Canada's workers movement: uneven developments

Labour/Le Travail, Spring, 2007 by Michael Goldfield, Bryan D. Palmer

WITHIN THE CONTEXT of North America, Canada's economy, politics, and labour movement, as well as the country's diverse cultures, have a dual, almost divided, character. On the one hand, they exhibit highly independent and distinctive features; on the other, they are deeply entwined with--indeed operating in the shadow of and influenced greatly by--the imperialist colossus to the south. An advanced capitalist nation in its own right, and one with an imperialist arm reaching into the Caribbean and elsewhere, Canada nevertheless remains very much within an 'American' sphere of influence. (1)

Historicizing National Difference

As Seymour Martin Lipset long ago noted, and as political scientists, historians, philosophers, and others as different in their views as Louis Hartz, Kenneth McRae, George Grant, and Gad Horowitz have grappled with, Canada's origins were touched with 18th-century toryism, the demographics of which registered in settlement by refugees from the Age of Revolution. (2) Compared to Mexico and the United States, Canada can look, superficially, like the land of counter-revolution, one that has ironically come to harbour a moderating and influential social democratic politics of balance. Until the 1960s Canada was arguably a white settler Dominion, well integrated, for all the popular and politically useful allusion to 'two founding nations', into the British Empire. (3) Its identity, which began to unravel under specific pressures after World War II, was long recognized as a unique experiment in imperial expansion, one that produced a specific northern vision that unfolded as a colony matured into a nation. (4)

That nation, however, was destined, as the founding father of Canadian political economy, Harold Adams Innis, understood, to be subjected to new pressures of colonization, however subtle. (5) With the waning of Britain's Empire and its global reach, the United States, by the 1920s, stepped into the breach. Over the course of the 20th century, Canada-us relations solidified as more and more of Canadian economic and cultural life came to be dominated by the dynamic expansion of United States capitalism which, on a world scale, was unprecedented, especially in the post-World War H years. (6) Today the Canadian and us economies, and the politico-cultural trajectories that arise out of them, are integrated to the point that it is difficult to discern where they are differentiated, where one stops and another begins. (7)

That said, the Canadian bourgeoisie has generally been an independent wing of world capitalism, in contrast to its Mexican counterparts, who have usually functioned as us subsidiaries. (8) The protection of Canadian home industries was often compromised in the face of us capital's capacity to extend its influence. Yet, the. Canadian state produced extensive networks of tariffs and other trade restrictions which, up until the 1980s, at least, allowed Canada's ruling class to preserve significant levels of autonomy. (9)

With the development of so-called free-trade agreements with the United States and Mexico (the Free Trade Agreement, or FTA, in 1989, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, in 1994), the Canadian bourgeoisie has succumbed more to the economic dominance of us capital. Bourgeois independence has subsequently suffered a series of blows, some of which are material, others ideological. The picture is complicated by the unevenness of the developments, but on balance it can be said that the neo-liberal restructuring of the free-trade era has not in fact strengthened Canadian capital in relation to its United States counterparts. Foreign ownership rose marginally in the period 1988-1996, increasing from 27 per cent to 31.5 per cent, but more surprisingly the much-predicted expansion of the manufacturing sector did not materialize, and Canadian dependency on staples exports has remained a key feature of economic life. This is due in part to low levels of productivity in particular sectors, specific lags in technological development, and, perhaps critically, the bellicose nature of the Bush Administration, which is more willing than any previous us governing political elite to simply insist that its arbitrary economic provisions be adhered to, however much they fly in the face of established trade agreements (softwood lumber, etc.). (10)

Despite far-reaching regional differences that demarcate Canada's west and east coasts, its prairie and northern landscapes, and its concentration of modern industry in southern portions of Quebec and Ontario, with traditional extractive and resource-dominated mining, lumber, and fishing endeavours located elsewhere, there remains much that is similar in the Canadian and United States economies. Both, for instance, gained immensely from the post- 1945 prosperity, being among the few developed western economies in the northern hemisphere that survived World War II with their productive capacities intact. The occupational and industrial structures of both Canada and the us have experienced similar changes in the last half-century, with strong expansion of the service sector and the resulting explosion of white- and pink-collar jobs. Post-war immigration has played a critical role in sustaining labour market growth. Institutions of social provisioning--hospitals, clinics, universities, research complexes, media of all sorts--are important components of a recognizable 'North American' way of life in which the consumption side of a Fordist regime of accumulation seemingly predominates. (11)