Periodical Writing

LETTERS IN CANADA: 1957 529 PERIODICAL WRITING' Millar MacLure This article is, as usual, necessarily selective in its reference, but the chief areas of emphasis in Canadian periodical literature of 1957 are indicated, and significant contributions to scholarship or opinion are cited and in some cases critically discussed. The great Canadian problem, the problem of our nationality, continues to engage the nervous attention of many of our most persuasive commentators , and to make staple fare for the readers of Canadian journals. Elections stir up this subject, for, as Sir John Willison observed, "with every change of government in Canada we are made into a nation over again." The "New Canada" of Mr. Diefenbaker's hustings fantasies seems to have caught on with the electors-or perhaps the landslide of March 1958 is the triumph of suburbia; one remembers Alan Brown's brilliant remark, "the entire country is a suburb." At any rate, the critical question of the 1957 election was the defence of Parliament against managerial rule, and that arose, as everybody knows, out of the pipeline question. Nationality, for Canadians, is not an ideological issue; as Hugh G. Thorburn points out ("Parliament and Policy-making: The Case of the Trans-Canada Gas Pipeline," CJEPS, Nov.), there is no conflict of doctrine between the government and the official opposition, and the empirical approach to politics results in policies that are a fusion of local and regional feelings. Nationality is a matter of communications, and from the building of the C.P.R., through the squabbles over the C.B.C. and T.C.A. "monopolies," to the minor fiasco of the Newfoundland ferry William Carson, the focus of debate and the test of the federal system have been the creation and extension of that imperial lifeline from east to west. This fact accelerates in Canada the modern tendency of the state to become a mammoth corporate structure, administered by a board of directors (the Cabinet) whose interests interlock with regions and with lesser, private corporations, and whose traditional ministerial responsibility to Parliament is thereby scamped and diminished. This great issue, which was dramatically lighted by the pipeline debate, is thoroughly explored from all points of view in a special section, "Focus on Parliament ," in Queen's Quarterly (Winter), and J. E. Hodgetts, who set up *The following abbreviations are used: Can. Art: Canadian Art; CC: Canadian Commentator; CF: Canadian Forum; eHR: Canadian Historical Review; CJEPS: Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science; CIT: Canadian Journal of Theology; eM}: Canadian Music Journal; DR: Dalhousie Review; JJ: Internalionallournal ; QQ: Queen's Quarterly; SN: Saturday Night; TR: Tamarack Review ; UTQ: University 0/ Toronto Quarlerly. 530 PERIODICAL WRITING this symposium in his editorial capacity, contributes a thoughtful discussion of the stresses upon the "bridge of miuisterial responsibility" in "The Civil Service and Policy Formation" (CIEPS, Nov.). To create that political and economic reality of which a mari usque ad mare is the heraldic image is no domestic task; it involves continual adjustment to the policies of the United States, and a rueful recognition of Canada's satellite status in the Americas. Discussion of the long-range results of the development of Canada's resources by American capital, the subject of some searching analysis in the periodical writing of 1956, continues this year chiefly with reference to the preliminary report of the Gordon Commission on Canada's economic prospects, a report characterized in the February Forum as vitiated by "woolly analysis" and schizophrenic economic thinking. A more technical (and detached) analysis of the report is provided by Jacob Viner, in "The Gordon Commission Report" (QQ, Autumn), who notes the nationalistic tone of the document but emphasizes the inevitable linking of the Canadian and American economies. This insistence upon the "practical determinants of Canadian economic development," to which L. B. Pearson has made continual reference during the current election campaign, is also the theme of a critical review of Viner's article, by George Mowbray (CC, Nov.). But the question of Canadian-American relations is larger than this. Canada, we have been told, is the "golden hinge" between the Commonwealth and the United States, or, more grandiloquently, between the Old and the New Worlds. The hinge...