You will perhaps think that, with that introduction, I have already answered the question in the title. Don't jump to conclusions! Attendez un peu!

When I was elected president of this Association last year, I could scarcely have been more astonished. Obviously, there were dozens of people far better qualified. I asked myself why I had been chosen, and there was only one possible reason that seemed to me to make any sense. The Association was to become bilingual, and I was one of the few senior English-speaking members who could make a respectable noise in French. I hasten to agree that this is a most inadequate reason for my election, but it is still the only one I can think of.

Be that as it may, the twin facts that the Association is now to be officially bilingual, and that I can make a respectable noise in French, seem to me to impose upon me a double duty: first, to say something about our bicultural state (you observe how carefully I avoid, so far, the controversial word “nation”), and second, to say at least part of it in French.

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.”

“There is scarcely any inquiry more curious, or, from its importance, more worthy of attention, than that which traces the causes which practically check the progress of wealth in different countries, and stop it, or make it proceed very slowly, while the power of production remains comparatively undiminished, or at least would furnish the means of a great and abundant increase of produce and population.” This introductory sentence is borrowed from T. R. Malthus' Principles of Political Economy, Book II, “On the Progress of Wealth” (2nd ed.), p. 309.

It is indeed curious that 152 years after Malthus' inquiry, and, what is more, twenty-six years after the Keynesian revolution, stunted growth remains a problem. Canada, for example, is exceptionally well endowed with natural riches, has a relatively well-educated, young, and increasing population, and enjoys a privileged position alongside the world's richest market. Yet, Canadian economic growth has been mysteriously stunted. Although Canada's recent evolution is perhaps the most puzzling to a foreign observer, stunted growth is not peculiar to this country. The United Kingdom, Belgium, and the United States are other instances. Until some ten years ago, France was generally considered as irretrievably condemned to economic stagnation, owing, it was said, to the characteristics of her population, and her institutions.

The history of uranium mining in Canada can be divided into four phases or periods, each marked by distinctive policies and by events and activities resulting therefrom. The initial phase is marked by the development of a mining and refining operation and the establishment of a market by a private enterprise. It begins with the discovery in 1930 by Gilbert Labine and E. C. St. Paul of a radio-active occurrence at Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, which they staked for Eldorado Gold Mining Company. It ends with the entry in 1942 of the Dominion government as the dominant body in the production and marketing of radio-active minerals. By 1932 the Port Radium mine had commenced operations, and in the following year a refinery for producing radium had been completed at Port Hope, Ontario. The mine was essentially a silver-radium mine, but the complex ore-body also contained uranium, copper, and cobalt. It was the first commercial body of ore found in Canada from which radium could be extracted. It kept alive a certain interest in radio-active minerals among prospectors and successfully challenged the Belgian monopoly in the world radium market. Although it remained a small and unprofitable undertaking throughout this phase, its existence accounted for Canada's emergence as the main supplier of the raw material, in the form of uranium, for the development of the atomic bomb.

L'orientation culturelle des Canadiens-français est devenue une des questions les plus importantes de l'analyse sociologique de ce groupe ethnique. Ainsi une des tâches principales des sociologues qui se sont intéressés à la question a été le développement d'une définition de la culture canadienne-française. Cependant, malgré l'ampleur et le nombre des travaux publiés, il n'existe pas de synthèse permettant une vue d'ensemble de la question. Notre but dans cet article est de formuler les étapes nécessaires à une présentation synthétique de la culture canadienne-française du point de vue de ses fondements sociologiques. Ce que nous allons dire ne prétend pas être une analyse complète de la question. Nous avons voulu retenir dans notre présentation, et de l'ensemble des situations et des problèmes susceptibles d'être examinés, seulement ceux qui nous semblent soit particulièrement importants, soit nettement révélateurs. Nous avons donc conscience d'être incomplet, mais nous pensons pouvoir présenter l'essentiel de la question.

