Eighty years after his death, judgments of Disraeli tend to focus on two opposing impressions. One of them derives from the portrait which he created of himself in his own lifetime. Striving as he did to exaggerate his personality in social and public life, he inevitably left the impression of being too much the opportunist ever to be sincere. The word “charlatan” was attached to him before he was out of his twenties, and he never completely outgrew it. When he was in his forties even a maverick like Lord Brougham felt free to point him out on the street as “the greatest blackguard in England.” What annoyed so many of his contemporaries was not simply that Disraeli was a Jew or an upstart, but that he did not accept the moral patterns of English politics. He seemed always too ready to make alignments beyond the fixed boundaries of party, and to use even his conservatism as a means towards personal power and fame. Dislike of him on this ground existed in various quarters from earnest statesmen like Bright, Gladstone, and Shaftesbury on the one hand, to Tory aristocrats like Derby and Salisbury on the other. By the end of his life there had developed also the criticism that his political career had been essentially a failure. Walter Bagehot, for example, wrote in 1876 that Disraeli possessed an inaccurate mind with little capacity for the real business of parliament. J. A. Froude in 1891 was even more negative when he said that Disraeli's real triumph was of short duration, since “no public man in England ever rose so high and acquired power so great, so little of whose work has survived him.”

One of the most important developments in the world economy since 1945 has been the emergence of strong and rapidly growing economies in Western Europe. This expansion has been accompanied by the formation of two free-trade blocs, with growing prospects for an association between them. Canadian reactions to these changes have ranged from apprehension and pessimism, on the one hand, to considerable optimism on the other and in the course of the discussion a number of suggestions have been advanced for modifying Canada's commercial policy. It has been suggested, for example, that because of these and other developments we should increase protection to domestic industry; another suggestion that has been advanced in several forms is that we should ourselves consider promoting some regional free-trade association.

These reactions and policy suggestions necessarily involve assumptions about the future of Canadian trade, particularly with Western Europe. In most discussions these assumptions remain implicit and unclear. The purpose of this paper is to identify and to assess some of these assumptions, recognizing fully all the hazards, difficulties and qualifications that inevitably attend forecasting exercises in economics. Specifically, I try to shed some light on the following two questions: (1) Given likely increases in Western Europe's national income over the next ten years, by how much is Europe's demand likely to increase for industrial materials that are important Canadian exports? (2) How great a barrier to Canadian exports, and how costly for Canada, are likely to be the tariff arrangements that EEC and EFTA propose to establish over the next decade?

The most interesting fact about the by-elections held in Peterborough and Niagara Falls on October 31, 1960, was not so much that the Conservatives (in power in Ottawa) lost them—or, rather, lost the one and failed to gain the other—as that the New Party won the Peterborough seat, with 46 per cent of the vote, and got 23 per cent of the vote in Niagara Falls. Taking the two constituencies together the New Party polled a larger popular vote than did either the Liberals or Conservatives: no minor achievement for a party that was making its first two appearances on the federal electoral scene, a party that at the time had neither a name nor a national leader and whose platform was still in the process of being formulated.

Who voted New Party and why? These were the first questions that seemed to need answering. Obviously, old-line socialists could not account for a very large part of the Peterborough poll since the best the CCF had ever done in Peterborough, in federal elections, was to get 12 per cent of the vote in 1945. In Niagara Falls, it is true, the CCF had reached the 23 per cent mark in 1949 but in subsequent federal elections its support had steadily fallen off—to 15 per cent in the 1950 by-election, 12 per cent in 1953 and 10 per cent in 1958. Was it, then, the alliance of the CCF with organized labour, under the New Party banner, that had done the trick? Had organized labour so rallied its supporters behind the New Party candidate, particularly in Peterborough, as to make the vote practically a labour affair? Or was the New Party vote more evenly distributed across the two constituencies, with all classes participating more or less equally in it? What about the different age groups and sexes? Whatever the distribution, was the vote simply a protest against the governing party in Ottawa as seems so frequently to be the case in by-election returns? If simply a protest why had it gone New Party rather than Liberal or, in the case of Niagara Falls, why had it not gone even more Liberal? Did the personalities of the candidates make very much difference? Or were election issues and party policies more important than personalities? Finally, to what extent, if any, did the New Party vote reflect or presage a fundamental realignment of political forces?

On May 3, 1940, the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations presented its report to the Prime Minister of Canada. This report, along with the specialized studies undertaken by direction of the commission, constitutes the most comprehensive investigation of a working federal system that has ever been made. In spite of the scope and quality of the commission's work, its analysis of federal-provincial relations has had surprisingly little influence on the directions that the theory and practice of Canadian federalism have taken since 1945. More specifically, the concept of provincial autonomy which is central to the commission's argument has been denied explicitly or implicitly by such influential writings on the Canadian federal system as the so-called Green Book proposals submitted by the federal government at the Dominion-Provincial Conference on Reconstruction in 1945, the Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, Mr. Maurice Lamontagne's book, Le Fédéralisme canadien, and the Report of the Quebec Royal Commission on Constitutional Problems, as well as by the actual developments in federal-provincial relations since the Second World War.

At the present time of uncertainty in the Canadian federal system it seems desirable to re-examine the perspectives of the Rowell-Sirois Report. This paper attempts to analyse one of these perspectives—provincial autonomy in the fields of health, welfare, and education.

I wish to consider how industries exploiting natural resources may be expected to develop. It is not my purpose to consider their entire relation with the economy of which they form a part. Rather, I wish to examine the logic of their own changes in technology and technique in response to stimuli from the rest of the economy. In tracing this development, I shall stress the changing technology itself; the adjustment of property and tenure concepts; some aspects of location and transportation; and the impact of all these changes on industrial and market organization.

