When the executive committee of the Canadian Social Science Research Council met in Ottawa on September 6, 1957, concern regarding the future programme and policy of the Council led it to establish a special committee with Professor S. D. Clark as chairman to give consideration to the kind of support for research which Canadian social scientists appeared to need most. To aid the committee in its task, Professor Clark was asked to visit as many of the universities of Canada as possible. Visits were made to the universities of New Brunswick, Mount Allison, Dalhousie, Saint Mary’s, Acadia, Saint Francis Xavier, Memorial, Laval, McGill, Montreal, Queen’s, Ottawa, Carleton, McMaster, Western, Assumption, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, and to United College and Victoria College. In addition, interviews were arranged with two persons from each of the following institutions: Regina College, Brandon College, and Bishop’s University. The report of the committee was presented to the Council at a special meeting on November 30. In view of the interest which the report aroused, Professor Clark was asked at the meeting to prepare for publication a paper setting forth some of the ideas and thoughts which had found expression in his report to the Council. The paper he prepared is now published as a special supplement to the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, the costs of publication being met by a grant from the Canadian Social Science Research Council. To the University of Toronto which kindly released Professor Clark from his teaching duties during the Fall Term, 1957, and to Professor Clark himself, the Council is deeply indebted.

Ghana is the first truly African state to emerge from colonial status. Her attitude towards and relations with the Western powers and the Communist bloc are, therefore, of considerable importance both in themselves and as indications of the policies other independent African nations are likely to pursue. While Ghana’s foreign policy is still not fully defined, the broad pattern which is emerging is sufficiently discernible to merit discussion.

The present position was defined by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah on the eve of Independence. “We of Ghana feel,” the Prime Minister declared, and has since repeated,

that at this stage our country should not be committed in any aspect of its foreign policy and that it should not be aligned with any particular group of powers or political bloc. At the same time, our new state does not intend to follow a neutralist policy in its foreign policy. It is our intention to preserve our independence and to act as we see best at any particular time.

The same view was expressed more succinctly in June, when it was stated that “Ghana will neither join any power bloc nor maintain a blind policy of neutrality and non-alignment.” These formulations of Ghanaian policy are deliberately vague. They do, however, admirably fulfil the pressing need which every country feels of having a foreign policy of its own, and at the same time they leave the Government free to pursue almost any particular course of action it might later choose.

Since the appearance of annual estimates of gross national expenditure and its components, their use has dominated the analysis of Canadian business fluctuations. They provide the most comprehensive picture of the value and volume of those goods and services, currently produced and consumed, which have passed through the market place. The national accounts have been adapted to analyses of the relationship between the Canadian economy and the economies of the United Kingdom and the United States, particularly of the latter. Interest in these relationships existed for many years before national income accounting became available, but its development certainly gave the problem new focus.

The use of national accounts for cyclical analysis has given rise to two problems. The first is that attention in Canada has focused on the period since 1926. There has been great emphasis accordingly on the Great Depression, its transmission to and impact on the economy. This cyclical experience has dominated the recent thinking of Canadian economists quite apart from the crises and misery which it brought. After all it is the one cyclical movement which stands out clearly in the national accounts. Furthermore, the experience of 1929-32 presented an unusual combination of circumstances. Nothing like it in duration or extent had occurred since the 1870’s. To base much of the analysis of Canadian business cycles on this one downturn, however major it might have been, and to draw implications for policy therefrom, could easily put public and private decision-making on an inadequate and misleading foundation.

“In politics the thing to do is build yourself an army.” The remark is attributed to the late Jimmy Hines, a successful Tammany Hall politician of the 1930's. In June, 1945, half way between the Regina Manifesto and the Winnipeg Declaration, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, at the head of the largest army in its history, prepared for the reward of virtue and patience—power in Ottawa and Ontario. The problems of building that army and then maintaining it under the adverse conditions following June, 1945, constitute the theme of this paper.

