It is with some misgiving that I put forward the suggestion that a Canadian may be in a better position than either an Englishman or an American—despite the experience of the former, the energy of the latter, and the assurance of both—to appreciate the complex problems of under-developed countries. Nevertheless, emboldened by the modest, freely admitted and unhesitating recognition (by Canadians) of Canada's success in the historic role of interpreting the United States to Great Britain and Great Britain to the United States, and undeterred by the somewhat less striking evidence of our capacity to interpret ourselves to one another within the framework of a federal state, I am ambitious to extend the operations of such an honest broker of goodwill to include a more racially variegated, linguistically diversified, and culturally challenging clientele.

The credentials which a Canadian may offer in asking to be considered as a possible interpreter of at least some of the problems of under-developed countries cannot be brushed aside as completely fraudulent. As an expert on under-developed countries has pointed out, “one might almost say that a country is ‘underdeveloped,’ if its government considers development a problem, in a way which calls for positive policy. In this sense, Canada would have been an underdeveloped country throughout the nineteenth century, and might even be considered so to-day, despite its high per capita income and its current rate of economic growth.” Certainly if one of the more important criteria of an under-developed country is a heavy reliance on foreign capital for economic development, Canada may still be looked upon as an underdeveloped country subject to many of the stubborn political and social, no less than economic, problems and frictions which such a position involves.

If we are to live we must act; action necessitates making choices; our choices, in turn, reflect philosophical outlooks and a multitude of competing pressures from the material world. In the politics of democracy choices are continually being made at many levels, under varying conditions, with the expectation that there is sufficient consensus within the community to produce or support decisions regarded by the members as comprehensible and tolerable.

In recent years political scientists have been directing their investigations to elections, probably the most conspicuous example of a formal choosing process in which most members of the community are entitled to participate. Resourceful manipulation of the cold figures in which these choices are recorded is now beginning to yield conclusions that can be expressed in qualitative as well as in the more customary quantitative terms. We are learning more and more about why voters make the political choices they do and we can confidently look to the “psephologists,” hovering over their wired boards, to give us more illuminating insights into this area of making decisions.

In the perennial discussion of American influences in Canadian economic life, Canadian sensitivity to United States business fluctuations is a prominent topic. Through three-quarters of a century of “National Policy,” Canadian business cycle indicators have behaved like those of a “forty-ninth state,” and many Canadians feel concerned about the dependence of Canadian prosperity on conditions in the United States.

Canadian economists have discussed the channels through which external influences reach Canadian business, and the probable trends in the strength of these influences. There have, however, been only very rough comparisons of the timing and amplitude of fluctuations in the two countries. This paper1 reports on a study of fluctuations in Canadian and United States time series, designed to determine whether there have been any significant shifts over the last half-century in Canadian sensitivity to United States fluctuations. An introductory section summarizes some Canadian discussions on the influence of external fluctuations, since these discussions suggest hypotheses relevant to the statistical investigation.

It is one of the truisms of Canadian politics that stable federal power cannot be achieved without support from the province of Quebec. Until 1896 the dominant political party, the Conservatives, was the one which held Quebec. Since that period, Liberal ascendancy has been based on solid strength in French Canada. The problem of creating sufficient inter-cultural agreement to make possible the formulation of federal policy has been the most important single factor in determining the character of national party competition. This difficulty has set a premium on those skills of negotiation and conciliation which have in fact distinguished most successful Canadian statesmen, and has, more than anything else, inhibited the formation of national parties with consistent principles and policies.

Political parties, as a condition of national success, have had to unite French and English elements; but thus far they have done so only on the most tenuous basis. For many purposes, a minimal consensus was sufficient, but it seems to have been inadequate to achieve the full measure of power and influence which the Fathers of Confederation envisaged for central government. Although judicial decisions, and economic and geographic forces, may have accentuated the trend to a decentralization far greater than that contemplated in 1867, the basic reason for this development has been the impossibility of creating national parties which would unite both French and English Canadians behind alternative programmes. In the words of a French-Canadian historian: “Les principaux auteurs de la Confédération n'avaient pas caché leur intention d'organiser un gouvernement central très puissant.” It must be concluded that they either seriously overestimated the range of shared assumptions between the two cultures, or badly underestimated the degree of unity on fundamentals which was necessary to run the centralized state they had tried to create. The only type of national political party which Canada has been able to construct successfully has not proved capable of fulfilling their intentions.

“Your business is not to govern the country; it is, if you think fit, to call to account those who do govern it.” This remark of Gladstone to the House of Commons during the Crimean War applies with equal validity to the Canadian House today. If Parliament is to call the Government to account, given party discipline as we know it, it must do so through the Opposition or it will not do so at all. Jennings comments: “The Opposition demands that policies be formulated openly, and the consequences of policies revealed. Parliament compels the Government to defend itself by open and rational argument; but it also compels the Opposition to state what is the alternative.”

This process of government by discussion involves more than the trading of facts and argument at arm's length between Government and Opposition. It enlists more than the intellects of the members; it involves their emotions as well. Members are conscious that they are the representatives of the people of the country, to whose desires and interests they must give voice. They are led in the course of debate to refer, usually in general terms, to the desirability of action along a certain line, or to express disapproval of another possible course. The Government, if it is wise, pays close attention to such remarks since the members' opinions are the most sensitive indicator of feelings in the constituencies. A rather vague agreement, usually transcending party, emerges on proposed lines of policy. It does not suggest a definite course of action at a given time; rather it indicates the trend and intensity of opinion in the country. In this vague and general sense, Parliament assists in the formulation of policy. As Lord Balfour said, “our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one, that they can afford safely to bicker.” It is up to Parliament to make clear on exactly what the nation is at one, as well as to take the lead in the bickering.

According to the classical theory of interest, which long served as a framework for the theory of money, prices, and income, the rate of interest is determined by the supply of and demand for savings. Monetary theorists, such as Wicksell, Fisher, Hawtrey, and Keynes, erected an imposing edifice on this foundation. Then came the Great Depression and disillusionment, the Second World War and the pegged market régime. At the same time, a growing ferment in the literature undermined the classical foundations. With regard to the savings function, agnosticism prevailed. As for investment demand, empirical studies and theoretical developments alike relegated the rate of interest to a minor role in entrepreneurial decision-making. In deference to considerations of debt management, open market operations were held in abeyance. Thus, little was to be expected of quantitative credit control as an instrument of public policy in the post-war period.

Despite the fact that ethnicity is an important principle of social organization in Canada, there are very few studies that attempt to describe and analyse how it operates at different levels and in different parts of the social system. In this paper we suggest ways that might lead to a clearer understanding of the significance of ethnicity in the country and its communities. In its relevance to research, this paper is both methodological and programmatic. We hope that it will provide fruitful suggestions for research and for the clearer formulation of problems for study.

Students in the field of ethnic studies seldom consider more than one ethnic group or category at a time. Where the group selected for study forms an autonomous community, we get an exhaustive account of the group and its relations with the “outside world,” rather like the account of an individual's life history. Even where the people who are being studied make up a large element in our population and are dispersed both geographically and socially, there is a tendency to follow the same procedure and to deal with what is really a category as though it were an autonomous, discrete group; the picture we get is of individuals of such and such an ethnic group (as though their only identity were an ethnic one) and their relations with outsiders. This procedure is comparable to making an analysis of a small group by taking each individual in turn and describing him exhaustively without taking into account the structure of the group itself.