Roads to Resources: Uneven Development, Mobile Work, and the

Extractive Imaginary in Canada

by

Katie Mazer

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Geography and Planning

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Katie Mazer (2019)

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Roads to Resources: Uneven Development, Mobile Work, and the

Extractive Imaginary in Canada

Katie Mazer

Doctor of Philosophy, 2019

Department of Geography and Planning University of Toronto

In recent years it has become common for workers to commute from high unemployment areas

of eastern Canada to work in the Alberta oil sands and related industries. Through a

genealogical investigation that moves from the post-war decades to the present, this dissertation

asks how, and to what end, mobile extractive work has become normal for east coast

communities. Drawing on participant observation and action research, in-depth interviews, and

archival research in provincial and federal state archives, I illustrate that welfare state policy,

rural restructuring, and targeted recruitment have driven workers into long-distance work, but

that a narrow set of stories about work and the economy have normalized these extreme labour

relations. In the decades after World War Two, as the Canadian state set its sights on

modernization and national economic expansion, it formulated the Maritime region as a

national problem. Framing the region’s seasonal economies, low productivity, and

“underdevelopment” as barriers to national growth, planners and policy-makers worked to

remake Maritime economies and people to fit with a vision of the national economy rooted in

industrialization, urbanization, and expanded industrial resource extraction. Welfare state

programs focused on rural development, modernization, and labour re-organized local material

life in powerful ways, but they also broadcast narrow ideas about what types of work,

livelihoods, and economies could be part of the future. These enduring stories about

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economic viability, I argue, have naturalized decline, mobility, and market volatility, rendering

the region’s remarkable reliance on long-distance resource employment ordinary. By obscuring

workers’ experiences of volatility and the underdevelopment that shapes extractive labour

markets, this normalization has been a linchpin in Canadian extraction. This research highlights

the central role of welfare state policy in producing relations and geographies of extraction in

Canada. But the state’s intensive investment in managing peripheral workers and regions also

underscores the persistence of economies, lives, and forms of valuation that break from the logic

of unending accumulation.

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Acknowledgements This is a long dissertation, written over many years. I have, at times, felt discouraged or

lost, but the support that surrounded me seemed to only grow with every page. I arrived in the University of Toronto Department of Geography as a master’s student, having moved to Toronto mostly to be closer to my new nephew, Elliot, rather than because of the department. But, when I found a group of students energetically committed to fostering community, political action, and fun, I quickly got the sense I was in the right place.

Many of these people have been, at once, my intellectual collaborators, co-organizers, and dear friends. I owe a special thanks to my long-standing reading group crew, whose companionship and curiosity framed these years: Martine August, Martin Danyluk, Caitlin Henry, Prasad Khanolkar, Laura Pitkanen, Brett Story, and Patrick Vitale. Over the course of my time here, I crossed paths with many other people in this department who made my time so rich. My thanks to: James Nugent, Nicole Latulippe, Lisa Freeman, Paul Jackson, Emily Eaton, Jen Ridgley, Josh Akers, Vanessa Matthews, Amy Siciliano, Shiri Pasternak, Heather Dorries, Zach Anderson, Raili Lakanen, Emily Reid-Musson, Lia Frederiksen, Elsie Lewison, Elizabeth Lord, Amy Buitenhuis, Kat Snukal, Jeff Biggar, Jess Wilczak, David Seitz, Ellie Ade Kur, Sabrien Amrov, Corey Ponder, JP Catungal, David Roberts, Charles Levkoe, Alexis Mitchell, Wes Attewell, Cynthia Morinville, Nickie Van Lier, Ayesha Basit, Saroja Ponnambalam, Diala Lteif, and Ben Butler. Other Toronto-based geographers also belong on this list, especially Dan Cohen, Heather McLean, and Claire Major.

Entangled in and beyond the Department of Geography, a motley crew of activists at the University of Toronto taught me new things about collective power, creativity, and love. From my vantage point, it began with U of T General Assembly in 2011—with Alex Conchie, Faraz Shahidi, Johanna Lewis, Daniel Vandervoort, and Zexi Wang, among others—which built models and relationships that flowed into the 2012 CUPE 3902 ‘strike that never was.’ Many of the geographers listed above are central to this story—above all, Caitlin, James, Amy, Patrick, Prasad, and Josh. And beyond geography, Sara Suliman, Ashleigh Ingle, Ozlem Aslan, Jaby Mathew, Jacob Nerenberg, Asli Zengin, and Mai Taha. Working with these folks gave me a little taste of what it might look like to actually invent the world we want into being.

I have benefited from the questions, insights, and everyday support of an incredible (and wonderfully large) dissertation committee. Emily Gilbert has a commitment to students that is unparalleled. Her detailed engagement and pointed questions always conveyed both the seriousness with which she took my work and her trust that I could rise to the occasion. This dissertation is unquestionably stronger for it. I did my best learning from Kanishka Goonewardena during the many evenings (over many years) we shared as part of the same reading group. He cracked open the way I understand and use theory, and is always keen to help when I come knocking with more questions. Katharine Rankin helped me navigate the early days of figuring out what it meant to ‘do’ scholarship. Her excitement for my work and her honesty helped me build my voice as a scholar and writer. Sue Ruddick’s teaching had a deep influence on this project. And as a committee member, I often felt like she could get inside my head, skillfully helping me untangle my thoughts and navigate my writing blocks. I have learned a tremendous amount from this eclectic group and am so grateful for their mentorship.

At the end, the committee got even bigger and better. My “internal external,” Michelle Buckley, has been enthusiastic about this project since the first time we met. Her insightful questions pushed me to think about this research in completely new and exciting ways. As my external examiner, Geoff Mann’s reflections and questions were not only thoughtful and generous; they also got right at the heart of the things that have stumped me. Thanks to Geoff for prying these questions open and, generally, for his supportive and enthusiastic engagement.

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This dissertation would not have been written without the steadfast support of my supervisor, Deb Cowen. Early on, Deb picked up on my twinned desire and reluctance to anchor this project in my own geographies. It was her gentle but persistent encouragement that convinced me in the end. That type of sensitive intuition has framed her support of this project the whole way through. She anticipated my barriers and strengths at every turn, helped me make sense of chaotic first drafts, and urged me over and over not to censor myself. This patient trust nourished my confidence, creativity, and growth as both a scholar and a person. I am deeply grateful to Deb for the time and energy she has invested in this project and for so generously sharing her insights, enthusiasm, and friendship.

I have also benefited from the teaching, guidance, and friendship of other faculty at the University of Toronto. Thanks, especially, to Mike Ekers, Scott Prudham, Alana Boland, and Matt Farish. Thanks to Ted Relph, who first planted the idea of a PhD in my mind. Sara Dorow at the University of Alberta and Suzanne Mills at McMaster University have also been generous with their enthusiasm about and support for this project. The Department of Geography staff keep this operation running smoothly day after day. My thanks, especially, to Mariange Beaudry, Jessica Finlayson, Marika Maslej, Kathy Giesbrecht, Jenny Jung, Yvonne Kenny, Andrew Malcom, and Maria Wowk. My thanks, also, to Myrna for her daily work and all our evening chats.

I was lucky to receive funding for this project from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in the form of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Thanks also to the Canadian Association of University Women Charlottetown, for awarding me the Margaret MacMillan Pratt Graduate Scholarship in the Arts. My travel for this research was supported by a University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies Travel Grant.

Writing this dissertation was a whole-body process. I owe tremendous gratitude to Alfie Vente, who helped me mend when I was starting to lose faith that was possible.

This research would not have happened without the everyday work of librarians and archivists at several institutions. Thank you to the archivists and staff at Library and Archives Canada, who reliably met my requests as I tried to figure out what I was looking for. My time at the Prince Edward Island Public Archives and Records Office was one my favourite parts of this research. The research was riveting, the atmosphere friendly, and the staff enormously helpful. The archivists there patiently pulled boxes, guided me through the collection, and made me feel welcome as I set myself up day after day. Over two separate periods, I spent many afternoons at the University of Prince Edward Island’s Robertson Library, trying to read as much of the PEI Special Collection as I could. Thank you to all the library staff for making this such a pleasant place to work. Thanks, in particular, to Simon Lloyd for his help and interest.

Thanks to Andrea Saldanha, Andrew Waye, Jen Ridgley, Annie McKenzie, and Lynn Chiarelli for generously opening their homes to me during the months I spent in Ottawa. Thanks, also, to Geri Blinick, John Dockendorff, Jess Fawcett, and, again, Annie for always being there to drag me out of my academic bubble and, most importantly, for that incredible winter of skiing.

In Fort McMurray, my old friend Shannon Comeau welcomed me into her home as though no time had passed. Over baseball, school pick-ups, and long spring evenings, she thoughtfully answered my questions and reminded me that, in many ways, this is just another place where everyday people live everyday lives. Thanks to Shannon, Carlene, and Danny Comeau, and to Steve, Quinn, Kaiya, and Hudson Kugler for the hospitality and fun.

Undertaking this research meant moving back to Prince Edward Island for a year where I was warmly invited into the fold of Island life. Part of my good fortune was to meet Island activists and organizers. These folks not only shaped this dissertation through their sharp

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insights on Island politics, they also gave me a new perspective on what it means to really root organizing in people’s everyday lives.

My gratitude to everyone in the PEI Coalition for Fair EI, especially Leo Broderick, Marie Burge, Mary Boyd, JoeAnne Callaghan, Leo Cheverie, Leonard Crawford, Michelle Jay, Jane Ledwell, Lori MacKay, Carl Pursey, Craig Walsh, and Ann Wheatley. I owe a special thanks Ann for originally inviting me to join a meeting. And to Lori, who sat down to talk with me in the very early days of research and, over the subsequent years, taught me so much.

Josie Baker, then at Cooper Institute, generously shared her wisdom from years of community-based work. Lucky for me, she also jumped at the chance to work together. Many hours spent organizing, writing, exploring, and plotting with Josie have left a major mark on this dissertation. Josie also introduced me to workers in the Blue House and the Yellow House. My thanks to them for welcoming me alongside Josie and for trusting us with their stories.

Thank you, also, to Maureen Larkin for always asking about my thesis. And to Alice Crook and, again, Ann Wheatley, for inviting me to occasionally rejoin the gathering.

I finished writing this dissertation in Willimantic, Connecticut. Here, the warm company of my old friend Sarah Harrigan pierced through what was otherwise a pretty lonely time. Thanks to Sarah, Jed Thorpe, and the delightful Maggie Harrigan-Thorpe for the sleepovers, beach days, and warm welcome to New England. Connecticut also introduced me to Emily Mitchell-Eaton and Sung and Ciaran Choe, who have quickly come to feel like old friends. Closer to home, Mia Karpov, Stefan Kamola, Maeve Doyle, and Patrick Crowley saw me through the final months of writing with warm meals and good company.

Steve and Linda Vitale have cheered me along with nothing but enthusiasm. My thanks to them for their incredible generosity and their incessant urge to celebrate. Elaina Vitale has an extraordinary capacity to remember and take interest in what is happening in other people’s lives. Thanks to Elaina for remembering, visiting, and being a good friend.

In Toronto, I had the good fortune of living amidst two families. Through almost the whole life of this project, I lived at “Wright House” with a revolving cast of housemates. At its best, our little experiment in cultivating mutual support felt to me like living the dream. For this, thank you, especially, to Patrick Vitale, Simon Vickers, and Caitlin Henry. Thanks to Simon for reminding me that the youthful thrill of new friendship can still happen in your thirties. And to Caitlin, for her steadfast companionship, collaboration, and care. I simply can’t imagine having gone through this process without her. Prasad Khanolkar, while never a housemate, has been part of this family and a source of constant friendship, always there when I’m ready to ponder.

Living in Toronto also meant that I was surrounded by brothers, cousins, and kids. Thanks to Simon, Carly, and Jonny Routh, and Alison (and sometimes, Natasha and Thomas) McLennan for reliving cottage fun. Alison, especially, has been an unending source of wisdom and love. Being close to her, Jess Leah, and now Avery and Jack has brought me so much joy.

My older brother, Alex Mazer, has seen me through this entire process with what I have often found to be a baffling amount of enthusiasm and pride. He and Attiya Khan have put me up, cooked me countless meals, patiently listened when I felt defeated, and been unrelentingly encouraging. Elliot Mazer has no idea the central role he played during “doctors.” His playfulness, love, and incredible sense of humour kept me laughing and grounded. My younger brother, Isaac Mazer, always asks about my progress in the most generous of ways. And then, to my great pleasure, he usually agrees to go for a run, where, rather than jobs and dissertations, there is just the rhythm of our well-matched strides.

Patrick Vitale has travelled with me—geographically, intellectually, and emotionally—the whole length of this PhD. It was Patrick who, through his characteristic curiosity about obscure places, got me thinking about my home with new interest. And, as I went about pursuing that interest, he debated, read, and tried to shorten many pages of this dissertation—

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often while lovingly battling back my relentless self-doubt. Dissertation writing, of course, cannot be separated from daily life living and, in this regard, I could thank Patrick for countless things. But in the constrained space of these words I will thank him, especially, for dwelling with me so often in the intermingled realm where dissertating rubbed edges with daily life through politics, exploration, and wonder.

In returning to PEI I also returned to my childhood home. My parents, Anne and Don Mazer, were nothing but thrilled to have me as their roommate for a year. And I would trade that year for nothing. For the first time in my adult life, I had the gift of their everyday, ambient company. Over meals, hikes, and long cups of coffee, our daily conversations traversed almost every part of this dissertation, weaving the ‘research’ into everyday life. They’ve supported this project in many ways, but I want to thank them, in particular, for that year of slow reflection. Their warm company and those lively conversations are everywhere in these pages.

Finally, I owe a great deal of gratitude to the many people who agreed to be interviewed for this project. In particular, thank you to the workers, community members, and other folks out east who welcomed me into their homes and the vulnerable corners of their lives. I showed up with nothing to offer but my interest in their stories and, repeatedly, I was met with openness, honesty, and reciprocal curiosity. I hope this dissertation does justice to that trust. And I hope it does justice to their stories, because stories like theirs—stories of everyday people in out-of-the-way places—are rich in truth about the world we live in.

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Table of ContentsList of Figures .............................................................................................................................. xAcronyms and Abbreviations .................................................................................................... xiIntroduction: How the problem of the Maritimes serves the staple state .............................. 1

“The problems of the Atlantic provinces and the North” .......................................................... 3Telling stories, forging futures ................................................................................................ 10Staple state, settler state, welfare state..................................................................................... 20Placing peripheral white workers in the settler staple (nation-)state....................................... 36Methodology............................................................................................................................ 46Structure of the dissertation ..................................................................................................... 50

Part I: Genealogies 1. Wasted manpower: The post-war periphery and the invention of seasonal unemployment............................................................................................................................ 53

“He wants everybody out of this place”: The spatiality of seasonality ................................... 53Resources for Freedom: Securing the industrial staple state ................................................... 60“Unemployment Insurance is primarily intended for industrial workers” .............................. 63“Labour time not used is permanently lost” ............................................................................ 72“Déportation en Alberta, pas pour nous!” ............................................................................... 80Grounding the welfare state: Seasons, staples, and unemployment ........................................ 87Conclusion: Making the welfare state work for extraction ..................................................... 94

2. Stranded manpower: Rural poverty, modernization, and the politics of viability.......... 97“A great number of rural and near-rural people will be greatly, and adversely affected” ...... 97The problem of regional inequality ....................................................................................... 105Locating the problem of poverty ........................................................................................... 108Narrating the problem of poverty .......................................................................................... 120Resolving the problem of poverty: The Comprehensive Development Plan ........................ 125Conclusion: The politics of viability and the circumscription of the future.......................... 139

3. Mining manpower: Crisis, mobility, and the national labour market ........................... 142Labour mismatch, matching crises ........................................................................................ 142Sourcing manpower: The city and the “fringes of habitation” .............................................. 146Coordinating manpower: Forecasting, productivity, and the promise of managed mobility 150Northern expansion, industrial mining .................................................................................. 155Mining mismatch ................................................................................................................... 163The contested north, the urban crisis, and the “challenge of mid-Canada”........................... 173Mining mobility ..................................................................................................................... 182Conclusion: Uneven development as socio-spatial fix.......................................................... 187

Part II: Trajectories 4. From “vulnerable talent” to just-in-time work: Building the talent pipeline................ 191

What to make of labour markets?.......................................................................................... 191Energy superpower, labour market panic .............................................................................. 197If you build it, they will come: The infrastructure of labour delivery................................... 201“Twice as safe, twice as productive”..................................................................................... 211

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Waiting for work: The temporalities of “Winter War” ......................................................... 216The long game and the talent pipeline................................................................................... 222Conclusion: Seasons, slumps, and the search for certainty ................................................... 226

5. “The Mighty Island”: New stories and old economies on the potato periphery............ 231Skinners Pond, 2015 .............................................................................................................. 231How to know an economy? ................................................................................................... 240“Our need for primary industries has faded”......................................................................... 242Thirty years of a new economy ............................................................................................. 250A new economy of natural resources..................................................................................... 256

Potatoes.............................................................................................................................. 259Lobster ............................................................................................................................... 264

Putting the Maritime problem to work: Permanent precarity and periodic mobility ............ 276Conclusion: Narrating economies, foreclosing questions ..................................................... 281

6. Dump truck destiny: Work, whiteness, and whittled futures.......................................... 287Putting whiteness to work...................................................................................................... 287From Whitie to Winter Warrior............................................................................................. 291“Look what those lazy Maritimers are doing!”: Unemployed and undeserving ................... 297Pricey new pickups and big-ticket items: Employed and irresponsible ................................ 308“They just work, and they seem to do it well”: Disciplined and reliable .............................. 315Conclusion: Stories, subjects, and attachment to extraction.................................................. 321

Conclusion: The value of unviability ..................................................................................... 327Archives, Interviews, and Bibliography ................................................................................ 339

Archives and collections........................................................................................................ 339Interviews .............................................................................................................................. 339Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 343

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List of Figures Figure 1.1: Proposed ‘remote’ areas to be excluded from UI, 1949............................................ 66 Figure 1.2: The Transportation of Iron Ore, US President's Materials Policy Commission. ...... 68

Figure 1.3: Advertisements that were part of the “Let's Do it Now!” winter employment campaign in Port Arthur, ON. ............................................................................................. 75

Figure 2.1: Designated areas of intervention for the Area Development Program, as of June 1967. .................................................................................................................................. 112

Figure 2.2: The mandate of the Special Planning Secretariat.................................................... 123 Figure 2.3: Land use planning map. Image from a community meeting concerning the Canada

Land Inventory Land Use Planning Project. ..................................................................... 136 Figure 3.1: The expansion of select industrial staples production in post-war Canada ............ 156

Figure 3.2: The expansion of iron ore production in post-war Canada ..................................... 157 Figure 3.3: Decline of gold production, first during World War Two and then in the 1960s ... 159

Figure 4.1: Two clocks display local time and Alberta time in an employment resource centre in PEI. .................................................................................................................................... 220

Figure 4.2: A display of the two main ‘local’ industries at an employment resource centre in PEI. .................................................................................................................................... 221

Figure 5.1: Frozen potato exports from PEI, 1990-2016........................................................... 263 Figure 5.2: Processed and live lobster exports from PEI, 1990-2016 ....................................... 273

Figure 5.3: Lobster landings in Canada and PEI, 1990-2015.................................................... 274 Figure 7.1: J.D. Irving billboard along a New Brunswick highway…………………………...332

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Acronyms and Abbreviations ACOA Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency ADB Atlantic Development Board APEC Atlantic Provinces Economic Council ARDA Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Act (became the Agricultural and

Rural Development Act in 1966) CBC Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CDP Comprehensive Development Plan CMA Census Metropolitan Area CMC Canada Manpower Centre CPI Consumer Price Index DEVCO Cape Breton Development Corporation DFO Department of Fisheries and Oceans (later Fisheries and Oceans Canada) DMI Department of Manpower and Immigration DoD Department of Development DOSCO Dominion Steel and Coal Company DREE Department of Regional Economic Expansion DRIE Department of Regional Industrial Expansion EI Employment Insurance EIC Economic Improvement Corporation ESDC Employment and Social Development Canada FIFO Fly-in, fly-out FRED Fund for Rural Economic Development GDP Gross Domestic Product HRSDC Human Resources and Skills Development Canada LDC Land Development Corporation LFS Labour Force Survey MMP Manpower Mobility Program NAICS North American Industry Classification System NEC National Employment Committee NES National Employment Service NFB National Film Board of Canada OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development RDC Rural Development Council SAWP Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program SPS Special Planning Secretariat TFWP Temporary Foreign Worker Program UI Unemployment Insurance UIC Unemployment Insurance Commission

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Introduction: How the problem of the Maritimes serves the staple state

We hear again and again this brisk, impatient and as it is said realistic response: to the productive efficiency, the newly liberated forces, of the capitalist breakthrough; a simultaneous damnation and idealisation of capitalism, in its specific forms of urban and industrial development; an unreflecting celebration of mastery—power, yield, production, man’s mastery of nature—as if the exploitation of natural resources could be separated from the exploitation of men.

- Raymond Williams, The Country and the City1

The power of the market economy reveals itself not only in the transforming of people’s lives and livelihoods but in its influence over the way we think. - Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts2

Atlantic Time: January, early 2010s

I board a flight from Moncton, New Brunswick to Toronto, Ontario. I am in the early days of

grad school and am flying back to the city after a visit home to Prince Edward Island for the

Christmas holidays. I take my seat on the plane beside a familiar figure: a man, probably in his

forties, wearing work boots and a company hat, clearly on his way to work in the Alberta oil

patch. With little semblance of the familiar tales of freewheeling young guys in search of

adventure and easy money, my seatmate opens up to me about his life. He tells me that there had

been a bad accident on his worksite in the days before the holidays, and that, in addition to the

normal pain of leaving home and family for weeks at a time, this tragedy was making him

particularly reluctant to return to work. He hates it, he tells me, but it’s a job, and it had allowed

him to pay down debts and keep on top of his bills. In a moment that has stayed with me, he

shows me his wristwatch: “I keep it on Atlantic Time,” he says; a little f-you to the uneven

development forcing him to travel 5000 kilometres to make a living.

Don’t write to the newspapers: March 31, 2015

Eric is probably about the same age as me. He lives in Summerside, Prince Edward Island and

works winters in Alberta on a seismic crew, where his starting wage had been $12.50 an hour.

We sit down for an interview in a busy Charlottetown café. He’s chatty and a good storyteller:

he tells me he’s writing a novel in his time off. Near the end of the interview, he says, “When I

saw your ad on Kijiji” looking to interview people who work out west, “I was very interested, 1 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 37. 2 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 244.

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because there’s something kind of hush-hush about it all.” I ask him why he thinks this is and

his explanation meanders through a wide range of different factors: Fort McMurray’s reputation

as a “hive of scum and villainy”; shame associated with collecting employment insurance in the

off-season, sometimes while working under the table; not wanting to revisit the misery of the

work in your time off; what he calls the oil industry’s “masculinity complex,” in which you

tough it up and don’t complain; and a vague sense that the opportunity will be taken away from

you if you talk about it. Struggling to find the right words, he says, a lot of east coast guys who

go west, “they’re kind of at the bottom of society, you know? They’ve been on [employment

insurance] all their life, they’ve worked crappy jobs. They found this; they’re not going to write

to newspapers.”

My Alberta clock: April 10, 2015

I walk into an employment centre at the very western tip of Prince Edward Island and am

reminded of the story on the plane: on the wall are two clocks; one set to Atlantic Time and one

to Mountain Time. “I became totally, I supposed, obsessed with it” the employment councilor,

Ruby, explains, as she points out her Alberta paraphernalia: “My Alberta map, my Alberta

clock, and I have [a clock] at home.” Near the entrance, under two framed photos of lobster

fishermen, is a tidy collection of industry swag: a pink Suncor helmet, an empty Suncor water

bottle, and a notebook from a smaller petroleum services company, standing tall on display. “I

envisioned how I wanted to become the middle person between the client and the companies,”

Ruby tells me, reflecting on the role she had fashioned for herself in helping locals connect with

these much-needed job opportunities. “How can I make the company realize what I can help

them get, and how can I get my people employed?” Describing her first trips to the major

recruitment fairs two hours away in the provincial capital, she explains that she had told the

companies: “‘I can give you a win-win situation. You want employees? I got the best clients in

the world. I have the men that work outdoors, work long hours, safety-oriented, after eighteen

hours they ask for another eighteen hours. These guys don’t sleep…they’ll do anything….’ And

every time I walked out of a room it was after huge hugs, because all these company owners

were hugging me.”

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“The problems of the Atlantic provinces and the North”

In June of 1955, in the context of post-war economic change and a period of escalating resource

nationalism, the Canadian government of Louis St. Laurent initiated a royal commission to

inquire into “the probable economic development of Canada and the problems to which such

development is likely to give rise.”3 The Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects

conducted two years of research and summarized its findings and recommendations in a five

hundred-page report containing twenty chapters, the penultimate of which had the peculiar title,

“Problems of the Atlantic Provinces and the North.” In this section, the Commission explained

the distinct sets of “problems” facing these distant and very different places: Atlantic Canada’s

lack of post-war growth and low per-capita income and north’s (the Yukon and Northwest

Territories) urgent need to adapt in anticipation of a dramatic expansion of industrial mining,

oil, and gas development. To address these problems, the Commission recommended “special

measures of assistance” targeting both regions.4 The report drew no direct links between these

problems; they find themselves in the same section, I assume, simply on account of their

deviance from the usual post-war trends in the Canadian economy and their shared demand for

“special assistance” so as not to hinder national growth. But while the Commission did not

connect the “problem” of rural ‘underdevelopment’ with the “problem” of the expanding

resource frontier, this is exactly the connection this dissertation seeks to make.

I knew nothing of the Gordon Commission or the oddly titled nineteenth chapter of its 1957

report when I embarked on this project. But, having grown up in the Maritimes, I did know

something—in an everyday way—of this connection between geographies of rural poverty and

far-flung geographies of resource extraction. For, during my lifetime, as the problem of local

development has endured in the region, it has become intimately tied to resource industries and

associated employment opportunities, as we say, “out west.” In the Maritimes, everyone knows

what it means to work “out west.” But, really, it’s a peculiar designation. Most often associated

with the Alberta oil sands, it actually refers less to a particular destination or type of work than it

does the view from the east: an absence from home, the promise of better wages, drawn out

travel and hard work, and, for some, a sense of escape, accomplishment, or social value. As

such, this general formula takes a wide variety of forms: “up north” instead of “out west” for 3 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1957). This quote is from the address to the Governor General at the beginning of the report. 4 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 401.

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example and perhaps mining, hydro, forestry, or industrial fishing instead of petroleum. Many

people work seasonally or for other long stretches, while some work on rotational schedules and

others move for a time or longer. Some are very well paid, but many are not, relying on

overtime hours to accumulate their sought-after savings. For some, going out west feels like

being part of something bigger; others dread the isolation and long to be home. For some, it is

clearly a choice; for others it is more an act of survival. Socially, and for many individuals, it is

a messy and impossible combination of these things. All of this, packed into “out west.” How to

historicize, explain, and evaluate this trend are all matters of quiet, everyday disagreement—not

expressed overtly but, rather, through competing common sense stories about what is

happening, why, and in whose interest. Haunting this quiet disagreement is the more

fundamental, but also more buried question: could it be any other way?

This dissertation investigates how a particular set of stories about the Maritime region—what it

is, has been, and ever could be—has shaped the geographies and relations of resource extraction

in Canada. In examining these relationships, which are between distant geographies and

between stories and economies, I assemble an account that is at once of the region and the

nation-state, of labour and land, of “out east” and “out west,” of staying put and being made to

move. It is an account that moves across places, and also across ‘hard’ things unfolding in the

world—work, unemployment, extraction, climate change, austerity—and how they are

understood, experienced, and narrated. This has meant traversing a somewhat vast constellation

of entangled geographies: oil fields, mine-sites, and industry offices; everyday life in Maritime

economies and communities; abstract and concrete spaces of the state; and the various

mobilities and networks that run through and constitute these geographies. It has also meant

traversing a constellation of entangled social processes: from working and travelling; to

planning, calculating, and managing; to imagining, feeling, and explaining. Investigating the

role of stories about one place in shaping geographies, relationships, and political economies not

bounded by that place demands an understanding of these vast geographies and social processes

as fundamentally inextricable. In writing against boundaries in this way, language is a

challenge; the image of the constellation is not perfect, but it is perhaps useful in that

constellations come into being only through relation and, in so doing, transcend relating (which

is binary) into something more integrated. In this spirit, this dissertation weaves a multi-

dimensional tale, stitching together far-flung stories, political economies, and geographies in

order to illustrate their inseparability.

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In the decades after World War Two, as the Canadian state set its sights on modernization and

national economic expansion, it formulated the Maritime region as a national problem. Working

from an understanding that the region’s seasonal unemployment, low productivity, rurality, and

general “underdevelopment” posed barriers to national economic growth, planners and policy-

makers set about remaking Maritime economies and Maritimers to fit with a vision of the

national economy rooted in industrialization, urbanization, and the expansion of industrial

resource extraction. State programs focused on rural development, modernization, and labour re-

organized material live in powerful ways, reconfiguring livelihoods by undermining family

economic formations and disrupting seasonal and pluralistic structures of work. But they also

did something else. They laid down a particular vision for society: of what types of work,

livelihoods, and economies were on the table as potential options. Many of these policies

operated through a dualistic narrative that the future contained two options. On one hand,

poverty; on the other, a very narrow understanding of modernization. Other modes of living, as

planners were fond of saying, were “unviable”: they were too seasonal, too rural, too rooted in

family, too unproductive. That is, in addition to restructuring social and economic life, this

federal drive to “make use” of Maritime land and labour also helped solidify an enduring set of

stories about work, the economy, and the “national interest.” That seasonal unemployment,

petty production, and rural life were problems—not because people were living in poverty, but

because they hindered productivity. That certain ways of organizing economic and social life

were not possible in post-war Canada. Today, this story endures. Policy-makers still frame

seasonal unemployment as waste and develop policies to solve “mismatches” between certain

markets for labour and certain unemployed workers. Most land-based livelihoods are still said to

be unviable while innovation and other policy trends are the way of the future. And, sensing a

lack of other reasonable options at home, workers, remarkably, continue to see the resource

frontier—oil in Alberta or hydro development in Labrador or diamond mining in the Northwest

Territories—as the next best option.

The chapters that follow focus on this link between, on the one hand, the simultaneous re-

narrating and remaking of the Maritimes and, on the other, the shifting geographies of the

Canadian resource frontier. As most often used in studies of North American history and

political economy, the concept of the frontier has served more as a foundation for settler

colonial fantasy and the erasure of settler colonial continuity than a meaningful way to think

6

about history and social power.5 I use it here deliberately, but want to turn it on its head, to

signal Canadian extractivism as both a constitutive element of settler colonialism in Canada and

an active terrain on which the authority and hegemony of the settler state is constantly

challenged. My analysis here and going forward is premised on an understanding of Canada as a

settler staple state. I review what this means in more detail below, but for now I want to flag

two things. First, that, in emphasizing staples, I mean a national political economy centred on

the extraction, circulation, and export of raw “natural resources.” My focus here is on social

relations and patterns of national uneven development associated with this political economy

and, in this way, I take some distance from common understandings and theories of the

Canadian staple state. Most notably, Harold Innis’s original staples theory and the subsequent

tradition of Canadian political economy (especially through the 1960s and 1980s), both of which

emphasized the idea that Canada was an economic hinterland on the global capitalist stage.6

Second, by qualifying the staple state as always the settler staple state, I mean to emphasize

there is no understanding resource economies (or, more generally, political economy) in Canada 5 The most notable example is Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” of US history, first presented in 1893. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, ed. Harold P. Simpson (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1963). In the Canadian context, J.M.S. Careless developed the Metropolitan Thesis, in opposition to Turner and building on Harold Innis, that the expansion of the Canadian frontier was constituted by the extension of metropolitan power. J.M.S. Careless, ‘Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History’, Canadian Historical Review 35, no. 1 (1954): 1–21. Historical theories of the frontier and the expansion of the Canadian economy that distort historical and ongoing colonial violence exist alongside much more sensationalist accounts of frontier ‘adventures.’ E.g. Pierre Berton, The Wild Frontier: More Tales from the Remarkable Past (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978). For a critical engagement with the Canadian frontier myth in the BC context see: Elizabeth Furniss, The Burden of History: Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999). 6 Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970); Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fishery: The History of an International Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); see also Mel Watkins, ‘A Staple Theory of Economic Growth’, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 29, no. 2 (1963): 141–58. The latter tradition, which became known as the “new” Canadian political economy, corrected an absence of power and class analysis in Innis’s work but replaced it with a left-nationalism that saw Canada’s capitalist development as stunted by US domination: a relation that had kept Canadian development stuck in a “staples trap.” Key works in this specific stream of Canadian political economy include: Kari Levitt, Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada (Toronto: MacMillan, 1970); Leo Panitch, ‘Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy’, Studies in Political Economy 6 (Autumn 1981): 7–33; Daniel Drache and Wallace Clement, The New Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1985); Melissa Clark-Jones, A Staple State: Canadian Industrial Resources in the Cold War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Wallace Clement and Glen Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy (Montreal and Kingston: Mcgill-Queens University Press, 1989). Paul Kellogg has written a broad review of this work that challenges its “left nationalist” framing and characterization of Canada as peripheral to the global economy. “The logic of the facts, from every indicator of development and underdevelopment,” he explains, “indicates that the image of an oppressed, weak, dependent, or semi-peripheral Canada is wrong and must be discarded.” Kellogg advocates, instead, for an analysis that approaches Canada as an imperialist nation. This intervention is extremely useful and important, but still hovers rather persistently at the level of the nation-state, attending much less to internal patterns and dynamics of power and unevenness. Paul Kellogg, Escape from the Staple Trap: Canadian Political Economy after Left Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 8.

7

without an analysis of both settler colonialism and Indigenous jurisdiction as enduring realities

shaping territorial, social, and economic relations in Canada.7 Canadian political economy

continues to be predicated on the dispossession of Indigenous lands and bodies, at the same time

as it continues to be shaped, limited, and interrupted by Indigenous peoples’ assertion and

exercise of their inherent jurisdiction over their homelands—and this is perhaps nowhere more

clear than in the historical geographies of so-called “natural resource” industries. While settler

colonialism is not the primary lens through which I have conducted this research, it is

indispensable context in which the relationships and processes in this dissertation take shape and

which they help to reproduce.

My argument is that the Maritime problem has been a powerful force in shaping this national

political economy. This argument hinges on the often-obscured centrality of labour in the

workings of contemporary settler colonialism, but also on a broader dynamic of state-managed

uneven development at the heart of Canadian political economy. The creation and management

of this white, rural periphery—as a story and material reality—has not only manufactured a

class of flexible resource workers around the volatile and shifting geographies of staples

production; the region’s perennial failure, more broadly, has been managed and narrated in

7 The relevant literature here is vast but on this particular point see Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake against the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). My use of jurisdiction, specifically, here comes from Pasternak’s work. She defines jurisdiction as the “apparatus through which sovereignty is rendered meaningful” or the “authority to have authority” 3, 5. Pasternak mobilizes jurisdiction as a framework for understanding how authority works in settler colonies: how the state seeks to establish its own jurisdiction over Indigenous lands, and how this is constantly contested by the ongoing exercise of Indigenous territorial jurisdiction, ordered through Indigenous law. This schism of legal orders renders settler sovereignty always precarious, the object of constant struggle for the settler state. See also: Tyler A. McCreary and Richard A. Milligan, ‘Pipelines, Permits, and Protests: Carrier Sekani Encounters with the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project’, Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2013): 115–29; Jen Preston, ‘Neoliberal Settler Colonialism, Canada and the Tar Sands’, Race & Class 55, no. 2 (2013): 42–59; Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Emilie Cameron, Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015); Dawn Hoogeveen, ‘Sub-Surface Property, Free-Entry Mineral Staking and Settler Colonialism in Canada’, Antipode 47, no. 1 (2015): 121–38; Anna Stanley, ‘Resilient Settler Colonialism: “Responsible Resource Development,” “Flow-Through” Financing, and the Risk Management of Indigenous Sovereignty in Canada’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 48, no. 12 (2016): 2422–42; Shiri Pasternak and Tia Dafnos, ‘How Does a Settler State Secure the Circuitry of Capital?’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 4 (2017): 739–57. These more specific studies of settler colonialism and resource extraction should be read alongside (and often draw on) Indigenous theory that has emphasized Indigenous thought and resurgence and the incomplete character of settler colonialism. Of note, see the work of Audra Simpson and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. For example: Audra Simpson, ‘Settlement’s Secret’, Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2011): 205–17; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

8

relation to these geographies.8 The Canadian state as welfare state has figured centrally here.

Programs governing unemployment and regional ‘underdevelopment’ have linked Maritime

unemployment and poverty to the dynamic geographies of the staple state by seeking to match

seasonal unemployment with seasonal production, directing surplus labour to areas of surplus

capacity, and staunching white poverty through the dispossession of Indigenous lands. But these

productive relationships between the Maritime problem and the resource frontier have been both

concealed and bolstered by a powerful set of stories about work, development, and the

economy: that rural decline is inevitable; that local economies are unviable; that east coast men

are a natural fit for remote resource work; that resource extraction is in the national interest; and

crucially, that economies must grow. By naturalizing mobility as the inevitable outcome of

underdevelopment, constraining local economic imaginaries, and normalizing extraction as a

solution to decline, these stories not only erase workers’ own experiences of volatility, they also

8 I engage more directly with questions of race and whiteness below, but want to flag here that in referencing the making of the Maritimes as a white, rural periphery, I am not referring to the racial makeup of the population. I want to emphasize, rather, that, in this history, the region has been interpreted and governed as an indisputable part of Canadian settler society: perhaps a failing part, but a part all the same. Here, I am drawing a distinction between how the Canadian state saw and approached this type of periphery and geographies that were more ‘remote’ to the centres of Canadian capitalism and settler society—namely northern geographies, which the state has generally perceived as resource peripheries. This distinction is laid out clearly in the final report of the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, in its identifications of “problems of the Atlantic Provinces and the North.” While the problem of Atlantic Canada is always, to some degree, one of both ‘underused’ labour and land, this formulation, crudely, frames one periphery as a source of labour and the other as a source of presumed resource wealth. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, ‘Final Report of the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects’ (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1957). The racial and colonial contours of this are hardly difficult to see, but are important to note. As Frances Abele outlines in her study of development policy in the territorial North, with the exception of sporadic interventions aimed at securing new mineral deposits, Dominion government engagement with the North was limited prior to World War Two. This changed dramatically in the Cold War context, intensifying state administration of northern territories and peoples and re-orienting the focus on resource development northward. But, as Abele explains, these new interventions, from resource policy to social welfare, were framed by colonial assumptions and decision-making structures that kept northerners in a disadvantaged position vis-à-vis both promised economic wellbeing and political power. Frances Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions: Forty Years of Northern Political Development’, Arctic 40, no. 4 (1987): 310–20. The Commission’s comments on the “precarious position of the Indian and Eskimo population”—in the context of ecological change, the decline of the fur trade, the changing northern economy, and the low numbers of Indigenous northerners entering into work in new government activities—reflect this. Emphasizing, especially, the plight of the Inuit, the report urges attention to facilitating the adjustment of Indigenous northerners to the industrialization of the north, stating, “Such aid should be generous but directed to preserve the independence and self-sufficiency of our fellow Canadians in the far reaches of the North.” Final Report, 418. This particular history is framed by the general tendency through Canadian political economic history to marginalize Indigenous labour (in resource industries, in favour of poor white or (im)migrant labour). As Glen Coulthard has highlighted, it is widely acknowledged by historians and political economists that Indigenous labour became increasingly marginal to the development of the Canadian state in the years that followed the transition from mercantilism to industrial capitalism (which he dates as roughly 1860-1914, with the important caveat that it varied significantly by region). Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 12–13; see also Cole Harris, ‘How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, no. 1 (2004): 165–82. In contrast, the white rural periphery has served as a source of surplus labour in this same political economic context, often encountering these same geographies through patterns of seasonal or cyclical mobility. See Chapter 3 for a more focused engagement with these dynamics.

9

obscure the state-managed uneven development that underpins the reproduction of extractive

labour and the settler staple state. In both discourse and practice, the naturalization of decline

has become the naturalization of mobility; the unemployment of Maritime workers has become

a source of industry flexibility; and the foreclosure of futures out east has become the forging of

futures out west. In this way, paradoxically, in its formulation as a problem, the region has

offered a solution to what is perhaps the staple state’s more pressing labour problem:

reproducing a workforce that can absorb and sustain the volatile and restless character of this

political economy.

