Draft version: Please do not cite.

Extractivism and the neoliberal self: and the challenge of climate change

Scott Staring University Partnership Centre, Georgian College

Introduction

When the held its annual convention in Edmonton this April, two news items received broad media play. The first was the not-so-surprising decision to dump Thomas Mulcair as party leader. But it was a second decision that really grabbed the headlines: Party delegates passed a resolution to consider adopting principles from the controversial Leap Manifesto, which calls for a significant restructuring of the economy and the phasing out of fossil fuels. The NDP’s non-committal agreement to merely discuss the manifesto elicited outrage and scorn from some commentators. The ’s Michael Den Tandt derided it as “an addled, cockamamie vision like something out of Orwell” (Den Tandt, 2016). One-time NDP leadership candidate, James Laxer, mocked the document as an unrealistic, elite scheme that “reeks of downtown ”(Laxer, 2016). Meanwhile the cover of Maclean’s magazine featured a picture of the manifesto’s leading advocates, and Avi Lewis, with a gargantuan headline reading “How to Kill the NDP” (2016). What lay behind this reaction to the manifesto? Why the fury over a document that some have described as a “middle-of-the-road” response to a crisis that threatens the very future of our planet? The answer I believe has to do with the challenge it poses to our very identity as modern . Over the past several decades our nation, like many others, has undergone a series of far-reaching neoliberal reforms. To understand the full effects of this neoliberalization, I argue, we must look beyond its economic effects and examine how it has shaped our very conception of self. Drawing on the thought of political philosopher George Grant, I identify the neoliberal self with a particular understanding of human agency, one which sees freedom as the ability to manipulate a world that has no value except for that which we impose upon it. It is this notion of selfhood, I suggest, that is threatened by challenges to the neoliberal status quo and that accounts for the harsh reaction to these challenges.

Klein on the dual origins of the climate crisis In her recent book This Changes Everything, Leap Manifesto co-author, Naomi Klein (2014), traces our current climate crisis to two distinct sets of practices and beliefs. The first of these is capitalism, which constitutes the central target of her book. More particularly, Klein aims her attack at the era of neoliberal capitalism that gained its

1 foothold in the age of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and dug in firmly during the decades of WTO-led trade liberalization that followed. Neoliberalism, Klein argues, propagates the belief that we “are nothing but selfish, greedy, self-gratification machines” (62), and treats the earth as so much raw fuel to be gobbled up. As such it remains one of the chief obstacles to meaningful action against climate change. The second phenomenon that Klein targets in her analysis is what she calls “extractivism”: a view of nature that treats it as a mere resource lying ready for us to exploit and consume (161-187). She traces the origins of this attitude back to the seventeenth-century revolution in thought that brought about the modern natural sciences. While Klein recognizes that the scientific revolution has brought us untold benefits, she also believes that it lies behind a redefinition of nature as something to be probed, manipulated and used up for our own selfish ends. In Klein’s account the early-modern natural sciences and neoliberalism are informed by complementary teachings about humankind and nature. The scientific revolution re-describes nature as something to be manipulated and controlled by our species; neoliberalism understands ours as a species meant to dominate and control nature for its own selfish purposes. The complementarity that her writing points to is, I think, both illuminating and hard to deny. At the same time, I would suggest that Klein’s account actually underestimates the depth of the interconnection between the modern sciences and neoliberalism. Klein, as it were, limits her efforts to describing the affinity between these two phenomena, but does not try to explain how this affinity came about. More specifically—to anticipate the argument put forward in this paper—she does not reflect on the possibility that the modern sciences and neoliberalism are linked through some shared common origin. For Grant, on the other hand, this possibility is an ongoing theme of reflection. His writings continually return to an exploration of what he sees as the common historical origins of modern science and modern capitalism. To speak very generally, Grant views both phenomena as being rooted in what can be described as a new conception of human individuality and human freedom. In his view, any attempt to understand modern extractivism or neoliberalism must come to terms with the emergence of this modern self.

