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...with--indeed 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)
The Labour Regime and National Welfare: Standards, Entitlements, and Race
Yet for all of the similarities, Canada and the United States are also quite different, especially in terms of the 'climate' of expectation and entitlement as it is lived out in the broad population and articulated within the workers movement. The labour relations environment has, since the consolidation of a modern post-World War II system of industrial pluralism, been different in Canada than in the United States. (12) Far more social democratic than their United States counterparts, Canadians, with a somewhat lower standard of living (which has experienced a long, slow slide since the end of World War II, one accelerating markedly in the 1990s), (13) nonetheless have deeply ingrained appreciations of programs of social universality. Especially evident in terms of health care, this Canada-us difference also appears in education and inner-city infrastructure. Canadians experience, moreover, nowhere near the level of contact with debilitating poverty that characterizes the contemporary United States. The racialization of this destitution, while evident, is simply not comparable in the two countries. Canadian cities tend to be cleaner, safer, and less desperate places than those in the us, recognized by Americans as well as Canadians as more liveable.
Evidence suggests that this difference is indeed fading, and if the free-trade era has produced change in Canada it is in the structural narrowing of specific historical gaps between the Canadian and United States ways of grappling with economic inequality. The share of Canadian government expenditure in the Gross Domestic Product, for instance, has fallen considerably between 1992 and 2001, bringing Canadian experience more in line with that of the United States. (14) The historic association of Canadian identity with universality and a relatively strong welfare state nonetheless remains an important component of contemporary political culture. And this is buttressed, in terms of comparison with the United States, by the significantly different levels at which racialization of poverty, welfare, and labour market segmentation have operated in the two countries. (15)
The extremes of racial polarization that exist in the United States, for instance, are historically rooted in the slave economy of the South, and continued in sharecropper form until as late as the 1960s. They involve significant regional enclaves of acute destitution (much of the American South) as well as urban ghettoes throughout the us (New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, among others). Increasingly important, at the level of a discourse of exclusion, are Latinos, now scapegoated as crashing the Mexican-us border in what is increasingly presented in a language of Lou Dobbs-racism as a threatening influx. (16) One measure of Canadian-United States difference in this regard is the current us orchestrated politico-economic moral panic over border surveillance. A few hundred security personnel staff the still relatively 'undefended' Canada-US border, while the much more geographically compact Mexico-us southern boundary has become an armed divide, patrolled and occupied by almost 10,000 'guards'. Even this is not enough, and vigilante forces have been called upon to monitor the border's porous nature, which, in the view of far too many, opens the floodgates to the Latino peril. (17) Another indicator of this race difference is what we might call the Katrina-phenomenon: the extent to which a major us metropolitan centre, New Orleans, was exposed by the devastation of a hurricane as a site of racially ordered poverty, Written off to the extent that virtually half of its population has been 'ethnically cleansed' in the aftermath of the 2005 disaster, the remaining residents of colour reduced to a refugee-camp-like status within a United States where market mechanisms turn a blind eye to the colour of calamity. (18) To be sure, the deep structure of racist treatment of Aboriginal peoples in Canada is appalling, and among Inuit, Metis, and First Nations communities, microcosms of New Orleans have existed in barren northern outposts and on isolated reserves for decades. That said, the quantitative concentration of African American and Creole populations in the devastation that rocked Louisiana outstrips anything imaginable in Canada, as does the callous indifference and gross incompetence of the state, which has worsened the situation. (19)
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.
Public Sector Workers and the Social Wage
Not surprisingly, and what is undoubtedly related to the preservation of minimal levels of institutionalized, state-orchestrated welfare, Canada's public sector is proportionately far larger than that of the United States, employing roughly one-third of the labour force, approximately 72 per cent of which is unionized. Yet it needs to be recognized that these organized public sector workers occupy rungs on a welfare state economic ladder that are being chopped at viciously by state policies...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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