I emphasize the centrality of stories here, not because I think a set of stories alone holds the

power to trigger historical change but because I want to understand how and in whose interest

the commonly understood possibilities for historical change got to be so narrow—even when so

many people understand they are not working. To this end, I understand stories to not simply

represent power relations, but as Emilie Cameron says, to also “intervene in the material

ordering of lives and livelihoods.”9 It is from such an understanding, then, that I argue that

stories—some that present clearly as stories, like myths or personal narratives, and others that

appear as science, silence, or simply truth—have had a powerful role in forging the complex co-

constitution of these two far flung geographies. This has been not only in stitching them

together, through, for example, labour migration; though it has done that. My focus, rather, is on

the ways these stories have formulated certain types of economies, livelihoods, communities,

and ways of living as possible while, sometimes in much more understated ways, formulating

others as impossible. This is a matter of regulating local livelihoods, certainly, and this deserves

attention in its own right. But in regulating these local livelihoods and, more precisely, in

regulating these local livelihoods in relation to abstract stories about the national economy, the

national labour market, and something called the national interest—stories about what must

happen for the sake of the economy or the nation—this curtailment of possible futures extends

well beyond this small and seemingly inconsequential region and the lives of the people who

live there.

Many people I encountered throughout my research told me that Maritimers have “always left

for work.” It look me a long time to really hear this assertion, convinced I needed to document

9 Cameron, Far Off Metal River, 26.

10

how current long-distance work structures signalled a break with the past, rather than a

continuity; to document something exceptional, rather than ordinary. It was only when oil prices

started crashing late in my research that I understood. As workers started filing home and

friends asked me what this meant for my project, I heard myself answer that it reinforced rather

than undermined my argument. In this backside of the oil sands’ explosive expansion, I started

to see the broader contours of the staple state: it was not the expansion of the oil sands that

mattered for the story I was telling, but the volatility, the constancy of crisis. In the context of

the staple state, the virtue of the Maritimes and Maritime workers—among and often against

other historical and enduring classes of marginal and mobile workers—has been their ability to

absorb this: to leave home in times of growth, return in times of industry crisis, and to leave

again when prices and production—somewhere—“pick back up.” Only in taking the long-view,

in really thinking about what it would mean if Maritimers have always left for work, does this

seeming chaos come into focus as a pattern. But the story doesn’t end there, with the way things

have always been. My hope is that this research can lend some clarity as to why, how, and,

perhaps more importantly, to what end, these mobile and flexible working lives have been not

only routinized, but also, in the collective local and national imaginary, normalized. While, for

capital, restlessness and the permanent spectre of crisis are certainly normal and ordinary, I

think we are well advised to hold on to the degree to which, for everyday life, relationships,

health, ecologies, and futures, all of this is completely extraordinary. It is this contradiction that

made it hard for me to hear the casual assertion that Maritimers have always left. It was not

about the veracity of the claim; I was reacting, rather, to a sense that extractive capitalism is

normal, that volatility is ordinary, that history is destiny. It is against this sense that this

dissertation cracks open the Maritime problem: and toward telling other stories that might forge

different futures.

Telling stories, forging futures

As for the Maritime provinces, nothing, of course, ever happens down there.

- Frank Underhill, The Image of Confederation10

Returning to my childhood home in Prince Edward Island to do this research quickly made clear

10 Frank H. Underhill, The Image of Confederation, The Massey Lectures, 1963 (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1964), 63; as cited in E. R. Forbes, ‘In Search of a Post-Confederation Maritime Historiography’, Acadiensis 8, no. 1 (1978): 8.

11

that dealing with stories would be an inescapable part of this project. The Maritimes are an

extremely storied place, and to grow up there was to grow up in this disorienting thicket of

stories. My first above board summer job, at age fourteen, was spent scooping ice cream at the

Anne of Green Gables house, dressed in what I assume was supposed to be a nineteenth century

dress and bonnet. I spent the subsequent two summers working in the dining room of a fancy

summer inn known to a certain subset of Canadians as the fictional White Sands Hotel from its

use in CBC television depictions of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s writings. When I worked as a

kayak guide at age eighteen my boss told me to play up my local status: tourists wanted to

interact with a real Island girl and they arrived with a sense of what this meant. During the

summer tourist season, especially, it seemed all of Island society was enrolled in performing a

slightly fictionalized version of itself. But performance, representation, and commodification of

daily life and culture run so deep here that fiction and life have become impossible to parse. At

fourteen I had already learned enough to resent the concocted fantasy of authenticity I was being

asked to perform at work—one I began to see also reflected back in the unremarkable routines

of daily life.

As the kid of two parents “from away”—as people who move to PEI from off-Island are known

locally—I was perhaps unusually sensitive to these seemingly innocent performances of

authenticity. My parents migrated to PEI independently in the early 1970s as part of a small and

loose wave of hippies, back-to-the-landers, and draft dodgers. My father, who grew up in what

was then the very Jewish neighbourhood of Rogers Park in Chicago, was (to his mind, anyway)

fleeing American empire, a PhD in progress, and a certain set of narrow expectations for his life

when he took a teaching job at the local university. As he tells it, he had applied only to

positions “in the mountains or by the beach.” To my Grama Rose in Chicago, PEI, a

hegemonically Christian place, was “the end of the earth”—a sentiment surely compounded by

my dad’s slight cultural deviance and marriage to my mum. My mum grew up in Willowdale,

North York and was enacting her own escape when she moved one summer to the tiny Acadian

community of Mont Carmel in western PEI. In sharp contrast to the rapidly changing world of

post-war Toronto she had left behind, she wanted to learn to live in a simple and self-reliant

way. Here, with the help of new local friends she learned to garden, harvest clams, and can her

bounty over a wood stove. Eventually, my parents met, built a house in the woods as part of a

“five-year plan,” and never left.

12

I grew up in a mixed world. Family friends, largely from away, were as weird as we were:

feminists, academics, and differently mixed families with strange accents, habits, and names.

But in my own world, I was, in many ways, an Island kid. I went to school with Islanders, made

friends with Islanders, and by and large sought to fit in with Island ways. But I was never neatly

granted local status. This type of social sorting—evident in the casual division of the world into

“Islanders” and people “from away”—is a banal part of daily life there. People get marked

through a mix of ethno-racial fantasies about who “Islanders” are and a complex of class

signifiers that often seem to have more to do with mannerisms and habits that reveal

connections to elsewhere than they do power and money. This plays out in bizarre ways. It was

that my father had a public sector job, more than an academic one, that marked my family’s

class position, for example—a cultural reference, I imagine, to histories of federal job creation

projects in which rare year-round, salaried positions were available to but a lucky few. This

particular conception of class is embedded in a broader narrative that has long obscured local

structures of power and inequality and emphasized, instead, that problems, power, and privilege

are brought in from the (always clearly identifiable) outside.11

But it was the first element of this social sorting—the socially acceptable habit of imagining a

definable Island People—that I grew sensitive to from a young age. Islanders like to think this is

a quaint part of daily life. People chuckle at traditions of casually interrogating someone’s

patrilineage as a way to place them socially: “who’s your father?” is a serious question; “that’s

not an Island name” is a perfectly acceptable response to an unexpected answer. This particular

form of truth telling was a defining feature of my young life—the interrogation of my name, my

manner of speaking, once recently even the shape of my jaw line; and the regular assertion that,

no matter that I was born and raised there, I was really from somewhere else. In some vague 11 This regional analysis of power relations has functioned historically to reinforce and reify the region at the same time as it obscures other significant power relations, especially those organized along lines of class. Gary Burrill has highlighted the ways these business-driven imaginaries of Maritime unity have served to entrench local inequities and corporate power, keep regional labour in submission, and suppress other forms of regional protest that work against these politics of elite regionalism. Gary Burrill, ‘A New Regionalism? Ernest Forbes and the Recovery of Regional Memory’, in Toward a New Maritimes, ed. Ian McKay and Scott Milsom (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed Press, 1992), 354. Ian McKay’s work on Nova Scotia, generally, speaks to this theme as well. In particular, the concept of regional “neo-nationalism”: an assertion of regional or provincial unity without a more radical vision for challenging or dismantling hegemonic power structures. The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia, Carleton Library Series Edition (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009). See also James Overton, ‘Towards a Critical Analysis of Neo-Nationalism in Newfoundland’, in Underdevelopment and Social Movements in Atlantic Canada, ed. Robert. J. Brym and R. James Sacouman (Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1979), 219–49. On the Maritime Rights Movement see Don Nerbas, ‘Revisiting the Politics of Maritime Rights: Bourgeois Saint John and Regional Protest in the 1920s’, Acadiensis 37, no. 1 (2008): 110–30.

13

attempt to understand this, I decided to begin my research process by interviewing my parents

about their own life histories. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was drawing links between

these habits of narrating a People and different habits of narration, about work, the economy, the

meaning of development. It seems obvious now, but I didn’t see it then: these stories are one in

the same. We already know this place, the story goes: this is who exists here, this is what it’s

like, how it’s always been, and how it can ever be. The place, people, poverty, and

predictability, are somehow inherently and forever unchanging.

In this way, entangled in the stories at the centre of this dissertation are important stories

through—and against—which I have narrated my own life. I foreground this here in part

because it frames my position as a researcher: not only the types of relationships I was and was

not able to form and my relative power, but also, filtered through the haze of familiarity, what

and how I have been able to see, be curious about, and distil with clarity. But I also foreground

this intimacy, because I think what I’ve learned from my own attempts to make my way in that

land of myths has inspired my approach to writing this dissertation: put simply, to embrace that

the mythical and material are inseparable. My early months of research were framed by the

claustrophobia of encountering familiar tales from my childhood. The deep history of having to

leave for work; the simple way of life and aversion to progress; the down-home generosity of

the people and the rural tradition of mutual aid; the absence of class conflict and radicalism; the

‘official’ collective memory of white hardship that selectively recognized the deportation of the

Acadians by the British or the Scottish Highland clearances; the Island’s comprehensive

Christianity; and a white ethno-racial purity, cleanly delineated along Scottish, Irish, English,

and Acadian lines. In their power to render the myriad of other stories about this place

invisible—diverse stories of violence, occupation, exclusion, and exploitation, but also stories of

survival, resistance, radical dreams, and difference—I was well practiced at resenting these

tales.12 But I had also long been getting tangled in them as I fruitlessly tried to locate the line

12 At their most basic, these other stories might include the presence of widespread produced poverty, extreme levels of corporate control over everyday life, the dramatic pace of ocean warming, elevated levels of cancers and other deadly diseases linked to agriculture and industry, histories of racial erasure, violent conflicts over resource extraction and circulation, fear and political nepotism. And they would necessarily also include longstanding and ongoing resistance to these realities. In the first year of my research in the region, alone, there were several major conflicts related to work, resources, and economic development: region-wide coalition organizing and protests against employment insurance reforms (see Chapters 1 and 6); an unprecedented region-wide lobster strike; and a months-long blockade against hydraulic fracturing development in southern New Brunswick led by the Elsipogtog First Nation and supported by Acadian and Anglophone allies. For background on the lobster strike see Suzanne Morton, ‘Historicizing the Lobster Fishery Tie-Up’, Active History (blog), 22 May 2013,

14

between ‘fiction’ and ‘fact’: to understand what this place really was. It has been somewhat of a

journey for me to let go of this struggle and to move toward patiently and thoughtfully—which,

I have had to remember, are not the opposite of critically—examining the impossibly narrow

ways this place has been recounted.13 But, in doing so, I have drawn on the powerful ways I

learned these lessons during those summers performing for tips at the nexus of the mytho-

material.

Ian McKay’s work on the reinvention of Nova Scotia history has been indispensable in helping

me understand the productive relationship between stories about a place—and the Maritimes, in

http://activehistory.ca/2013/05/historicizing-the-lobster-fishery-tie-up/. For a summary of the fracking resistance at Elsipogtog see Miles Howe, Debriefing Elsipogtog: The Anatomy of a Struggle (Halifax: Fernwood Books, 2015). 13 Notably, academic narratives have often reproduced these tendencies. In 1978, E.R. Forbes noted Canadian historians’ failure to include the region in their analyses of national history, but also the failure of Maritime academics to “respond effectively to the Maritimers’ own obvious, and sometimes desperate, search for an historical perspective which would help them to understand their plight in a modern world.” At the time, Forbes attributed this to the dominance of a Canadian “frontierist approach” inspired partly by the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner and partly by a domestic myth about the promising and progressive nature of the west: that, to understand the “progressive dynamic animating Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one should look westward to Ontario, to the Prairies, the British Columbia and to the North.” Forbes, ‘In Search of a Post-Confederation Maritime Historiography’, 3, 6. This is, of course, not a matter of mere regional exclusion but the omission of particular histories, people, and struggles within the region, including their place in much broader national and transnational process. Gregory Kealey, for example, has documented how the story of the “‘radical’ west and the conservative east” have omitted rich traditions of labour radicalism in the east from narratives of Canadian labour history. As McKay and Bates would note about Nova Scotia thirty years later, “[b]ookshelves groan beneath the weight of studies detailing the province’s constituent communities, pivotal events, and prominent personalities, but they are far less crowded with studies offering general interpretations and analytical frameworks.” Studies that emphasize relationality and aim to traverse the stories of the region’s various peoples, historical epochs, and industries, and to explicate the entanglement of historical representation and material history are much more rare. Gregory S. Kealey, ‘1919: The Canadian Labour Revolt’, Labour / Le Travail 13 (Spring 1984): 15; Ian McKay and Robin Bates, In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 22. There was brief moment, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which a group of Marxist political economic scholars were grappling with the question of uneven regional development in relation to the Maritimes and Atlantic Canada. This body of scholarship noted that most Marxist analyses of unevenness attended to the global (imperialism) and urban scales, but much less to the regional spatial variation within the nation-state. See Candace Kim Edel et al., ‘Uneven Regional Development: An Introduction to This Issue’, Review of Radical Political Economics 10, no. 3 (1978): 1–12. These scholars argued that attention to regional differentiation had overlooked questions of labour and class and was largely dominated in the Canadian context by spatial science and variations on Innis’s staples theory. This work engaged ideas including uneven development, semi-proletarianisation, and surplus population in an attempt to provide a historical materialist account of Maritime underdevelopment. See, for example Michael Clow, ‘Politics and Uneven Capitalist Development: The Maritime Challenge to the Study of Canadian Political Economy’, Studies in Political Economy 14 (1984): 117–40; R. James Sacouman, ‘Semi-Proletarianization and Rural Underdevelopment in the Maritimes’, Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology 17, no. 3 (1980): 232–45; R. James Sacouman, ‘The “Peripheral” Maritimes and Canada-Wide Marxist Political Economy’, Studies in Political Economy 6 (Autumn 1981): 135–50; Henry Veltmeyer, ‘The Underdevelopment of Atlantic Canada’, Review of Radical Political Economics 10, no. 3 (1978): 95–105. See also Robert J. Brym and R. James Sacouman, eds., Underdevelopment and Social Movements in Atlantic Canada (Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1979).

15

particular—and its political economy.14 McKay has expertly picked apart the persistent and

hegemonic notion of what he calls the Simple Life, carefully documenting the twentieth century

forces—economic crisis, industrial urbanization, entrenched class divisions, the reconstruction

of race, new ideas about the country and the city, and the production of folk tourism—that

coalesced to produce what he calls the framework of “Innocence” in the Nova Scotia context.

“A set of fused and elaborated myths,” Innocence, as a system of explanation, “provided Nova

Scotians [for McKay, a thoroughly invented category] with an overall framework of meaning, a

new way of imagining their community” as “innocent of the complications and anxieties of

twentieth century modernity.”15 McKay’s work has helped me see that it is precisely the

seeming irrelevance of the Maritimes that makes excavating the region’s filth and documenting

its centrality in Canadian capitalism an important political challenge. For McKay, this re-

narration of Nova Scotia life was driven by and helped shore up the political-economic status

quo. This was not only by securing new areas of life for commodification and profit-making, but

also through its impact on local modes of understanding: undermining radical imaginaries and

working class organizing and making way for new “neo-nationalist” political identifications and

ideologies rooted in the region or an imagined provincial community, to borrow from Benedict

Anderson.16 As a guiding mythology of daily life, these tendencies certainly persist today. As he

describes in the foreword to the latest edition of The Quest of the Folk, the book has inspired

praise from some readers, but has also sparked a “‘lock-up-your-children’ moral panic” from

others. McKay insightfully speculates that this is likely for the simple reason that “it documents,

and then often critiques, everyday things that have a ‘taken-for-granted’ feel to them.”17

For McKay, this charged realm of the ‘taken-for-granted’ is the realm of hegemony, a theory of

ideology and social power that he takes from Antonio Gramsci.18 For Gramsci, governing power

14 McKay, The Quest of the Folk; McKay and Bates, In the Province of History; see also Ian McKay, ‘Tartanism Triumphant: The Construction of Scottishness in Nova Scotia: 1933-1954’, Acadiensis 21, no. 2 (1992): 5–47. 15 This ‘new truth,’ which emerged in the period between 1920 and 1950, McKay explains: “was that the province was still enchanted, unspoiled, a Folk society, natural, and traditional: that the fall into capitalism and the ‘disenchantment of the world’ had not affected this society’s essential innocence of everything negative suggested by the phrase ‘modern life.’ The call of the blood and the racial memories of Folk, the timeless traditions of the fishing coves, the unceasing battles of male adventurers against the eternal sea, the pull of strong families bound together by tight knots of tradition and religion: these were some of the new particular myths produced by the general mythomoteur of Innocence” McKay, The Quest of the Folk, 30, 32; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006). 16 McKay, The Quest of the Folk, 36. 17 McKay, xi. 18 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); for a useful guide to some of these ideas see also Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 2007).

16

operates through a dual process that involves both coercive measures and the sowing of consent.

Hegemony refers largely to the latter form of power (though, the two are ultimately

inseparable): a diffused structure of power threaded through daily life in both thought and

practice, reproduced through the structure of society itself. As Raymond Williams explains it, “a

whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living.”19 Western and cultural

Marxist work on ideology has served as somewhat of an entry point into the questions about

stories at the centre of this project. In particular, I was drawn into theories of ideology in

reaction to the rather cold contours of traditions in geographical political economy that make

little room for the textures of lived life in their theories of space and power.20 In theories of

ideology I found a world of rich writing that tried to do exactly this: to grapple with the ways

incomprehensible structures of power and social relations are reproduced and resisted in social

life; to make sense of the place of feelings, experience, and everyday life in the reproduction of

capitalist relations.21

Raymond Williams, in particular, captures the richness of this dynamic, emphasizing how lived

experience finds explanations not in abstract ideas but in the felt material manifestation of the

world. In his study of the historical development of ideas of the country and the city, Williams

argues that this binary contrast—the country as the idealized past and the city as the realistic

future—has served as a dominant way of interpreting what are fundamentally the dislocating

experiences of capitalism. But, in the absence of other vocabulary for these experiences of 19 This useful quote continues: “our sense and assignments of energy, our shaping of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society….” Raymond Williams, ‘Hegemony’, in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 110. 20 I first had this reflection when introduced to the writing of David Harvey during an intensive graduate course focused on his work. My reaction was to his total body of work—in large part because I found it very powerful and compelling—but the dynamic is most palpable in his early Marxist theories of the production of space. For example: David Harvey, ‘The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: Toward a Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory’, in The Urbanization of Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 32–61; David Harvey, ‘The Urban Process Under Capitalism’, in The Urbanization of Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 1–31; David Harvey, ‘The Geopolitics of Capitalism’, in Social Relations and Spatial Structures, ed. Derek Gregory and John Urry (London: Mcmillan, 1985), 128–63. 21 On this first point, some have characterized this circulation as something akin to a map, wherein ideas, conceptions, or ideologies allow us to navigate a complex social terrain, serving as both a guide to social reality and a descriptive explanation of our own practices of navigating this reality. In particular see Barbara Jeanne Fields, ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America’, New Left Review 1, no. 181 (1990): 95–118; on mapping and ideology see also Kanishka Goonewardena, ‘The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics’, Antipode 37, no. 1 (2005): 46–71; Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Chiacago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60; and Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); including the analysis of his work offered by Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction.

17

alienation, the country and city have given them structure: “It is not only an absence or distance

of more specific terms and concepts; it is that in country and city, physically present and

substantial, the experience finds material which gives body to the thoughts.”22 The power of

Williams’s writing is not simply to outline how these ideas reflect the social order, but also to

illustrate how they are lived, both in terms of how and why they take hold as dominant ways of

understanding the world and how they open and foreclose how the future is imagined, enacted,

and struggled over. Importantly, as Terry Eagleton emphasizes, for Williams, and before him,

for Gramsci, hegemony is dynamic: always incomplete and in-process and, therefore, always

precarious. “Common sense”—or McKay’s realm of the taken-for-granted—as such, is always

an active terrain of contestation.23

But part of my turn to story here, is also a deliberate (partial) move away from theories of

ideology. The first reason for this is simply that I find them somewhat suffocating: compelling

and, I think, pivotal, but also, by design, near totalizing. Placed in its historical context of

working class defeat and fascism, what Perry Anderson calls the pessimism of Western

Marxism, broadly, makes sense.24 And, the question of struggle is central to what these authors

were trying to grapple with. Perhaps most clearly in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, but across

this broader body of work, the point was never to merely understand how class power and

ideology works, but to understand how to escape it. But, while it makes this political problem

clear, as a body of work, it has been much more powerful in relation to delineating power rather

than contesting it. This work has certainly helped me understand the nuanced and pervasive

workings of power, especially in relation to social institutions: notably, work, development, and

the state.25 But it has most influenced my thinking through the questions it has helped me ask

(rather than the answers it has given me) about how everyday ideas, knowledge, and narrative

constitute a key terrain of political contestation. This is, importantly, by no means the ‘domain’

of Western Marxism or theories of ideology. This point has been made in different ways, but

with at least equal force by diverse traditions of feminist and anti-colonial writing, for

22 The Country and the City, 291 emphasis added. 23 Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 115–16. 24 As noted in Eagleton, 146. Anderson explains: “For the root determinant of this tradition was its formation in defeat – the long decades of set-back and stagnation, many of them terrible ones in any historical perspective, undergone by the Western working class after 1920.” Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1976), 93. 25 In particular, Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks; Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1958); Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’.

18

example.26 This particular emphasis on contestation loosens ideology’s grip somewhat,

emphasizing that hegemonic common sense always hangs in the balance because there are

always other stories, traditions, and ways of knowing that challenge it or simply see and do

things otherwise. And it embeds daily life with political possibility, highlighting innocuous and

unsuspecting experiences and social relations as important to the reproduction of the status quo.

In this way, we can draw loosely on this work to see stories as a sort of ideological practice, a

specific terrain of ideological contestation.

Against this backdrop, thinking through the role of stories in structuring relationships has given

this analysis more nuance and specificity. In her study of how settler stories have shaped the

social and environmental relations of the contemporary Arctic, Emilie Cameron explains her

close examination of one particular story as a methodological tool: “a kind of organizing focus

that draws attention to some of the complex relations through which past, present, and future

Norths have been made possible, sensible, and legible.”27 My own engagement with stories is

more diffuse—spanning the naturalization of poverty and pathologies of failure, to narratives

about the imperative of economic growth, labour market flexibility, and the “national

interest”—but this idea of story as a way into social relations and social processes resonates with

my project. If we take seriously the idea that stories are constitutive of relationships and material

realities, then in examining particular stories in their detailed historical geographical contexts,

we can gain insight into the processes and relationships that have governed the at-once material

and ideological contours of the possible. Importantly, taking stories seriously as a way in makes

space for elements of social life and experience not often captured in political economic

analysis. Such an approach would always come up short here, including (among other reasons)

for the fact that it could never account for how the options for the future—whether the

‘inevitability’ of pipeline expansion or the ‘inevitability’ of working out west—ever got set to

be so narrow. Exploring this broader political economy with and through the stories that have

not only interpreted but also helped to organize these narrow futures opens space for concretely

making sense of their inseparability.

26 E.g. Nancy Harstock, ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’, in Discovering Reality, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, 1983, 283–310; Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, Reprint edition (New York: Grove Press, 2005); Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks. 27 Cameron, Far Off Metal River, 13.

19

As I have grappled to make sense of these circulating stories I have also begun to see how my

own choices as a storyteller are part of these dynamics. From the very beginning, of course, my

decisions about how to frame my questions, where to travel, whom to speak with, and which

historical avenues to pursue have shaped the story in this document. But beyond these more

concrete research decisions, I have also had to decide how to recount the detailed facts I learned

in my research and, above all, how to tell a story about the vast and convoluted geographies of

Canadian political economy. As in my struggle with common sense stories above, it took me a

long time to understand this as a matter of storytelling. There is a peculiar, messy, and

somewhat undiscussed part of the social science research process that lies between collecting

data and “writing up” your findings. In a project like this there is no pre-determined conclusion

that arises from the research. Faced with hours of interview tape, thousands of photographed

documents from the archives, pages upon pages of notes, memories and emotions from my

research encounters, I had to find a story: a way to make sense of a complex of regional,

national, and global processes that would at once do justice to the experiences of the people at

the centre of this research and convey the powerful forces structuring those experiences. In this

sense, in writing this dissertation I am yet another storyteller. And, while bound by the details of

my findings, I have made deliberate decisions to weave a path through these details that

challenges the tendency of so many stories to obscure the contingency of these histories.

The story that got me thinking about these questions was the story that Maritimers have always

left for work. The history is told in sequence: first to the “Boston states” in the late 1800s to

work in manufacturing, then to the Prairies at the turn of the century for the Harvest Excursion,

then to Ontario after World War Two to build the suburbs and work in the plants, and today, to

Alberta to work in oil. I heard this sequence over and over, padded with accounts of

grandfathers walking to New Brunswick to work in forestry or intergenerational return

migration between the east coast and Ontario. In its repetitive character, fantastical sensibility,

and detached delivery—a casual claim that something seemingly so extraordinary was utterly

ordinary—this narrative took on the hazy and ambiguous character of a story. I started to see

similar dynamics at play in other contexts: the story of the crippling Alberta labour shortage, the

story of the imperative to build pipelines, the story of the “new” local economy, the story of

rural decline, the story of “good jobs” out west. Seeing this plurality of stories as they were

situated in the national political economy drew my attention to a whole different arena of

contestation: how the stories about what has been, what is, and what will be are powerful forces

20

in determining what, how, for whom will be. The stories in this dissertation span worker’s

narratives about their own lives, employers’ stories about workers, official government rhetoric,

labour market science, and economic development policy. This is a somewhat eclectic group of

narratives, reproduced by vastly different actors with different degrees of power, but they are

united in a strange way as declarations of destiny: stories about enduring, unchangeable pasts

and inevitable futures. The question at hand, then, is not only where these particular declarations

of destiny came from, but what types of lives, relationships, geographies, and experiences they

reproduce, undermine, re-create, and make make sense. With these questions in mind, this

dissertation uses these stories as a portal into the networked and dispersed social relations of the

Canadian staple state.

Staple state, settler state, welfare state

As I write, the world is reacting to the remarkable news that the Canadian government has

decided to purchase, for $4.5 billion, the Trans Mountain Pipeline and its planned expansion

project from the Canadian division of the Houston pipeline company, Kinder Morgan.28 The

expansion project, which would triple the amount of diluted bitumen flowing between the

Alberta oil sands and the Port of Burnaby in BC, has been subject to fierce opposition from

Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, municipalities, and the BC government.29 The

Secwepemc Nation, in particular, has issued a declaration that the pipeline will not pass through

their territory (which comprises a major portion of the route) and First Nations,

environmentalists, and municipalities have brought court cases challenging the approval of the

project.30 Frustrated by unpredicted delays and investment risks—caused by assertions of

28 Canada. Department of Finance, ‘Agreement Reached to Create and Protect Jobs, Build Trans Mountain Expansion Project’, Press release, 29 May 2018, https://www.fin.gc.ca/n18/18-038-eng.asp. 29 See Marc-Andre Cossette, ‘Expect Protests “Like You’ve Never Seen Before” on Kinder Morgan Pipeline: Vancouver Mayor’, CBC News, 19 November 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/gregor-robertson-kinder-protests-house-1.3857711. For background on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project see: https://www.transmountain.com/project-overview. 30 For information on the Secwepemc declaration and resistance to the pipeline see, https://www.secwepemculecw.org/. See also Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade, Standing Rock of the North: The Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Secwepemc Rick Assessment, 2017, https://www.secwepemculecw.org/risk-assessment. On the consolidated challenge to the Federal Court of Appeal, see: Ethan Lou, ‘Lawsuit against Kinder Morgan Pipeline Expansion Starts in Canada’, Reuters, 2 October 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/legal-us-canada-kinder-morgan-cn-lawsuit/lawsuit-against-kinder-morgan-pipeline-expansion-starts-in-canada-idUSKCN1C71DL; Brenna Owen, ‘We’ve Got New Trans Mountain Data and We’re Sharing It’, APTN News, 3 July 2018, http://aptnnews.ca/2018/07/03/weve-got-new-trans-mountain-data-and-were-sharing-it/. Details of the court challenge are available here: https://www.neb-one.gc.ca/pplctnflng/crt/index-eng.html. For two cases in the BC courts see: Justine Hunter, ‘Long List of Intervenors Approved in B.C. Reference Case on Oil Pipelines’, The Globe and Mail, 18 June 2018, online edition, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-long-list-of-intervenors-approved-in-bc-

21

Indigenous jurisdiction and several court cases—Kinder Morgan gave the federal government

an ultimatum: fix it or we’re out. As other prospective pipeline projects have fallen, one by one,

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has remained unflinching in its commitment to expanding

the Trans Mountain line. As investment conditions have worsened and opposition has mounted,

rather than use this moment to begin re-imagining the Canadian economy, Trudeau and his

government dug in their heels. Touting jobs and the national interest, on May 29 Finance

Minister Bill Morneau made clear that that Canada would forcefully assert its jurisdiction,

announcing the government’s decision to purchase the project.

Canada has long been characterized, following Harold Innis, as a “staple state.” In recent

decades federal governments, including the current one, have bolstered resource nationalism and

reasserted the centrality of natural resources in the national economy.31 This period, which

Suzanne Mills and Brendan Sweeney have characterized as a “neostaples” era, has been marked

by increasingly large and foreign-owned firms, capital-intensive operations, mobile labour

regimes, and the export of unprocessed resources.32 Federal policy continues to actively enable

this agenda, securing private access to Indigenous lands and criminalizing land defenders,

reducing regulations and streamlining approval processes, developing and securing the

infrastructure needed to move resources to market, and facilitating labour flexibility.33 Moments

reference-case-on-oil/; Emily Lazatin and Simon Little, ‘Squamish Nation, City of Vancouver to Appeal Trans Mountain Court Ruling’, Global News, 4 July 2018, https://globalnews.ca/news/4312322/squamish-nation-city-of-vancouver-to-appeal-trans-mountain-court-ruling/. 31 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada; Innis, The Cod Fishery; see also Watkins, ‘A Staple Theory of Economic Growth’; Clark-Jones, A Staple State. 32 Suzanne Mills and Brendan Sweeney, ‘Employment Relations in the Neostaples Resource Economy: Impact Benefit Agreements and Aboriginal Governance in Canada’s Nickel Mining Industry’, Studies in Political Economy 91 (Spring 2013): 7–34; see also Mel Watkins, ‘Staples Redux’, Studies in Political Economy 79 (Spring 2007); Jim Stanford, ‘Staples, Deindustrialization, and Foreign Investment: Canada’s Economic Journey Back to the Future’, Studies in Political Economy 82 (Autumn 2008). 33 On surveillance and criminalization see: Russell Diabo and Shiri Pasternak, ‘First Nations Under Surveillance: Harper Government Prepares for First Nations “Unrest”’, First Nations Strategic Bulletin 9, no. 1–5 (May 2011): 1–6; Tia Dafnos, ‘Pacification and Indigenous Struggles in Canada’, Socialist Studies / Études Socialistes 9, no. 2 (2013): 57–77; Preston, ‘Neoliberal Settler Colonialism’; Jorge Barrera, ‘RCMP Intelligence Centre Compiled List of 89 Indigenous Rights Activists Considered “Threats”’, APTN News, 8 November 2016, http://aptnnews.ca/2016/11/08/rcmp-intelligence-centre-compiled-list-of-89-indigenous-rights-activists-considered-threats/. On approval processes see Robert B. Gibson, ‘In Full Retreat: The Canadian Government’s New Environmental Assessment Law Undoes Decades of Progress’, Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal 30, no. 3 (2012): 179–88; Max Paris, ‘Energy Industry Letter Suggested Environmental Law Changes’, CBC News, 9 January 2013, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/energy-industry-letter-suggested-environmental-law-changes-1.1346258. On infrastructure: Shiri Pasternak, ‘The Economics of Insurgency: Thoughts on Idle No More and Critical Infrastructure’, Rabble.Ca, 14 January 2013, http://rabble.ca/news/2013/01/economics-insurgency-thoughts-idle-no-more-and-critical-infrastructure; John Paul Tasker, ‘Trudeau Cabinet Approves Trans Mountain, Line 3 Pipelines, Rejects Northern Gateway’, CBC News, 29 November 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-cabinet-trudeau-pipeline-decisions-1.3872828; Jeffrey Monaghan and

22

like this one, in which the state circles its horses around extraction, reveal some of the key

linchpins in this national political economy. The staple state is on clear display in this rush to

mobilize resources—land, labour, capital, infrastructure, law, and allegiances—in the service of

extraction. In this way, moments like this crystallize clearly the Canadian state’s strong

managerial role vis-à-vis extractive economies and labour markets. But, if we are to take

seriously the centrality of resource development to Canadian political economy, we need to also

understand its quotidian forms. Events like Morneau’s purchase bring the settler colonial staple

state into sharp focus, but they are not distinct from the ongoing, everyday, and often

unspectacular ways that diverse peoples and places are enrolled in—and resist—the

relationships and processes through which this state form finds its power.

This dissertation aims to contribute to the project of understanding the quotidian operations of

Canadian political economy. Here, I am working from an understanding of the Canadian state as

an active facilitator of extractive accumulation and associated land, labour, and resource

markets. But while my attention is broadly on the reproduction of extractive economies, my

investigation of state power often looks away from the resource frontier, focusing, rather, on

people and places that are both distant and peripheral to these sites of intensive accumulation. I

emphasize the entwined governance of resources, land, and labour and attend to seemingly

removed arenas of state administration—most notably, as I explain below, poverty policy—as

central to the state management of these economies and to the territorial dynamics of Canadian

political economy more generally. In focusing on these more obscured and quotidian forms of

state power I am attempting to move away from historical explanations rooted in distinct

political eras with distinct (and often taken-for-granted) political logics. Rather than accept the

expansion and function of welfare state policy, for example, as operating through a particular

logic (e.g. poverty relief or political discipline), I have sought to investigate, by examining the

historical everyday workings of state administration, what the logic is, where it comes from, and

how it operates. Using this approach, I have tried to assemble an explanation of state power that

attends more closely to the details—the work, conflicts, contradictions, and failures—at the

Kevin Walby, ‘Surveillance of Environmental Movements in Canada: Critical Infrastructure Protection and the Petro-Security Apparatus’, Contemporary Justice Review 20, no. 1 (2017): 51–70. And for some basic background on Canada’s flexibility labour regimes: Karl Flecker, ‘Building a Disposable Workforce through Temporary Migration Policy’, Canadian Issues, Spring 2010, 99–103; Harsha Walia, ‘Transient Servitude: Migrant Labour in Canada and the Apartheid of Citizenship’, Race & Class 52, no. 1 (2010): 71–84; Julia Temple Newhook et al., ‘Employment-Related Mobility and the Health of Workers, Families, and Communities: The Canadian Context’, Labour / Le Travail, no. 67 (Spring 2011): 121–56.

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heart of how state programs to mobilize labour, exploit resources, and manage markets are (and

often are not) actualized.

To this end, I have focused heavily on the somewhat banal and often invisible work of

bureaucracy. I have emphasized the ways that, despite the dramatic shifts in the dominant

political ethos—from the high modernism and welfare state expansion of the 1960s to the

neoliberal gutting of state programs and market regulations that continues today—the

bureaucratic workings and failures of the state both fragment the state’s coherence and

hegemony at any given moment, and in doing so, produce a sort of continuity across a longer

term: most notably, the enduring dispersed attempts and persistent failure to perfectly manage

markets, mobility, and the coordination of so-called national resources. While these historical

periods are most often contrasted, my analysis of the Canadian state emphasizes the continuity

that runs through these shifts, highlighting enduring logics evident in both welfare and resource

policy, and the relationship between them. In taking this approach, I am not arguing that the

Canadian state has featured some sort of persistent planned coherence. My aim, rather, is to

highlight bureaucracy and bureaucrats as both a portal into state logic and an important site of

state power and fracture. By attending to the messy details of bureaucratic work in both its

failure and success to actualize state programs, this research emphasizes how certain

fundamental logics of Canadian political economy endure across the changing political

landscape.

In pursuing this analysis of Canadian political economy, I am building on a long tradition of

theorizing the Canadian state in relation to what are commonly referred to as “natural

resources”—though this language already says something of the relationship. Scholarship in this

tradition has broadly encapsulated this relationship through the concept of the staple state,

signifying the central role of the pursuit, extraction, and export of raw resources in shaping the

course of national social and economic history.34 Staple theory is most directly attributable to

political economist Harold Innis, who articulated these ideas, first and foremost, empirically:

most notably through two extremely detailed examinations of key commodities in Canada’s

34 While Innis roots the staple state within the context of the global circulation of materials that fed British imperial expansion, his focus remains on the process of trade.

24

economic history, fur and cod.35 Staple theory, in its original form, places the staple commodity

at the centre of Canadian economic history, arguing that the search for and exploitation of these

staples—for export to colonial centres—is central historically to the social and economic

development of the nation and its internal regions. Spurred in part by Mel Watkins’s revival of

staple theory in 1963, Innis’s work would go on to inform a renewed school of Canadian

political economy over subsequent decades.36 Like Innis, this work centred trade as a key

determining factor in shaping Canadian economic history, emphasizing that Canada’s

subjugation to US capital and markets had rendered it a resource hinterland. Throughout of the

1970s and 1980s, scholarship in this tradition drew attention to some important elements of

class and power that had been previously understudied in Canadian political economy:

interrogating the development of elite power formations and state-industry alliances,

considering production regimes and the political economy of war, and making (some) room for

imperialism.37 Innis’s deeply empirical investigations offer a useful model of economic change

that integrates internal differentiation with global imperial relations. And subsequent work has

built on this in some crucial ways through (selective) attention to class dynamics and political

power.

But here we run up against this work’s major limitation: Canadian political economy has been

plagued by a persistent nationalism, rarely interrogating the “Canada” on which its analysis is

built. As Paul Kellogg notes in his critical review of this work, these analyses have been

35 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada; Innis, The Cod Fishery. These ideas were then popularized by Mel Watkins more than twenty years later, who used the theory to analyse Canada’s structural underdevelopment Watkins, ‘A Staple Theory of Economic Growth’. 36 Watkins, ‘A Staple Theory of Economic Growth’. 37 Canadian political economy from this time can be broadly classified into this “New” (Innisian, left nationalist) Canadian political economy and a looser Marxist school of Canadian political economy. While the empirical concerns and political thrust of this work certainly varied, there is an overwhelming concern with the consolidation of corporate capital within the context of continental dynamics: the position of Canadian capitalist development vis-à-vis the US. For a useful overview of this work see the Autumn 1981 special issue of Studies in Political Economy, including the article by Leo Panitch in which he characterizes Canada’s “new political economy.” Panitch, ‘Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy’.” Key works from this era include: E.g. James Laxer, The Energy Poker Game: The Politics of the Continental Resources Deal (Toronto: New Press, 1970); Larry Pratt, The Tar Sands: Syncrude and the Politics of Oil (Edmonton, AB: Hurtig, 1976); Wallace Clement, Challenge of Class Analysis (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988); Wallace Clement, ‘Debates and Directions: A Political Economy of Resources’, in The New Canadian Political Economy, ed. Wallace Clement and Glen Williams (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 36–53; Clark-Jones, A Staple State; Clement and Williams, The New Canadian Political Economy; Drache and Clement, The New Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy. For an important critique from that period see Frances Abele and Daiva Stasiulis, ‘Canada as a “White Settler Colony”: What about Natives and Immigrants?’, in The New Canadian Political Economy, ed. Wallace Clement and Glen Williams (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 240–77.