The scientific revolution and the modern subject For Grant, one of our first glimpses of the modern self comes to us in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon, whose account of the scientific method he views as seminal to the rise of the natural sciences. He shares this view of Bacon, not incidentally, with Klein who describes him as the “patron saint of the new sciences” (170). Both Grant and Klein point to the unmistakable violence behind Bacon’s account of the experimental setting. Klein, for her part, cites a passage from Bacon’s 1623 work, De Augmentis Scientiarum where he speaks about “hound[ing] nature in her wanderings,” and “penetrating into [her] holes and corners” in the pursuit of truth. (as cited in Klein, 170). Grant, on the other hand, makes repeated references to Bacon’s account of his method as “putting nature to the question,” i.e., torturing nature for its secrets (and torture, as Grant notes, is a practice Bacon had direct experience of as the one-time attorney general of England [1969, 20; 1995, 135]). Both Klein and Grant recognize Bacon’s violent formulations as antecedents of the widespread view today that nature is something lacking inherent worth, a mere

2 resource that we are free to plunder. For Grant, however, Bacon’s apothegms also suggest new modes of understanding and agency which ultimately underpin a new account of the human self. Bacon’s scientific writings frame knowledge as the product of manipulation and control, something pursued through acting on the world. Grant describes this modern account of knowledge as a species of “making,” and sees in it an intimate connection with modern technology (which derives etymologically from the Greek roots for craft or art [techne], and reason [logos]) (1986, 12). In Bacon’s portrait, Grant tells us, nature has no worth or meaning independent of our acting upon it. Nature, in a word, has been redefined as an “object.” Reflecting on the word’s Latin root (iacere: to throw), Grant notes that an object is a “thing that has been thrown in front of [ob] us. Thrown in front of us, it lies there at our disposal.” (2009, 183; see also 1986, 32). The “objective” science of nature which Bacon helped to found, Grant tells us, constituted a direct repudiation of the Aristotelian teleological conception of nature that had been woven into the political and theological traditions of the Middle Ages (1969, 20; 2000, 147-148; see also 1974, 16-17). For Bacon, nature had no natural purpose or end to fulfill: humans were free to impose their own ends upon nature. In assuming the power to define nature’s ends, Grant insists, humans also assumed a new understanding of their own species. The corollary of nature as “object,” he notes, was the idea of the human being as “subject.” The modern subject, who in Bacon’s description stands apart from the world and controls it through his or her knowing-making, becomes the very “foundation and measure of all that is” (1998, 224). As one commentator puts it, the human being emerges from Bacon’s writings as “a needy self that must make its own provisions to the point of making its own world” (Faulkner 1993, 88)1 Nor is there anything, such as a natural moral law, that might constrain the subject’s ability to act on the world in this way. Instead, the human being has been reconstituted, to use Grant’s phrase, as an “Archimedean freedom outside of nature” (1969, 32).

Science and (neo)liberalism It is this conception of the modern subject that suggests the strongest link between the new scientific perspective and contemporary neoliberalism. Grant claims that modern classical liberalism shares with the natural sciences the same basic presupposition that human beings’ “essence is their freedom.” (1978, 144). 2 Neoliberalism, in his view, is but the ideologically purified expression of classical liberalism. By exploring what he has

1 Faulkner argues that Bacon understood very clearly that what the new sciences were re- describing not just nature, but how our species stood in relationship to nature, and that this entailed a radical new conception of the human being as an “individual”—a conception that Faulkner claims Bacon traced out in a manner that was more consistent, and “in many ways more revealing than what is often supposed the locus classicus of individualism of Thomas Hobbes” (87). 2 “From the very beginnings of modern thought,” Grant writes, “the new natural science and the new moral science developed together in mutual interdependence so that the fundamental assumptions of each were formulated in the light of the other. Modern thought is that unified fate for us” (1969, 32).

