ONE THING I don’t see Bob Hunter ® strictly personal e in the latest Bank of B.C. drama is Edgar Kaiser Jr. quietly handing over control of the bank he brought back from the edge of oblivion to the boys from the Bay Street Golden Hectare. In case you hadn’t thought about it, ego plays as much a role in the destiny of banks as it does in lesser institutions, like provincial governments and media conglomerates. Kaiser’s ego is okay. No worry there. And he has been insulted often enough by the lords of the central Canada banking cartel to have a personal stake in keeping the one surviving Western bank out of the clutches of the gnomes of Torento. The latest insult was a refer- ence to him by a top government finance department bureaucrat as | a “rich American.’’ Hey, hey! He’s a_ naturalized Canadian. That makes him as Canadian as Maple Syrup. But this kind of smear campaign isn’t new. it is not just that the ir- repressible former LBJ aide and entrepreneur-turned-banker is an outsider in the cloistered halls of Canada’s banking establishment, or that he is an aggressive, brilliant player in the high-stakes money game. He also happens to hold quite a different philosophy about banking than the poobahs at the Royal and the B of M and the others. In an interview recently, I ask- ed him: ‘‘Do you ever get a sense that Canada might be better off in some ways if we had 1,500 or even 15,000 banks instead of the set up we have?’’ He could have dodged that question easily enough, but he had the jam to say: ‘‘Well it sounds like you believe that, and so do 1.” ‘ That's radical stuff. He went on to say nice things about what a great country this is, the sort of pep talk you would expect a banker to offer. But he added something you just don’t hear from your run of the mill Canadian banking execu- tive: “We are a nation of savers. That leaves a very liquid, a very strong, base to work off as a na- tion. I would argue that what you need therefore is an opportunity to be able to finance your ideas. If you have a very sma!l (bank- ing) club whose members are always together, and you or I are turned down by one member of the club, the odds are no other member of the club is going to help us with our idea either." Meaning? “We look at the United States as an extremely vibrant economy, and that's because you or 1] can go to any one of 500 different sources to finance our dream, so you always have the alternative of being able to go ahead if you've got the perseverance and the nugget of an idea that makes sense. That deesn’t exist in this nation." In other words, as we know, if the Big Six don't like you, you’re out of luck. In Canada, an indi- vidual’s financing options are much, much more limited than south of the border. Anybody wondering why our economy performs so sluggishly might look to the central banks long before they start looking for po- litical scapegoats. The Bay Street banking gang are an unusual~elite composed mainly of smalltown Canadian males who left high school to take jobs as clerks in the local bank and worked their way up, never doing anything else in their lives. Considering that they operate out of a country with minor stat- ure in the real world, they have succeeded over the years in quiet- ly assembling one of the most powerful financial cabals in the world, rivalling in stealth and steely dedication to the bottom line, an influence that in some ways is nearly as dispropor- tionately large as that of the clever Swiss. Outside the country, our big banks are considered as wonderous as our big mountains. Canada, a nation of a mere 25 million peorle, now has six banks that control 95 per cent of the banking business. This is weird. With the demise of the Cana- dian Commercial and the Nor- thland banks last year, the com- ponents of the Canadian banking megamachine are all head- quartered in Toronto and Mon- treal — except, of course, for the diminutive Bank of B.C. Does this have an effect on the quality of day-to-day life in Western Canada? Believe it! Are major credit decisions made back East? Guess-guess. Does the way a Western businessman finds himself being treated, depend on which of his competitors has a directorship in the bank he’s dealing with? Ask Jimmy Pattison. Are these corporate behemoths shielded from normal Canadian accoun- ting practises when it comes to preparing financial statements? Does the tide rise around Siwash Rock? The long and the short of it is, if the East succeeds in gaining control of the Bank of B.C. through some sort of governm- ent-foisted merger, it will be over the bones of W.A.C. Bennett and Edgar Kaiser Jr. alike. Hard Landscaping Made Easy! 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