In its first decade the C.C.F. had successfully welded a united, national organization out of a federation of parties and groups along a social-democrat and agrarian-protest spectrum. The absence of a New Deal party gave the “movement,” as its members still call it, its opportunity. Its central bond was a common hatred of capitalism, allegedly responsible for the depression and its accompanying hardships. It was, however, less than unanimous about the remedy. The Regina Manifesto of 1933, the party’s initial declaration of faith and intentions, was framed in the social democratic tradition. “No CCF government,” it concluded, “will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism.” But no statement of policy could ever avert the inevitable debate on “how far” and “how fast” socialism should be implemented.

The topography of C.C.F. beliefs can be roughly charted by identifying its closest friends and mentors and its ideological boundaries on the “right” and “left.” Its chief, though not unanimous, favourites have always been the Labour and Social Democratic parties of the Commonwealth, Scandinavia, and especially Great Britain. Its supporters ranged all the way from people who were made uneasy by talk of socialism despite endless assurances, to those drawn enviously to the glamour of revolutionary intrigue and virile, uncompromising militancy which they associated with Communism and Trotskyism. While these ‘left wingers” pressed the leaders constantly to declare themselves on the questions of “how far” and “how fast,” the great majority entrusted these matters to the leaders and concentrated instead on building the organization.

The subject of this paper is the economic analysis of the alienation of natural resources, by which is meant not only the disposal of a resource by outright sale but also the disposal of rights, perhaps for a limited period, to exploit, perhaps in a limited fashion, one or more of the natural resources of a specified area. In order to illustrate current procedures and their trends, I begin by describing very briefly the methods by which enterprises obtain rights from the province of British Columbia to exploit resources. (Readers interested only in analysis may wish to skip this first section.) In the next sections I discuss the contribution economic theory can make to an appraisal of methods of alienation; then, in the light of this discussion, I suggest a few desiderata in policy.

Since provinces are fairly free to make their own policies on alienation, procedures differ from region to region. Before the procedures followed in British Columbia are outlined, it should be emphasized that the more complete and absolute alienation to private ownership, the more the rights of the province shrink to the regulation of industry, collection of taxes, and other general powers enumerated in the British North America Act. It should also be kept in mind that the administration of natural gas and petroleum carried across provincial boundaries, of fisheries, and of rivers that cross the international boundary may be affected by both federal and American regulations and laws.

Agricultural land. Some land is alienated by pre-emption but in most cases it is sold on a first-come-first-served basis after survey and some development work by the government. On alienation, the land generally passes into private ownership, though mineral and water rights are reserved.

Fisheries. Anyone may fish, on conditions imposed mainly by the federal government.

Although the birth-rate has declined in all Western nations since the middle of the nineteenth century, the decline has not been equal among the various groups that compose their population. Measures of fertility for national units conceal differences in the fertility of the many distinct groups in urban-industrial societies. Changes in the pattern of these differences are of particular significance in the later stages of the demographic transition from high to low birth-rates and death-rates which the Western world has undergone in the past century. Changes in the birth-rate rather than in the death-rate are the main determinants of growth in societies where mortality has been brought under control by modern medicine and public health practices.

Demographers have often treated differential fertility as a special, virtually autonomous subject instead of viewing it in the broad historical context of the Western demographic transition. In fact, as J. W. Innes has pointed out, few studies have been made of trends in differential fertility by comparison with the numerous studies which simply establish the existence of group differences in fertility at a single point in time. The present paper is concerned with class differences—probably the most pervasive of all group differences in advanced societies. The attempt is made to gather together by historical period the available data on trends in class differences in fertility for several Western countries in order to present a systematic picture of the way in which these differences have evolved in modern times.

The problem of dividing a population into socio-economic classes that are genuinely distinct from one another in a sociologically meaningful sense has been widely discussed by sociologists. Demographers, however, usually work with official data which provide only limited information on the characteristics of populations. They are, therefore, unable to employ the more refined indices of class developed by sociologists and are forced to use as indices such relatively simple objective attributes as income, occupation, or education.

This article attempts to describe the process of election as it occurred in one Canadian constituency in the federal general election of June 10, 1957. Since it would be foolish to generalize on the basis of one example, no effort is made to draw conclusions. The article is expository and intended only to illumine one of the unexamined corners of Canadian political science after the fashion of Larzarsfeld’s work on the 1948 American election and the valuable constituency studies contained in Butler’s book on the British election of 1951.

