Peer Zumbansen interviewed me about the first steps Canadian political economists in the 70s took towards forming a movement with support from many different individuals, organizations, and neo-Marxist critical perspectives. It was revealing to revisit the issues which galvanized the rebirth of Marxist, Social Democratic, and Left thinking in Canada. These discourses also functioned as a framework for many other movements. This includes the environmentalists, feminists, and labor movements although this is not by any means an exhaustive list. In this interview/memoir, I go out on a limb and try to address its visible and not so visible impacts from my Toronto perspective.
Peer Zumbansen: Is political economy just a way of thinking critically about capitalism, or is it a belief about being on the right side of history?
Daniel Drache: Locating oneself as a historical actor is a primary starting point to think systematically and analytically about the powerful forces of modern global capitalism. There are important markers in the famous historical debate between Hayek and Keynes, (full employment/social justice versus optimal freedom of market capitalism) that reverberate down to the present. As a political economist, I was busy reading Deutscher, de Beauvoir, Camus, Sartre, and Marx himself. I was also later reading psychoanalytical literature like R.D. Laing and Freud, as well as Jung and Wilhelm Reich.
Later, I spent 18 months in Paris working with the regulation school and Robert Boyer collaborating on a number of research projects at the CNRS research center. It had a huge impact on the kind of research I would be able to do on my return to Canada. The renegade popular historians like Pierre Burton or Peter C. Newman as well as Marxists like Frank and Libby Park, and Stanley Ryerson were key figures in keeping us grounded about class and power in Canadian political economy.
We were in our 20s, young and brash, and believed we could topple capitalism. Mordecai Richler’s first novel entitled The Leftovers was about three post-war activists. — one a communist, one an anarchist, one a liberal — who had been left behind by the Cold War, Stalinism, and McCarthyism. In the novel, the pre-war ideologies had crumbled and the points on the compass had all been scrambled like they are today. Certainly, I did not want to be a leftover. Political economy gave me tools and a perspective to be informed.
Zumbansen: How did Canadian political economy get off the ground in the early 1970s?
Drache: it was a turbulent time with university occupations and many antiwar demonstrations being organized in Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver. 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. For a lot of us the university became an activist zone because there were many issues converging in its classrooms.
At the time. Canadian universities were on campus for US corporations such as Dow Chemical to hire graduates for its war machine and Canada’s Security agencies who we later discovered had infiltrated student organizations to spy on left-wing anti-war groups who were very active and had a public presence. A lot of us had finished graduate school and for many years the social sciences in Canada had been dominated by perspectives and concerns emanating from United Kingdom and the United States. It was humiliating, a form of intellectual colonialism.
My early influences were Mel Watkins, Wally Clement, RT Naylor, Gail Dexter, Gad Horowitz, Robin Matthews, Madeline Parent, and Abe Rotstein. We were focused on the Americanization of the university and the economy, and this included major debates about the role of class particularly the role of our elites in facilitating an open-door policy towards American capital. Later, I branched out and did a lot of work on counterpublics and dissent, the changing workplace, the WTO and trade policy, and most recently, populism’s assault on liberal democracy. I’ve always tried to follow my curiosity wherever it led.
At the time we thought that the point has now been reached where there exists in Canada a critical number of researchers and teachers able to sustain a distinctly Canadian critical perspective. So in 1976, at the then called Learned Society’s conference in Quebec City, I organized the inaugural meeting of the political economy section in the Canadian Political Science Association.
It was quite a battle to be recognized as a distinct entity. The Parti Québécois had been elected the government in Quebec, regional disparities were high on the agenda and equal pay for equal value in the workplace was front and center. Nationalism was at center stage, and we are still trying to figure out its relationship to a more orthodox Marxist approach. There was a lot of focus on class analysis and working-class insurgency.
Our prospective was not a parochial one; it was drawn from theories developed particularly from Europe and Third World societies. Mel Watkins deserves special mention. He said if we wanted to be recognized as an academic field we needed a bibliography to define discipline boundaries, major publications with academic presses, and a visible group of researchers who were part of this revival. Wally Clement and myself produced the bibliography: A Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy.
Zumbansen: What would be the demographics of first wave political economists? Who were they sociologically?