3 to say about liberalism’s common origins with modern science, then, we can also presumably learn something about the presuppositions animating neoliberal doctrine. In Grant’s account, modern history is largely the story of the concomitant development of science and liberalism and the unfolding of their shared vision of humankind’s essential freedom. Like the natural sciences, liberalism was born out of a conscious rejection of the Aristotelian conception of natural ends (1974, 16-17). In the understanding of Thomas Hobbes, whose writing was foundational for later liberal thinkers (and who worked briefly as Bacon’s literary assistant), “there is no Finis Ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.” Instead Hobbes claimed that humans found their sole fulfillment or “felicity” in the “continual progress of the desire, from one object to another” (1996, 70). Although John Locke offered a softer portrait of human beings in their relations with one another, he affirmed Hobbes’ non-teleological (or even anti-teleological) account of our freedom. In his Second Treatise he describes men in the state of nature as enjoying a “state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions, and persons as they see fit”(1980, 8)3 To underscore the significance of this revolution in the “physical and moral sciences” (1969, 22), Grant contrasts the new mode of understanding nature with a more contemplative tradition that he traces back to Greek sources (most notably, Plato [see 1978, 107]). The modern sciences, he explains, tend to view the world as “a field of objects considered as pragmata,” and frame the pursuit of knowledge as an act of “doing.” The older contemplative tradition, on the other hand, evokes a very different response to the world: one of “wondering or marveling at what is, being amazed or astonished by it, or perhaps best, in a discarded English usage, admiring it.” It should be noted that Grant is not describing something inaccessible or recondite here, but refers to a way of relating to the world that falls within common experience. As he puts it, it is “an apprehension [that is] present…as the undergirding of our loves and friendships, of our arts and reverences, and indeed as the setting for our dealing with the objects of the human and non-human world” (1969, 35). When we experience admiration for a friend or a work of art, we are in a sense affirming that we want this person or work to exist—and we want them to exist as they are, not simply as something that we can manipulate or change according to our desires (1986, 64). Grant describes this way of relating to the world variously as “attention to otherness, receptivity to otherness, consent to otherness” (1978, 107). It is incompatible, he claims, with that modern, hypertrophic self described by Bacon, that knows the world only by acting upon and dominating it. When one admires something in the way that Grant is describing, the self loses its status as the foundation and measure of all that is, and is almost overwhelmed by the otherness of what it is contemplating.4

3 Although Locke goes on to say that this freedom must be exercised “within the bounds of the Law of Nature,” this law is not meant to impose a positive end on our actions, but rather a negative limit. 4 In the words of Simone Weil, the 20th century Platonist whom Grant credited with having the greatest influence on his own thought, one becomes absorbed by an “attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears” (1986, 212).

4 Grant does not pretend that there was ever a golden age when this more contemplative approach to knowledge had absolute sway in the west. He acknowledges that the idea of the human being as a subject that confronts its environment as object has roots in western traditions reaching back well beyond the modern age. (Notably, he points to traces of it in the early western Christian tradition, with its conception of a pneumatic self that is commanded to act on the world out of charity.)5 But he contends that since the rise of the modern natural sciences and modern liberalism, this subject- centred model of knowledge has become more and more dominant, and the contemplative model increasingly residual. Grant believes that nowhere is this more evident that in North America.

North America and the new physical and moral sciences From its beginnings as a European settler society, North America proved to be especially fertile soil for both the natural sciences and modern liberalism. The new physical sciences were readily embraced in a place where, as Grant puts it, “the very intractability, immensity and extremes of the new land” meant that survival itself would be “a battle of subjugation” (1969, 17). These new sciences were also compatible with their desire to break away from the old European patterns of authority. They represented “the useful part of [European] culture,” as opposed to everything that was “oppressive, hierarchical, stifling, old-fashioned” (Eisenberg 1998, 242-243)6 But modern science served as more than a mere tool to be used for the conquest of nature; it redefined the self so that its essential freedom was realized in this conquest. Modern liberalism was the political analogue to the new science: an ideology that defined human beings by their “perfect freedom,” in Locke’s words, to dispose of their world as they see fit. Although the new-world settlers were driven partly by a worldly desire to make a better life for themselves, Grant insists that this does not fully explain their receptiveness to the new physical and moral sciences. Expanding upon Weber’s thesis, Grant argues that the Calvinist faith embraced by many American colonists made them especially open to these ideas (1969, 32; 1995, 150). To begin with, Calvinism shared with the natural

5 In western Christianity, the Greek contemplative tradition was made “subservient to charity” and treated as a “means to that obedient giving oneself away.” At the same time, certain theologians, in their efforts to think more clearly about their religion were led “back to the most comprehensive thinkers that the west had known” (amongst whom Plato ranks highest for Grant), where they encountered an understanding of contemplation “as something they could not use” (1969, 35). 6 The New World settlers were of course not alone in embracing new technology to subdue the land; Europe also turned to these means in its quest to exploit nature. But in Grant’s view the technological encounter with the land was formative for North Americans in a way that it was not for Europeans. It became, in his own language, “primal” to our experience of nature, since “we had no long history of living with the land before the arrival of the new forms of conquest which came with industrialism.” Grant concludes solemnly that “there can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object” (1969, 17).

