bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Statutes, Orders, and Official Statements Relating to Canadian War-Time Economic Controls
Authors: Stewart Sheila I. 
Published: June 2006

The statutory basis for Canada's war-time economic controls and programmes is to be found, in the main, in a number of orders-incouncil issued under authority of the War Measures Act of 1914 and, only occasionally, in acts of Parliament. Even in those cases when the control agency derived its powers and responsibilities from an act of Parliament (e.g., the Department of Munitions and Supply) many of the more important operations of the agency in question were conducted by controllers who derived their powers from successive orders-in-council. The detailed regulations of the various war-time controllers and administrators in turn were usually promulgated in the form of additional orders-in-council or in the form of administrators' and controllers' orders. Thus, while the statutory powers and responsibilities of the Wartime Prices and Trade Board—the operations of which touched upon almost every section of Canada's economy—were derived from less than half a dozen basic orders-in-council, the hundreds of regulations governing the conditions of production and distribution applicable to specific industries were issued in the form of board orders and administrators' orders and, less often, in the form of informal directives.Apart from the latter type of measure, all the various war-time orders and regulations were printed in Canadian War Orders and Regulations (now Statutory Orders and Regulations) or, previous to October 1, 1942, in Proclamations and Orders-in-Council, both issued from the office of the Privy Council. Such orders and regulations have run into the tens of thousands during the war years. The student of Canada's war-time economic controls approaching this subject for the first time would find it difficult to select from this mass of printed material, much of it dealing with minor administrative procedures or appointments, the more basic or significant regulations.
Some Longer-Term Factors in the Canadian Balance of International Payments
Authors: Watts G. S. 
Published: June 2006

Thinking on balance of payments matters has been dominated for so many years by particular day-to-day problems that a reconsideration of longer-run factors seems clearly to be a timely topic for discussion. Admittedly, in times like these, this type of study has severe limitations: of necessity it has to be largely speculative, and one can certainly not expect it to yield a blueprint for the future. Nevertheless, it is the aim of this paper to suggest that a careful study of current and prospective developments is more rewarding than might appear at first sight; that it discloses or emphasizes a number of important enduring tendencies that are bound to have a decisive influence on our balance of payments for a long while to come; and that a realization of them will provide some bearings in a realm which nowadays involves all too large an element of dead reckoning. Needless to say, owing to reasons of space it will not be possible to do more than sketch the principal changes and suggest some tentative conclusions.The first of these trends, and perhaps the most important so far as the domestic economy is concerned, is the rebirth of natural resource development. Such development was, for many years, the main dynamic behind Canada's growth; however, it was in large measure inhibited for the better part of a generation except for a few specialized instances, first by the depression and later by the war. In spite of several recent spectacular discoveries, it is doubtful whether the full potential impact of these developments on our future balance of payments is adequately appreciated. Possibly the long interval of stagnation and reverses has tended to make Canadians rather cynical about favourable reports even when well substantiated. Admittedly nothing is easier than to be dazzled by thoughts of future riches; at the same time, however, a balanced appraisal of future prospects involves a realization of potential strengths as well as calculable risks. A good many of the projects referred to below are in their early stages and fall in the realm of the engineer and the geologist. But a general pattern of their magnitude and significance is beginning to emerge that merits the economist's attention.
The Canadian Agricultural Price Support Programme
Authors: Booth J. F. 
Published: June 2006

Much of the activity relating to the support of agricultural prices in Canada is conducted under the authority of the Wheat Board Act and the Agricultural Prices Support Act, but the programme in its broadest sense involves other legislation and a variety of government policies. Part of this programme originated in the inter-war period and earlier years. This paper, dealing with various aspects of the programme, is introduced by a brief outline of background developments.Governments, both federal and provincial, have traditionally been concerned in the main with activities aimed at increasing efficiency in the production and marketing of farm products. These have included experimental and scientific research; efforts to improve the quality of plants and animals; the introduction and enforcement of grades and standards for marketing; and extension work designed to acquaint farmers with useful information as it became available.During the First World War this pattern of activity was enlarged. At that time the federal Government took over control of the marketing of wheat. It gave to a body known as the Board of Grain Supervisors authority to fix the prices and to market the crops of 1917 and 1918. This proved to be the forerunner of a development that has since come to occupy an important place in government activity.
The Role of Support Prices in a Full-Employment Economy
Authors: Johnson D. Gale 
Published: June 2006

