In recent years in many countries of the world a great deal of attention has been directed toward the need for more nutritious diets. The term “protective” foods has become established in the literature on nutrition. While there may be some differences of opinion as to what constitutes protective foods, practically all the lists of such foods which have been prepared by nutritionists include milk, meat, eggs, cheese, and fruits and vegetables.

The first studies of consumption of agricultural products in Canada were made by the Economics Division of the Dominion Department of Agriculture in 1930 when by the use of mail questionnaires a survey was made of the purchases of apples by consumers in Toronto and Montreal. A year later the first study of milk consumption in Canada was made by the Economics Division in the Sydney-Glace Bay area of Nova Scotia and in 1935 a more comprehensive study of milk consumption was undertaken in a number of urban and rural areas. Since 1935 additional studies of consumption of foods of various kinds have been made by the Economics Division as well as by other agencies. Most of these studies have been in relation to protective foods which in the main are the more expensive kinds of foods. These studies have been largely confined to city people although information has been gathered on the use of certain commodities in rural Canadian homes.

Economic literature of the past decade suggests, and most economists would surely agree, that there are two fundamental economic problems: unemployment and monopoly. Together, enforced idleness of resources and maldistribution of resources due to monopolization of all kinds are responsible for whatever gap exists between actual and potential national real income. They account for a good deal of the inequity of income distribution as well. Economic policy has as its chief concern the elimination of monopoly without loss of efficiency, and the elimination of unemployment without inflation or misuse of resources.

The post-war period will present these two basic problems in aggravated form. Exigencies of war have led to increased concentration of industry, which could easily crystallize into enhanced monopoly power. With half our national income now generated by war expenditures, the task of maintaining full employment while shifting production from things that win wars to things that promote welfare will be of unprecedented magnitude. At the same time, vast new holdings of cash and other liquid resources, combined with the backlog of demand for both consumers' and producers' goods that will have accumulated, will constitute a grave threat of inflation. The balance of the economy, which must be maintained by what Professor Lerner has aptly called “functional finance,” will be delicate indeed.

This article suggests an approach to post-war tax policy designed to meet these problems. While the setting is Canadian, the analytical tools and even the policies proposed would be applicable to the British or American scenes with minor modifications.

When I was invited to present a paper on “Problems of Public Administration in International Organizations” I readily accepted as I am a firm believer in the efficacy of public discussion of important issues. Ordinarily, the selection of a topic in this broad field would offer unlimited choice, but taking into account recent changes in the international political scene, there was no doubt in my mind about the subject on which I should speak.

Anyone associated with the activities of international organizations over the past ten years has inevitably been impressed by the intense desire of the poorer countries for improved standards of living through accelerated economic development. Equally impressive has been the substantial response of the more advanced countries.

Reflecting their mutual interest in achieving social progress and economic development, and acting in fulfilment of article 55 of the United Nations Charter, governments of most advanced countries (outside the Soviet sphere) increased the flow of bilateral aid in the early post-war period and at the same time joined in establishing a number of new international agencies and programmes for economic development. In the time at my disposal today I will not attempt to describe in detail the different concepts underlying each of these programmes. But it will give some indication of their objectives and scope if I mention the large amounts of bilateral aid now being provided by the United States through the International Cooperation Administration and by Canada and other Commonwealth countries under the Colombo Plan. At the same time international organizations have increased their programmes substantially. Loans extended by the International Bank since the war now exceed $2½ billion.

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.

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.

In any study of Canadian industry today, words such as growth and development quickly come into their own. The very scope and rapidity of the changes have introduced a new pace which in many ways is unique. Some of the reasons are not hard to trace. Once growth reaches a certain stage it seems to accumulate momentum. The proximity of Canada to the United States and her access to the industrial technology of that country have also contributed greatly.

A large measure of the expansion of Canadian industry has been the result of extensions of United States corporate activity into Canada through the establishment or development of branches and subsidiaries. In this manner, United States industrial technology, supported by abundant sources of financing in that country, has speeded and extended the process of Canadian development. And important parts of the growth which provide sources of supply for United States industry are in turn closely linking Canadian growth to growth in the United States economy. Participation by British and European enterprise and industry to a greater degree than formerly should also be noted, although it is much smaller in scale than the parts sponsored by United States industry. The pace of development would have been much slower had there not been this borrowing of non-resident resources both technological and financial. In the past half-dozen years or so, over half the increase in investment in Canadian industry has been owned by non-residents. That suggests the degree of financial assistance. It would be very difficult to evaluate the borrowing of technology but in some industries it has been very great and has provided the indispensable “know-how” without which ventures would carry much greater risks. Most of this increased investment has taken the form of equity ownership and control which carries with it potential claims to participate in subsequent growth in the rapidly developing, commodity-producing industries—manufacturing and mineral production.

On May 1, 1851, Queen Victoria, accompanied by the Prince Consort, to whom must be given credit for the undertaking, with the royal family, the ministers of state, ambassadors, and a great throng of all who were famous in the United Kingdom, opened the Great Exhibition housed in the Crystal Palace, “that blazing arch of lucid glass.” A massed choir of a thousand voices—the Victorians loved massed choirs and massed orchestras—sang an ode composed by Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, in which they praised “the invisible, universal Lord,”

Who lets once more in peace the nations meet,
Where Science, Art and Labour have outpour'd
Their myriad horns of plenty at our feet.

