Canada's sovereignty has been 'castrated'

A political economist offers a Canadian take on globalization

Alexandra Samuel
September 4, 2002

Something terrible has happened to the man formerly known as Canada.

At least that's how it looks to Stephen Clarkson, a leading political economist. Clarkson's dismal assessment of Canadian sovereignty concludes that: "[I]n the absence of political testosterone, the state could legitimately be considered castrated, a harem keeper for its global and continental masters, but without any vital fluids to call its own." That may be the juiciest quotation from Clarkson's new book, Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism and the Canadian State.

The ground Clarkson covers has been well-travelled in international debates over deregulation, trade liberalization and budget-cutting. What his book offers is a uniquely Canadian take on the business pressures, political decisions and institutional changes that brought us to the era of Seattle, Quebec City and Genoa.

Clarkson positions Canada as an early adopter of economic and political integration. NAFTA and the WTO are just the latest developments in a long history of asymmetric economic interdependence, first with Britain, then with the United States.

While Canada has survived in this state of quasi-independence, our sovereignty has shrunk dramatically since the days of Mulroney, Reagan and Thatcher. Neoconservative ideologues have seduced Canadians with fix-all solutions ranging from free trade to tax cuts. The result is a diminished Canadian state that no longer offers common culture, standard or opportunity.

Clarkson's argument measures the current situation against our Keynesian glory days, when government played an active role in managing the economy. A current of nostalgia for postwar Keynesianism runs throughout the book, threatening the measured analysis of such phenomena as constrained social policy, federal offloading and the domination of multinational corporations.

While Clarkson rightly argues that these developments have diluted our identity as a politically sovereign state, his nostalgia for Keynesianism suggests that he is looking backwards rather than forwards for solutions. That suspicion is borne out by the book's final chapter, which posits a vague vision of "post-globalism" as the antidote to neoconservatism. Clarkson's notion of post-globalism includes calls for strategic NAFTA violations, independent funding for democratically run NGOs and wider access to government information; but these intriguing ideas don't add up to a coherent strategy for reconstituting the Canadian state.

Like many other left analysts, Clarkson is ultimately trapped between his skepticism about neoconservative globalism, and his commitment to democratic politics. The new institutions of global governance may be bad, but they're at least partly the product of democratically elected governments. So how do we reject them without rejecting democratic decision-making?

Clarkson's attempted solution is to simultaneously under- and over-estimate his fellow Canadians. On the one hand we're credited with a nobility of spirit that assumes that we'd gladly trade in our access to cheap electronics and Gap clothing in return for better programming on the CBC. On the other hand we're the sheep who were blindly manipulated into the neocon camp in the first place.

If this contradiction compromises Clarkson's prescriptive viability, it does not detract from a historical analysis that would prepare the weakest sheep for an intellectual battle with the neoconservative wolves. If enough of us sheep do our homework, perhaps we can restore Canada to her former glory.