When the Twentieth Century opened, socialist parties were already well established in Continental Europe and were just getting under way throughout the English-speaking world. In Canada, however, three further decades elapsed before the CCF's numerous progenitors, aroused by an acute economic and political crisis at home and abroad, drew together in order to form a socialist party on a national scale.
The CCF served its investigators primarily as a gauge of the Canadian scene. They saw in its birth and growth evidence of serious discontent among certain groups, whose changing sentiments they measured according to the shifts in the party's support.
Thus, instead of settling on one specific body for investigation, the study uses several, depending on the problem or the available data. From the national to the provincial to the metropolitan, the focus sometimes narrows to the riding association level for a closer view of the rank and file.