In the 1870's, party attitudes to Canada's nascent labour movement were clearly reflected in the federal legislation of successive Conservative and Liberal administrations. Especially was this true of the Trade Unions Act of 1872 and the Breaches of Contract Act of 1877. The bill concerning trade unions was guided through the House a few weeks before a federal general election by Sir John A. Macdonald, conscious of the special contribution it would make to the success of his National Policy. It was passed in response to organized labour's outspoken demands and in the face of George Brown's determined efforts to destroy trade unionism. The Breaches of Contract bill was driven through the Commons for no clear electoral purpose by Edward Blake and Alexander Mackenzie, conscious of the special contribution they could make to the success of the Grand Trunk Railway Company. It was passed in spite of labour fears and in the face of stiff opposition from Macdonald, Irving and other leading Conservative and Independent politicians. Whereas the famous Trade Unions Act asserted the right of all workers to organize and to strike, the less well-known Breaches of Contract Act denied the right to strike to all employees of public utilities. Thus the seventies, while witnessing some major federal legislation directly affecting Canada's young trade-union movement, also saw labour inevitably moving within the orbit of Macdonald's Conservative party.

The purpose of the paper is to provide more firmly based estimates of some aspects of Canadian population growth. In Part I estimates are derived of the natural increase in the Canadian population by decades from 1851 to 1931 based on survival rates derived from life tables. The figures on natural increase then permit the derivation of net migration estimates. In Part II new estimates of immigration are developed that, together with the net migration figures of Part I, yield estimates of emigration by decades. Part III tests some of the results by an examination of the limited information available on other aspects of Canada's economic development in the period.

The life table is a basic tool of population study. The most recent application of the life table to the problem of the reconstruction of Canadian population growth was made by Nathan Keyfitz. While the same method is used here, we feel that we have made more realistic assumptions in deriving a life table designed to represent the mortality characteristics of early Canadian populations.

This paper provides a reconciliation of the Marshallian and Slutsky theories of demand. Incidentally, it also demonstrates that vertically parallel indifference curves involve unitary price elasticity and clarifies Marshall's analysis of consumer's surplus.

In Figure 1 the consumer is assumed to be initially in equilibrium at A, where he purchases OA′ of X (a composite commodity) at a price of P, as indicated by price line FA, and devotes OM of his given money income to all uses, Y, other than expenditures on X. Thus Y represents dollars spent on all uses other than X. The price of X is then allowed to decrease to (P − ΔP) as indicated by price line FB and the quantity of X increases to (X + ΔX), or to OB′, while the price of Y remains constant at unity, and the quantity of Y decreases to ON. Since the consumer's money income remains constant, any change in the total amount spent on X must produce an equal and an opposite change in the total amount spent on all other goods. The change in the total amount spent on all other goods is defined as the difference between the amount spent on X in the initial position at A and that spent on X in the new position at B, or as:

.

In view of the approaching revision of the Bank Act in 1964, it may now be appropriate to re-examine contemporary opinion and practice concerning commercial bank capital. It is tempting to inquire whether there is an optimum ratio of capital to assets towards which commercial banks should aim. The traditional economic function of capital accounts has been to protect bank depositors against loss caused by depreciation of bank assets. “Bank capital is in effect a first line of deposit guarantee. Any supervisory standard for measuring capital adequacy should be expressed in terms of the function of bank capital. The function of bank capital is to protect the bank creditors, mostly depositors, against ultimate loss.”

Taking a literal view of this function, supervisory authorities in the United States came to apply a standard ratio of capital to deposits of 10 per cent; “there appears to be no scientific basis for this particular ratio. It is simply a good round decimal, easy to calculate at a glance.” Then, as the capital: asset ratio fell substantially with the increase of bank holdings of government securities, a capital: asset standard was suggested. Since losses result from asset depreciation, and bank assets do not all involve the same degree of risk, assets seemed a more relevant guide to capital requirements than deposits. Such an assets standard would not indicate a need for more capital until earning assets of some inherent risk were being acquired. Incidentally, if protection of assets were the accepted function of bank equity, it would only be that portion of capital funds in excess of fixed assets which would be relevant for the numerator.

Monetary policy in the United States since 1950 has involved the abdication of fairly traditional powers by the authorities and a retreat to an orthodoxy reminiscent of the earlier years of this century. In the course of this retreat the monetary (and fiscal) authorities have sought to reduce federal debt to a quasi-private character, while, in contrast, the government has elevated vast amounts of private debt to a quasi-federal status. It will be argued here that in the light of the changing institutional environment, the drive to monetary orthodoxy plus an undue preoccupation with inflation are in large measure responsible for making exasperatingly difficult the maintenance of orderly Treasury finances and may be self-defeating with respect to the control of inflation.

For our purposes, modern Federal Reserve policy has its roots in the bond support policy of the Second World War. Actions taken after the War until 1950 showed an attitude of increasing restiveness with that policy and involved “chipping away” at individual items in the policy. With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Federal Reserve relations with the Treasury, which sought to maintain a “pegged” market, reached a low point. In March, 1951, came the famous Accord, with virtually unconditional surrender by the Treasury in matters of the level and structure of interest rates. In 1952 came the revival of large-scale discounting and the fostering of its use by the authorities.

