On Friday, October 2, 2026, a group of academics, experts, and policy practitioners convened at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto for a one-day conference entitled ‘The Reset: Citizens and other Marginalized People in the Asset Economy’ that asked, “how can we build a progressive agenda for a sovereign Canada?” The conference was organized by Daniel Drache, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at York University, and Peer Zumbansen, Professor of Business Law at McGill University.
The conference is part of a longer-term Canadian Political Economy Reset (CPER) project, which aims at both a critical self-reflection on origins, experiences and lessons from Canadian Political Economy (CPE) work since the 1960s, on the one hand, and the since-emerged issues and sites of contestation, on the other.
The CPER conference featured five panel discussions on several aspects of Canadian sovereignty and political economy. Panels included discussions on the moment of neoliberalism defining the present, the Staples Thesis that has defined the developmental analysis of CPE for decades, a look ahead to the future of CPE, and contest of markets and democracy.
Panelists and organizers were asked, as part of the CEPR Project’s effort to preserve the collective memories of decades of CPE work and analysis, to provide short reflection papers on why they became political economists and the evolution of those perspectives. These reflections are featured in Perspectives Journal as a collection of progressive CPE expertise that can be studied and disseminated to continue the legacy of critical analysis. Without needing to rethink CPE from scratch, students and experts today and tomorrow can build upon the decades of research and experience for further critical analysis of Canadian and international political economy.
The anti-war movement was the incubator, the training ground for the emergence of the Canadian political economy movement I had been active in the sixties in the peace movement and then later in the Student Union for Peace Action as a full-time organizer.
Important political economy analytics of “capture”, outsourcing, public-private partnership etc., fall short of adequately capturing the degree to which private corporate power has assumed sovereign functions today. A new era for political economy research is just beginning, the time for democratic resistance is now.
My read of history turned into a read of the aggregate data points that influence the formation of political economy; the present state of society’s institutions, informed by history.
