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Highway Employment and Provincial Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Duff Spafford
Duff Spafford
Affiliation:
University of Saskatchewan
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Abstract

There was a dirt road through our village. A few weeks before an election the government party's poll captain, who was ex officio the local road superintendent, would announce that the boys down in Halifax had instructed him to get her ready for pavin'. Men were hired to spread gravel, cut bushes and widen ditches…. The Saturday before election day the work stopped, and three or four years later (sooner if there was a by-election) they got her ready for pavin' again.

Type
Note
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 135 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1981

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References

1 Nowlan, Alden, in Maclean's, May 1975, 64Google Scholar.

2 Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Highway Statistics: Canada 1949, 6.Google Scholar

3 For an alternative approach to the study of the politics of highways see Munro, John M., “Highways in British Columbia: Economics and Politics,” Canadian Journal of Economics 8 (1975), 192–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the subject of which is the allocation of highway expenditures among electoral districts.

4 That election times are good times is hardly a new idea, but its subsumption in a cyclical model of government policy is fairly recent. See Lindbeck, Assar, “Stabilization Policy in Open Economies with Endogenous Politicians,” American Economic Review 66 (1976), 1–19Google Scholar.

5 Nordhaus, William D., “The Political Business Cycle,” Review of Economic Studies 42 (1975), esp. 186CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Tufte, Edward R., Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. 9–15Google Scholar.

7 Paldam, Martin, “Is There an Electional Cycle? A Comparative Study of National Accounts,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 81 (1979), 323–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The results shown in Table 1 are based on the following series: Data Set I—Highways, Bridges and Street Construction (1948 SIC Code 406); Data Set II—Highway and Bridge Maintenance (1960 SIC Code 516) for British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec; Transportation (1960 SIC Code 500–519) for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Data sources, publications in the Statistics Canada/Dominion Bureau of Statistics employment and payroll series (title varies) are, by catalogue number, 72–002, 72–201, 72–501, 72–504, 72-D-52.

9 Two of the 36 elections in the sample had to be put aside because they occurred within a year of each other.

10 The Set II series for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia pertain to a category of employment in which highway employment has a weight of about one in four, and there is some question about how much these series can tell us about changes in highway activity over time. If the two provinces are dropped from the sample, p(N(+ -), .25) becomes .175 for Eij and .077 for Tij, and the null hypothesis cannot be rejected.

11 Quinn, H. F., The Union Nationale: A Study in Quebec Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 135Google Scholar.

12 Data are drawn from Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Employment and Payrolls (cat. 72–002), monthly numbers for 1952.

13 Quinn (The Union Nationale, 135) states that some of the new employees were put on the payroll but given no work to do, and that just before the election “the Roads Department paid out cheques in one electoral district to a number of children between the ages of five and twelve.”