The principle of intra-party democracy underlying the so-called constitutional crisis within the Labour party in Great Britain—a struggle between the party conference and the parliamentary party over the creation of defence policy—has for some time been the subject of widespread discussion in academic journals and the “responsible press.” This paper examines the difficulties within the organization of the United Farmers of Ontario when intra-party democracy resulted in a clash between the parliamentary and mass sections of the party, and attempts to relate the implications of this study to the general question of the distribution of power in parties of extra-parliamentary origin.

The domination of the Legislative Assembly from 1919 to 1923 by an alliance of the United Farmers of Ontario and the Independent Labor party provided Ontario with its unique experience of “third-party” government. The suddenness of the intervention of these parties into the traditional order of Ontario's Conservative-Liberal politics was matched only by their equally rapid exit after less than four years of power. Standing as it did at the forefront of a wave of protesting third parties in the following two decades, the event is of considerable significance both for its contribution to a general understanding of the problems of third parties and for the opportunity it affords as a case study of farmer-labour co-operation. Although intra-party democracy was important for both members of the union, this paper deals with its effects on only one of the parties—the United Farmers.

In a recent paper, J. N. Wolfe has interpreted P. Sraffa as having exposed a logical inconsistency in Marshall's Principles of Economics. According to Wolfe, Sraffa interpreted Marshall as being concerned with perfect competition and yet as allowing his representative firm to possess unexhausted internal economies; he therefore believed that Marshall was inconsistent, for the two phenomena are incompatible. Wolfe himself interprets the Marshallian representative firm as an oligopoly model.

This note discusses the following points. First it will be shown that Marshall's model when discussing increasing returns and the representative firm involved neither perfect competition nor oligopoly but imperfect competition. Second, I shall argue that the representative firm was largely designed to describe the problems which exist when product differentiation is recognized but when the industry is retained as a meaningful concept. That is, Marshall faces the same difficulties as those faced by J. Robinson and E. Chamberlin, but his solution involves a different approach. This is not to suggest that there was no need for the Robinson and Chamberlin volumes; indeed their appearance, together with Sraffa's article, reflected the unsatisfactory state in which Marshall left his analysis on this topic. Third, it follows from our interpretation that for Marshall the representative firm was a structure of the mind, a tool of analysis, and not a real firm. To clarify his views, I reproduce certain passages from which it is clear that he is not guilty of logical inconsistency either in the case of actual firms, or in the case of the representative firm.

Historians will probably mark the 1950's as the period in which the economists' two-decade preoccupation with stability gave way to a revival of their long-run and continuing preoccupation with economic growth. If they do, they will be under obligation to explain the coincidence of economists' renewed interest in growth and the economic affluence attained by those societies which produced most of them. Why should economists of the Western world assign primacy to growth and at the same time voice concern that most of their fellow citizens already earn larger incomes than they can dispose of intelligently? An obvious explanation, but not necessarily a full explanation, is that in the mid-twentieth century economists have become very much aware of the political interdependency of nations. The growing economic strength of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and the poverty and illiteracy of new African and Asian nations, not the low income of Mississippi dirt farmers, Belgian coal miners, and Sicilian fruit pickers, spark the interest of Western economists in economic growth. Growth rates otherwise sufficient to produce consumer affluence in Western countries may not in prevailing political circumstances assure this affluence and adequate defence, supremacy in space technology, and large aid programmes to underdeveloped countries.

The first report of the Borden Commission appeared in October, 1958. It dealt with the transmission, export and regulation of natural gas, and with the financing of Trans-Canada Pipe Lines Limited. Very little was said about the transportation and export of crude oil. This second report is designed to fill the gap. It deals with “the policies which the Commission believes will best serve the national interest in relation to the export of crude oil and the marketing of crude oil within Canada itself.”

On the model of their first report, the Commissioners start out by comparing reserves and potential output with future Canadian needs. But while they could regard natural gas as a limited stock of energy avidly desired by the United States market, they soon found that Canadian crude, like Canadian coal, had become excessively abundant. The United States and the rest of the world were so far from scheming to get hold of Canadian crude oil that they might even have been relieved if Canada had never found it. Even while the Commission sat, the situation deteriorated further. Those who sought approval of Canada's recently gained export markets along the Transprovincial pipeline in the American middle west, and in the Puget Sound area on the west coast, were replaced by those pleading for new Canadian markets to replace a falling export demand.

The Report of the Advisory Commission on the Review of the Constitution of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Monckton Commission, will undoubtedly be a document of historic significance. Not only will its findings be certain to affect the destinies of the seven and a half million inhabitants of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; not only does it form yet another in the long series of stepping stones of liberal imperialism leading to the creative abdication of imperial responsibilities; but the assumptions it starts from and the appeal it makes for a partnership between the races will also be important for the future relations between black and white in all Africa.

The Monckton Commission was established in 1959 at the instigation of the British government, to advise that government, the federal government of the Central African Federation and the three territorial governments of Southern and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland on future constitutional developments. Led by Lord Monckton, a distinguished former British cabinet minister, the Commission was composed of members appointed by these governments. The importance of the constitutional review was emphasized by the selection of a Canadian and an Australian to sit on the Commission. Professor D. G. Creighton of the University of Toronto was invited by the British government to serve as the member from Canada.