Challenging Canada
By Sebastian Lamb
The preceding articles give us a very different understanding of Canada than the ones that most leftists and activists have. They make a powerful case for seeing Canada not as an underdog on the world stage and a country oppressed by the US, but as an advanced capitalist society, a colonial-settler state and an imperialist power. When we break out of the narrow perspective that looks at Canada mainly in relation to the US instead of placing Canada in relation to the entire global system, we can appreciate how Canadian capitalists and governments are globally dominant, not dominated.
Obstacles to Understanding
Why don’t more people understand this even on a gut level, even on the Left? One reason is that within English Canada the usual way of thinking about Canada is in relation to the US, not the world as a whole. It’s obvious that Canada lies in the political shadow of its imperialist super-power neighbour to the south. It’s less obvious that Canada’s relationship to most of the world is one of domination.
Another reason is nationalism. All nations have their myths, their stories about what makes them unique. English Canada is no exception. One of the central ideas of the kind of Canadian nationalism that has flourished since the 1960s is the notion that Canada is at its core a caring society, nicer than the neighbour south of the 49th parallel. The greatest symbol of this supposed caring nature in Canadian nationalist mythology is medicare. Public health care is widely believed to somehow express the essential identity of Canada as a nation. Obviously it’s important to defend public health care against privatization. But the proposition that medicare defines Canada is inadequate and misleading, not least because the federal Medical Care Act (covering physician insurance) was only introduced in 1966, almost a century after Confederation.
The New Left that sprang up in English Canada in the 1960s as part of an international wave of protest and radicalization was strongly influenced by this kind of nationalism, and contributed to it. English-Canadian left-nationalists saw English Canada and Quebec as neo-colonies of the US, and many thought of themselves as fighters in the global movement of anti-imperialist resistance spearheaded by the Vietnamese. New Left nationalism shaped the political generation that radicalized from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. People from this group have become influential as left-wing researchers, teachers, union officials, NGO and community agency executives and journalists.
A fourth reason has to do with how English Canada’s opposition to an increasingly aggressive US ruling class is expressed. The increasingly crude and arrogant drive for global dominance mounted by the Bush administration and the US ruling class more generally (under both Democratic and Republican presidents) since the collapse of the USSR at the end of the 1980s has increased the likelihood that opposition to neoliberalism, war and imperialism in English Canada is expressed in Canadian nationalist terms.
Nationalist Problems
Nationalism involves the belief that all members of a nation share something in common, just because they are part of the same imagined national community. This obscures the irreconcilable antagonism between rulers and ruled, exploiters and exploited. That’s why all nationalisms are problematic from the perspective of socialism from below.
But some nationalisms are worse than others. The nationalism of imperialist powers is the most objectionable. The nationalism of oppressed nations can play a progressive role to the extent that it expresses a liberation struggle.
Canadian nationalism is the nationalism of a colonial settler-state founded on the conquest of Aboriginal Peoples and the people of New France. It perpetuates the smug lie that Canada is fundamentally a peaceful, caring and sharing society - and, thanks to state multiculturalism policies, not racist. In this vision, class divisions, racism, sexism, heterosexism and the domination by English Canada of Aboriginal Peoples and Quebec are all erased, obscured or downplayed.
Canadian nationalism creates a huge blind-spot for the Left, one which hides the exploitation and oppression that goes on every day within the borders of Canada and which is projected by Canadian capital and its state outside these borders.
The belief that Canada is an underdog oppressed by the US is part of the “common sense” of the Left because the Left’s ideas are drawn from the same pool of ideas from which everyone socialized in English Canada draws. This pool is fed by powerful, deep-rooted streams of ideology. Nationalism is one such stream.
Ideologies aren’t simply delusions, but systems of thought which provide misleading interpretations of reality. In English Canada, the four previously-mentioned factors, along with the low level of class struggle and the feebleness of working-class politics, help explain the strength of nationalism among left-wing people. Recognizing this helps guard against simply dismissing people who hold nationalist ideas. That said, understanding why left-nationalist ideas are influential should not lead anyone to buy into them!
An effective approach to fighting for social change needs to be informed by a sound analysis of what it is we’re trying to change. The preceding articles on “Canada and Empire” in this issue offer the foundations of such an analysis of Canadian society. They point to some important political conclusions:
1 For people living in Canada, the rulers of Canada are our main enemy
There is a well-developed capitalist ruling class in Canada. The much greater power of the rulers of the US should not distract us from our responsibility to challenge what Canada’s rulers do, both within and outside its borders. Opposing what they do goes against the grain of English-Canadian culture more than denouncing the US does, but that’s no excuse for letting Canada’s rulers off the hook.
2 Anti-racism and solidarity with struggles for national self-determination must be central
The oppression of Aboriginal Peoples is as old as the European presence in what is now the Canadian state. Racism is pervasive, corrosive and divisive in this colonial-settler state. Anti-racism and support for the right of Aboriginal Peoples to determine their own futures must not be “add-ons” for the Left. The same is true for support of Quebec’s right to self-determination (a subject unfortunately not addressed by a specific article in this issue).