Drache: The first wave were largely middle-class, white radicalized grad students in the social sciences and humanities at the University of Toronto where we were very active in different Marxist and neo Marxist organizations. We were Orthodox Marxists, the Social Democrats of infinite varieties, new Left activists of all description and out of all this we succeeded in establishing ourselves. There was a strong national dimension that built on the activism of the Student Union Peace Action (SUPA). Political economists were very active at the University of Manitoba, Carleton University, McMaster, UBC and UQAM and McGill. Later there were also significant community organizing in Toronto and Kingston when John Sewell was the mayor of Toronto in the late 70s. The founding of the American SDS also had an important influence on us and what was written in their manifesto.
The Artistic Woodwork strike took place in 1973 was a turning point when hundreds of students and workers from other unions fought against scab labour and the police. The workforce of immigrant workers at the company were fighting for their first collective agreement. Madeleine Parent and Kent Rowley asked me to be the chief inside organizer for the union with a small team and it was part of a strategy to organize workers in small and medium-sized plants. It became a very bitter strike because the owners, who were Estonians, saw the Union drive as a Bolshevik-inspired takeover of the factory! It was complex because there were only 200 workers and the company had four small factories where different groups of workers finished picture frames.
Eventually hundreds of people came out to support the picket line in Toronto. For political economists and New Left activists strike activity was part of a strategy of building student-labour alliances. For activists, it was a time of engagement and experimentation that also included solidarity work with liberation movements in Southern Africa. In 1983, Henry Morgenthau opened his Toronto abortion clinic and it was attacked by the Christian right, and he was physically assaulted, and defending the clinic to operate safely with constant picketing was another turning point.
Looking back, initially organizations were largely led by men even though I estimate that roughly between 30 to 40 percent of the activists were women. The ‘left little Lenin patriarchy’ was untenable and unsustainable in many new left organizations. They had to change their theory and practice to be relevant. You can see fundamental evolution of political economists in the New Edition of The Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy edited by myself and Clement. It was very ambitious with an introductory essay entitled “The Coming of Age Of Canadian Political Economy” With a wide-angle lens looking at turbulent changes to the global order and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The new 1985 edition included 26 chapters by leading experts from across the country including focus on Quebec Independence with a strong emphasis on Canada’s competing regional identities. One of my ideas as co-editor was to use its publication to take the pulse of the Canadian economy movement. What was evident is that there had been a shift away from economic questions to a more inclusive agenda on feminism, culture, ideology.
Zumbansen: Looking back, what do we learn about these often acrimonious and highly polarized debates between political economists?
Drache: From the perspective of today, many of the polemics seem dated and did not clarify very much. But if you go back in time, they forced many issues onto the agenda which needed airing. Political economists are very disputatious by nature and there were many hard-fought debates among feminists on goals and strategies, between political economists about the conflicted role of the state in Canadian development, Canadian capitalism, Canada’s role in Latin America, working-class formation. Often ideological blow-ups masked conflicts between individuals or between leaders of different factions. Often, they were as much about the personal idiosyncratic as the political. Despite the fluidity, sectarianism and intensity of the time, we were remarkably productive and engaged.
Earlier I had published a seminal article entitled “The Rediscovery of Canadian Political Economy” in the Journal of Canadian studies which discovered that liberal political economy had a long tradition in Canada beginning in the 1930s with the research and publication of Innis, Creighton, Lower and others on the origins of Canadian capitalism, the state, First Nations and Canada’s elites. A lot of us thought the older tradition of liberal political economy of Thorstein Veblen, T.H Marshall, and Gustavus Myers was a bridge between their work and ours.
It is now forgotten that John Porter published The Vertical Mosaic in 1965, his magisterial study of Canada’s elites and power really the first of its kind, (though there were other antecedents). It is the most significant book that also bridged the Liberal and Marxist schools of political economy. It is still regarded as a foundational text in the field. Significantly it has never been published in French in Quebec, further evidence of Canada’s chasm-like ‘two solitudes’ even among Quebec and English Canadian sociologists. Porter hardly made an impact in Quebec. Instead, they were reading Marcel Rioux’s, Quebec in Question , Guy Rocher’s, le Québec en mutation and Michel Brunet’s new history of the Conquest.