25

preoccupied with concerns about Canada’s political economic “dependence” and located the key

axis of power as operating north-south between Canada and the US.38 At times, authors have

gone so far as to characterize the staples economy as rendering Canada politically and

economically “balkanized” or, even, having “always meant colonialism for Canada,” first by

Britain and then the United States.39 Frances Abele and Daiva Staliulis noted in an important

intervention in 1989—pointing to what they called the “white settler colony” analysis—

historically, political economic studies of Canada have engaged very little with questions of

race, nation, and colonialism.40 And Marxist political economists—most notably, David

McNally—have challenged the Innisian tradition as fetishistic for placing the inherent qualities

of the staple commodity, rather than social relations, at the centre of its analysis.41 McNally’s

38 Kellogg, Escape from the Staple Trap. 39 Laxer, The Energy Poker Game, 15. Much of this analysis flowed from an understanding that Canada’s staples dependency and the dominance of foreign firms have prevented the development of a mature manufacturing sector. The solution, from this analytical and political vantage point, is rooted in economic nationalism. Visions for what Clark-Jones calls “a nationalist approach to development of natural resources” that “link the production of resources to the construction of indigenously controlled manufacturing,” for example, remain firmly embedded in assumptions of industrial resource production, class-based politics, and the nationalization of resources. Clark-Jones, A Staple State, 11. As Paul Kellogg explains in his critical review of these traditions in Canadian political economy, this tradition of scholarship and the political solutions that flowed from it were based in a “left nationalist” politics that remain prevalent in self-identified Canadian “left” politics. As he says, “in an imperialist nation, it is impossible to combine ‘left’ with ‘nationalist.’ The call for something like a ‘nationalist resistance movement’…opens the door to the political right, not to the political left…. If you have any doubt, try calling for a ‘nationalist resistance movement’ in Germany, France, Italy, Japan, or the United States – and then reflect upon the history of the twentieth century.” Kellogg, Escape from the Staple Trap, 8. But the other looming context in any appeal to the Canadian state vis-à-vis politics generally and “natural resources” more specifically is that of ongoing relations and processes of settler colonialism. As Emily Eaton and David Gray-Donald write in a recent piece on the question of socializing oil and decolonization in Saskatchewan, “While socialization can be a first step in wresting control from the corporations that are privately profiting from using a shared resource while despoiling the land, water, and air, it cannot be the endgame.” For the sake of both the climate and decolonization, they write, “Lands must be returned, and the industry must be wound down.” Emily Eaton and David Gray-Donald, ‘Socializing and Decolonizing Saskatchewan’s Oil’, Briarpatch, 30 April 2018, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/socializing-and-decolonizing-saskatchewans-oil. 40 In The New Canadian Political Economy, Abele and Stasiulis highlighted these dynamics in Canadian political economic theory as what they called the “white settler colony” analysis. These authors point to the tendency among critical political economists to historicize Canadian development to the mid-1800s and largely erase the role of Indigenous and immigrant labour and, crucially, the centrality of consolidating control over Indigenous livelihoods and lands to the Canadian state project. Abele and Stasiulis, ‘Canada as a “White Settler Colony”’. 41 See: David McNally, ‘Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism: Marx, Innis and Canadian Political Economy’, Studies in Political Economy 6 (Autumn 1981); David McNally, ‘Technological Determinism and Canadian Political Economy: Further Contributions to a Debate’, Studies in Political Economy 20 (Summer 1986): 161–69. McNally and Kellogg both note that in his 1963 essay on staples theory—which helped to popularize Innis’s ideas among a new generation of Canadian political economists—Watkins is much more tentative about the determining power of staples or the “staples trap” than subsequent work would become. Watkins, ‘A Staple Theory of Economic Growth’; McNally, ‘Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism’, 46; Kellogg, Escape from the Staple Trap, 8. Wallace Clement’s work has examined labour and industrial relations in Canadian mining. For a detailed study of industrial relations and technological change in mining, which includes the voices of workers, see Wallace Clement, Hardrock Mining: Industrial Relations and Technological Changes at Inco (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981); see also ‘The Subordination of Labour in Canadian Mining’, Labour / Le Travail 5 (Spring 1980): 133–48.

26

emphasis here is on the absence of labour and class struggle as historical drivers, but we might

also extend his observation to point us to the centrality of territory in the social relations of the

staple state.42 The left nationalism of much Canadian political economy not only glosses over

the realities of this resource-based political economy for communities and ecologies on the

ground. It also lets Canada off the proverbial hook, erasing both its global imperialist power and

inseparable internal structures of settler colonialism, failing to question the foundational

relations of exploitation and dispossession in which Canadian political economy is embedded

and reproduced.

More recent scholarship, including in geography, has taken these questions on more directly.

Scholars including Glen Coulthard, Shiri Pasternak, and Cole Harris have worked to situate

political economies of resource extraction in relation to Canada’s historic and ongoing drive to

secure access to Indigenous territories, reframing (though perhaps not renaming) the staple state

as the settler staple state.43 In taking on the broad legal, bureaucratic, territorial, and ideological

workings of the state vis-à-vis questions of sovereignty and jurisdiction over resources and land,

this type of work has, in some ways, revived—but, crucially, remade—a tradition of ‘big’

political economy, driven by detailed empirical research, and focused on critically interrogating

“Canada.” I have pored over this research with great enthusiasm—enthusiasm I also felt for the

‘old’ political economy of Harold Innis’s study of cod or Wallace Clement’s study of

technological change and the labour process in Inco mines—but it took me time to understand

why it felt so relevant to my own work.44

In reading the broad histories of colonial and resource policy alongside empirical and place-

based accounts of how they have played out on the ground, I began to see resonances between

those trajectories of state power and resistance and the historical geographies I was studying. In

an attempt to follow this feeling, I set about building a multi-pronged timeline. Using sticky-

notes and the back of my office door, I tried to lay out what I thought were the four threads of

staple state regulation: resource policy, “Indian” policy, rural modernization and land reform,

42 For a similar critique of more recent Canadian political economy see David McNally, ‘Political Economy Without the Working Class?’, Labour / Le Travail 25 (Spring 1990): 217–26. 43 Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002); Harris, ‘How Did Colonialism Dispossess?’; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Pasternak, Grounded Authority; Pasternak and Dafnos, ‘How Does a Settler State Secure the Circuitry of Capital?’ 44 Innis, The Cod Fishery; Clement, Hardrock Mining.

27

and the regulation of labour and unemployment. It didn’t take long for the threads to become

braided, but in my inability to distinguish between them—an inability reflected back in the

shifting contours of government ministries over this same period—I found something of an

answer. Threaded through this account of the settler staple state I could insert a different set of

policy struggles that operated to a similar rhythm: government anxieties over regional

underdevelopment as a barrier to national productivity; the regulation of unemployment and

poverty; rural modernization and land consolidation; and longstanding patterns of rural white

labour mobility linked to shifting national geographies of capital accumulation. These were

anxieties and policies focused on places and people distant from the ones in the books I was

reading, but in their ambitions to ‘liberate’ resources for the sake of national growth, these

programs enrolled peripheral workers and geographies into the same national political economy.

Importantly, a political economy in which these peripheral places and manufactured classes of

workers would repeatedly be put to work on the staple state’s frontiers of accumulation: over the

decades, harvesting crops, clearing roads, building suburbs, or extracting resources. Equally

importantly, though, this is a political economy that, despite the ongoing rhetoric, never was and

never will be in the interest of these people or the places they live. But these very people and

communities have been powerful pawns in Canadian resource politics. Governments and

industry boosters have held them up as the abstract recipients of promised jobs and the

otherwise unemployed, as a concretization of the “national interest” and, in turn, as existing in

material and ideological opposition to critics of the extractive economy. In this way, the

everyday lives of these workers, the uneven development and ecological crises that shape their

material lives, their formulation as a ‘natural fit’ for extractive work, and the factors that enable

their incredible flexibility warrant investigation not only on their own terms, but also as

linchpins in the reproduction of the settler staple state.

What I aim to do, then, is to offer something back to this longstanding and somewhat disjointed

project of theorizing Canadian political economy. My contributions are two-fold. First, by

interrogating the historical geographical processes constituting and reproducing one class of

extractive workers, I hope here to emphasize the role of labour (making it, moving it, enacting

it, regulating it) in reproducing the political economy of the settler staple state. The question of

labour remains somewhat distant from scholarship (described above) delineating Canada’s

constitution as a settler state and a staple state. Historical studies that have linked settler

colonialism, the staple state, and labour, meanwhile, have tended to focus on the question of

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specifically Indigenous labour (discussed below) rather than, generally, the ways labour has,

often at great difficulty and with great effort, been structured in relation to processes of

occupation, settlement, and resource development. Resource labour is not and never has been a

given. In the face of “remoteness,” seasonality, and cyclicality, employers have long struggled

to formulate flexible, mobile, and reliable workforces for extraction. In drawing links between

geographies of concentrated poverty and unemployment, regional uneven development, and the

state’s pursuit of new resource frontiers, this research illustrates that extractive labour needs to

be—repeatedly and from many different angles—made.

In their own efforts to formulate these workforces, employers have received support from the

state through mechanisms that are often difficult to see as such. Making, moving, disciplining,

and periodically dispersing resource workers has been the subject of intensive effort and anxiety

on the part of the Canadian state. But this problem, and the state’s attempts to resolve it, are

embedded in a much broader dynamic of uneven development. In shifting my focus away from

the site of extraction alone, to include national geographies of accumulation, decline, and state

intervention, this research tries to articulate these seemingly disparate processes as one. Any

account of extractive labour must be situated in the broader political economic context in which

it is embedded. This means working to develop an analysis (and a method) that can

meaningfully account for both land and labour and their fractured, disparate, distinct, but related

governance. And so, while my focal point is extractive labour, I have tried to always keep these

workers in context: to move between the forces shaping their working lives, the broad

machinations of the national staple state, the ongoing historical relations of territorial

contestation that shape not only these industries but Canadian political economy more generally,

and the commonsense stories that frame these dynamics. This is a somewhat unwieldy load to

manage. Trying to keep these different balls in the air has meant that, in certain sections, the

story moves somewhat rapidly across vast geographies and very different social and economic

contexts (Chapter 3 is especially guilty of this). This has inevitably cost some intimacy but it has

also allowed me to keep these labour geographies in context and to lend these mobility patterns

the historical depth and political significance they deserve.

To this end, my second and related contribution to the study of Canadian political economy

stems from my focus on the role of the welfare state. Not only in its general function in

“regulating the poor,” as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued in their pivotal

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analysis, but in regulating poor people, labour markets, and ‘underdeveloped’ regions in relation

to specific geographies of accumulation.45 The staple state, in general, is plagued by the

perennial problem of mismatches: in various configurations, between capital, resources, and

labour. This is partially informed by the unique characteristic of “natural resources,” in contrast

to many other industries, as being fixed in space and often available for access or production

only seasonally.46 In the Canadian context, industrial staples activity is often located far from

major population centres (that is, ‘remote’ to settler geographies and centres of capital) and

work rhythms are shaped by the seasons, cycles of production and crisis, or both.47 These

conditions have often overlapped, not only in agriculture and forestry, but also, since the

postwar period, in mining and petroleum because activity in many northern regions is only

possible in the winter when heavy equipment can be brought in over frozen muskeg.48 Resource

industries in Canada have, as such, tended to present a series of labour challenges for employers

that arise from entangled social and natural dynamics. This is a central feature of the broader

mismatch problem that I am calling the staples-labour problem: the entwined spatio-temporal

mismatch between labour power and staples production, which demands constant management

but can never be fully resolved. The staples-labour problem informs the priorities and actions of

both industry and policy-makers, but, generally, in different ways. While industry’s anxieties

tend to focus on coordinating the right resources in time and space, state actors, preoccupied

with ‘waste’ have emphasized mobilizing ‘underused’ resources (e.g. unemployed or seasonally

employed people) to resolve the problem—thereby attempting to resolve two problems by

matching two different kinds of surplus.

45 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971). 46 See William Boyd, W. Scott Prudham, and Rachel A. Schurman, ‘Industrial Dynamics and the Problem of Nature’, Society & Natural Resources 14, no. 7 (2001): 555–70. 47 In their capacity as “natural resources” (that is, potential commodities in need of extraction in order to be sold on the market) these predetermined characteristics we can attribute to nature exist only ever in relation to social structures. And so, a designation like the “remoteness” of these resources is always a relative and social designation, rather than a “natural” condition. 48 Peatlands (composed of bogs or muskeg, fens, and swamps) comprise 13 percent of Canadian land surface, over 90 per cent of which is within the Boreal and Subarctic regions. Peatlands are deep waterlogged complexes of living and decomposing plant matter that developed throughout large areas of limited soil drainage after last glacial retreat. While over a third of Canada’s peatland is frozen, the majority is not. Depths average two to three metres but can run upward of 10 metres. In industries that operate in or travel over this ecosystem, I heard stories throughout my research of heavy equipment falling through the ice and being left submerged in the muskeg. Barry G. Warner and Taro Asada, ‘Biological Diversity of Peatlands in Canada’, Aquatic Sciences 68, no. 3 (2006): 240–53. See also Liza Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009). See specifically chapter 8 (“Industrial circuitry”) for an account of these transportation dynamics in the post-war subarctic.

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If mismatches have been a perennial problem of the staple state, welfare state capacity, I argue,

has been and continues to be mobilized as a solution.49 Since the post-war period, and perhaps

longer, state actors have sought to use poverty policy, land reform, and unemployment

programs—programs billed as serving the interests of the poor and unemployed—to ‘fix’ the

staples-labour problem.50 This general function of the welfare state is most notable in the post-

war era in which the expansion of welfare state capacity coincided with the focused expansion

of industrial resource production and a targeted initiative to ‘develop’ both poor rural areas and

what was seen as the resource periphery. With an eye to the efficient use of “national

49 There is a vast body of literature on what we can broadly call the regulatory function of the welfare state. Most of the early work on the spread of the welfare state form across Western capitalist democracies happened outside of geography, largely in history, sociology, and political economy. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 1971; James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973); Ian Gough, ‘State Expenditure in Advanced Capitalism’, New Left Review, no. 92 (August 1975): 53–91; Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, ed. John Keane (London: Hutchinson, 1984); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). Because critical political economy did not take hold in economic geography until the welfare state was already in decline, geography’s engagement with the welfare state emerged somewhat late and largely in response to post-Fordist state restructuring, rather than the roll-out of the welfare state itself. Here, I adopt a broad view of the welfare state that is grounded in political economy and focused on the state’s general role in organizing the economy. In emphasizing continuity, rather than change, I place my argument alongside scholarship that has refused a binary opposition between a period of welfare-state expansion, characterized as good for workers and the poor, in contrast to a subsequent period of contraction, characterized as bad. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 1971; Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse; Deborah Cowen, Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); David Garland, ‘The Welfare State: A Fundamental Dimension of Modern Government’, European Journal of Sociology 55, no. 3 (2014): 327–64. I follow scholarship that historicizes the welfare state not in the post-war period, but in national economic depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s and in wartime itself. On the former see Garland; on the latter see Cowen, Military Workfare; Jytte Klausen, War and Welfare: Europe and the United States, 1945 to the Present (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). This perspective emphasizes the managerial capacity and institutional continuity of the welfare state as a system of national administration—a state structure that specializes in capturing and redirecting resources and capacity toward “national” economic ends. My specific focus here is on the welfare state’s role in producing, managing, and mobilizing geographies of white poverty in the so-called national interest of extractive accumulation. Finally, while my framework for thinking about this particular state drive to make legible, manage, and coordinate ‘national resources’ has been a somewhat expansive conception of the welfare state (and what constitutes welfare state policy), Geoff Mann’s recent work on the long history of Keynesianism raises some of these same logics as central to what he calls Keynesian reason. My own analysis wavers on how to explain this drive to (and faith in) rational, calculative, coordination and management—between, as the case may be, national productivity, individual and population work and political discipline, and a colonial imperative that needs labour to control land and access resources. By Mann’s account, Keynesian reason—which is not the same thing as, but is perhaps evident in the welfare state as I understand it—is rooted in a deep “distrust of the masses,” a fear of radical democracy. This is not because the masses are seen as a political threat but is, rather, based on the belief that without the managerial hand of state, guided by the capable few, civilization itself would collapse. Rational scientific management and, more generally, the bureaucratic function of the state, in this context, are invoked as the means to ensure the reproduction of orderly and productive social and economic life in the face of both capitalist contradictions and the self-destructive drive of civil society. Geoff Mann, ‘Keynes Resurrected? Saving Civilization, Again and Again’, Dialogues in Human Geography 6, no. 2 (2016): 119–34. 50 I mean this in a double sense—as did David Harvey, through the concept of the “spatial fix”—that it both resolves the problem and fixes resources in space. See Harvey, ‘The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: Toward a Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory’; David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London; New York: Verso, 2006), chap. 13.

31

resources,” planners and policy makers set about remaking Maritime economies and Maritime

workers to fit with a broader vision of the national economy and what they called the “national

interest”: industrialization, urbanization, and the expansion of industrial resource extraction in

new ‘remote’ geographies not previously considered viable for extraction.51 Land reform and

mobility programs in eastern Canada sought to free “idle” resources to serve this vision of the

national economy: thereby—in theory—at once resolving the barriers that ‘underproductive’

regions posed to national economic growth and furnishing frontiers of accumulation with

resources required for their ongoing expansion. In this way, in extending its administrative reach

through so-called poverty policy, the state was able to secure the governance of marginal people

and places, to forge relationships between them, and, in doing so, to exploit deepening

geographies of national uneven development in the service of extractive accumulation. This

51 The combined shifts in geographies and modes of staples production in the decades following World War Two constitute key context for this dissertation. While the post-war period is often imagined as a moment of transition in the Canadian economy away from primary production, a series of factors coalesced to spur the Canadian state’s pursuit (or, more accurately, its facilitation of private pursuit) of new raw industrial resources (namely base metals, petroleum, and forestry products), at new scales, in regions that had not previously been subject to intensive industrialization because they were seen as unprofitable or unviable. In mining specifically, the post-war era marked a shift away from specialized, high-grade metals (especially silver and gold) toward base metals and lower-grade properties, many of which were located in the provincial north. A scattering of examples of significant industrial extractive geographies that developed in this region during this time includes: iron ore development in the Labrador Trough; the aluminium smelter in Kitimat, BC; the nickel-copper deposit at Lynn Lake, Manitoba; Uranium City, Saskatchewan; uranium mining at Elliot Lake, Ontario. Ken Coates and William Morrison, The Forgotten North: A History of Canada’s Provincial Norths (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1992). The factors contributing to this shift are somewhat diffuse: the expansion of the US economy and increased demand for industrial resources; the Cold War and Canada’s configuration as a ‘safe’ source; the militarization of the north, increased access to new geographies, settlement, and demand or ‘economic development’ and resources in the north; increased Canadian administrative state capacity from the War; and an invigorated colonial modernist ethos. The US President’s Materials Policy Commission and its report entitled Resources for Freedom (also known as the Paley Report)—which identified Canada as an important source of industrial materials for the US economy—forms an important part of this context. US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom: A Report to the President. (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1952); see also Clark-Jones, A Staple State; Clement, Challenge of Class Analysis. Frances Abele has reviewed the consolidation of federal control over the territorial north: a history inextricably linked to shifting industrial geographies of resource prospects. She notes this shifting emphasis was evident in the changing contours of government departments. Quoting Kenneth Rea, she explains that in 1954 the Department of Resources and Development was renamed the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources “to emphasize that ‘the centre of gravity of the department [was] being moved north’.” Twelve years later it would be renamed again, Indian Affairs and Northern Development, with additional responsibility for national “Indian” affairs. Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions’, 313; Kenneth J. Rea, The Political Economy of the Canadian North: An Interpretation of the Course of Development in the Northern Territories of Canada to the Early 1960’s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 47; see also Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, chap. 2. On Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s aspirations of Northern development see Philip Isard, ‘Northern Vision: Northern Development during the Diefenbaker Era’ (Masters thesis, University of Waterloo, 2010). For an examination of the provincial north (including see Coates and Morrison, The Forgotten North. Liza Piper also covers some of this history in The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. As Jonathan Peyton has argued, while many of the industrial resource and related infrastructure projects envisioned during this era were never realized, even in failure they altered the meanings of nature and place and the possibilities for what could be made of them. Jonathan Peyton, Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017). These changes are discussed in more detail in Chapters 1 and 3.

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genealogy brings to the fore somewhat innocuous, far flung, and unsuspecting sites of state

administration as powerful but easily obscured factors in the reproduction of Canadian

extraction and its territorial dynamics.52

In addition to the comprehensive character of welfare state administration, certain facets of the

Canadian welfare state have also played an important role in the story of regional unevenness

and Canadian economic development. While the disciplinary, punitive, and stigmatizing

character of welfare policy has been well documented and theorized—the most foundational

studies on which I draw examine the US context—the Canadian context is somewhat distinct

from the US in that the longstanding importance of federal equalization transfers reproduces

many of these same dynamics at a regional level. Introduced in 1957 in the era of mounting

federal concern over Atlantic underdevelopment and regional inequality, and enshrined in the

Constitution in 1982, equalization is designed to ensure all provinces (which have less capacity

to generate revenue than the federal government) have sufficient revenue to provide comparable

services across the country. 53 Based on each province’s revenue-raising capacity provincial

governments become either net contributors or beneficiaries of equalization: so-called “have” or

“have-not” provinces.54 Central to the enduring national dynamics of equalization is the fact that

the Atlantic region and Quebec would, from the get-go, be the major recipients of these

transfers. By the 1970s equalization payments accounted for more than one third of Atlantic

provincial governments’ revenues.55 With the exception of Newfoundland, which became a

“have” province and went off equalization in 2008 on account of oil revenues, this has remained

the case.56

52 My thinking about the relationship between the regulation of unemployment and the territoriality of Canadian political economy has been inspired by James Struthers’s research on Canadian unemployment policy. I review his ideas in some detail in Chapter 1. James Struthers, No Fault of Their Own: Unemployment and the Canadian Welfare State, 1914-1941 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 8. 53 In contrast to other transfer payments (the Canada Health Transfer and the Canada Social Transfer, which originally did but no longer have an equalization component), the Canada Fiscal Equalization Program is not earmarked for a specific purpose. Daniel Béland et al., Fiscal Federalism and Equalization Policy in Canada: Political and Economic Dimensions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 54 The equalization payments that flow from this calculation are based on the amount needed to bring a province’s fiscal capacity up to the national average Daniel Béland et al., ‘The Challenge in Canada’s Equalization Program’, Policy Options, no. Institute for Research on Public Policy (18 July 2018), http://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/july-2018/challenge-canadas-equalization-program/. 55 Della Stanley, ‘The 1960s: The Illusions and Realities of Progress’, in The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation, ed. E. R. Forbes and D. A. Muise (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 421–59. 56 Department of Finance Canada, Federal-Provincial Relations Division – Federal-Provincial Relations and Social Policy Branch. Equalization Entitlements, 1980-81 to 2017-18. Historical Transfer Tables: 1980-Present, Open Government. https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/4eee1558-45b7-4484-9336-e692897d393f. Accessed November 1, 2018.

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This somewhat unique dynamic of “have” and “have-not” provinces—and the persistent status

of the Atlantic region as “have-not”—has been an important factor in perpetuating notions of

east coast failure and an accompanying politics of regional resentment that sees this region as

parasitic on the rest of the country. Through a logic that mirrors neoliberal critiques of welfare,

one longstanding critique of Canadian transfer payments holds that these transfers have helped

discourage economic adjustment in failing regions.57 Invoking the problem of the undeserving

poor, critics blame equalization for subsidizing poverty, rewarding poor economic performance,

and encouraging dependence on government handouts.58 Importantly, while the original

equalization formula included only three sources of provincial revenue, by the late 1960s, it had

been expanded to include sixteen, including 50 percent of provincial natural resource revenues

(including energy resources) in 1962.59 As oil prices and revenues increased in the 1970s and

after, petroleum began to overshadow other elements of the equalization formula, shifting the

‘burden’ of equalization onto resource rich provinces in western Canada.60 Resources continue

to play a pivotal role in these politics of resentment and shame. In mainstream national media,

conservative politics, and regional political imaginaries, resource rich regions are often

characterized as unfairly having to shoulder the burden of underproductive regions, sometimes

explained as having chosen not to develop resources in their own jurisdiction.61 In this sense, the

fact of equalization and the imaginaries that surround it are pivotal not only to the story of 57 As E. R. Forbes explains, economists Thomas Courchene promoted this view with considerable success in the late 1970s. As Forbes writes, explaining Courchene’s use of “equilibrium theory”: “If wages fell low enough in the Atlantic Provinces the people would either leave, thus saving the welfare costs, or stay, thus providing a pool of cheap labour that would help to attract new industry.” Thomas J. Courchene, Regional Adjustment, the Transfer System, and Canadian Federalism, Research Paper (London, ON: Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario, 1979); as cited in E. R. Forbes, ‘Epilogue: The 1980s’, in The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation, ed. E. R. Forbes and D. A. Muise (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 506. 58 Mainstream economic analyses of transfer payments understand them as helping to discourage “fiscally induced migration” between provinces: that is, mobility driven by the availability of public goods and services, not employment. Since it is organized around the consumption of services rather than work, this type of mobility is understood as opposing productivity. But, as Béland et al. state plainly, transfer payments themselves have also often been understood as hindering productivity: “However, the economic literature suggests that, under some conditions, equalization payments may also create ‘welfare traps’ in recipient provinces, removing the incentive for economic migration and making both the ‘trapped’ population and the country worse off in the long run.” Béland et al., Fiscal Federalism and Equalization Policy in Canada, 4. 59 André Lecours and Daniel Béland, ‘Federalism and Fiscal Policy: The Politics of Equalization in Canada’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 40, no. 4 (2010): 569–96. 60 Lecours and Béland. 61 Courchene has called this “confiscatory equalization.” Thomas J. Courchene, ‘Confiscatory Equalization: The Intriguing Case of Saskatchewan’s Vanishing Energy Revenues’, Choices 10, no. 2 (2004): Institute for Research on Public Policy. For a recent example of this rhetoric being mobilized about Maritime resource development, see: Gwyn Morgan, ‘Fracking Opponents Should Stop Biting the Hand That Feeds’, The Globe and Mail, 5 October 2014, online edition, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/fracking-opponents-should-stop-biting-the-hand-that-feeds/article20937977/.

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Maritime failure, but also, to the political economy of the Canadian staple state and its broad

dynamics of uneven development.

Geographical theories of capitalist development have argued that geography and spatial

relations should not be seen as afterthoughts but are, rather, “active moments” in the dynamics

of capitalism.62 David Harvey, in particular, has illustrated a spatial contradiction in these

dynamics: that in producing the geographies that enable its reproduction, capitalism throws up

barriers to its own expansion.63 This dynamic is particularly pronounced in the context of

extractive accumulation, wherein projects are often relatively short-lived but involve intensive

investment in infrastructure and require a dramatic influx of labour. This contradiction is

perhaps most visible in the stark social and economic geographies of Canada’s many single-

industry towns that were abandoned by capital during the decline of what Hayter and Barnes

call “resource Fordism.”64 Here, investment by industry and the state in not only production, but

also, locally, in social reproduction, brought capital’s restlessness into clear focus by

highlighting its social implications. For its part, industry was able to mediate some of these risks 62 Harvey, ‘The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: Toward a Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory’. 63 As Harvey explains, the produced geographical landscape is “both the crowning glory of past capitalist development and a prison that inhibits the further progress of accumulation precisely because it creates spatial barriers where there were none before. The very production of this landscape, so vital to accumulation, is in the end antithetical to the tearing down of spatial barriers and the annihilation of space by time.” Harvey, 43. Much of Harvey’s work (and the uptake of his work) has focused on these dynamics in processes of urbanization but he has also theorized this dynamic at different scales and in relation to the capitalist system much more generally. See Harvey, ‘The Urban Process Under Capitalism’; Harvey, ‘The Geopolitics of Capitalism’; Harvey, The Limits to Capital. Smith proposed a more comprehensive theory of uneven development, broadening the scope of analysis to include questions of ideology, the inseparability of the production of capitalist nature/space, and offering an analysis of the processes of uneven development at multiple scales, including globally and at the scale of the nation-state. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, 3rd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); see also Scott Prudham and Nik Heynen, ‘Uneven Development 25 Years On: Space, Nature and the Geographies of Capitalism’, New Political Economy 16, no. 2 (2011): 223–32. 64 Roger Hayter and Trevor J. Barnes, ‘Canada’s Resource Economy’, The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien 45, no. 1 (2001): 36–41. See also John H. Bradbury, ‘Instant Towns in British Columbia: 1964-1972’ (Dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 1977); John H. Bradbury and Isabelle St-Martin, ‘Winding Down in a Quebec Mining Town: A Case Study of Schefferville’, Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien 27, no. 2 (1983): 128–44; Roger Hayter and Trevor Barnes, ‘The Restructuring of British Columbia’s Coastal Forest Sector’, BC Studies 113 (Spring 1997): 7–34; Roger Hayter, ‘“The War in the Woods”: Post-Fordist Restructuring, Globalization, and the Contested Remapping of British Columbia’s Forest Economy’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93, no. 3 (2003): 706–29. The classic study of single-industry towns in Canada is Rex A. Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown: Life in Canadian Communities of Single Industry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971). Lucas laid out a four-stage theory of resource town evolution, the final stage being “maturity.” As Hayter and Barnes note, Lucas’s conclusion would have been informed by the fact that his study was published before the end of what they characterize as a long Fordist resource boom. Hayter and Barnes, ‘The Restructuring of British Columbia’s Coastal Forest Sector’. Keith Storey and Heather Hall have recently argued that contemporary models of long-distance commuting have replicated some of the regional vulnerabilities and social effects of the single industry town, but at a distance. Keith Storey and Heather Hall, ‘Dependence at a Distance: Labour Mobility and the Evolution of the Single Industry Town’, The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien 62, no. 2 (2018): 225–37.

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(that is, risks posed to industry), as it always has in the staple state, by offloading costs and

accountability onto the state: for infrastructure development, for example, but also for the social

fallout of deindustrialization.65 But while their focused investment and concentrated geographies

render this contradiction highly visible in the case of company towns, this is a fundamental

dynamic of the staple state that predates and precedes resource Fordism. For both industry and

the state, the question of how to reproduce labour around this volatility—so as to mitigate the

costs and risks of its immediate unevenness but, also, of eventual restructuring—has always

been, and remains at its centre. Over the past 150 years, employers and governments have

pursued strategies for managing this problem: the government-run harvest excursion that,

between the 1890s and 1930s, coordinated the seasonal transportation of workers from Eastern

Canada to the Prairie wheat harvest; the exploitation of unemployed men in government work

camps during the Great Depression; Fordist attempts to settle workforces in resource towns

during the post-war period; and, most recently, fly-in, fly-out and other dramatic mobility

arrangements that dominate extraction, forestry, and resource-related construction today.66 In

ways that are both obvious and obscured, poverty policy and welfare state capacity course

through all these histories as mechanisms for managing one of capitalism’s most fundamental

contradictions: that while capital needs labour, it is also entrapped by investments required to

make it, move it, and reproduce it.

Welfare state policy has offered the promise of dovetailing the peaks and valleys of uneven

development: planners and policy-makers have sought to stitch together mismatched surpluses

across time and space. For, while regional inequality, uneven labour markets, and rural decline

were the necessary underbelly of post-war ‘progress,’ and while the Canadian state has

65 John Bradbury theorized this dynamic in relation to capitalist dynamics of uneven development. See: John H. Bradbury, ‘Towards an Alternative Theory of Resource-Based Town Development in Canada’, Economic Geography 55, no. 2 (1979): 147–66. For a study of off-shoring in the nickel sector see John H. Bradbury, ‘International Movements and Crises in Resource Oriented Companies: The Case on Inco in the Nickel Sector’, Economic Geography 61, no. 2 (1985): 129–43. 66 John Herd Thompson, ‘Bringing in the Sheaves: The Harvest Excursionists, 1890-1929’, Canadian Historical Review 59, no. 4 (1978): 467–89; W. J. C. Cherwinski, ‘The Incredible Harvest Excursion of 1908’, Labour / Le Travail 5 (Spring 1980): 57–79; Struthers, No Fault of Their Own; Michael Ekers, ‘“The Dirty Scruff”: Relief and the Production of the Unemployed in Depression-Era British Columbia’, Antipode 44, no. 4 (2012): 1119–42; Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown; Hayter and Barnes, ‘Canada’s Resource Economy’; Keith Storey, ‘Fly-in/Fly-out: Implications for Community Sustainability’, Sustainability 2, no. 5 (2010): 1161–81; Keith Storey, ‘The Evolution of Commute Work in the Resource Sectors in Canada and Australia’, The Extractive Industries and Society 3, no. 3 (2016): 584–93; Sara Dorow, ‘The “Elastic” Oil Sands Commute(r): The Uneven Work of Mobility’ (Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, San Francisco, 2016); Laura Ryser, Sean Markey, and Greg Halseth, ‘The Workers’ Perspective: The Impacts of Long Distance Labour Commuting in a Northern Canadian Small Town’, The Extractive Industries and Society 3, no. 3 (2016): 594–605.

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repeatedly framed them as ‘problems,’ this unevenness—managed through poverty and welfare

policy—has also repeatedly served as a solution to the very problems that it poses. While, as a

regulatory mechanism, welfare policy has often been understood as a source of structural

stability and evenness in the face of capitalism’s crisis tendencies, here, in the context of the

short-lived, volatile, and dispersed industrial geographies of staples production, policy makers

have pursued stability by managing unevenness.67 In this paradoxical way, uneven development,

in the context of the staple state, has been an inherent and enduring problem, but also a solution.

The state’s high profile fretting about regions of decline, ‘underdevelopment,’ and

unemployment has helped justify the intervention and regulation that has long targeted these

places and people. It is in this broad sense that welfare state capacity has been used as a ‘fix’ for

the specific contradictions of the Canadian staple state: in an attempt to ‘match’ surplus labour

and ‘underproductive’ regions with geographies of expanding accumulation. As I hope the

chapters make clear, when we trace these different programs across their dispersed

geographies—following mobilized workers between regions and industries, drawing links

between land reform and the labour markets it gives rise to—we can see how, through the

decades, poverty policy has ensnared distant, marginal people and places in the broader logic of

extractivism: in different ways, to be sure, but toward the same “national” end.

Placing peripheral white workers in the settler staple (nation-)state

If staples have been a constitutive element of the Canadian state, they have occupied at least as

powerful a place in the formulation of the Canadian nation, perhaps most powerfully through

the notion that resource development is in the “national interest.”68 Staples-based declarations of

the national interest have often consolidated around infrastructure development: from the

national railroad in the late nineteenth century, to Roads to Resources in the 1950s, to today’s

pipeline politics, governments and industry have long mobilized staples infrastructure as nation-

building.69 Aimed at resolving what Cole Harris called the “struggle with distance,” these

67 On the welfare state and capitalist crisis see: O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State; Ian Gough, The Political Economy of the Welfare State (London: The MacMillan Press, 1979); Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State; see also David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 68 There is a rich body of scholarship that documents how race and nature have formed an entwined foundation of Canadian national mythology. See, for example Andrew Baldwin, Laura Cameron, and Audrey Kobayashi, eds., Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011). 69 See, for example, Pierre Berton’s books on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway: Pierre Berton, The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970); Pierre Berton, The Last Spike: The Great Railway 1881-1885 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971). On the links between

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infrastructure projects were (and are) capillaries of extraction and circulation through which the

settler state lays down roots.70 As Harris highlights in relation to the colonization of BC, shifts

in transportation technology and the compression of time-space not only shortened the “external

distance” with Europe; these changes also reshaped “internal distance,” enabling new

geographies of settlement, extraction, and circulation of both people and resources. A bigger

history of empire lurks in this story: as Deb Cowen, Marcus Rediker, and Stefano Harvey and

Fred Moten have all made clear, logistics and circulation are at the foundation of global

architectures of colonialism, slavery, and war-making.71 My focus in this dissertation is not

directly on the logistics of empire but, following these scholars, the specific contours of

Canadian resource development can’t be pulled apart from broader processes of colonization,

race-making, and the construction of the modern nation-state. This dissertation aims to animate

these dynamics by examining them from the vantage point of resource labour. I centre workers

as actors and agents in the fraught processes of nation-building and highlight the inextricability

of these labour relations (and their conditions of possibility) from the broader context of the infrastructure, resource development, and “nation-building” in the context of Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision see Isard, ‘Northern Vision’. Governments and industry have promoted subsequent major infrastructure projects as comparable to the construction of the national railway. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, for example, championed the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline—a multi-billion dollar pipeline to transport natural gas down the Mackenzie River Valley, through Dene, Inuit, and Métis homelands, to southern Canadian and American markets—by comparing it to the construction of the railway that had opened the West for settlement. Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions’; for context on the pipeline see Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, chap. 2. Today, proposals to construct and expand pipeline infrastructure to transport Alberta bitumen are widely referenced as “nation-building” projects. In advance of Albert Premier Rachel Notley’s 2013 visit to New Brunswick to discuss their shared support for the Energy East Pipeline (from Alberta to Saint John, NB), local Premier David Alward said, of his government, “We believe a west-east pipeline is as important to our economic future as the national railway was to our past, and I look forward to continue working with Premier Redford and our partners to make this critical nation-building vision a reality.” Canada. New Brunswick, ‘Alberta Premier to Visit New Brunswick’, Press release, 31 May 2013, http://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/news/news_release.2013.05.0518.html. In a more recent example, Canada’s Building Trades Unions’ response to the Federal government’s purchase of the Trans Mountain Pipeline exclaimed, “this is a nation building exercise of the highest order. It parallels the recent bailout of the auto industry, the railways, the first Trans-Canada Pipeline and other such undertakings.” Canada’s Building Trades Unions, ‘Government of Canada Steps up for National Interest’, Press release, 29 May 2018, http://buildingtrades.ca/2018/05/29/government-of-canada-steps-up-for-national-interest/. Deb Cowen’s work on infrastructure’s power to both connect and divide peoples and communities has approached infrastructure (broadly conceived) as a site of contestation: both in struggles over infrastructure (e.g. pipelines, border walls, prisons) and in efforts to build, as she says, infrastructure otherwise so as to enable different lines of social connection, different systems of value, and different possible futures. Importantly, these types of “fugitive infrastructures” have often been enabled, inadvertently, by “infrastructures of oppression” which, by their nature, forge connections and networks across difference and distance. Deborah Cowen, ‘Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance’, Verso Books (blog), 25 January 2017, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3067-infrastructures-of-empire-and-resistance; The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2014), 229. 70 ‘The Struggle with Distance’, in The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geograpahical Change (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 161–93. 71 Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics; Cowen, ‘Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance’; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007); Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013).

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settler staple state.72 That is, I have tried to always hold onto the function of the Maritime

problem, the processes that configure these workers as distinct, and what Patrick Wolfe in a

different context calls the “involuntary collaboration” between this workforce and other political

economic and race-making processes that serve to enable extractive economies.73

In taking this approach I have drawn on key works in Atlantic and post-colonial history: Peter

Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra and Eric Williams’s Capitalism and

Slavery, for example, historically delineate the triangulation of capitalism, settler colonialism,

and labour (both slavery and also histories of labour regulation and resistance that predate it),

illustrating the inseparability of these structures and the thefts of land, labour, and livelihoods on

72 This question of labour’s agency in relation to capital and uneven development has been the primary focus of the subdiscipline “labour geography”: what Castree calls the “heartland” of a much wider discussion of labour in geography. Most notable here is the work of Andrew Herod: Andrew Herod, ‘From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor’s Spatial Fix and the Geography of Capitalism’, Antipode 29, no. 1 (1997): 1–31; Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2001); ‘Workers as Geographical Actors’, Labor History 53, no. 3 (2012): 335–53. For a sense of the debates about agency see: Noel Castree, ‘Labour Geography: A Work in Progress’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 853–862; Steven Tufts and Lydia Savage, ‘Labouring Geography: Negotiating Scales, Strategies and Future Directions’, Geoforum 40, no. 6 (2009): 945–48; Neil M. Coe and David C. Jordhus-Lier, ‘Constrained Agency? Re-Evaluating the Geographies of Labour’, Progress in Human Geography 35, no. 2 (2011): 211–33; Don Mitchell, ‘Labor’s Geography: Capital, Violence, Guest Workers and the Post-World War II Landscape’, Antipode 43, no. 2 (2011): 563–595. While this heartland continues to push politically important debates about agency, the study of labour in geography extends well beyond this subdiscipline and it is within this broader context that I situate my own research. Rather than engage in debates about the generalized agency of labour, I agree with Don Mitchell’s caution against overestimating, in any general sense, the degree to which workers’ can make their own spatial fixes and his call for careful, materialist assessments of hegemonic geographies of work. In this study, I aim to do this by examining both the details of working life and the economic, spatial, and regulatory infrastructures that often function to not only strip workers of their agency, but to also contort desires, aspirations, and political imaginaries. I take inspiration here from a somewhat eclectic, but empirically and theoretically powerful body of literature in and out of geography on what I would categorize as the cultural politics of work. This scholarship treats culture itself as a site of contestation, asking how social relations of work are constituted by and constitutive of the contested politics of culture in capitalism: how the politics of ‘culture’ serve to enable these social relations and how work serves as a broad site through which the meaning of value (capitalist and otherwise) is negotiated. Importantly, this body of scholarship approaches geographies of work beyond the limiting categories of work and workers, contextualizing workers’ lives and struggles within a much broader context, dissolving the boundary between ‘work’ and ‘life,’ broadening the actors implicated in organizing work, and attending to everyday and experiential elements of working life within a broader historical materialist assessment. See, for example: Vinay Gidwani, Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Ken Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Geoff Mann, Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers, & the Political Economy of the American West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Don Mitchell, They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Clyde Adrian Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (London: Verso, 1998). 73 Wolfe here is talking about the historical dovetailing of colonial expansion and increasingly global class struggle. “The two were inseparable, the cotton that the industrial proletariat made up in Manchester’s dark mills being sourced from colonised labour put to work in Egypt, India, and the US Deep South, the two sources of labour further provided an expanding market for the products of their involuntary collaboration.” Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 21.

