Maximum Canada by Doug Saunders

Author:Doug Saunders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2017-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

This observation—that Canada would not be able to grow successfully as a country until it looked outward for markets—was in 1985 self-evident to many Canadians. But it would take a decade, including an ugly showdown over free trade in the 1988 federal election, for this view to become a national consensus.

The 1980s seemed to experience an odd political inversion, in which the Tories and Liberals reversed the positions they’d held for a century on Canada-U.S. free trade. This was partly an illusion born of political contingency. The big, and historic, change was the Progressive Conservatives’ abandonment of the colonial, anti-American view they’d held at least until the end of Diefenbaker’s leadership. The Liberals hardly seemed comfortable with their anti-trade posture and would soon abandon it, ratifying the North American Free Trade Agreement and returning to their pro-trade status by the time they formed a majority government in 1993. The NDP spent a decade as virtually a single-issue anti-trade party, a stance that thrust them into the political margins until the 2000s, when it was largely abandoned by leaders Jack Layton and Thomas Mulcair. By 2003, there was a wide political consensus across the mainstream Canadian political spectrum in favour of North American integration—a consensus that appears to be shared by most Canadians.

That more open view of trade and economic relations, along with a widely shared expansionist view of the economy, the role of Quebec and indigenous peoples, the rights of individuals and the plural nature of citizenship and society, means that Canadians—if they can find the political will—are in a position to build an increasingly equal, thriving, ecologically sustainable and socially just country during this century. The major remaining limitation is the increasingly visible price of underpopulation.

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