The Scope of the Survey. The survey was confined to the Mackenzie River District. The places visited were Fort Smith, Fort Resolution, Hay River, Fort Providence, Fort Simpson, Norman Wells, Fort Good Hope, Arctic Red River, Fort McPherson, Aklavik, Yellowknife, and Port Radium. Fort Norman and Fort Rae were not visited, but information in regard to these was obtained from medical officers for these areas. All but one doctor in the area were interviewed. The hospitals and schools were visited and the authorities in charge were most co-operative in supplying information. Useful interviews were had with the clergy, R.C.M.P., R.C.C.S., Hudson Bay Company officials, independent traders, oil and mine operators, and many other residents of the Territories.

Prior to 1930 discussion of public investment was conducted largely on the basis of an assumption of full employment within a closed economy. Consequently it centred around the productiveness of public investment as opposed to that undertaken in the privately-operated sector of the economy, the appropriate methods of financing the projects undertaken, and the legitimate spheres of operation of public bodies. The usefulness of public investment projects was believed, in the main, to be confined to their long term contribution to the productiveness of the economy. In practice, even well into the nineteen-thirties, governments, with exceptions, undertook public projects when finances were buoyant and borrowing relatively easy, and curtailed them, in attempts to balance budgets, when depression became serious.

After 1930 both in the thought and practices of some central governments and in economic writing the pendulum swung the other way. Main emphasis was laid on the current employment and income giving effects of public investment. This change in emphasis received additional impetus after the advent of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money when economic discussion became much more concerned with the level of employment than the distribution of the factors of production among alternative uses.

The transfer of attention from the long term aspects of public projects to their effect on current employment and income maintenance was accompanied by the shortcomings of practice and thought which are inevitable in an undeveloped field. While a good deal was written and spoken about the desirability of well thought out and well planned investment, insufficient attention was given to its attainment and in practice resort was had to many undertakings whose value, from either a short or long term viewpoint, was dubious. The shortcomings were largely associated with failure to cope adequately with the institutional and administrative problem involved. Further, there was a penchant for fastening on single devices to meet the overall employment problem.

This paper is primarily an account of Canadian relations with the War Production Board and with the Office of Price Administration, and with their antecedent agencies. Large sections of the Washington scene, with which the writers had no special familiarity, are completely omitted. In particular there is little reference to the agencies controlling shipping and overseas trade, or to the armed services themselves. Further, there is no account of relations with the War Food Administration, or with the Combined Food Board on which the United Kingdom is represented as well as the United States and Canada. Even the two Combined Boards dealing respectively with production and resources (on which Canada is represented) and with raw materials (where it is not) are omitted although relations with these Boards are almost indistinguishable from relations with the War Production Board which supplies their United States membership. In short, this paper is concerned almost entirely with relations between Canada and the United States in regard to supplies moving directly between them. In this all-important field the relations amounted to a co-operation so close, continuous, effective, and friendly that the two sovereign nations might in many respects have been two parts of one country.

It is convenient to consider first relations in the field of war supplies because it was in this field that war-time co-operation and collaboration first became necessary. Here a pattern was established for subsequent collaboration in the field of civilian supplies.

The duties assigned to the writer, as his part in the project of the Canadian Social Science Research Council for the study of the Canadian Arctic, were: (a) to visit Indian Residential and Day Schools as well as non-denominational schools for children who are not wards of the Dominion Government; (b) to survey all educational facilities and activities; (c) to make recommendations for improving educational services. In pursuing this assignment during the months of July and August, 1944, the localities were visited in the following order: (a) Fort Smith, (b) Norman Wells, (c) Arctic Red River, (d) Aklavik, (e) Fort McPherson, (f) Fort Good Hope, (g) Fort Simpson, (h) Fort Providence, (i) Hay River, (j) Fort Resolution, (k) Yellowknife, (l) Port Radium. Thanks to a very complete list of key people provided by the Department of Mines and Resources, it was possible to meet those who knew most about the matters under investigation and who, without exception, were most cooperative and anxious to provide all relevant information and all possible assistance.