Pour les fins de la présentation nous avons divisé notre article en trois parties que nous jugeons d'égale importance. Les deux premières parties consistent en une analyse: premièrement, de la tradition culturelle de la Nouvelle-France; et deuxièmement, des traditions culturelles nées après la Conquête de 1760. La troisième partie consiste en une analyse de la conjoncture culturelle actuelle. Il existe une raison fondamentale à faire précéder l‘analyse « synchronique » par une analyse « diachronique »: sans l'analyse des traditions culturelles il est pratiquement impossible de saisir la conjoncture sociologique actuelle, et ceci en raison des ambiguités qui existent aussitôt que l'on veut définir ce qu'est le Canada français du point de vue politique ou géographique, ou même purement sociologique. Mais, en partant de l'analyse des traditions culturelles il est possible d'établir les grandes lignes de ce qu'est présentement le Canada français du point de vue de la culture canadienne-française. Nous procéderons de la même manière dans l'analyse de chacune des parties de la présentation. Nous essaierons de faire le point sur la documentation en existence et nous émettrons des conclusions.

In this paper I propose to examine the placement policies of Canadian life insurance companies, and the campanies' place in the Canadian capital market, during the period of rapid agricultural and industrial development which preceded the First World War. It is no longer possible to maintain, as Buckley could maintain in his study of capital formation, that before the War Canada had a very undeveloped domestic capital market. McIvor's recent work has increased our knowledge of Canadian financial history, a subject strangely neglected since the work of Shortt and Breckenridge some sixty years ago. Kilbourn's study of the Steel Company of Canada has provided valuable evidence on the early stirrings of our capital market. I have argued elsewhere that these stirrings were both vigorous and significant for Canadian economic development before 1914, and that particularly in the field of government finance they cannot sensibly be ignored. The following pages discuss selected aspects of the financial history of this most interesting period. I shall try to show not only what the life insurance companies were doing with their funds but why they were doing what they did. The paper concludes with some reflections on the social rationality of their investment policies.

First, some description of the Canadian life insurance companies themselves. By 1895 they already bulked large on the domestic scene, though not so large as the chartered banks. Their assets were valued at $32,000,000 in 1895, and their annual premium income then amounted to $5,703,000 from domestic business and $595,000 from foreign business. By 1914 the companies' assets were worth $257,800,000, their annual domestic premium income was $26,047,000, and their foreign premium income was $12,680,000. Throughout this period they faced vigorous competition from British and especially from American firms, which collected 45 per cent of the total Canadian life insurance premia in 1895 and 40 per cent in 1914.

This paper is not designed primarily as a contribution to the theory of political decision-making. Nor is it an economic analysis of the problems studied by the Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying. Rather, it is an attempt to show how the opposition Liberal party developed a strategy to deal with the important issues of economic policy raised by the investigation and how it developed an alternative policy position.

On February 2, 1934, the Prime Minister, R. B. Bennett, moved that a Select Committee of the House of Commons be established to inquire into the causes of price spreads and a variety of related problems in the areas of distribution, inter-firm relations, and labour conditions. From the beginning, H. H. Stevens, the chairman and Minister of Trade and Commerce in the Bennett administration, dominated the Committee's hearings—selecting witnesses, scheduling proceedings, and stretching the Committee's already elastic terms of reference in search of new abuses and new sensations. He denounced unfair trade practices and what he felt were flagrant abuses of economic power by department stores, meat packers, and other mass buyers, economic power which he charged was used to squeeze the small retailer, supplier, and producer and destroy decent working conditions. The public interest in the hearings was high and the press coverage was extensive and full, particularly when the Chairman had angry exchanges with the presidents of Canada Packers and the Imperial Tobacco Company.

The way the Franco-American views the issues, candidates and the parties largely determines the vote in at least thirty cities and towns in New England. Though constituting about 12 per cent of the region's inhabitants and considered by some as the most unassimilable of all the ethnic groups in the area, the Franco-Americans have not enjoyed the same degree of attention from students of politics that larger, more widely distributed ethnic minorities have received. But a brief survey of their political past and of their vote in the 1960 presidential election will demonstrate that the French provide an excellent case study in ethnic politics.

