Escape from the Staple Trap: Canadian Political Economy after Left Nationalism by Paul Kellogg (review)

This book addresses the Canadian political economy tradition in the past fifty years from its early associations with left nationalism through the free trade debates of the 1980s and 1990s to more recent critiques of neo-liberalism and globalization. The account is not historical in design – that is, the aim is not to account for the intellectual development of this interdisciplinary field, spanning economics, political science, and sociology and its core ideas and actors. The book offers, rather, a broad-scale critique of Canadian political economy, focusing on key terms, texts, and authors. Kellogg wishes to “escape the staples trap” or dispense with what he judges to be outworn, ideological conceptualizations of Canadian economy and society inspired by left nationalism. Canadian political economy in the left-nationalist tradition, he argues, has laboured for too long under a “powerful empirical idée fixe . . . that insists that Canada’s economy is characterized by a truncated manufacturing sector, arrested industrialization, and its status as a hewer of wood (or pumper of oil) for the us empire” (163–4).

Several terms that helped to crystallize key perspectives in Canadian political economy draw Kellogg’s critical inquiry, including the staple trap, dependency, and sub-periphery. Kellogg explores the various roots of these terms in the work of Mel Watkins, Kari Levitt, Glen Williams, and others and in the wider international literature of dependency theory and world systems theory. Whereas New Left scholars of the 1960s and after judged Canada to bear certain structural similarities to exploited countries of the Global South, due to its reliance on resource exports and as a site of significant foreign direct investment, Kellogg argues that such declarations, and the terminology that framed them, ignored the country’s comparative wealth and the extent of its manufacturing base. In some of the more interesting sections of the book, Kellogg explains the peculiar decision of some political economists to remove the auto industry from assessments of Canadian manufacturing strength because of the industry’s ties to the United States under the Auto Pact. Kellogg also helpfully reveals the shifting definitions of industry contained in the Canadian census, which added confusion to the debates over Canada’s industrialization and the importance of resource exports. He also highlights some of the terms political economists borrowed from international Marxism, like comprador bourgeoisie, to (mis)define different aspects of Canadian economy and society. In general, Kellogg seeks to reveal the range of ways in which left nationalist perspectives foreclosed empirical investigation and held fast to established ideological interpretations despite changing conditions.

Kellogg approaches his subject as an unsparing critic, with no sympathy for nationalism, and seeks to inoculate political economy from its left nationalist past. While his empirical tests of core concepts are interesting, he is often seeking to disprove positions taken decades ago. The effect is curious and often incomplete. For example, in criticizing the use of the terms “semi-colony” and “rich dependency,” Kellogg suggests that it would be useful for political economists to dispense with the colonial discourse about Canada at large and investigate actual settler colonial relations in Canada. While it is difficult to disagree, Kellogg seems unaware of earlier attempts by some left nationalists to investigate and advocate for indigenous peoples (see, for example, Mel Watkins and the University for Social Reform’s Dene Nation: The Colony Within, University of Toronto Press, 1977). All the while, Kellogg puts little emphasis on understanding the historical and political contexts that gave rise to the ideas under investigation. Amazingly, the book includes only passing reference to the Vietnam War, the Liberal Party under Trudeau, and the New Democratic Party Waffle. While the Waffle is mentioned on nine separate occasions, Kellogg never explains or defines it. Kellogg seems to assume a readership steeped in the niceties of Canadian federal and left politics over several decades. Much of the intellectual historical context before 1960 is also barely mentioned...