Stephen Clarkson - Uncle Sam and Us

Stephen Clarkson

Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press and Washington DC, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002.

viii + 534 pp. ISBN 0-8020-3758-5 (hardback) and 0-8020-8539-3 (paperback)

Stephen Clarkson has written an impressive book deploring the subordination of contemporary Canada to the United States. Fittingly, he holds a Chair with the splendid title of 'Political Economy', for only somebody with a grasp of both democracy and dollars could have achieved such an analysis. Yet this is no bloodless parade of trends and figures. As Clarkson points out, social science methodology elevates precision at the cost of significance. The statistic that Canada exports goods worth $360 billion to the United States has no inherent meaning, even though that represents forty percent of the country's gross domestic product. 'Grasping the significance of a fact involves making a judgment, and making a judgment invokes one's core values.' (9) An activist for Canadian national causes for forty years, his book was triggered by the simple query posed by a friend, 'Stephen, will Canada survive?' (407). Canada, he was sure, would continue to fill its space on the map, but what sort of country it would be? The result is a prolonged cry of pain, a combination of post-mortem and rallying cry.

A passionate book, but constructed around a social sciences definitional framework. Ottawa is located at the mid-point of five levels of governance, staggering beneath the emerging global and continental tiers above and dumping its responsibilities on the existing provincial and municipal spheres below. In 1971, Nixon refused to exempt his northern neighbour from an emergency import surcharge, so shaking Canadians in their comfortable Keynesian paradox that used the profits from cross-border trade to combine State support for industry with the provision of welfare services for the citizenry. Canadians now faced a clear choice, and being Canadians they adopted both policies, although not simultaneously. Down to 1984, Trudeau sought a more autonomous Canada, through diversified trade and multilateral diplomacy. This approach was already in the doldrums when the Conservatives swept into office. According to Clarkson, Brian Mulroney brought no fresh ideas and, consequently, he was temperamentally vulnerable to embracing the free trade panacea argued in the 1985 MacDonald Report. Thus Canada bounced headlong from insulated independence to the barely considered Plan B of continental integration.

At this point, enter globalization. In principle, the phenomenon goes back to Edison, if not to Columbus. Its terrifying modern form brings rapid and intrusive change: trans-national corporations, unsleeping stock markets, computerisation of cash and information, the imposition of hegemonic cultural norms. But Clarkson also discerns two accompanying concepts, global governance and globalism. For corporations to operate on a world stage, rule-making is required. By tackling this issue with regulations in phone-book bulk, the European Union flies in the face of globalism, which fights the very notion of regulation by governments. It would be flippant to dismiss Clarkson as yet another Canadian nationalist intellectual crying 'we was robbed' by the victory of free trade with the United States (CUFTA) in 1988. He is right to identify the novel feature of the Canada-US agreement as the opening of cross-border movement to services. Once locked into CUFTA, Canadians found, as they had been warned in 1891 and 1911, that they must follow Washington wherever it led. When the Americans opened trade talks with Mexico, CUFTA soon became NAFTA, and Canada was sucked into a new philosophy of continental governance. Investment is a service, and investors must be protected from expropriation by excitable Latins. Under NAFTA's Chapter 11, any investor, actual or even potential, can sue a sovereign government for obstructing trans-national corporations as they gouge environments and customers. Two years after NAFTA, in 1994, came the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and neoconservative corporate governance went global. (Ottawa, incidentally, has taken a WTO case against France for using health regulations to block imports of asbestos that are banned within Canada.)

Chapter after chapter chronicles the damage that Clarkson blames upon neoconservatism. Some of his arguments may be probed. Clarkson is a Torontonian, proud of a great city that faces environmental and economic problems, including loss of control over its powerful pan-Canadian banking sector. He argues that neoconservatives have hypocritically downloaded key public functions to the municipal level to weaken the role of government, as symbolised by the lethal epidemic caused by polluted drinking water in Walkerton, Ontari. But it does not follow that creation of a single municipality for Metro-Toronto fits part of the pattern, for all that Clarkson briefly labels the behemoth as 'glocalization'. The parallels with Margaret Thatcher are far-fetched: she hand-bagged big-city regimes. Nor is it cricket to cite Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman's demand for provincial status without noting that most Metro intellectuals regard Lastman's election as a sad loss to his previous calling of furniture retailing.

It is striking to note the virtual omission of concern about the Quebec issue. A decade ago, it was 'whither Canada?' that agonised such tomes. Now secession is silently dismissed, as the neoconservative challenge to the State prompts the question 'wither Canada?' Sometimes there is a tension between Clarkson proving that the State has been castrated and Clarkson hoping that it might be revived to protect Canadian values. To a Britain facing the challenge of the Euro, the Bank of Canada's autonomy, however constrained, and the country's ever-sinking dollar, may seem potent symbols of old-fashioned sovereignty. His suggestion that the dollar should 'float up to what is thought to be its true value' (thought by whom?) in order to 'raise the wealth of all Canadians' (416) sounds like the greatest piece of Voodoo economics since Harold Wilson reassured us about the pound in our pockets. (A stronger dollar would, as Clarkson says, make imports cheaper. It would also flood the country with American and Mexican goods, while increased export prices would force Canada back to a mere staple producer.)