S. D. Clark

Samuel Delbert Clark grew up on a farm near Streamstown, attended what was later known as the Meridian School, as well as high school in Lloydminster.  He went on to the University of Toronto.  

He is credited with founding the study of Sociology in Canada.  Over his long career he received many prestigious awards.  He is still regarded as one of Canada's leading scholars of the 20th Century.

One sociologist who did use some of the ideas of Innis was S. D. Clark, a sociologist at the University of Toronto from the 1940s through the 1960s. Samuel Delbert Clark was born in 1910 near Lloydminster in Alberta. Better known as S. D. Clark, he studied at McGill, the London School of Economics, and Toronto, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1937 and appointed as the university’s first sociologist in 1938. Clark studied with Innis and attempted to relate elements of Canadian social organization to Innis’s staple approach. Clark also studied the social gospel, the Social Credit movement, political protest movements and suburban society. In Harrison’s view, Clark straddled the individualist and collectivist tradition within Canadian sociology (p. 122). While he was an important sociologist in his time, his work is not cited extensively in contemporary sociology and his ideas might be usefully incorporated into current sociological approaches.