Economic theory has been powerfully advanced within the past decade by its new interest in national income and effective demand, and by its attention to the bearing of such magnitudes as savings, investment, consumption, and money holdings upon the aggregate employment of resources. After the first impact of a revolution, however, the signs of continuity with the past are bound to re-appear. In the field of economic doctrine it may be confidently expected that continuity will be established by exploration as to how particular equilibrium conditions—under the diverse situations of competition, monopoly, oligopoly, and the like—help to account for the behaviour of those large aggregates with which the “modern” theory has too exclusively dealt. With equal confidence one may expect that this synthesis of Marshallian and Keynesian theory will cast new light upon the problems of economic policy.

Fortunately, however, it is not necessary to await the full fruition of this cross-fertilization of ideas: its main features are already indicated in a very substantial field of agreement as to policy in all but the most extreme wings of economic thought. The language of popular discussion in America epitomizes this field in two cardinal ideas—the necessity of government action to secure full employment and the desire nevertheless to preserve a private enterprise system. To extremists on either side these ideas represent incompatibilities. But the effectiveness of economics and of economists in the current scene is primarily conditioned upon the elaboration of policies compatible with both of these cardinal requirements.

There is current in Canada very little accurate information about the evacuation of Japanese from the defence area of the Pacific coast between February and October, 1942. Widely in use across the Dominion, but in the process of change, are the pre-war stereotypes of Japanese character which are still basic to some proposed solutions for the settlement of the so-called Japanese problem. This paper deals with aspects of the problem on which there is no recorded information, namely the reaction of the Japanese people to the handling of the Japanese problem since December 7, 1941.

In the process of working out a status for people of Japanese ancestry in British Columbia, the main historical effort of the Caucasians has been to limit as much as possible their acceptance in British Columbian society. These desires for total rejection have been supported by three major stereotyped rationalizations: the Japanese maintain a low standard of living, the Japanese are penetrating peacefully into this country, and the Japanese are unassimilable. We did not know before the Pearl Harbor attack just how widely these stereotypes were distributed, nor did we know their potency. But as a result of years of agitation and manipulation by politicians together with the breakdown of international security, vague fears, although not always verbalized, came to be widely held. Thus the war crisis made the historically developed stereotypes suddenly effective among many more people than they were before Pearl Harbor. As a result, attitudes based upon traditional conceptions of rights of citizenship and civil liberties were more than neutralized: they were completely ineffective in the presence of individual and organized demands for stringent action, justified by these rationalizations, especially by the one regarding peaceful penetration.

The second part of my journey in north-west Canada began when I left Tuktuk on July 25 for Aklavik and Norman Wells. I had hoped to fly from Aklavik to Norman Wells, and so save a week's delay, but the planes are very irregular to the north of Norman Wells and it did not seem advisable to leave the Distributor until I was back in the regular “flying area.” We left the flying field at Norman Wells at 4 p.m. on August 1, and flew across the river to Canol. Here, after a short stop to pick up passengers, the plane proceeded south to Fort Simpson, which we reached in about two hours. We flew at a height of about 10,000 feet at about three miles a minute, so that it was impossible to make detailed notes. There was, of course, no settlement, and the only variations in scenery were in the character of the streams and sloughs. Occasionally outcrops of rock were visible, reminding one of whitish rounded scales in a green hide.

We waited only twenty minutes at Fort Simpson Airport, which is some distance from the settlement, and then flew south-west over unoccupied country to Fort Nelson on the Alaska Highway. We could make out the “winter road,” at times crossing from lake to lake, with one group of huts near Petitot River about sixty miles from Nelson. We landed at the huge airport of Muskwa (Fort Nelson) about 8 p.m. I stayed a day at Fort Nelson, and made a survey of the old fur-trading settlement, but it will be more convenient to consider this district after the Yukon area has been described. The distance from Nelson to Whitehorse is about five hundred miles, and we flew this between 8.30 p.m. and midnight.

It is extraordinary that almost all the well developed analysis of the alleged drift toward collectivism in economic organization is composed of studies of industrial concentration, of the banking system, and of the relations in general between government and economic life. We have no comparable studies of labour markets. It is the intention of this paper to offer hypotheses relating to the part played by collective bargaining in the alleged decline of competition and the inevitability of its attacks on competition and also to make several suggestions on public policy.

