Some confusion regarding the present position ot the Canadian wheat economy is inevitable if one reads the newspapers at all. One press report will suggest a temporary lull in the almost monotonous prosperity in which the prairies are said to have basked for the last ten years or more; another suggests blue ruin and a return to the hungry thirties. The Toronto Globe and Mail, viewing the essentially simple economic and social phenomena of the hinterland as from a metropolitan eminence, attempted a compromise some weeks ago in a cartoon showing a horde of embattled western farmers descending on Ottawa demanding justice and parity in a fleet of Cadillacs. Yet the gibe seems a bit unfair at a time when the wheat farmer does not know where his next Cadillac is coming from. All this may suggest that an effort is necessary to find some middle path between the unfailing optimism of the Minister of Trade and Commerce, whose department and board have in their custody and care the disposition and sale of our wheat, on the one hand, and the almost unrelieved pessimism of certain other V.I.P.'s and the Interprovincial Farm Union Council on the other.

If there are problems facing the prairie economy today they can hardly be charged either to reckless expansion of wheat acreage or to improvident gambling on high prices for wheat in the world market. Perhaps it is prairie experience with the heavy human and capital losses of prolonged depression, through the thirties and early forties, which explains why the wheat grower seems to have put so much emphasis on stability in the post-war period.

In reviewing the literature on the purpose and administration of the combines and anti-trust legislation for this paper, it became apparent that there were topics very close to the core of the matter which, although they were separately the subject of exhaustive analysis, were rarely brought face to face; nor were the problems involved in their integration fully probed. Recent developments in economic theory and differences of approach on the part of lawyers and economists, to mention only two areas of potential discord, may create issues that are attributed to quite different sources. Neither time nor personal competence will permit a detailed exploration of this important subject. Nevertheless, a brief survey of some of the issues that often lie submerged in our discussions of combines matters may serve as a useful background for the more detailed review that follows.

The difference in the approach of lawyers and economists to the problems of monopoly and restraints of trade was the subject of a recent paper by Dr. Jesse W. Markham, then Acting Director of the Bureau of Industrial Economics of the Federal Trade Commission. Basically, legal and economic disciplines are regarded as being oriented toward different sets of values and sometimes differently toward the same set of values.

Economics [Dr. Markham said] is concerned largely with fundamental social phenomena and with the laws of human behaviour by which man brings order to economic activity. The law, on the other hand, is concerned with formal rules enforceable in the courts. The law, on the other hand, is concerned with formal rules enforceable in the courts. Thus, the economist views the competitive enterprise system as a particular form of economic organization … while the legal mind views it as a set of rights and obligations related to private property, contracts, and other aspects of business as expressed in the formal law. In brief, economics is oriented toward fundamental relationships among men and business firms; while the law is simply the accepted rules of conduct for such relationships.

The object of combines policy is to preserve effective competition by reducing the monopolistic attributes of markets, industries, or industry-market complexes. Neither effective competition nor monopolistic attributes can be measured without ambiguity. Efforts to protect the former and dispose of the latter cannot be evaluated by the customary criterion of economic efficiency, namely, the ratio of the quantity of competition preserved–or of monopolistic elements removed–to the quantity of resources devoted to the purpose.

The following, then, is a collection of qualitative comments, rather than an evaluation. The amount of resources devoted to combines policy is taken as given. The manner in which they have been used is considered on the premise that there are always some markets in which competition can be made more effective by public intervention. The resources in question are those of the Combines Branch of the Department of Justice. While the entire policy includes also the work of the Minister of Justice, of the Attorneys General of the several provinces, and of the courts, in this paper attention is mainly directed to some of the reports prepared under the authority of the Combines Investigation Act since the end of the Second World War. The choice of markets where the threat to competition must be checked, and of remedies by which the threat is to be reduced, has a bearing on the effectiveness of combines policy.

Experience, not design, first confronted me with contrasts in the roles of clergymen, teachers, and psychiatrists. On second thoughts these contrasts seemed theoretically important. Their importance will here be assessed on the basis of a tradition of developing thought that as such must, however, be taken for granted. Still, the concrete observations from which this essay takes its departure, as well as the conditions under which they were made and initially interpreted, need prior attention. Subsequently various theoretical proposals will then have their proper balance in material that at best can illustrate them. Rigorous assessment must, as usual, come later still.

For four years I was on the staff of “a mental health project,” called the Human Relations Service, as a sociologist. It was the intention of this project to extend the traditional patterns of psychiatric practice and to gather relevant knowledge about matters of emotional balance to be found in a town of 20 thousand fairly well-to-do people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The staff of the project included psychiatrists, a psychiatric social worker, clinical psychologists, and various social scientists. Administratively the H.R.S. was linked with the community through an executive committee the chairman of which was the local Unitarian minister. The project, in other words, was committed to research as well as service, including short-term psychotherapy.

Ground rent for provincial forest land in Ontario, dating back as it does to the mid-nineteenth century, is among the earliest means whereby the provincial government has sought and obtained revenues from the forest. As this charge on licensees of Crown timber-lands has been established for so long, it is pertinent to review its history and to record its place in the annual revenues yielded by the province's forests over the past century.

These annual forest revenues have in the past come chiefly from stumpage—the price paid for timber cut on Crown lands. Forest revenues have also included, besides ground rent, bonuses paid by licensees in order to acquire their limits at auction from the Crown, tolls for the use of certain timber slides built by the government, and small sums collected as penalties for trespass and other infractions of the law. Slide tolls ceased to form a part of provincial revenues after Confederation as they were then collected by the Dominion government. Today the province's revenue from the Department of Lands and Forests comes from a variety of sources. For comparison with the forest revenue of early days, forest revenue in this study is equated with the revenue of the Department's Division of Timber Management. This includes stumpage—the chief component and now comprising Crown dues and the Crown evaluation and bonus payments—ground rent, fire tax, mill licence fees, certain payments for scalers, and sundry other small items.

Ten years ago, almost to the day, a memorandum describing the conceptual framework of Canada's National Accounts was presented at a special session of the annual meeting of this Association held in Kingston and its substance appeared soon afterwards as chapter 1 of the first of the series of publications on the National Accounts, Income and Expenditure issued by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. The present occasion therefore marks the tenth anniversary of Canada's National Accounts, and it seems appropriate to commemorate it with something of a stock-taking and a glimpse into the future. We have been prompted to undertake this task not merely by reasons of sentiment but primarily by a very practical consideration. For various reasons noted below, the Bureau is commencing work on a revised volume of the National Accounts which it plans to release two years from now. We hope that the present discussion will help to make this document as useful as possible by promoting a cross-fertilization of ideas between the users and producers of the data.

However, not all the matters discussed here will be incorporated in the forthcoming volume. Indeed much of the work in progress described here is developmental and will take many years to complete. Furthermore, some matters to be discussed are still speculative and hypothetical, introduced primarily to illustrate interesting possibilities which may or may not take the form of published statistical series. It is difficult to draw the line clearly or with confidence in all cases but we hope that, in general, it will appear from the context which parts are likely to be included in the forthcoming report, which parts represent developmental work that eventually will see the light of day, and which parts have a more uncertain fate.