ONEA LIFE ON THE LEFT

Though I lay no claim to have led an important life, I have been active in the Canadian labour movement, the New Democratic Party (NDP), and left academia since the 1970s. Most notably, I was the chief economist and then director of social and economic policy of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), the union of unions, for a quarter century from 1989 to 2012. As such I had a front-row seat on the neglected role of Canadian labour in politics. This book is part personal memoir, part historical analysis, and part political manifesto. Perhaps my anecdotes and passing insights will have some resonance with fellow veterans of the left and, hopefully, with a new generation of activists who are drawn to the traditions of democratic socialism.

My world has admittedly been quite a small one. I was once at a conference where my good friend and colleague Jim Stanford was introduced as “one of Canada’s leading trade union economists.” Jim said he appreciated the sentiment, but that the only other one was at the back of the room! That was a slight exaggeration; he left out colleagues such as Sam Gindin of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), Hugh Mackenzie of the Steelworkers, and Toby Sanger of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). It’s evidently been a mainly male world, as well. That said, the research staff at the CLC and many affiliated unions has become more balanced in terms of gender. Angella MacEwen, the first CLC woman economist, was appointed before my retirement and quickly gained a high and well-merited public profile. As a senior staffer at the CLC, I was privileged to work closely with the presidents of the Congress (in my time, Shirley Carr, 1986–92; Bob White, 1992–99; and Ken Georgetti, 1999–2014) and the other elected officers, notably the incomparable Nancy Riche and Dick Martin, and also the leadership and senior staff of the affiliated unions such as CUPE, the Steelworkers, and the CAW (now Unifor).

I played a role as a policy adviser to the British Columbia and federal NDP caucuses before and during my CLC years, watching the federal party go through a near-death experience before reviving in the early 2000s under Jack Layton. Over much of my career with the CLC, I was also active in the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), a “left-leaning think tank,” as it is almost invariably referred to in the mainstream media, in contrast to the neutral moniker of “think tank” applied to such bastions of the right as the Fraser Institute. I wrote many studies for the CCPA documenting adverse economic and social trends, such as rising income and wealth inequality, and criticizing so-called neo-liberal right-wing ideas, and I published many articles and several books on Canadian political and economic issues over the years. These include Work and Labour in Canada: Critical Issues, now in its third edition with Canadian Scholars Press. As something of a labour and left-wing pundit, I had a regular column in the Report on Business section of the Globe and Mail for seven years after I retired from the CLC. I have been a frequent contributor to the blog of the Progressive Economics Forum, and have prepared major reports on inequality, the attack on labour, and the future of social democracy, as well as commentary on policy issues of the day for the recently founded Broadbent Institute. For two years after retirement, I taught at York University as the Packer Visiting Professor of Social Justice, a great experience for a lapsed academic, for which I thank professors Leo Panitch and Leah Vosko.

The labour movement is an important, if rather neglected, institution. (A neglect that has been partially remedied by a new generation of labour studies scholars, such as Larry Savage of Brock University and Stephanie Ross of McMaster.) Unions exist to define and represent the interests of workers and to counter the power of employers in the workplace and in the wider society. In the social democratic or “embedded liberalism” era, which lasted from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, unions were major social, economic, and political actors, successfully promoting fair wages, decent working conditions, and social programs and public services that benefit all citizens. There were close organizational and ideological ties between the labour movement and the social democratic party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor, the NDP. While they have been very much on the defensive since then, Canadian unions still make a significant difference for their members and for working people generally. They provide workplace representation and increase wages and the wage share of national income. They are an important force for greater economic equality, in that collective bargaining narrows wage differentials, including the gender wage gap and pay and employment discrimination against workers of colour. This broader equalizing impact owes much to lifting the wages of the lower paid, but also to conscious, if inadequate, attempts to promote greater equality for all Canadians and not just a largely white, male, unionized elite. Through the NDP and other means, Canada’s unions remain deeply engaged in political action.

