Chairman I notice, by this item, that the government is carrying on its policy of cutting down expenditure. Last year the government appropriated for agricultural exhibitions the sum of $650,000. This year the grant is reduced to $350,000. It is a cut of $350,000 at 46 per cent. The assistance given to agricultural exhibitions represents outwardly, since it is a kind of advertisement, assistance to farming. The item therefore entirely sums up the government's policy. This year, the government under pretext of cutting down expenditure, thought fit to reduce the estimates of agriculture. Others who preceded me in this debate have stated their views on this kind of economy as vexatious as it is irrational. If there is a department where the estimates should have been increased instead of being cut down, it is certainly. that of agriculture.

It is common topic that agriculture is the foundation of the national economic structure. This house has often heard it repeated. It appears daily in the press. Economists are unanimous in proclaiming it. A nation without agriculture cannot subsist. History gives us many proofs of this. The world of to-day would not be undergoing such a serious crisis, if it had not forgotten that underlying principle. It is not only in the economic field that a chasm intervenes between the principle and the practice. But it is always amazing to note how easily under the sway of ambition, one neglects what would prove its strength and resistance, and how easily one forsakes the prey for the shadow.

Mr. GOULET (Translation):

The shadow is overcapitalized industry, industry on a large scale. The prey is the land, the soil, agriculture. A number of countries such as England, Germany and Japan, owing to an overcrowded population from which they suffered had to forsake the land and go in for an intensive and unbounded industrial development. They depend on other countries for their living. And it is in the former countries that the crisis is most acute: it is industrial, financial, commercial, and therefor social in character.

Here, in Canada, there would be no reason to suffer from such depression, if we had strictly adhered to the principle that agriculture is the foundation of all lasting economic structure, if we had not despised this axiom,

a common-place one, so admitted by all. Canada encloses a vast area of land suited to farming but not yet settled. The land at our disposal is perhaps not unlimited as it was truly pointed out, it is, however, considerable, especially in Ontario and Quebec.

We are fortunately witnessing a change of thought which we would, however, like to see, more general. Some still imagine that when they have discussed trade, finances, currency, gold standard, transportation, they have covered all topics and feel quite at their ease.

They are laggards, they were responsible for the fiasco of our immigration policy and our deplorable emigration to the United States. Governments are still entangled in the webs of incoherent economic theories.

Broadminded people clearly saw the path to follow. They advocated settling the country and the back to the land movement in order to relieve congested cities and bring back the deserters to the farm.