Escape from the Staple Trap. Canadian Political Economy after Left Nationalism

Facts are simple and facts are straight Facts are lazy and facts are late Facts all come with points of view Facts don't do what I want them to Facts just twist the truth around Facts are living turned inside out Facts are getting the best of them -Talking Heads 1980Whilst reading Paul Kellogg's Escape from the Staple Trap I could not help but think of the refrain from an old Talking Heads (1980) song "Crosseyed and Painless."By way of statistical and historical analysis, Kellogg challenges many of the underlying theoretical and methodological assumptions that underpin much of the Left Nationalist perspective from the 1960s onwards.In particular, he challenges the argument that Canada followed an economic development model typical of the staples-exporting economies in the global south.This argument was popularized in a series of papers and reports including the 1968 Task Force on the Structure of Canadian Industry, Kari Levitt-Polanyi's Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada (1970) and Robert Laxer's Canada Ltd.The Political Economy of Dependency (1973).According to this view, Canada was slowly but steadily undergoing a process of cultural assimilation-cum-political disintegration as ever more control of its economy came under foreign (that is, U.S.) control and ownership.Although Canada was a rich nation, it remained one nevertheless lacking sovereignty and domestic control of its own future.Kellogg, instead, argues that Canada sits at the core (not periphery) of the world's capitalist economies, retaining a significant amount of independent power and sovereignty."Canada is now, and has been for some decades, a full participant in the core of the world system.It is an advanced capitalist economy, coexisting there with a handful of similarly privileged states" (xvi).Kellogg argues that following the failed 1837-38 rebellions, the Canadian elite were "able to assert effective national sovereignty over the territory that was to become the centre of the Canadian state" (xviii) In fact, Canada became imperialist in its own right, not the least of which is in relation to its treatment of Indigenous peoples.Canadian imperialist expeditions then spread to the Caribbean and South America resulting in both internal and external forms of imperialism.As the name implies, Left Nationalists were part of a rising tide of resistance to traditional systems of authority and 'Americanization' north of the 49 th parallel amid the struggle for an autonomous and independent Canada.Indicative of this argument are the essays found in Lumsden

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