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which they depend.74 And a broader body of work has laid bare what Lisa Lowe calls the

“intimacies” between Western liberal modernity and the global, violent geographies of slavery,

colonialism, and imperialism.75 Importantly, as Linebaugh and Rediker’s writing makes

especially clear, these global geographies of empire and capitalism are profoundly social.76 By

its very nature, capitalism forges relationships, stitching together far-flung and diverse forms of

dispossession and manufactured surplus. In centering the productive relationality of

dispossession (for them, always precarious and contested) in their historical accounts of

capitalist empire, these studies have offered me a framework for activating labour in my own

analysis as integral to dynamics of colonialism, accumulation, and race- and nation-making.

In studies of contemporary settler colonialism, by contrast, labour has often figured marginally.

It is widely accepted of Canada and other settler colonies that colonial power has been oriented

first and foremost toward the acquisition and control of land, rather than Indigenous labour; the

emphasis in the scholarship reflects this, focusing primarily on territorial, rather than labour

relations.77 Where labour has been the focused object of analysis, emphasis tends to be on the

question of specifically Indigenous labour rather than the broader question of how (and which)

labour is situated in this process.78 John Lutz has argued that, while the European economy of

74 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 75 See, for example: C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963); Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2014); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2015). In her sweeping history of the colonization of the territory known as the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz outlines the transatlantic character of European colonial tactics. Drawing connections between the dispossession of the European peasantry (“the first population forcibly organized under the profit motive”) and the colonization of the Americas, she writes: “The institutions of colonialism and methods for relocation, deportation, and expropriation of land had already been practiced, if not perfected by the end of the fifteenth century.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 33. 76 Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra; see also James, The Black Jacobins. 77 On this point about land see: Harris, ‘How Did Colonialism Dispossess?’; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. For a focused study on the practices of race-making and the interplay of colonized labour and Indigenous dispossession in the workings of colonialism see: Wolfe, Traces of History. 78 Here, some authors have emphasized the exclusion of Indigenous workers, highlighting the role of colonial policies and racist employment practices, while others have emphasized the important, but obscured, role Indigenous workers played in the early and ongoing development of Canadian resource economies. E.g. John Lutz, ‘After the Fur Trade: The Aboriginal Labouring Class of British Columbia, 1849-1890’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 3, no. 1 (1992): 69–93; John Lutz, Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008); Steven High, ‘Native Wage Labour and Independent Production during the “Era of Irrelevance”’, Labour / Le Travail 37 (Spring 1996): 243–64; Rolf Knight, Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Labour in British Columbia, 1858–1930 (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1996); Ron Laliberte and Vic Satzewich, ‘Native Migrant Labour in the Southern Alberta Sugar-Beet Industry: Coercion

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the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did rely on Indigenous labour, the historical erasure of

this labour as labour was a precondition for territorial dispossession.79 Key Western political

and legal theories underpinning colonial logic equated civilization and the right to own property

with narrow Western conceptions of labour and what it meant to use or improve nature.80

Against this backdrop, racialized conceptions of Indigenous peoples as lazy and unreliable

reinforced the idea that seasonal, periodic, or supplementary participation in the wage economy

did not count as work, thereby (according to colonizers) justifying the transfer of land from the

peoples who had historically occupied, used, and managed it to colonial states and settlers. In

these characterizations, Indigenous workers were contrasted against other groups: in the context

of late nineteenth century BC, according to Lutz, namely Chinese immigrant workers who were

strategically (and inconsistently) celebrated by employers as relatively industrious.81 This type

of relational race-making functioned both to formulate a cheap and disciplined workforce and to

reinforce ideas about Indigenous peoples that served the colonial project of land dispossession.

By this account, racialized segmentation of (especially staples) labour and the erasure of

Indigenous work is foundational to the historical mechanics of colonial dispossession in

and Paternalism in the Recruitment of Labour’, The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 36, no. 1 (1999): 65–85; Mills and Sweeney, ‘Employment Relations in the Neostaples Resource Economy’; Jean-Sébastien Boutet, ‘Opening Ungava to Industry: A Decentring Approach to Indigenous History in Subarctic Québec, 1937–54’, Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 79–97. Though somewhat peripheral to his main project, Cole Harris’s attention to labour, meanwhile has illustrated the relationships between different groups of resource workers, including different relations to mobility. By his account, despite their increasing confinement to reserves, Indigenous peoples in BC remained attached to their ancestral lands and families and ultimately “were where they lived, not where they worked.” While it was common for Indigenous workers to travel for seasonal employment in resource economies, in contrast to immigrant and transient white workers, permanent relocation in the name of (increasingly urbanized) employment was widely understood as a non-option as late as the mid-twentieth century. As such, many of these workers moved between two economies with different logics and demands, weakening their position in the competitive wage labour market. For industry, this rootedness was a liability: “The spatial economy was fluid, the locus of work shifting, and from capital’s perspective a mobile labour force largely composed of single men was the efficient response to such instability.” Immigrants and domestic transient workers offered this high degree of predictability and flexibility. By Harris’s account, differential relations to the temporal-spatial demands of waged labour, material poverty and the need to sustain diverse economic activities, and connection to ancestral lands and family—in addition to racist policies and preferential hiring practices—all laid the foundation for a racialized labour market in resource industries. Harris, Making Native Space, 287–88. 79 Lutz, Makúk. 80 Lutz highlights in particular the ideas of John Locke and Emmerich de Vattel, but these ideas are part of a longer genealogy of Western legal justification for the seizure and occupation of Indigenous territories through the doctrine of discovery. In particular, England’s development of the principle of terra nullius, which stated that lands could be claimed under discovery if they were either not occupied or were occupied but were being used in a way that was not recognized or approved by European law. See Robert J. Miller et al., Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Emerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations; Or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (1758) (Philadelphia: T. and J.W. Johnson, 1861); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 81 Lutz, Makúk, Ch. 3: ‘Making the Lazy Indian’.

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Canada.82 Global historical geographies of empire remind us that the colonial governance of

land and labour are fundamentally relational; the accumulation of social difference comes into

view here as foundational to the accumulation of capital and territorial control.83 It is in this way

that documenting the who, where, and how of resource labour matters to understanding the

colonial geographies of Canadian extractivism. Race, nation, and gender—always in-the-

making—are pivotal not only to the formulation of distinct groups of workers, but also in

placing them productively in relation to other workers, geographies, and struggles.84 Taking a

broad view on the entangled global geographies of circulation and the relational dispossession

that have historically underpinned industrial capitalism has helped me to place labour within

broader dynamics of empire and nation-building.

It warrants stating explicitly that in placing the employment structures under investigation in

relation to land and colonialism I am not trying to shift the analytical lens through which we

understand colonialism back, yet again, onto settlers’ lives and perspectives. Rather, I am trying

to tell a story about the formation of a white resource periphery and the structuring of labour

therein that accounts for these intimacies between labour and land. As will become clear as the

chapters unfold, while the geography of this project is vast, it emanates very much from east

coast settler society: the maps, categories, and historical geographies that frame the stories are

organized accordingly. This is deliberate, for in undertaking this project I have always meant to

turn my gaze on white workers. This is in part because this realm of the rural white periphery is

my personal terrain; but it is also because work and whiteness are constitutive and enduring

elements of settler colonialism that are deserving of investigation. To this end, I should also note

that in emphasizing whiteness I do not intend to reduce settler colonialism to a matter of ‘race

relations.’ I am, rather, trying to sort through how geographies of extraction have been bolstered

by race- and nation-making practices that both crystallize and operate through uneven

development, declared destinies of poverty and decline, and the cultural politics of work.

82 For Lutz this erasure of Indigenous labour is not just a matter of misrecognition, but the basis for a misunderstanding about the mechanics of colonialism, for it “misses the role that wage labour played in the larger project of the ‘peaceable subordination’ of Canadian Aboriginal Peoples and the establishment of modern Canada.” By ‘peaceable subordination’ he means “strategies used by certain European colonists and colonial states to dominate occupied lands while publicly deploring the violence of conquest.” 8. 83 On race as a key mechanisms of social differentiation in colonialism see Wolfe, Traces of History; for a feminist analysis of social difference and primitive accumulation see Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004). 84 Patrick Wolfe has emphasized that race is a process. In Traces of History, he documents what he calls “race in action” in settler colonial contexts, how “different racialising practices seek to maintain population-specific modes of colonial domination through time.” Wolfe, Traces of History, 10.

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There is a rich body of scholarship that has examined work, specifically, as a crucial site

through which categories and hierarchies of race, nation, and social citizenship take shape and,

conversely, are resisted. Notable here is the work of critical whiteness studies, the emergence of

which is commonly associated with white scholars including David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev,

but which Roediger roots, above all, in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois.85 Through detailed

historical scholarship, these writers have illustrated the centrality of work, competition, and

class formation to the history of race and racial ideology and made clear that shifting racial

consciousness must be situated within its shifting class and economic context.86 But this work

has hinged largely on a binary understanding of race as white and Black and has remained

almost always in the realm of wage—rather than territorial—relations.87 Roediger gestures to

85 See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2007); David Roediger, ‘Accounting for the Wages of Whiteness: US Marxism and the Critical History of Race’, in Class, Race, and Marxism (London: Verso, 2017), 47–72. Among the important studies within this tradition of what has been called critical whiteness studies number Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness; Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger, ‘One Symptom of Originality: Race and the Management of Labour in the History of the United States’, Historical Materialism 17, no. 4 (2009): 3–43; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, Reprint edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). But Roediger emphasizes that the tendency to characterize critical whiteness studies as something ‘new’ beginning in the 1990s—and produced largely by white scholars—erases the fact that “writers and activists of color had long studied white identities and practices as problems needing to be historicized, analyzed, theorized, and countered.” He emphasizes the contribution of Du Bois, in particular, but also C.L.R. James, James Baldwin, and George Rawick, as well as the more recent work of Toni Morrison, Cheryl Harris, and Painter. Roediger, ‘Accounting for the Wages of Whiteness: US Marxism and the Critical History of Race’, 47; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 1993); Cheryl I. Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91. 86 Roediger, for example, documents how, for white workers, the systematic emergence of whiteness as an identification is historically inseparable from working class formation in the nineteenth century. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. 87 Roediger reflexively makes note of this false binary understanding of race in Class, Race, and Marxism (London: Verso, 2017), 21. In the Canadian context, research on race, resource economies, and labour, specifically, has focused largely on agriculture and much less on other resource industries. On the contemporary Canadian context see, in particular, the work of Tanya Basok and Emily Reid-Musson: Tanya Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003); Tanya Basok, Danièle Bélanger, and Eloy Rivas, ‘Reproducing Deportability: Migrant Agricultural Workers in South-Western Ontario’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40, no. 9 (2014): 1394–1413; Emily Reid-Musson, ‘Grown Close to HomeTM: Migrant Farmworker (Im)Mobilities and Unfreedom on Canadian Family Farms’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107, no. 3 (2017): 716–30. On the pre-histories of contemporary transnational agricultural work programs see: Emily Reid-Musson, ‘Historicizing Precarity: A Labour Geography of “Transient” Migrant Workers in Ontario Tobacco’, Geoforum 56 (September 2014): 161–71; Edward Dunsworth, ‘Green Gold, Red Threats: Organization and Resistance in Depression-Era Ontario Tobacco’, Labour / Le Travail 79 (Spring 2017): 105–42. In the US context, Don Mitchell explores the intertwining of domestic and international migration in agricultural labour in They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California. Empirical research on specifically Indigenous wage labour in the Canadian context, in general, is somewhat limited. Most notable here is the work of Rolf Knight and John Lutz, but see also Ron Laliberte and Vic Satzewich for an analysis of a government program designed to mobilize Indigenous workers in agricultural labour. Knight, Indians at Work; Lutz, Makúk; Laliberte and Satzewich, ‘Native Migrant Labour in the Southern Alberta Sugar-Beet Industry’. For an historiography see: High, ‘Native Wage Labour and Independent Production during the “Era of Irrelevance”’.

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the interplay of work, whiteness, and colonialism in Wages of Whiteness. His engagement with

this relationship is limited, but his basic proposal is important: that in the settler colonial

context, “work and whiteness [join] in an argument for dispossession.”88 While Roediger’s

emphasis here is on racial attitudes, Cole Harris has made a complementary argument through a

framing more focused on the economic mechanics of settler colonialism. In an empirically

grounded theory of colonial dispossession focused on the history of BC, Harris argues that, in

combination with the physical power of the state, a racist discourse of civilization and savagery,

and disciplinary technologies including maps and the law, setter self-interest was core to how

colonial dispossession historically worked on the ground. Emphasizing the relationality of

settlers’ own drive for material security and the logics of colonization, Harris illustrates how the

routine workings of capitalist incentives consolidated around land. He explains:

In short, in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to

ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on

access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer,

depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of settlers and capital converged. For both, land was the

opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy.89

What I like about both Roediger and Harris’s brief reflections on whiteness, work, and

colonialism is that their ideas are firmly planted in material questions: that economic fears and

incentives drove settlers to pursue activities, desires, and perspectives that solidified settler

colonialism and racial hierarchies as both ideologies and structures—not the other way around.

For Harris, especially, this allows him to draw broad connections between these somewhat

innocuous forms of occupation in BC and political economic change in settlers’ distant home

geographies. In a way that is far from reductive, given the richness of his overall theory of

colonial dispossession (which spans and integrates physical force, discourse, and discipline, in

addition to settler self-interest), Harris here positions both the banality and the drama of these

stories within a historical geographical context that makes clear both the detailed structures that

88 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 21–23 emphasis added. Roediger also later made the case for an “intersectional” historical analysis of race in the United States that accounts for settler colonialism and social reproduction. See ‘Removing Indians, Managing Slaves, and Justifying Slavery: The Case for Intersectionality’, in Class, Race, and Marxism (London: Verso, 2017), 102–14. 89 Harris, ‘How Did Colonialism Dispossess?’, 173.

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have incentivized settlers’ decision-making and the colonial logic that runs through them. This

is the type of connection I am trying to draw. Not as a move to innocence for white workers or

an attempt to reduce colonialism to capitalism and class, but as a way of sketching a certain set

of far flung social and economic pressures—tangled up in processes and ideologies of race- and

nation-making—that are serving the reproduction of contemporary colonial extraction.

As the current climate of pipeline boosterism illustrates, workers are enrolled in the promotion

of staples development as the concrete embodiment of why these projects are matters of

“national interest.” This type of strategic alliance with a certain manufactured class of

workers—in this case peripheral, male, white, and otherwise unemployed—to shore up the

staples economy has a long history that relies on geographies of poverty and uneven

development to drive its point home. The federal government’s purchase of the Kinder Morgan

pipeline, for example, was met with a half-hearted rally to revive the Energy East pipeline

project: ‘think of the workers!’ cried the New Brunswick elite, giving a calculated but crooked

nod to the Maritime problem they have helped create.90 To be sure, especially as Alberta layoffs

have exacerbated local unemployment, the prospect of a pipeline to the east was seen by some

as the promise of a job closer to home. My point is not to diminish that need or that desire, but

to question whose purpose this declared concern for the unemployed and the narrow solution to

their problems is serving. As the Canadian state has jockeyed to equate Canada’s national

economic future with extractive expansion, workers have served as sympathetic tools, made to

exist in material and ideological opposition to those questioning and challenging this equation.

In their formulation as perennially struggling at home and a natural fit out west, the power of

these assertions deepens as they come to seem natural. But especially in their seeming normalcy

and inevitability, these “modest opportunities for ordinary people,” as Harris explains, “[give]

settler colonialism its energy.”91

In her eloquent argument that race is ideology in the United States, Barbara Jeanne Fields

differentiates between racial ideology and racial attitudes: one cannot understand the history of

race and racism through attitudes, she says, for racial attitudes “are promiscuous critters [that]

90 See, for example: James Risdon, ‘NB Tries to Revive Energy East Pipeline’, The Telegram, 7 June 2018, http://www.thetelegram.com/business/nb-tries-to-revive-energy-east-pipeline-216433/; Todd Veinotte, ‘New Push for Energy East Pipeline Is Needed in Wake of Trans Mountain Decision: Jim Irving’, Global News, 29 May 2018, https://globalnews.ca/news/4240288/irving-energy-east-revival/. 91 Harris, ‘How Did Colonialism Dispossess?’, 173.

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do not mind cohabiting with their opposites.” Rather than take attitudes—changing or

unchanging—as indicative of historical trends in racial ideology, Fields urges the following

question: “What kind of social reality is reflected—or refracted—in an ideology built on the

unity of these particular opposites?”92 In Alberta, “east coast workers,” deliberately recruited

from high unemployment areas, are having their moment in the sun as reliable, hard workers.

This is often said in the same breath, to give just one example of this promiscuity, as employer

stories that delicately pathologize Indigenous workers as broadly unreliable. The irony here is

difficult to ignore: these same east coast communities have long been on the receiving end of

scorn and public shaming as pathologically lazy, dependent, and averse to work. Similarly, as

employers in declining rural communities out east have begun to hire young workers from

(among other places) China, Mexico, or the Philippines to work their fields and staff their fish

plants, locals’ anxiety about job security, entitlement, and work ethic might consolidate around

age, race, and nationhood; down the road in Alberta, meanwhile, in times of economic distress,

accusations of “stolen jobs” are easily launched at “east coast” migrants. These stories—and the

material realities they exploit and reproduce—are always relational. And attitudes, always

promiscuous: “east coast workers” have often figured in these volatile and shifting positions

between pathology and privilege. Rather than assign these workers an essence (rugged,

disciplined, loyal, lazy, defeatist), we need to investigate how their enrollment into particular

political economic positions actively produces racial categories and national ideologies—related

not only to work and class, but also to territorial relations and to Canada itself. How the

confinement of their options has, in fact, nourished resource nationalism both ideologically and

materially. How the extractivist machine eats up uneven development and spits out hierarchies,

inequalities, and social divisions as a matter of course, and how these divisions benefit only the

very few. And finally, in the realm of everyday work and life, how workers—who are by no

means dupes in this race to the bottom that they are only periodically and marginally winning—

understand, navigate, and resist these divisive structures.

92 ‘Ideology and Race in American History’, in Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 155.

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Methodology

My methods were designed to investigate the same process—the movement of workers out of

one political economy and into another—from a variety of angles.93 I mean this in terms of

whose perspectives I engaged (workers’, employers’, bureaucrats’, decision-makers’, etc.), but

also in terms of place (east coast communities, Alberta, Ottawa), logics (daily life, labour

markets, economic forecasting, logistics), histories (since the post-war period), and ideologies

(about work, the economy, and the national interests). To this end, my methods can be divided

into two categories: ethnographic and in-person methods and archival (largely textual) research.

I have complemented these main approaches with some statistical analysis (largely form

Statistics Canada and Industry Canada) and analysis of media, industry sources, and government

policy and reports.

Between 2013 and 2015, I spent approximately sixteen months in the Maritime region, largely

in Prince Edward Island, conducting participant observation. During this time I conducted

interviews, participated in daily life, attended and observed relevant events, and tracked public

discussions and debates on relevant themes. In the Maritime region (largely in PEI and Cape

Breton) I conducted interviews with forty-six individuals (in forty-three separate interviews),

most of which were in-depth and semi-structured. These included interviews with workers who

self-identified as working or having worked “out west,” employment councillors, politicians and

policy-makers, planners, community and labour organizers, fishers and fisheries experts, and

other community informants. The specific direction of these interviews varied depending on the

interviewee, but focused broadly on themes of work, employment insurance, labour mobility,

and local economic change. In an effort to avoid personal connections (though this was not

always successful), I tried to recruit mobile workers primarily through online and newspaper

postings and through referrals from the workers I interviewed. Other interviewees were

primarily contacted by phone or email. Across categories, interviews were occasionally

arranged through personal networks.

It is important to also emphasize that my research in the Maritime region was deeply informed

by relationships, political work, conversations, and observations that were often informal and

often not deliberately pursued as part of my research. Old and new friendships with local

93 See Michael Burawoy, Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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activists and community organizers, especially, have deeply enriched my thinking and

inevitably infused my writing with their influence, but these do not constitute a formal part of

my research. In retrospect, I was perhaps ill equipped to occupy the role of ‘researcher’ in a

place where I was so socially embedded. I generally managed this—perhaps rightly—by putting

my researcher-self on hold so that I could participate in daily life in what felt like a more

genuine and less extractive way. In particular I spent a year working with a local community

coalition organizing to defend access to employment insurance and also collaborated closely

with a local organization working on issues of migrant justice related to the Temporary Foreign

Worker Program (including working closely with transnational migrant workers in local rural

communities). These experiences and these relationships taught me a great deal but I did not

enter into them as a researcher and, as such, while they have influenced my thinking in ways I

deeply appreciate, I make little direct reference to these experiences throughout the dissertation.

I also spent one month in Alberta (Calgary, Edmonton, and Fort McMurray), where I

interviewed sixteen people (in twelve separate interviews) including representatives of oil sands

companies, oilfield services companies, petroleum industry associations, provincial government,

and one labour organization. These interviewees were contacted by phone, email, and through

company websites. In the petroleum services sector I made a point of targeting companies

known for hiring Maritime workers and, in particular, companies that had employed some of the

workers I had interviewed. This trip also allowed me to experience the geography of the Alberta

petroleum industry, to travel some of the common commuting routes, and to visit Fort

McMurray and get a sense of the industrial areas, work camps, and aerodromes that surround it.

This part of my research was enriched by visits with friends who live there but, again, this was

in no way formal research, and I do not reference them directly. Over the course of my research

I also conducted two phone interviews with experts in different relevant fields, one in-person

interview with a member of the Employment Insurance Commission, and several informal

interviews with academics and documentarians. I have included a detailed list of interviewees at

the end of the dissertation, following the Conclusion.

Broadly, my goal in carrying out these interviews and participant observation was to understand

how local economic change, extreme labour mobility, and the national oil economy are

understood in the context of everyday life, both in the Maritimes and in the industry. But my

understanding of what this means has changed over time. I was originally much more intent on

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understanding the historical and political economic conditions that were funnelling workers

west. Early on, I saw this as somewhat clouded by common narratives that naturalized or

obscured the dramatic character of this mobility. I took for granted that what was “really”

happening was separate from these banal explanations. Over time I have moved away from this

perspective, in part on account of what came out in my research: the relationship between

narrative and lived experience was a central theme throughout. In certain contexts this was the

heavy contradiction between commonsense stories and lived experience; in others it was an

emphasis on the importance of telling certain stories to help produce the desired reality. So, over

time, this element of my research has served more to help me understand how and to what end

the dramatic processes at the centre of this story—extreme mobility, extreme extraction,

extreme volatility—circulate as natural or unremarkable.

I complemented this contemporary research with several months of historical research in federal

and provincial (PEI) government archives (see the list of specific collections at the end of the

dissertation, following the conclusion). Here, my approach broadly takes inspiration from

Foucault’s genealogical method: an approach, as Vinay Gidwani explains it, that “proceeds not

from the certitudes of given categories but instead takes as its philosophical task to ask how

those categories acquired their givenness and with what consequences.”94 As such, my archival

research cast a wide net across disparate themes—different eras of unemployment policy,

research and management of seasonal unemployment, rural modernization planning, manpower

mobility, mining and resource development history, and the War on Poverty—as I looked for

convergences between seemingly unrelated histories, the formulation of new governance

problems (regional underdevelopment, labour shortages, seasonal unemployment, dependence,

etc.), and the logics informing proposed solutions. By approaching these questions

genealogically, my aim has been to historicize the coming into being of governance problems

and solutions, their implications in local everyday life, and their naturalization as both

‘problems’ and material conditions. This dynamic between the declaration of governance

problems, the management of material problems, and the naturalization of hardship forms the

historical foundation on which the contemporary dynamics of labour mobility and rural

94 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 76–100; Gidwani, Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India, xvii.

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economic change at the heart of this dissertation rest. In this way, this historical research exists

in a close two-way relation to the contemporary research.

Throughout, this research was very much mediated by my familiarity with the place I was

studying. I have opened with some reflections on my place in the research for this reason. Both

my own commonsense knowledge and my self-conscious embeddedness deeply inform what I

did and did not see, learn, and wonder about through the course of this research. In particular, I

have tried to take seriously the degree to which I am tied to the everyday lives of my research

participants: through political economic processes, experiences of mobility, shared historical

and cultural references, local commonsense explanations, and personal networks. While I had

anticipated this place-based commonality, this perspective was reinforced and expanded by my

conversations with mobile workers. These men took an interest in my own working life and, to

my surprised, emphasized the broader structures of precarity, mobility, and family separation

that ran across our stories. I think this unification—as much as differentiation, which has more

often been the focus of research and writing on researcher positionality—is important to reflect

on partly because it simply shapes my vantage point, but also because my own understandings

and memories form useful contributions to my research, as data. Rather than treat my preformed

understandings of this place as a bias or methodological flaw, I have sought to incorporate it

into my research by documenting it, giving it some critical distance, and analysing its meaning

and production. To do this, I kept an active journal throughout my research in which I tried to

reflect self-consciously on these specific themes and, more generally, on anecdotes, questions,

and confusions. Where I was able to capture those ideas and questions honestly, some of these

entries have offered me clarity that was hard to regain once I started to more formally analyse

my research.

To this end, I should state explicitly that writing has been and important part of my

methodology. In addition to journaling, I have been deliberate about writing short pieces for

popular media and the occasional piece for community outreach or popular education,

sometimes with collaborators. But it has been in the process of writing these chapters that I have

found the most clarity. I am a slow writer: not because I find it hard to write, but because I write

a lot. I struggle immensely with organization, with breaking the big story down into manageable

parts, with setting aside one part of the story to work on another. I am a miserable outliner. A

furious attempt to record one point can easily balloon into a paragraph, pages, and even a

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chapter, while the other bits of the original outline are left hanging. When I started writing, I felt

like I was trying to write the dissertation from the inside out: begin by saying everything, and

then break it down into the details. That produced a lot of vertigo and a lot of pages, but not a lot

of chapters. This continued in an only slightly less frantic way chapter by chapter. I have written

folders of documents that are not in this dissertation. For a long time I thought this meant I was

doing something wrong. But I have come to see writing, for me, as exploratory—how I get the

lay of the land—and, therefore, as a constitutive part of my methodology. And I think the slow

and indirect way I have done this has given me useful distance from the “research” itself: giving

breathing room to the “structures” I was trying to explain, reminding me I am not in pursuit of a

tidy map, and allowing me some perspective on things that were otherwise hard for me to see

through the fog and fear of familiarity.

Structure of the dissertation

The body of the dissertation is divided into two parts: “genealogies” and “trajectories.” The first

three chapters trace the genealogy of key contemporary logics about unemployment, economic

development, and labour mobility. Historically, this section begins with early post-war debates

about the national unemployment insurance program and seasonality (Chapter 1) and spans into

the 1960s with the rise of regional modernization planning (Chapter 2) and national manpower

planning (Chapter 3). Taken together, these chapters focus on the development of the Canadian

welfare state in relation to changing geographies of staples production throughout this period.

Across these three chapters I trace how these state programs pathologized and reorganized

seasonal unemployment, narrated local economies as “unviable,” and naturalized long-distance

and plannable labour markets. By reformulating both the shape of and imagined possibilities for

local and national economies, these welfare state programs have helped to organize geographies

of poverty and unemployment in the service of staples production. By tracing these logics

through to the present moment, this first section makes the case that these ways of narrating

labour and economies continue to shape the material and ideological contours of Maritime

‘development,’ staples geographies, and labour mobility.

The second half of the dissertation shifts focus toward what I am calling trajectories. These

three chapters focus more directly on the contemporary context, spanning three key stories that

frame the recent labour pathways between “out east” and “out west”: the story of the Alberta

labour shortage and the ‘problem’ of national labour market flexibility (Chapter 4), the story of

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the ‘new’ economy in the Maritimes and the decline of primary resource industries (Chapter 5),

and a set of contradictory stories about east coast workers themselves (Chapter 6). I emphasize

how these stories have helped to naturalize these extreme long-distant labour relations by

normalizing mobility, writing workers out of local economic futures, and naturalizing these

men’s ‘fit’ for work on the resource frontier. This second section moves away from the direct

focus on the state in Part One to also examine the logics of employers, employment counsellors,

local economic planning, media, and workers themselves.

In the Conclusion, I return to the Maritimes and the constrained stories about the region’s future.

Highlighting contemporary narratives that continue to impose narrow pathways of capitalist

economic development, I sketch a different sort of link between this region and the resource

frontier. While the manufactured failure of the Maritimes has long helped forge the future of the

staple state, the reverse is also true. Persistent modes of social reproduction that stray from the

narrow route of progress turn this failure on its head: finding security, space for local futures,

and a way out of extraction’s grip by refusing to get caught it, rather than helping to resolve,

capitalism’s perennial crises.

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Part I: Genealogies

53

1. Wasted manpower: The post-war periphery and the invention of seasonal unemployment

“He wants everybody out of this place”: The spatiality of seasonality

My personal opinion? He wants everybody out of this place of Cape Breton Island. He

doesn’t want anybody fishing. And they want to come in here because they know there’s

an abundance of oil out there, and they want to go after the oil. Yep. If they cut you out

of EI there’s nobody gonna want to stay. And, there is oil out there. They know there’s

oil out there. They’re running out of oil out West: why not east coast? So, if there’s no

one fishing…. Right now there’s big things in place to kind of stop people from fracking

and going out drilling for oil, on account of the livelihood of the lobster and everything.

But if nobody ain’t fishing, well, there’s no need to stop it! We can go right ahead and

do as we please!

It was the summer of 2013 and I was sitting in the office of Victoria Co-op Fisheries in the

northern Cape Breton Highlands. Across the table, filling me in on the background to the

community’s current state of crisis, was the plant manager and community fire chief, Clayton

McKinnon. Given his central role in the community, Clayton had become a repository of sorts

for his neighbours’ stories of hardship and confusion and had taken on the role of responding to

media inquiries and communicating with politicians. After getting his name from a local

politician, I had made the eight-hour drive north to speak with him in person.

As Clayton explained, the previous fall about eighty people in the villages of Bay St. Lawrence

and St. Margaret Village—which have a combined population of around three hundred—had

received letters advising them that their employment insurance (EI) payments were being cut,

pending the findings of a Service Canada investigation into claims made between 2007 and

2010. The community had been under investigation since 2007. According to Clayton, at that

time, 184 locals received letters followed by phone calls, advising them that their files were

under investigation and that should report to the local RCMP station so they could be

interviewed about their claims. He described the scene:

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They had a lot of people pretty much in tears by the time they got out of there because

they were just threatening them and going on and, it was just, I know a lot of people who

said that it was very gruelling. And they put you in an interrogation room—almost like a

jail—they walked by a jail cell, to show it to you, and everything else. It was pretty

gruelling, I tell ya. Pretty gruelling.

As Clayton explained, although benefits were reinstated until the close of the investigation in

response to the communities’ protest, more than eighty people in the region were ordered to

repay tens of thousands of dollars from years past, some as high as $90,000. “Receiving those

letters was, I think, the most fearful point of each and every person’s life,” Clayton told me.

“They want roughly $2 million paid back from this community, between eighty-some people. It

will crush this community.” In the height of the crisis the small fishing community was forced

to set up a local food bank for the first time in its history.

The official reason for the investigation was Service Canada’s suspicion that claimants were in

violation of the ‘arm’s length’ clause of the Employment Insurance Act, which stipulates that

employment is only insurable in cases where employer and employee are dealing with each

other at an ‘arm’s length.’1 In this case, it was the prevalence of familial employment that drew

suspicion. While the arm’s length rule doesn’t automatically disqualify familial employment,

employers need to demonstrate that the conditions of employment mirror those that would apply

to non-relatives. “These fishing boats are family owned fishing boats. They’re gonna hire their

family!” Clayton explained. “Why should they have to hire somebody else? They just don’t get

it.” This type of familial employment is common practice in the Atlantic inshore fishery, and

fishing families around the region have been able to collect EI on the basis of this employment

for years. For seasonal economies like this one, the loss of this off-season income would be

devastating. Clayton explained, “The only way you could live here is if you won the lottery,

1 The meaning of arm’s length dealings is outlined in the Income Tax Act. The Employment Insurance Act relies on that definition as well as the following stipulation about employment relations with relatives: “if the employer is, within the meaning of that [Income Tax] Act, related to the employee, they are deemed to deal with each other at arm’s length if the Minister of National Revenue is satisfied that, having regard to all the circumstances of the employment, including the remuneration paid, the terms and conditions, the duration and the nature and importance of the work performed, it is reasonable to conclude that they would have entered into a substantially similar contract of employment if they had been dealing with each other at arm’s length.” Income Tax Act, R.S.C., c. 1 (5th Supp.) (1985), s. 248(1), 251(1), 251(2), 251(4), 251(5)(a), 251(6), 252(1), 252 (2); Employment Insurance Act, S.C., c. 23 (1996), para. 5(2)(i), 5(3)(a) and (b).

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cause you can’t work to make money if you can’t get your—it’s just seasonal, that’s all it is, is

seasonal. There’s nothing else. It always has been.”

In addition to the targeted crackdown on familial employment, Bay St. Lawrence and other

seasonal communities were experiencing another blow. The previous winter the federal

government had introduced the biggest overhaul to the national employment insurance program

since the devastating neoliberal gutting of EI in the 1990s.2 I met Clayton on a preliminary

research trip to the Maritimes the summer after the changes had been announced. I was in the

early stages of writing my dissertation proposal and was setting out to get a better sense of the

impact of the large-scale labour migration between the region and the Alberta oil industry. But

in the four months I spent out east that summer, no one really wanted to talk to me about the

ways that local everyday life was being reorganized around the western oil economy. What

people wanted me to hear about was the sure devastation hanging over the region in the wake of

sweeping and punitive reforms to EI. These cuts specifically targeted seasonal (“frequent”)

users of the program, erecting what many feared would be fundamental barriers to their way of

life, ultimately forcing people to leave.3 For decades, EI in communities like this has been a

critical way to make it through the winter between periods of seasonal summer work. It is part

of a web of social, resource, and economic policy—much of it developed as a stopgap way to

mitigate a range of social and ecological crises—that hold these ‘peripheral’ seasonal economies

together, albeit, precariously.

As he walked me through the ordeal, Clayton kept emphasizing his sense that the government

saw the economic life of his community as a nuisance. To his mind, the investigation of his

community hadn’t been simply about cutting costs or punishing the unemployed. His

2 This set of major reforms—largely from the Liberal government under Jean Chrétien—dealt a major blow to the unemployment insurance program. The federal government stopped contributing to UI, qualifying times increased dramatically, the duration and value of benefits were reduced, and repeat users were penalized. The program name was changed from Unemployment Insurance to Employment Insurance, reflecting the new emphasis on serving the needs of the labour market rather than those of unemployed workers. Government research papers and discussions leading up to these changes featured pathologizing anxieties about seasonal and marginal workers and the redistribution of resources from central and western Canada to Quebec and Atlantic Canada. Together the change in the ways contributions were calculated and the decrease in entitlement rapidly created a surplus in the EI fund. Rather than going back to workers, this money became a source of federal revenue. For a detailed account of this period see Georges Campeau, From UI to EI: Waging War on the Welfare State, trans. Richard Howard (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), chap. 8 and 9. 3 For an overview and analysis of the 2012 EI changes see Ann Porter, ‘Austerity, Social Program Restructuring, and the Erosion of Democracy: Examining the 2012 Employment Insurance Reforms’, Canadian Review of Social Policy 71, no. 1 (2015): 21–52.

56

explanation meandered through a whole range of problems. He thought the existence of the

inshore fishery was seen as posing a barrier to offshore drilling in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He

figured the fragmented owner-operator nature of the inshore fleet posed a political problem for

governments wanting to concentrate regulatory control and circumvent opposition. He assumed

all levels of government were tired of servicing these sorts of remote communities that were

seen by many decision-makers as belonging to the past. And, ultimately, the seasonal

employment so prevalent in this community is understood by government as voluntary

unemployment and constitutes a longstanding thorn in the side of the federal government

unemployment policy. As Clayton seemed to understand it, the ‘violations’ were wide reaching

and fundamental: about the temporal, social, and spatial organization of local economic life;

about slightly deviant modes of production; about too much community autonomy, fragile as it

was, as we were coming to see.

“They’re basically just juggling your life in their hands,” Clayton concluded, reflecting on the

impact of the investigation. Although everyone who stuck out the multi-year fight had their

benefits reinstated in the end, the interrogation, intensified income insecurity, and exposure of

the community’s vulnerability led many who were able to take the only control over their lives

available to them: relocation. In the three years since the ordeal exploded, Clayton knew of

thirty-two community-members who had relocated to Alberta.

With this, Clayton outlined the geographical character of seasonal employment as both enabled

and constrained by the EI system. He explained not only that access to EI had enabled the

reproduction of local economies, but also that losing this access (even anticipating this loss) had

forced people to go—in particular and importantly, “out west.” This chapter works closely with

the following two to make sense of this link: to examine how welfare and poverty policy have

been a powerful force in shaping geographies of resource extraction and staples labour in

Canada. By enabling certain kinds of economies and foreclosing others; by disciplining workers

and managing mobility; and by reinforcing what count as nationally valued forms of work,

production, and social reproduction. In this chapter, I take up the specific question of seasonal

employment and EI. I consider how early deliberations about EI and insurability not only

established seasonal and peripheral economies and workers as problems, but also imagined

putting these ‘wasted’ resources to use in other ways and other places.

57

Looking to the early post-war period, I argue that the state’s orientation toward seasonality took

shape in relation to debates about the changing geography of the national economy. In the wake

of World War Two, alongside the industrialization of agriculture and urbanization, officials saw

the expansion of industrial staples (namely forest, mine, and energy products) as helping to shift

the national economy away from old seasonal industries, petty primary production, and other

forms of rural un-productivity. This was a period of dramatic economic change marked by the

pursuit of regularity. Policy-makers emphasized the wasteful character of seasonal economies,

favoured urbanization of both economies and populations, and through labour market

management and regional interventions, aimed to coordinate resources across the country

toward national productivity. Within this context, the rhythms of Canadian economic activity

were markedly irregular: productivity across many sectors continued to vary seasonally in the

decades after the War. In addition to the seasonality of construction, manufacturing, and other

non-staples sectors expanding in the post-war years, economic seasonality was aggravated by

the persistence of marginal ‘problem’ economies: peripheral, rural, unproductive, and resource-

dependent. But the dynamics of state-supported industrial staples production were also

irregular: cyclical, sometimes seasonal, and distant from major population centres. While one

was upheld as the way of the past and the other, the way of the future, peripheral seasonal

economies and industrial staples challenged the assumptions underpinning post-war

modernization is somewhat similar ways. And in this challenge, they converged in deliberations

about Canada’s bourgeoning welfare state policies: namely, unemployment insurance (UI).4

The Canadian model of unemployment insurance was based on the British system—a response

to the social problems and labour geographies of early British urbanized industrialization—and,

thus, inherited the assumption of an economy based in urban industrial production.5 Benefits

and eligibility reflected the rhythms and geography of these industries: year-round, full-time, 4 The original name of the program was unemployment insurance. It was changed to employment insurance in the 1990s as part of a broader set of neoliberal reforms. See Campeau, From UI to EI. 5 Campeau. The theory of unemployment advocated by William Beveridge, on which the British and then the Canadian welfare state would be based, emerged within the context of the nineteenth century entrenchment of industrial capitalism, and social welfare policies were designed to regulate the contradictions therein. Unemployment in this context came to be broadly understood no longer as a matter of personal responsibility but, rather, as the “obverse side of wage labour”: a social problem caused by industrialization and an inherent part of industrial capitalism. And, therefore, a social crisis that capitalists would have to manage. Struthers, No Fault of Their Own, 3. Social insurance, in this context, would arise as one response to the social problems of industrialization. As David Garland writes, the global emergence of the welfare state government, consolidated after World War II, “was a response to the new and distinctive problems of the urban, industrial, market societies that were taking shape at the end of the 19th century—above all, to the 'normal accidents' of industrial production and the risks and uncertainties caused by insecure wage labor.” Garland, ‘The Welfare State’, 351.

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and urban. But, given the historical centrality of staples to the national economy, Canadian

labour markets had never neatly fit this model. Nor did they in 1940, when the passage of the

Unemployment Insurance Act marked a pivotal moment in the consolidation of the post-war

welfare state. From the persistence of small-scale primary production to the expansion of

modern industrial staples, bureaucrats and decision-makers were left facing spatio-temporalities

of production and employment (some valued, others not) that did not match the assumptions

embodied in the new insurance program. This, of course, posed a problem for the country’s

many seasonal workers; but, from the vantage point of the state and industry, it also posed a

problem for the reproduction of the workforce that would be needed in expanding the post-war

economy and, in particular, the industrial resource frontier.

