The Lost Massey Lectures (38 page)

If we accept the assumption—which, incidentally, has never been demonstrated—that there will be a greater world output,
how is it to be shared? Who will decide the distribution? What percentage will go to improving the standard of living of consumers? What percentage will be invested to increase the military power of the bloc or to validate the perennial promise of a better tomorrow? Will the developed or less developed nations fare best? Which nations will benefit now and which in a distant future?

More fundamentally, who in our brave, new global world will make the decisions? Since each nation's resources have been placed in an international pot and its manpower assigned some partial and specialized role, the nation's freedom to create the instruments necessary to the achievement of its own priorities has been sharply reduced. As the scope for national decision making declines, the instructions coming from the supranational authority increases. The professionals in the international bureaucracies will save the nations of the world from politicians and democratic politics with “all those noisy and incoherent promises, the impossible demands, the hotchpotch of unfounded ideas and impractical plans. . . .”

The new reality with which Canadians must deal is simply this—the United States considers the security of the Western world to be indivisible with its own. Given this purpose and its acceptance by the leading industrial nations, the United States government believes that the task it has undertaken requires that it obtain the unqualified support of the Canadians, the Europeans, and the Japanese in all things political, economic, and military. This is the commitment that was demanded at Williamsburg. This is the commitment that was given.

Williamsburg created the superbloc of the West. Is that superbloc to be America and the six satellites or America and the six allies? In any event, Canada's interests are being poorly served by maintaining the pretence that we are a leading industrial
power. We are not. We will never develop the set of strong domestic policies needed to give us control over the directions of our economy until we accept that fact.

Neither Japan nor Europe nor the United States has any intention of helping Canada to become an industrial power. These three industrial giants are each fully capable of supplying a whole range of manufactured products, cars, televisions, steel, radios, capital equipment, tools, and so on, to world markets. Canada's manufacturing potential is neither needed nor will it be welcomed in a world that is moving, despite all protestations, toward increasing protectionism. As these three powers divide the world into industrial spheres of influence, Canada's role will be the supplier of raw materials and energy resources.

Canadian economic policy has, since Confederation, rested on the twin pillars of resource exploitation and capital imports in the colonial form of direct investment. Both policies have been used to such excess that Canada is presently the most vulnerable nation in the world, with its abnormal dependence on export markets, trade cycles, and corporate-capital flows.

To bury ourselves in the bosom of the American superstate is to condemn Canadians forever to the role of suppliers of raw materials. The current trade conflicts between our two countries are an example of the challenge that we face. The United States has always insisted on at least an equilibrium in their balance of trade with us. As we continue to ship billions of dollars of petroleum and mineral resources, they will insist on an equivalent return flow in manufactured goods. For every million dollars in wages and salaries that we export, we will be importing three to four million dollars in American or Japanese or European wages and salaries. In employment terms, we import the labour and effort of three to four workers for every Canadian employed.

How are we as a nation to counteract age-old policies? Are we
nasty nationalists if we try? Moving Canadian economic policies into line with those of the United States—consequences, as President Reagan phrased it at Williamsburg—means that we are serving the interests of the bloc rather than our own. It means that Canada will continue to concentrate on the extractive export industries and that domestic and imported capital will abandon the pursuit of industrialization. No industrial policy for Canada but rather the age-old specialization in primary production, with this difference—that it will no longer be the result of market forces and inept government leadership but will be the outcome of the political pressures imposed on us by our trading partners at Williamsburg.

There is no abstract set of international policies that can simultaneously satisfy the needs and requirements of nations as unequal in wealth and power as Canada and the United States. Each nation in the world must define and pursue the strong domestic policies tailored to the development of its own material and human resources. Free trade was the appropriate policy for Great Britain at the zenith of her power in the nineteenth century, but, as Bismarck remarked, “free trade is the policy of the strong,” suitable for the nations that were industrial leaders but not necessarily for nations that wanted to be.

Canada's tariff policy of 1879 was a national policy, although it turned out to be counterproductive. Infant industry protectionism can be made to work if it is accompanied by strong industry creation, as the policies of both the United States and Germany have shown. But Canada failed to create the industries that the tariff was designed to protect, and so the foreign investment and the branch plants took over.

Reaganomics, the emphasis on military power and economic hegemony, is clearly a new national policy designed to establish in the West the measure of cohesion and unification that has existed
in the Soviet bloc. Those searching for Canadian policy options in the eighties are not nasty nationalists (what nation blindly places the interests of others before its own?), but Canadians genuinely concerned with the vulnerability of the economy that they are turning over to the next generation.

President Reagan was elected on the promise to make the United States strong again, to restore American prestige and power to the level of the 1950s and the 1960s. He has done so. At Williamsburg, with U.S. nuclear might as the lever, he guaranteed the security of the West on condition that they follow American economic initiatives, and then—less tactfully—become American satellites. A weak and uncompetitive American economy is back in the saddle again, dictating objectives, formulating policies, and assigning roles to the leading nations of the West.

Hyping the unthinkable, the threat of nuclear holocaust, has brought great dividends to the rhetorician of the White House. He cannot lose. When the nuclear tensions lessen, as indeed that insanity must, the United States will have regained undisputed economic leadership of the West, and this is what the exercise is all about.

