The Social Sciences in Canada: 50 Years of National Activity

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

The Social Science Federation of Canada (SSFC) is, with the Humanities
Federation of Canada, the major representative of nonscientist academics
to government. From its origins in 1940, in the dark days of World War
II, through the era of indifference that preceded the federal
government’s first moves to support higher education in the mid-1950s,
the Federation and its predecessors lobbied for scholarship. The
creation of the Canada Council gave the academics some power and, though
funding has become increasingly tight in recent years, that power has
not been lost. Academics today are sometimes listened to by the
government and bureaucracy, and the SSFC, like the Royal Society of
Canada and the scientific and medical councils, has its small place in
the power structure. What the recent federal move to have the Canada
Council swallow the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council will
do remains unclear, but the SSFC will likely continue to administer
publication programs and lobby. This brief commissioned history by a
sociologist is competent but uninspired—and critics within the SSFC as
well as without might well ask why a historian was not asked to write
it.