In both Canada and the United States the agricultural programmes that attempt to support or raise the level of farm prices were conceived during the inter-war period of readjustment and depression. Now that we have had ten years of full employment and high-level incomes in our respective economies, it is perhaps time to reassess the role of support prices.The reassessment that I propose to make is based on the assumption that we will be able to maintain full-employment economies most of the time and that if a depression should come, it will be relatively mild and of reasonably short duration. Fear of war, war, and preparation for war are likely to lead to a full-employment economy for some time. It may not be too much wishful thinking to believe that if the happy era should come when war no longer serves as an impetus for aggregate demand, our economies will be guided by competent monetary and fiscal leadership and will be able to maintain a fairly even keel. The mild recession which the United States experienced in 1949 and which had almost ended before the fateful attack in Korea offers some support for, though obviously not confirmation of, this view. In any case, we should clearly separate in our thinking and in our actions the problems of agricultural price policy as they relate to conditions of full employment and to conditions of depression.
Emergency Powers and Civil Liberties
Authors: Clokie H. McD. 
Published: June 2006

No apology need be offered for continuing the discussion of either civil liberties or emergency powers, exhausting and exhausted as the topics may now seem to have become. The very fact that such wide interest has been aroused by the agitation conducted by defenders of civil liberties in recent months indicates a growing realization that there is something at stake here requiring careful consideration and alert watchfulness. Whether one views civil liberty as flowing from numerous aspects of a well-balanced constitutional system of government, as the present writer does, or as the special area of distinctively designated fundamentals laid out to-protect individual rights, as many of the most vocal libertarians seem to do, every person must recognize the peculiar and intimate relation subsisting between civil liberty and constitutionalism. The preservation of the liberty of the subject is the distinguishing feature of all systems properly called constitutional and marks them off quite definitely from all forms of arbitrary government, no matter how the latter may be designated politically, socially, or economically. And at the present time no one can fail to observe that the unregulated and uncontrolled exercise of emergency powers constitutes one of the most serious threats to civil liberty as long understood and that it poses a most difficult problem for the constitutionalist.It is unnecessary to enter here upon any consideration of the nature or elements of civil liberty; still less is it necessary to embark on a defence of liberty or to ask why freedom matters. Liberty has been claimed on so many grounds —religious, rational, economic, national, and ethical—and has spawned such a volume of defences, from Milton's Areopagitica to Laski's Liberty in the Modern State, that one is entitled to assume that adequate exposition has been made and the goal denned in general terms acceptable to all sharing the historic concepts of western civilization. Nevertheless, it ought to be noted that the very same sources from which libertarian doctrines emanate are also quite frequently the springs of its repression, namely, some religious dogmas, some economic doctrines, some national cults, and social gospels of various types.
Town-Country Relations and the Problem of Rural Leadership
Authors: Burnet Jean 
Published: June 2006

The country town, like the country village, has usually been considered not only as a part of the rural community but as its centre. The existence of division and even antagonism between town and country has not been ignored, but it has been discussed as something which ought not to be. This has been the result of at least two errors into which sociology frequently falls. One of these is forgetting that many of its easy dichotomies, such as that beween rural and urban communities, are merely logical constructs. They are tools which are at times useful in the analysis and interpretation of data; they are not immutable truths. The second error is setting sociology up as a normative rather than a scientific discipline. General sociology is beginning to outgrow this, but rural sociology is still strongly disposed to describe the ideal rather than the actual. In point of fact, throughout the United States and Canada, especially in times of rapid social change, the town of a few thousand people and the farming district around it have not formed a single community; they have been distinct and often hostile social entities.The town-country rift is especially wide on the frontier because of the different speeds with which the two types of community respond to new social conditions. On the farming frontier the small town is the representative of the old order of things, the rural community the representative of the new. In the early Canadian settlements, this fact was made very evident by the gathering of British government and military officials in the towns. The farmers in a recently settled region are pressed toward radicalism by the demands of the new environment and by temporary necessities arising from frontier conditions; they are cramped by the old system, and begin to strive for reform. The townsmen are farther removed from the situation to which the old ways do not provide a tolerable mode of adjustment; they are, to a greater extent than the farmers, in the position which Veblen ascribed to the leisure class, a position “sheltered from the action of the environment.”
Bentham's Ideal Republic
Authors: Peardon Thomas P. 
Published: June 2006

