The Unstable Society

THE UNSTABLE SOCIETYI Sir Geoffrey Vickers For three years I have paid an annual visit to Canada to take part, as the only non-Canadian participant , in an inquiry organized by the School of Social Work at the University of Toronto into the effect on the well-being of ordinary men and women of the rapid industrialization which is transforming Canada and her society. This is a report and personal commentary on that experience. Consider first the significant fact that the inquiry was held at all. If ever there were a time and place where men might well accept their state as good and growing even better, that time and place is surely Canada today. Her per capita income is among the highest in the world. The great majority of Canadians provide abundantly for their essential needs and have an increasing margin of buying power at the service of their individual choice; and this choice has at its call a market of fabulous extent. It commands not only automobiles and deep freezes and the other conventional necessities of their culture but also access to knowledge , enjoyment, and leisure. And all this is theirs without excessive labour, without apparent sacrifice of freedom or order, without obvious overdrafts on irreplaceable resources. Canadians, of all people, might be excused if they regarded industry simply as a cornucopia, a source of plenty; and rapid industrialization as the rate of increase in the volume and variety of that abundance. In fact, few today regard industry so simply. There is a price to be paid. What exactly is that price? How is it set? How is it paid? Who pays it? These questions may be considered at various levels. A school of social work lives in the world of case histories; it sees ill-being in terms of individual men and women and children, each a unique problem in .The substance of an address given at McGill University, November 18, 1958, including material which will appear as pan of a book, The Undirected SOciety. to be published shortly by the University of Toronto Press. 314 SIR GEOFFREY VICKERS distress and bewilderment. Yet such a school, none the less, has its roots in the social sciences and seeks to understand its world in terms of general concepts which can unify experience. As one would expect, then, the approach of this inquiry was partly practical and partly theoretical; and the two paths converged. The project, which became known as the Round Table, brought together about a hundred prominent Canadians from business, government , organized labour, the professions, and the social sciences; but it differed from similar gatherings in the past in important ways. It met for a week not once but three times, at intervals of a year. It spent most of its first two meetings in groups of twenty, visiting places where the impact of industrialization seemed likely to be most striking-such as Cornwall, near which the Seaway has required the bodily removal of a whole township; or Malton, where the combined needs of peace and war set suddenly in an agricnltural village a vast industrial complex and one of the world's great airports. It involved a partnership between laymen and professionals, in that the work of the three conferences was prefaced and linked by social surveys, professionally directed. The participants met and talked with representative people in these communlties from all walks of life. The groups were mixed; in each, business executives , priests, labour leaders, and social scientists were fused into a team by their common experience and no attempt was made to influence or guide their thinking, though contributions to the theoretical background were made in papers given before or during each conference. The third meeting was a residential conference, devoted to thinking through the most urgent questions raised by the inquiry. Apart from Cornwall and Malton, five other areas were visited-Elliot Lake, where a new town is being created to serve the uranium fields; Iroquois Falls, where the Abitibi Pulp and Paper Company carried out a similar project forty years ago; Scarborough, an example of Toronto's unplanned expansion; and a half-derelict area of downtown Toronto, which is the scene of...