Legislation and Economics in Canada

MR. BENNErr, the Prime Minister of Canada, can have taken little comfort from the fact that, with the close of the last session of Parliament on July 3rd, the only visible rewards for his efforts were two Liberal landslides in the provincial elections in Saskatchewan and Ontario on June i9th, the reverberations of which had scarcely died away. The session had provided more positive and advanced legislation than any of its predecessors, yet there remains little room for doubt that these two elections, despite their provincial scope, indicated a definite antipathy to the Federal as well as the provincial Conservatives. In the face of this paradox, the political signs in Canada are hard to read. The Government has refreshingly abandoned the idea that prosperity will return like manna from heaven and there are now on the Canadian statute books a series of enactments which definitely commit the State to a degree of control of the economic life of the country. The more important of these have been the provision for a central bank, the Natural Products Marketing Act, farm debt adjustment legislation, a program of public works and, finally, the appointment of the Parliamentary Committee on Price Spreads and Mass Buying. The Bank of Canada ostensibly will be the outcome of the report of the MacMillan Committee on Banking and Currency. In so far as a central bank had been advocated by the Liberals and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (or C.C.F.) and public opinion was veering in favor of such a move, the appointment of this commission was largely a method of permitting the Conservatives to introduce the measure without losing face. As a consequence, the report was devoted essentially to the desirability of a central bank rather than to the more important question of its form, recommendations for which were only included in an un

Economics · Law and economics · Legislation · Political science · Canadian Policy and Governance · Law