Seldom read today, Bentham's Constitutional Code (1820-1832) nevertheless ranks among the most significant political treatises of the last century. It contains an extended statement of the ideas of Philosophic Radicalism on the eve of their partial victory in the Reform Bill of 1832. It must be nearly, it may be actually, the last work of any important figure of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. At the same time it is one of the first works in which through the fog of doctrinaire radicalism there can be seen fairly clearly the characteristic features of the contemporary state with its extreme centralization, its myrmidonian corps of bureaucrats, its elaborate administrative apparatus, and its miscellaneous services to the public. There are few books of a century ago in which the contemporary political scientist, provided he can overcome initial hurdles of style and manner, ought to feel more at home, if only because he will find there the twentieth-century student's interest in institutions and the emphasis on administration that plays so large a part in the study of government today.The Constitutional Code may be regarded as Bentham's view of the best possible commonwealth—a Utilitarian Utopia. Like all Utopias it was the product of disappointment with the here and now. It is well known that Bentham turned to systematic consideration of constitutional questions only after repeated failure to persuade the rulers of England to accept his legal reforms and especially his Panopticon scheme for a model prison.
Implications of Canadian Iron Ore Production
Authors: Wansbrough V. C. 
Published: June 2006

For the purposes of this paper it is proposed that we should assume, for a short time, the role of the prospector, and take a look for ourselves at one particular Canadian mineral resource, iron; and having done so, should then, more dangerously, assume the mantle of the prophet, attempting to forecast what that metal may mean in the economy of Canada during the years immediately ahead.As everyone here will know, the amount of iron produced in the course of the astonishing and proliferous mineral output of the last fifty years, has been small, sporadic, and, for certain periods, non-existent. Now, for the first time in Canadian history, we stand on the verge of a great age of iron production, which will certainly have a profound influence on the economic development of this country, of the North American continent, and quite possibly beyond. In addition, iron production, on the scale which can now be reasonably expected, may well prove to be the greatest single factor in redressing our financial and trade imbalance with the United States, and in tipping the scales towards the accomplishment of the long-awaited St. Lawrence Deep Seaway. The purpose of this paper will be to attempt to give some factual underpinning to these large assumptions.
Freight Rates and Regionalism
Authors: Currie A. W. 
Published: June 2006

The freight rate structure is the price list at which railways sell their services. It is distinguished from the pricing systems of businesses other than public utilities by the degree of its differentiation or discrimination. Freight tolls are not based on cost except in a general way but on value of service. The carriers charge low rates on raw materials and basic commodities, the products of farm, forest, mine, and sea which will not stand higher rates and still move in volume, and they collect relatively heavier tolls on manufactured articles and general merchandise which are better able to bear such tolls. This differentiated pricing arrangement was devised to enlarge railway revenue by encouraging the movement of freight, the widening of market opportunities, and the settlement of the country. Though calculated chiefly to meet the financial requirements of the railways, the system aided business and advanced national interests. During the last twenty years, however, the conditions of transportation have so altered that a complete re-examination of the entire pricing system of railways is now required.The need for this re-examination can be seen most clearly in terms of the historical development of the Canadian freight rate structure. During the period 1885 to 1915 railways benefited from improved technological efficiency, rapid growth in the volume of their traffic, and increasing density per mile of line. The gains from these changes went chiefly toward generous dividends on Canadian Pacific stock and capital re-investment in railway property. In addition, some important reductions in rates were granted. For the most part, these did not take the form of scaling down substantially all rates but of cutting the tolls on basic commodities and the rates to various sections of the Dominion.
Some Aspects of Recent Freight Rate Discussions
Authors: Moffat Robert E. 
Published: June 2006