5 sciences and liberalism that rejection of the medieval Catholic tradition, interwoven as it was with elements of Aristotelian teleology. But more than this, the Calvinist was confronted a liturgically stripped-down, transcendent, and therefore “elusive,” god who was too inscrutable to be the object of contemplation, and whose will therefore had to be served through devoted practice or work. The goal of this work, like the Calvinist god, remained obscure or indeterminate and was reduced almost to an end in itself. Faced with the “responsibility which could find no rest,” the Calvinist was thrown into a ceaseless, angst-fueled struggle to control and transform the external world (1969, 23). This mission, which pitted the lonely self against a world seen as raw material for a project of personal salvation, opened the door to the natural sciences and liberalism. While Calvinism predisposed American settler society to the new ideas found in thinkers like Bacon and Locke, what cemented this influence was the country’s particular revolutionary history. Grant does not tire of reminding us that the is the only country with no history before the modern age (1969, 71; 1997, 77). In its determination to rid itself of earlier Tory traditions, America committed itself to the almost undiluted principles of Lockean liberalism, including its radically individualistic notion of the self as an Archimedean freedom. Grant argues that because of its Lockean founding, there is very little in America’s dominant political traditions to dampen this individualism or moderate its consequences. One result, he claims, was an unchecked enthusiasm for the power of modern science and technology to transform the natural environment to satisfy human desires. Another related result was a national identification with capitalism, which offered an endless proliferation of consumer goods to satisfy individual tastes. Both capitalism and modern technological science were therefore perfect complements to a concept of liberty which saw “the human good [as] what we choose for our good” (1997, 70).

Canada and the common good Grant insists that it would be misleading to make too much of the differences between America’s and Canada’s respective political foundings. Still, there are distinctions that he highlights and in fact attaches a good deal of significance to. One of the defining features of Canadian history, in Grant’s view, is the fact that the nation was born out of a conscious rejection of America’s individualist political creed and a genuine desire to preserve a stronger sense of the common good. This desire was shared by the country’s English and French colonizers alike, and it provided them with a fragile basis of coexistence, despite their great cultural differences, and the tensions arising from the former’s dominant position in this relationship. As Grant puts it, the French found their political arrangement with the British “endurable,” because it provided a greater possibility of protecting their traditions from the experiment in radical individualism taking place to the south (1997, 81 and ff). This shared concern with a common good expressed itself in a belief that “public order and tradition, in contrast to freedom and experiment, were central to the good life.” At a practical level it gave rise to a greater willingness “to use governmental control over economic life to protect the public good against private freedom” (83). Canada practiced “greater state intervention” than its southern neighbour, and the result, according to Grant, was “a nicer, gentler society” (1988, 6). The evidence of this interventionist impulse could be seen, for example, in

