[11] He warned, however, that Western civilization is now imperiled by powerful, advertising-driven media obsessed by "present-mindedness" and the "continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity.

McLuhan wrote: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing.

"[26] Before his final undergraduate year at McMaster, Innis spent a summer teaching at the Northern Star School in the frontier farming community of Landonville near Vermilion, Alberta.

[30] Innis's role as an artillery signaller gave him firsthand experience of life (and death) on the front lines as he participated in the successful Canadian attack on Vimy Ridge.

His thesis, called The Returned Soldier, "was a detailed description of the public policy measures that were necessary, not only to provide a supportive milieu to help veterans get over the effects of the war, but also to move on with national reconstruction.

"[39] While at Chicago, Innis was exposed to the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, the iconoclastic thinker who drew on his deep knowledge of philosophy and economics to write scathing critiques of contemporary thought and culture.

Anne Innis Dagg did doctoral work in biology and became an advisor for the independent studies program at the University of Waterloo and published books on zoology, feminism, and Canadian women's history.

Babe writes that, for Innis, the CPR's equipment "comprised a massive, energy-consuming, fast-moving, powerful, capital-intensive 'sign' dropped into the very midst of indigenous peoples, whose entire way of life was disrupted, and eventually shattered as a result.

His CPR history ends, for example, with a recounting of Western grievances against economic policies, such as high freight rates and the steep import tariffs designed to protect fledgling Canadian manufacturers.

It holds that Canada's culture, political history and economy have been decisively shaped by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fish, wood, wheat, mined metals and fossil fuels.

Innis realized that he had to search out archival documents to understand the history of the fur trade and also travel the country himself gathering masses of firsthand information and accumulating what he called "dirt" experience.

[56] Harold Innis's interest in the relationship between empires and colonies was developed in his classic study, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (1930).

[60] The Fur Trade in Canada concludes by arguing that Canadian economic history can best be understood by examining how one staple product gave way to another—furs to timber, for example, and the later importance of wheat and minerals.

"The new technology with its radical innovations," Innis writes, "brought about such a rapid shift in the prevailing Indian culture as to lead to wholesale destruction of the peoples concerned by warfare and disease.

"[64] Historian Carl Berger argues that by placing First Nations culture at the centre of his analysis of the fur trade, Innis "was the first to explain adequately the disintegration of native society under the thrust of European capitalism.

"[65] After the publication of his book on the fur trade, Innis turned to a study of an earlier staple, the cod fished for centuries off the eastern coasts of North America.

Innis's study of the effects of interconnected lakes and rivers on Canadian development and European empire sparked his interest in the complex economic and cultural relationships between transportation systems and communications.

[76] The next year, in an essay entitled, The Canadian Economy and the Depression, Innis outlined the plight of "a country susceptible to the slightest ground-swell of international disturbance" but beset by regional differences that made it difficult to devise effective solutions.

He described a prairie economy dependent on the export of wheat but afflicted by severe drought, on the one hand, and the increased political power of Canada's growing cities, sheltered from direct reliance on the staples trade, on the other.

"[77] Innis's reputation as a public intellectual was growing steadily and, in 1934, Premier Angus Lewis Macdonald invited him to serve on a Royal Commission to examine Nova Scotia's economic problems.

His inaugural address, The Penetrative Powers of the Price System, must have baffled his listeners as he ranged over centuries of economic history jumping abruptly from one topic to the next linking monetary developments to patterns of trade and settlement.

Innis also tried to show the commercial effects of mass circulation newspapers, made possible by expanded newsprint production, and of the new medium of radio, which "threatens to circumvent the walls imposed by tariffs and to reach across boundaries frequently denied to other media of communication."

Innis and Underhill had both been members of an earlier group at the university that declared itself "dissatisfied with the policies of the two major [political] parties in Canada" and that aimed at "forming a definite body of progressive opinion."

In 1931, Innis presented a paper to the group on "Economic Conditions in Canada", but he later recoiled from participating in party politics, denouncing partisans like Underhill as "hot gospellers.

Eric Havelock, a left-leaning colleague explained many years later that Innis distrusted political "solutions" imported from elsewhere, especially those based on Marxist analysis with its emphasis on class conflict.

The same year, he served on the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education and published Political Economy in the Modern State, a collection of his speeches and essays that reflected both his staples research and his new work in communications.

[98] McLuhan focused on what may be called a medium's "sensory bias" arguing, for example, that books and newspapers appealed to the rationality of the eye, while radio played to the irrationality of the ear.

"For Innis, the yellow press of the United States and the Nazi loudspeaker had the same form of negative effect: they reduced men from thinking beings to mere automatons in a chain of command."

Watson argues that while McLuhan separated media according to their sensory bias, Innis examined a different set of interrelationships, the "dialectic of power and knowledge" in specific historical circumstances.

In his introduction to the 1964 reprint of The Bias of Communication, McLuhan marvelled at Innis's technique of juxtaposing "his insights in a mosaic structure of seemingly unrelated and disproportioned sentences and aphorisms."