We didn’t want to become prisoners of the disciplinary boundaries of economics, history, political science social geography, anthropology and sociology. Even more so as Marxists it was important to sustain a distinctly Canadian perspective. This appetite to build an indigenous narrative fed off the work of Braudel’s historical research and Sartre ‘s the need for a method, powerful antidotes against contemporary dogmatic Marxism that was incapable of understanding real living individuals and American dustbin empiricism. This flawed. conceptual failure eventually opened the door to identity politics on the left as well as the right. If I could sum it up. It was a very exciting time intellectually and the world of critical thinking was everywhere.
Zumbansen: What were some of key factors that helped Canadian political economy find its legs?
Drache: This is a good question because, for instance, in Canadian history the discipline had moved on after Innis, Creighton and Lower to focus on a variety of national concerns and the conflicts of nation building regionally and locally. You see this in McClelland and Stewart prestigious multi volume History of Canada where modern historians became hyper specialized slicing and dicing Canadian history into small units.
In a parallel development, whole departments stopped teaching Canadian economic history in some cases or was downgraded as an option in the Economics Department at the University of Manitoba. At the University of Toronto, the Department of Political Economy renamed itself the Department of Economics. The dismal science relegated Innis and others to the back burner and replaced them with all kinds of quantitative models and a preoccupation with empirical testing.
These paradigm shifts meant that there was room for big thinking in political economy because we were young, purposeful, and highly motivated. In the production of knowledge, there are times when, let us say, in a 10-year period, there is an extraordinary amount of original research and publishing. There was a bonanza of original research and scholarship published on class analysis and its impact on Canadian development. This included Wallace Clement, The Canadian Corporate Elite, An Analysis Of Economic Power. Leo Panitch, the Canadian State, Tom Naylor, A History of Canadian Business., Kari Levitt: Silent Surrender, the Armstrongs, the Double Ghetto, Viv Nelles, The Politics of Development, Ian Lumdsen, Close The 49th Parallel, ETC as well as many other monographs and articles. What people could see is that political economy was dealing with real issues with innovative methodologies and consequential findings. Quebec political economists would have a very different list, reflecting their theoretical and historical awakening among researchers, trade unionists, and the independence movement.
Zumbansen: Having university and trade publishers to support. ‘non-standard’ scholarship is often a choke point. What happened in Canada?
Drache: Canadian political economy would not have survived and thrived without the support of key commissioning editors at the University of Toronto Press, Queen’s, McGill University Press, James Lorimer Press, McClelland and Stewart, Garamond Press. New Press, Between The Lines, Women’s Press who actively solicited books from Canadian political economists. Early on, we established a series at the University of Toronto: Studies in Political Economy, which was self-funded from the sales of other books in the series.
Organizationally, the different geographically based communities undertook many important initiatives to establish political economy as a major presence: The Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory, Studies in Political Economy, and many feminist and environmental journals were established. Editorial boards became important sites for networking, activism, and interdisciplinary collaboration. It is important to remember that political economy in the first decade or so had this unique support from publishers. This publishing business model no longer exists today with few exceptions. In the world of academic publishing, almost all academic presses require authors to apply for grants from Canada’s cultural agencies.
Zumbansen: Which organizations are part of Canadian political economy movement in Toronto and other cities?
Drache: It is difficult to estimate because there were so many groups congregating on the neomarxist side of Canada’s political culture. They formed significant small to medium social networks where ideas and individuals often collaborated, found employment and became significant sites of engagement and activism. Some of the research organizations have folded their tents and are no longer in existence. Generally. their mandate was to be in the public square using knowledge mobilization and research bombshells to move the needle of public opinion in a left direction.
Some of these have been disbanded noted by an asterisk and are included in order to illustrate the diversity of interests of political economy activism and its long established roots in Canadian society. The list would be very different for Ottawa, Montreal, Regina, Vancouver.
