1941: George Britnell joins Wartime Prices and Trade Board

On October 18, 1941, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, driven by sharply rising prices and the fear of an inflationary spiral, announced “an experiment hitherto untried on this continent” – comprehensive wage and price controls.  These controls were to come into effect on December 1.  As King acknowledged, this would require “a new and complicated administrative machinery” and “impose irksome restrictions” – but Canadians were asked “to accept cheerfully the limitations imposed upon them as a necessary contribution to Canada’s maximum war effort.”¹   This “administrative machinery” was to be managed by the Wartime Prices and Trade Board (WPTB). George Britnell, a professor of Economics and Political Science with a growing reputation in agricultural economics, was asked to join the Board as economic adviser to the Foods Administration of the WPTB.  It appears that the appointment was made rather hurriedly.  Britnell confirmed on 29 September 1941 that he had been granted

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an indefinite leave of absence from the University, but wrote to the Secretary of the Board: “I have very considerable qualms in leaving the University to undertake this work.  I am obviously leaving a position which I know I can do reasonably well, to go to a position of which I don’t even know enough about to know whether I can do it at all. ... I gathered from our conversations that the Board was anxious that no time be lost. ... It seemed most sensible, in the circumstances, to come prepared to stay as soon as I could get away at all, and, despite the general inadvisability of leaps in the dark, to hope for the best.”²   Britnell planned to arrive in Ottawa in mid October, and he stayed there until the end of the war.  While he had hoped to return immediately to the University, he first extended his leave (for part of 1945) to become chairman of the new CCF government’s Saskatchewan Economic Advisory Committee.

Related Collections

G.E. Britnell fonds, MG 41

See also: Audio: 1941 broadcast (MP3 file) The broadcast was interrupted by the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbour; George Britnell was a member of the panel. From the Wartime Radio 1941 page of the Internet Archive.

Images

1941a: G.E. Britnell. Photograph Collection, A-3270.
1941b: Telegram from K.W. Taylor, Secretary of the Wartime Prices and Trade Board, 29 September 1941, and Britnell’s response. G.E. Britnell fonds, Correspondence, MG 41, file I(a)(6).

Sources

1. Quotes from Prime Minister King’s speech in G.E. Britnell fonds, Wartime Prices and Trade Board, Press Clippings, MG 41, file V(a)(9)).
2. G.E. Britnell fonds, Correspondence, June-Dec. 1941, MG 41, file I(a)(6).
3. Spafford, p. 156.