This article is an attempt to evolve an administrative technique for Dominion-provincial co-operation in the social services—with particular reference to public health—within the framework or confines of the existing British North America Act of 1867.

The recent war has brought the need for social services into sharp relief. The realization has finally dawned that in the complex society in which we live, a comprehensive programme of social progress is now essential, but such a programme must necessarily be nation-wide, since we can no longer afford disparities in the social services on account of the serious reactions such disparities have on the general welfare and national unity of the country. To develop such a national system of public welfare services, it is vitally necessary that the Dominion should extend its influence, leadership, and activity, but here we are at once confronted with the vexed—and, as yet, unsolved—problem of Dominion-provincial relations. Valiant attempts have been made to solve this problem, but two main obstacles still obstruct all efforts.

The Need for Income and Employment Security. In modern times insecurity of income has been the lot of many workers in most countries. This income insecurity is the result of the effects of seasonal variations, cyclical fluctuations, secular changes, and random fluctuations upon production in individual plants and businesses. Production in industries such as meat packing, fruit canning, or clothing manufacturing is typically seasonal because of the nature of their raw materials, or of the demand for their products. Cyclical fluctuations in economic activity affect the economy as a whole but hit particularly severely durable goods industries such as the building and construction industry, or the automobile industry. Further, the economy is subject to secular changes owing to such causes as changes in the size and age structure of the population, technological advance, or changes in the buying habits of consumers. In addition, economic phenomena exhibit chance or random fluctuations.

The security of income and employment of the working population is affected by all these different types of economic variations but it is with cyclical and seasonal unemployment that we are concerned chiefly here. It is difficult to determine whether a worker is suffering as a result of either cyclical or seasonal unemployment as there is generally a combination of both in most industries. In many cases, however, unemployment is markedly cyclical or seasonal in character although it is little consolation to the worker to know the kind of unemployment of which he is the victim.

In a number of important aspects Canadian war-time price controls were a pioneering venture and for this reason have aroused considerable interest both at home and abroad. It is too soon to present a considered appraisal of these policies and procedures—indeed the operation has not yet been concluded—but it is perhaps not too soon to record in a broad way what was done and why.

When war broke out in September, 1939 Canada, in common with most other countries, was emerging uncertainly from a decade of economic depression. Prices were low, unemployment was high, and the costs of relief were still a heavy charge on federal, provincial, and municipal budgets. The general index of wholesale prices was 28 per cent below 1926 and only 9 points above the low point of the depression in 1933. The iron and steel industry was operating at 20 per cent below 1928-9, and probably not in excess of 50 per cent of capacity. Recorded unemployed formed 12 per cent of the normal working force, and under-employment affected a further large percentage. Nearly a million persons were on direct relief and the fully employable persons on direct urban relief numbered nearly 200,000. In brief we entered the war with a high proportion of idle and underemployed resources.

We also entered the war with a sound and reasonably well thought out conception of overall war-time economic policy, but, excepting foreign exchange control which had been carefully prepared in detail well in advance, with very little organization for carrying it out and no very clear notion of what kind of a war it would be and along what lines our major contributions would, lie. The Defence Purchasing Board, predecessor of the Department of Munitions and Supply, began operations in July, 1939, but the organization of price and supply controls received detailed consideration only a few weeks before hostilities broke out. The Wartime Prices and Trade Board was created on September 3, 1939, and within a few weeks was actively involved in half a dozen commodity fields.

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.

It is customary to regard the planning function as being distributed over three levels of government—national, local and regional. This analysis radically differs from existing administrative machinery in most modern states: nevertheless it has been widely recognized that comprehensive, nation-wide planning cannot be carried out solely through the normal processes of national and local government. There is a need for a new level of power and responsibility: a level of government intermediate in function between central government and the municipality both geographically and administratively. To quote E. A. Gutkind: “Planning implies a systematic procedure starting from the top and the bottom at the same time. It includes large-scale plans as well as local plans, or in other words, its general framework consists of a national plan while local plans constitute, as it were, the cellular components which are bound together through the medium of regional schemes. Consequently planning proceeds on the different levels of national, regional and local activities forming one coherent whole ….”