For Toronto, a very partial listing includes activists from other parts of Canada: Latin American Working Group, community organizing activists*, the Anti-Free Trade Movement*, the Toronto Law Union, National Action Committee*, the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa (TCLSAC), Anti-Poverty Groups, Council of Canadians, the Toronto Law Union. LGBTQ network, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Ottawa-based Broadbent Institute, Maytree Foundation, Maude Barlow, David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Law Association, Pembina Institute. Greenpeace Canada, Ecojustice. Toronto Environmental Alliance, UNIFOR, CUPE, Steelworkers, Canadian Union Textile Workers*, Student Movement, Abortion Access Movement, Daycare alliance, editorial boards of Canadian Dimension, Canadian Forum*, Georgia Straight*, Studies in Political Economy, the Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory*, Journal of Canadian Studies.
Zumbansen: Why did Innis become such an important figure in English Canada political economy?
Drache: Innis was Canada’s most accomplished political economist of his generation and best known internationally. In his writings about the state and communications, the history of communications and Canadian development through the Staples trades, he had a lot of nasty things to say about Canada’s elite falling into step with U.S. Cold War imperialism.
In this foundational period, we were very interested in understanding the origins of Canadian capitalism as an export-led growth economy, and Innis and Lower had produced two volumes of historical documents which were crucial in our search for a method. Perhaps we read too much into Innis’s diffuse writing style, but he had advanced a theory of Canadian capitalist development that focused on rigidities and the role of unused capacity as determinant factors impacting the growth and orientation of Canadian capitalists.
His idea was very far from classical political economy of a self-correcting supply and demand imperatives of a market economy. He thought that the overdevelopment of resources led to deep disequilibria in the developmental process. Innis was outspoken against the polarity of the Cold War and the failure of Canada to find its own trajectory. His public outspokenness didn’t harm his reputation. He became a preeminent Canadian public intellectual at the time. Sadly, he died at a very early age of 52 and was unable to complete his term as the first non-American elected president of the American Economic Association.
It has to be remembered that Innis was part of the clerisy, the high Canadian academic establishment, with enormous power over academic life across the country. He always reminded me of the character Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf who lived from the chin up a distant authority figure. In the late 40s, he spent time in the Soviet Union reporting on socialism and lectured at the Collège de France. His nationalism and anti-imperialism were completely out of place with the prevailing orthodoxy of Canada as the loyal ally of Washington and totally committed to export-led growth model.
Zumbansen: Do you think that political economy movement and its programmatic agenda in the broad sense of the term has had a major impact on public policy in Canada?
Drache: It’s difficult to gauge accurately its impact. At the university level, books, periodicals, articles, and courses have been transformed by the thought and influence of Canadian political economists and their research. Political economy cuts across disciplines, and in many areas, gender, poverty, feminist, environmental, governance, democracy, access to justice, developmental issues reflect the knowledge work of this generation. For a number of years, I was an assessor for the SSHRC, and I read hundreds of applications for community university academic research alliance files. It gave me a very clear perspective on the extent to which political economy has been adopted by hundreds of academics for their research projects. In some disciplines, such as economics and law, the impact has been at the margins.
In the political arena, the answer to this question did we make a difference is more difficult. Robert Solow famously quipped that ” in the computer age you can see the evidence everywhere, but in the productivity statistics.” Are we everywhere but not recognized for what we have accomplished?
It matters because if we of the political economy tribe are not recognized, the necessity for dissent and contestation will surely be erased. On a scale of 1 to 10. on Morgentaler, we mattered. On right to abortion, we mattered. On equal work for equal pay, we mattered and still fighting for it in the public domain. On Mahar Arar, wrongly imprisoned by American authorities, imprisoned in Egypt with the collaboration of the Canadian government, we were part of a larger coalition demanding his release.
On economic issues the scorecard looks different. Kari Levitt, Silent Surrender made a significant contribution to a reawakening of national consciousness. The Liberal government was forced to respond to public pressure and took a few very modest steps on the foreign investment–US takeover of Canadian firms largely in response to Walter Gordon, the Minister of Finance in the Pearson government, who highlighted and opposed American takeovers of Canadian firms. He appointed the Watkins Commission on foreign investment that called for government action to review foreign investment. In addition, the high-profile role of Abe Rothstein, a leading political economist at the University of Toronto as editor of the Canadian Forum, he made the issue of foreign ownership a cause célèbre.
Zumbansen: Was there a pivotal make-or-break point for political economy?
