The New Deal of R.B. Bennett during the late 1930s expanded the purpose of the federal government in Canada. The expansion continued during the war under William Lyon Mackenzie King, and afterwards as well, now justified by Keynesian economic intervention. For more than half a century the public service in Ottawa grew and grew.
The Americans followed a similar trajectory and added the Great Society program of President Johnson in the mid-1960s. In Canada a few years later the impact of Pierre Trudeau’s “Just Society” proposals had less of an impact, but the centralization and triumph of expert bureaucratic control of the daily life of Canadians was, if anything, greater than it was in the States.
