Canada and the Challenges of International Development and Globalization

Mahmoud Masaeli, Lauchlan T. Munro, Mahmoud Masaeli, Lauchlan Munro

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780776626383
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Globalisierung

What areCanada's various links with international development and globalization? Theyextend beyond foreign aid to diplomacy, trade, finance, aid, immigration, military intervention (both peacekeeping and combat roles), membership in avariety of international organizations, relations with indigenous peoples, andpeople-to-people links.

Thismulti-disciplinary and multi-author textbook, designed for first- orsecond-year students, introduces the main concepts, theories, and perspectivesthat have shaped Canada's interactions with developing countries in aglobalizing world.

It starts by considering Canada as a case study ininternational development and globalization. It examines Canada's diplomatic, economic, military, social, immigration and aid policies, how they have changedover time and how they have interacted with each other and with Canada'streatment of Indigenous peoples. The book presents economic, political, andcultural dimensions of the process of globalization and the ways they affectCanada; examines the public institutions, private sector and civil societyorganizations in Canada; and explores the moral imperatives behind Canadianinternational policy. Finally, it examines current issues, including Canada'spromotion of human rights, democracy, good governance, support to the private sector, and relations with fragile and conflict-affected states and the emergingeconomies.

Finalist - PROSE Award, Textbook/Social Sciences January 2019
This book is published in English.
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Comment se déploient les interventions du Canada en matière de développement international et de mondialisation? Bien au-delà de l'aide à l'étranger, celles-ci touchent la diplomatie, le commerce, les finances, l'aide, l'immigration, les interventions militaires, l'adhésion à des organisations internationales et des liens entre personnes.
Conçu pour les étudiants de première et de deuxième année du premier cycle, ce manuel multidisciplinaire est une initiation aux principaux concepts, idées, théories et approches qui forment le contexte historique et les fondations mêmes des interactions du Canada avec les pays en développement à l'ère de la mondialisation.
Il aborde la question de la diplomatie canadienne et de son évolution, examine les politiques canadiennes en matière d'immigration, d'aide, de politique, d'économie, militaires et sociales. Il présente les dimensions économiques, politiques et culturelles du processus de mondialisation et les façons dont elles touchent le Canada, les institutions et politiques en lien avec le développement, les organismes du secteur privé et la société civile au Canada et les impératifs moraux qui sous-tendent la politique internationale canadienne. Enfin, il examine les droits humains, la démocratie, la bonne intendance, le soutien au secteur privé, les relations avec des états fragilisés et les liens avec les économies en émergence.
Finaliste - PROSE Award, Textbook/Social Sciences Janvier 2019
Ce livre est publié en anglais.

Part I

Introduction

Basic Concepts

1	Canada as an Example of International Development and Globalization

Lauchlan T. Munro

Key Terms

capitalism

colonialism

dependency

development

economic nationalism

Indigenous peoples

institutions

modernization

modernizationism

(neo) liberalism

pluralism

subaltern studies

theory

Overview

A century and a half ago, the average Canadian died at age 41; today, she will live 81 years. Back then, we were a lot poorer in material terms. Our government was a lot less democratic and the threat of political violence was common. Our social and political values were very different back then. Yet Canada evolved, some would say “developed,” into the country we know today: more health, more wealth, more pluralist and democratic. That process of social, economic, and political change was highly disruptive, often contested, and sometimes violent. It has also been very incomplete, in that the fruits of prosperity and democracy have not been shared at all equally. But, if Canada can undergo such a long-term transformation, however incomplete, can other countries do the same? What is the best way to understand Canada’s development and how it relates to the rest of the world? These are the questions that this chapter begins to address.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, students will be able to:

• understand Canada as a former colony of two great powers, Britain and France, built on Turtle Island;

• describe in what ways Canada used to resemble today’s “developing countries” and still does;

• describe in broad terms how Canada has developed socially, politically, and economically over the past three centuries;

• recognize and describe the main schools of thought concerning development and globalization in relation to Canada.

