CANADA: ECONOMIC DEPENDENCE Al\D POLITICAL DISINTEGRATION

The following is a sketch of Canada’s slide into a relationship of economic political and cultural dependence upon the U.S.A. It seeks to explain the process whereby national entrepreneurship and political unit, have been eroded to a point beyond which lies the disintegration of the Canadian nation-state.

Canada was discovered. explored and developed as part of the French, and later the British mercantile, system. It grew to independence and national road in a brief historical era in which goods, capital and people moved in response to economic forces operating in relatively free, competitive international markets.

Present-day Canada has been described as the world’s richest underdeveloped country. Its regression into a state of extreme economic and political dependence cannot possibly be attributed, as is fashionoble in some quarters, to an unfavourable endowment of resources. Nor con its present lack of independent dynamic be ‘laid of the door of a traditional culture. Here we are forced to seek the explanation of underdevelopment and fragmentation in the institutions and process’s of modern society. We suggest it is to be found in the dynamics of the New Mercantilism of American corporate economy.