Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform
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The Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER) is an international publishing and education centre based in Toronto, Canada.
Its mandate is to study the destabilization that its members believe current economic and monetary policies have caused, and are causing, for the citizens of Canada and other countries.
COMER argues for a mixed economy (economic reform), and changes in monetary policy (monetary reform) through returning to the mandate of Bank of Canada Act. Specifically, COMER proposes allowing the government to borrow money from the central bank rather than from private banks, effectively allowing the Bank of Canada to underwrite the national debt.
The committee particularly opposes the discretion of private banks to increase interest rates. William Krehm, co-founder of and a prominent writer for COMER, argues that this "anti-inflation" tool has been abused by the banking sector to the detriment of modern urban societies.
It publishes a monthly newsletter, Economic Reform, which was launched as COMER Comments in 1988. COMER has chapters in Toronto and Kingston that hold monthly meetings.
The group is heavily involved with the Canadian Action Party (CAP), a small economic nationalist party which has run candidates in several Canadian federal elections without success. Paul Hellyer, the founder and former leader of CAP has addressed COMER conventions, as did then CAP leader Connie Fogal, who is a long-time COMER member.
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Lawsuit[edit]
COMER is engaged in a lawsuit in the Federal Court of Canada against the Canadian Government. It claims that that, contrary to the Bank of Canada Act, since 1974 the Bank of Canada and Canada’s monetary and financial policy have been dictated by private foreign banks and financial interests operating through the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Financial Stability Forum.[1]
COMER is legally represented by Rocco Galati. COMER "call[s] on our federal government to revive the powers of the Bank of Canada to provide funding to all levels of government in Canada, largely with interest-free loans, as was done between 1935 and 1975 with very low inflation, enabling our nation to break out of the Great Depression, to fulfill extraordinary responsibilities during World War II, and to prosper while building our infrastructure and highly valued social programs during some thirty post-war years. We Canadians now urgently need a renaissance of these powers of our Bank of Canada."[2]