If Williamsburg is to be Canada's future, that future is bleak indeed.

Wallace Stevens, an American poet, wrote “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” in which he speaks of the influence that the land has on people.

The soul, he said, is composed
of the external world.
There are men of the East, he said,
Who are the East.
There are men of a province
Who are that province
There are men of a valley
Who are that valley. . . .

The roots of a community are two—the land and the people who come to it. A society is born when a sufficient number of people gather together in a particular place. Each person will have
his own reasons for settling in a region—the escape from poverty and oppression, the attraction of a greater freedom and liberty, the hope and promise of greater opportunity. In time, the people of the region will develop their own ethos, the spirit and dispositions that will provide the set of norms and moral postulates that will govern their economic affairs and their political relations. A community, above all else, expresses the tone, the outlook, the vital force and spirit underlying the living reality of people at work and leisure.

To a great degree nature itself defines and imposes the scope and range if not the limits of opportunities open to the people. It is certain that over the generations there will be in the community a gradual harmonization of values, of expectations, of viewpoints, and of purposes. Thus defined, the community has no problem with its identity.

The external world, as Wallace Stevens writes, affects us, forms us, and commands our work. The challenges facing the east-coast fisherman are not the causes of concern to the prairie farmer or even to the west-coast fisherman. Nor will the responses be the same.

Each accepts his environment for what it is and strives to shape it and to use it rationally and consistently within the limits that nature itself imposes. In this unity of man and environment there is the continuity that will survive even the greatest social upheavals. A better example of survival can scarcely be found than the preservation of French Canadian identity and nationalism after military defeat and political catastrophe. As Canon Groulx has written, “
La même entité humaine continue sa vie, sur la même terre, dans le même environnement géographique.
” The strength of the Quebec culture lies in the historical fact that the spiritual beliefs, the outlook, the language, the social institutions, and the political forms remain rooted in the same soil that shaped past generations. And this is true of all communities.

A community, established in its particular living space, soon develops the principles and norms of conduct, the laws and form of government that reflect the beliefs and value systems of its people and guide both internal conduct and a collective approach to the outside world. Local government is a necessity for the members of a community who wish to attain the good of order and the possibility of the collective definition of goals and purpose. Fundamental to this creation of meaningful civic relations is the individual's surrender of his own use of force and the assignment of monopoly powers of coercion to the civil authorities. Without this transfer there could not be community. There would be confusion and anarchy.

Out of the creation of local government by people in particular places flows the range and nature of the specific choices to be made and the goals to be pursued—the third element of the complete society. At the level of community, the horizons embrace all modes of man's existence: the religious, the economic, the social, the scientific, and the cultural. And it is principally at this level, while all the principal directions of living and intending are still open to them, that men and women have the greatest freedom of choice. I take the community to be the solid core of the social system.

What does society lose when successively higher forms of political integration, inspired by unproved and doubtful claims of commercial and financial efficiency, are introduced?

Community economics is an uncomplicated but rational system. The logic of the community requires that the power to produce be matched with an equivalent capacity to consume. The community priority is a standard of living.

David Riesman's question, “Abundance for what?” is not a relevant question at the community level, where “sharing” is the distinguishing feature and no one need feel alone. If the question
were raised, the answer would be clear and unequivocal—a large production and a fair distribution of that production go hand in hand. The circle of economic activity is complete.

Economics was born in the minds of men who lived in a world of court privilege, mercantilism, monopolies, national objectives of empire and trade surpluses, and hated what they saw. “No man produces for the sake of producing and nothing further,” said James Mill. “Things are distributed as also exchanged to some end. That end is consumption.” As for Adam Smith, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.” And that was that.

As we move to more complex and larger social groupings, Riesman's question raises troubling issues. Production is not necessarily for a good distribution but for more production. Future growth and wealth itself become goals that insert themselves ahead of equitable distribution and improvements in sharing and the present standard of living. Here we are on sensitive ground! John Stuart Mill, writing of the growing abundance provided by the American economy, continued as follows: “and all that these advantages seem to have done for them is that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters.” This brutal passage, which appeared in the first (1848) edition of Mill's
Principles of Political Economy
, was deleted from the following editions. It is dangerous to suggest that investment in a better tomorrow may leave the living generation hooked on money and nothing else.

Repeating our definition, a community is a sufficient number of people in a particular corner of the world who form a government empowered to define and enforce rules of conduct so that man may know and be free to choose among the principal directions and modes of his existence. In short, the community has no problem with its identity, is the first expression of social
humanism and freedom, and is the mould that shapes character, choices, and careers.

The problem of Canadian unity, for example, is to find a way in which the primary importance and fundamental values of community can be maintained in the face of escalating concentration and regimentation at both the political and economic levels. I do not see how this can be accomplished unless our political leaders start from the beginning with the objectives of strengthening our communities and reinforcing our provinces. This will be no simple task in an age of technological, industrial, and financial integration. What the computer imposes upon us is a social discipline, conformity, and homogeneity unknown in all previous history, for corporate and public bureaucracies, if their aims are to be achieved, must define and program the individual in functional terms—man becomes a means to an end, not an end in himself.