It is important to underline that the potential for labour to promote far greater economic equality depends upon high union membership as a proportion of the labour force. I remember Elaine Bernard of the Trade Union Program at Harvard University arguing that the union wage premium in the United States (the wage gap between union and non-union workers) was the highest in the world, and that that was a big problem. It made employers especially hostile to unions and resulted in union members becoming, and being seen to be, a labour elite. A genuinely progressive labour movement should seek to represent and mobilize the great mass of the labour force through actively organizing the non-unionized and speaking out in the interests of all workers. Sadly, the actual labour movement has been only sporadically and largely inadequately engaged in organizing and political campaigns that make a real difference in the lives of workers.

The labour movement has also been a central part of the wider progressive movement to make Canadian society more democratic, more secure from the perspective of working people, and more equal in terms of the distribution of income and economic resources between social classes, while also countering discrimination against women and racialized workers. Unions have been a key force pushing for public health care, public pensions, the expansion of accessible and affordable post-secondary education, and income-support programs such as unemployment insurance. Social movement unionism, as opposed to narrowly workplace-based unionism, has sustained a critical vision of society and mobilized working people for progressive political change, both directly and through labour’s political arm, the NDP.

Unfortunately, in my time union membership as a share of the workforce has slipped a great deal in the private sector, from a high of more than 30 percent in the mid to late 1980s to about 16 percent today. This is, however, still more than double the level in the United States. The decline has been mainly due to the shrinkage of the once-large manufacturing sector amid repeated rounds of restructuring, particularly in the wake of the 1988 Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the global economic crisis of 2008, combined with greatly reduced union representation in what little is left of the world of large industrial employers. Unions in Canada have always been very weak in the fast-growing private service sector of the labour market, despite the prevalence of low wages and insecure jobs in many areas like hotels, restaurants, retail, building services, and so on. Unions are also very weak among private sector professional employees, but continue to represent the vast majority of public services workers, including those in fast-growing sectors such as health care, education, child care, elder care, and so on.

Unlike in the United States, overall union membership has remained quite stable at about one in three (30 percent in 2017) workers. Notwithstanding the overall climate of hostility to unions, labour law has been more friendly in Canada than has generally been the case south of the border, and new organizing has brought non-union workers into the labour movement, albeit at a rate that has not matched the loss of unionized jobs. On a positive note, the face of the labour movement has changed greatly; women now make up well over one-half of the membership, as the stereotypical burly blue-collar union guy has become an increasingly endangered species outside very-large-scale industry and construction. Suffice to say that the labour movement remains a significant, if weakened, actor in our national life.

For the two decades I was with the CLC, we operated in the generally hostile political environment caused by the national and global shift to neo-liberalism, an ugly term that stands as a useful shorthand for the deliberate ideological and political project to roll back the managed and somewhat more egalitarian capitalism of the immediate postwar period and to restore the power of capital at the expense of labour and governments through privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of once-national economies to international capital flows and global competition.

As I wrote with Bob Baldwin:

From a labour perspective, the years from the mid-1970s to today have been marked by a series of losses. The limited postwar consensus on economic and social policy was torn apart. Unemployment was deliberately tolerated and increased through tough monetary policies in order to contain wages. Unions and labour market regulation measures, such as the minimum wage and employment standards, came to be constructed as barriers to job creation and sources of economic inefficiency. The ability of unions to organize and strike was increasingly constrained through legislation. Social programs (particularly income supports for unemployed workers) were trimmed and then slashed. Previously regulated industries, such as transportation and communications, were deregulated. Public enterprises were privatized. Activist and nationalist economic development policies were abandoned in favour of the free market and free trade. The squeeze on public finances arising from slower economic growth and the drive to balance budgets brought governments into particularly sharp conflict with public-sector unions, while the great national debate over the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement marked a very fundamental cleavage of views between the labour movement and business.¹

In other words, I spent most of my life banging my head against the wall. Still, as Bob White liked to argue, “fighting back makes a difference” and the battle of ideas has been fought by the labour movement and the wider left notwithstanding Margaret Thatcher’s arrogant claim that “there is no alternative” to neo-liberalism in today’s hypercompetitive global economy.

