As we move into a trade war with the United States, it is important remember how we got into this mess, and the powerful movement opposing free trade leading up the 1988 election.
There are interesting parallels – even as the threat of American imperialism was tied to free trade then and to the imposition of tariffs now. For instance, one of the most widely circulated images – symbolizing the early anti-free trade campaign—was an American flag with the maple leaf added as a star, signifying the absorption of Canada within the United States as the 51st state; the tagline read “No, eh.”
Often, I think people tend to remember this early movement somewhat dismissively as one of “left nationalism,” which was premised on the uncritical celebration of Canadian identities, a period before the left moved towards a more progressive internationalist standpoint. But, in our project looking at the history of the early free trade struggles, we found that the people we interviewed did not frame Canada as an identity, so much as it was the potential for a fundamentally different sort of political project, one that diverged from the emerging neoliberalism in the United States. As one interviewee noted, “It was really about, for most of us I would say, understanding that what we were trying to do in Canada, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, was a different project than what was happening in the US. That there was a different place for the corporate agenda of deregulation and privatization.”
In this sense, the early coalitions such as the Action Canada Network – which did not trust the Canadian political class to negotiate a fair deal but actively set out to establish a counterforce in the “popular sector” – were not just opposing free trade through the affirmation of existing national identities; they were actively forging new ones, using these coalitions to learn from one another in ways that were profoundly transformative. As one activist notes,
“everybody who was coming were people who had given some thought to what it meant in their constituency or their sector. They were eager to come and tell other people, maybe with a little bit of discipline, having to get their message condensed into a short five-minute summary. So, everybody came with the intention of saying, “This is what this could mean for women”, or “This is what it’s going to mean for farmers if we lose our marketing board.” There were environmental impacts if we had to harmonize with US standards, that sort of thing. But when we actually got there, what was more interesting than our own story was to hear everybody else’s because we were learning, we were really really learning about things that we didn’t know about and couldn’t have even imagined in some cases that could be a consequence of deregulating, harmonizing, or losing public institutions. That was part of the energy which was feeling like a new world and some new insights were opening up. Also because we tended to be—I know that it seems like one issue to say free trade but in fact, it covered the gamut of economic and social issues. So, it was a very wide-ranging conversation. As time went on, we dug deep into the weeds on, you know, the details of the agreement as bits and pieces started either being leaked or more formally presented. Eventually, we were able to teach, or at least relay or communicate what we had learned in our work analyzing the agreements, as more and more Americans, Mexicans, and eventually Latin Americans became concerned about something for the entire hemisphere and started to pay attention. We were early on this. We were the first up with the Canada US Free Trade Agreement. So, by the time NAFTA and others rolled around we had a lot to share.”
In a similar sense, I think we could be seeing this moment as an opportunity not just to oppose American imperialism and oppose Trump, but to learn from one another, seeing how the emergent neoconservative agenda is impacting us all — auto workers, trans people, women, undocumented immigrants, indigenous people, health care workers, farmers, etc – and building extra-parliamentary collective analysis and collective forms of praxis through those encounters.