6 “our opening up of the West,” which relied more extensively on “the law of the central government” than on the economic ambitions of the “free settler.” It also gave rise to a host of institutions set up as part of the public good, from Ontario Hydro and the CNR, to the CBC and healthcare (1997, 83). The attempt to build a political alternative to America on the northern part of the continent demanded a certain level of self-denial. Canadians were not immune to the lure of American society with its exciting entertainments, its political spectacles, and above all, its vast wealth and entrepreneurial opportunities. But the country’s survival, Grant writes, “has always required the victory of political courage over immediate and individual economic advantage.” In its earliest decades this meant embracing bold and risky nationalist schemes over the enticements of continental integration. In 1891 and again in 1911, Canadians were willing to make this sacrifice, and turned their backs on with the United States. But this resolve, according to Grant, was exhausted by the infinitely more serious sacrifice that had been called for in World War I: “Those who returned,” Grant argues, “did not have the vitality for public care, but retreated into the private world of money-making” (1969, 70). Whatever one thinks of this rather compact explanation, the war did seem to signal a shift in Canada’s attitude toward the United States. In 1935, Mackenzie King signed Canada’s first free trade deal with Washington, an event that historian C.P. Stacey dubbed the “Turning Point” in Canadian history, as it represented the first deviation from that original determination to avoid American economic integration (1972; 1981, 177-178).7 Following World War II, Canada’s absorption into the American economy accelerated at a pace that worried many nationalist economists. The process could be partly explained by the fact that Canada’s traditional trading partner and financier, Britain, had experienced a precipitous economic and political decline following WWI (Granatstein 1989). Ottawa was thus forced out of sheer necessity to look south of the border for new sources of investment and trade opportunity. At the same time, it would be misleading to say that Canada’s turn toward the United States was simply about survival. The fact is that the alarmingly rapid and deep continental integration that took place after the war allowed Canadians to do much more than survive. In a somewhat

7 Stacey is not the only scholar to see the deal as a watershed in Canada’s relations with the United States. Also see Gordon T. Stewart, “‘An Objective of US Foreign Policy since the Founding of the Republic’: The United States and the End of Empire in Canada,” in Canada and the End of Empire, edited by Phillip Buckner (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 100; Marc T. Boucher, “The Politics of Economic Depression: Canadian- American Relations in the mid-1930s,” International Journal 41:1 (Winter 1985-86), 6. Steven Scheinberg likewise describes the 1935 deal as having laid the “foundations” for the “Americanization of the Canadian economy.” “Invitation to Empire: Tariffs and Economic Expansion in Canada,” The Business History Review 47:2 (Summer 1973), 237. Richard N. Kottman argues that the reciprocal trade deal laid down the diplomatic groundwork for the Ogdensburg Agreement and Hyde Park Declaration, arrangements which represented significant steps toward Canada’s integration into the American economic and defence spheres. “The Canadian-American Trade Agreement of 1935,” Journal of American History 52:2 (September 1965), 275.

7 dyspeptic but not altogether baseless remonstration published in Maclean’s magazine, historian Donald Creighton complained that Canadians had too complacently acceded to a model of economic growth based on mass consumerism. For the first time, Canadian houses and garages began to fill up with “assorted unused junk, which they had never needed, or had discarded and forgotten.” In return the country had cashed in a share of its national sovereignty to the Americans, Creighton argued (1980, 38). Grant’s writings express deep concern over Canada’s postwar rapprochement with the United States. Like Creighton he worried that our growing dependence on the Americans was eroding our ability to make independent decisions in the realms of domestic and foreign policy. But underlying this fear was a deeper anxiety: namely, that the nation was gradually abandoning the notion that there are common goods that should counterbalance the private needs and desires of the individual. For Grant this represented the further development of that modern conception of ourselves as pure agency confronting a world that acquires meaning and value only in light of our freely determined ends. To be sure, even during these postwar decades of continental integration and growing consumerism, Grant saw many signs of concern for the common good in Canada. He praised, for instance, the institution of a national healthcare system in 1966 (1988, 6), and even took some small comfort in the public excitement surrounding the country’s Centennial celebrations. But he believed that the more general movement of Canadian history was toward a society of greater individualism where all goods were increasingly defined according to the freely chosen aims of the self. By the 1980s, Grant noticed a hardening of this trajectory as Canada and its two strongest allies, the United States and Britain, entered a period of neoliberal reform. Whatever suspicion Canadians had once demonstrated toward the unregulated pursuit of individual gain seemed to be fading and Grant found himself living in an age that had taken to “praising capitalism to the skies” (1985, 45).

