The history of uranium mining in Canada can be divided into four phases or periods, each marked by distinctive policies and by events and activities resulting therefrom. The initial phase is marked by the development of a mining and refining operation and the establishment of a market by a private enterprise. It begins with the discovery in 1930 by Gilbert Labine and E. C. St. Paul of a radio-active occurrence at Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, which they staked for Eldorado Gold Mining Company. It ends with the entry in 1942 of the Dominion government as the dominant body in the production and marketing of radio-active minerals. By 1932 the Port Radium mine had commenced operations, and in the following year a refinery for producing radium had been completed at Port Hope, Ontario. The mine was essentially a silver-radium mine, but the complex ore-body also contained uranium, copper, and cobalt. It was the first commercial body of ore found in Canada from which radium could be extracted. It kept alive a certain interest in radio-active minerals among prospectors and successfully challenged the Belgian monopoly in the world radium market. Although it remained a small and unprofitable undertaking throughout this phase, its existence accounted for Canada's emergence as the main supplier of the raw material, in the form of uranium, for the development of the atomic bomb.

The way the Franco-American views the issues, candidates and the parties largely determines the vote in at least thirty cities and towns in New England. Though constituting about 12 per cent of the region's inhabitants and considered by some as the most unassimilable of all the ethnic groups in the area, the Franco-Americans have not enjoyed the same degree of attention from students of politics that larger, more widely distributed ethnic minorities have received. But a brief survey of their political past and of their vote in the 1960 presidential election will demonstrate that the French provide an excellent case study in ethnic politics.

Migration and other processes swelled the Franco-American population of New England from an estimated 150,000 in 1850, to 400,000 in 1880, to 800000 by 1908. Though some influx occurred in subsequent decades, especially in Maine, the great migration from French Canada ended by the turn of the century. Overpopulation, a dwindling supply of good agricultural land, and the absence of a good transportation system to the Canadian northwest were the reasons for this exodus southward. Most of the emigrés settled in New England's smaller cities and larger towns, and became textile, leather, or paper-mill workers.

A transformation in the pattern of consumer expenditures has occurred in the nations that have reached high income levels during the past century. Smaller fractions of national income are spent on food, clothing, and shelter; larger fractions on recreation, medical care, education, and luxury goods. Cross-sectional studies of family budgets have been fairly reliable indicators of this trend. As early as 1857 Ernst Engel had pronounced his famous law about food expenditures on the basis of Edouard Ducpetiaux's Belgian budget studies. Similar assertions by others about clothing, fuel, and shelter followed; and in 1919 William Ogburn published his statistics of Washington, D.C., family budgets, indicating, in effect, that income elasticities of demand were highest for amusement and education. As the pattern slowly emerged, economists were not much disturbed. Why should consumers not be left alone in choosing between carrots and bedrooms? Interference with choices among luxury goods and services seemed even less warranted. Advertising posed no problem beyond encouragement of elementary veracity.

In the past decade, however, this unconcern has faded. Several economists have joined sociologists, moralists, and general philosophers in questioning trends in consumer expenditures. Their concern is less with morals and social repercussions than with optimum consumption patterns in terms of economic value and resource allocation. Advertising in particular is no longer reproached merely for a bent towards mendacity. It is seen as more insidious, as manipulating consumers' choices by kindling subconscious anxieties. It puts consumers in a squirrel cage in which production and the want-satisfying process create wants that would otherwise not exist.

This paper is an attempt to describe developments in the European hatting industry as a background to the evolution of the North American beaver trade. Most studies of the fur trade trace the movement of the furs no further than the fur market; interest is centred on production and marketing with insufficient attention directed to the ultimate sources of the demand. Vague references to style changes usually suffice as explanations of long-run demand movements. There were, however, certain technological discoveries and evolutions in hat-making which underlie both the style changes and the long-run demand fluctuations. My intent is to examine these developments and to relate them to the Canadian fur trade.

The cornerstone of this essay is L'Art de faire des chapeaux, by M. I'Abbé Nollet, published at Paris in 1765. This mid-eighteenth century work examines the sources of raw materials, the methods of production, and the history of the French hatting industry. In order to understand the industrial background against which this book was written and to explain several of the references Nollet makes, it is necessary to begin with a history of the felt hat industry. In sketching this history I have drawn extensively on other sources. Some of the hypotheses advanced in Section I may be open to question; the evidence upon which they are based is fragmentary, and I have had to content myself with material in secondary sources. In later parts of the paper I shall compare L'Art de faire des chapeaux with the article on hatting in Diderot's Encyclopedia published in 1753.