As an analytical technique for tracing these changes, I shall make use of a “stages of development” approach. It will be shown that most industries working natural resources may be said to be in one of three, roughly consecutive stages. The precise dating of the transitions between the stages is highly arbitrary, but this defect is unimportant since the chief function of the stages approach in its present context is to bring out the successive impacts on resource exploitation of two outside forces. The first of these is a mechanical, capital-using technology. The second is the application of science to “control” the resource, biological or mineral, in the same sense that agricultural and manufacturing industries have control over their processes.

In the model, stress is laid on the industries that today are still extracting raw materials from nature: fishing, hunting, logging, oil and gas, metals, and water. Agricultural activity also properly belongs with these industries. However, since agriculture has already passed well into the third stage, it is referred to chiefly for purposes of example and comparison. The farmer no longer “hunts” his cattle, nor “collects” wild rice or fruit.

Canada's unemployment record during the post-war period falls readily into three distinct periods. Before 1954 unemployment averaged about 2.5 per cent of the labour force and was never a significant problem. Since it has been estimated that seasonal unemployment alone amounts to about 2 per cent of the labour force, non-seasonal employment was almost non-existent in this period. During the next four years a moderate increase occurred and in this period unemployment averaged about 4.2 per cent. Then, in late 1957, unemployment passed the 5 per cent point; for the three years 1958 to 1960 it averaged 6.7 per cent of the labour force and in early 1961 it has been running close to 8 per cent on a seasonally adjusted basis. The moderate increase that occurred after 1953 was due in part to a more rapid growth of the labour force. In two years, between 1955 and 1957, the labour force increased some 6.9 per cent and the non-agricultural sector rose by more than 9.5 per cent, an increase that reflected the heavy immigration following Suez and the uprising in Hungary. But the further increase in unemployment that developed in late 1957 cannot be attributed to a similar cause. For since 1957 there has been some decline in the rate of growth of both the total and the non-farm labour force (see Table III). Nevertheless, the non-farm labour force has continued to grow rapidly and this explains the recent paradox of increasing unemployment at a time when total employment is still rising.

The intent of this paper is to demonstrate (1) that Marx's analysis of the workers' fate under capitalism is not quite as scientific as he had professed, and (2) that, on the other hand, his analysis of wage and employment determination in a capitalist economy is not quite as misleading as many critics contend.

If Marx's theoretical contributions in this area have been unjustly discounted by “bourgeois economists,” much of the fault may be traced directly to Marx himself. For it was he who suggested that the veracity of his economic analysis could be measured by the accuracy of his economic predictions. Non-Marxists and neo-Marxists alike have faithfully followed his suggestion. Thus, since overwhelming evidence of rising standards of living in Western capitalist countries clearly discredits Marx's prediction concerning the increasing misery of the proletariat, we generally discard not only the prediction but also the theoretical apparatus whence it was allegedly derived.

To reject Marx in this matter on his own grounds, however, is to acknowledge logical consistency in his derivation of prediction from model. It is the consistency that is questioned here. And if Marx's prediction of misery is found not to derive from his wage and employment theory, then the Marxian theory of wages and employment may prove to be a more valid view of capitalism than is generally suspected.

Both Canadian and Australian governments were quick to appreciate the benefits to be gained from wireless broadcasting. In 1905 in Australia and in 1913 in Canada, ministers of the Crown were given the power to oversee the development of wireless telegraphy. Shortly after the First World War, technical advances made possible the broadcasting of music and the human voice; in 1919 the Marconi Company, through its station XWA, Montreal, initiated radio broadcasting in Canada; in the same year, Amalgamated Wireless of Australasia Pty. Limited, through a small station in Sydney, broadcast Australia's first radio programmes. By the late 1920s, Canada boasted seventy-nine broadcasting stations and 297,000 licensed receivers, while Australia had twenty broadcasting stations and approximately 225,000 receivers. With few exceptions, these stations were privately owned, subject to little government regulation and, in Canada at least, supported entirely by commercial revenues.

In the first thirteen years of Australian broadcasting, from 1920 to 1932, at least three different attempts were made to find a satisfactory economic basis for broadcasting. Each reform, however, failed to silence the complaints about poor reception, tardy news reporting, indifferent programming, and the concentration of broadcasting in the urban areas of the country. Limitations of space prevent a discussion of all the schemes attempted, but brief mention will be made of one of them which, if not unique in the annals of broadcasting, is of interest as an historical oddity and an example of man's ingenuity.

Economists and statisticians are gradually amassing new knowledge of economic processes and enlarging the range of data which provide the underpinnings of their craft. Since the end of the Second World War, a number of new statistical tools have been developed for measuring the performance of the economy, and a good deal of new quantitative information on the structure and behaviour of the economic system has been collected. Among these new tools have been developments in the field of social accounting, and new and improved techniques for isolating and studying fluctuations in the business cycle. It is with the latter question that this paper is concerned-the decomposition of time series into their trend-cycle, seasonal, and residual elements. While the work in this field in Canada in the early 1950's was initially focused on measuring cyclical fluctuations in the quarterly national accounts, it has long since evolved a full-fledged life of its own, and a general programme of time series analysis has been under way at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics since 1955. The recent application of electronic computers to the problem is rapidly transforming the entire field.

The present paper has a three-fold aim: to review the rationale of time series analysis; to give an account of the background and status of the work at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics; and to provide a brief outline of the electronic computer programme now in use in this area.