Thanks, Paul, for your excellent synthesis of key issues about early
Canadian political economy. I have a couple of questions, though I
apologize that they are rather incoherent.
This thread began on the issue of free labour and land. What would you say
about the idea that one of the main reasons industrial capitalism in Canada
developed later and less robustly than in the US was because access to land
was more restrictive in Canada? (I'm referring here to social restrictions,
not issues of climate/soil etc., which are also important.) Very crudely,
I'm trying to relate this to the broader issue of the role of agriculture
in promoting capitalism.
Wakefield's appendix to Lord Durham's Report, Pentland's work, etc. point
out that British colonial policy in Canada tried to ensure an adequate
supply of exploitable or free labour, expecially by keeping land prices
high. However, this was often thwarted by the easier access to land in the
more democratic republican US. For most of the 19th century, out-migration
to the US exceeded in-migration to Canada from Europe.
You point out that settlement of the western plains was inhibited by the
absence of a continuous agricultural frontier. Would you agree the colonial
land system was also central? The west was rapidly settled (European
settlement) after Canada copied whole sections of the democratic post-Civil
War US Homestead Act. If further Metis settlement, or European settlement
(perhaps via the south of the lakes rather than north) had been encouraged
decades earlier through easy access to land, wouldn't there have been
takers, even before the railway?
And, in earlier periods, if the British had not maintained feudal tenure in
Lower Canada for 70 years after the Conquest, and had made it easier for
poor settlers to get land in Upper Canada (rather than granting 1/7 to the
Church and much of the rest to wealthy speculators) would a more dynamic
('American') form of capitalism probably developed?
In some ways, I suppose this is another way of looking at the balance of
power between commercial and industrial capital as the key to explaining
Canadian development, but in other ways it is a different approach. For
example, you mention commercial profits and public finance as two bases for
the primitive accumulation of capital in Canada. Why not land - seized from
Natives and granted to a colonial elite? This shifts attention somewhat
from the traditional focus on staples production. Yes, Canadian development
is different, but I wonder if the difference should be understood more in
terms of being a white-settler state than a resource-commodity exporter.
BTW, your contribution about the role of WW1 public finance sounds too
important to have to wait for completion of your book. Can you give at
least a rough outline of the argument?
Bill Burgess
