The British North America Act is usually considered to go no further in guaranteeing fundamental rights than to provide some protection for the French Canadians of Quebec with respect to their peculiar property and social institutions, for Protestant and Catholic minorities in the provision of educational facilities, and for English and French minorities in the use of their languages. Yet subsection 26 of section 91, which authorized the Dominion Parliament and not the provincial legislatures to enact laws on divorce, was no less a protective device. For, as Georges Etienne Carrier pointed out in Parliament in 1870, the Protestants of Quebec would have been unable to secure divorces if the granting of them had been left to the legislatures, since the legislature of Quebec would not have established a court for that purpose or permitted them by special bills. According to Carrier, the bishops of his Church had accepted the subsection relating to divorce because Canada was a mixed community; he hoped, however, that, when Catholics petitioned for divorce, Protestant members of Parliament would remember that the provision was intended for Protestants. The inference was that Parliament was to give different treatment to petitioners of different religious faiths.

This article explores the structure of the Canadian economy revealed in the recently published inter-industry table for 1949. It seeks not to treat exhaustively any aspect of Canada's economic structure, but to use inter-industry methodology to test a variety of familiar hypotheses about that structure. In announcing the coming of input-output analysis to the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, S. A. Goldberg heralded the appearance of an “experimental table for the year 1949.” He stressed its prospective value for checking the consistency and completeness of the Bureau's statistical coverage. But he added the hope that the table would “help to strengthen the habit of looking at the economy as being composed of interrelated variables and in this manner … assist economic as well as statistical analysis. If the data provided by the table are useful for the purpose of appraising emerging trends in the economy, there will be an additional gain.” A demonstration of the uses and limits of “input-output analysis” may give some help to those who must estimate the marginal productivity of gathering further data in this area. Thus, a subsidiary theme of this article is the potential usefulness of inter-industry analysis for the formation of policy, both by government agencies and private firms.

Transport costs have been somewhat neglected in international trade theory, most of which is expounded on the assumption that transport costs are absent. In this paper I shall present a simple geometric method for describing transport costs in offer-curve diagrams, and apply this method to consider the effects of transport costs on the terms of trade, the transfer problem, the optimum tariff, and real factor returns.

To avoid introducing a third industry—the transport industry—it will be necessary to employ a drastic, but very useful assumption regarding the nature of transport costs. I shall assume that transport costs are met by the wastage of a proportion of the goods traded. This assumption will mean that: if each country provides the resources for transporting its own exports, then only a proportion of the goods exported will be received as imports by the other country, the remainder being used up as costs of transport; if each country provides the resources for transporting its imports, then a proportion of its exports will be used up for every unit of the other country's good imported; and if each country shares in the transport of each good, some of each country's resources will be used up in transporting each good. The meaning of this assumption will become clearer later in the paper.

The Canadian government's post-war policy of supporting the prices of government bonds and thereby restricting the workings of the free price system in regard to interest rates stood in decided contrast to its policy in most other fields, including since 1950 the field of exchange rates. As recently as 1954, the wisdom of this policy was reaffirmed by Mr. Graham Towers, then Governor of the Bank of Canada. In his view, freeing the interest rate at the end of the war would not have been a wise policy since the Canadian price level “could not have been held substantially below that which occurred in the United States without sacrificing an appreciable part of the increase in production which was achieved here.” This paper examines this apparent contradiction between the government's preference for price control in the field of interest rates and for the workings of the free price system elsewhere in the economy, and in the light of this analysis evaluates Canada's post-war monetary policy down to 1954.

The agricultural sector of Israel's Jewish population is not very large; nevertheless the role of agriculture in the political life of the country is of the utmost importance. Seven of the sixteen members of the present cabinet (July, 1956) are members of kibbutzim (collective agricultural settlements). Twenty-six of the seventy-five Jewish members who support the government coalition in the 120-member Knesset (Israel Parliament) are members of kibbutzim or of moshvei-ovdim (co-operative agricultural settlements). David Ben-Gurion, Israel's outstanding leader, who is the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, retains his affiliation with a kibbutz and declares himself to be an agricultural labourer. Recently, for example, he relinquished all his official positions and left for a year and a half to do agricultural work in a kibbutz in Israel's pioneering frontier area, the Negev. The Minister of Finance, the Director General of the Ministry of Defence, and the Secretary General of the Histadrut (Federation of Labour)–three of Israel's key positions–consider themselves members of kibbutzim and take pride in their past as agricultural labourers. The Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces, a most popular figure with the youth of the country, was born and raised in a co-operative agricultural settlement, and his father, himself a farmer, is a member of the Knesset.

Elite groups, from the point of view of sociological theory, are composed of individuals who are the effective decision-makers and co-ordinators of the social system. These individuals occupy, as Professor Mills has put it, “the command posts” of the institutional hierarchies of modern complex society. Empirical studies of élite groups are concerned with at least three problems. The first is an attempt to discover the principles on which a social system allocates certain types of individuals to the élites, or positions of power, and thereby denies power to others. In all social systems the allocation of these roles is orderly, and supported by a widely held ideology. There need be no correspondence between the ideology held and the realities of power. In most social systems certain biological and social characteristics stand out as putting an individual in a preferred group for recruitment to positions of power. Power is not exercised by youth and rarely by women. Religion, ethnic affiliation, educational experience, social class and other social characteristics may form the basis of preference. Thus a study of preferred social types is an initial step in the analysis of the structure of power.

In this paper I intend to do little more than sketch in very broad outline some of the main features of the electoral anatomy of the province of Ontario as revealed by the official provincial election returns. Since I have relied solely on the actual voting record, which is, of course, tabulated by constituencies, my method is ecological and, unlike survey methods, provides only rough and indirect measures of the social and economic factors related to voting behaviour. My findings are entirely descriptive and do not go much beyond what is accessible to any alert newspaper reader who may have followed Ontario politics over the past two decades.

The chief methodological problem confronting ecological analysts of voting behaviour is how to equate electoral units with the administrative units by which population characteristics are tabulated in the census. In Ontario the smallest units for which official election statistics are given are polling subdivisions, but these fail to correspond to any units for which data on population characteristics are available. However, data on voting by townships can be derived from the election returns, and the census tabulates population characteristics by townships. I have made some determination of the voting habits of ethnic groups from data on townships, but have not set out these findings in detail in the present paper, which does not analyse units smaller than constituencies, and is thus confined to a very broad scrutiny of differential voting patterns.