Neoliberalism and the subjective valuation of nature The beginning of the neoliberal era is often associated with the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Both figures sought to liberalize their economies and shrink the role of government through a mixture of monetarism and tight fiscal policy (Thatcher focussing her efforts on the former, Reagan, the latter8). Viewed from a Grantian perspective, these reforms amounted to a further erosion of government’s willingness to intervene in the economy in the name of a common good. They also fuelled the radicalization of that modern understanding of the individual as Archimedean freedom. For economists like Hayek and von Mises, whose ideas are considered foundational for neoliberalism, objects have no intrinsic value; rather “value results from a given object’s relationship with subjective human needs, and

8 It is worth noting that while Reagan cut government spending in some areas (e.g. social programming), he also increased military spending by a whopping 30%. These increases, combined with simultaneous tax cuts, both contributed to his posting massive budget deficits.

8 is both subjective and contingent” (Shepherd 2008, 142)9 Here the liberal subject overlaps with the subject of modern technological society, who encounters the world as a field objects “ly[ing] there at our disposal.” Understood in this light, neoliberalism is revealed as the perfect justificatory economic framework for a technological science put to extractivist purposes. What Grant’s thought has to teach us is that to understand our extractivist economy is to understand ourselves. If there is merit to this analysis, then I believe there must be a shift in how we understand our own extractivist excesses in Canada. It is easy enough to blame those political actors who have noisily gone about instituting neoliberal reforms and putting the resources of our country at the disposal of big business. We have to look a bit harder, however, to identify the subtler political forces that have shaped our understanding of ourselves as neoliberal subjects.

Canada and the neoliberal self The most dramatic early sign of Canada’s slide into neoliberalism was the Mulroney government’s negotiation of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement [FTA]. While Grant died one year before the deal was finalized in 1989, his writings express fears that it would open the door wider to the excesses of American capitalism (1998, 150-153).10

9 Both Hayek and von Mises took this subjectivist interpretation of value from their teacher, Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser (Muller 2002, 348). Paul Gray notes that this subjectivist theory of value distinguishes neoliberal economics from classical economic theory, which informs earlier expressions of liberalism, inasmuch as for classical economists “value was analyzed in objective terms as deriving from the labour content of the asset or resource under consideration” (Gray 1998, 16). Milton Friedman, another seminal thinker for neoliberal economists, offers a description of parenthood that spells out the implications of the this subjective theory of value in a particularly vivid way. For Grant, children provide the most powerful example of an otherness to which we owe a duty of care and which limit our freedom to order or consume the world around us (1986, 38-39). Friedman, at the risk of being understood as “callous,” describes children as “at one and the same time consumer goods and potentially responsible members of society. The freedom of individuals to use their economic resources as they want includes the freedom to use them to have children to buy, as it were, the services of children as a particular form of consumption” (1982, 35). Individuals become free, for Friedman, when they are no longer used by/depend upon others around them. 10 Grant was very poorly disposed toward the government of Pierre Trudeau, largely because of its attempts to suppress Québec nationalism, as well as for allowing Washington to test the cruise missile over Canadian territory. He supported Mulroney’s government in his first term and was generally pleased by its more generous attitude toward Québec. He admitted, however, that he doubted it “intends to do much about our relations with the Americans” (Christian 1993, 355). This suspicion was confirmed when Mulroney announced that he would pursue free trade with the US. Grant, although expressing some ambivalence at first, was quickly galvanized against the deal and spoke out against it and Mulroney (363), whom he privately described as “the Republican Party North” (1996, 388).