The terms “social democracy” and “democratic socialism” are often used interchangeably to describe a political tradition dating back to at least the late nineteenth century. The great split in the socialist and labour movement in 1917 between reformers and revolutionaries produced, as one strand, parties standing for a socialist third way between Communism and liberal capitalism. These parties embraced liberal political traditions and values, but sought an activist democratic state in both the social and economic sphere and a strong labour movement to promote greater equality and security. Until well into the postwar period, economic democracy in the sense of social ownership and regulation of private capital, or of at least the “commanding heights,” was very much on the broad social democratic agenda.

Social democrats can take much of the credit for the (temporary and contested) transformation of liberal capitalism into the postwar Keynesian welfare state of the 1960s and 1970s. They advanced a broad vision of rights to public education, health, and welfare services delivered outside of the market and based upon citizenship. The goal of decommodification of labour through the public provision of needs went well beyond liberal reforms, which typically focused on amelioration of poverty rather than on broad citizen rights, and equality of opportunity rather than substantive equality of condition (as if the former were possible without the latter). Social democrats also worked hand in glove with mass labour movements, seeing them as a key foundation for equality and economic democracy in the workplace.

Many social democrats came to believe, in the postwar period, that the goals of the movement could be realized through full employment, a mixed economy, strong public services, and the advanced welfare state, and that socialism in the sense of predominantly public ownership of the means of production was no longer necessary. By the 1990s, some social democrats, notably Tony Blair of the UK Labour Party and Gerhard Schröder of the German SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) consciously sought a new third way between social democracy and neo-liberalism. As I see it, they strayed from and discredited social democracy itself, leaving many left social democrats to describe themselves as democratic socialists. (The term is also used by non-Communist parties to the left of mainstream social democratic parties.) The NDP constitution refers to the roots of the party in both the social democratic and democratic socialist traditions.

Social democrats and democratic socialists both embrace working through the institutions of liberal democracy and want to promote democracy in the workplace and the economy, not just settle for a redistributive welfare state. Democratic socialists, who often function as the left wing in social democratic parties, have further argued that inequality of both condition and opportunity is rooted in the concentrated ownership of private capital and in the fact that the often perverse logic of capital accumulation and production for profit limits the workings of political democracy and also undermines economic stability through recurrent crises.

A democratic socialist is, by my definition, a social democrat who believes that a capitalist economy must, at a minimum, be closely regulated by the state, argues for much greater economic democracy in the form of expanded public and social ownership as well as workplace democracy, and perhaps wants to, at least ultimately, move beyond capitalism. This theme is taken up in the concluding chapter of this book. Democratic socialism is also closely associated with a politics of movement building, as opposed to a narrow electoral focus and, often, on building closer links between a left political party and the labour and other social movements. However, it took a long time for social democrats of all stripes to engage with feminism, anti-colonialism, and the environmental movement and so-called new social movements that came to prominence in the 1970s.

To be clear, I see “democratic socialism” as a term to designate the ideas and practices of the social democratic left. This is important today, since the term “social democracy” has been discredited by the shift of many nominally social democratic parties to neo-liberalism.

The broad historical trajectory of social democratic thought is inevitably closely bound up with the changing trajectory of capitalist economies. In the 1930s and 1940s, mainstream social democrats generally supported a “socialist” agenda of expanded public ownership and control of the economy to address mass unemployment and the rise of fascism. The great economist John Maynard Keynes argued in favour of “the euthanasia of the rentier,” close controls on the international movement of capital, and the central role of public investment in managing the economy. The social democratic parties in most of the advanced economies, including the NDP in Canada, understandably became much less critical of capitalism per se in the economically buoyant postwar boom, arguing mainly for stronger public services and an equalizing welfare state. These parties largely failed to embrace a coherent left alternative to the right-wing neo-liberal response to the “stagflation” crisis (high inflation combined with rising unemployment) of the mid to late 1970s. Instead they moved slowly to the right, to the point that some more or less embraced a neo-liberal economic agenda, including liberalized trade and investment, a lightly regulated financial system, market delivery of many public services, as well as weak unions and deregulated labour markets. They supported “reform” of the traditional welfare state to reduce so-called dependency, while arguing for only modest amelioration of growing inequality. To its credit, the NDP in Canada, in my view, remained broadly social democratic in inspiration, though not without lapses.