The provision of a satisfactory transportation system is absolutely indispensable if Canada is to survive as a national unit. Without a transportation system which moved, relatively cheaply and conveniently, vast quantities of the country's primary products over long distances, it would be literally impossible for great sections of Canada to support its present population. In this context, modern transportation really means railway transportation for no other form of transportation can possibly transport such commodities as wheat, coal, and lumber over the distances and in the volumes which are involved in Canada.For this reason, there has never been any difference of opinion as to the absolute necessity of providing the Canadian railways with sufficient revenue to enable them to continue to provide satisfactory transportation service. There have, however, been serious differences of opinion as to whether or not the present freight rate structure does yield to the railways enough revenue for that purpose and as to the source from which any additional revenue should be secured if it is decided that it is necessary. There have also been differences as to who was to be given the responsibility and authority to decide these issues.
Problems in Census Taking
Authors: Lemieux O. A. 
Published: June 2006

While this is too early a date to produce for discussion a tentative questionnaire for the 1951 Census, with all the necessary definitions, we, in the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, are greatly pleased to have the opportunity of placing before you some of the problems that we will have to solve before our army of enumerators begin their house to house canvass to gather the information. Along with the discussion of these problems, I would like to mention some of the improvements that we propose to make in the 1951 Census as compared with previous censuses.The taking of a census is a very important and costly operation. The Advisory Committee on the United States Census stated in 1921: “Of all the peace-time activities of the federal government, taking and compiling the census is the largest.” Because of its high cost, it is necessary to make it yield its maximum both in quality and quantity of returns. The problem of determining the optimum quantity, keeping in mind that quantity very often works against quality, is possibly one of the most difficult ones to solve. Just before the census is taken we receive suggestions from a very large number of persons and groups for additional questions to be placed on questionnaires. These persons reason quite correctly that the most costly part of our organization is the one which makes it possible to cover every nook and cranny of this vast country of ours; and they also reason, not quite so correctly, that since our enumerators visit every home anyway, there is no harm is asking a few more questions. Mind you, the great majority of these questions are worthwhile and would produce information which is not available anywhere else. We are, therefore, placed in the unhappy position of having to appear to be unco-operative or to load our questionnaires beyond the point where it is possible to obtain reliable information. The first point, then, is to determine how long census questionnaires should be to provide as much information as possible without placing the quality of the statistics obtained in jeopardy.
The Municipal Business Tax in Canada
Authors: Clark Robert M. 
Published: June 2006

The nature, origin, development, and possible justification of the municipal business tax in Canada are the topics considered in this paper. These subjects are all the more interesting because there has been no comparable development in the United States. Statistics as late as May, 1947 indicate that New York City is the only city in the United States with a business tax comparable to the municipal business tax in Canada.The term “municipal business tax” generally is used in Canada to refer to a tax on premises occupied for business purposes. Three bases are in use: a fraction of the assessed value of the premises, the annual rental value of premises, and square feet of space occupied.
Britain's Post-War Economic Policy, 1945-50
Authors: Crick W. F. 
Published: June 2006

No one in England would claim that the radical readjustments of the national economy necessitated by the Second World War had yet been completed. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that much progress has been made, in many ways even beyond the pre-war level of attainment, since the fighting came to an end; and certainly the past five and a half years have been a period of intense activity, aimed perhaps not so much at reconstruction of a former economic system but rather at building a structure which should be more in accord with popular aspirations than the kind of economy that prevailed before the war.This interpretation of fundamental objectives is supported by a quick review of the tasks confronting Great Britain as she emerged from the war. First, and of immediate concern, was the delicate process of transition to a peace economy, involving the innumerable interlocking problems of switching manpower and physical resources back from war service to the purposes of a more peaceable way of life. Then there were more deep-seated problems to be faced, such as the replacement of physical assets, both social and economic, destroyed during the war or rendered obsolescent while the economic system had been concentrated upon the overriding purposes of war production. Along with these went a whole network of complicated problems of monetary reorganization, arising largely from the facts that in process of financing war requirements Britain's international position had been dramatically changed, from the status of a creditor country to that of a debtor, that her international reserves had been heavily reduced, and that her export trade had been ruthlessly sacrificed as part of the larger strategy of war. Finally, and underlying all these, was the widespread demand for the establishment of an economic system which should serve the needs of the people more effectively and more equitably than in times past, above all, one which should guarantee to every willing and competent citizen the continuous opportunity of remunerative employment. Naturally, there was wide disagreement about the best means of securing all these ends; but the ends themselves were generally accepted as necessary and worthy objectives.