As government officials deliberated the place of seasonal and peripheral work and workers in

the new unemployment insurance program, they struggled with a contradiction: how to regulate

the new ‘problem’ of seasonal economies without hindering labour markets for nationally

valued (but still irregular) forms of production. In deliberations about these questions and in the

state’s broader attempts to research, understand, and regulate seasonal productivity, bureaucrats,

economists, and policy-makers ushered in a new understanding of “the season” as a unit of

labour time that could be wasted or put to use. Caught between an understanding of seasonality

as an inherent feature of the Canadian economy and a burden on productivity, these debates

flagged the potential for UI to not simply enable wasted seasons but, perhaps, to help make use

of them. In this way, UI would help link marginal workers and seasonal economies with national

economic priorities, bolstering new staples industries, imaginaries of workforce coordination,

fragmented labour geographies, and enduring stories about the problem of seasonality. The story

that seasonal unemployment is a problem of national productivity remains a powerful logic

underpinning the regulation of unemployed people and seasonal economies in Canada.

Importantly, the rhetorical emphasis has always remained on the incompatibility of seasonal

employment and insurance. Seasonal claimants are cast as lazy and dependent, ensuring these

forms of work remain not only economically but also normatively marginal. These forms of

marginality are inseparable. As the case of Bay St. Lawrence lays bare, unemployment

insurance holds the power to not only sustain these types of seasonal economies, but to also

discipline them, undermine them, and disperse them into other industries which, by no accident,

are also often seasonal and dependent on workers’ access to insurance. By at once preserving,

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pathologizing, and mobilizing seasonality, unemployment policy has helped to reproduce this

“problem of seasonal unemployment”: sustaining precarious structures of seasonal employment,

reproducing these structures as problems, and, fueled by this dual marginality, sending workers

to the resource frontier. In drawing these lines between the regulation of unemployed people and

the shifting geographies of resource development, this analysis ‘grounds’ the welfare state in a

way that places welfare and poverty policy in relation to these specific geographies of

accumulation. In doing so, it suggests that the regulation of unemployed people has been a

powerful but easily overlooked force in the formulation of geographies of extractive

accumulation in Canada.

Historically, my focus is on the early days of welfare state policy in Canada, when programs and

policies concerning unemployment were in the process of being imagined, deliberated, and

tested. It is easy to imagine the ‘advent’ of the welfare state as a sudden and orchestrated affair:

policy-making in the post-war period, after all, was framed by somewhat grand aspirations of

modernization, coordinated administration, and national planning. Enabled by technologies and

state capacities derived from wartime and powered by intensive research and information-

gathering, employment and economic policy during this time embraced a strong interventionist

orientation toward labour market management.6 In Canada, this agenda would reach its apex in

the high modernism and official “active” manpower policy of the 1960s, which saw focused

attempts at coordinating the national labour market through counselling and mobility programs.7

While even these high modernist tactics did not function with the fluidity they promised (as the

next two chapters illustrate), figuring out the purpose of these programs and building the

knowledge and bureaucratic infrastructure to implement them took time. I focus on the early

days of unemployment policy precisely because state officials were in the midst of deliberating

key questions about what the programs were for and how they should function: for example,

what should constitute insurable employment. In these early days, things unfolded in ways that

were often haphazard and somewhat clumsy.8 And in this clumsiness and deliberation we can

6 William Walters has argued that, historically, it is with the identification of the casual [or seasonal] labour problem that “poverty begins to be thought about and acted on from the perspective of the labour market.” William Walters, ‘The Discovery of “Unemployment”: New Forms for the Government of Poverty’, Economy and Society 23, no. 3 (1994): 269. 7 See John Grundy, ‘Administering Employability: Employment Service Delivery in the Era of Activation’ (Unpublished book manuscript, 2014). 8 The National Employment Service offers an example. The National Employment Service had been established alongside Unemployment Insurance and was considered especially necessary given the climate and prevalence of seasonality in the economy. Through employment centres where employers could post vacancies and unemployed

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get a sense of how and why certain ways of thinking about—if not yet governing—

unemployment and the staples-labour problem took shape.9

Resources for Freedom: Securing the industrial staple state

The post-war period in Canada is often represented as a key moment of transition characterized

by high rates of urbanization, the decline of primary resource industries, and the rise of

manufacturing. While ‘traditional’ staples industries like agriculture and the fishery underwent

intense industrialization during this period the post-war period by no means marked a transition

away from a resource-based economy to one based in manufacturing. Rather, this period marks

a shift in the Canadian staples economy away from commercial and toward industrial staples;

that is, the extraction of largely non-biological inputs for industrial production, namely forest,

mine, and energy products.10 The context for this shift was the booming American postwar oil

economy and its enormous demand for industrial staples, technological and research advances

coming out of World War Two, the reorganization of world trade, the Cold War context, and the

US Government’s drive for energy and materials security.

In 1951, amidst perceived vulnerability resulting from the Korean War and the broader Cold

War context, United States President Harry Truman constituted the President’s Materials Policy

Commission. The Commission was tasked with studying the United States’ “Materials

Problem” to the end of ensuring an adequate and secure supply of industrial materials for the

continued expansion of the American economy. The following year, the Commission released

the findings of its study in a report entitled Resources for Freedom. Referring to the “new Dark

Age” of international communism, the opening section of the report reads: “In defeating this

barbarian violence moral values will count most, but they must be supported by an ample

material base…. The use of materials to destroy or to preserve is the choice over which the

world struggle today rages.”11

workers could register for referral, the Service was designed to work in conjunction with UI as a tool for managing the domestic labour market. Registration with the Service was required of workers applying for UI benefits; refusal of the employment offered by the NES would disqualify the applicant. But, as Grundy notes, “Perhaps predictably, given the prioritization of UI applicants in job referrals, the majority of employers did not register vacancies with the NES.” The program was never widely used by employers, remained of marginal use for the purposes of domestic labour coordination, and was considered to be largely ineffective. Grundy, 78. 9 At the same time, the material implications of the introduction and gradual expansion of UI during this period should not be overlooked: coverage increased from 42% in 1941 to 59% in 1954. Campeau, From UI to EI. 10 Clark-Jones, A Staple State. 11 US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom, 1.

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The report identified Canada as the primary safe source for thirteen of the twenty-two key

materials outlined in the report, including nickel, copper, lead, zinc, asbestos, iron ore, sulphur,

titanium, cobalt, petroleum, natural gas, aluminium, and newsprint.12 Key, from the perspective

of Resources for Freedom (which became known as the Paley Report after the Commission’s

Chair, William S. Paley) was not only Canada’s territorial proximity to the US industrial

heartland and the possibility of efficient and secure transportation routes, but also the perception

of Canada as a ‘friendly’ and politically stable source country.13 US agencies were established

to stockpile resources, and the state encouraged private American companies to negotiate

special agreements with source governments covering tax laws, regulations on foreign

ownership and management, labour codes, transport facilities, and so on.14 As Wallace Clement

and Melissa Clark-Jones have both documented, these measures, combined with the Canadian

and provincial governments’ enthusiasm to cooperate, led to the rapid expansion of resource

development in Canada, concentrated control over production by major American companies,

and an emerging continental political and economic resource alliance.15 During this period—

Hayter and Barnes call the 1950s and 60s the ‘Golden Age’ of resource development—forestry,

mining, and energy would become the focus of export-led development in Canada.16

The postwar forest, mine, and energy staples, according to Clark-Jones, were typical of the “new

staple” type in important ways: they were capital- and technology-intensive, relied largely on

wage labour rather than independent producers, and represented semi-processed resource

12 US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom; see also Clement, Challenge of Class Analysis; Clark-Jones, A Staple State. 13 With the caveat about transportation that the Saint Lawrence Seaway would finally come to be built, as officially recommended in the report. US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom. To increase investment in strategic resources internationally the report recommended action by international banks, development agencies, and tariff negotiators. To increase production of resources by American firms, it recommended lowering tariffs on raw materials, using long-term government purchasing contracts with American companies, and subsidizing production loans and tax measures. See Clark-Jones, A Staple State, 15. 14 Clark-Jones, A Staple State. 15 American ownership in mining and smelting, for example, increased from 38% in 1946 to 70% in 1957. Clement, Hardrock Mining, chap. 4. Clark-Jones argues that, in this way, Canadian energy and extractive policy during the post-war era was determined not just by American markets and government policy, but also American industry. She has documented in great detail the links that were forged during this time between the Canadian state and representatives of international energy and industrial capital and the emergence of a “continental decision-making network…with its major headquarters in the military-petroleum and oil-import agencies of Washington, D.C.” Clark-Jones, A Staple State, 25. 16 Hayter and Barnes, ‘Canada’s Resource Economy’; For empirical studies see Clement, Hardrock Mining; Bradbury, ‘Instant Towns in British Columbia’.

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exports characteristic of the “second industrial revolution.”17 On the whole, these industries

were much less labour intensive than older staples production, tending to be labour intensive in

the exploration and construction phases, but very capital intensive in the production phase.

Clement quotes a 1976 study from Energy, Mines and Resources Canada that documented a

“steady increase in value added per employee from 1960 to 1975.” Of note, “The increase was

much larger in absolute terms in mining than in manufacturing; it also grew much faster, more

than doubling in fifteen years.”18 But Clark-Jones also emphasizes that these “new staple”

industries were somewhat unique on account of the central role played by the state in facilitating

their capital consolidation and subsequent “continental resource capitalism.” She outlines that

policies set during the early stages of mining, forest, and energy resource development sought to

facilitate capital concentration, subsidized resource development, centralized decision-making

and new forms of industry-state collaboration, and de-emphasized the generation of employment

and manufacturing.19

Hayter and Barnes locate the political economic transition to what they call “plantation style”

staples development firmly within the broader logic of Fordism as a regime of accumulation (a

combined production system and regulatory framework).20 This was, by this account, a form of

Fordism oriented toward the continental economy and defined by the political hegemony of the

United States, free trade and foreign direct investment, and “a spatial division of labour in which

Canada’s role was to supply resources for processing in the U.S.”21 Much theorization of

Fordism and post-Fordism has documented the role of the welfare state as a key institutional

17 Clark-Jones, A Staple State, 21. 18 Canada. Energy, Mines and Resources Canada, Mineral Policy: A Discussion Paper (Ottawa: Ministry of Supply and Services Canada, 1982); as quoted in Clement, Challenge of Class Analysis, 98. 19 Clark-Jones, A Staple State. 20 By “plantation style” development, they mean as branch plants of multinational corporations, rather than “entrepreneurial” or small-scale production. This is a transition that began in the 1920s, but fully takes hold in the late 1940s. Hayter and Barnes, ‘Canada’s Resource Economy’. Within critical and Marxist strains of economic geography, Fordism is often understood a regime of accumulation: a framework derived from French regulation theory. By this analysis, Fordism is combined production system and regulatory framework: domestic (or, in this case, continental) mass production and a range of institutions to ensure consumption. These ranged from Keynesian demand management to welfare state benefits to policies supporting wages, job stability, and the constrained power and rights of organized labour (largely enjoyed by white men in manufacturing) that were hard-won but also disciplined the working class politically. For an account of this process in Canada see Peter S. McInnis, Harnessing Labour Confrontation: Shaping the Postwar Settlement in Canada, 1943-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). For a useful account of Fordism more generally see Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, chap. 8. 21 Hayter and Barnes, ‘Canada’s Resource Economy’, 38. In making these observations, they are drawing on Jane Jenson’s theory of Canadian Fordism as “permeable.” Jane Jenson, ‘“Different” but Not “Exceptional”: Canada’s Permeable Fordism’, Canadian Review of Sociology / Revue Canadienne de Sociologie 26, no. 1 (1989): 69–94.

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structure in regulating against capitalist crisis.22 From this perspective, framing the

consolidation of industrial staples production within the context of Fordism (as Hayter and

Barnes do), can help us think broadly about what it meant, in concrete terms, for the state to

regulate industrial staples production. The political economy of staples development cited above

offers a broad framework for understanding the regulation of capitalist dynamics within this

context. The regulation of labour, however, remains somewhat obscured: a tendency that I think

is exacerbated by the historical emphasis on the ‘stability’ of resource Fordism as it appeared

through the resource town model. But there is a rich body of scholarship that has documented

the welfare state’s powerful role in regulating workers too: instilling discipline through punitive

poverty policy and formulating low-wage, temporary, mobile, and otherwise peripheral labour

markets.23 Especially given the context of the staples-labour problem in Canada, these questions

of labour regulation are as important to consider in making sense of resource Fordism as they

would be for understanding any other regime of accumulation.

“Unemployment Insurance is primarily intended for industrial workers”

In the face of the shifting national political economy and new geographies of production,

bureaucrats of the bourgeoning welfare state scratched their heads about what the drive to

expand industrial staples production meant for labour market policy. As government officials

22 For some early examples see O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State; Gough, The Political Economy of the Welfare State; Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State. 23 Chief among these studies is Piven and Cloward’s pivotal research on the “functions of public welfare.” Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 1971. While not an explicit study of the welfare state, this work emphasizes the longstanding role of poor relief—a tradition core to the genealogy of the welfare state, as Michael Katz illustrates—in regulating people through the enforcement of work and the suppression of disorder. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse; see also Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. The literature here is somewhat vast and varied. Since the rise of neoliberalism and workfare programs, much of the emphasis (in geography perhaps especially) has been on the ‘transition’ away from the welfare state to new forms of regulating and governing poverty. Of note, see: Jamie Peck, Workfare States (New York: Guilford Press, 2001); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). This research has articulated the relationship between state restructuring, changing regimes of accumulation, and new geographies of insecurity and inequality as well as the central role of welfare state restructuring in the enduring, though shifting, state regulation of labour markets and workers. In this dissertation, I follow scholars who have explicitly troubled a historical opposition between a period of welfare-state expansion, characterized as good for workers and the poor, in contrast to a subsequent period of contraction, characterized as bad. In addition to the work of Piven and Cloward and Katz, I have found the following works useful in this way: Cowen, Military Workfare; Frances Fox Piven, ‘A Response to Wacquant’, Theoretical Criminology 14, no. 1 (2010): 111–16; Garland, ‘The Welfare State’. Garland argues that the welfare state is not an ideology or a particular set of programs, but a governmentality defined by the rationality and techniques it employs in governing the national economy and population. Garland locates a logic emerging from the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s that “regarded unemployment not as a problem of ‘work effort’…but as a ‘problem of industry’ operating at a level of the labor market,” 337. This led to new ideas about the government’s capacity to manage the economy, not just individual workers, rendering the national economy, the labour market, and the structure of industrial production into objects of governance.

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deliberated whether unemployment insurance had a role to play in shoring up extractive labour

markets, discussions focused on how to determine “insurable” employment. These deliberations

zeroed in on both the space and time of industry.

In 1940 the federal government had implemented the first major plank of the modern Canadian

welfare state. After the unemployment crisis, mass organizing, and relief camp strikes of the

Great Depression, long-running disputes about what level of government held responsibility for

the unemployed, and a constitutional amendment, the 1940 Unemployment Insurance Act would

finally put in place a national income security program for workers.24 In 1941, just one year

after the program was established, the Unemployment Insurance Advisory Committee proposed

a clause allowing, subject to the approval of the Commission, for the exclusion of certain remote

regions from the Act—regions deemed to have “inconsiderable insurable employment.”25 By the

late 1940s, the UI Commission revisited the problem of what they called “remote area

claimants”—anxious to develop a solution given the imminent addition of Labrador to the

Dominion. In the summer of 1948, Chief Claims Officer H.S. Relph outlined an example of the

problem for to UI Commissioner C.A.L. Murchison:

As you know, the Maritime Provinces and in the Province of Quebec we have a large 24 For this history of UI, see Campeau, From UI to EI. On the key political context of widespread agitation of the unemployed during the Great Depression, see: Lorne Brown, When Freedom Was Lost (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986); Bill Waiser, All Hell Can’t Stop Us: The On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot (Calgary, AB: Fifth House Publishers, 2003). The long evolution of the Canadian unemployment insurance system is somewhat complex. As Campeau summarizes, “True to our Poor Laws heritage, unemployment and the attendant poverty were primarily individual responsibilities. It was therefore up to the private sector to solve the problems of poverty induced by unemployment. The family, then the local community (i.e., the municipality or parish), had to take care of the poor. When industrial unemployment made its appearance, however, the economic system became accountable. As in Britain, the central government was asked to help contain the damage…. As a result, the idea of an unemployment insurance scheme began to make headway in the political class…. The federal government, however, refused to take any responsibility for unemployment. For Prime Minister Robert Borden, solutions to this problem fell under the jurisdiction of the provinces.” From UI to EI, 33. By the early 1930s, arguing that the crisis was severe but temporary, federal-level measures to deal with unemployment took emergency form and relied on Poor Law logic, the means test, and severe state discipline, culminating in the Department of National Defence-run work camps which housed 20,000 unemployed and operated until 1936. In the face of nation-wide and increasingly militant jobless organizing, a growing number of unemployed “transients” flooding into the cities in search of work, and Roosevelt’s New Deal, however, Prime Minister Bennett, an “apostle of laissez-faire” declared, “I nail the flag of progress to the masthead. I summon the power of the state to its support” quoted in Campeau, 43. In the wake of the 1935 Regina Riot Bennett defended his support for a national unemployment insurance program on the grounds that it was good for business; the 1935 Employment and Social Insurance Act was passed later that year but would be struck down as violating provincial jurisdiction in a Supreme Court constitutional review ordered by the King government. The Privy Council also ruled the program unconstitutional on the same grounds. With the advent to World War Two, the King government would come to support a national UI scheme and after a constitutional amendment the 1940 UI Act was passed that summer Campeau, From UI to EI. 25 “Exclusion from Coverage of Employment in Remote Areas.” Unemployment Insurance Commission. Ottawa, March 2, 1949. LAC RG50, Vol. 21, File 4-13.

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number of what might be termed remote area claimants. At the present moment, no

definite instructions of guidance can be given regarding this type of claimant. One of the

most difficult points is the Magdalen Islands where we have over 7,000 persons resident,

many of whom only work on the mainland during the summer months and beat it back to

the Magdalen Islands; in the winter there is no means of getting these people from the

Islands to the mainland except by airplane and as it often happens in the winter months,

at the nearest office, Moncton, there are enough persons unemployed to fill all the

vacancies that could possibly happen and to move these remote area claimants would not

only be expensive but might be prejudicial to placement procedure in the area.26

In March of the following year, the UI Commission, again, proposed a wholesale regulatory

exclusion of certain areas understood as too distant from insurable employment (see Figure 1.1).

The report outlining the proposed change to the Unemployment Insurance Advisory Committee

opens by stating: “Unemployment Insurance is primarily intended for industrial workers.”

Clarifying the assumed mutual exclusion of industrial production and “remote” geographies, the

Commission explained: “Since the Act provides insurance against unemployment due to

temporary dislocation in industrial areas, it is assumed that an unemployed worker must be

available for alternative employment. That is to say, he must remain in an area that is reasonably

accessible.”27 Using circular logic, the report points to remoteness as inherently problematic,

while simultaneously collapsing geography with the problems of non-industrial employment

relations and availability for work—both of which were already established as grounds for

exclusion from the program. Addressing the logistics of administering UI, the report reads:

“There have always been some areas in Canada where the problem of applying the Act has been

difficult. These are areas which, although subject to the Act as regards coverage and collections

of contributions, are sufficiently remote from centres of substantial insurable employment that it

is always questionable whether workers continue to be available when they withdraw to such

areas during periods of unemployment.”28

26 Letter from H.S. Relph to C.A.L. Murchison. Ottawa, July 8, 1948. LAC RG50, Vol 21, File 4-13. 27 “Exclusion from Coverage of Employment in Remote Areas,” 3. 28 “Exclusion from Coverage of Employment in Remote Areas,” 3.

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Figure 1.1: Proposed ‘remote’ areas to be excluded from UI, 1949. Note that the line circumvents the industrializing area along the Quebec-Labrador border.29

Using the example of the north shore of the lower Saint Lawrence River the report detailed the

experience of two federal auditors who, in the summer of 1948, travelled 732 miles along the

coast by boat, from Quebec City to Blanc Sablon. Mixing climate and logistics into the cocktail

of reasons to cast the periphery out of the welfare state, the auditors reported under eight-

hundred insurable employees along the route and significant administrative barriers to selling

stamps and collecting contributions, including remoteness of the area and the shortness of the

“season of favourable weather” in which travel was possible.30

In contrast, when the Paley Report was published three years later, it would point to the

importance of the “great Labrador reserve”—which lay along the northern border of Labrador

and Quebec, just inland from the route the auditors had travelled—to American industrial

expansion. In fact, at the time of their trip, backed by the enthusiasm of the federal government,

29 “Exclusion from Coverage of Employment in Remote Areas.” Unemployment Insurance Commission. Ottawa, March 2, 1949. LAC RG50, Vol. 21, file 4-13 30 “Exclusion from Coverage of Employment in Remote Areas.”

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elaborate and capital-intensive plans were well underway for the development of the Labrador

reserve, including the construction of a remote rail line that would transport ore from the site of

extraction to the Quebec port town of Sept-Iles. The size of the Labrador reserve was said to

dwarf other available high quality reserves of iron ore and, anticipating the ongoing expansion

of American steel production and the depletion of key domestic iron ore deposits, the report

highlights that once developed and given unhindered access, this deposit could serve as a remote

and secure stockpile capable of flexible production that would meet the needs of American steel

manufacturing: “Output from this area…can quickly be doubled or tripled by adding manpower,

shovels, trucks, and rolling stock.”31 But, as the report flagged, transporting this ore from

Labrador to the mills of the American Midwest posed an obvious challenge: the narrow

channels around the International Rapids at Montreal reduced the size of possible shipments, rail

transport would involve heavy investment in infrastructure, and shipment 1,500 miles to

American ports on the Atlantic coast posed a serious security threat. As such, Resources for

Freedom asserted the “imperative” of completing the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which would

ultimately allow a four-fold increase in the amount of iron ore that could be shipped to Midwest

steel mills.32

Alongside this description is a map illustrating this imagined geography of unfettered access,

extraction, and circulation (see Figure 1.2). With no marker of even an internationally

recognized border—let alone conflicting assertions of sovereignty inside these national borders

as the Canadian state extended its reach over these territories—the map traces the flow of ore

from the Labrador Formation, through the Great Lakes and the anticipated Saint Lawrence

Seaway, into American port cities and, finally, the steel city of Pittsburgh and various Midwest

mill towns. The map draws clean connections between the far-flung worlds of Northern Quebec

and Labrador and the American industrial heartland, representing the contested territories of the

Canadian north as cleanly accessible to American government and industrial interests.

31 US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom, 20. 32 US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom.

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Figure 1.2: The Transportation of Iron Ore, US President's Materials Policy Commission.33

The federal auditors’ claims about the impossibility of selling unemployment insurance stamps

along the north shore of the Saint Lawrence stand in stark contrast to the celebrated possibility

of unrolling an industrial extractive landscape that reached hundreds of miles inland from the

shore. In their travels, the federal auditors had sailed right past the anticipated ground zero for

the “iron road to Labrador,” where heavy machinery would be flown over the muskeg and

thousands of workers would lay 360 miles of rail.34 Along this rail, the Iron Ore Company of

Canada planned to have two-thousand rail cars carry ten million tons of ore from the Ungava

region to the port of Sept-Iles on the Saint Lawrence river, through the soon-to-be-built locks

and canals of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to American steel plants.35 A celebratory account in

33 US President's Materials Policy Commission, "Resources for Freedom: A Report to the President." Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1952, 10. 34 Richard F. Dempewolff, ‘The Iron Road to Labrador’, Popular Mechanics, February 1954. Jean-Sébastien Boutet covers some of this early history in ‘Opening Ungava to Industry’. 35 Dempewolff, ‘The Iron Road to Labrador’. Constituted in Delaware in 1949, the IOC was a joint venture of northeastern Ontario mining giant Jules Timmins—owner of Hollinger North Shore Exploration Company and Hollinger Consolidated Gold mines, the latter of which would buy majority ownership of Labrador Mining and Exploration Company, thereby giving Hollinger control over the Labrador concession—and Cleveland giant M.A.

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Popular Mechanics from 1954 boasts about the technological feat of producing such a

thoroughly industrial operation on the very basis of the ‘remote’ and challenging natural

environment: “an army of men has battled its way northward” in the “biggest railroad-building

project this continent has seen in nearly half a century,” reads the dramatic frontierist account.

“Giant ‘cats’ are roaming the forests and lake-strewn wilds of Labrador…gouging the muskeg,

toppling stunted spruce trees and pounding the thick moss carpet to a pulp.”36

While, under the proposal for remote area exclusion, people and economies designated as

“remote” were slotted as non-industrial and denied insurance on the very basis of their

remoteness, their homelands were increasingly sought after by big international capital (with the

aid of the Canadian government) as sites of major extractive development and capital

accumulation. Nor are these social and industrial geographies separable. Innu workers had been

indispensible in the early stages of iron ore exploration and production taking place in their

territory, first as guides and prospectors, and then as labourers. Through a historical geography

of the Schefferville mine (across the provincial border in Quebec, but part of the same mineral

formation) that emphasizes Innu perspectives and agency, Jean-Sébastien Boutet highlights that

this labour history often gets lost: not only in the celebratory accounts of planes, helicopters, and

bush pilots, but also in “simplistic binaries that oppose mining and non-mining worlds,

traditional and non-traditional livelihoods, and state-corporate and Indigenous geographies.”37

Boutet explains that, in the early development of the Quebec-Labrador railway, before planes

and helicopters could ‘roam the forest,’ Innu wage earners played a crucial and skilled role in

transporting supplies across the territory by foot and canoe. The workforce in these early stages

of the project was an amalgam of local Innu and migrant working class Canadians, Quebecois,

and Newfoundlanders. But once the railway progressed and planes were able to land closer to

the work camps, as Boutet explains, this specialized transportation role became less essential

and far fewer Innu were hired. Even as Innu workers were indispensable throughout exploration

and early construction, the social and environmental relations of post-Confederation mining,

forestry and, eventually, hydro development—both the dispossession of local Indigenous Hanna Mining, which could guarantee significant exploration capital. Hollinger and Hannah joined forces in 1943 to undertake exploration and, six years later, would join with five major US steel companies, who would act as principal ore buyers, to form the IOC. See Boutet, ‘Opening Ungava to Industry’. 36 Dempewolff, ‘The Iron Road to Labrador’. 37 Boutet highlights the complex ways Innu workers navigated the wage economy and sustained “life projects” on their own terms throughout the industrialization of their homeland. Boutet, ‘Opening Ungava to Industry’, 91–92. The idea of life projects comes from Mario Blaser, Harvey A. Feit, and Glenn McRae, In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization (London: Zed Books, 2004).

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peoples and industry’s reliance on their labour—are, unsurprisingly, rendered invisible by the

smooth space of both the ‘remote area exclusion’ map and the Paley Report.

It is worth noting that the proposed clause to exclude remote areas from unemployment

insurance retained the insurability of workers who resided in the south and went into the

proposed excluded areas “in connection with some temporary work for their employers.”38 The

map illustrating the proposed excluded areas draws a line along the mid-latitudes that seems to

jut carefully around northern areas that are already undergoing industrial expansion.39 While not

preventing remote residents from returning home in between bouts of work in insured areas,

“the Commission, having declared these areas to be areas of inconsiderable employment,

proposes…that any person who goes into one of these excluded areas in effect makes himself

not available for employment, and this would result in automatic disqualification so long as the

person resided there”40 In this way, welfare policy sought ways to spell out not only normative

and colonial ideas about who constituted the ‘good’ economic subject, but also what would

constitute ‘good’ economic geographies.

The year prior to the 1949 remote area exclusion proposal, the Director of Unemployment

Insurance corresponded with the regional superintendents in affected areas asking for their

feedback. In their responses, the western regional superintendents challenged Ottawa’s

perception of their regions as remote from modern industry, suggesting that the Director of

Unemployment Insurance had underestimated the degree of industrial development occurring in

the north. This form of remote area exclusion, they worried, would function to mute the growth

of this expanding extractive development. In addition to general reminders that industry was

prevalent throughout the proposed excluded zone and appeals to the importance of having

access to seasonal workers for lumbering and canneries, the Pacific Regional Superintendent

insisted, “We are of the opinion that within the next ten years the whole of this north country

will be opened up to an extent never dreamed of by even the oldest inhabitants.”41 Pointing to

the challenges of orchestrating a labour force for expanding northern industries, his Winnipeg

38 “Exclusion from Coverage of Employment in Remote Areas.” Unemployment Insurance Commission. Ottawa, March 2, 1949. LAC RG50, Vol. 21, File 4-13. 39 March 16, 1949. “Map of the Dominion of Canada”. LAC RG50, Vol. 21, File 4-13. 40 “Exclusion from Coverage of Employment in Remote Areas,” 6. 41 Letter to Mr. R.G. Barclay, Director of Unemployment Insurance, Ottawa from Wm. McKinstrey, Regional Superintendent (Pacific). Re: “Remote Areas – Inconsiderable Employment”. Vancouver, November 5, 1948. LAC RG50, Vol. 21, File 4-13.

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counterpart highlighted the important role UI access played in being able to fill labour needs:

“We have difficulty sometimes in recruiting for these outlying areas but if people find they are

going into a non-insurable area it is going to be doubly bad nor should we expect them to give

up their rights.”42 While Ottawa bureaucrats presented a contradiction between ‘industrial

production’ and ‘remoteness,’ bureaucrats on the ground highlighted the potential for

unemployment policy to shore up the irregular contours of these extractive geographies.

These debates shed light on the contradictory place of industrial staples production in realizing

the vision of the post-war modern economy. While industrial staples were at the heart of the

post-war Fordist regime, the spatio-temporality of industrial staples production in post-war

Canada differed in important ways from those assumed to underpin Fordism: distance from

urban centres and centres of capital, different structures of labour mobility, and various forms of

temporal irregularity. This ‘problem’ was reflected in debates about UI. In trying to navigate the

peculiar factor of ‘remoteness,’ bureaucrats were caught between their intent to enable industry

and their desire to regulate local livelihoods and economies that did not conform with the ideals

of modern industry and economic citizenship.

As a regulatory instrument for the modern economy, depending no how it was used, UI had the

ability to do both: to shore up the variably mobile, seasonal, or otherwise irregular work patterns

or to discourage them. Focused on spurring northern development, local superintendents saw the

need for the former. Bureaucrats in Ottawa, meanwhile, were worried about the latter: people,

places, and livelihoods that deviated from the geographies of post-war modernity. This shone a

light on a key contradiction of this new national unemployment policy: that the agenda for

national economic expansion demanded different things of different regions and populations. As

the Gordon Report would come to identify, the post-war agenda for national economic growth

posed both the “problems of the Atlantic Provinces and the North”: ‘underdevelopment’ and

‘underused’ resources in some areas; expanding and nationally valued development in others.43

As bureaucrats danced around this tricky matter of ‘remoteness,’ trying to square northern

development’s temporal irregularity and distance from capitalist centres with ideals of industrial

progress, they were entangled in this contradiction. As the next section explores, as they 42 Letter to Mr. R.G. Barclay, Director of Unemployment Insurance, Ottawa, from Fred J. White, Regional Superintendent for Winnipeg. Re: Remote Areas – Inconsiderable employment. Winnipeg, November 5, 1948. LAC RG50, Vol. 21, File 4-13. 43 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, Final Report, Ch. 19.

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continued to grapple with the place of irregular employment and production in the national

economy, bureaucrats would start to think across these regional differences, pondering if and

how they might manage places, people, and economies in relation to each other.

Importantly, while the emphasis was on geography (as the map makes clear), the ‘problem’ that

Ottawa and local bureaucrats were trying to manage was also and inseparably temporal. On

account of their spatiality, these industrial geographies often demanded variably mobile labour.

As the regional superintendents urged, restrictions on UI could discourage temporary movement

into these industries. And as Ottawa’s promise to insure southerners who worked temporarily in

excluded zones made clear, they shared these concerns. As Canadian bureaucrats went about the

daily work of building and servicing the industrial staple state, these concerns about labour

mismatches, shortages, and immobility, given the temporal and geographic organization of these

industries, would run through the expanding field of labour market management.

“Labour time not used is permanently lost”

The proposal to exclude remote areas claimants from unemployment insurance was never

approved by Cabinet, but the anxieties on display in those deliberations—about the

contradictory geographical assumptions inherent to the emerging welfare state and industrial

staples production—did not fade with the demise of this proposal.44 In the years that followed,

in trying to navigate what this contradiction meant for labour market policy, bureaucrats began

to focus explicitly on the temporality of production, reframing some of the same ‘problems’ in

terms of seasonality rather than remoteness.

In contrast to concerns about labour shortages in the north, the Department of Labour grew

preoccupied with seasonal surplus labour in the southern regions of the country, emphasizing

the problem of seasonal fluctuations in productivity and winter unemployment. Characterizing

winter idleness as a national problem, bureaucrats asserted that seasonal fluctuations in national

productivity and related unemployment constituted a waste of national resources: both time and

labour power. Bolstered by the wartime emphasis on research and information gathering,

national planning, and administration, policy-makers embarked on a mission to research and

44 “Exclusion from Coverage of Employment in Remote Areas.” Communication from the Unemployment Insurance Commission to the Unemployment Insurance Advisory Committee. Ottawa, July 12, 1949. LAC RG50, Vol. 21, File 4-13.

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regulate seasonality.

Seasonality had long been a defining feature of unemployment and poverty in Canada—or, it

had at least long been a way of explaining poverty.45 But with the advent of a national

uemployment policy the season went from being understood as a political problem on account

of the poverty it engendered to a problem of national productivity. In the historical context of

widespread seasonality and occupational pluralism, petty production and semi-subsistence

economies had served as a way to warehouse seasonal labour. In the changing post-war

economy, by contrast, the assumed-to-be-insurmountable seasonal variation of these economies

was cast as a national barrier to productivity and accumulation. This contradiction framed post-

war policy discussions. While it was common to appeal to the natural limits of the Canadian

economy—a result of the northern climate and staples-based economy—policy discussions were

increasingly guided by the drive to overcome these limitations.46 In this way, in deliberating and

researching the problem of wasted winter labour in the 1950s, policy-makers got caught

between contradictory narratives about the season as something that could and should be

eradicated and as an inherent feature of the Canadian economy.

A 1950 pamphlet from the International Labour Organization on the National Employment

Service illustrates this logic, winding together seasonal unemployment, resource extraction, and

45 Many key sources on the history of unemployment and unemployment policy in Canada are oddly uncritical in their assertion of the harsh climate and “the season” as responsible to poverty and unemployment. E.g. Struthers, No Fault of Their Own; Campeau, From UI to EI. There are resonances here between this ‘season theory of unemployment’ and Harold Innis’s staples-theory. Innis’s theory has been rightfully critiqued by historical materialists as fetishistic for placing the inherent qualities of the staple commodity—rather than social relations underpinning a historically-specific organizations of nature and economies—as the driver of history. McNally, ‘Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism’; McNally, ‘Technological Determinism and Canadian Political Economy: Further Contributions to a Debate’. Similarly, the ‘season’—as a pre-existing, commodifiable, and wasteable unit of time—must be understood as brought into being through a particular set of social relations. On the history of seasonality and poverty in Canada, see Judith Fingard who has written about what she calls the “seasonal contours” of pre-industrial poverty. She writes, “While it would be simplistic to suggest that winter was the only cause of poverty, it intensified the underemployment of labour, aggravated illness, and attracted the destitute rural poor to the cities where sufficient wealth, self-interest, and jobbery could be found to sustain charitable relief and public asylums” Judith Fingard, ‘The Winter’s Tale: The Seasonal Contours of Pre-Industrial Poverty in British North America, 1815‑1860’, Historical Papers 9, no. 1 (1974): 66; see also Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager, Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 46 The National Advisory Council on Manpower, “Suggested approach to the problem of seasonal unemployment and results of research,” LAC RG19, Vol. 2225, File 9244-06-2 (Part 1). In 1952 the Economics and Research Branch of the Department of Labour began a statistical analysis of seasonal employment fluctuations. The same year, an Interdepartmental Committee on Seasonal Unemployment was established under the National Advisory Committee on Manpower to administer a national seasonal unemployment survey among employers and suggest how the government might best deal with the problem of persistent winter unemployment.

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labour mobility, and naturalizing these dynamics within the context of Canada’s northern

climate and harsh winters:

The climate varies considerably. Long winters and short summers are the rule in the

northern sections, a rule which is reversed in the south. Certain types of labour cannot be

carried on in some parts of the country during the winter season. This means that

workers engaged in those particular activities must go elsewhere for employment in their

own callings. The working population of Canada must have mobility. Workers must, at

times, be prepared to move long distances or else turn to some other occupation when

seasonal conditions make their own work impossible.47

In the face of what was feared to be mounting unemployment in the 1950s, organized labour and

the organized unemployed were calling on the federal government to eradicate the “excepted

employment” clause in the Unemployment Insurance Act (stipulating ineligible forms of

employment) and to introduce benefits for all unemployed. The Union of Unemployed

Workers—who were making demands that the federal government take one hundred percent

responsibility for all unemployed—claimed that the federal government continued to blame

structural unemployment on seasonal fluctuations as an excuse to avoid expanding benefits.48

As these groups argued, policy-makers were using seasonality to naturalize patterns of

unemployment that were increasingly dominated by industrial rhythms. All the while, in places

and occupations peripheral to these industrial rhythms, the material problem—poverty—of

longstanding and persistent actual seasonal employment persisted.49

47 “National Employment Services: Canada.” Published by the International Labour Office. Geneva. 1950. 105 pages. LAC RG26, Vol. 96, File 3-11-3 – National Employment Service (Labour Dept) – (Part 1). 48 “Brief to the Federal Government on Public Relief, Unemployment and Trade.” Submitted by the Union of Unemployed Workers, Toronto. June 16, 1952. LAC MG28, Vol. 238, File 7. 49 In their examination of urban unemployment in Canada in the late nineteenth century, Baskerville and Sager highlight that the “camouflaging” of structural employment with appeals to ‘natural’ seasonal fluctuations is co-extensive with the whole history of industrial capitalism and structural employment in Canada. That is, the emerging problem of surplus labour in the context of early industrialization in the mid-nineteenth Century—defined by the authors as the generalization of workers’ vulnerability to capitalist markets within the context of wage dependence and cyclical depressions—was “concealed by its seasonal appearance.” The authors connect this to the northern climate, arguing that within the context of widespread regular seasonal movements of workers between rural and urban labour markets, “‘lack of work’ presented itself as a seasonal problem in the distribution of workers.” In this way, labour shortages became the focus of unemployment policy in the second half of the century and the first government employment offices would emerge as a way to meet farmers’ demand for seasonal labour: a process which would help to define the problem of unemployment as one of spatio-temporal mismatches rather than structural factors. What was—and would remain—at stake for workers was to unearth the politics of this seasonal explanation. The existence of industrial unemployment (in the form of surplus labour), of course, posed a

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Figure 1.3: Advertisements that were part of the “Let's Do it Now!” winter employment campaign in Port Arthur, ON.50

Meanwhile, concerned about surplus winter labour, the federal government had descended on

the season as an object of study. In 1952 the Economics and Research Branch of the Department

of Labour began a statistical analysis of seasonal employment fluctuations. The same year, an

Interdepartmental Committee on Seasonal Unemployment was established under the National

Advisory Committee on Manpower to administer a national seasonal unemployment survey

among employers and suggest how the government might best deal with the problem of

persistent winter unemployment.51 Increasingly frustrated by the undulating graphs produced by

the research, the National Employment Service undertook a Winter Works program in

threat to working class security; rather than some naturally-occurring climatic condition, idleness now figured centrally as part of class relations. Baskerville and Sager, Unwilling Idlers, 24. 50 LAC, RG26, Vol. 96, file 3-33-3 (part 3). 51 “Suggested Approach to the Problem of Seasonal Unemployment and Results of Research.”; “Seasonal Unemployment.” Report of the National Employment Committee. 1954. LAC RG19, Vol. 4425, File 9244-06-2 (Part 1).

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collaboration with municipalities, and experimented with public campaigns to enroll the public

in winter job creation. A local campaign in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay) called “Let’s Do it

Now” (see Figure 1.3) promoted cold-weather construction and encouraged agents ranging

from governments to community institutions such as churches, to individual home renovators to

do their part in what the government imagined as a national “battle against seasonal

unemployment.”52

In 1954, the National Employment Committee (NEC) released the results of the national survey

on seasonal unemployment.53 “The most serious result of seasonal unemployment,” warned the

report, “is the waste of manpower involved. An important characteristic of manpower which

distinguishes it from other resources is that it cannot be stored, so that labour time not used is

permanently lost.”54

Differentiating between seasonal unemployment that results from decreased consumption (farm

equipment manufacturing or much of the service industry, for example) and decreased or halted

production (e.g. agriculture), in the cover letter to the report, the Chairman of the NEC, W.J.