The centrality of class and the goal of radical social and economic change was marginalized in the era of neo-liberalism and so-called globalization, which intensified under Thatcher (elected in 1979) and Ronald Reagan (elected 1980). Over most of my lifetime, the left has had to try to keep the vision of democratic socialism alive in a period of reaction. Much of the mainstream social democratic movement in advanced economies succumbed to the siren call of neo-liberalism and has paid a high political price for abandoning class-based politics and democratic socialist principles since the implosion of the new liberal, global economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. A decade of stagnation has worked to the political benefit of the populist right rather than the traditional left.

But there has been something of a revival of the democratic socialist left in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis of 2008. This has been shown by the strength of popular support for the radical policy agenda of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, when he was elected as Labour leader and in the election of 2017; the broad support for Bernie Sanders’s two campaigns for the Democratic party nomination in the United States; the election of several self-proclaimed democratic socialists to the US Congress; and the partial electoral success of parties to the left of mainstream social democratic parties in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere in Europe. Young people in particular seem to again be attracted to socialist ideas and to political action. In the otherwise disastrous 2019 UK election, a majority of young people under age thirty-five voted Labour.

Here in Canada, somewhat under the radar, millennial social justice activists who self-identify as socialists are starting to play an influential role in the NDP. Among them are to be counted my daughter Emma Jackson, who has managed to radicalize me in my dotage! After the 2015 federal election, Tom Mulcair was unceremoniously dumped by a majority vote of the NDP membership at the 2016 federal convention, though he hung on as leader in Parliament for the duration of a disastrously long leadership contest. At the same convention, delegates called for grassroots discussion of the Leap Manifesto, which was closely attuned to the traditional left as well as to a new generation of climate justice activists and champions of Indigenous rights, though it was strongly opposed by the Alberta NDP and some parts of labour.

The 2018 Ontario provincial election saw the election of many progressive members of provincial parliament with deep community roots who mobilized younger activists in large numbers. For example, Joel Harden, an ex–student activist and a former colleague of mine at the CLC, won almost 50 percent of the vote and a sweeping victory in the Liberal stronghold of Ottawa Centre. Some five hundred people worked on Harden’s campaign.

In November 2018, Paige Gorsak, a prominent anti-pipeline activist with Climate Justice Edmonton and a close friend of Emma, narrowly lost, by twelve votes out of seven hundred plus, at a well attended and closely contested federal NDP nomination in the riding of Edmonton Strathcona. The winner and eventual member of Parliament was a more mainstream New Democrat endorsed by the incumbent New Democratic MP Linda Gordon and strongly supported by the Notley government’s local NDP members of the legislative assembly and political staff. Gorsak was said by Dave Cournoyer’s Daveberta blog to be running an “unabashedly democratic socialist campaign that focuses on social justice issues that push beyond the centre-leftish territory many NDP politicians have staked out in recent years.”

In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and in the face of ever-rising inequality and obscene concentrations of wealth and power, it is clear that neo-liberalism has failed to deliver shared economic and social progress. As this book went to press, the still unfolding COVID-19 pandemic seemed to have the potential to revive the broad left by making so clear the gaping holes in the existing economic and social fabric, and by restoring belief in the efficacy and indeed necessity of government and collective political action. At the same time, Joe Biden’s narrow victory over Trump may have created greater space for progressive political forces in the United States and, by example, here in Canada.

The key elements of an alternative economic and social agenda exist, including an emphasis on new forms of social ownership, on the importance of public investment, and on the necessity of dealing with catastrophic climate change and environmental degradation through a Green New Deal and planning for a carbon-free and sustainable future. Democratic control of the economy is, to me, central to the democratic socialist vision and must now be brought into the mainstream. We cannot have a true democracy if we have great inequalities of wealth, income, and thus political power, as great social democrats such as Olof Palme in Sweden and Willy Brandt in Germany as well as Tommy Douglas and Ed Broadbent here in Canada have understood.

THE FIRE AND THE ASHES

CONTENTS

ONEA LIFE ON THE LEFT