After John Maynard Keynes moved the “Final Act” of the Bretton Woods conference, William A. Mackintosh was one of two called upon to second the motion, which he did in eloquent words that were misattributed in the draft minutes and some secondary works to Canada’s absent Finance minister (Grant 2015, pp. 251, 461). Hugh Grant’s impressive biography of Mackintosh will remind Canadian economists, and inform economists outside Canada, why an economics professor on leave from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, was considered an obvious choice to second Lord Keynes (whom Mackintosh privately termed “a spoiled brat” despite their intellectual affinity).

In his first academic article in 1919, Mackintosh regretted that the Canadian government “with few exceptions … asked and received but little aid from Canadian economists.” Queen’s University economics professors soon changed that: Oscar D. Skelton, Mackintosh’s teacher and his predecessor as department head (and, in Skelton [Reference Skelton, Deutsch, Keirstead, Levitt and Will1909] 1961, an early proponent of countercyclical fiscal policy), was the undersecretary of state for External Affairs from 1925 until his death in 1941; W. Clifford Clark was the deputy minister of Finance from 1932 until he died in 1953; and John Deutsch, Mackintosh’s wartime colleague and his successor once-removed as principal and vice-chancellor of Queen’s, was the first chair of the Economic Council of Canada. William Lyon Mackenzie King, not a Queen’s graduate but like Mackintosh a Harvard PhD in political economy (of an earlier vintage—King published twice in the Journal of Political Economy in the 1890s), was prime minister for all but six years from 1921 to 1948, simultaneously valuing the advice of Skelton, Clark, and Mackintosh and suspicious of the “Queen’s intelligentsia.” (Mackintosh demurred from a minister’s reference to the “brains trust” on the grounds that “[y]ou don’t think we have any brains and you don’t trust us.”) Mackintosh, despite an exceedingly full career of teaching, research, journal editing, and university administration, was deeply involved in government for decades, introducing Keynesian ideas as main author of the final report of the National Employment Commission in 1938 and, most importantly, of the White Paper on Employment and Income in 1945. Nominally just one of two special assistants to the deputy minister of Finance from December 1939, Mackintosh was the leading member of the Economic Advisory Committee, a wartime coordinating committee of deputy ministers and the Bank of Canada governor (with Clark as chair and Keynes’s former student Robert Bryce as secretary), chaired (with Alvin Hansen) the Canada-United States Joint Economic Committees from June 1941 (six months before Pearl Harbor), and was acting deputy minister of Finance for six months in 1946, while Clark was ill. Mackintosh led four wartime Canadian missions to Britain and was de facto head of the Canadian delegation at Bretton Woods (where he chaired the committee on IMF operations). Mackintosh’s long involvement in both economic policy and university administration, and particularly with the federal government’s commitment at the end of World War II to maintaining a high and stable level of employment and income, brings to mind Sir Douglas Copland and the 1945 Australian White Paper on employment, but Copland appears in Grant’s book only as vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, bringing Mackintosh on a seventy-five-day lecture tour in 1951 (an endnote acknowledges but does not explore “many parallels” between the careers of Copland and Mackintosh).

Hugh Grant demonstrates careful scholarship and a command of the sources. To find fault one must be sufficiently nitpicking to note that the Lord Tweedsmuir, who received an honorary doctorate from Mackintosh, was not the former governor-general of Canada (the novelist John Buchan, who died in office in 1940) but his son (p. 331), or to suggest that, given the harsh comments quoted on page 272 about the economist and long-time McGill principal F. Cyril James, chair of a rival wartime advisory committee (“supercilious … a pretentious climber … pushy and manipulative … an ass of a fellow”), Stanley Frost’s biography of James might be cited for a contrasting view. Readers outside Canada, and perhaps also Canadian readers younger than Professor Grant or myself, may wonder why they should care that Pauline Jewett was appointed instructor in political science at Queen’s for 1947–48 (p. 304) or that she was then a recent MA (p. 477n15)—she was subsequently a member of Parliament (first as a Liberal, returning later as a New Democrat) when Parliament was overwhelmingly male and was the first female president of a major Canadian university (Simon Fraser University). Readers should be aware that the 102 pages of endnotes (not counting bibliography and index) are not just source references but include interesting asides (such as the misattribution of Mackintosh’s speech at the close of Bretton Woods, or Lydia Lopokova’s interrupting talks of the British delegation in Ottawa “in a state of near nudity”), and, most importantly, Grant’s critique of how Mackintosh has been misjudged in the literature on the staples thesis (pp. 502–503n4)—one of the most valuable (and liveliest) paragraphs of the book, buried in an endnote. The index does not cover material in the endnotes.

Mackintosh’s “Economic Factors in Canadian History” (1923), still widely cited and reprinted, shared with the writings of Harold Innis in creating the staples thesis that the economic and social development of Canada was shaped by the particular techniques of production and social organization of a succession of primary commodities produced for export, a process that Innis described as Canada’s movement from “colony to nation to colony” Grant (pp. 98–101, 113–126, 386–387, 502–503n4), lucidly sorts out the similarities and differences between Mackintosh and Innis, and makes a compelling case for the importance of Mackintosh to Canadian political economy, a tradition in which, as Grant bitingly demonstrates, Mackintosh has sometimes been denigrated by nationalist admirers of Innis who know little of Mackintosh’s writings (“When thrice removed from the original sources, the argument borders on the burlesque” with Mackintosh supposedly advocating the “curious combination” of “free trade and import substitution,” p. 503n4). Hugh Grant has produced what will undoubtedly stand as the definitive account of Mackintosh’s central role in the creation of the staples thesis of Canadian economic history, the development of academic economics in Canada, and economic policymaking in mid-twentieth-century Canada.