The problem of multilateral international trade looms large in the present plans for the new world economy. The International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development as well as the agreement underlying the United States loan to the United Kingdom aim at establishing a workable system of multilateral international trade. Roughly speaking, the principle of multilateralism requires that each country should be guided in its purchases in other countries solely by the price and quality of goods without taking into consideration whether the supplying countries are or are not buyers of the produce of the country in question. It will be seen that the operation of such a system in balancing foreign trade may create serious difficulties for those countries which pursue a policy of maintaining full employment. Each country at full employment will require a certain volume of necessary imports. Now it is by no means obvious that it will be able to secure under a multilateral trade system a level of exports which will provide it with a sufficient amount of foreign exchange to pay for the volume of imports required at full employment. The country concerned may thus tend to achieve more security in its foreign trade by concluding a series of bilateral agreements with other countries relating in some way imports from and exports to those countries. Or it may enter together with other countries into a “regional block” expecting, on the basis of the economic characteristics of the participants, to be able to secure within the block a large part of the required imports in exchange for its exports. (The trade within the block would be operated on a multilateral basis, while the exchange proceeds from exports to countries outside the block would be “pooled” and allocated to the member countries of the block according to a certain schedule.)

Francis Bacon long ago pointed out that to know truly is to know by causes. I think it can be said with some measure of accuracy that no one can know the patent system and be capable of judging its merits and defects who does not possess a reasonably intimate knowledge of its historical foundations and development. As Mr. Justice Holmes observed, historic continuity with the past is not a duty but only a necessity and if this be so, in no field is it more applicable than in a consideration of patents and monopolies. The superficial writers of history, and their slavish imitators, have persisted in painting the picture of an English citizenry groaning under the grievous weight of monopolies dispensed with a lavish hand by the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns to greedy and avaricious courtiers and favourites who milked the populace dry with their monopolistic exactions. They point to the Statute of Monopolies of 1624 as a milestone in the history of English law—a statute forced upon a reluctant king in much the same spirit as the little affair at Runneymede four centuries earlier. That is not an accurate view. Monopolies were not all regarded as anathema either by the common law or by Parliament in those early days. If they were for the good of the realm their propriety was never questioned. From this theory evolved the thought that a new invention or the setting up of a new manufacture was a laudable thing and a grant of monopoly to its introducer by an exercise of the Crown prerogative was a beneficial act and did not offend against the principle of the common law which regarded as illegal and in restraint of trade any monopoly which took away any freedom or liberty enjoyed by the public before the grant. From the genesis of this policy stemmed the great influx of alien workmen to England which, commencing in the reign of Edward III, was responsible for the introduction of a number of new trades and manufactures and the transmutation of England from an economy of importation to one of domestic production of manufactured goods. An examination of the patents for new inventions and manufactures granted by Elizabeth and James I will show that to them was owed in large measure the great upsurge in domestic manufacture which accompanied the policy of self-sufficiency inaugurated by Cecil and pursued under James. Whatever criticism may be offered of a few of the monopoly grants, that criticism fades before an appraisal of the benefits conferred by the introduction, under the spur of monopoly patents, of the important inventions and manufacturing which began to appear during the Tudor and Stuart periods.

I do not propose to discuss here the problems of the transition from war to peace, or how unions can help to get full employment in the first place. I am concerned with the more fundamental problem of the place of unions in a society which has achieved full employment in peace-time, without sacrificing any of the essential freedoms, and which wants to keep both full employment and freedom. I am assuming that full employment involves planning. I am assuming also that unions are not just nuisances but, in one form or another, permanent and desirable social institutions. Can we plan production without planning wages, hours, and conditions of work? If full employment involves planning these also, where do the unions come in ? Must they sacrifice their traditional freedom to bargain collectively on behalf of their members, and suffer a sea-change into something, if not rich and strange, at least very different from what they have ever been before? Or can the community do this part of its planning through collective bargaining? Can we continue to have purely sectional bargaining, plant by plant, industry by industry, or must the various unions act as a unit according to a general wage policy laid down by some central organization? Must trade unionism change its functions, or its structure, or both?

These questions have been widely discussed in Britain, and to some extent also in the United States; in Canada, as far as I know, hardly at all. If we mean business when we talk of full employment, especially full employment in a free society, it is high time they were. For they are not by any means minor questions. Mrs. Wootton goes so far as to say that “Of all the possible points of conflict between conscious planning of priorities and traditional freedoms, the regulation of wages is likely to prove the most stormy”; and of course in this context “wages” include hours and conditions of work—not only what is paid, but what it is paid for. In Canada, freedom to bargain collectively can scarcely be called one of the “traditional” freedoms; for most Canadian workers it is still a recent, hard won, and imperfect conquest. But it is none the less prized for that, and it will not be easily surrendered, even as the price of full employment. For of all the freedoms, this is perhaps the one that comes closest home to the ordinary worker.

The subject of industrial relations was never of more vital importance than A at the present time, not alone to those directly involved but possibly to our whole economic and social life. It requires but a glance at the daily newspapers to indicate to thinking people that something is wrong, very wrong, with the human relationships in too many phases of North American industry. I am not suggesting that the blame should fall on any one group in industry. Good industrial relations are a joint responsibility, a two-way affair, just as any friendship. Happy industrial relations are just like happy marriages. Success in either of these two important fields of endeavour depends on how sincerely we want success, and how hard we are prepared to strive to attain that objective. Good industrial relations, like happy marriages, are no accident.

Industrial relations have been in a state of flux and evolution in recent years. Interest in that field was greatly stimulated during the war. In the war period we largely submerged our differences in our concentration on the job in hand, the forced fellowship of a nation in peril. Now, in the critical period of adjustment, the accumulated strains of the war years are coming to the surface. Our collective failure to anticipate, and adequately solve them is not only threatening to blot out our vision of a better post-war world, but is preventing our recovery and delaying our return to the higher standards of living which we all seek.

The most significant economic events of the past twenty years in the world at large, were the boom, the depression, the re-armament, and the war, and the lesson of this precarious period, more than of any other perhaps, is the necessity of trying to look ahead. The issue is not whether we should make forecasts or avoid forecasts. It is whether we should look ahead in a haphazard, unorganized way, or whether we should try to systematize our outlook, appraising current and foreseeable trends as part of a broader programme for maintaining high employment and sustained levels of income. Part of the federal government programme devoted to these ends, has been to set up a research unit which among other jobs, is attempting to develop a technique of forecasting suited to Canadian conditions, and which is trying to extend this as a basis for consideration of policy. This paper is a report on the progress of this forecasting unit: an attempt to state its objectives, the stage of development of its procedures, and its difficulties as they are now seen.

These remarks should be prefaced by reference to an informal committee on forecasting, established in Ottawa by representatives of several federal departments. Much of the forecasting work is reviewed by that committee, and the content of this paper is much affected by its work. But this paper expresses a personal view of the matter, for which that committee would probably be unwilling to take much responsibility.