Although this idea is probably true of planning, however its field is defined, it is worth remembering that the word is loose in meaning, and that under it several very different activities have been lumped together. In its commonest usage, planning means city planning: the reconstruction of cities to render them more efficient and more liveable. Though such planning usually requires permissive national legislation for its prosecution, it is emphatically a local activity, carried out normally in the smallest governmental units. Primarily, it is a matter for the architect and the engineer. But equally vital (perhaps more vital) to the community is the planning work of the conservationist, who is concerned to stop the wastage of physical resources and amenities. In the United States, the conservation movement has gathered impetus in this century until there are now many governmental agencies wholly concerned with work of this character. The work chiefly rests with either state or federal agencies: it involves too great an expenditure and too wide a viewpoint to be carried out locally. Lastly there is the group of purely national activities we can label economic and social planning, which may cover anything from public investment policies to such matters as the relocation of industry, the colonization of hitherto undeveloped country, or the systematic restriction of some field of production.

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.

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.”

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.) movement in Saskatchewan is the first avowedly socialist group to win an electoral majority in any province or state of Canada or the United States. Many have expressed surprise that a socialist party should have won office in the most rural province in Canada. This paper is an attempt to throw some light on this question through a study of the leadership of the C.C.F. as compared with that of other community groups and political parties in that province.

The significance of the growth of the C.C.F. party can best be expressed in economic class terms. The movement has two important aspects. Essentially, it represents the latest historical phase of the almost continuous conflict of the western grain farmers of the United States and Canada with eastern business interests. Secondly, within the province, success of the movement has resulted in a political transformation in which the representatives of the rural majority supported by the working class of the cities and towns rejected the political control of the urban middle-class business and professional groups which dominated the Liberal and Conservative parties and the government of the province.

Since 1901, the farmers of the West and of Saskatchewan in particular, have been attempting to reduce the hazards of a one-crop wheat economy which is perennially subject to extreme fluctuations in income, as a result of the variability in grain prices and climatic conditions. At the turn of the century, Saskatchewan farmers organized the Territorial Grain Growers' Association (later the Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association) to force the Canadian Pacific Railroad to provide loading platforms and freight cars for their wheat.

The ideological weakness of modern liberalism has long been recognized as one of the more striking features of contemporary politics. Although constitutional democracy has on the whole proved rather more successful than totalitarian government in satisfying the ordinary needs of men, its achievements have generally failed to arouse a great deal of enthusiasm. In comparison with the aggressive self-confidence of communists and fascists, the attitude of contemporary liberals is notoriously defensive and pessimistic. What are the causes underlying this curious failure of liberal morale? To what extent can it be attributed to deficiencies in the theoretical structure of modern liberalism? These questions must be of interest to anyone who is concerned with the problems of contemporary political thought.

When substantial accomplishments fail to evoke enthusiasm, it is reasonable to suppose that those accomplishments are being measured against standards which in some way or other are alien to their nature. A good deal of the weakness of modern liberalism arises out of the fact that it insists on judging the achievements of constitutional democracy, an essentially pluralist system, in terms of standards which are still largely absolutist in character. Liberal government depends in practice on the existence of a multi-myth, multi-group society. Policy is determined not, as in totalitarian countries, by imposing the will of a homogeneous ruling group upon the rest of the community, but by a process of parliamentary negotiation between the supporters of widely varying points of view. In a society of this sort, the coercive functions of government are necessarily limited by the claims of rival individuals and groups.

By “agricultural policy” I mean the pattern of those acts of government, especially of national governments, which specifically concern the agricultural segment of society. The discussion of agricultural policy, like that of any other social problem, involves all the social sciences, perhaps one should say all the sciences. Economic analysis, dealing as it does with a limited range of abstractions, cannot pretend to give an “answer” to any social problem, agricultural policy included. Sociological, political, legal, historical, psychological, technical considerations obviously enter into the discussion. Nevertheless it may be useful to ask what are the insights yielded by economic analysis, as a discipline of thought and as a system of related propositions, in approaching a problem of this degree of generality. The case for economics, or for any other discipline of thought, is the case for specialization. The problems involved in the study of even so relatively simple a problem as agricultural policy are beyond the wit of any single mind to explore fully. To appreciate the problems of agriculture fully one would need to be an economist, sociologist, political scientist, social psychologist, biologist, chemist, physicist, botanist, zoologist, and much more; and in these days no one man can hope to be expert in all fields. The only way in which we can even begin to encompass any problem is by specialization; but, according to what is almost the first proposition in economics, specialization is useless without exchange. The aim of this paper is a little intellectual trade, a small offering of an economist to other disciplines, in the hope perhaps of some enlightenment in return.