To question the principle of administrative secrecy is to question a long-cherished tradition of the British parliamentary system. Yet when one explores the full range of its adverse effects one cannot help but ask whether it conforms with the requirements of modern democracy. The Cold War and the need for military security have led to certain areas of administrative activity being walled off entirely from the public. During the post-war era of McCarthyism and hysteria in the United States, the need for military secrecy and personnel security was greatly exaggerated by the administration, and the press in that country complained loudly about the dangers and evils resulting from this over-extension of secrecy. Readers will perhaps recall Herblock's biting cartoon late in 1956 in which John Q. Citizen is sitting before a stage, and all he can see is a paper curtain with the official words stamped on it in huge letters: “SECRET, CLASSIFIED, SHH!” At the side of the stage is the master of ceremonies, Mr. Government Secrecy, saying, “It's a great performance going on—take my word for it!” It is easy for Canadians to be under the comfortable impression that this passion for secrecy was one of the excesses of American society. But in fact the United States has always had a much more open system of administration than our own, and the pinch of secrecy was felt much more acutely by the public and press in that country than in Canada. Moreover, if one compares the American personnel screening system with our own, one sees that the secrecy of our system has not only obvious virtues but subtle vices.

The current widespread concern with economic growth has stimulated much quantitative study of the economic history of now-developed countries, including Canada. Population change has been an important part of the Canadian record and considerable attention has been given to international migration. Unfortunately, in the period now of greatest interest–say between Confederation and the eve of the First World War–insufficient attention was paid in Canada and other countries to the problems of keeping accurate and comprehensive records of migration. As a result serious doubts must attach to any migration statistics which still survive from this period. These doubts must extend to the Canadian official figures, even though immigrant statistics go back to 1852, are ostensibly complete in that the annual series is thereafter unbroken, and ostensibly genuine in that immigrants are defined as “those who have never been in Canada before and who declare their intention to live there permanently.” In fact, the Canadian official record of migration in the second half of the nineteenth century suffers from at least three serious defects: the immigration figures are lacking in internal consistency; the unguarded propinquity of the United States created more problems in counting migrant heads than Canadian (or American) authorities could solve; and there are no data at all on emigration.

It is possible that the current “crisis” in French-English relations in Canada has been helped to its present pitch through a simple lack of understanding of the roots of French-Canadian discontent on the part of English Canadians, rather than as the result of a clash between irreconcilable ends. Two of the most common manifestations of this lack of understanding are to be seen in the lines of argument so often employed by English Canadians in discussing constitutional questions. The first has a long and honourable history, going back at least as far as 1887. Moreover, it enjoys the distinction of having seen active service down through the years on both sides in the various English-French and Dominion-provincial disputes.

The error in question is that of basing constitutional arguments upon an interpretation of the intentions of the Fathers of Confederation. This basis of argument has been invoked by both the compact theorists, among the upholders of provincial rights, and the “Judicial Committee ruined our Constitution” school among the centralists. (This word is used in a non-pejorative sense, although it seems to have acquired pejorative overtones in recent years.) The Fathers of Confederation were practical politicians attempting to deal with the practical political problems of the mid-nineteenth century, and it was with reference to these problems and to the contemporary value systems of the various communities of British North America that they conceived the series of compromises embodied in the British North America Act. To credit the Confederation settlement of a century ago with eternal validity is to credit the Fathers with a prescience which they simply did not possess.

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century the self-governing colonies of the British Empire and particularly Canada attempted to obtain a broader degree of freedom in developing their commercial policies. The campaign, which may be said to have commenced in 1878, had as its goals the right for the dependencies to conclude preferential tariff agreements with each other, the establishment of tariff preference throughout the Empire, including the United Kingdom, and the denunciation of the mother country's treaties with Belgium and the German Zollverein. Abrogation of the latter two agreements was regarded as vital since they provided that any duty concessions made to the United Kingdom by the colonies had to be accorded to Belgium and Germany. These concessions also had to be extended to all other foreign countries with which London had treaties containing the most-favoured-nation clause that included the colonies.

