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.