Drache: The high point of political economy’s influence is without question the 1988 free trade election. There were other crises. Wage and price controls, the War Measures Act, the Meech Lake Accord, the failed Charlottetown Accord and referendum, and the Kanesatake Resistance (Oka Crisis) between Mohawk protesters, Quebec police, and the RCMP and Canadian Army each one became a choke point. But the free trade election is in a special category It was an intense, no-holds-barred election campaign with dozens of meetings and debates held all over the country on the merits and costs of negotiating a free trade deal with the Bush administration.
A cross-section of Canadian trade unionists were active supporters of the anti-free trade movement. There were organizations in Quebec, across the West, and British Columbia who opposed the new free trade agreement because it offered so few protections to Canadian industry and jobs.
A lot of us – myself included -were debating in public free trade economists such as John Crispo, Ed Safarian, Richard Lipsey, Alan Rugman. There was extensive media coverage, and it had grassroots organization involving hundreds of people. When the campaign began, Prime Minister Mulroney’s conservative Party was behind in the polls, and John Turner the Liberal leader and Bay St. lawyer from one of Toronto’s elite families was ahead. It was a seesaw battle for the votes of Canadians thanks to the role of the anti-free trade movement in mobilizing public opinion against its passage.
More people voted in this election than any other, close to 80% turnout. But when the votes were counted, it is clear that with Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and large parts of Ontario voting for free trade with the United States, the ‘battle of the century’ was lost because it was an election where seats matter and it wasn’t a referendum decided by a majority.
So, even though a majority of Canadians voted Liberal and NDP and against free trade, it still became the economic framework policy of successive Canadian governments until the election of Carney decades later and his commitment to reject export-led growth model. For such a broadly-based movement, it is surprising how quickly the anti-free trade coalition receded.
So, the question is why didn’t the anti-free trade movement have the same staying power as the Quebec separatists kept on fighting and organizing? I don’t think there is a clear and easy answer. David Peterson, the former Premier of Ontario, said, “[Free trade] helped the resource side of the economy. It has not helped the innovation side particularly.” Researchers have documented that there were over 10,000 takeovers of Canadian firms following the Free Trade Agreement. The 1990 recession, which followed, cost Canada thousands of jobs and the closure of many plants and companies. So it was a net loss and a defeat. That taught us a great deal about the political dynamics facing Carney as he builds a coalition of Canadians against Trump.
When the election was called, Mulroney was 10 points ahead of the Liberals and the NDP at 22 points. Then the Liberals overtook the lead after Turner’s performance in the debate. Then the polls changed again just before the election, where public opinion showed a dead heat. In the end, Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives won 43% to 32% for the Liberals and the NDP scored 20%.
Among other things we learned is that to form a majority and win an election, Quebec and Ontario had to be on the same page and that Quebec voted for deep integration, and the Ontario vote was split slightly against. Prairies were strongly for, as was Quebec. Obviously, we can’t claim that political economy reversed the tides of neoliberalism, but activists slowed the erosion of the social contract across the country. The NDP elected more members to Parliament than any time previously.
The Social Planning Council of Toronto was a typical kind of organization, city-based that challenged the march toward the right through its publications and mobilizing. Even the election of the NDP in Ontario under the leadership of Bob Ray could claim few victories with an economic crisis paralyzing the government. It was a time of disillusionment. There was little about the Ray government that was challenging, exciting, and fresh. We can’t pass over this kind of differences today. Ford is totally in character in the pivotal captain Canada role he plays as a street fighter with his insults and name calling attacking Trump.
Zumbansen: Are you an optimist about the future?
Drache: At the time, many thought erroneously and ahistorically that Marxism was forever at its core, unchangeable; it would protect us from the crashing tectonic plates of history. We have learned the hard lesson of the falsity of this ideal. We have seeing the need to retool in the face of immense changes from the rise of the hard right to billions of dollars being spent to build data centers to transform the Fordist model of mass production run by AI agents. In a decade from now, we won’t be able to recognize the way advanced capitalist societies like Canada are organized. I am afraid of what lies ahead and not sure whether Carney’s efforts to find an alternative to economic integration, the export-led growth model, the swamp of cultural capitalism will withstand Trump’s trade war. Yet despite all the red lights flashing, the reset has already begun.
