264 COMMISSION OF CONSERVATION 



aluminum, magnesium and other metals, have produced standardized 

 products. 



It has been a costly, and sometimes bitter, training, but it has 

 been done ungrudgingly and with great patience, and as a result 

 the standard of Canadian products today is greater than ever before. 



STANDARDIZATION OF SKILL 



The widespread knowledge of new processes, involving the scien- 

 tific study of metals, the flow of materials, and their physical, chemical 

 and metallurgical values, has been such that one can hardly imagine 

 it would have been possible for the universities and technical schools 

 of Canada to have provided such instruction in the course of many 

 years which has been crowded into as many months. Every work- 

 shop has been a school of training in standardizing its skill. Every 

 factory in which steel is made and forged is now partly or fully equipped 

 with the means for measuring temperatures and intelligently discov- 

 ering the value of the materials with which they are working. In 

 every workshop in the different provinces of Canada where shrapnel 

 shells are made, the scientific treatment of steel is known. There is 

 hardly a town of any importance in which the use of precision instru- 

 ments and gauges for measuring shells and their component parts 

 does not exist. 



It is difficult to assess the value of this skill to Canadian industry, 

 in which over 250,000 workers have ^become skilled in the art of such 

 processes and the manipulation of such tools and gauges. It is 

 more surprising still to know that nearly 12,000 workers have become 

 skilled in this work. Never in the history of the world has there 

 been such an incentive to acquire such skill for a purpose the like of 

 which our civilization should be ashamed, but which is nevertheless 

 an asset which will be of great value in the peaceful commercial indus- 

 tries for the expansion of Canada. 



CONTRIBUTING FACTOR IN THE STANDARDIZATION OF SKILL 



The mental processes which have been silently at work developing 

 character, while the hands of the workers have been acquiring precision 

 in the use of tools and gauges, are factors in the life of the individual 

 worker which cannot be overlooked. Canada has shown a rare 

 capacity during this great war, comparable in some measure with 

 the vastness of its territory. 



I have just referred to the great skill and ingenuity displayed 

 by Canadian munition workers with the standard of which you have 

 just cause to be proud. But there has been during the past two and 

 one-half years a growth of character without which all skill and ingen- 

 uity would be soulless. I refer to that moral fibre in the character of 

 the worker which has shown such fine courage and unfailing endur- 

 ance. This fibrous character has through the ages "transformed the 

 malady of thought into a bounding hope." It is this moral fibre 

 which has given courage, energy, patience and unselfishness to the 

 worn-out workers. It has inspired a quality and amount of inventive 



