Distinguished Professor Emeritus Bill Waiser, CM, SOM, FRSC, DLitt, University of Saskatchewan

A Tale of Two Futures: The Saskatchewan Business Plan in 1905 and 2005.

An examination of the original economic blueprint for the new province of Saskatchewan in 1905 and how and why the provincial economic plan is fundamentally different a century later.  Bill is author of more than a dozen books, including A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan before 1905, winner of the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

Penny Bryden, Professor of History, University of Victoria

Regions and Provinces in Canada’s Business History – Central Canada

An overview of the role and impact of Central Canada to the country’s business history since Confederation.

Marcelin Joanis, Associate Professor & Research Vice President, Polytechnique Montreal & CIRANO

Business cycles in Québec since the 1940s: Insights from a newly computed quarterly GDP series.

We present a newly computed quarterly series of Québec’s real GDP for the period 1948-1980. This new series enables business cycle dating (expansions, contractions) with increased accuracy for the period surrounding the Quiet Revolution. The quarterly GDP series generated by our approach is shown to be robust to the standard tests proposed by the related econometric literature. Professor Joanis is the founding co-editor of the quasi-annual monograph Le Québec économique.

Don Nerbas, Associate Professor, McGill University

Development and Disparity: The Maritimes and the National Policy

This paper examines trends in the business and economic history of the Maritimes during the National Policy period. Focusing principally on the example of Cape Breton coal, the paper demonstrates the role and limitations of entrepreneurs in defining and advancing regional interests and shaping government policies.    Don holds the Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies in the Department of History and Classical Studies, and his current research centres on the rise of the Cape Breton coal industry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.