The concept of a corporation was familiar to the first settlers in Canada, both French and English. The Company of New France and the Hudson's Bay Company are examples of the importance of trading companies in our early economic development. Moreover, colonial legislatures incorporated several dozen companies by special acts before deciding to allow companies to come into being without each one having to go directly to Parliament for its own charter. But a companies act which would permit companies to be expeditiously incorporated for manufacturing, trading, mining, and other ordinary kinds of business was not evolved without some experimentation, a good deal of borrowing from other jurisdictions, and the creation of two rather special methods of our own.

Until about 1850, the principle of limited liability was not generally accepted either in Canada, Britain, or most of the United States. Even as late as 1862 Nova Scotia's “Act for the incorporation and winding-up of Joint Stock Companies” (25 Vict. c. 2) forbade the incorporation of companies for “ordinary, mercantile and commercial business.” Legislators were afraid that a company might purchase excessive amounts of merchandise on credit and so take unfair advantage of its creditors, as individual traders often did during the nineteenth century.

Limited liability was permitted for banks, but only on certain conditions. In Canada, bank shareholders were usually liable for twice the par value of their stock and bank charters were valid for only ten years, so that periodically the government could review and perhaps amend the pertinent statutes.

There have been a number of ambitious studies on an international scale in recent years attempting to identify and compare “industry patterns” or “national patterns” of industrial conflict in different countries. Outstanding among these have been two analytical surveys, “The Inter-Industry Propensity to Strike,” by Kerr and Siegel, and Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict, by Ross and Hartman. One of the findings in this latter study, incidentally, was that, among the fifteen countries surveyed, there has been a relatively high incidence of strikes in Canada—second only to the United States, in fact.

This paper is based on the premise that, in Canada, the individual province, or perhaps better, the region, is the most fruitful unit for studying such phenomena as industrial conflict. For regional differences in several respects are more pronounced in Canada than in most comparably industrialized countries, so that the portrayal of behaviour patterns in terms of national averages or configurations can lead to highly misleading conclusions.

British Columbia, next only to Quebec, perhaps, offers a particularly interesting area for research in this field, because it is a separate and distinct industrial complex, and has experienced patterns of industrial conflict that differ markedly in certain important respects from other major regions of the country.

It is not my intention, however, to emphasize the unique or special features of the labour scene in British Columbia. The field of industrial relations in general has suffered too much already, perhaps, from a plethora of detailed descriptive studies of matters of purely local scope and interest.

In a previous article in this Journal, I discussed the prospects for the stabilization of democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany. I considered the factors which I thought to be favourable, and then noted certain problematic features inherent in both the constitutional structure of the Federal Republic and in the political praxis—the “unwritten constitution”—as it has developed under the chancellorship of Konrad Adenauer. Some of these danger points will be the subject of the present paper. Our concern will be with certain structural weaknesses which are, so to speak, built into the system of government, structural features which are independent of issues and ideologies.

A brief commentary on certain recent events will serve as background for our discussion. In the election campaign of 1961 one observed a rather desperate attempt by the Social Democrats (SPD) to broaden their support among the intellectuals and the petite bourgeoisie, and also the farmers, by modifying their economic programme to such an extent that very little was left of specifically socialistic propositions. Marx was relegated to history; the party made it very clear that it is no longer a Marxist party. No longer does the party demand socialization of the “means of production” except in cases where private enterprise cannot meet the needs of the community. On the contrary, as a major “plank” in its election platform, it advocates a wider distribution of property by a new scheme of profit-sharing. In its foreign policy the party has abandoned its former proposals for gradually intensified contacts with the East German regime, and in striving for a “joint foreign policy” has come very close to the course of the Adenauer government.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the behaviour of the rate of increase in the money stock as a leading indicator of the Canadian economy over the period 1924–58. The study was suggested by work done by Milton Friedman for the United States showing that changes in the rate of increase in the stock of money lead changes in economic activity. Section I presents the theoretical framework underlying the concept of “leading monetary indicator.” Section II presents the specific cycles of the seasonally adjusted rate of change in the Canadian stock of money and the relation of this series to Canadian reference cycles. Section III presents the conclusions. An appendix discusses the sources of the Canadian stock of money and its components.

The quantity theory of money is the theoretical framework underlying the “leading monetary indicator” approach. This theory argues that the stock of money is an important determinant of economic activity. On this view individual non-bank holders of money cannot change its nominal quantity, but they can in the aggregate change the real value of their cash balances. Thus, holders of money may decide that they are holding excessive cash balances which they may individually attempt to reduce by an increase in their rate of spending. In the aggregate, however, they cannot do so for the money disposed of by one holder will be acquired by another so that the nominal stock of money will remain unchanged. The attempts by holders of money to reduce their nominal cash balances will raise the flow of expenditures and so money income and prices.