Lindel, concedes that:

It is either impossible or difficult to do certain things in certain seasons. Canadian

farmers cannot, with the best will in the world, plant wheat in February. Ice makes

inland navigation impracticable in the winter and salt-water fishing faces increased

difficulties in the winter.... On the other hand, logging is a fall and winter industry since

52 “The Port Arthur Story”. The Port Arthur National Employment Service. “Let’s Do It Now” Job Campaign. A Complete record of all types of advertising in the proportion of the recent job campaign at Port Arthur, Ontario. February 1955. LAC RG26, Vol. 96, File 3-11-3 (Part 3); “The Battle Against Seasonal Employment”. Reprinted from the Labour Gazette. May 1956. Department of Labour. LAC RG26, Vol. 96, File 3-11-3 (Part 3); News Release. Department of Labour. Address by Hon. Milton F. Gregg, Minister of Labour, to the Annual General Meeting of Canadian Construction Association, Winnipeg, January 16, 1956. LAC RG26, Vol. 96, File 3-11-3 (Part 3). 53 In December 1952 the Interdepartmental Committee on Seasonal Unemployment had brought a proposal to the National Advisory Council on Manpower that a letter and questionnaire on seasonal unemployment be sent to a sample of employers. The Council asked the National Employment Committee to consider the proposal. The NEC had appointed a sub-committee that had compiled and, through the Regional and Local Employment Committees, distributed the letters and questionnaires to over one thousand employers in nineteen industries. See “Seasonal Unemployment.” Report of the National Employment Committee. 1954. LAC RG19, Vol. 4425, File 9244-06-2 (Part 1). 54 “Seasonal Unemployment,” 2. Without making any mention of structural unemployment, the Committee framed the report as an examination of seasonal unemployment in contrast to mass unemployment like that seen in the 1930s and frictional unemployment (the inherent time lags between firing and hiring or when workers are transitioning between jobs).

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the frost and snow make woods transportation easier, and the spring thaw is depended

upon to provide high water for the log drives. In these industries, seasonal

unemployment occurs because the climate determines to a large extent the character and

magnitude of production activity.55

The Committee recommended the “stabilization” of employment in seasonal operations and,

where that wasn’t possible, more government measures to facilitate labour mobility between

areas with industries whose seasonal patterns “dovetailed.”56 In the explanation of seasonal

unemployment patterns in the logging industry east of the Rockies, the report highlights one key

instance of dovetailing seasonality and the risks of uneven stabilization of seasonal industries.

Explaining that fishing and farming provide the useful function of reabsorbing logging labourers

in the off-season, the report warns that uneven year-round production could function to

exacerbate the problem of seasonal unemployment:

At present, many of the seasonal workers employed by logging companies are farmers or

fishermen who return to their farms or nets when bush work is finished. Since logging in

eastern Canada has a seasonal pattern running counter to the seasonal pattern of most

other industries, the overall effect which the elimination of seasonal variations in logging

might have is not clear. It is possible that such a reduction would increase rather than

decrease the total amount of seasonal unemployment in Canada. Logging provides

winter jobs for a large group of workers and a reduction of seasonal employment

variation in logging would mean that some of these winter jobs would disappear.

However, if seasonal variations were reduced simultaneously in all industries, including

agriculture and fishing, this objection would be overcome.57

These anxieties about seasonal coordination echo deliberations from five years prior about

whether to extend unemployment insurance benefits to seasonal workers. When off-season

unemployment benefits were first extended to seasonal workers in 1950 workers in non-

55 “Seasonal Unemployment.” 56 Much of the emphasis in relation to stabilization was on the construction sector, partly because if its size and prevalence across the country and partly because of the central role of public works in the sector. The committee emphasized the importance of industry-wide “co-operation” and recommended the establishment of joint working groups composed of government, employers, and labour to consider how to reduce seasonal fluctuations in the industry. “Seasonal Unemployment.” 57 “Seasonal Unemployment.”

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insurable seasonal industries gained access to special benefits designated for the seasonally

employed only if they were registered with the local employment office and able to demonstrate

off-season attachment to the labour market.58 These deliberations around the coordination of

dovetailing industries lay bare the social construction of seasonality—the deliberations about

where it is harmful or strategic economically to eliminate versus preserve seasonal production.

But they also place the analysis and regulation of petty agricultural and fisheries production, for

example, in relation to other staples industries.59 Policy-makers saw insurance as a one way to

incentivize and coordinate off-season employment: tying together dispersed places, people,

industries, and temporalities.

But, bearing in mind the useful character of seasonal petty production within the context of the

staples economy, the UI Commission had simultaneously cautioned that the uneven insurance of

seasonal employment can contribute to the “overloading of the labour market” in the off-season

with unused labour power:

For example, in the Okanagan Valley when the fruit processing plants shut down, our

offices are filled with persons who claim they are looking for work when there is no

work available. Before there was unemployment insurance, these same people went back

to their farms and their homes and were not in the labour market. Unemployment

insurance should not upset the regular employment practices and there should be some

method whereby we do not distort the ordinary flow of labour, either the flow from

homes and farms and fisheries to short periods of employment in insurable industry, or

the flow back to these places when the seasonal need is finished.60

While their focus here is on different staples industries and geographies, throughout these

attempts to understand and organize seasonality, bureaucrats were struggling with the same

58 In explaining the conditions of these seasonal provisions the Secretary of the UIC, E.C. Desormeaux, writes: “Comparatively few workers depend on seasonal employment for their whole livelihood. For example, very few persons engaged in transportation on inland waters spend the winter months in idleness; very few persons in lumbering and logging are idle during the summer months; even the women who work in fruit processing plants are employed as housewives while they are not in industry. It would seem, therefore, that seasonal regulations should be designed primarily to restrict benefit only as regards those who normally do not work in the off-season.” From “Seasonal Regulations,” Memo from the Unemployment Insurance Commission to the Unemployment Insurance Advisory Committee. Ottawa, June 27, 1950. LAC RG 50, Vol. 21, File 4-37-1. 59 Memo from the Unemployment Insurance Commission to the Unemployment Insurance Advisory Committee. Ottawa, June 27, 1950. LAC RG 50, Vol. 21, File 4-37-1 60 “Seasonal Regulations,” Memo from the Unemployment Insurance Commission.

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contradiction that characterized the ‘remote area exclusion’ debates. In their aspirations toward

full ‘use’ of the national labour force and increased national productivity, seasonality seemed

wasteful. But the detailed realities of Canada’s industrial geographies—from the seasonality of

the construction sector to the prevalence of a range of seasonal staples industries—made clear

the combined temporal, regional, and sectoral unevenness of the economy and its employment

structures. Within this context, the season posed not only a problem but, if properly managed,

perhaps also a solution. Examining these early attempts to grapple with the season, we can see

how policy-makers imagined that they might use insurance to coordinate seasonality in ways

that attended to the spatial and temporal mismatches between various staples industries and the

labour they required. These awkward and contradictory experiments with the boundaries of

‘insurability’ signal the usefulness of seasonal unemployment in the context of the staple state.

Across the deliberations about both seasonal and remote area exclusion, we can get a sense of

bureaucrats’ early, if somewhat clumsy and haphazard, contemplation that unemployment

insurance might be play a role in managing mismatches and making use of idle labour.

Labour market policy would undergo more significant reforms and increased direct government

intervention in the years that followed. But, it was in these early deliberations about irregularity

and employment insurance that seasonal unemployment became a national problem, deliberated

and debated in relation to national economic anxieties and goals. While seasonal unemployment

was a longstanding feature of the Canadian economy, in the post-war decades it became a

problem of national productivity. The characterization of labour power as a “national resource”

that should be managed and used toward improving national productivity has been foundational

to the logic of Canadian unemployment policy since: a logic that has linked—and has made this

linking make sense—far-flung people and their home economies with distant places, economies,

and work.

The insurability of seasonal work would expand from this point. Special off-season benefits for

seasonal workers were first introduced in 1950 and, when a new act was passed in 1955,

seasonal workers were fully integrated in the UI scheme.61 The fishing benefit was introduced

two years later; though, this was tentative, and with the clear sense that because the “problems

involved in insuring fishermen are so complicated,” the “first couple of years ought probably to

61 For the details of this evolution see Campeau, From UI to EI, chap. 5.

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be recognized...as an experimental period” after which the benefit should be reviewed.62 The

extension of UI to seasonal workers, that is, was often haphazard, always precarious, and paired

with an active and stigmatizing claim that this is not what the program is for.

But while the rhetorical focus has been on the incompatibility of seasonal employment and

insurance, unemployment insurance in Canada would go on to structure seasonal lives and

economies in powerful ways. Unemployment insurance has certainly been crucial to

reproducing seasonal economies, but in its pervasive, inconsistent, and increasingly punitive

presence, it has also maintained a tight regulatory grip on these geographies: pathologizing

irregular work patterns, disciplining economies, ensuring a seasonally available supply of

surplus labour, and normalizing precarity, flexibility, and mobility. Through the uneven

expansion and contraction of eligibility, insurance has not only pushed and pulled workers

between regions and occupations, but has also regulated what count as nationally valued forms

of work. Governments continue to claim that the ‘problem’ is the season, casting the very

economies that this program shores up as unviable and naturalizing material problems of

poverty and employment.

“Déportation en Alberta, pas pour nous!”

In one of his first international statements after being elected in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen

Harper declared that Canada was to become an “energy superpower” with Alberta bitumen as its

cornerstone.63 When his government laid out plans to overhaul the employment insurance

program in 2012—the changes that would wreak havoc in Bay St. Lawrence and across the

Maritimes—it was part of broader set of policy changes meant to fuel this agenda.64 In 2012 the

62 See LAC RG27, Vol. 3456, File 4-2-5-7 (Part 1). The entire file is useful. The quotes are from two letters introducing the “Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Unemployment Insurance Plan for Fishermen.” November 6-22, 1956. Department of Labour, Research and Economics Branch. The application of UI to the fishery was quite contentious. In one of these letters, J.P Francis writes “The final paragraph of the attached memorandum to the UIC indicates that although the rules are felt to be reasonable ones at the moment, they should not be regarded as final. Actually, in drawing them up, the Committee was ‘shooting in the dark as far as quite a few aspects were concerned’…. For this reason, I have felt that it should be explicitly stated when they are brought into effect that there will be a trial period of possible two years at the end of which they will be reviewed thoroughly in the light of experience gained.” November 20, 1956. 63 Stephen Harper, ‘Address by the Prime Minister at the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce’ (Speech, 14 July 2006), http://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2006/07/14/address-prime-minister-canada-uk-chamber-commerce. 64 Canada. Department of Finance, Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity: Economic Action Plan 2012, Budget (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2012), http://www.budget.gc.ca/2012/plan/pdf/Plan2012-eng.pdf. Greenpeace successfully documented the government’s correspondence with industry about these changes. See: Heather Scoffield, ‘Pipeline Industry Drove Changes to Navigable Waters Protection Act, Documents Show’, The Toronto Star, 20 February 2013, online edition,

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majority Conservative government pushed through two huge omnibus budget implementation

bills that included a range of severe measures aimed at “improving conditions for business

investment” with a focus on aggressive natural resource development.65 Near-indigestible in

their size and spanning hundreds of pages, the Jobs, Growth, and Long-term Prosperity Act

impacted legislation ranging from (and beyond) labour and unemployment, immigration, social

security, and environmental policy.66 Among the most high profile changes were those

contained in a section of Bill-38 called “Responsible Resource Development” that sought to

aggressively transform the Canadian environmental regulatory regime: overhauling the

Environmental Assessment Act, reducing protections for fish and fisheries, exempting pipelines

and power lines from waterways protections, among other changes.67

Within this context, the employment insurance reforms (introduced in the same budget

implementation bills) were framed as a response to what government and industry touted as a

devastating skills and labour shortage.68 In the case of booming Alberta and the petroleum

sector, these labour woes were framed as a product of the industry’s rapid growth and projected

expansion, its remote geographical location, and an aging national workforce. Industry reports,

media, and government communiqués from those years are full of warnings and strategies for

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/02/20/pipeline_industry_drove_changes_to_navigable_waters_protection_act_documents_show.html; Canadian Energy Pipeline Association et al., ‘Letter to Peter Kent, Minister of Environment Canada and Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources Canada’, 12 December 2011, http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/Global/canada/pr/2013/01/ATIP_Industry_letter_on_enviro_regs_to_Oliver_and_Kent.pdf. Documents obtained by Greenpeace through Access to Information and Privacy request. 65 Canada. Department of Finance, Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity. 66 Bill C-38, An act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures, ch. 19, 1st sess., 41st Parliament, 2012. http://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/BillDetails.aspx?Language=en&Mode=1&billId=5514128; Bill C-45, A second act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures, ch. 31, 1st sess., 41st Parliament, 2012. http://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/BillDetails.aspx?Language=E&billId=5754371. These two enormous bills were meant to implement the government’s budget: “Jobs, Growth and Long-term prosperity.” 67 For an overview of the changes to environmental assessment law, see Gibson, ‘In Full Retreat’. 68 In an announcement about reforms to the TFWP, Diane Finley speaking in April 2013 said: “Canada is facing major skills shortages that are hurting our economy” and stated that addressing this shortage was a priority for her government. Canada. Employment and Social Development Canada, ‘Speaking Notes for the Honourable Diane Finley to Announce Reforms to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program’ (Speeches, 29 April 2013), http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?nid=736709. These references are made throughout the budget report, including in reference to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). See Canada. Department of Finance, Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity. In 2012 the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities undertook a study of labour shortages in Canada. Both the hearings and the final report also reflect this. Canada. Parliament. Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development, and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, Labour and Skills Shortages in Canada: Addressing Current and Future Challenges, 1st session, 41st Parliament (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2012), http://www.parl.gc.ca. Records of the hearings can be found on the Committee’s website: http://www.ourcommons.ca/Committees/en/HUMA. I explore the politics of the labour shortage in more detail in Chapter 4.

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resolving labour shortages, refining the “people supply chain,” and fixing the skills and labour

“crunch.”69 In 2013, when Jason Kenney was appointed Minister of Employment and Social

Development, he took to asserting a “skills mismatch” rather than a generalized labour shortage:

after receiving his appointment, he tweeted that he would “work hard to end the paradox of too

many people without jobs in an economy that has too many jobs without people.”70 While a

shortage indicates an overall lack of workers, Kenney’s analysis suggested that there were

plenty of jobs, but the unemployed were not filling available vacancies because they were not

looking hard enough, were too lazy to move, or were lacking the right skills. There was, in the

end, no compelling evidence to support Kenney’s claims, but this always-looming ‘crisis’

served as a justification for implementing industry-friendly and anti-worker labour market

policy: EI restrictions, the controversial Canada Job Grant, and the expansion (and subsequent

punitive contraction) of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.71

69 E.g. Ernst & Young, Human Resources in Canada’s Oil and Gas Sector: A Snapshot of Challenges and Directions (Ernst & Young, 2011), http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Human-resources-in-Canada-oil-gas-sector/$FILE/Human-resources-in-Canada-oil-gas-sector.pdf; Yadoullah Hussain, ‘No Quick Fix for the Labour Crunch: CAPP’, Financial Post, 5 November 2012, online edition, http://business.financialpost.com/2012/11/05/no-quick-fix-for-labour-crunch-capp/. 70 Pedro Atunes, ‘Don’t Be Fooled by 7% Unemployment: A Labour Shortage Is Coming’, The Globe and Mail, 6 November 2013, online edition, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/dont-be-fooled-by-7-unemployment-a-labour-shortage-is-coming/article15280766/; Jason Kenney, ‘Ensuring Canada’s Continued Economic Success: Tackling the Skills Mismatch’ (Speech, 8 October 2013), http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?nid=779329; Jason Kenney, ‘I Will Work Hard to End the Paradox of Too Many People without Jobs in an Economy That Has Too Many Jobs without People. #shuffle13’, Twitter post, 15 July 2013, https://twitter.com/kenneyjason/status/356786240978288642. 71 In 2014, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Canada’s budget watchdog, released a report debunking the myth of a national labour shortage and an abnormally high skills mismatch. With the exception of some regional tightness in the market, what the research found instead was a shortage of available jobs and muted wage growth across the country. Canada. Parliamentary Budget Officer, Labour Market Assessment 2014 (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2014), http://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/. A report by TD had drawn similar conclusions one year prior. Derek Burleton et al., Jobs in Canada: Where, What, and for Whom? (TD Economics, 2013), https://www.td.com/document/PDF/economics/special/JobsInCanada.pdf; see also Jim Stanford, ‘Canada’s Sluggish Labour Market and the Myth of the Skills Shortage’, Academic Matters, November 2013. It turns out that, during the exact time that the government was sounding the alarm about devastating labour shortages, the Department of Employment and Social Development cut spending on labour market information by 20 percent—in direct contradiction to the recommendations of the Advisory Panel on Labour Market Information from two years prior. Bill Curry, ‘Internal Memo Reveals Ottawa Cut Labour Market Data Spending’, The Globe and Mail, 11 June 2014, online edition, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/memo-reveals-ottawa-cut-labour-data-spending/article19112612/; Advisory Panel on Labour Market Information, Working Together to Build a Better Labour Market Information System for Canada: Final Report, Prepared for the Forum of Labour Market Ministers (Canada, 2009). In assembling its claims about labour shortages, the government also drew on dubious source of data: when the governments stopped counting ‘help wanted’ adds on Kijiji, for example, the job vacancy rate it reported fell from 4% to 1.5%. Bill Curry, ‘Job-Vacancy Rate Plunges as Tories Drop Kijiji Data’, The Globe and Mail, 5 May 2014, online edition, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/jobs/ottawa-adjust-labour-data-raising-questions-about-national-skills-shortage/article18457198/. Other reports relied on qualitative information from employers, for example. E.g. Bank of Canada, Results of the Spring 2014 Survey, vol. 11.1, Business Outlook Survey, 2014, https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bos-spring2014.pdf.

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The reforms to the EI program were wide-ranging, and included measures to discipline job-

seekers, force people to take lower-paying work further from home, discourage appeals, and

penalize repeat users. The sweeping changes caused confusion for many and, paired with

increased fraud investigations and house calls, led to an overall climate of fear and uncertainty.72

As part of the overhaul, in an initiative called Connecting Canadians with Available Jobs,

claimants were divided into three classes based on the frequency and duration of their previous

use of the EI system, with “frequent users” subject to stricter and more punitive conditions.73

Depending on a claimant’s classification, workers could now be expected to accept employment

at as low as 70 percent of their previous wages.74 Workers also became subject to new

regulations around what type of work they were required to seek and accept: “suitable

employment” would be determined based on past use of the EI system, rather than past

employment. In keeping with the punitive pattern, “frequent claimants” would be more easily

forced into lower paid work outside their usual occupation. After week seven of their claim,

they would be required to seek and accept “any job you are qualified to do.”75 Of particular

concern in seasonal economies was the threat of EI disqualification for workers who leave

“permanent” (i.e. year-round) employment for seasonal work.76 Of course, while the

government equates “permanent” work with year-round work, many people in these

communities consider seasonal work to be their permanent work. The changes also modified or

cancelled successful pilot programs and dismantled the sixty-five-year-old Board of Referees 72 As was revealed by a Service Canada whistleblower—who sacrificed her job in the process—the federal government was operating under a quota system that required federal bureaucrats to “recoup” almost half a million dollars in EI payments from recipients each year: payments, importantly, that are fully funded by workers and employers since the federal government stopped contributing to the EI fund in 1990. CBC News, ‘EI Whistleblower Suspended without Pay’, CBC News, 21 July 2013, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ei-whistleblower-suspended-without-pay-1.1407761. 73 Long-Tenured Workers includes workers who have not claimed in seven of the previous ten years and have collected 35 weeks or less EI over the past five years; Frequent Claimants includes those who have made three or more claims and have received over 60 weeks of benefits in the past five years; and Occasional Claimants includes everyone else. Canada. Service Canada, ‘Connecting Canadians with Available Jobs’, 11 December 2012, http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/sc/ei/ccaj/index.shtml?utm_source=Connecting+Canadians+With+Available+Jobs&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Action_Plan. 74 See Porter, ‘Austerity, Social Program Restructuring, and the Erosion of Democracy’. The reforms scrapped the section of the Act that had protected workers against having to accept work at lower wages or outside their usual occupation or area of skill. 75 Canada. Service Canada, ‘Connecting Canadians with Available Jobs - Helpful Definitions’, 11 December 2012, http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/sc/ei/ccaj/definitions.shtml#def3. 76 At the time people worried this stipulation would affect claimants now required to take off-season work at 70 percent of their previous wage. If those jobs happen to be permanent, and if workers choose to return to their better-paid seasonal work when the time comes, there was concern may be actively disqualifying themselves from accessing EI benefits should they be laid off in the future. For details, see Bill C-38, An act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures, ch. 19, 1st sess., 41st Parliament, 2012. http://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/BillDetails.aspx?Language=en&Mode=1&billId=5514128. See also Canada. Department of Finance, Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity.

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system for evaluating appeals, removing employer and labour representatives from the process.

Local processing centres were shut down, reducing access to support and leaving many without

answers to their questions, and claimants became subject to new forms of monitoring and

accounting. And, throughout, by drawing repeated rhetorical connections between the EI

program to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program—blaming local workers’ failure to work

for local employers’ ‘need’ for migrant labour—the government pitted these two groups of low-

wage workers against each other.77 Whether regulated or intimidated out of the system, by 2013,

the percentage of unemployed workers in Canada accessing regular EI benefits had fallen to 38

percent: the lowest it had been since 1944.78

After the cuts communities in seasonal and EI-dependent economies quickly spiraled into crisis

mode. A coalition formed around the Gulf region to fight the cuts and seasonal workers

responded. In the Magdalen Islands, on January 6, 2013—the day the cuts were implemented—

four thousand people, one third of the islands’ population, took to the streets.79 The theme of

their protest was “Non à l'exode”: Against the exodus. It was a common understanding that by

making EI harder to access, especially for seasonal workers, the cuts were meant to usher

workers from seasonal and high unemployment regions to low unemployment regions. This was

a move that would both deal with the persistent ‘problem’ of unemployed and seasonal workers

and cool the hot Alberta labour market by flooding it with job seekers—relatively cheap ones at 77 This link was largely rhetorical, but the implications were meaningful. The budget document stated that “ the Government is developing approaches to notify EI claimants when employers are looking for workers, and to inform employers if there are EI claimants in the same region who match the open positions. Creating a link between the EI program and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program will help make local and qualified Canadian workers aware of vacancies and available to fill them, while ensuring temporary foreign workers are employed where they are most needed.” Canada. Department of Finance, 147; see also Canada. Service Canada, ‘Connecting Canadians with Available Jobs’. When the government subsequently contracted the TFWP, this change was focused on high unemployment areas and drew the same link between local laziness and employers’ reliance on the program. 78 As calculated by economist Armine Yalnizyan, ‘Proportion of Unemployed Canadians in Receipt of Jobless Benefits, 1942 to July 2014’, Twitter post, 18 July 2013, https://twitter.com/ArmineYalnizyan/status/512602190360633344. While some of 2012 changes to EI are consistent with the erosion of benefits and state supports that have been ongoing since the 1990s, as Ann Porter argues, others have more to do with the concentration of state control than they do with cost-cutting. For example, more power to Cabinet to change EI regulations without approval from Parliament; the replacement of old community-based appeals system with an Ottawa-based Social Security Tribunal; the increase in fraud investigations and house calls. Contrary to the small-government and free-market rhetoric of the Conservative Government, with these reforms the state actually took on a more direct and aggressive role in regulating the unemployed. Emphasizing that the reforms were not simple cost cutting measures, Porter posits, “What clearly comes through is a concern with labour markets and promoting particular types of jobs and economic growth, in part connected to the priority at that time of developing natural resources, including the extraction of oil in Alberta” Porter, ‘Austerity, Social Program Restructuring, and the Erosion of Democracy’, 43. 79 Lee Berthiaume, ‘Feds Report Dramatic Increase in “Fraudulent” EI Claims to $160 Million’, Canada.Com, 31 October 2013, http://o.canada.com/news/feds-report-dramatic-increase-in-fraudulent-ei-claims-to-160-million.

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that. One media photo from a protest in Montreal displays this common sentiment on two

poignant placards: one reads, “HEY! MR. HARPER, WE ARE NOT A POOL OF CHEAP

LABOR!” and the other, “DÉPORTATION EN ALBERTA PAS POUR NOUS!”80

Employment insurance is widely understood as a linchpin of eastern Canada’s seasonal

economies, and there is a long history—written by national media, government and industry—of

crying foul about seasonal workers’ reliance the program. For critics, who characterize

unemployment as an individualized problem, EI is seen as a crutch that allows the unemployed

to avoid pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Four years before being elected Prime

Minister, Stephen Harper broadcasted this sentiment, claiming, “There is a dependence in the

region [of Atlantic Canada] that breeds a culture of defeatism.”81 In advance of the most recent

EI overhaul, pre-empting the changes that would push unemployed workers—especially regular

seasonal claimants—to accept more precarious, poor-paying, or demeaning work, Finance

Minister Jim Flaherty rose in the House of Commons to remind Canadians that “There is no bad

job, the only bad job is not having a job.”82 And in the wake of the cuts, in the midst of

mounting industry hysteria about labour and skills shortages in Western resource regions,

mainstream media blamed seasonal EI for keeping afloat unviable rural communities, cramping

Canada’s national productivity, and forestalling the fluid mobility of labour that was heralded as

the solution to both supposed problems.83 “The worst part of EI,” declared Globe and Mail

columnist Margaret Wente in an ire-inducing attack on a thirty-year old single mother who had

80 Andy Radia, ‘Why Are People Leaving Prince Edward Island?’, Yahoo News Canada, 27 November 2013, https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/why-people-leaving-prince-edward-island-000959461.html. 81 CBC News, ‘Harper Plans to Battle “Culture of Defeatism” in Atlantic Canada’, CBC News, 30 May 2002, http://www.cbc.ca/1.306785. 82 The Canadian Press, ‘There Are No Bad Jobs, Flaherty Says’, CBC News, 15 May 2012, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/there-are-no-bad-jobs-flaherty-says-1.1246444. 83 Margaret Wente, ‘Is the PEI Woman Who Was Denied EI a Victim?’, The Globe and Mail, 22 January 2013, online edition, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/is-the-pei-woman-who-was-denied-ei-a-victim/article7605770/; Jesse Kline, ‘Too Many Maritimers Live in Small, Rural Communities and Rely on Employment Insurance’, National Post, 7 February 2013, http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jesse-kline-too-many-maritimers-live-in-small-rural-communities-and-rely-on-employment-insurance; Brian Lee Crowley, ‘EI for Seasonal Workers Is a Corrosive Economic Policy’, The Globe and Mail, 6 March 2013, onlilne edition, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/ei-for-seasonal-workers-is-a-corrosive-economic-policy/article9365289/; Tavia Grant, ‘Stuck in Place: Canada’s Mobility Problem’, The Globe and Mail, 6 June 2012, online edition, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/canada-competes/stuck-in-place-canadas-mobility-problem/article4237314/; Sarah Boesveld, ‘Is the EI System Making It More Attractive to Not Work?’, National Post, 18 May 2012, http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/is-the-ei-system-making-it-more-attractive-to-not-work.

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lost her benefits on account of the changes, “is that it traps people and discourages them from

moving to areas where their futures (and their kids’ futures) might be better.”84

Walking back to my car after one of my early interviews, the woman I had spoken with—a

seasonal worker for the provincial Department of Highways—called to me from her porch:

“You go to Ottawa and fix that policy!” Moments earlier she had walked me through her

calculations that that year, on account of the cuts, she’d be without income for four months at

the end of the winter as she waited for her job to resume in the spring. On top of the detrimental

gap in her minimal income she explained the stress and degradation of intensified monitoring

and accounting measures: having to attend mandatory training sessions and information

meetings and continue a regular ‘search for work’ in a context where there was simply nothing

available in the off-season. The small and intimate nature of her community made it all the more

difficult. As she laid her letters and directives from the federal government across her kitchen

table, she wondered whether she’d be looking for work in Alberta within the year. “What do

people around here think about the future?” I asked her. “There is no future,” she responded, “I

heard that from people. There’s no future on PEI, they say.” She figured things had changed six

or seven years prior. “People seemed to get along, but now there’s nothing…. And the thing is,

Unemployment [EI], they chase you; till they chase you off the Island.”

In an attempt at pacification, Stephen Harper came to PEI in May 2013 to tell anxious

Maritimers that “there is nothing, absolutely nothing in our changes that targets seasonal

industries or seasonal workers, or requires anybody to leave their region to get a job.”85 But if

the everyday experiences of seasonal and unemployed workers weren’t enough, by the time of

Harper’s visit federal statistics had begun to tell a striking geographical story. In the first four

months under the new regulations, PEI and New Brunswick were leading the way in rising EI

disqualifications compared to the previous year, at 18.3% and 15.9% respectively. Alberta,

meanwhile, had seen a decrease in disqualification of 15.2%.86 The mobility of Maritime

workers into the Alberta oil industry is often naturalized, explained by the simple wage

84 Wente, ‘Is the PEI Woman Who Was Denied EI a Victim?’ 85 Steven Chase, ‘Harper Dogged by EI Controversy in PEI’, The Globe and Mail, 14 May 2013, online edition, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-dogged-by-ei-controversy-in-pei/article11925603/. 86 CBC News, ‘PEI Residents Kicked off EI up 18%’, CBC News, 27 June 2013, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/p-e-i-residents-kicked-off-ei-up-18-1.1362577. For the data, see: Statistics Canada. Table 14-10-0004-01 Employment insurance disqualifications and disentitlements, monthly, unadjusted for seasonality.

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differential between these two places. But, people don’t usually leave home unless they have to:

as these anecdotes and the historical record make clear, if labour is going to be mobile and if

seasonal production is going to “dovetail,” these labour markets have to be made. Federal-level

regulation of unemployment remains a powerful tool for regulating national labour markets in

this way. This has not only been through punitive material measures but, at least as powerfully

and even in moments when the program was expanding, through the state’s repetitive story that

seasonal, underproductive, and peripheral places are problems.

Grounding the welfare state: Seasons, staples, and unemployment

By tracing the regulation and pathologization of peripheral lands and labour in relation to shifts

in staples production, my intent is not to draw a tidy line between these geographies. What I

mean to illustrate, rather, is that the production and management of this marginality—whether

framed as geographical, social, or economic—is never separate from the production and

management of accumulation. In the post-war period and again today, staples have certainly

been important geographies of capital accumulation in Canada. But more generally, the

dynamics of capital accumulation in Canada are historically inextricable from the conjoined

geographies of resource development and colonialism. In this sense, understanding the ongoing

production of the periphery helps us understand not only staples, but also the broader historical

production of the capitalist core: not only urban, as it is commonly understood, but inseparably,

extractive and colonial.

As Hayter, Barnes, and Bradshaw argue in a useful intervention in 2003, economic geographers

have a penchant for focusing on the “core.”87 Framed by a desire to formulate a global economic

geography, theory and analysis, the authors explain, tend to focus on core regions as centres of

the economic processes “at the heart of economic geography.”88 These authors problematize this

sidelining of resource peripheries, calling for a reinvigoration of what is often represented as

“old fashioned” resource geography that examines the periphery as a site of significant capital

accumulation and political contestation. I enthusiastically agree. But in pursuing this agenda, we

should also take care not to reproduce a version of the problem it critiques: to elevate the

periphery itself to the status of core, reproducing a somewhat binary understanding of these two

87 Roger Hayter, Trevor Barnes, and Michael Bradshaw, ‘Relocating Resource Peripheries to the Core of Economic Geography’s Theorizing: Rationale and Agenda’, Area 35, no. 1 (2003): 15–23. 88 Hayter, Barnes, and Bradshaw, 17.

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categories. Peripheral, as these scholars highlight, is not the same as unimportant. Sometimes

the centrality of peripheral people and places is in their peripheral character.

Explanations of Canada’s resource economy that emphasize the rhythms of continental Fordism

can easily fall into this pattern. Much of the more grounded research on the development and

social reproduction of post-war industrial staples industries has focused on the site of the

resource town.89 Given the catastrophic abandonment and decline of many resource towns with

the decline of resource Fordism, these studies offer important insight into the human

consequences of restless staples economies—in particular, those organized through this specific

mode of workforce reproduction. This work has, at times, emphasized this catastrophe in

contrast to a period of employment and reproductive stability in these resources industries

throughout the Fordist period.90 As Hayter and Barnes frame it, by the early 1970s “Canadian

resource towns, which served as a lynchpin between the staple itself and international markets,

had achieved both stability and prosperity” akin to Rex Lucas’s “mature” stage of single

industry town development.91 These are important studies and I don’t mean to suggest that they

are somehow inaccurate in pointing to this shift. But, taken together, in focusing on the more

stable formulations of the Fordist resource regime—the advent of company towns, the

stabilization of local workforces, and the regularization of employment—they emphasize only

the ‘core’ of resource Fordism.

As feminist political economists have long illustrated, Fordism relied on many types of

production and forms of employment that differed from the normative standards of Fordist

work: continuous, full-time, lifelong, and usually urban and industrial.92 If we accept that the

regulatory function of the welfare state shares a genealogy with important post-war shifts in the

mode of accumulation, then in order to understand both Fordism and the welfare state we must 89 Important studies of Canada’s single industry towns include: Bradbury, ‘Instant Towns in British Columbia’; Bradbury, ‘Towards an Alternative Theory of Resource-Based Town Development’; Bradbury and St-Martin, ‘Winding Down in a Quebec Mining Town’; Greg Halseth, ‘“We Came for the Work”: Situating Employment Migration in BC’s Small, Resource-Based, Communities’, Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien 43, no. 4 (1999): 363–81; Hayter, ‘“The War in the Woods”’. See also Rex Lucas’s earlier classic study of Canadian single industry towns: Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown. 90 John Bradbury’s work is one notable exception to this. See, for example: Bradbury, ‘Instant Towns in British Columbia’; Bradbury, ‘Towards an Alternative Theory of Resource-Based Town Development’. 91 Hayter and Barnes, ‘Canada’s Resource Economy’, 38–39; Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown. Studies of contemporary dynamics also often emphasize this historical transition: from labour organized through resource towns to structures of long-distance commuting and mobility. E.g. see Storey, ‘The Evolution of Commute Work’. 92 For a very clear account of this see Leah F. Vosko, Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

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also examine them from these ancillary vantage points. In her critical engagement with the

‘transition’ from Fordism-Keynesianism to neoliberal post-Fordism, Leah Vosko highlights how

the unspoken social standpoint of this theorized transition is that of the white male citizen,

employed full-time in manufacturing.93 “After the Second World War,” she writes, “welfare

state governments, like Canada, did not extend the social wage to all workers. Rather, they

encouraged employers to differentiate among the labour supply.”94 In tracing the origin of what

she calls the Standard Employment Relationship (SER), as a normative entity, to post-World

War Two reconstruction and the emergence of the welfare state, Vosko outlines the “myth of the

so-called Fordist period” as universally differentiable from neoliberalism in terms of

employment relations. Fordism was far from “standard,” relying, rather, on a wide range of

workforces, types of production, and employment relations. That is, while the SER never really

existed as the empirical norm, it was upheld as a normative standard against which other sectors

of the economy in which women, immigrant, and racialized workers were over-represented were

pathologized and regulated. As Vosko notes, tracing the existence and reproduction of this

segmentation is crucial to understanding the particular and persistent ways in which capital,

supported by the state, works to divide the labour supply.95

In considering the historical geographies of staples labour in Canada, if we shift our perspective

accordingly—to peripheral, temporary, mobile, immigrant, unemployed, or otherwise marginal

resource workers and geographies—these varied forms of insecurity come into focus as a

longstanding feature of resource work and the way it has been regulated. While the post-Fordist

changes of the last thirty years are certainly significant, to characterize the Fordist period as one

of stability in the resource sector, in contrast to post-Fordist instability, would be to fall into the

same trap—of universalizing a normative, but not empirical standard—that Vosko and other

feminist political economists have repeatedly flagged.96

93 “With the gradual, although partial, materialization of Ford’s vision…the SER [Standard Employment Relationship] came to be characterized as a lifelong, continuous, full-time employment relationship where the workers has one employer and normally works on the employers premises or under his or her direct supervision” Vosko, 24. 94 Vosko, 25. 95 She writes: “it is preferable to think in terms of ‘continuity through change.’ The history and evolution of the TER [temporary employment relationship] (and the SER) is very much about how states mediate persisting tensions and contradictions in capitalist markets, the means by which employers modify their practices to suit different regulatory environments and the ways in which labour resists coercive employment practices and continually attempts to neutralize the peculiar commodity status of labour power.” Vosko, 28. 96 Scholars have outlined the key qualitative changes that have come to characterize Canadian staples production since the tumultuous breakdown of Fordist production; especially since the turn of the century, what Mills and

90

Placing the present fraught intertwining of seasonal unemployment, resource extraction, and

labour mobility within this deeper history moves our analysis of changing employment

structures past binaries of before/after (Fordism/neoliberalism) and roots the emergence of

national unemployment policy and its slippery relationship with seasonality and extractive

geographies in relation to particular historical conditions of production. In reviewing the history

and power struggles that preceded the 1940 Unemployment Insurance Act, James Struthers

draws a crucial connection between the punitive regulation of the unemployed in Canadian

history and the political economy of Canadian territory and resources. While unemployment did

not officially become the jurisdiction of the federal government until the passing of the

Unemployment Insurance Act in 1940, there is a much longer, and more haphazard, history of

federal-level regulation of unemployment in relation to resources, land, and settlement. In the

decades preceding the Act various experiments in employment policy used the resource frontier

as a way to contain unemployed workers while, conversely, exploiting unemployment and

poverty to expand resource geographies. From this vantage point, the very genealogy of

Canadian unemployment policy is bound up the shifting political economy of staples

accumulation.

Canada was one of the last Western industrialized nation-states to implement a national

unemployment insurance scheme, holding tightly to a nineteenth century liberal logic of

individual responsibility well into the twentieth century. Canada had quickly adopted the

principle of “less eligibility” implemented by the British government through the 1834 Poor

Laws: that the compensation and conditions of relief should be kept below those of working

people so as to make an example of the unemployed and deter idleness. “Less eligibility”

remained the largely unchallenged ideological foundation of Canadian poor relief until World

War One.97 In the context of rising unemployment in the 1920s, the business and political

Sweeney call the “neo-staples” era has been characterized by increasingly large and foreign-owned firms, running capital-intensive operations, using mobile labour to produce and export unprocessed natural resources. Mills and Sweeney, ‘Employment Relations in the Neostaples Resource Economy’; Stanford, ‘Staples, Deindustrialization, and Foreign Investment’; Watkins, ‘Staples Redux’. One labour mobility specifically see Storey, ‘The Evolution of Commute Work’; Storey and Hall, ‘Dependence at a Distance’. 97 Including in relation to the country’s abundant seasonal workers: “Even though it was generally recognized that thousands were put out of work each winter by seasonal factors, this did not soften attitudes toward the destitute. Why could the labourer not save over the summer months so that he and his family might exist independently during the winter? Instilling the ‘habit of economy’ in the poor became the principle response of the middle class to poverty and unemployment.” Struthers, No Fault of Their Own, 7.

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elite—who strongly opposed the creation of a national insurance scheme—consistently hitched

the supposed “abnormality” of early Depression-era unemployment to the “abnormality” of

urbanization, blaming poverty and unemployment on poor individual decision-making among

the masses of so-called transients flooding into the cities. Invoking the poor-law doctrine of less

eligibility, the proposed liberal solutions took the form of restricted urban relief and various

back-to-the land schemes until, in the height of the Great Depression, unemployed men were

corralled into remote work camps run by the Department of National Defense.98

Struthers highlights the “Harvest Excursions” that, between the 1890s and 1930s, coordinated

the seasonal transportation of workers from eastern Canada to the Prairie grain harvest as a key

moment in the emergence of a national labour market, allowing the convergence of

unemployment and staples management. During these decades, he writes, “the massive labour

requirements of settling the West, building two new transcontinental railways, and providing a

migrant farm labour supply drew the federal government, the transportation companies, and

more than three hundred private employment agencies into the recruitment and placement of

more than a million farmers and hundreds of thousands of railway navvies and agricultural

labourers.”99 By the 1920s, the federal government and the railways were shipping out thirty to

fifty thousand workers each fall from eastern Canada to the Prairies. This massive undertaking,

alongside the manpower demands of World War One would trigger the emergence of

unemployment as a national issue—crucially, in a way that was inextricably tied to geographies

of both staples production and settlement.

By Struthers’s account, it was with the development of the Soldier Settlement scheme in the

wake of World War One (which provided land and financial aid to veterans willing to take up

farming) that unemployment policy would become explicitly tied to land and settlement for the

first time. As part of an active program to diminish, settle, and cultivate Indian reserve lands in

the Prairies the Department of Indian affairs aggressively appropriated these lands; in the years

following WWI the Soldier Settlement Board acquired over eighty-five thousand acres of

reserve land in Western Canada on which they settled non-Aboriginal soldiers.100 While, as

Struthers notes, it was not new for the federal government to play an active role in Western 98 Struthers, No Fault of Their Own; Ekers, ‘“The Dirty Scruff”’. 99 Struthers, No Fault of Their Own, 5–6. 100 Sarah Carter, ‘“An Infamous Proposal:” Prairie Indian Reserve Land and Soldier Settlement after World War I’, Manitoba History 37 (Spring/Summer 1999).