3 Canada is not a force for peace and justice
Bono is wrong: the world does not need more Canada. The Canadian state needs to be restrained from intervening militarily and politically in other countries, not encouraged, as articles in this issue demonstrate.
4 Appeals for Canada to stand up are misguided and harmful
The US government’s decision to ignore the NAFTA dispute resolution ruling in Canada’s favour on softwood lumber has sparked a new round of such appeals from people on the Left.
For example, Duncan Cameron argued in the online magazine Rabble that “Canada must abandon its subservience to the US.” Cameron wrote that “Canada sits passively in the NAFTA protectionist fortress, emerging only to champion ill-conceived, dangerous and downwright criminal American trade initiatives on public services, investmet and intellectual property.”
This suggests a bad case of tunnel vision. Passively? The federal government has been anything but passive in its efforts to make Canada a more profitable place to do business and to help Canadian capital make greater profits abroad. It actively champions the initiatives to which Cameron refers, such as the General Agreement on Trade in Services – not because it is subservient to the US but because of its commitment to neoliberal capitalism.
Equally striking is the complete absence of class analysis in such appeals. Cameron argues “Gas prices rise because we have a US-led continental energy policy, not a policy made for Canadians.” Which Canadians? What exists is an energy policy made for US and Canadian capital.
The fact that political figures who are anything but opponents of neoliberalism have been coming out with similar salvos of nationalist indignation should make people on the Left think twice. Lloyd Axworthy, a cabinet minister under Jean Chretien and now President of the University of Winnipeg, published a newspaper article in August 2005 entitled “No More Mr. Nice Guy.”
Axworthy argued that “we are dealing with an American political system currently steeped in the ideology of ‘empire.’ It recognizes few rules, adheres only to those treaties that are expedient to basic interests, and believes that the only political currency that counts is the exercise of raw power.” Music to the ears of left-nationalists!
But what exactly did Axworthy propose? “Let’s begin by seriously considering an end to NAFTA and reliance instead upon the World Trade Organization to regulate the terms and provisions of free trade.” In other words, switch to a different neoliberal treaty to regulate North American capitalism!
Instead of shouting for the Canadian government to play hardball with the US, the Left should raise demands that oppose neoliberalism and fight for them through campaigns of mass mobilization. The federal government acts as it does because it is charting a course for Canadian capital in the global economy, not because it’s unpatriotic or subservient to George Bush.
Nationalist criticism of neoliberal policies is misleading and strengthens a reactionary ideology. Because it advocates a stronger federal state, it has a proven track record of dividing the English-Canadian Left from the Quebecois Left, which does not see the federal state as its friend. This has been clear from the campaign against the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in the late 1980s through the debates around the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional deals of the early 1990s to Jack Layton’s backing down from his opposition to the Clarity Act in 2004.
The fact that the nationalist website notacolony.ca posted Axworthy’s article, alongside nostalgia for the Canadian Avro Arrow fighter jet of the late 1950s, speaks volumes about the politics of Canadian nationalism. So too does the publication without comment of “Wounded, the Interim Report by the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence,” on the left-nationalist website vivelecanada.ca. It’s little wonder that far right elements have been active in such nationalist circles (as documented by Will Offley’s article in the Jan-Feb 2001 issue of Canadian Dimension).
5 Canadian sovereignty is not a progressive goal
Many people who want to defend public health care and who oppose Canadian participation in wars, occupations and other “regime change” interventions like the one in Haiti argue in favour of defending or achieving Canadian sovereignty.
In order to assess this kind of argument, we need to clarify what sovereignty means. Sovereignty can mean more than one thing. “National sovereignty” refers to a nation having its own state, with its own government, central bank, judiciary, police and military. “Popular sovereignty” refers to the relationship between a people and those who rule (“the sovereign power”); in a capitalist democracy, the claim by political philosophers that the people are sovereign masks the reality of class rule.
Canadian national sovereignty already exists: there is an independent multi-national state called Canada with its own institutions (Quebec and the First Nations are subordinated within this state and do not have national sovereignty). As an imperialist power, Canada is quite unlike the many independent nation-states, such as Mexico, whose national sovereignty is undermined by imperialism, not to mention occupied countries like Iraq.
To say that Canada has national sovereignty doesn’t mean that the people who run Canada can do whatever they want, free of outside influences. The actions of every state in the world, even the USA, are limited by the deep interconnections between societies that have been woven over centuries by the development of the capitalist world economy and state system. The fact that Canada’s rulers are subject to the influence of economic and political forces they don’t control does not prove that Canada lacks national sovereignty.
Demands for Canadian sovereignty are regressive in the way that they bind popular sentiments of opposition to neoliberalism, capitalism and imperialism to Canadian nationalism. In English Canada, such progressive sentiments are often expressed in nationalist terms. The Left should be trying to disentangle these sentiments from nationalism, but left-nationalist arguments for sovereignty tie them together.