Commentators on Malthus's population theory have generally based their remarks upon the Essay, particularly upon his observation that “population invariably increases where the means of subsistence increase, unless prevented by some very powerful and obvious checks” which are resolvable into “moral restraint, vice, and misery.” They have overlooked important passages in the Essay, having to do with the circumstances on which depend the increase and the availability of subsistence, and, therefore, the growth of population. They have overlooked his extended consideration of the question of population in the Principles where his primary concern was the increase of the supplies on which population growth depends. They have, therefore, missed his total population theory, and the manner in which it developed.

It is our purpose, in this essay, to discover the whole of Malthus's population theory, and to indicate, in some measure, the views of earlier and contemporary writers regarding elements of which this theory is composed. In section I we discuss Malthus's theory of economic progress and the “effectual demand” for labour, as it relates to the population question. While this discussion is based upon the Principles much more than upon the Essay and other writings, it is evident, as we state in the conclusion, that Malthus's theory of demand probably evolved out of his consideration of the population question. In section II, we examine Malthus's treatment of industrialization, in which he apparently found a workable solution to both the problem of economic progress and the question of population.

The development of a region can obviously not proceed faster than transportation facilities will permit. In an area of the vast extent of the Canadian northland, isolation remains the predominant characteristic in nearly all portions, and no part can expect to advance economically unless it has efficient and cheap transportation to the outside world.

The present transportation facilities in the western part of sub-arctic Canada are surprisingly good when one considers the limited volume of traffic they handle, yet the transportation routes follow in the main only the major water routes running northward. Great stretches of country to the east and west of these waterways are without transportation. However, in the present state of our knowledge there has been little if any thought of development in these large “dead” areas.

The first question to be asked, probably, is whether existing traffic can be handled adequately by the existing means of transportation. Before the war the answer would undoubtedly have been “yes.” American activities in Yukon Territory and the Mackenzie District since the United States entered the war have increased the volume of tonnage moving in the North enormously. Transportation has been improved by highway construction, the addition of railway rolling stock, water craft, and aeroplanes, and by the introduction of tractor trains. For the handling of a special commodity, oil, the Canol pipe-line has been built. Despite these improvements northern transportation is still under a strain, but is meeting its difficulties with about the same degree of success as is wartime transportation elsewhere.

My research interest in the settlement of the new North-West dates back to the summer of 1929 when I was asked to make a preliminary study of the Peace River Country which was one of the “Frontiers of Settlement” studies published during the first half of the nineteen-thirties. During the following summer the field study was completed and the Settlement of the Peace River Country was published in 1934. This study made familiar to the author the Alberta and British Columbia divisions of the Peace River region from Notikewin, seventy-five miles north of Grimshaw through the settlements of the Peace as far west as Fort St. John. Among many communities studied in this survey were Notikewin on the north-east fringe of settlement and Dawson Creek which forms the southern anchor of the Alaska Highway. The opening of the Alaska Highway, built between 1942 and 1944, together with the oil developments along the MacKenzie River and the mineral production of the Precambrian area just east of it, focused attention on this new North-West. The possibilities of settlement in this far north-western territory have received wide publicity. Among others, I spent the summer of 1944 in this great stretch of territory, which lies north of the Peace River and extends from a line drawn from Waterways to Coronation Gulf on the east, (approximately the western boundary of the Precambrian Shield), to the Alaska Highway on the west. The northern boundary of the territory studied is the Arctic Ocean. My own part of this survey included also that part of Alaska served by the Alaska railroad and the highway network which lies between Fairbanks and Anchorage.

Statistics provide data for action. A statistic which will not be used was not worth the trouble of collecting. I consider this a part of the definition of the subject and will not undertake to support it here. The action of course need not follow immediately; it may not be taken until the results of many other observations are available.

Specifically, statistics deal with random variation. In any practical situation, after we have accounted for every variable which can be brought under control, we still cannot say exactly what will happen. In manufacturing a coil spring, we may use metal of fixed chemical specification, even from the same heat, have a fixed setting on the machine which coils the spring, the same time and the same temperatures in tempering it, and still the tensions of the successive springs which are produced will vary. Given a variety of wheat whose seed is the purest strain we can procure, we plant a number of plots in soil of the same chemical composition, apply the same manurial treatment, see to it that the slopes and the irrigation are the same, plant the seed and cultivate the grain in the same way, and yet we find that the yields vary. In no practical case can theory provide an exhaustive account of the relevant variables, our physical control of real situations is never perfect, and consequently we are never in a position where the result will come out exactly to order.