Experiments in Economics and Identity

Yesterday my son added apple cider vinegar to the family grocery list - soaked in a bandana it affords protection against tear gas. He and other young activists, gathering in Ottawa and elsewhere to demonstrate against the June 2002 summit of industrialized world leaders in Kananaskis, Alberta, have grown up assuming that political expression entails a risk of violent response from authority. They also, intuitively at least, see no distinction between economic and social issues: liberalized trade goes to the heart of domestic policy, including the capacity of individuals and communities to determine their futures. In Canada,one legacy of this capacity is a history of diverse efforts - in a sense, experiments - by communities and regions to achieve economic security. This issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies begins with three articles that examine several such efforts in Atlantic Canada. For many centuries, as Russet Barsh explains, the Mikmaq people of the maritime region harvested ocean resources (mammals, fish, shellfish). They were governed by the ethic of netukulimk: roughly, to take only what you need. This ethic, and the allocation of hunting territories, likely ensured, at least in the absence of European competition, that resources would not be depleted. Today, however, commercial fisheries have damaged many stocks, and there is conflict between the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Mikmaq. Barsh argues that it is time to consider a new regime for conserving the Atlantic fisheries, drawing on Mikmaq experience, and devolving some management authority to communities and ports. In the 1930s the Antigonish Movement in Nova Scotia began as a practical expression of the inseparability of community solidarity and economic security. Movement leaders, like Moses Coady, saw community co-operatives as the basis for a middle way between capitalism and socialism. But Scott MacAulay argues that, in practice, the movement leaned far closer to capitalism. Coady and others defined economic democracy fairly narrowly: in terms of people as consumers, rather than as workers. While giving people more power over their lives, co-operatives would, it was hoped, forestall the radicalism of communism, and its inherent risk to private property and the capitalist system. Essentially supportive of capitalism, the movement failed to provide an alternative to it. Stephen Tomblin provides a contemporary perspective on the relations between economics and politics. Across Canada, governments have been urged to respond to the imperatives of globalization and other economic changes by reducing their role in the economy. Newfoundland has responded in varied ways: while Clyde Wells, premier after 1989, embraced an agenda of smaller government and a larger role for market forces, his successor, Brian Tobin, asserted a continuing role for government in fostering economic security. The contrast, according to Tomblin, illustrates how economic arguments, however pervasive, will not necessarily drive political change, particularly within a province wary of discarding traditions of economic intervention by government. In the next article Rod Haddow gives us a broader perspective, by exploring the complex relations between government, business, labour and other interests. These relations have often followed one of two patterns: corporatist, in which business and labour are balanced through close working relations with government; or associational, in which relations between these interests are smaller in scale and more flexible in design. …

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