Coming of age in the 1970s, my early social and cultural politics were shaped by the simple but powerful anti-Americanism that was common in much of Canada at that time. Even in Alberta, where I was born and bred, there was a widely-held common-sense belief that Canada was a better place, blessedly free of war machines and ghetto scenes. We understood that Canadians had to be ready to defend those attributes against encroachment from U.S. multinationals, cruise missiles, and even tourists. (Only later, when studying economics, did I come to appreciate the economic stimulus provided by the hordes of American Winnebagos crowding the Rockies!)
Most of my first political activism fit within that broad frame of resisting American influence, and defending a diffuse and somewhat rose-coloured understanding of being Canadian. These included solidarity work with refugees fleeing the U.S.-engineered coup in Chile, protest against U.S. military testing in Alberta, and early activism against initial negotiations for free trade with the U.S. Indeed, as a result of speaking out publicly against the free trade negotiations, my first professional job came to an end and I started on a new career as a union economist. Perhaps that was a personal harbinger of the disruption that would upend millions of other Canadian lives once free trade became a reality.
Intellectually, my university studies and subsequent union and social movement research fit comfortably into the tradition of nationalist Canadian political-economy – led by Innis, Gordon, Watkins, Laxer, Cameron, Drache, and Griffin Cohen. My adolescent simple-minded nationalism was fleshed out with growing understanding (thanks to a good heterodox training in economics) about unequal exchange, underdevelopment, and staples traps. My personal mission became working to provide economic ammunition for the struggle – as old as Canada – to build a fully-fledged, capable, inclusive, and above all independent industrial economy.
Of course, nationalism has acquired a bad name in the decades since my early political-economy awakening — in many aspects richly deserved. The misuse of nationalism to fuel far-right, anti-immigrant, and racist politics is fearsome, and recent global developments have highlighted those dangers. Hopes that a cross-class alliance might defend Canada against free trade were quickly dashed during and after the 1988 election. Canadian business elites showed themselves willing supplicants to American domination, as long as their pockets could be lined in the process. Nationalism in the Canadian context is further complicated by domestic colonial domination over indigenous lands and peoples, the history of Québec subjugation and resistance, and the newer and perverse rise of separatism in Alberta.
Perhaps most fundamentally, we’ve learned painfully that our supposed superiority compared to America is fragile and in some ways phony. Canada’s social welfare system has been eroded by years of austerity and privatization. Progressives once naively believed in an inherently more progressive set of “Canadian values,” that could buttress our incrementally more inclusive and fair society. But that faith is not credible. Achieving economic and social justice here requires a desperate and unending struggle against other Canadians – rich and powerful Canadians – who seek the same power and wealth their counterparts enjoy in other countries. So there is no inherent basis for Canadians to feel smug about our incremental and contested successes in building a society that is better than America. Those successes can only be sustained through struggle – including struggle against Canadian elites, empowered by their alliances of convenience with American hegemony.
So over the first 35 years following the initial Canada-U.S. FTA, my early naive nationalism became somewhat dulled. There was a one-dimensional tendency at that time among leftists in Canada to blame everything wrong on free trade. I found their implicit conclusion that “nothing good can be won unless we throw off the shackles of free trade” both inaccurate and disempowering. Indeed, we proved that victories could still be won to defend public services, redistribution, and value-added industry despite the negative influence of integration with the U.S.
Similarly, the familiar emphasis in nationalist industrial policy on adding more value to Canadian resources (as I often argued, for example, in advocating more petroleum refineries as an alternative to bulk exports of raw crude oil) had to be nuanced by appreciation for the environmental limits of resource extraction in general (especially fossil fuels). We also had to broaden our lens to consider the nefarious actions of Canadian capital in other parts of the world (led by mining companies and banks), complicating the traditional left portrayal of Canada as a dependent or peripheral nation. In fact, Canada has some characteristics of a minor imperialist power itself.
Trump’s return to power, however, with its more transparent and aggressive annexationist agenda, is perhaps completing a historical circle for left Canadian political-economy. Defending the existence of Canada, and its distinct political, economic, and cultural features, is once again at the top of the agenda. As nation-building policy has had to do since before Confederation, governments and all willing constituencies in Canada need to redefine and fight for a Canadian entity that remains separate and different from the continental behemoth below us.
It is inevitable that different classes, regions, and cultural groups in Canada will have different, often clashing visions of what makes Canada different and worth fighting for. The financiers and technocrats who attended Carney’s recent investment summit no doubt imagine a Canada that is deregulated, fiscally austere, and dominated by the logic of business and profit. They must be challenged by progressives, from all walks of life, demanding a more balanced, sustainable, and democratic model of national policy. Some purists may be tempted to denounce all nationalism, write off Carney as just another neoliberal, oppose big nation-building projects in general (not just bad ones), and retreat to the margins of the current discourse which has captivated and in many ways inspired masses of Canadians. I think that would be a mistake; it would leave the direction of Canada’s response to Trump all the more firmly in the hands of privatizers and pipeliners.
Canada is a contested idea. We are not all in this together. But a broad sense of Canadian mission and identity can motivate progressive struggles at this hinge moment in our history. We are not just fighting for Canada; we are fighting for a better Canada. In that fight we need to challenge not just Donald Trump, but those right here at home who have opportunistically seized on this moment to ram through what they wanted long before Trump came on the scene: more business power, more profit, more extraction. We need to assemble a concrete, practical program of investment (including private investment, suitably regulated), innovation, trade, and care that offers a realistic path to a sovereign, sustainable, and inclusive economy. In sum, a clear-eyed realistic nationalism, grounded both in pride at what Canada has accomplished but also determination to improve it, is an asset in our advocacy. It should be embraced, refined, and mobilized.