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settlement—nor, of course, in the dispossession of Indigenous lands—this settlement scheme

was novel in that it offered “the first indication that the government viewed land as its principle

solution to unemployment.”101

As the economy began to fall into recession and political fears mounted about the concentration

of unemployed “transients” in the cities as breeding ground for radicalism, farmers, business

interests, and federal policy makers scrambled to send the unemployed “back to the land.”102

Throughout the 1920s federal and provincial government policies remained heavily focused on

settling the West and developing northern resources; at this time, farmers were still Canada’s

largest employers of unskilled labour and this powerful group favoured unemployment schemes

that would ensure their access to cheap seasonal farm labour. Given these economic priorities,

as Struthers argues, “neither level of government could long concede the right of the post-war

unemployed to remain in the cities when work, albeit at little better than room-and-board wages,

beckoned on the frontier.”103 In the early 1930s, government and municipal officials continued

to lay blame for the mounting unemployment crisis on migration from rural areas to Prairie

cities and favoured back to the land schemes (including the ‘Colonization at Home Movement’

in 1930 and the federal-provincial Relief Land Settlement Agreement of 1932), which used

settlement as a way to get families off direct relief.104 In the height of the Great Depression the

frontier would emerge perhaps most clearly as a way of managing unemployment and

dispersing the concentration of unemployed men in the cities. Depression-era rural work camps

served not only to disperse concentrated urban unemployment; they also directed these men’s

labour power toward projects considered to be matters of national interest including

infrastructure development to enable resource development.105

101 Struthers, No Fault of Their Own, 17, emphasis added. 102 Struthers, No Fault of Their Own. On urban ‘transience’ see Jody Mason, Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 103 Struthers, No Fault of Their Own, 43. 104 Mason, Writing Unemployment. 105 See Ekers, ‘“The Dirty Scruff”’. These were the grounds on which the Vanderhoof and District Board of Trade (in BC) wrote to the Minister of Labour requesting that the McKenzie Highway be added to the list of highway projects that would be locations for relief camps. The letter reads: “The reason why work on this Highway is particularly urged at the present time, is the fact that it is the only road connection with a vast mineralised area lying to the north of the Canadian National Railway, and a district with great mineral possibilities, particularly in placer gold mining. With the pronounced focussing of public attention on gold mining in general, this Highway is being used to a greater extent this year than ever before, and at the moment of writing, is in very poor shape, and badly in need of improvement.” Describing the placer mining operations being undertaken by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company and two other companies, it describes that “The difficulties encountered by those companies in moving their machinery and freight into the scene of operation have been colossal.” June 28, 1933. LAC RG27, Vol. 2255, File – Unemployment Relief Camps – BC 1933-34.

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Referring to the enduring power of “less eligibility” and the longstanding drive to send the

unemployed “back to the land” rather than provide relief in the cities, Struthers says, “This

indifference to the plight of the unemployed reflected Canada’s preoccupation with the land.”106

His emphasis here is on what he calls the “agrarian orientation of Canada’s economy.” Among

the settler population, fears of rural depopulation were widespread and urban migrants were

seen as morally weak and unwilling to work. Moreover, these land-based schemes let farm and

resource-industry employers off the hook for supporting workers in times of unemployment,

supplied them with reserve army of labour, and ensured a group of workers willing to work

under poor conditions for low wages. The particular structure of agricultural work and the class

power of agricultural employers are significant, but I think it is Struthers’s emphasis on land

that matters most here.

That is, in his recounting of this history, Struthers is connecting the regulation of unemployment

in Canadian history with the much broader geographical political economy. In particular, he is

linking this history of labour regulation to the state’s preoccupation with securing access to

territory and resources. Though not always directly or visibly, governments have repeatedly

drawn on poverty policy as a mechanism to resolve the staples-labour problem, putting

particular types of poverty and unemployment to work in the service of extractive accumulation.

This type of analysis highlights the network of far-flung material and social relations in which

Canadian national unemployment policy is and always has been situated. It illustrates the way

the regulatory function of unemployment policy extends well beyond the unemployed

individual, to resources, places, and modes of production. And it places the seemingly banal

everyday work of welfare state policy—planning, coordinating, and deploying people, capital,

and productive capacity—within the specific historical geographies of staples production and

associated state aspirations for unfettered control over people and territory.

Piven and Cloward’s pivotal work on the “function” of welfare is useful here. These authors

argued that, while expansive relief policies are designed to mute civil disorder, restrictive

106 Canada was, still developing an “agricultural frontier” when other industrialized countries had already thoroughly urbanized, industrialized, and developed class-conscious labour and socialist movements. In these contexts, governments were pursuing new and different ways of dealing with unemployment, which would only arrive in the Canadian context later on. Struthers, No Fault of Their Own, 8.

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policies are meant to reinforce work norms.107 Their account is a useful reminder—when

thinking about a case like the 2012 overhaul of EI—to push our analysis past the mere presence

and absence of welfare benefits to consider the regulatory function of the system as a whole,

across much broader geographies and histories. In this way, Piven and Cloward help us to

‘ground’ these histories of unemployment governance in the changing materialities of the

economy and to highlight the ways that unemployment policy has actually been used to produce

geographies of extraction, accumulation, and unevenness.

Conclusion: Making the welfare state work for extraction

In advance of the 2012 employment insurance overhaul, the federal department of Human

Resources and Skills Development commissioned a study on the relationship between labour

mobility and EI access in Canada, stating its “considerable concern that the EI system inhibits

geographic mobility from high unemployment regions to low unemployment regions.”108

Researchers ran focus groups in high unemployment regions of Quebec and Atlantic Canada,

asking “frequent” EI claimants about the factors that might compel or deter them from moving

for work and the role of EI access therein.109 In their report, the researchers outlined one barrier

to relocation that they called the “permanent seasonal worker mindset”:

A very important concept for understanding the widespread disinclination to pursue

permanent work elsewhere is what we will call the ‘permanent seasonal worker

mindset.’ The core of this idea is that the person sees him/herself as having a permanent

type of work to do, but the nature of the work is such that they do not or cannot expect

year-round employment in this type of work (e.g. construction, fishing, etc.)…. The

mindset of these permanent seasonal workers tends to be that they are focused more on

making this way of working viable from year to year than on making fundamental

changes such as a permanent move away.

107 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, Updated Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 108 Sage Research Corporation, Focus Groups for Evaluation Study on Geographic Mobility: Synthesis Report (Prepared for Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, 2012), 1. Documents obtained by Dean Beeby, CBC News, through Access To Information and Privacy request to HRSDC, no. A-2012-00141, A-2012-00011. 109 Like previous studies, this one provided little evidence that reduced access to EI would directly encourage people to relocate. While many workers had thought about moving, they named moving costs, uncertainty, lack of formal training, and ties to family and community as barriers to doing so. In fact, the study suggested that for those considering relocation, access to this small amount of money might provide them with the resources they need to make the move.

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The report explained that, between the financial security of permanent seasonal work, off-season

employment, spousal income, and employment insurance, people in these seasonal economies

were finding ways to get by. Moreover, many of these workers had low levels of formal training

and, while year-round work might have been ideal, given the realities of the region, many felt

that permanent seasonal work was the best option available to them. Finally, the researchers

asserted, this “permanent seasonal worker mindset” was reinforced by workers’ preference “to

continue living in their community rather than move, because of family, friends, and perhaps

their love of the region.” On account of these factors, the permanent seasonal work pattern, the

researchers claimed, “substantially reduces or inhibits interest in making a permanent move,

basically because it can be a financially sustainable lifestyle.”

“These people, they’re not abusing the EI system,” Clayton echoed this comically reasonable

sentiment, “If they had more work, if there was more jobs here, they would gladly work—no

problem. But, when there’s no work, what else is there? You don’t really want to get up and just

leave to go to work. To leave your community, leave your whole family, so…” But, in a bid to

reduce what economists call ‘mobility barriers’ and ‘labour market rigidities,’ the 2012 EI

reforms were designed to do just this: to nudge workers across space and occupations by

threatening to cut off a crucial lifeline on which seasonal communities depend. In order to

induce this mobility the federal government had to undercut the stability of “permanent seasonal

work” by taking aim at one its financial pillars.

The insurability of seasonal work would expand into the 1970s, but often haphazardly, always

precariously, and paired with an active and stigmatizing claim that this is not what the program

is for. To this day, despite the ongoing assertion that seasonal EI claimants are lazy and

dependent, Canadian staples producers benefit from the labour flexibility enabled by the

insurance of seasonal work and by regionally-differentiated access to the program. The

prevalence in the oil and gas industry of short-term, flexible, and low-paying winter jobs, for

example, is predicated on access to workers in seasonally complimentary industries in other

regions—and, in turn, on these workers’ access to EI. The regulation of seasonality, that is,

remains deeply geographical: not only inducing mobility but hitching the fate of peripheral

seasonal rural economies to the staples geographies of the energy superpower.

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Throughout all this, the season remains an object of struggle. This struggle is about not only

how long a person works, or even where; it is a bigger struggle over places, communities, and

whole modes of social and economic life. Because, while EI has certainly enabled the regulation

of seasonality, it has also enabled the reproduction of these somewhat deviant—peripheral—

economic geographies. Throughout our conversation, Clayton conveyed to me his sense of his

community’s mere existence was a barrier to accumulation: in its ‘remoteness’; in the way it

blocked local extraction by asserting of other modes of economic life; in the way it had dealt

with local bouts of unemployment and resisted pressures to relocate. In threatening to cut his

community off from EI, the government was not only threatening the community’s economic

security. By undermining this key element of the local economy, the federal government was

challenging the viability of the local fishery and threatening to re-inscribe this space with new

economic (and largely extractive) geographies: whether the forced relocation of workers to

Alberta, or the consolidation of the inshore fishery, or the possibility of drilling for oil and gas

in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The reproduction of local seasonal modes of production stood as

barriers to these visions. When communities around the region responded with such vigor to the

2012 employment insurance reforms, this is what was at stake.

While bureaucrats in the postwar era developed an understanding of the season as “lost labour

time,” the “permanent seasonal worker mentality” invests the season with a different type of

meaning, refusing the notion that resources must always be used. In communities like Clayton’s,

by supporting this different temporality, access to EI allows for particular types of communities,

economic activities, and modes of life. Cutting off access to this source of income is disruptive

to these entire geographies of social reproduction. The season, in this sense, is a crucial site of

political struggle: not just over time, but over modes of production and reproduction, ways of

life, and places themselves.

But, once established, the powerful idea that seasonal unemployment was wasteful would

persist. As the next chapter illustrates, in the following decades this same logic would underpin

state efforts to remake and re-imagine these peripheral rural economies in much more

comprehensive ways.

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2. Stranded manpower: Rural poverty, modernization, and the politics of viability

Jobs are too often seasonal in nature and this, in turn, creates a climate for a dependence on welfare.

- PEI Premier Alex Campbell, 19671 The supply of fish does not permit an appreciable expansion in total activity, accordingly, good earnings for the individual will be possible only with a smaller number of fishermen

- Development Plan for PEI, 19692

“A great number of rural and near-rural people will be greatly, and adversely affected”

“There’s no processing being done in any of the rural areas anymore,” a city official for the

Cape Breton Regional Municipality explained to me. “And so, everything’s being harvested and

[exported].” Earlier that day I had made the drive up the Cabot Trail from North Sydney to the

fishing village of Bay St. Lawrence (introduced in Chapter 1), which is part of the last

remaining cooperative fish processing plant in Cape Breton.3 As explained in detail in Chapter

1, the community had come under investigation by the federal government due to widespread 1 From a speech included in Roger Hart, The Prince Edward Island Development Plan, Part 1: Ten Days in September, Documentary (National Film Board, 1969), http://archive.org/details/10DaysInSeptember. 2 Canada. Department of Regional Economic Expansion, Development Plan for Prince Edward Island: A 15-Year Federal-Provincial Program for Social and Economic Advancement (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1969), 42. 3 This plant is an enduring legacy of the Depression-era program of adult education and economic cooperation that became known as the Antigonish movement. The movement grew out of St. Francis Xavier University’s (in Antigonish, Nova Scotia) adult education extension program: in late 1920s extension workers began to travel the province, holding classes and meetings with the aim of helping farmers, fishermen, factory workers, miners—“the masses”—become “masters of their own destiny.” The context for this was not only the particular economic circumstances of the Depression, but the longstanding realities of poverty, loss of ownership and control (through mercantilism and proletarianization), rural depopulation, and general rural depression. With the support of local universities and religious leaders, communities organized study groups and developed local structures of economic cooperation and control including producer cooperatives (mostly lobster factories), cooperative stores, and credit unions. The region’s credit unions and a few remaining processing co-ops owe their origins to the Antigonish movement. The program spread across the region, to other parts of Canada, and received international attention and support, including funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (Croteau). That the details of this history are not widely known is striking. For background, the classic account is that of Father Moses Coady (the “father” of the movement”: M. M. Coady, Masters of Their Own Destiny: The Story of the Antigonish Movement of Adult Education Through Economic Cooperation (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1939). For a history of the movement in Prince Edward Island see John Tougas Croteau, Cradled in the Waves: The Story of a People’s Co-Operative Achievement in Economic Betterment on Prince Edward Island, Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1951). While most explanations for the movement’s ability to take hold focus on the dire conditions of local life, James Sacouman has argued for considering more structural factors that attend to the specificities of local social relations. Reflecting on the social relations across coal, fishing, and agriculture in eastern Nova Scotia (including Cape Breton), he writes that the region was: ”particularly ‘beseiged’ [sic] in the 1920s and 1930s, as capitalism, co-operation, and trade unionism/socialism vied in an organized, though unequal, fashion for hegemony.” He argues that, within this fraught context, the Antigonish agenda offered a “middle way” between “big capitalism and big socialism” that created interclass sympathies and directed political energy away from more radical action and ideas. R. James Sacouman, ‘Underdevelopment and the Structural Origins of Antigonish Movement Co-Operatives in Eastern Nova Scotia’, Acadiensis 7, no. 1 (1977): 66–85.

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allegations of unemployment insurance fraud; a situation that was exacerbated when the

government made deep cuts to the program in 2012 in an effort to increase the mobility of the

national labour force. Because of the seasonal nature of local livelihoods, people here rely on EI

to make it through the winter and the community had put up a serious fight to maintain their

benefits and, by extension, their collective livelihood. On this visit, the news about the

community’s EI fight was largely positive. Everyone who had not moved away from the

community and who had filed an appeal had finally had their benefits reinstated. But, the

impacts of the both the investigation and the cuts were lasting and had been heaped atop an

already-precarious livelihood. The fear, insecurity, and need had caused many people to leave

the community, making it much more difficult to find experienced workers for the Co-op.

Perhaps even more significant, the cuts had left the community with a deep sense of

vulnerability as it seemed increasingly clear that policy-makers saw remote seasonal

communities primarily as a drain on resources.

Back in Sydney, I listened with some bewilderment as my interviewee explained the Regional

Municipality’s vision for an urban economic future for Cape Breton. At the centrepiece of this

vision for the island was the construction of a deep-water port in Sydney, capable of handling

bigger cargo ships than any other port on the eastern seaboard of North America. He explained:

Our view is that there needs to basically be a significant urban area—call it a city. A

hub. And so…for our economic region, what we’re trying to do is build the port and

we’re trying to build Sydney as a city. Viewing the world as an urban world now, OK?

And basically viewing the rural communities as being residential communities, but not

being economic entities. If you want to think of it that way…. It’s basically saying ‘We

can’t stabilize all of these communities; the best that we can do, we think, is stabilize the

region overall and build a significant urban centre that can compete in this modern world

with other urban communities.

As I listened I was, of course, taken by the contradiction between his words and where I had

been earlier that day, where a real processing plant formed the economic backbone of real

communities. But the Regional Municipality’s vision of regional transformation, as recounted

by this official, was also eerily reminiscent of the little-discussed high modernist regional

planning projects that were rolled out across Atlantic Canada and eastern Quebec in the 1960s.

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Fifty years earlier, a group of audacious planners had laid out a plan for regional reform in Nova

Scotia coal country, including Cape Breton. Like other plans of the era, this one was designed to

rationalize the region’s primary industries and increase output in the manufacturing sector. As

explained in one planning document:

These forces together should effectively meet the main planning goals of rising income

and productivity per head. In doing so, the present circumstances of a great number of

rural and near-rural people will be greatly, and adversely affected: the process of

rationalization will generate a significant ‘push’ away from traditional rural activities

and way of life; the acceleration of manufacturing output and employment will create a

massive ‘pull’ into a few urban areas and all that that implies.4

The plan was never implemented but the ideological overlap rung in my ears as I listened to the

vision for the port. When I pointed to this resonance my interviewee noted that, in contrast to

the regional plans of the 1960s, the vision for today was not being discussed publically. “No one

is challenging us, and so, we’re just moving,” he said. When I asked if he anticipated resistance,

he explained: “A lot of people don’t understand what I’ve just conveyed to you. So, no, [we’re]

not getting resistance because they don’t really understand what’s happening…. We will get

opposition, but…on a project-by-project basis as opposed to somebody understanding what I’ve

just conveyed to you and saying ‘No, we don’t agree with that!’”

*************

In the 1960s the Canadian state embarked on an intensive regional modernization program

focused on Atlantic Canada and eastern Quebec. In 1957 the Royal Commission on Canada’s

Economic Prospects, also known as the Gordon Commission, had characterized regional

underdevelopment as a barrier to national economic growth and had recommended “special

measures of assistance” for Atlantic Canada and the north: the latter on account of the

anticipated dramatic expansion of mining, oil, and gas development, and the former because of

the region’s lack of post-war growth and low per-capita income. Driven by the Commission’s

4 “The Implications of Rationalization,” 1. PARO, RG 33, Department of Development, First DoD Series – to 1970, Box 21, file 705 – Cape Breton Development Corporation.

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findings, and in step with broader trends in North American governance, the Canadian

government ‘discovered’ poverty in the 1960s: amidst widespread post-war prosperity, it turned

out, poverty persisted in underdeveloped rural areas and inner city neighbourhoods. The

government launched its official War on Poverty in 1965, which included measures targeting

underdeveloped regions. While the branding of the War on Poverty faded, the regional

development agenda was consolidated three years later through the formation of the Department

of Regional Economic Expansion. Throughout the Canadian War on Poverty and the era of

regional development, planners, economists, and politicians crafted an understanding of certain

lives and economic arrangements as “viable” within this new vision for the future. By extension,

much like the Cape Breton planner quoted above, they designated others “unviable.” By

designating lives “unviable” on the basis that they trapped people in poverty, these planners and

policy-makers worked to justify a dramatic expansion of state intervention in the 1960s in the

service of industrial interests: from programs for land “improvement” to national manpower

policy meant to induce flexibility. They also fostered a powerful and enduring narrative that

constrained collective imaginaries of the future.

This chapter interrogates the creation and mobilization of (un)viability in debates about the

‘underdevelopment’ problem in Atlantic Canada in the 1960s. Bringing together the federal

government’s War on Poverty, modernization planning in the Maritimes, and the growing

concern with coordinated national manpower mobility, I explore how unviability was invented,

researched, diagnosed, and put to use in the service of rapidly changing geographies of

accumulation. The decades following World War Two, of course, constituted a time of dramatic

economic transformation. In Canada, the economy was transitioning away from agriculture

toward manufacturing, services, and the production of industrial resources. On one hand,

geographies of population and economic growth were increasingly concentrating in the major

urban centres; on the other, governments and industry pushed to ‘open’ the north to

development and industrial resource extraction. As discussed in Chapter 3, the post-war rise in

mining, oil, and gas, the mechanization of operations, and the progressive incursion of industrial

activity into more northern locations ‘remote’ from southern centres presented industry with a

particular set of manpower dilemmas that had implications for federal labour market policy.

These changes would dovetail with both the rural modernization agenda focused on eastern

Canada and the rise of “active” manpower policy, together producing new geographies of

extractive labour in Canada. Throughout the War on Poverty, the diagnosis of particular lives

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and places as unviable helped to ‘liberate’ manpower, ‘improve’ land use, encourage

urbanization, and intensify industrial extraction. But the story of unviability also played—and

continues to play—an important ideological function: to entrench a local and national ‘common

sense’ about the problem of poverty, the meaning of development, and the possible course of

social and economic history.

The Gordon Commission had connected the persistent rurality, “marginal” economic activity,

and low per capita incomes in the Atlantic Provinces to the region’s conditions of low capital

investment, “inadequate” use of land, and poor transportation infrastructure.5 The Commission’s

seamless characterization of the regional uneven development as both a problem of productivity

and a problem of poverty set the tone in important ways for how the federal government would

come to talk about poverty and the economy the 1960s. The War on Poverty, regional

development plans, and national labour market policy that followed in the wake of the

Commission and into the 1960s adopted this simple equation between poverty and lack of

productivity, discretely hitching the interests of the newfound poor to the government agenda

for economic expansion. At the same time as planners and policy-makers emphasized that rural

and regional modernization was meant to make ‘full’ and more efficient use of Canada’s natural

and human resources, they recounted that these plans were designed to improve local standards

of living and to close a whole plethora of gaps between underdeveloped rural eastern Canada

and industrialized central Canada—gaps related to productivity and mechanization on the one

hand, and income and employment on the other. As the stated metric for “unviability,” poverty

became a sympathetic and compelling justification for the consolidation of land, the

rationalization of industry, and the flexibilization of labour. Meanwhile, the fluid functioning of

the economy, elevated to a status far above the material and experiential lives of actual people,

served to explain why poor people and marginal economies needed to be brought into the

“mainstream” of the country’s economic life.6 This meant the consolidation and reorganization

of land-use, but also, crucially, making use of their labour power within the context of a national

labour market.

5 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, Final Report, 404–6. 6 As characterized in the background paper for the 1965 Federal-Provincial Conference on Poverty and Opportunity: “War on Poverty,” N.D. LAC, RG124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division. File “Background Papers”.

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Among the most ambitious regional plans of the era was a fifteen-year $725 million social and

economic modernization plan that would cover the entire province of Prince Edward Island.

Known as the Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP), the federal-provincial plan set out to

completely reorganize the Island’s economy away from small, semi-subsistence, and family-run

agricultural, forestry, and fishing operations toward consolidated and industrialized resource

economies, expanded processing and manufacturing, and, a dramatically expanded tourism

sector. In order to achieve the “full development of the labour force potential,” the plan also

included an overhaul and consolidation of the public school system, and investments in housing,

health and welfare services, and other infrastructure.7 In a textbook case of what David Harvey

has named “accumulation by dispossession,” planners imagined that as land was concentrated in

the hands of large farmers and as the fishery was “rationalized” those who had been small

operators would become factory workers in the new processing plants, populate the waged

labour force needed to transform the province into “Holiday Island,” or, with the help of the

state, relocate to other parts of the country where their labour would be more easily absorbed.8

There is a curious hole in the popular historical record when it comes to this era of intensive

modernization planning. Despite spending the first seventeen years of my life on PEI and

completing all of my public schooling there, I had never heard mention of the CDP until I

undertook the research for this dissertation. In addition to its jarring comprehensiveness, I have

chosen to write about the CDP here on account of this silence. Throughout this period

government officials and planners kowtowed to the interests of industry and deliberately undid

small producers’ economic and personal security in pursuit of a vision of progress that—despite

the rhetoric—did not have ordinary Islanders’ interests in mind. The hubristic character of this

plan was not a matter of ignorance or simply a problem of arrogant outside ‘experts,’ as is often

casually said. The Plan was, rather, a thoroughly organized vision for the systematic

dispossession of land and labour from independent small holders and, alongside this, the

consolidation of largely local power and class interests.9 The amount of time and money that

was invested in studying Islanders and their way of life, and to recounting the discovered Truths

of “underdevelopment” and “underemployment” back to them, constituted an important 7 Canada. Department of Regional Economic Expansion, Development Plan for Prince Edward Island: A 15-Year Federal-Provincial Program for Social and Economic Advancement, 24. 8 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 9 See David A. Milne, ‘Politics in a Beleaguered Garden’, in The Garden Transformed: Prince Edward Island, 1945-1980, ed. Verner Smitheram, David Milne, and Satadal Dasgupta (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed Press, 1982), 39–72.

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ideological element of the Plan. Through this intensive research and public outreach, planners

tried to instil a new vision of the good life—full on modernization and capitalist progress—in

the Island imaginary. While my focus and ability here is not in recounting a complete history of

the Plan itself—a task better left in the hands of historians and scholars of the local context—in

peeling back some layers of the CDP within the broader context of Canadian political economic

change in the 1960s, I hope to lend some historical perspective to contemporary unemployment,

distribution of land and resources, and modes of economic life.10 But, more than this, this

chapter aims to historicize the narrow stories we tell about the character and potential of the

local economy.

In focusing on the politics of viability I attend to what Alice O’Connor, speaking to the

American context, calls “poverty knowledge”: the technical and cultural understanding of

poverty that has defined the “poverty problem” in isolation from social relations, and the

experts, instruments, and research that produced this understanding.11 David Tough has used

O’Connor’s work to argue that the Canadian War on Poverty produced new representations and

cultural explanations of poverty and the poor that served to isolate people, places, and their

material conditions from the social relations that produced them and in which they were

10 The best reference the CDP and the broader local transformations of this era is the collection of essays assembled by Smitheram, Milne, and Dasgupta The Garden Transformed: Prince Edward Island, 1945-1980 (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed Press, 1982). Within the collection, Milne’s ‘Politics in a Beleaguered Garden’. essay on the depoliticizing impact of the “garden myth” provides important political economic and cultural context for the broader development agenda. Other essays in the collection focus on the Plan’s impact on specific sectors: on tourism see Judith Alder, “Tourism and Pastoral: a Decade of Debate”; on school consolidation see Verner Smitheram, “Development and Debate over School Consolidation”; on land use see John McLellan, “Changing Patterns of Land Use.” Errol Sharpe’s account of the Plan, while a smaller part of a much larger Island history, is refreshing in its attention to power and political economy and references to the Plan’s public education component. See: Errol Sharpe, A People’s History of Prince Edward Island (Toronto: Steel Rail Publishing, 1976). The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council assembled quite a comprehensive account of the CDP and the planning process for the PEI government, which serves as a useful background to the sequence of events. See: Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, A History of the Prince Edward Island Development Plan to 1977, Submitted to the Department of Development, Province of Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, PEI, 1980). The Plan factors widely into the work of PEI historian, Edward MacDonald: E.g. Edward MacDonald, If You’re Strong Hearted (Charlottetown, PEI: Prince Edward Island Museum and Heritage Foundation, 2000); Edward MacDonald, ‘A Landscape... with Figures: Tourism and Environment on Prince Edward Island’, Acadiensis 1 (Winter/Spring 2011): 70–85. Environmental historian Ryan O’Connor has attended to the contested politics of rural development, including organized resistance. See Ryan O’Connor, ‘Agrarian Protest and Provincial Politics: Prince Edward Island and the 1971 National Farmers Union Highway Demonstration’, Acadiensis 37, no. 1 (2008): 31–55. Now-Premier Wade MacLauchlan has recently published a book about the premiership of Alex Campbell; this account contains significant primary research and many details of local government activities surrounding the plan, but is quite celebratory of the Plan’s impacts. H. Wade MacLauchlan, Alex B. Campbell: The Prince Edward Island Premier Who Rocked the Cradle (Robertson Library, University of Prince Edward Island, 2014). 11 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century US History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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embedded.12 These representations, both authors assert, served as a foundation for

individualised and cultural understandings of poverty that helped to undercut support for welfare

state policy in the decades that followed. What I hope to add to this history is that this rhetoric

of poverty not only served the retrenchment of the welfare state that began in the 1970s, it also

served to justify a dramatic expansion of state intervention in the 1960s at the expense of

particular livelihoods and in the service of particular industrial interests: from aggressive rural

modernization designed to consolidate production and resources, to national manpower policy

meant to sculpt the workforce to the needs of the market in terms of both geography and skill.

Foregrounding the relationship between the rhetoric of poverty and the expansion, rather than

contraction, of the welfare state highlights the fact that the War on Poverty was not, first and

foremost, concerned with making poor people’s lives better. Rather, as Piven and Cloward have

helped us understand through their broad examination of the “functions of public welfare,” the

welfare state itself has always been foundational to the regulation of workers and labour

markets.13 During periods of massive dislocation, either depressions or periods of rapid

modernization, state relief systems have historically played a crucial role in managing these

problems of adjustment such that dislocated people are absorbed into the labour supply.14

12 David Tough, ‘“At Last! The Government’s War on Poverty Explained”: The Special Planning Secretariat, the Welfare State, and the Rhetoric of the Poverty in the 1960s’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 25, no. 1 (2014): 177. Canada’s ‘official’ study of poverty, carried out by a special Senate committee that was established in 1968 and reported in 1971, had similarly documentary tendencies, failing to engage with the causes of poverty in Canada. The Committee’s main findings were that despite the fact that the government was spending $6 billion a year on financial need one in five Canadians were defined as ‘poor’. Sixty percent of the poor worked most or all of the year and so didn’t qualify for welfare. The committee proposed a guaranteed annual income that would be financed and run by the federal government. In response, four dissenting staff members of the senate committee prepared and published The Real Poverty Report. They argued that the proposal failed to take acknowledge many key causes of poverty: corporate power, inequitable tax system, lack of bargaining power for most workers, a failure to challenge the ideology of the free market, etc. This report called for a policy on full employment, more public control over corporations, centralized collective bargaining, welfare reform, and a guaranteed annual income in the form of a demogrant. This history is recounted in Dennis T. Guest, The Emergence of Social Security in Canada, 3rd edition (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), chap. 11; Canada. Parliament. Senate. Special Senate Committee on Poverty, Poverty in Canada (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1971); Ian Adams et al., The Real Poverty Report (Edmonton: M.G. Hurtig, 1971). 13 Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 1993. 14 During periods of modernization (mechanization, agricultural industrialization, the incorporation of new sources of power, etc.) they explain, “portions of the labouring population may be rendered obsolete or at least temporarily maladjusted. Market incentives do not collapse; they are simply not sufficient to compel people to abandon one way of working and living in favor of another.” Explaining the lived chaos of this abstract process of labour market adjustment, they write: “In principle, of course, these dislocated people become part of a labor supply to be drawn upon by a changing and expanding labor market. As the history of Western market systems shows, however, people do not adapt so readily to drastically altered methods of work and to the new and alien patterns of social life dictated by that work. They may resist leaving their traditional communities and the only life they know. Bred to labor under the discipline of sun and season, however severe the discipline may be, they may resist the discipline of factory and machine, which, though it may be no more severe, may seem so because it is alien. The process of

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This chapter works closely with Chapter 3. Across these two chapters, in trying to understand

the politics of viability, I bring together the War on Poverty, modernization planning in the

Maritimes, and anxieties about the supply, mobility, and reliability of mining manpower. The

broad approach taken here requires that I forego important details of how labour markets,

economic restructuring, and the ‘national economy’ manifest in the daily lives of ordinary

people. But, in return, moving across these three perhaps seemingly disparate contexts allows

for a more complete view of how both powerful and mid-level industrial and state actors

constructed a common sense about the lives of these ordinary people, the land and resources on

which they depended, and the power and entitlement of national administration to reorganize

and exploit them both. The declaration that certain lives, places, and modes of economic

organization had no place in the future by virtue of being ‘unviable’ was the common sense

discourse constructed by the state to accompany a program of deep structural adjustment. This

appeared to be—and was, but was not limited to—a localized program of agricultural land

consolidation, rationalization, urbanization, and social development focused on underdeveloped

regions of Quebec and Atlantic Canada. But when we broaden our view we see a much more

dispersed set of social relations underpinning a dynamic of national uneven development in

which this regional modernization agenda was situated and intimately intertwined. In this

chapter and the one that follows, I read these regional modernization programs through a lens

that tries to account for these broader dynamics, relationships, and geographies.

The problem of regional inequality

The Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects was tasked by the Order-in-Council

with reporting on “the probable economic development of Canada and the problems to which

such development appears likely to give rise.” This included the supply of raw materials and

energy, growth and redistribution of the national population, changing markets for Canadian

products, trends in productivity and standards of living, and requirements for industrial and

social capital.15 The final report, published in 1957, lays out a sweeping picture of the changes

to the structure of the Canadian economy since World War Two and those anticipated in the

decades to follow. The report projected a future in which agricultural production would decline

human adjustment to these economic changes has ordinarily entailed generations of mass unemployment, distress, and disorganization.” Piven and Cloward, 6. 15 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, Final Report, 3.

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in relative economic importance, while other, largely industrial resources (forestry, mining,

energy, but also fishing), secondary manufacturing, and services would experience a relative

expansion. Crucially, the Commission anticipated the declining relative importance of

agriculture to the national economy would imply the dramatic urbanization of the population

and the economy, concentrated among the largest urban centres of Montreal, Toronto, and

Vancouver. This increased productivity was presented as the key to increased prosperity; the

Commission anticipated, overall, a sunny future of greater disposable income per capita, higher

levels of education, more leisure time, and earlier retirement for the Canadian population.

Most of the necessary “adjustment” to these changes in the structure of the economy would be

spurred by the forces of the market. “Not only does a free market permit, even enforce, the

multitudinous adjustments that are necessary to create some rough harmony between what

buyers want and what producers have to sell,” the report explained, “it also promotes efficiency

through the spur of competition, which is constantly altering the relative position of producers

and leading to a more productive use of the labour and capital and natural resources of the

economy.”16 To guard against unemployment and inflation, however, the Commission also

highlighted the importance of state intervention, especially monetary adjustments, to ensure “a

high level of demand and of employment opportunities and yet a stable price level.” But the

Commission also warned that, “Even a successful full employment policy may leave untouched

the problems of particular regions and areas that are not sharing in the progress of the country as

a whole.” For, hidden by this generalized prosperity, poverty persisted “both in the cities and in

the country,” the Commission explained. And, “In spite of higher wages, there are still families

with too little money to bring up their children decently. In spite of social security measures and

the efforts of charity, there are still old people slowly dying in back bedrooms on which the rent

is long overdue.”17

On the question of regional poverty and inequality, specifically, the Commission expressed

concern. In particular, the Commission warned that problems in Atlantic Canada and the north

would pose barriers to continued national economic expansion, and that targeted “special

16 The Commission explained, “For all its surface confusion, [the market] is the forum for a dialectic of great practical importance. It is there that producers and consumers communicate with one another through the language of process; and no better method of communication between them has ever been devised” Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 12–13. 17 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 14.

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measures of assistance” would be required. The pairing of the two regions is somewhat curious,

given their divergent economic and social geographies, and their treatment in the chapter is

equally at odds. The north was said to constitute a “new economic frontier” on account of

growing postwar demand for industrial materials and expansion of transportation and

communication networks during and after the Second World War.18 The problem of population

‘adjustment’ among Northern “Indian” and “Eskimo” populations—namely, the social and

ecological impacts of the expansion of industrial extraction—is presented at the end of the

chapter, as a consequence of growing the economy through the expansion of industrial

extraction. The Atlantic region, in contrast, was presented as a much more integrated social and

economic set of problems. Drawing a relationship between rurality, “marginal” economic

activity, and low per capita incomes, the report explains these problems as inseparable from

conditions of low capital investment, the inefficient use of land, and a lack of transportation

infrastructure. Whereas northern Indigenous peoples were understood primarily through

territorial relations of production, people in the Atlantic region were primarily understood to

pose a threat to economic development in their unrealized potential as workers.

Casting life in the Atlantic region as a relic of the past in a country that has otherwise largely

adjusted to the future, the report explains the persistence of occupational pluralism (subsistence

farming supplemented by part-time fishing and logging) in the region and the resultant

inefficient use of land, as “one of the main reasons for the continued lag in average incomes.”19

People involved in these “marginal activities,” the report continued, “often have few skills

which can be readily adjusted to the modern industrial society of the urban centres of Canada.

Their reserves of cash are usually limited and in many cases the families of the people

concerned tend to be large.” To facilitate their adjustment, the Commission urged the

government to provide financial and other assistance “to consolidate small holdings of land

[and] also to assist people who wish to relocate.”20 Any piecemeal approach to improving

economic conditions in the Atlantic region risked simply reproducing economic activities and

industries “which may no longer be wholly justified in economic terms.” Rather, the report

reads, “What is needed we believe is a bold comprehensive and co-ordinated approach to the 18 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 413. Continued economic development would depend on the expansion of mining operations and the development of oil and gas in the region, both of which were dependent on continued mapping and exploration, and the expansion of transportation, given the distance to markets. 19 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 404. 20 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 412.

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underlying problems of the region.”21

It was this type of inequality, the Commission clearly explained, that, barring a major disaster—

atomic war or another deep depression—posed the greatest threat to the economic order and the

post-war growth agenda:

In Canada, as in other countries, there are social tensions latent in the community that in

times of stress might come to the surface and cause a serious setback to economic

progress. There are tensions between regions, between races, between various economic

groups and between management and labour. If Canadians as a whole were to prove

indifferent to the economic difficulties of particular regions; if the effort of sympathetic

comprehension between the races in Canada were to be suspended; or if any of the

economic groups in the community were to make exorbitant claims on its resources; in

all of these cases the consequent strife and discontent might well bring economic

progress to a full stop.22

Herein lay the political economic problem of inequality with which governments would become

very invested in the following decade. The War on Poverty that consolidated these efforts in the

mid-1960s held up the compelling individual stories of poverty: the families too poor to raise

their kids and the “old people slowly dying in back bedrooms.” But the economic and political

rationale for investing in poverty lay in the state’s drive to make efficient ‘use’ of national

resources and the entwined problem of discontent so bluntly presented by the Gordon

Commission. What would become clear into the 1960s was that, behind the rhetorical sheen of

the War on Poverty, policy-makers perceived the coordination of economic, regional, and

manpower policy as a potential “fix” to the problems of national uneven development and

labour “disequilibrium”: unemployment in some areas, wage inflation in others, and the

subsequent political problems of both.

Locating the problem of poverty

Spurred by the recommendations of the Royal Commission and a parallel “discovery” of

poverty in the United States, on April 6, 1965, the Pearson government announced its intention

21 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 404. 22 Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 15, emphasis added.

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to develop “a program for the full utilization of our human resources and the elimination of

poverty among our people.” The program, as outlined in the Speech from the Throne, would

include “improved measures for regional development, the re-employment and training of

workers, the re-development of rural areas, the assistance of needy people, the renewal of areas

now blighted and congested in our cities, and the establishment of opportunities for young

Canadians.”23 To carry out this anti-poverty agenda, the government formed a Special Planning

Secretariat (SPS) under the directorship of the Prime Minister’s policy chief, Tom Kent, and

assigned this new Secretariat with two central roles: to coordinate the federal government’s

disparate anti-poverty initiatives and to draw attention to poverty as a pressing social issue by

educating the public about the realities of poverty in Canada.24 What came to be known as the

SPS’s Work and Opportunity Program added a third pillar to the federal government’s

traditional approach of dealing with poverty through general economic expansion and social

security programs. As explained in a background paper for the SPS’s 1965 Federal-Provincial

Conference on Poverty and Opportunity, the new understanding of poverty held that these

measures alone were insufficient. Economic expansion would only widen the gap between the

rich and the poor, while social security was a surface solution that bred dependence and did

nothing to help the poor truly “shar[e] in the world around them.” What Canada needed was a

targeted “social opportunity” program that “aims to prevent poverty caused by people being

outside the mainstream of the country’s economic life” and helps “people on the bank to learn to

swim.”25 Taken together, these three pillars promised a comprehensive strategy for Canada’s

“War on Poverty.”

The 1965 announcement of the War on Poverty did not represent the government’s first foray

into the issues of poverty, inequality, and so-called underdevelopment. For one, the expanding

collection of social security and insurance programs in the 1940s and 50s—family allowances,

Old Age Security, government hospital insurance, and unemployment insurance—indicated the

federal government’s conviction in the feasibility and benefits of state intervention in issues of

population and economy.26 Moreover, on the specific issue of geographically defined

underdevelopment, motivated by the Gordon Commission’s warnings about the national perils 23 Canada, ‘Speech from the Throne to Open the Third Session of the Twenty-Sixth Parliament of Canada’ (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 5 April 1965). 24 Tough, ‘“At Last! The Government’s War on Poverty Explained”’. 25 “War on Poverty,” 2, 3. N.D. LAC, RG124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division. File “Background Papers”. 26 On the expansion of these programs see Guest, The Emergence of Social Security.

