This paper presents some information about the two disciplines which have hitherto composed our association. It is largely a by-product of a series of studies in which I have been collaborating on the international migration of scientists and engineers. My paper arises from our research because, as I hope to suggest, many of the particular characteristics of the collectivity of political scientists and economists in Canada arise from its uncertainty about its geographical reference. This in turn is a consequence of the dependence of Canadian academic departments, and of other employers, on sources outside Canada for the training of new recruits.

The subject is by no means new. At least part of my theme was put before this association almost twenty years ago by Professor H. F. Angus in his 1949 presidential address “Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences,” in which much consideration was given to advanced study abroad. In 1952 Professor J. E. Hodgetts reviewed three contemporary reports (by Professors Dawson, Watkins and Keirstead, and Macpherson) on the teaching of political science in Canada; they make gloomy reading today. We have also had the advantage of a series of papers on research in the social sciences, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council of Canada, by Messrs. Ostry, Dawson, Clark, and others.

“The wages fund theory is the crowning instance of an untrue abstraction … and it has probably done more injury to the reputation of economic theory than any other generalization ever received into economics textbooks and then expunged from them.” These words, by James Bonar, fairly well express the view that has dominated economic thought on the wages fund doctrine for the past century. Writing forty years after Bonar, Paul Samuelson claims he has been impressed by the “falseness and emptiness of the wage fund doctrine,” stating that the controversy it inspired “constitutes one of the most sterile chapters in that dreary gap between the classical age and the revolutionary neoclassical discoveries of that last third of the nineteenth century.”

It is now a more or less established feature of Canada's political life that many sectors of the Canadian electorate are disposed to reject the two “major” political parties in favour of “minor” party alternatives. Recently, the New Democratic party, one of these so-called minor parties, has received substantial electoral support especially in urban English Canada, to such an extent that it is now bidding either to replace one of the major parties or to join both of them in a position of relative equality. Until now, the rather scanty commentaries attempting to account for this “deviant” electoral behaviour of some Canadians have tended to be highly speculative.

This article analyses survey findings that shed some light on the NDP phenomenon in the 1960s in four cities in English Canada. It begins by examining the economic and social elements in partisan choice, emphasizing religion and class identification. Next it deals with political habits and attitudes and with party identification and issue orientation. Following this, some of the characteristics of people switching to the NDP are probed. Finally, the findings are related to other research on the topic and some limited comments about the future are made.

In 1960, the first major decision of any doctrinal importance concerning mergers under section 32 of the Combines Investigation Act was handed down in the Supreme Court of Ontario. This decision established that there is no merger problem under the Act unless the fusion of firms creates a monopoly situation. Such a test, aside from being incomprehensible in economic terms, is based on a narrow legal premise (that may or may not be legally correct) which, taken together with the decision in R. v. British Columbia Sugar Refining Co. Ltd. and the inexplicable decision of the Crown to appeal neither case, has resulted in complete emasculation of the merger section of the Act. In effect, mergers have ceased to become an economic problem.

The purpose of this paper is to reevaluate the Brewing case solely in terms of economic criteria, by putting economic flesh on the bones of the statutory offence: “merger … which has operated or is likely to operate to the detriment or against the interest of the public.” Such criteria as will be erected are generally applicable to the section because here the application of appropriate economic criteria requires not so much a change in the Act as a better and more sophisticated treatment in the courts.

Although most of this essay relates to the work of political scientists, some of it deals with the writings of others who have contributed to our understanding of the government and politics of Canada. It would be a perverse and superficial student of our political institutions indeed who confined himself to the scholarship of political scientists without familiarizing himself at least in a general way with the writings, for example, of historians Ramsay Cook and W. L. Morton, sociologists S. D. Clark and John Porter, economists John Dales and Harry Johnson, legal scholars Edward McWhinney and Frank Scott, and, outside the bounds of Academia proper, journalists Peter Newman and Claude Ryan, and practising public administrators A. W. Johnson and Herbert Balls.