The exhibition was off to a good start, and its success was phenomenal. Fourteen thousand exhibitors from all the leading nations of the world had brought the best they had of their wares. Six million visitors, brought to England by the new steamships and to London by the new railways, came to see the marvels displayed, and thought it all very wonderful. And it was wonderful; nothing like it had ever been seen before. It was the apotheosis of the Industrial Revolution. The Victorians believed in Progress; they had every reason to believe in it and the Crystal Palace was its outward and visible sign. The entrepreneurs, the manufacturers were entirely satisfied with things. Everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. God was in his heaven and all was right everywhere; or at least it was all right in Manchester where they made fortunes from cottons; and in the Black Country where, under the shadow of those “dark satanic mills” which had vexed the gentle soul of William Blake, they were making even greater fortunes.

The decennial redistribution of federal constituencies in Canada always reveals the House of Commons in an unusual light. Almost alone among major pieces of legislation, the Representation Bill that follows each census is not openly an embodiment of cabinet policy; for statements of policy are confined to declarations that redistribution is the business of the House, not of the government. Party discipline is thus relaxed to the extent that every member of Parliament must look out for himself, and in this self-seeking he can assume that his party colleagues, particularly those from his own province, will stand by him; and they do. A redistribution calls forth not party discipline but party cohesion, and commonly offers many illustrations of the decentralized nature of Canadian political organization. Since every member of Parliament is an expert on at least one clause in the bill and has a vested interest in one constituency, local and personal considerations enter largely into debate, so that the House of Commons during a redistribution presents a somewhat disconcerting picture of what the electorate could expect if cabinet leadership in important legislation were weak or relaxed all the time instead of once in ten years.

This paper is primarily an impressionistic sketch of an on-going piece of family research. No conclusions can as yet be offered. Instead, I intend briefly to suggest a frame of reference for the study of family hostility as well as enumerate some of the procedures of field work used in the present project.

Much has been written about the family by many sociologists of various persuasions. Yet a large part of this phase of sociological effort leaves one dissatisfied. Admittedly data on our own types of family structure are hidden from clear view precisely because of their familiarity as well as their privacy. But this fact is not sufficient to account for the disparity between the experienced complexity of family life and the sparsity of published details made significant by a sustained and incisive theoretic orientation. Headway could be made by the use of a frame of reference which combines sociological with psychological considerations, without confusing them, and which draws its vitality from the impassioned analyses of the structure of large-scale social systems and of individual character as begun by Weber and Freud. At the present time family research seems on the whole to have made little consistent use of the leads of kinship analysis and to have by-passed a cumulative effort at spelling out the empirical details of the social structure of various types of American families. As it is, we hear much about the family as a “unity of interacting personalities,” about processes of accommodation or conflict, or about the kinds of valuation that marital partners place upon one another; yet we hear little of the intervening details which, in their fullness, would give us a sense of how indeed a family as an on-going concern functions and how the inherent or emergent demands of its social structure are met, how the social structure of a family is related meaningfully or functionally to the rest of the social system, and how any given family of orientation dissolves into successive families of procreation.

From 1905, when Saskatchewan was made a province, to 1911, the Liberal party in Saskatchewan controlled both the federal and the provincial patronage. These six years gave it an enviable opportunity for laying firm foundations for a political organization. During the next ten years the federal patronage was in the hands of a Conservative or a Union party but the more important provincial patronage remained with the Liberals. Then in their last eight years of uninterrupted power, the Saskatchewan Liberals once more had the support of a federal Liberal government. Thus for twenty-four years after the formation of the province the Liberal rule over Saskatchewan was uninterrupted, and for fourteen of those years the Liberals also ruled over the Dominion. Until a few years before its defeat in 1929, it seemed as if the longer the party remained in power the stronger grew the party organization. It is this long period of development under favourable conditions which makes the Liberal organization in Saskatchewan worthy of close study.

The Liberal party in Saskatchewan, like Liberal and Conservative parties in the other provinces, had two sides to its organization—one formal and ineffective, the other informal and effective. In its formal aspect it resembled party organization elsewhere. The Liberals in each polling sub-division elected one or two representatives. These met to elect a constituency executive. Each constituency executive had one representative on the central council of the provincial party, on which there also sat the executive elected at a party convention. This formal organization, which paid so strict a homage to democratic theory in its pyramidical structure based upon the people's will, was unimportant. The constituency organization, for example, did very little; it met, perhaps, once a year. The formal organization constituted a democratic façade which hid from the common gaze the naked autocracy of effective party management. In the effective party organization which did the work, won the elections, and consequently possessed the reality of political power, appointments were from the top down.

On March 9, 1964, the Hon. J. W. Pickersgill moved in the House of Commons the second reading of the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Bill, a step of major constitutional importance which not only made provision for the first redistribution of Canadian federal constituencies since 1952, but provided that, for the first time, this task of redistribution would be taken out of the hands of parliamentary committees and entrusted to independent representation commissions. All this was long overdue and there was broad, if not unanimous, agreement that the creation of impartial representation commissions was a desirable reform. As Mr. Pickersgill said in the House next day:

The first and by far the most important of these [principles] was that we should not follow the pattern that had been followed in the first ninety years since Confederation, of having the readjustment of representation in this place done in this place by its members directly, but that it should be done by some body which would be as impartial as we in our collective ingenuity could provide and who would be as competent as we could find means to provide through legislation and subsequent appointment.