The Two Dimensions of Canadian Regionalism

The Two Dimensions of Canadian Regionalism PATRICIA MARCHAK Canada has a crisis of Confederation, according to the Task Force on Canadian Unity: The rather rough-and-ready consensus which once ensured the reasonably effective governing of the country is at the point of breaking down.I The causes of the crisis are Quebec's potential independence, the "impersonal forces of modernization " including urbanization and industrialization , the struggle for control by provincial governments, and the loss of loyalty to the central government. Fifteen years ago, it [the central government ] stood high in the minds of a large number of Canadians, and was widely regarded with.respect and a feeling of loyalty....Today, that is much less true.2 One is reminded of F.H. Underhill's observation in 1935 that: This tendency to concentrate attention upon the political forms in which a society is organized instead of upon the economic forces which lie behind them is a characteristic of the modem bourgeois liberal mind.3 He suggested that this tendency led Canadian liberal thinkers to regard the depression as a "crisis of federalism" instead of as a "crisis of capitalism.'' Because the Task Force is so sure that "duality and regionalism lie at the heart of the Confederation crisis," and because it so consistently ignores the nature of capitalism, the concentration and centralization of capital, and the reasons (as distinct from the laments) for "the long term structural weaknesses and vulnerability of the Canadian economy,'' there is a temptation to dismiss the report as a rather trivial contribution to Canadiana . 88 Nonetheless, there is something that might be called a "crisis" in Canada, regionalism does have some bearing on it, and it may be apparent in nothing quite so much as the failure of the federal government's agencies and task forces to impress the population with the need to do something about it. This would suggest that it is, indeed , a political crisis: a crisis of legitimation. Legitimation in a Marxist theory of the state is the obverse side of coercion, and the support system for accumulation of capital by the private sector. In O'Connor's thesis, a crisis of legitimation is the potential penalty for solving a fiscal crisis of the state by cutting back on social services (these being the means by which private accumulation is rendered acceptable to the population ).4 But that is not the present meaning. In the context of a federal state dependent on foreign capital and deeply divided by regional differences, a crisis of legitimation occurs when the regional populations are unable to believe that national unity is in their interests. Such a crisis does not nece~sarily imply a simultaneous loss in the accumulation capacities of private capital; it merely implies that the federal state is no longer essential for the process. There are two aspects to regionalism in the context of a legitimation crisis. One is the interaction between levels of the state, given their divergent class and institutional bases. The other is a strained and often intangible interaction between people who have regional locations and corporations which are extra-territorial in their interests and organization. This paper is concerned with examining the two aspects in relation to one another and to the enterprise of "making legitimate'' the Canadian state. I If Naylor is substantially correct, the irony that is Canada is the result of one class having had too little need to compromise with competing interests early in the process of national development .5 Until the first war, perhaps until as late as the end of the National Policy Era in 1930, the federal state had little need to worry about the "common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" because the uncommon affairs of its fractions posed Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. I 5, No. 2 (Ete 1980 Summer) no serious threat to its unity. Regionalism in the form of general protests against this arrangement is not a new phenomenon in Canada. Lovell Clark complains that "regional griping has long been the national pastime."6 Paul Phillips argues that "it is one of the reasons for Canada."7 Hershel Hardin celebrates it as one of the three essential contradictions that...