About eighteen months ago I had begun to fear that Canada might come out of the war with too low rather than too high a price level. I felt that if production and employment averaged little or no higher after the war than before it, and if prices were no higher than in 1944, the national money income would sink to the point where federal revenues would develop an enormous chronic deficit of, say, 30 to 50 per cent of current expenditures. Such might be the outcome, no matter how high the rates of taxation employed. Ultimately deficits of so great a size would lead to an expansion of bank credit and hence to a higher price level, but in the meantime the country would experience a demoralizing series of political and financial crises resembling those in France between 1920 and 1927. In the design of high policy I felt that care should be taken to avoid such an outcome, which would leave our political system and our social structure greatly weakened.

That the quantity of money in use by the community tends to rise and fall as the level of prices does, is (I believe) universally admitted. “The Quantity Theory of Money,” said J. M. Keynes in his Tract on Monetary Reform, “states that the amount of cash which the community requires, assuming certain habits of business and of banking to be established, and assuming also a given level and distribution of wealth, depends on the level of prices.” He might perhaps have added, as a summary of the discussion which with these words he introduces, “and vice versa.” Lord Keynes's own formulation of the dependence, n = p(k + rk′), expresses by way of a snapshot what Fisher's celebrated equation, MV + M′V’ = PT, expresses by way of a moving picture; that, the community's business and banking habits being assumed on the one hand, and on the other, the extent and distribution of its wealth, the quantity of money and the level of prices are proportional to one another. Open to argument remain such details as: how to define the quantity of money; and, whereby to measure the level of prices; and, how to judge of such changes in business and banking habits, or in the extent and distribution of wealth, as may change the quantity of money though prices were to stay constant, or raise or lower the price level though the quantity of money were kept unchanged.

The historic controversy over the “rights of the subject” has again come into public prominence and gives evidence of being here to stay for a considerable period. The occasion of the new interest in the topic was apparently the notable departure from customary procedures in the espionage cases, but once attention was directed to the issue additional grounds for grave anxiety were found in the treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses in the province of Quebec. It would be a mistake, however, to consider that these particular examples of the invasion of civil liberties reveal a novel form of arbitrary conduct in Canadian government. The essential conditions of the situation have been present in most parts of the country for many years, though generally unobserved and unchallenged. Indeed, the current alarm might easily have been dissipated and the recent events might have been a warning only to the most sensitive if those responsible had expressed the least nominal regret at their mistakes.

The literature of scientific studies, either demographic, economic, or sociological, on Canadian families, is rather thin. Except for some valuable local monographs and theses interred in university libraries, one must rely almost exclusively on excellent but very few general studies of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Among such are the 1931 Census monograph on the Canadian family, the 1937-8 national survey on the Canadian family income and expenditure pattern and, more recently, the remarkable series of studies by Dr. Enid Charles on the trends and differences in Canadian family size as revealed by the last Census of 1941.

The French-speaking part of Canada geographically concentrated in the Province of Quebec represents, within the Canadian context, a culturally and politically conscious social structure. At present, this society, owing to rapid industrialization and concomitant adjustments, includes areas and communities of all the possible transitional shades from the solid, old-settled, rural type, to the more complex, dynamic, and urbanized variety. Studies of French-Canadian families in any of these differentiated areas are also scarce. The traditional type of French-Canadian rural family has been ably studied by the Canadian sociologist follower of the Le Play School of Social Science, Léon Gérin, especially in his monograph entitled the Habitant de Saint-Justin. More recently, Horace Miner scientifically analysed for the first time, the relationships between land and the family in rural Quebec. Both of these studies stress the following basic features of the traditional rural French-Canadian family: a high degree of familism and of internal solidarity, a fundamental functional relationship with the tenure system of large family-ownership of the farm as well as with a peculiar pattern of land inheritance which consists in the passing of the whole farm, undivided, to only one inheriting son in each family.

It has been a truism that the distribution of income is relatively fixed. The slope of the Pareto curve of income may change slightly in the various stages of the business cycle; but it oscillates about a norm, it does not fluctuate at random. It conforms itself to relative productivity.

Relative income is important socially as well as economically. Income is one of the major yardsticks by which people establish themselves in a social hierarchy; and any attempt to alter the income pattern may be expected to produce serious disturbances. The new situation can persist only if the relative supplies of labour of different grades are correspondingly altered. Otherwise unemployment may be expected.

The distribution of income among wage-earners has been sharply altered since 1939. There was a very strong tendency to give wage increases as so many cents per hour and not as a given percentage of the previous wage. The cost of living bonus was so designed; and its pattern was followed by the large industrial unions when they demanded further wage increases. The total of increases given in this fashion was large enough to narrow sharply the percentage spreads between the skilled and the unskilled occupations. The present situation is one of unstable equilibrium and the study which follows attempts to measure the degree of distortion in the wage structure and therefore to indicate how much change must be made in it before it is again normal. The broad fact is clear; all that can be claimed for this paper is that it helps to give precision to what is now vague common knowledge.

This article is an attempt to evolve an administrative technique for Dominion-provincial co-operation in the social services—with particular reference to public health—within the framework or confines of the existing British North America Act of 1867.

The recent war has brought the need for social services into sharp relief. The realization has finally dawned that in the complex society in which we live, a comprehensive programme of social progress is now essential, but such a programme must necessarily be nation-wide, since we can no longer afford disparities in the social services on account of the serious reactions such disparities have on the general welfare and national unity of the country. To develop such a national system of public welfare services, it is vitally necessary that the Dominion should extend its influence, leadership, and activity, but here we are at once confronted with the vexed—and, as yet, unsolved—problem of Dominion-provincial relations. Valiant attempts have been made to solve this problem, but two main obstacles still obstruct all efforts.