Economic History of Canada - The Second World War and The Boom Years

The Second World War and The Boom Years

The turn around brought about by the command economy imposed at the beginning of the Second World War was immense. Unemployment virtually disappeared by 1940 as soldiers were recruited and factories turned to war production. Canada was in the unusual situation of helping Britain financially, through a program similar to the American Lend Lease.

In the twenty-five years after the war, there was an immense expansion in the Canadian economy. Unemployment remained low and the end of wartime production was quickly turned over to making consumer goods. Canada, along with many other developed nations, firmly established itself as a welfare state with publicly-funded health care, the Canada Pension Plan, and other programs.

During this period, the Canadian economy became much more closely integrated with the American one as tariff barriers fell and trade agreements like the Canada-United States Automotive Agreement and the "Hyde Park Declaration" were signed.

Read more about this topic:  Economic History Of Canada

Famous quotes containing the words the second, world, war, boom and/or years:

    Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
    Book Of Common Prayer, The. The Second Sunday in Advent, “The Collect,” (1662)

    Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.
    Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

    Have you noticed when reading War and Peace the difficulties Tolstoy experienced in forcing morally wounded Bolkonsky to come into geographical and chronological contact with Natasha? It is very painful to watch the way the poor fellow is dragged and pushed and shoved in order to achieve this happy reunion.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
    Joan Didion (b. 1935)

    The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognised as love at all.
    Iris Murdoch (b. 1919)