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The Price of Integration with the USA
CPS Election Analysis 2008 - Week 5
Tim Buck – From Put Monopoly Under Control – Progress Books 1964
The problems which impelled the Minister of Finance to call his book Troubled Canada were brought on by the fact the policy followed through the past seventeen years, by both Liberal and Conservative governments, comes increasingly into conflict with the main trend of the world developments.
This policy of integration with the USA which started during the war, in 1947 became the stated policy of Canada, introduced by the St. Laurent government.
There was heavy United States pressure for the complete economic integration of Canada because of preparations for a world atomic war.
Louis St. Laurent became infatuated with the idea that, as he said in a Toronto lecture on Jan.10, 1947: ”In my lifetime we shall engage in the greatest and most destructive war ever witnessed by mankind, to preserve our Christian civilization from the spread of socialism.” Canada’s traditional national policy was discarded and replaced by the policy misnamed “Canada-United States integration.”
The change was smuggled in without being referred to the electors.
But world development has not followed the path the integration policy was based upon. On the contrary the prospects fought for by St. Laurent are being discredited. The main effect of the change has been to shut Canada off from the advantages that could be secured if we co-operated actively in the historic change taking place in [the] world economy.
Some of the consequences of “integration “are”:
· It enables the monopolies to deform that economy and obstruct its development, so much so that there has been a decline of production per capita in most of the past seven years.
· It enables the monopolies to maintain exorbitantly high process for the necessities of life, so much so that the cost of living is now the highest ever while the tendency for wages to be below the level in the US is perpetuated.
· It undermines Canada’s relative position in the world foreign trade and reduces the home market which could be enormously expanded.
· It imposes crippling annual deficit in our trade with the United States.
· It is one of the main reasons for the federal budget deficits which are weakening the Canadian dollar and the national credit, and along with this goes high military spending – the military side of integration with the USA.
· It is making hundreds of thousands of Canadians victims of chronic mass unemployment and creating depressed areas.
Apart from these direct effects, the most serious long-term effect of integration is the far reaching distortion of our economy and politics by US ownership and control.
The conflict between “integration “and Canada’s real interests is illustrated starkly by the economic results of the year 1963. It was a boom year. Corporation profits were the highest ever. Production “broke out” from the stagnation of the previous five years. But, because of the extent to which the economy of our country is possessed by foreign owners, the boom did not strengthen Canadian sovereignty but fastened ever more tightly the grip of US monopolies.
The majority of the population, including some Canadian capitalists who are fighting to maintain a degree of independence, are victims of the insatiable greed of the monopolies and their unbridled domination. In the monopolies Canadian workers confront their class enemy, the employers, in the most direct and concentrated form, Canadian firms such as Stelco no less than US subsidiaries like General Motors. In retail trade, insurance, among the loan sharks and “consumer credit” pirates, as well as in direct exploitation on the job, a battle that the people cannot evade is here. The field of battle is set by the monopolies.
Workers’ struggle for wages and job security, farmers’ struggles for security, consumers’ actions to stop the piratical price increases, the struggle for civil rights, action for peace – all these are in fact struggles against monopoly because, in Canada today, it is the monopolies that determine the social conditions in which we live.
To the individual worker it may seem to make no immediate difference whether the corporation which exploits him is owned in Canada or in the U.S.A. Alienation of the worker from the dignity of labour, security of employment and control of conditions, are not less bitter because the employer who inflicts it is Canadian. Canadian corporations are no less rapacious than others.
But for the working class and for Canada as a whole, United States domination of our economy is disastrous. The distortion of the economy it causes has become so pronounced that even with large-scale expansion of the production of some raw materials the over-all picture of production is one of economic stagnation.
Measured in “constant” dollars the production of manufactures during the 1950s failed to grow even as fast as the population. The rate of growth of employment in manufacturing declined to an average for 1950-1960 of less than 2 percent per year. During 1956-60 the value manufactured goods per head of population actually declined by the average amount of $36. This was during a period in which the market for manufactured products, both consumer goods and machinery of production, grew substantially, while our imports of manufactured products from the USA alone grew to three-and-a-half billion dollars a year.
Deliberate distortion of the economy due to the US grab of our raw materials, which cuts down growth of our manufacturing industries, plus the chronic deficit in out trade with the USA (for ten years 1951-60 this totalled $11,526,000,000) – these are the price Canadians are paying for a policy which Mr. St Laurent “justified” by looking towards world atomic war against socialism.
This process has facilitated the monopoly control of government.
Monopoly capital has become fused with the state machinery, so that today we have state-monopoly capitalism. The state is no longer neutral towards different sections of the capitalists. The state machine is now completely the instrument of big monopolies and has become itself, through the huge war budget especially, a customer of big business. It works in the service of the great monopolies, against non-monopoly capital as well as against the people. The Tory and Liberal parties are in the service of monopoly. |