Editorial

JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES Editor DENIS SMITH Associate Editor BERNARD R. BLISHEN Editorial Assistant ELIZABETH A. McLEOD Editorial Board MAURICE J. BOOTE ROBERT D. CHAMBERS LEON DION KENNETH E. KIDD ANDRE LAURENDEAU W. L. MORTON T. H. B. SYMONS Advisory Board ANTHONY ADAMSON DONALD G. CREIGHTON KATHLEEN FENWICK DAVID M. HAYNE JOHN HIRSCH JEAN PALARDY CLAUDE RYAN B. D. SANDWELL RONALD J. THOM REVUE D'ETUDES CANADIENNES Redacteur Redacteur adjoint Assistante Comite de redaction Comite consultatif Editorial "Scientific institutions," wrote an American historian recently, "are in the process of becoming one of the main things that American politics will be about for as far into the future as one can imagine." The sophisticated demands of military technology, pure science, consumer industry, and medicine have drawn Washington into a spending programme on scientific research that now reaches $15 billion annually. The scientific community has been catapulted into the centre of politics; not only the health of the American economy, but the survival of many politicians has come to depend intimately upon the distribution of federal resources in the sciences. It is a commonplace to say that Canada is backward in its support for the sciences in comparison with the United States. In some senses, it is obviously inappropriate to judge Canadian policy by American. The military effort of the United States, for instance, promotes a vast range of scientific projects that only a great power can contemplate. In some fields there is good reason for the United States to spend munificently while Canada spends nothing; in others, there may be equal reason for Canada to spend more per capita than does the U.S. What is obvious for Canada from the immensity of the scientific effort in the United States, and from the central role of government in this effort, is that much thought needs to be given quickly to the special place of scientific research and development here. We are too much i~fluenced by American life to ignore the Iournal of Canadian Studies 1 deep effects that massive research and technical change will have upon intellectual, material and political life in the coming decades. The creation of the Science Council of Canada under the eminent chairmanship of Dr. 0. M. Solandt, is a hopeful beginning. Its purposes , according to the Minister of Industry (whose remarks on second reading of the Bill creating the Council appear as a Document in this issue), are to obtain and focus information, and to advise the government on national scientific policy. This general commitment to virtue gained the support of all parties in the House of Commons. Yet the record of debate on the Bill provokes a number of urgent reflections. One concerns the House's startling indifference to the problems of scientific development and their relationship to politics, an indifference that undoubtedly reflects a general ignorance of science and technology in the House. In the debates on the resolution and the Bill, only twelve Members, including the Minister, participated. Discussion of the measure occupied just four and a half hours of parliamentary time, and it would be generous to say that the debate was mediocre. Perhaps four of the participants, including the Minister, made any sort of disciplined and constructive remarks. A major measure involving national scientific policy surely deserves more than the complacent neglect it received from the House. Within the realms of "science and technology" come many of the fundamental problems that will preoccupy politicians during the next twenty years: automation, technical education and retraining; the electronic storing and transmission of information; research and scientific education in the universities ; the stimulation of industrial research; public health and medical research; the social consequences of rapid changes in technology; and many more related problems. If the House of Commons is to have any comprehension of policy in these fields, and any critical influence upon its formation, it will have to transform itself. The parties will have to offer inducements for men of science to enter politics, and opportunities to make use of scientific in2 terests in the House; the Library of Parliament, the parliamentary committees, and the parties' own central offices will have to provide the assistance and facilities to enable some M...