Migration and other processes swelled the Franco-American population of New England from an estimated 150,000 in 1850, to 400,000 in 1880, to 800000 by 1908. Though some influx occurred in subsequent decades, especially in Maine, the great migration from French Canada ended by the turn of the century. Overpopulation, a dwindling supply of good agricultural land, and the absence of a good transportation system to the Canadian northwest were the reasons for this exodus southward. Most of the emigrés settled in New England's smaller cities and larger towns, and became textile, leather, or paper-mill workers.

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?

Canada's recent return to a pegged exchange rate marks the end of a highly interesting experiment in international economic policy and the end of an era in the history of the Canadian balance of payments. It is now appropriate, therefore, to look backwards and to examine the effects of changes in the balance of payments on the Canadian economy during the period in which the value of the Canadian dollar was allowed to fluctuate freely. Only a very narrow aspect of the problem is examined in this paper, namely, the effect of the large long-term capital inflow of the 1950s on the Canadian business cycle. This problem is interesting not only for its own sake, but also because the cyclical effect of a capital inflow is extremely important in determining whether the borrowing country achieves its potential or required growth rate.

If, for our purposes, we define the potential supply of goods and services available to an economy as domestic production at full employment plus imports minus exports, a capital inflow increases that supply by bidding up the value of the Canadian dollar until sufficient upward pressure on imports and downward pressure on exports is imposed to transfer the capital inflow in real terms. This increase in supply implies that planned aggregate expenditures in Canada can increase without exerting inflationary pressures on the economy. A capital inflow allows a higher level of investment expenditure and this raises the potential rate of growth of the productive capacity of the economy.

A transformation in the pattern of consumer expenditures has occurred in the nations that have reached high income levels during the past century. Smaller fractions of national income are spent on food, clothing, and shelter; larger fractions on recreation, medical care, education, and luxury goods. Cross-sectional studies of family budgets have been fairly reliable indicators of this trend. As early as 1857 Ernst Engel had pronounced his famous law about food expenditures on the basis of Edouard Ducpetiaux's Belgian budget studies. Similar assertions by others about clothing, fuel, and shelter followed; and in 1919 William Ogburn published his statistics of Washington, D.C., family budgets, indicating, in effect, that income elasticities of demand were highest for amusement and education. As the pattern slowly emerged, economists were not much disturbed. Why should consumers not be left alone in choosing between carrots and bedrooms? Interference with choices among luxury goods and services seemed even less warranted. Advertising posed no problem beyond encouragement of elementary veracity.

In the past decade, however, this unconcern has faded. Several economists have joined sociologists, moralists, and general philosophers in questioning trends in consumer expenditures. Their concern is less with morals and social repercussions than with optimum consumption patterns in terms of economic value and resource allocation. Advertising in particular is no longer reproached merely for a bent towards mendacity. It is seen as more insidious, as manipulating consumers' choices by kindling subconscious anxieties. It puts consumers in a squirrel cage in which production and the want-satisfying process create wants that would otherwise not exist.

Broadcasting is the most pervasive, and therefore one of the most powerful, of agents for influencing men's thoughts and actions, for giving them a picture, true or false, of their fellows and of the world in which they live, for appealing to their intellect, their emotions and their appetites, for filling their minds with beauty or ugliness, ideas or idleness, laughter or terror, love or hate.

