Maple syrup neoliberalism
Nationalism without social and economic democracy is just a new paint job on an old model that needs to be scrapped
This piece is part of an ongoing series on nationalism, Canada-US relations, the state of Canadian politics, and Donald Trump’s trade war.
In 1975, Canada’s former Minister of Finance Walter Gordon published a book called Storm Signals: New Economic Policies for Canada that among other things addressed the issue of US ownership in Canadian industry and the wider question of American dominance. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, there was actually a general consensus among Red Tories, progressive liberals, and socialists that both constituted a genuine political problem and a serious threat when it came to the country’s ongoing viability as an independent nation.
Gordon himself was a particularly influential figure in Canadian nationalist circles, and also someone sincerely committed to the cause. In the 1960s, while a cabinet minister, he persuaded prime minister Lester Pearson to commission a hugely significant report on the question of foreign ownership. And though he returned to the business world upon retiring from politics in 1968, he continued his work on the issue. Educated at Upper Canada College, Gordon was — in the words of his own biographer — “a pillar of the Canadian establishment” (though this evidently did nothing to dissuade the country’s security agencies from keeping a file on him).
He was also very much a L/liberal, in both the partisan and ideological sense of the word. Which is to say: for all his earnest belief in Canadian independence, Gordon’s steadfast ideological commitment to the tenets of liberal capitalism — markets, private ownership, and a fairly narrow role for the state when it comes to intervening in them — often rendered his nationalism hopelessly naive on a practical level.
Gordon’s analysis in Storm Signals was a case in point.
Having outlined the problem of American domination in quite detailed and vivid terms, his major prescription for preserving Canadian independence was the passage of a resolution in Parliament asking foreign owners of the 32 largest Canadian subsidiaries to sell their stakes to private Canadian owners “gradually over a period of years.” Barely missing a beat, he rejected other more direct solutions to the problem — activist industrial policy, nationalization of industry, tight regulation of corporate behaviour, etc. — on the ideological grounds they all involved too much interference in private enterprise by the state.
Elsewhere in the book, meanwhile, Gordon sought to address inflation and a number of other problems by advocating the likes of wage freezes, the banning of public sector strikes, the introduction of hospital fees, and a lower corporate tax rate.
It was a vision of a Canada made stronger and more independent through voluntary changes in the behaviour of multinational companies; of a repatriated Canadian economy made more competitive through tax cuts and the disciplining of labour power. Having steadily bought up larger and larger pieces of Canada’s lucrative resource base, American investors were now magically going to sell them back (to private investors north of the border) because Parliament had asked them nicely. In a review of Storm Signals for the Globe and Mail, my late friend Ed Broadbent offered a pointed response whose basic thrust was aptly summed up by its somewhat bemused headline: Bizarre, naive. What manner of political universe is this?
The problem with liberal nationalism
You might be wondering why any of this is relevant or what exactly it has to do with anything happening in politics right now. Here, I’d like to table the following:
These are merely two instances among many of Canadian responses to Donald Trump’s belligerence. The first evinces a “Freedom Fries” level of cringe but is also pretty benign; the second is emblematic of a kind of thinking now ascendent in Canadian business circles, wherein the solution to the threat posed by Trump just happens to be exactly what people in these same circles would be advocating regardless of circumstance (its authors, for context, are Kevin Lynch — a former Clerk of the Privy Council and vice-chair of BMO Financial Group and Paul Deegan, among other things a former executive at BMO and CN)— i.e. deregulation and cuts to both taxation and social expenditure.
In different ways, each of these examples illustrates the basically free-floating character of nationalism and its total futility as a concept once refracted through the prism of neoliberalism. Ultimately, what you get is either just a new form of shopping whose effect is entirely cosmetic or a familiar, corporate-friendly program of deepened austerity and cuts.
You can, it turns out, put a nationalist gloss on virtually anything. So what?
The likes of current and former banking executives aside, I think plenty of those currently preaching the gospel of Canadian nationalism while advocating for responses or policies in a similar vein are being perfectly sincere. When Canada’s newly-minted prime minister Mark Carney proposes cutting the capital gains tax and deregulating interprovincial commerce under the aegis of “controlling Canada’s economic destiny” I see no reason to conclude there’s anything underhanded or dishonest going on.
As I’ve written elsewhere, Carney is, much like Walter Gordon, a sincere believer in liberal capitalism, and for him the idea of economic and cultural patriotism is wholly circumscribed by that belief.1 Becoming “Masters in our own home” — to use a turn of phrase regularly invoked by Carney he’s decided to borrow from Quebec’s Quiet Revolution — thus implies creating a more favourable business climate, and perhaps the gradual transformation of Canada’s economy into one where Canadian rather than American investors are overwhelmingly the stakeholders.
My own view here, once again, is so what?
An economy directed from Bay Street rather than Wall Street isn’t going to be substantively different from the one Canada currently has. Similarly, buying Canadian doesn’t mean all that much if the companies we’re buying from remain price-gouging quasi-monopolies whose workers are underpaid and whose owners are congenitally undertaxed.
In many ways, I have found the swelling of Canadian nationalism that’s come in response to Trump’s annexation threats both surprising and heartening. The return of economic nationalism, even in the abstract, offers a clear opportunity to undo at least some of the destructive impact wrought by Canada’s asymmetrical trade relationship with the USA. But I also worry these very sentiments will ultimately be exploited to put a patriotic veneer on policies and behaviour that are both socially destructive and all-too familiar.
As free trade disintegrates and as Canada’s economy necessarily undergo structural reforms, Canadians deserve better than Maple Syrup neoliberalism.
If the idea of an independent and sovereign Canada means anything, it is surely a country more humane and less unequal than the United States — a place where markets rule, private enterprise is the civic religion, and those most struggling to survive are incessantly told they’re really just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Since its inception in the late 18th century, nationalism has meant many different things to people of different nations, classes, and ideological persuasions. In its worst expressions, it has been wielded by political elites as a glue to ensure social cohesion amid the maintenance of hierarchy. At its best, it has been a bulwark of social solidarity and been a vehicle for economic and social democracy.
To me, it seems pretty clear which kind of nationalism is more desirable.
This is true of Carney’s thinking in other areas too, and his intra-corporate activism around climate change is a perfect illustration of that thinking’s flaws. Here’s a description of that activism and what became of it, excerpted from a piece by my friend David Moscrop. Among other things, you will note the quite explicit parallel with Walter Gordon: “In 2020, Carney was appointed as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action, tasked with mobilizing private finance to combat climate change, primarily through the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero. The voluntary alliance was doomed from the start—rooted in the belief that the market, and particularly the banks, could solve the climate crisis they led the way in producing.”