Canada's Economic Prospects: A Survey of Ten Industries

Abstract

HISTORANS will probably mark the 1950's as the period in which the economists' two-decade preoccupation with stability gave way to a revival of their longrun and continuing preoccupation with economic growth. If they do, they will be under obligation to explain the coincidence of economists' renewed interest in growth and the economic affluence attained by those societies which produced most of them. Why should economists of the Western world assign primacy to growth and at the same time voice concern that most of their fellow citizens already earn larger incomes than they can dispose of intelligently? An obvious explanation, but not necessarily a full explanation, is that in the mid-twentieth century economists have become very much aware of the political interdependency of nations. The growing economic strength of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and the poverty and illiteracy of new African and Asian nations, not the low income of Mississippi dirt farmers, Belgian coal miners, and Sicilian fruit pickers, spark the interest of Western economists in economic growth. Growth rates otherwise sufficient to produce consumer affluence in Western countries may not in prevailing political circumstances assure this affluence and adequate defence, supremacy in space technology, and large aid programmes to underdeveloped countries. The Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects (the Gordon Commission) was certainly not created to solve the problems of an undeveloped country-Canada enjoys a standard of living second only to that of the United States. Nor is it likely that creation of the Commission was prompted by a sense of political responsibility to match the growth rates recorded by the Soviet bloc; within the fraternity of Western democracies the weight of this mantle of responsibility is greatly reduced before it touches the shoulders of Canada. Moreover, Canada's post-war growth rate of 6 per cent per year is extraordinarily high. A slump in 1960 slowed the rate down to 2 per cent, but the Commission could not have foreseen this in the mid-1950's when it initiated its enquiry, or even as late as 1958 when it issued its final report.' In so far as one can judge from the tone and focus of the published reports, the Commission was primarily concerned with developing a reasonably detailed picture of the Canadian economy in 1980 for the benefit of Canadians and the Canadian government. Individual reports used the United States, not the Soviet Union, as a comparative standard; they focused on the role of trade in