Upbeat Ending

In deference to a custom of long standing, Canada's Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent will broadcast a message to the Canadian people on New Year's morning. St. Laurent recorded the speech last week just before leaving Ottawa to spend the holidays at his Quebec City home. The actual text was to be kept secret until the broadcast, but one of the aides who helped prepare it disclosed what the tone of the message would be. "It will be calm and confident," he said, "with what Hollywood calls an upbeat ending."

Such a message, particularly the upbeat ending, would accurately reflect Canada's year-end mood. Earlier in the year, the nation's confidence was shaken by forebodings of depression. Unemployment was on the increase; industrial wage scales began to dip. Western Canada's wheat crop was the poorest in 17 years; retail business fell off. The gross national product, the handiest yardstick for measuring economic progress, appeared to be headed sharply downward for 1954.

Suddenly, in the year's last quarter, the upbeat began. In October, for the first time in 1954, employment topped the 1953 figure. The industrial wage index not only snapped out of its decline, but rose to a new alltime high ($59.26 weekly). Then a great surge of Christmas business hit the retail stores. Morgan's big department store in Montreal had the best December in the company's log-year history; Vancouver stores estimated that their 1954 Christmas sales would be at least 10% above last year's.

When the time came at year's end for government statisticians to compute 1954's gross national product, they got a pleasant surprise: the total came close to $24 billion, only $500 million below the 1953 record. The decline was due almost entirely to the prairie crop failure, which cut farm production by just about $500 million. Except for that one unavoidable setback, the Canadian economy in 1954 had kept pace with the record 1953 rate, and fully warranted an optimistic report by Prime Minister St. Laurent as the new year dawned.

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