A Family History

The new country where the immigrant family arrived had a troubled past and an uncertain future. Less than two decades earlier, there had been a nasty war with the new republic to the south, and both capital cities had been burned to the ground. Six years after the immigrant family arrived in the new country, rebellions broke out as people demanded a more representative form of government. The rebellions were suppressed with violence, though the government did eventually concede to the rebels’ demands. A decade later, the parliament building was burned down by a mob during a politically inspired riot.

The immigrant family were not destitute when they arrived in the new country, but they were not rich either. It is not clear why they left their old country. They had been tenant farmers on a large estate in their old country. Maybe the prospect of owning land in the new country enticed them to move; maybe they were unsure of their long-term prospects in the old country. For in the old country they had been members of an ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority, albeit a relatively privileged one. Their ancestors in turn had come to that old country from their country of origin 140 years earlier, as part of a government plan to stabilize a restive colony. As the immigrant family arrived in the new country, they still felt strong ties of allegiance to their country of origin that their ancestors had left a century and a half before, though none of them had ever been there.

The family’s journey to the new country was difficult. The youngest daughter died during the three-month-long voyage and was buried at sea. Another daughter was born almost immediately upon arrival in the new country and was given the same name as the girl who had just died. Six more children followed over the next eight years. One of them died within weeks of being born.

The immigrant family settled just north of the capital city of the new country, the capital that had been burned down just years before. The government allocated them land on condition that they develop it; they had to clear land for cultivation, build a house and farm buildings, and dig a well. The children grew up in that area, went to school, married the children of other recent immigrants from the same ethnic, linguistic, and religious background, and in turn established their own families and businesses. The eighth child, a boy, married a young woman and took over the family farm from his ageing parents. At the age of 29, he volunteered for the local militia and helped fight off a raiding party from the pesky republic to the south, a country that was just emerging from its own vicious civil war.

When they took over the family farm, the eighth son and his wife took on a debt load that they were never able to shed. Years later, when he was 55 years old and she was 42, they went bankrupt and had to sell the farm. The government was then offering free land farther west and so the family piled all their belongings onto a train and went west. They tried farming for two years but the crops failed both years. The family almost starved and froze to death the first winter. They survived by their wits and thanks to government relief.

After two years, they gave up farming and moved into the nearest town, where the family diversified into several lines of business. The elder daughters went into teaching, the father into hardware sales; a son went into the transportation business. Soon the family was thriving and the eighth son became a leading figure in the local community. At the age of 75, he mounted a white horse and led the annual parade celebrating a great military victory by his ancestors back in the old country, a battle that had happened 225 years before. When he died by accidental poisoning four years later, hundreds attended his funeral, and the local newspaper reported that people of a great variety of religious faiths and ethnic origins were in attendance. His wife died the following year, aged 67.

The eighth son and his wife had eleven children. The youngest had her life saved when two doctors in Toronto discovered insulin as a treatment for diabetes. She became a schoolteacher and married a young lawyer. The young lawyer had served in the army in a great war overseas, working as an ambulance driver, taking the wounded from the front lines back to the field hospitals for treatment. He never spoke of his wartime experiences. Around 65,000 citizens of the new country died overseas in that terrible war. The lawyer welcomed clients who were not from the same ethnic, religious, or linguistic background as he was. He also worked with the Indigenous people of the land where he and his wife’s family had settled, the people whose forebears had been displaced by that settlement. Not every lawyer was willing to take immigrants and Indigenous people as clients.

The schoolteacher and the lawyer got married in the middle of an economic boom, but shortly thereafter disaster struck. A decade-long economic crisis hit the country; the economy shrank by almost half, and a quarter of all adults were unemployed. Malnutrition became common. A large group of unemployed men announced their intention to ride the railway to the national capital to demand government relief; on arriving in a provincial capital, they were met with police gunfire. Hundreds were arrested and shipped off to detention camps in the bush. Then there was another terrible war on the other side of the world, in which another 44,000 citizens of the new country lost their lives.