The movement suffered a considerable set-back in 1895 when the Colonial Secretary, the Marquis of Ripon, issued his famous circular letter to the colonies in which he stoutly defended Britain's free-trade policy and emphasized the value of her commerce with the foreign world. His policy statement rejecting the establishment of tariff preference within the Empire and the abolition of the two treaties was aimed at a series of resolutions emanating from the Colonial Conference of 1894 held in Ottawa. This imperial pronunciamento was not the last word. The entire issue was raised again in 1897 when a new tariff bill was introduced in the Canadian House of Commons by the Finance Minister, W. S. Fielding. The purport of the bill was to grant preference to British goods.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the way in which policy decisions have been made by the government of Metropolitan Toronto during its first twelve years of operation, and to set policy-making in the broader context of interest-group and electoral politics in the Toronto area. I begin with some comments on the structure of Metro government and on the current debate over Metro’s successes and failures.

The Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto was a major breakthrough in the post-war drive for reorganization of local governments in metropolitan areas. As the inability of small, autonomous local governments to deal with metropolitan problems became apparent, most North American metropolitan areas began considering various devices for meeting region-wide needs. Metro Toronto, created in 1953 by an act of the Ontario legislature, is the oldest example of what has become known as the metropolitan federation plan, a device subsequently adopted for the Miami and Winnipeg metropolitan areas.

The 1953 provincial statute setting up Metro brought the City of Toronto and twelve suburbs under the umbrella of a new regional government, but did not alter any municipal boundaries in the area. A few powers were shifted to the Metro level, a few were left solely with the municipalities. A majority of powers, however, were to be shared by both levels of government. Metro was dominant in the fields of public transportation, property assessment, capital borrowing, highway construction, and the construction of water and sewer facilities; the municipalities were dominant in the fields of zoning, housing, welfare, police, fire, licensing, and traffic control. The only major change in this 1953 division of powers occurred in 1956, when policing and licensing functions were amalgamated–that is, shifted from the municipal to the Metro level.

It appears to be generally agreed that there ought to be a close integration of economic theory and the building of econometric models, together with the auxiliary activities of data collection and processing. If this is to be so, then every econometric model must be a special purpose model or at best a model designed for a limited range of related uses. A model is, by definition, an image of reality that is simplified according to certain criteria of what is important and what is not. Its construction necessarily reflects the main preoccupations of its builders, the relations and measures they think relevant to the problems they face, and even their particular versions of economic theory. This leaves the door wide open for differences in emphasis, in priorities, and even in fundamental interpretations of economic phenomena. In short, a model appropriate for, say, Quebec, will necessarily differ considerably from models constructed for the federal government or its agencies and from models set up by large corporations for their own use. And it is not just a matter of fitting different parameters into the same logical structure; the logical structures themselves will differ.

Secondly, if true integration of model building with economic theory is to be attained, and if a solid observational basis is to be secured, we must work very close to the micro-economic level. This means that models must be disaggregated, since our most solid theoretical results are in micro-economics.

This paper is a preliminary report of a study of post-war patterns of aggregate consumption in Canada. The data consist of the eight gross categories of personal consumption recorded in the official statistics, and the corresponding price indicators. A fifteen-yeai time-series spanning the years 1949 to 1963 has been used to fit a complete system of consumer demand equations for the eight categories using a method more fully reported elsewhere. Basically, this method makes the simplest plausible assumption about the form of the utility function, namely, that of “directly additive preferences,” and utilizes the consequent dependence between substitution and income effects to sharpen the specification of the model. In the absence of such specifying restrictions, analysis of short time series is not likely to prove very fruitful.

It is not claimed that “directly additive preferences” provides the optimum set of restrictions (though it certainly provides the simplest). More sophisticated utility schemes, such as Mr. Barten's “almost-additive” preference concept, are likely to yield more reliable results. In this sense, the present report is preliminary. There are also other areas even within the framework of additive preferences in which further improvements could be sought; some of these are indicated later. Finally, the available arbitrary classification of consumption expenditure is in no sense ideal.