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Chapter 3 From the National Policy to Continentalism and Globalization The Shifting Context of Canadian Agricultural Policies K. Murray Knuttifa Rural Saskatchewan is experiencing a continuing process of social, economic, and political transformation. The fact that the transformation involves declining numbers of farms, increasing farm size, struggling and disappearing communities, the loss of many rural services, and high levels of personal stress means that it is a crisis as well as a transformation. In the past such crises have often resulted in producers being able to convince the national government to undertake relief and emergency assistance programs; however, government responses to the current crisis are more and more characterized by inaction. Indeed , there is a common refrain coming from federal governments, that might be summarized in the following manner: "We are part of a global economy and need to restructure in order make ourselves more efficient and better able to compete." In order to understand recent government responses it is necessary to place the ongoing transformation of Western Canadian prairie agriculture in its larger context. In one of his two classic studies of the development of Western Canada, Vernon Fowke suggests that the best way to understand the development and fate of agriculture in an industrial society is to place it within the larger economic context. He wrote: In this study the hypothesis is advanced that agricultural policy can best be explained by an historical consideration of agricultural functions. Essential to an understanding of governmental treatment of the agricultural community, it is argued, is an historical knowledge of the uses to which agriculture has been put from time to time and from place to place. If we can learn why agricultural development was wanted at a particular time and place there arises the possibility of knowing why agriculture was encouraged or neglected, what 48 K. Murray Knuttlla groups were interested in its development, and the political pressures under which agricultural assistance was extended. (Fowke 1947:vii) If we are to understand the nature of the current crisis in Western Canada it is useful to follow Fowke's advice and attempt to understand the relationship of prairie agriculture to the larger patterns of economic development in Canada. The initial section of this chapter provides an overview of recent stages in the development of capitalism as a world system. This will provide a context for understanding the role that agriculture has played vis-a.-vis industry in the Canadian economy. The second section describes the basic patterns of economic development in Canada since Confederation in the context of the overall development of the capitalist world system. The final section suggests an approach to periodizing the development of agricultural policy in Canada in order to provide an understanding of the nature of the current crisis and the response of the state. Canada, the World System, and the National Policy In order to understand Canada we must place its essential patterns of economic development from before Confederation to the present within the context of the world capitalist system. The accumulation of capital is the core activity that literally drives this system. The conservative Canadian nationalist, George Grant, is among the diverse thinkers who have recognized this fact. Grant (1965) summarized the essence of the capitalist system in the following manner: "Capitalism is, after all, a way of life based on the principle that the most important activity is profit making" (47). In a recent essay, "The Drive for Capital," Robert Heilbroner (1992) uses the phrase "the rage for accumulation" (32) to describe the inner logic of the system that drives the continual changes that characterize capitalism: Capital thus differs from wealth in its intrinsically dynamic character, continually changing its form from commodity into money and then back again in an endless metamorphosis that already makes clear its integral connection with the changeful nature ofcapitalism itself. (30) The core activities that provide the basis for the accumulation of capital have changed radically since the emergence of the capitalist system in the early sixteenth century. Scholars such as E. K. Hunt (1990), Broadus Mitchell (1967), Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy (1966), S. B. Clough and C. W. Cole (1967), and Robert Heilbroner (1968) argue that capitalism has passed though a series of distinct phases or stages, each marked by different regimes of accumulation characterized by From National Policy to Contlnentalism and Globalization 49 different levels of technical development and different social relations of production. Although there are variations among the schemas employed by these writers, the...

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