The schoolteacher and the lawyer had one daughter, who became the first woman in the family’s history to attend university. She got two degrees, worked for many years as a social worker, and had two sons with her first husband, an architect who had served in the navy in that second overseas war, before getting a divorce. The younger of those two sons is the author of this chapter.

Canada, Colonialism, Globalization, and the British Connection

In outlining my (maternal) family’s history (McCullagh 1968), my objective is not to praise them or to claim that they were extraordinary. Many millions of Canadians could outline a similar history of migration, displacement, death, birth, marriage, divorce, failure, and success. Rather, I use my family’s history to illustrate aspects of Canada’s history over the last 180 or so years, namely how Canada today is a product of an earlier era of globalization and development. As the attentive reader may have detected, many of the characteristics of what we now call the “developing countries” were once—and to some extent still are—characteristics of Canada.

When my great-great-grandparents, Richard and Susannah Perry, arrived in what is now Toronto in 1831, Upper Canada (now called Ontario), it was a British colony. Upper Canada was poor compared to Britain; it was relatively cut off from global trade and was in many ways technologically backward. Infrastructure was weak and the colony’s only institution of higher education was less than five years old. Women routinely died in childbirth and a third of all children died before their fifth birthday.

In fact, Upper Canada had many of the characteristics of what we now call a fragile state. The colony suffered from an unrepresentative government dominated by a few rich families; social and political tensions were high, as the elite resisted calls for reform. Open rebellion erupted in both Upper Canada and Lower Canada (now called Quebec) in 1837, and these rebellions were suppressed by gunfire, mass arrests, and a few hangings. Even after democratic reforms were introduced, rioters burned down the parliament building in Montreal in 1848.

There were also sharp social cleavages between people of different religions (especially between Protestants and Roman Catholics) and languages (English and French). For many years, my great-grandfather led the Orange Day parade in Estevan, Saskatchewan; the parade celebrates the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland in 1688. Participants in Orange Day parades have historically engaged in virulent anti-Catholic and anti-French rhetoric, as well as expressing loyalty to the British Crown. Such parades were common in rural Ontario towns and in Toronto until quite recently.

The colony also had to deal with a sometimes hostile and equally fragile neighbour, the United States. The Americans burned York (now called Toronto) to the ground in 1814, and British and Canadian troops did the same to Washington, D.C., a few months later. Civil War wracked the United States from 1861 to 1865. From 1866 to 1871, the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Americans of Irish descent, conducted armed raids into Canada, hoping to stir up rebellion against the British Crown. My great-grandfather joined the anti-Fenian militia. Many an American politician dreamed of annexing the British colonies on America’s northern border.

My great-great-grandparents came to Upper Canada from County Limerick, Ireland. Their ancestors had come to Ireland around 1690, as part of the British government’s effort to implant settlements of loyal Protestants throughout Ireland, a country with a staunch Roman Catholic majority and a distaste for British rule. When the Perrys moved to Upper Canada in 1831, their arrival was facilitated by a British colonial government eager to settle the lands near the American border with the same sort of people, Protestants loyal to the British Crown. To facilitate that settlement, the colonial authorities took land from the Chippewa and Mississauga Nations. The legality of that land grab was dubious, and was not corrected until 1923.

When my great-grandparents Richard Perry II and his wife Sarah Jane Hunter Perry went bankrupt in Ontario in 1892 and moved west to what was then the Territory of Assiniboia (now Saskatchewan), their migration was facilitated by the government-subsidized Canadian Pacific Railway. The Perrys were given land in Assiniboia by the Canadian government, which had recently acquired the territory from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Government of Canada was eager to populate the Canadian prairies in order to deprive the Americans of any excuse to occupy “empty” lands. But the lands were not and had not ever been “empty”; th...