The truth of this statement from the Beveridge Committee on British broadcasting is not now questioned. Indeed the danger today is that governments, instead of ignoring the power of radio to influence opinion, will exaggerate it and take needless precautions against the “contamination” of the public mind. Such an attitude has long been recognized as characteristic of totalitarianism, but in this paper I am concerned to show that the “fundamental freedoms” of speech and of the press do not always extend to the broadcasting services, even in states with otherwise strongly established democratic traditions. In the two countries examined, Great Britain and New Zealand, broadcasting is a government monopoly, operated in Britain through the British Broadcasting Corporation, a semi-independent public corporation, and in New Zealand through the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, a government department under the control of a minister. According to a recent announcement from New Zealand, however, the Government intends “to end direct state control of radio and television in New Zealand and create an independent three man corporation to assume control from 1st April 1962.” The governments of both countries have demonstrated that they regard broadcasting rights as a privilege not to be extended to all who might claim access to them.

There has been considerable discussion recently in the English-speaking world about the office of Ombudsman, or complaints commissioner, in the Nordic countries. The present paper first explains the need for the office, and shows how it meets this need. We then deal with arguments that have been raised against transplanting the institution to other countries, consider some problems regarding its functions and powers, and finally discuss the specific problem of its application to Canada.

Briefly stated, the argument for the Ombudsman scheme derives from the fact that all democratic countries in the twentieth century have experienced a shift from the laissez-faire to the positive state. The accompanying tremendous growth in the range and complexity of government activities has brought with it the need to grant increasing powers of discretion to the executive side of government; and as Dicey has warned us, “Wherever there is discretion, there is room for arbitrariness.” It is quite possible nowadays for a citizen's rights to be accidentally crushed by the vast juggernaut of the government's administrative machine. In this age of the welfare state, thousands of administrative decisions are made each year by governments or their agencies, many of them by lowly officials; and if some of these decisions are arbitrary or unjustified, there is no easy way for the ordinary citizen to gain redress.

This paper is an attempt to describe developments in the European hatting industry as a background to the evolution of the North American beaver trade. Most studies of the fur trade trace the movement of the furs no further than the fur market; interest is centred on production and marketing with insufficient attention directed to the ultimate sources of the demand. Vague references to style changes usually suffice as explanations of long-run demand movements. There were, however, certain technological discoveries and evolutions in hat-making which underlie both the style changes and the long-run demand fluctuations. My intent is to examine these developments and to relate them to the Canadian fur trade.

The cornerstone of this essay is L'Art de faire des chapeaux, by M. I'Abbé Nollet, published at Paris in 1765. This mid-eighteenth century work examines the sources of raw materials, the methods of production, and the history of the French hatting industry. In order to understand the industrial background against which this book was written and to explain several of the references Nollet makes, it is necessary to begin with a history of the felt hat industry. In sketching this history I have drawn extensively on other sources. Some of the hypotheses advanced in Section I may be open to question; the evidence upon which they are based is fragmentary, and I have had to content myself with material in secondary sources. In later parts of the paper I shall compare L'Art de faire des chapeaux with the article on hatting in Diderot's Encyclopedia published in 1753.

Few areas of taxation have been the subject of more controversy than capital gains and losses. In some countries, Canada for example, capital gains are excluded from the concept of taxable income, while in others such gains are partially excluded or are subjected to preferential tax rates. This article is divided into two parts. The first deals with the economic nature of capital gains and the relation of these gains to ordinary income. The second examines critically the arguments for and against the taxation of such gains. Basically, it will be argued that there is no fundamental fiscal difference between capital gains and “ordinary” income which could justify preferential tax treatment of the former. While the two types of personal economic accretion exhibit superficial distinctions, these are of little, if any, relevance from the standpoint of the income tax. It is admitted that more complete taxation of capital gains will present some complications. While the problems are suggested, their solutions are properly left to the lawyer, accountant, and legislator. Suffice it to say that solutions exist.

The conceptual distinction between capital gains and ordinary income has been described as follows:

In both law and common speech, capital gains are generally regarded as the profits realized from increases in the market value of any assets that are not a part of the owner's stock-in-trade or that he does not regularly offer for sale; and capital losses, as the losses realized from declines in the market value of such assets. Ordinary profits and losses, in contrast, are realized on the sale of goods and services that are a part of the seller's stock-in-trade or that he regularly offers for sale.

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.