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 world, war, boom and/or years:
“Your mouth, dear child, is envied of the bees.”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“Our job is now clear. All Americans must be prepared to make, on a 24 hour schedule, every war weapon possible and the war factory line will use men and materials which will bring, the war effort to every man, woman, and child in America. All one hundred thirty million of us will be needed to answer the sunrise stealth of the Sabbath Day Assassins.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The cohort that made up the population boom is now grown up; many are in fact middle- aged. They are one reason for the enormous current interest in such topics as child rearing and families. The articulate and highly educated children of the baby boom form a huge, literate market for books on various issues in parenting and child rearing, and, as time goes on, adult development, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, and of course, death.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“[F]rom Saratoga [N.Y.] till we got back to Northampton [Mass.], was then mostly desert. Now it is what 34. years of free and good government have made it. It shews how soon the labor of man would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object, the happiness of man, to the selfish interests of kings, nobles and priests.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)