Constituency X is a large residential electoral district, part of which lies within Metropolitan Toronto. Brought into being by the Redistribution Act of 1952, the riding grew quickly because of the flight to the suburbs and the rapid growth of Toronto. Between 1951 and 1956 the population more than doubled, from 72,117 to 167.310. The huge size of the constituency and its swift increase presented a challenge in organization that is worth noting in itself.

The task rested in the hands of a woman who had served as returning officer in the previous election also. For the 1957 election she began in October, 1956, to make preparations for taking the vote and by the following April she was giving all her working hours to the job. For the three months immediately preceding the election she had a full-time assistant and two part-time workers helping her. The extent of the operations involved can be gathered from the statistics. Enumerating the riding required the appointment of 636 enumerators and the assignment to them of 318 election kits containing about a dozen items each. In addition to supervising the drawing up, posting, and revision of the lists of electors, who totalled 104,000, the returning officer was also responsible for splitting the constituency into 318 polling divisions, for establishing 427 polling stations, and for appointing a deputy returning officer and an election clerk in each. On voting day, with a staff of four people, she tabulated the 74,995 votes cast and was among the first to report results.

Throughout its history the Canada Post Office has faced substantially the same set of problems but the emphasis has shifted. For instance, technology, which formerly was mainly related to the use of railways and then of automobiles and airplanes, is now concentrated on the problem of sorting mail by electronic means. At one time the Post Office devoted much attention to extending postal services to all parts of Canada, however remote. Now it is increasingly concerned with providing service intensively, that is, with giving door-to-door delivery in suburban areas and in every community of 5,000 or more people. Postal authorities and the general public have always been interested in the relative rates on letters, magazines, advertising circulars, and parcels, as well as in the allied question of a surplus or deficit on the operation of the Post Office as a whole. In the last few years rising wage-rates and rapid growth in the volume of second- and third-class mail have made the matter of pricing for postal services more significant than ever before. This article deals first with the history of the Canada Post Office and then with problems of the postal service which remain unsolved.

Before 1851, all postal services in British North America were ultimately controlled by the Postmaster General in London. Even after the reforms of Rowland Hill, the Postmaster General’s policy for the colonies was to secure a profit which was remitted to Britain. After the colonies assumed control they rapidly increased the number of offices and the milage of postal routes. Internal postage rates, which had averaged 18 cents per half ounce and were graduated for distance, became uniformly 2d. sterling or 5 cents anywhere in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada. The colonists bore the resultant deficits without much complaint.

Despite the considerable influence exercised on North American historians by what Professor Careless has called “frontierism,” those who have dealt with the early history of the North Pacific have been almost unanimous in finding in metropolitan institutions the key to developments in that area. The usual interpretation is based on the hypothesis of a sharp competition for the North Pacific trade in furs between various forms of enterprise, each of which mirrored the institutions of the metropolis which had spawned it—a semi-government Russian corporation, government-directed Spanish enterprise (or lack of it), British enterprise almost hopelessly handicapped by obsolete trad¬ing institutions, and unrestricted (free) Yankee enterprise, with an occasional genuflection towards a similarly “free” enterprise based on Montreal but handicapped by the British connection. In that competition, it is alleged, the handicaps of government regulation precluded successful Russian, Spanish, or British competition with the “free enterprise” of the New Englander, and this, coupled with his superior resourcefulness and shrewdness—by-products, apparently, of the institutions of his particular metropolis—enabled him to dominate the North Pacific trade in furs.

While this interpretation may “validate the status” of one metropolis and at the same time “denigrate that of others”—the purpose, Leach suggests,2 of national myths and legends—it appears to be founded on caricatures of the forms of enterprise there, and on some lack of appreciation of the global setting in which the trade was carried on. Those caricatures, it would seem, derive from a focusing of attention on particular, and allegedly deplorable, elements of the metropolitanism of Spain or Russia or Britain, and from the assumption that, despite the remoteness of the frontier, those elements com¬pletely dominated the enterprise of the various competitors. The failure to achieve a proper perspective of the place of the North Pacific in the overseas thrust of European powers probably derives from a lack of appreciation of ends other than business profits and of the existence of alternative oppor¬tunities for such profits.