9 Klein, for her part, sees the FTA as a prototype for the WTO-led process of trade liberalization that dominated the 1990s, and a crucial building block of our current extractivist economy (2015). Certainly there are good grounds for this claim. As Jim Stanford argues, the FTA included provisions that ensured American access to Canada’s energy resources. It thus laid “the institutional stage for a huge shift in the focus of Canada’s economy,” from value-added industry, back to staples production. More specifically, it set “the institutional stage for the subsequent bitumen boom” (Stanford 2014). While it is Stephen Harper who won back-to-back Fossil Awards for his fixation on tar-sands development, the Mulroney government deserves an honourable mention for putting the enabling neoliberal trade architecture in place. But if extractivism depends not just on certain kinds of economic institutions, but on a particular definition of self, then I think that there is another government that deserves special attention. There is a case to be made that the most potent period of neoliberalization in this country took place under the Liberal regime of Jean Chrétien. Notwithstanding his zeal for free trade, Mulroney fell behind Thatcher and Reagan when it came to enacting neoliberal reforms.11 Much of this would be left to the government of Jean Chrétien, who not only presided over the expansion of the FTA into the North American Free Trade Agreement, but who also committed his government to a harsh program of deficit-elimination. Chrétien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, proceeded by slashing government and down-loading education and healthcare costs to the provinces, while at the same time cutting taxes. By 1997 they posted the first of ten consecutive surplus budgets. Meanwhile, Stanford points out that government spending, which “at the beginning of the neoliberal era…was considerably more expansive than that in the US…was cut by ten percentage points of GDP within a decade,”—a “stunning and unprecedented withdrawal” that brought Canadian spending more or less in line with the US (Stanford, 2014).12 But one of the Chrétien government’s most lasting effects is what might be called the normalization of neoliberal assumptions and ideas. As Reg Whitaker remarks, the Chrétien-Martin team “went about their business in a low-key, low-profile manner, deliberately eschewing the ideological rhetoric of their predecessors” (2006, 8). The “subtlety and cunning”(7) of this approach helped them to enact their neoliberal agenda with broad public acceptance.13 Government, following the New Public Management

11 “The Mulroney neoliberal project,” Whitaker writes, “while strong on rhetorical formulation, was weak on consistency and follow-through” (2006, 7). 12 It is true that the Chrétien regime appeared ready to make very significant concessions to the common good by signing on to the Kyoto Protocol. But as Robert Manne has argued, Kyoto was a deeply flawed agreement. For one thing, “by creating a legally binding treaty without enforcement provisions, agreements could be dishonoured almost without cost” (2015). It appears from comments made by Chrétien’s top aide, Eddie Goldenberg, that this was exactly the calculation that the government was making in ratifying the agreement (Whittington, 2007). As it happens, greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise significantly under the Liberals. 13 Whitaker notes that in the dramatic 1988 election which was principally fought over the FTA, a majority of the Canadian population gave their support to the Liberals and NDP. In 2003, however, an Ipsos-Reid poll indicated that 70 percent of Canadians were

10 mantra, was spoken of less and less as a body entrusted with the public good, and more as a service-provider that existed to cater to the needs of individual “customers” or “clients.”14 Ordinary Canadians were increasingly addressed not as citizens who owed a debt of responsibility to their neighbours, but as taxpayers who were owed “accountability” from their government. Even Stephen Harper, by no means a fan of Chrétien, grudgingly acknowledged the effectiveness of his government in normalizing the basic economic vision of Thatcher and Reagan (thereby robbing conservatives of their platform). In Canada and other countries, he complained, “social-democratic/left-liberal” parties had “simply stop[ped] fighting and adopt[ed] much of the winning conservative agenda. Socialists and liberals began to stand for balanced budgeting, the superiority of markets, welfare reversal, free trade and some privatization” (Harper 2003). Sometimes social change announces itself with the trumpet blasts of revolution. Other times it comes through subtle shifts in language and practice that change our self- understanding in ways that we barely perceive. The Chrétien government’s neoliberal reforms were enacted in a business-like way, without boilerplate pronouncements, but they had far-reaching effects. If the Harper regime found it easy to sell the average Canadian on unlimited oil-sands expansion, the Liberals were owed a debt of thanks for lowering the vision of politics until it focused squarely on the bottom line.

Conclusion Today there are a few optimistic signs for Canadians worried about the country’s extractivist excesses. The Kyoto-renouncing, oil-loving Harper government has been replaced by a new administration which has committed, at least in speech, to making green-house gas reduction a priority. What is more, the Trudeau government has defied neoliberal doctrine by eschewing tight fiscal policy and vowing to run deficits for several years. But at the same time, Trudeau’s win suggests a sobering parallel with the 1993 election. Then too a conservative government that had become highly unpopular with many voters was unseated by a Liberal government promising a return to that “kinder, gentler” nation evoked in Grant’s writing. In such moments a change in rhetoric can convince us of a change in ways, even while we sink deeper into the old ones.

fully in favour of the deal. “What had appeared as novel and threatening in 1988 soon became the accepted order of things” (9). 14 Or to cite Friedman, government becomes “a means, an instrumentality” (1982, 10).

11

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