Canada's workers movement: uneven developments

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

To address racism in Canada, and to focus on its contemporary face, is to see an ugly countenance, to be sure, but it is one that differs significantly from that of the United States. The racialization of the Quebecois was a standard feature of Canadian life until it was decisively challenged in the first class war salvo of the Quiet Revolution, the Asbestos Strike of 1949, and then later further exposed and vilified in Pierre Vallieres' s 1960s-published White Niggers of America. (20) A virulent strain of anti-Asian racism runs through the late 19th-century experience of both the US and Canada, continuing well into the 20th century, where it is most visible in pre-World War I pogrom-like riots, exclusionary 'head tax' legislation, and the internment of the Japanese during World War II. (21) It is quite obvious that there is considerable, and historically longstanding, nativist animosity against newly arrived immigrants to Canada. (22) The contemporary period is marked by an increasing socially constructed media-driven racialization of criminality in major Canadian urban centres, especially Toronto and Vancouver, jarring in its crudeness. (23) There is, therefore, certainly no basis for complacency about racism in Canada. (24) Nonetheless, there is little Canadian equivalent to the extreme and ongoing United States fear-mongering around race, drugs, and violence that fuels a culture of xenophobic labour market exclusionism. One reflection of this is penal retribution, culminating in the expanding us prison population, its medieval Death Row component, and the rising body count, overdetermined by race. It is surely no accident that while the death penalty in the us exists in a majority of states, it has no political salience in significant regions of the country. The majority of executions take place in only two states, Texas and Florida, and hardly any happen outside of the South, the historic site of African American slave cotton plantation labour. (25)

The history of racial oppression in the United States, compared to that of Canada, is also inseparable from key political-economic differences. Canada has a much smaller low-wage manufacturing sector, where workers are permanently trapped in poverty. There is, of course, an obvious Canadian gap between rich and poor, but not the ostentatious street visibility of this separation, evident in acute form in the United States. Canada's social safety net, however ragged in its capability of catching the most egregious instances of individuals falling from economic grace, is, while under attack and constantly threatened by growing state cutbacks and erosions, far more generous in its provisioning than what has historically existed in the us. Health care, unemployment insurance, housing provisions, and welfare entitlements remain, whatever their precariousness, better in Canada than in its neighbour to the south. And public discussion of this, even in an age of market-driven priorities, reflects recognition that this matters to Canadians. In generalizing, we leave aside the growing significance of region. Provinces such as Alberta may nurture views similar to those associated with a seemingly 'American' perspective. In contrast, in the us the levels and nature of unionization and attitudes toward social provisioning may be more similar to Canada in certain states than in many others, with the upper mid-West of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, parts of the north-east, including New York, California and sectors of the Northwest, and Hawaii embracing more progressive positions.