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of Atlantic regional underdevelopment, the federal government had established the Atlantic

Development Board (ADB) in 1962. The year prior, Parliament had passed the first explicit

regional development spending program, the Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Act

(ARDA), a joint federal-provincial program that aimed to intensify agricultural production in

slow growth areas through comprehensive regional development, rural manpower programs

(including relocation services), land consolidation and land-use adjustment, projects to benefit

people engaged in the fishery and other non-agricultural natural-resource industries, and the

development of water and soil resources.27 The ADB, conversely, had an explicitly regional

focus on the Atlantic provinces and was mandated with developing a comprehensive

development plan for the region. While this mandate remained unfulfilled when the ADB was

disbanded in 1969, throughout the 1960s ARDA had commissioned extensive research into the

‘rural problem,’ helping to secure rural poverty’s place in the government agenda and the public

imagination.28 As Maurice Sauvé, Minister of Forestry and Rural Development, explained of

this poverty research in a January 1966 speech to the Empire Club in Toronto entitled “The

Need for Unity in Canada” (reprinted in the Ottawa Citizen under the by-line “The Other

Canada: Trapped in Poverty”): “The results showed shocking conditions of low income and

poverty—or, in the economists’ terms, low productivity and underemployment.”29 The emphasis

on regional development planning remained threaded through this era’s rural modernization

initiatives. In 1963 Pearson introduced a new Department of Industry and in conjunction with

the department he established the Area Development Agency and the Area Development

Incentives Act as tools to attract industry to poor regions. The Department of Forestry and Rural

Development was created in 1965 and ARDA responsibilities were moved to this new

department.

Development planning of the early ARDA era emphasized problems with the physical

properties of land as an explanation for rural poverty. Perhaps due to the influence of

geographers and soil scientists within government decision-making, it was commonly

understood that poor soil and water management, in addition to small farm size, were key 27 Donald J. Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). ARDA was expanded to include non-agricultural activities in 1966 and renamed the Agricultural and Rural Development Act. 28 In 1969 all federal regional development initiatives were brought under the new Department of Regional Economic Expansion. 29 Maurice Sauvé, ‘The Need For Unity In Canada’ (Speech to the Empire Club of Canada, 20 January 1966), http://speeches.empireclub.org/60776/data?n=1. The title for the article was a reference to Michael Harrington’s The Other America, which was widely credited with spurring the American War on Poverty.

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factors in the reproduction of agricultural poverty.30 ARDA had grown out of the work of the

Special Senate Committee on Land Use (1957 to 1963), which had identified soil fertility and

erosion problems. The Resources for Tomorrow Conference (1961) had similarly emphasized

the economic impacts of soil problems.31 Criticisms of ARDA’s orientation eventually arose on

the grounds that the development of physical resources could not exist without parallel attention

to developing and managing human resources. By the mid-1960s planners and policy-makers

began to realize that the problems of marginal agriculture could not be solved through

agricultural measures alone, and in 1965 ARDA was expanded to address a wide range of rural

problems and rural industries. The Fund for Rural Economic Development (FRED) was adopted

the following year, which targeted regions with widespread adjustment problems but that were

understood to harbour significant development potential. As two economists would explain to

the Globe and Mail two years later, “There exists a very common—but erroneous—zeal for

economy which cannot tolerate the waste of land but easily overlooks the waste of labor on the

tidy parcels of the small farmer.”32 Five deals were eventually signed under FRED, covering

Northeast New Brunswick, the Mactaquac region of New Brunswick, Interlake Manitoba, the

Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec, and all of Prince Edward Island. Studies were also undertaken in

Northern Nova Scotia and Western Newfoundland.33 The regional focus of the plans is quite

stark and would be reiterated throughout the early regional planning agenda. After Pierre

Trudeau was elected on a platform that narrated the problem of regional underdevelopment as a

threat to “national unity,” for example, his newly appointed Minister responsible for regional

development, Jean Marchand, announced that 80 percent of regional development funds would

be spent east of Trois-Rivières, Quebec.34 While all FRED plans took account of both economic

and social factors, the PEI plan—the only plan to cover an entire province—was unique in its

level of social and economic comprehensiveness.

30 T. N. Brewis, Regional Economic Policies in Canada (Toronto: MacMillan, 1969); as cited in J. Barry Cullingworth, ‘Regional Planning at the Federal Level’, in Urban and Regional Planning in Canada (London: Transaction Publishers, 1987), 187–202. 31 See Sonya Dakers, Agriculture Soil Conservation: Federal Policy, Current Issues Review (Ottawa: Library of Parliament, Research Branch, Science and Technology Division, 1997). This logic was reflected in federal investment in major national projects including the Canada Land Inventory, a comprehensive national survey of land capability and use. It included assessments of the land’s potential in relation to agriculture, forestry, recreation, and wildlife; an assessment of current land use; and a survey of social and economic factors related to land use. Canada. ARDA, The Canada Land Inventory: Objectives, Scope and Organization (Ottawa: Government of Canada, Department of Forestry, 1965). 32 Quoted in Lewis Seale, ‘Allegations of Backward Rural Aid Policies Are No Shock to ARDA Authorities’, The Globe and Mail, 25 January 1968. 33 Seale. 34 Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren, 85.

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Figure 2.1: Designated areas of intervention for the Area Development Program, as of June 1967. As was the case with much of the era’s regional planning, the initiative focused on Atlantic Canada and eastern Quebec. The ADP operated through the Department of Industry, operating programs “to foster employment and higher income through industrial expansion in ‘designated areas.’”35

Notably, when Pearson announced Canada’s War on Poverty in 1965, his emphasis was on the

full utilization of human, not physical resources. This despite the fact that development planning

in Canada was already quite organized around an integration of economic (land) reform and

labour market planning. But Pearson’s rhetorical emphasis on poverty existed within the broader

context of the “discovery” of poverty in North America. In the first half of the 1960s, poverty

and poor people had become a preoccupation that consumed policy agendas and the public

imagination in both Canada and the Unites States. The widespread belief following the Second

World War was that the industrial expansion of the North American economy, new programs of

redistribution, and the growth of the welfare state had together produced generalized prosperity

and rendered poverty a thing of the past.36 But in the early 1960s poverty was “rediscovered”

amidst this wealth: in peripheral rural areas, in the inner city, and, in Canada, on reserves. As 35 Special Planning Secretariat, “Fighting Poverty in 1966,” August 1967, p. 15. LAC RG 26, Vol. 83, File 1024-61 – Programme and Planning on Poverty. 36 Of course, scholars have now thoroughly debunked the notion that Keynesian economic policy and the Fordist mode of production with which it is intimately associated “floated all boats.” As both an economic and regulatory structure, Fordism-Keynesianism was organized around a set of normative assumptions about a Standard Employment Relation (full-time, year-round, urban, industrial factory work) based on the life of a particular normative (white, male, married, citizen) subject. Differently positioned people never had full access to Keynesianism nor Fordism’s full array of social and economic benefits; conversely, in many ways this socio-economic regime depended on the irregular, precarious, and un(der)paid labour of women, people of colour, im/migrants, seasonal workers, and other groups were underrepresented in regular waged employment. E.g. see Vosko, Temporary Work.

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Katz, O’Connor, and others have argued, it was with the rise in journalistic attention to

poverty—in particular the publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America—that

poverty became a central tenet of the public policy agenda.37 Published in 1962, The Other

America argued that widespread post-war affluence had shielded most Americans from the

realities of rural and urban poverty. Harrington’s book “introduced a rhetoric of poverty that

underlined its invisibility, its status apart from industry, from the suburbs, from everything that

defined America to Americans in the late 1950s. The poor, Harrington wrote, ‘have no voice;

they have no face.’” As Tough explains, by showing the invisibility of the poor, Harrington

“powerfully underscored the importance of representing the poor, and lent that representation an

ethical and subversive resonance.”38

Alice O’Connor explains the rise in public concern about poverty and the mainstreaming of the

“culture of poverty” analysis in the US in the early 1960s. Structural explanations for poverty

were on the rise in the early 1960s. The civil rights movement was explaining poverty through

an analysis that incorporated automation, labour market exclusion, and racial exploitation and in

the summer of 1963 would undertake the March on Washington under the banner of jobs and

freedom. The National Farmer’s Union, similarly, argued against an agenda of economic

expansion as a solution to poverty and called for attention to the root causes of economic

inequality.39 But, as O’Connor so thoroughly illustrates, as the structural critique of economic

growth began to appear in more popular formats, including Harrington’s book, the analysis of

poverty would shift is focus from political economy and the concentration of wealth to “the

demographic and psychological traits that distinguished the poor from everybody else.”40 It was

this interpretation of poverty that both captured the imagination of the American public and that

ultimately made its way into the liberal growth agenda as the explained justification for targeted

social spending on the poor.41

37 Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge. 38 Tough, ‘“At Last! The Government’s War on Poverty Explained”’, 181. 39 O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 149. 40 O’Connor, 151. 41 With public concern about poverty at an all-time high in the United States, the Council of Economic Advisors began to lay the analytical groundwork for a comprehensive offensive against poverty in the winter of 1963. As O’Connor explains, “Based though it was on social scientific analysis, it was also shaped by [Chairman] Heller’s sharp awareness of political interest and need—most immediately, to defend CEA growth policies against the structural critique that they would bypass the poor, but also to establish the CEA and the administration as the locus of expertise on poverty” O’Connor, 153, emphasis added. In the US Administration’s ‘construction of poverty’ that would follow, Heller’s priority “was to elaborate upon a concept of poverty consistent with the CEA’s vision of

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The US War on Poverty did not focus originally on the inner city and racialized poverty;

inspired by Harrington’s focus on rural poverty, Kennedy’s initial interest was in Appalachia.

But by mid-decade, the civil rights movement and the urban crisis redirected attention toward

the inner city and recast poverty as a problem largely afflicting African Americans.42 The

context in Canada was different. Canadian cities did not experience the same degree or intensity

of disinvestment and depopulation as did US cities and the contours of racial segregation and

inequality differ from those in the United States. Moreover, the centrality of natural resource

industries to the Canadian economy and the rise of industrial staples in the 1960s meant that

governments understood rural and remote areas as increasingly important sites of potential

accumulation—in terms of land and, eventually, also labour.43

While common understandings of the urban problem would change as the decade wore on, in

the early 1960s, where anxiety about disorder in Canadian cities did exist, it consolidated at

times around rural poverty and the problem of ‘adjustment’ in a rapidly urbanizing and

industrializing society.44 Policy-makers upheld post-war Canada as a modern urban society and

most regional development planning was designed to encourage the urbanization of population

and economic growth. But, the urbanization of ‘unadjusted’ rural people constituted a problem.

economic growth” and to incorporate it into the domestic policy agenda. This new construction of poverty would emphasize the problem of deprivation and “consciously avoid defining poverty as a problem of inequality” (154). As one CEA staffer and poverty expert declared, “Probably a politically acceptable program must avoid completely any use of the term ‘inequality’ or the term ‘redistribution of income or wealth’” quoted in O’Connor, 154. 42 Katz, The Undeserving Poor; see also Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 1993. 43 Throughout the 1950s, the Paley report, the Gordon Commission, and Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision had all asserted of the imperative of ‘opening’ the North, increasing the exploitation of mining, oil and gas, forestry, and industrial fishing operations in rural and remote areas, and intensifying industrialized agricultural production. US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom; Canada. Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, Final Report; for background on Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision see Isard, ‘Northern Vision’. 44 The expansion of secondary manufacturing during and after World War Two had driven the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country. By the early 1960s only one quarter of Canadians remained living in rural areas in contrast to 90 percent at the turn of the century. Joseph Katz, Society, Schools and Progress in Canada (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1969), 15; as cited in Cowen, Military Workfare, 148. The geography of this urbanization was dramatically uneven. In 1961, for example, 77 percent of Ontarians lived in urban areas, in contrast to 50 percent in of Atlantic Canada’s population. Relative to other regions, the eastern provinces were remarkably resistant to this broader trend toward urbanization. For example: Western Canada’s population was only 32 percent urban in 1941, while the Maritimes’ (PEI, NB, and NS) was 44 percent. But by 1961, these numbers would be 58 and 50, respectively; and by 1996, 74 and 53. Data is from Robert Bone, The Regional Geography of Canada, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 173. (Data for Newfoundland is not included until 1961, hence my shift in the categories I am comparing to “Maritimes” for the earlier years). The politics and imaginaries of poverty and unemployment in Canada had often been narrated in the rather depoliticized terms of the urban/rural: while excessively rapid urbanization has been blamed for poverty and political radicalism before the War, by the 1960s, industrial urbanization was understood as the solution to underdevelopment.

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“Maritimers” in particular, became a source of anxiety in the Toronto region during the 1960s.45

Faced with seasonal unemployment, poverty and structural adjustment in their home region, and

guided by rumours of plentiful employment in central Canada, people headed westward, largely

to urban and industrial Ontario, where their mobility and unemployment would take on new

political meaning.

As Greg Marquis explains, the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) grew by 18 percent

between 1961 and 1966 and early into the decade had lost its majority “British” ethnic majority.

In addition to attracting over 30,000 immigrants a year during this time, the Toronto CMA was a

major destination for internal migration and by 1961 migrants from the Atlantic region

comprised 49 percent of the city’s interprovincial newcomers. As their numbers increased,

Maritime migrants were quickly characterized as out of place, of dubious moral standing, and,

crucially, unemployable. The director of the Metro Traveller’s Aid Society explained to the

Globe and Mail in the fall of 1963 that “Persons from the Maritimes are often uneducated,

unprepared for big city life and have very little to offer.”46 Given the flood of migrants,

Toronto’s unemployment rates remained relatively high despite the city’s rapid economic

expansion. Municipal officials reported that by 1965 more than twenty-five thousand people

were on municipal welfare with eighteen thousand new additions to the rolls each year.47 In

1966 Kenneth Dear, the Toronto alderman who represented the ward encompassing Parkdale,

complained that the neighbourhood was saturated with Maritimers, “clogging welfare roles” and

exacerbating the housing shortage. He eventually proposed a public campaign to encourage

these people “to stay home if they had no job.”48 In a way that echoes the fear of transients in

the 1930s, internal rural-to-urban migrants, whose mobility was very difficult to regulate, were

demonized for their ‘abuse’ of municipal welfare and cast as undeserving. As Marquis has

documented, by the late 1960s, media reports and research studies of urban delinquency would

tie Maritime migrants to alcoholism, crime, and Toronto’s skid row.49

45 Greg Marquis, ‘Confederation’s Casualties: The “Maritimer” as a Problem in 1960s Toronto’, Acadiensis 39, no. 1 (2010): 83–107. 46 The Globe and Mail, ‘Ex-Maritimers Called Metro Social Problem’, The Globe and Mail, 23 October 1963. 47 Marquis, ‘Confederation’s Casualties’. 48 As quoted in Marquis, 91; For a sense of the events see: Pat McNenly, ‘Rent Subsidy Idea Faces Sharp Fight, “Gouging” Is Feared’, Toronto Daily Star, 29 July 1966; Toronto Daily Star, ‘Police Guard Alderman after Phone Threats’, Toronto Daily Star, 2 August 1966; The Globe and Mail, ‘Dear to Seek Maritimes’ Aid to End Influx’, The Globe and Mail, 6 August 1966; The Globe and Mail, ‘Alderman’s Remarks Don’t Endear Him to Maritimers’, The Globe and Mail, 10 August 1966. 49 A 1969 study carried out by the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Research Foundation into the “Chronic drunkenness disorder” among Toronto transients, for example, offered profiles of Maritime migrants and explained

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Marquis illustrates that, with the intensification of urbanization, the figure of the Maritime

migrant arose as a new form of urban pathology in the 1960s. But this characterization of rural

migrants as a burden on the productive and hard-working citizens of modern, industrial Toronto

can be traced back to the ‘problematic’ character of their home economies. At the same time as

Toronto social services grappled with “the problem of persons away from home” the federal

government was carefully interrogating the socio-economic characteristics of the places they

had left behind.50 Amidst the extensive research undertaken into the “rural problem” as part of

the ARDA agenda was the 1963 Eastern Canada Farm Survey, carried out by private consultants

under the order of the Federal Department of Agriculture.51 The Survey was meant to “detect

and define the influences opposing and favouring adjustment” in agricultural areas of the six

easternmost provinces and to direct ARDA’s future activity accordingly.52 The final report

typologized the widespread problem of adjustment amongst the agricultural population,

highlighting that 50 percent of farms in the area are “non-viable” and constitute the “hard core

of the farm problem.” In a section on the “redundancy” of these farmers, the report explains the

infectious nature of rural poverty: not only were these unviable farms trapping people in a state

of poverty and “in no sense essential as a contribution to the food supplies or national product of

Canada,” but they were a “breeding ground” for non-productive and dysfunctional members of

society.53 The report explains:

the region’s culture of drinking and masculinity. “The chronic drunkenness pattern tended to begin early for those men whose low education equipped them to engage mainly in sporadic, unskilled and all-male employment which facilitated and normatively encouraged heavy and/or spree drinking. This was particularly the case for those young men who had been raised in the Maritime provinces where male peer group heavy drinking appears from the interviews to be the informal expectation for validation of the male role…. Heavy drinking among the Maritimers, then, tended to be less associated with difficulties in interpersonal relationships or downward occupational mobility and more closely related to normative discrepancies, with reference to both work skills and to drinking patterns, between small towns in the Maritimes and urban Toronto. Gus Oki and Mary Morton, The Chronic Drunkenness Offender, Chapter 9: Education and Work (Toronto: Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Research Foundation, 1969), 61. 50 The Globe and Mail, ‘Ex-Maritimers Called Metro Social Problem’. 51 The Report of the Eastern Canada Farm Survey, 15. 1963. Hedlin-Menzies, 502-191 Lombard Ave, Winnipeg 2, Manitoba. May 9, 1963. Winnipeg, Manitoba. PARO, Accession #3688, Walter R. Shaw Fonds, Premier’s files 1959-1966, Subject Files, File 178 – Agriculture – 1963 – Eastern Canada Farm Survey. 52 The Report of the Eastern Canada Farm Survey, 2. 53 The report explains, “If the resources now controlled by these non-viable farmers were freed for acquisition by viable farmers or, alternatively, there was some increase in price of farm products as a result of a modest, short-run supply reduction, the remaining farmers would expand their production by the necessary 20 percent with little new investment and at enormously reduced social and economic cost.” The Report of the Eastern Canada Farm Survey, 6.

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…this study reveals beyond reasonable doubt that the economic, social and human costs

of maintaining a rural population earning no more than a sub-standard income from the

inadequate resources at its disposal are very high. It is wasteful of human talent. It is

frequently a breeding ground for persons who cannot be accommodated in the country or

employed in the city and are destined to exist throughout life in a no-man’s land of

under-training and under-employment. Such people are denied all hope of achieving

either farm prosperity on the one hand or urban prosperity on the other.54

In a section worth quoting at length, the report highlights that “…compared with urban areas, all

provinces in the survey area are failing to train their farm young people to fit into the rapidly-

changing economic environment of today” and warns that, “without adequate training, the

height of aspiration held out for them is to exchange their experience of under-employment and

subsistence living for periodic unemployment in the towns with income supplemented by

unemployment insurance and welfare payments.” Ultimately, “Not only are the poorer farms of

today the rural slums of tomorrow, but as the source of a continuous flow of the uneducated and

unskilled to the towns, they are the progenitors of future urban slums and the hard core of the

industrial unemployed.”55

That is, as the 1963 Farm Survey emphasized, the federal government’s agricultural land reform

and rural modernization programs needed to account for the people who would be rendered

‘surplus’ as a product of land consolidation, mechanization, and the eradication of subsistence

farms. Left to their own devises, dislocated rural people would flow into the cities in search of

employment and, if left unregulated, this process of population ‘adjustment’ was simply moving

the problem from one place to another in which people would have fewer resources, face worse

living conditions, and wind up concentrated in the city’s poor quarters. While Toronto media

and politicians had characterized urban transience as a moral and distributive problem, and

while the War on Poverty publically highlighted the problem of want and suffering, this report

brings to the fore the political problem of industrial adjustment. That is, while it may have been

an inefficient use of land and labour, rural poverty did not harbour the same potential for

54 The Report of the Eastern Canada Farm Survey, 8. 55 The Report of the Eastern Canada Farm Survey, emphasis added.

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political turmoil as did concentrated urban and industrial poverty.56 In Canada, rural poverty has

historically been understood as a problem under two conditions, both of which were heavily

invoked in the War on Poverty agenda and throughout the 1960s: because it constituted a waste

of human and physical resources, or because it threatened to become urban. On the latter point,

the Great Depression was not a distant memory and while the political problem of poor

transients had perhaps been partly resolved through the expansion of the social safety net and a

national unemployment insurance program, the fear of mass concentrated unemployment

lingered in the minds of politicians and property owners.

As we have seen, ARDA’s initial lack of focus on the social factors related to land reform

became a key criticism of the program in the mid-1960s. The Eastern Canada Farm Survey

anticipated this critique, arguing that “the most significant contribution ARDA can make to the

small, non-commercial farmers is to devise techniques that will help them to move to other areas

of economic activity.”57 The Farm Survey couched the problem of marginal agriculture within

the context of the threat it posed to national economic expansion: “non-commercial” farms had

a “central influence…on the misallocation of the nation’s human and production resources.”

The authors explained, “The success and future policies to expand and develop the national

economy will depend to a major degree on a recognition of the extent to which an

unreconstructed agriculture can inhibit and frustrate economic growth.”58 As John Grundy

notes, since the early part of the decade, reports out of Ottawa were echoing this concern,

pointing to a disequilibrium between the skills and location of labour supply and labour demand.

This mismatch was thought to not only exacerbate structural unemployment, but to also

entrench regional labour shortages leading to price and wage inflation. Analysts posited that

these trends would likely worsen with ongoing urbanization, industrialization, and technological

change, compounded further by the impending influx of baby boomers into the labour market.59

In response to these concerns, by mid-decade, the federal government would adopt a more

“active” approach to manpower policy (discussed in more detail in Chapter 3). The Department

of Manpower and Immigration (DMI), which focused much of its attention on labour mobility 56 Piven and Cloward have highlighted the changing political significance of poverty and unemployment as it moves from an agricultural to an urban context. As they explain it, in the context of the modernizing agricultural economy in the American rural south, employment conditions hindered political disorder: dislocation was gradual and workers were geographically dispersed; “only when the rural workers migrated to the central cities, where they were concentrated in the ghettoes, did turmoil erupt” Regulating the Poor, 1993, 212. 57 The Report of the Eastern Canada Farm Survey, 4. 58 The Report of the Eastern Canada Farm Survey, 4, 38. 59 Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’, 79.

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and coordinated its programs with rural modernization planning, would provide the

administrative infrastructure through which to theoretically find a third way between full

employment and inflation.60

If dislocated people—‘freed’ from so-called marginal economic activity—were a necessary

consequence of national economic expansion, something would have to be done to control the

redeployment of their labour. Beyond their concern about the political threat posed by large-

scale dislocation of the rural poor, policy-makers also understood that the successful

coordination of manpower across space and occupation could conceivably present a ‘fix’ to the

key contradictions of national economic expansion in the 1960s: geographically concentrated

industrial expansion and “labour shortages” in manufacturing and extraction, the threat of wage

inflation in these industries, and the growing power of organized labour. Despite its rhetorical

focus on poverty alleviation, when the War on Poverty was announced 1965, it would aim to do

exactly this. Under the guidance of the SPS, key programs chosen for immediate development

included manpower mobility grants to assist unemployed workers in relocating; manpower

training programs focused on underdeveloped regions; an area industrial development program

focused in eastern Canada that would supply tax concessions to industry willing to locate in

areas with high unemployment; and a rural development fund under ARDA to support economic

development in poor rural areas.61

60 As Grundy recounts in his historical analysis of Canada’s active manpower policy, in 1961 and 1962 the Senate Committee on Manpower and Employment and the Committee of Inquiry into the Unemployment Insurance Act, respectively, raised concerns about this issue. The first two reports (1964, 1965) of the newly formed Economic Council of Canada would also flag this concern, and, at the international level, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (1966) would do the same the following year. As cited in Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’. Canada. Parliament. Senate. Special Committee on Manpower and Employment, Report of the Special Committee on Manpower and Employment (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1961); Canada. Committee of Inquiry into the Unemployment Insurance Act (Gill Committee), Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Unemployment Insurance (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962); Economic Council of Canada, Annual Report for the Fiscal Year 1963/64 (Ottawa, 1964); Economic Council of Canada, Second Annual Review: Towards Sustained and Balanced Economic Growth (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1965); Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Manpower Polices and Programmes in Canada. (Paris: OECD, 1966). 61 In addition to these manpower and regional development initiatives, the Canada Assistance Plan and the Company of Young Canadians were also part of this list. “War on Poverty,” N.D. LAC, RG124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division, File “Background Papers”. The Company of Young Canadians was a program the gave youth the opportunity to live in remote communities and develop community animation projects; Margaret Hillyard Little has described the CYC as an attempt to curb the student movement that ended up, instead, radicalizing many youth and alerting them to the struggles of Aboriginal peoples and the growing gap between the country’s rich and poor. Margaret Hillyard Little, ‘Militant Mothers Fight Poverty: The Just Society Movement, 1968-1971’, Labour / Le Travail 59 (Spring 2007): 179–98.

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Narrating the problem of poverty

In its dual role, the Special Planning Secretariat both undergirded the coordination of these

efforts and, with its partners, developed explanations for why a broad agenda of economic

adjustment was necessary—namely, poverty.62 Throughout this work, the focus was on

narrating poverty, revealing the “face” of poverty, and telling individual stories about the

difficult lives of poor people and families.63 While previous poverty research had been

characterized by a reliance on statistical data and broad, high-level analysis, the SPS insisted

that “poverty is people—not national averages” and focused on illustrating the problem of

human suffering.64 As Tough explains, while this narrative was “easier to communicate to the

public, the representation of poverty as a style of life tended to abstract it from society as a

whole.”65

This message was broadcast through a variety of avenues. The SPS issued a small number of its

own publications, including a booklet series called Meeting Poverty/Face à la pauvreté that

would become a bi-monthly newsletter in 1966.66 But much of the Secretariat’s work was done

in partnership with community organizations and producers, most notably the National Film

Board (NFB).67 The first (and most infamous) collaboration between the SPS and NFB was a

1967 film called The Things I Cannot Change: a portrayal of a poor Anglophone family who

had migrated from Nova Scotia to Montreal in search of a better life, only to find deeper

poverty. Considered “one of the most controversial films ever released by the NFB,” according

to Brenda Longfellow, the film was widely cast as an unethical project for exploiting and

62 See Tough, ‘“At Last! The Government’s War on Poverty Explained”’. 63 For an excellent example of this type of work see 1965 Canadian Welfare Council Report that seems to have been widely circulated and quite influential in the way it profiled rural poverty. Canada. Canadian Welfare Council, A Preliminary Report of Rural Poverty in Four Selected Areas, Prepared for the Canada Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Administration (Canada Department of Forestry, 1965). LAC RG124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division, File 1.3. 64 As quoted in Tough, ‘“At Last! The Government’s War on Poverty Explained”’, 192. Tough’s reference is as follows: Consultation Looking Toward a National Conference on Urban Community Development (draft), 11 October 1966, Library and Archives Canada, MG 28 I10 Volume 213, File 213-17 Special Planning Secretariat of Privy Council; Urban Community Development 1965–1966, 19. 65 Tough, 193. 66 The issue from winter 1967 covered the topic of housing and included clips from interviews with decision-makers and stakeholders, governmental and non-governmental initiatives in different communities around the country, sources for additional information. The Special Planning Secretariat, “Meeting Poverty/Face à la pauvreté,” 1, no. 2 (Jan-Feb. 1967). LAC RG26, Vol. 83, File 1-24-61 (Part 2) – Programme and Planning on Poverty. 67 The most famous collaboration with the NFB is a film called The Things I cannot Change. See Tough (2014) for a discussion of this film.

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publically exposing the subject family.68 Shot in handheld black and white, the heavily

promoted film was “positioned as a sensational exposé of the dark and hitherto obscured

realities of poverty in Canada.” Reviewers commented that the film’s camera vérité style

allowed it to go “beyond the statistics” in peering honestly and intimately into the lives of the

poor.69 Promotional material for the film was sent to eighty thousand households in advance of

the CBC screening in the fall of 1967 and when it was aired on public television in that spring,

The Things was estimated to have reached millions of viewers across the country.70 Both

Longfellow and Zoë Druick place the film and its portrayal of poverty squarely within the

context of the government’s War on Poverty; before being aired publically, the film had

received approval from the Prime Minister and the Privy Council.71

Tough has highlighted the “aesthetic fascination with the lives of the poor” that ran many of the

SPS materials and collaborations.72 It is difficult here to disentangle the Secretariat’s work from

other government and agency research happening at the time, since the SPS was located so

centrally and powerfully in the government bureaucracy (the Privy Council Office) and, from

that position, worked so closely with a range of agencies and organizations. Moreover, as we

have seen, this aestheticization of poverty was central to the broader War on Poverty, both in

Canada and the United States and, while it was certainly core to the SPS’s work, it also

superseded it. This was reflected in the research undertaken and commissioned by Ottawa,

especially the ARDA research reports issued in mid- and late-decade, which, similarly, engaged

observational and descriptive methods to recount the lives of the rural poor. A 1965 study

68 Brenda Longfellow, ‘The Things I Cannot Change: A Revisionary Reading’, in Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, ed. Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker, and Ezra Winton (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 149. Longfellow explores these dynamics in this chapter. 69 Longfellow, ‘The Things I Cannot Change’, 153. 70 Zoë Druick, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007); Longfellow, ‘The Things I Cannot Change’; Tough, ‘“At Last! The Government’s War on Poverty Explained”’. 71 Within the broader context of “discovery” and mounting interest in poverty in the early 1960s, The Things was envisioned as the beginning of a whole series of films about poverty jointly funded by the NFB and the SPS (the Privy Council). The Montreal film was meant to be a pilot for a series of films about poverty that had been conceived of by a representative of the Privy Council in 1965, and officially proposed two years later—after The Things had already been shot. Gary Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); as cited in Longfellow, ‘The Things I Cannot Change’, 157. The series would ultimately become the Challenge for Change program, which was more inspired by the era’s social movements and advanced a more radical critique, envisioning itself not only changing public attitudes, but also inciting concrete social change through engaging both poverty professionals (social workers, welfare agencies, Indian Affairs officers, etc.) and poor people themselves Druick, Projecting Canada; Longfellow, ‘The Things I Cannot Change’. 72 Tough, ‘“At Last! The Government’s War on Poverty Explained”’, 193.

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prepared for ARDA by the Canadian Welfare Council aimed to “sketch ‘le visage de la

pauvreté’” and to contribute to a better understanding of the behaviours of the rural poor.73

Importantly, while the objective of the report was to present an “image of poverty” in four rural

regions, it was with the familiar goals in mind of, on one hand, supporting policy choices

between mobility and area development and, on the other, helping to address the urban problem

by ensuring that measures taken to address rural poverty (e.g. mobility) did not further

exacerbate “the national problem” or the wellbeing of individual poor people. That same year, a

similar ARDA study was undertaken to study “Life and Poverty in the Maritimes.” As explained

in the final report, the purpose of the study was “a search for a true image of poverty other than

that expressed by statistics and external evaluation…. We are trying to illustrate a milieu.”74

Importantly, lying beneath these narrations of poverty was a whole constellation of social and

economic policy that constituted the action of the War on Poverty. When federal and provincial

officials convened in December 1965 for the SPS’s Federal-Provincial Conference on Poverty

and Opportunity, attention was heavily focused on analysing and addressing the key problems of

regional underdevelopment, unemployment, labour mobility, and the urban adjustment of rural

migrants.75 Some background papers prepared for the conference detail the “culture of poverty,”

the role of attitudes, and the problem of “a persistent way of life passed down from generation to

generation.”76 Others, meanwhile, were much more abstract and structural, outlining the

73 “A Preliminary Report on Rural Poverty in Four Selected Areas.” Highlights of a Study prepared for ARDA by the Canadian Welfare Council. Ottawa. 1965. LAC RG 124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division, File 1-3. 74 Pierre-Yves Pépin, Life and Poverty in the Maritimes, ARDA Research Report (Ottawa: Department of Forestry and Rural Development, 1968), 1. In a response letter addressed to Pépin, one dairy farmer from Kings County, PEI (one of the profiled communities), “venture[d] into some philosophical areas” to explain that “Essentially your study paints a picture of ignorance, misery and desolation and the final conclusion would be of hopelessness and utter discouragement on part of the population. Actually this is not generally the case. Few people regardless of their circumstances believe themselves to be in poverty. In fact many of them are prepared to accept poverty rather than become involved in the additional effort and responsibilities associated with what the rest of us would term ‘higher standards of living.’ If leisure time is any measure of good life, then the working population in Kings County is in a happy situation.” Letter from J. Lincoln Dewar (PEI dairy farmer) to M. Pierre-Yves Pépin, University of Montreal. September 4, 1968. PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 26, File 12-1-0 – Agriculture. 75 See LAC RG 124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division. 76 “Profile of Poverty in Canada: The Role of Attitudes in the Development and Perpetuation of Poverty.” Part of a collection of papers prepared for the Federal-Provincial Conference on Poverty and Opportunity, December 7-10, 1965, by members of the SPS, Privy Council Office. LAC RG 124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division, File 1-1.

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problem of “re-allocating” manpower in the urbanizing economy and regional structural

adjustment.77

Figure 2.2: The mandate of the Special Planning Secretariat. This 1965 flow chart of the SPS’s mandate illustrates its dual mandate to not only represent poverty but to also coordinate government activity ranging from more traditional welfare provision to manpower mobility and regional development.78

An ARDA background paper on “rural manpower location” points specifically to the problem of

Atlantic Canada and Quebec, where “adjustment” away from primary industries “was not as

rapid” as in the rest of the country. While “To some extent the employment problem in rural

areas can be improved within the areas by the application of ARDA and other programs,” the

report explains, “Much of the rural underemployment and low-income problems…can only be

solved by improving the educational levels and mobility of rural manpower.” This would

require that ARDA undertake remediation work alongside the Department of Labour’s training

and manpower measures. Moreover, and in light of this, the report urged more research into the

“adaptation problems of the millions of rural migrants who have moved to urban-centred

77 “Profile of Poverty in Canada: Employment, Unemployment and Underemployment.” 78 LAC RG124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board - Planning Division, file “Background Papers.”

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industries.”79 Expounding that the growing need for increased mobility was part of the long-

term shift in the Canadian economy from primary to secondary and tertiary industries, a report

from the Department of Labour argued that, “Of all the problems of the labour market, this lack

of occupational and locational mobility is by far the most costly one, both to the society and to

the individual.” The author explains:

Most of the needed mobility took place through the regular labour market process, but

many people, particularly in communities where primary industries dominated, failed to

respond to rising opportunities elsewhere. Inability or unwillingness on the part of these

people to make the necessary adjustments has produced in these areas large and

persistent surpluses of manpower. Further, those performing work often do so at

generally low levels of technology and productivity, hence at low incomes and

frequently below their potential as workers. This manpower has tended to become ‘land

locked’ or ‘stranded’ as its ability to compete in the active markets has become

increasingly more limited. Once such a situation is reached, it also appears to persist. In

this connection, one might suggest that low productivity and low wage industries owe

their existence to this ‘stranded’ type of manpower which in turn helps to perpetuate this

problem.80

On the question of how to redeploy this type of “stranded” manpower, one background report by

the ADB about regional economic planning explained that, “While it might be agreed that all

Canadians have a right to a job, it may not be agreed that everyone has a right to work in the

precise location of their choosing.” For all that “it is reasonable to expect that Canadians can

expect to work at jobs in Canada,” the report reasoned, “At the other extreme, it is difficult to

justify the creation of jobs in areas which have no chance of achieving economic viability at all.

Somewhere in between a line has to be drawn; where, is the issue.”81

79 “Making Opportunities Effective: Rural Employment Location,” 1, 3-4, 6. Prepared by ARDA. Part of a collection of papers prepared for the Federal-Provincial Conference on Poverty and Opportunity, December 7-10, 1965. LAC RG124, Vol. 75, File 3-6. 80 “The Labour Market: Background Paper for Conference on Poverty, December 7-10, 1965,” 12-13. Department of Labour, Government of Canada (prepared by Gil Schonning, Economics and Research Branch). LAC RG 124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division, File 3-4. 81 Regional Economic Planning, 3.” (Prepared for the Federal-Provincial Conference on Poverty and Opportunity, December 7-10, 1965). Atlantic Development Board. Dated November 25, 1965. LAC, RG124, Vol. 76, File 6-1. Another backgrounder by the ADB on “the problem of declining communities” (including those which might be deemed “superfluous and inherently non-viable”) echoes this sentiment. Drawing on the town of Dominion in

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Importantly, and in stark contrast to the SPS’s ongoing and powerful humanistic narration of the

symptoms of poverty, through all of these materials, the problem of poverty is characterized as a

problem of national productivity. While, “In recent years the problem of balanced regional

development has gained increasing recognition…. What is needed now is a comprehensive and

co-ordinated national policy of regional and social development as the essential means for

eliminating avoidable poverty and for opening the door to a new era of national expansion.”82

As national policy would become more comprehensive and coordinated, poverty experts and

cultural producers, both inside and affiliated with federal and provincial governments, continued

to generate descriptive narratives of the problem of poverty. The type of “poverty knowledge”

reproduced through projects like The Things I Cannot Change and SPS publications continued

to define the poverty problem in isolation from the social and economic context in which it was

embedded. In addition to cultural representations, an important part of this poverty knowledge

was generated through other means of researching poverty and the poor. The maps, surveys,

interviews, and statistical analysis that underpinned both land reform and manpower policy also

focused in on the demographic and psychological characteristics of the poor that supposedly set

them apart from the rest of society. This interrogation into the lives and economies of poor

people and places generated new categories and understandings of poverty, productivity, and

economy, helping to push a new common sense about the “viability” of certain economic

futures and the “unviability” of others.

Resolving the problem of poverty: The Comprehensive Development Plan

On April 6, 1965 the governments of Canada and Prince Edward Island signed a Rural

Development Agreement under the authority of the federal Agricultural Rehabilitation and

Development Act. The agreement provided the framework through which the governments

Northeast Cape Breton as an example, the report explains, A “determined attack on the structural problems of the economy” would require both agricultural land reform—the familiar elimination of marginal or “submarginal” farms—and measures to deal with structural unemployment in non-agricultural industries—either modernization, diversification, and economic expansion, or “retrenchment with retraining and relocation of the labour force.” According to this perspective, individual communities would need to be surveyed and evaluated for their potential growth. “The Problem of Declining Communities, 4-5. (Prepared for the Federal-Provincial Conference on Poverty and Opportunity, December 7-10, 1965). Bernard Sufrin, Atlantic Development Board. Ottawa, Ontario. LAC RG 124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division, File 4-4. 82 “The Profile of Poverty,” 11-12. LAC RG 124, Vol. 75, Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds, Atlantic Development Board – Planning Division, File “Background Papers”. Stamped as received by the ADB December 1, 1965. Ottawa.

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would prepare a comprehensive development plan for the province, meant to “increase income

and employment opportunities and raise standards of living.”83 When the plan was eventually

signed in 1969, it took the form of a fifteen-year modernization plan that targeted all aspects of

socio-economic life on the Island:

The plan is based on a development strategy that would bring about full economic

exploitation of the Island’s large and potentially profitable resources for agriculture.

Other main features of the strategy are: a considerable development of tourist facilities;

better utilization of forest assets; rationalization of fisheries; extension of education

programs and training for the full development of the labour force potential; increased

efficiency and some expansion in processing and manufacturing industry; investment in

housing, health and welfare services and other infrastructure required for effective

development.84

Like ARDA’s rural modernization agenda in general, the Comprehensive Development Plan

(CDP), as it would come to be known, concerned itself with problems of “adjustment,”

explaining that: “The historical pattern of land ownership in Prince Edward Island is badly

adapted to the needs of modern technology for agricultural, forestry and tourist development.

Holdings are small and often scattered and the market mechanism for allocating land between

these three sectors has been ineffective.” In order to “permit full development of the Island’s

resources…a Province-wide land management program” would be required “to remove the

barriers to efficient land reorganization and reallocation to more effective uses.”85 Central to the

plan was something called Integrated Land Management, a centrally managed program of land

transfer and consolidation and farm enlargement. Through credit, pension and land purchase

schemes, and heavy government coordination, this program of land reform would “enable those

who wish to leave farming to release their land when they wish, and to allow those who want to

expand their holding to acquire such land when and as they are able to manage it.” More

specifically, the role of government in this Island-wide process of land reform would be to “act

as an intermediary, standing ready to buy land offered for sale by individuals within or outside

83 As quoted in Canada. Prince Edward Island, White Paper on Economic Planning and Development (Tabled in the Legislature of Prince Edward Island, 1967), 12. 84 Canada. Department of Regional Economic Expansion, Development Plan for Prince Edward Island: A 15-Year Federal-Provincial Program for Social and Economic Advancement, 24. 85 Canada. Department of Regional Economic Expansion, 31.

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the integrated land management program. The Government will then improve and lease or sell

good agricultural land in units of viable size. This land will be available to qualified farmers and

those who become qualified as a result of training. Through these transactions, the Government

will play an active role in financing where there are gaps in the present system.”86

Prior to the signing of the Rural Development Agreement under ARDA in 1965, both levels of

government had already carried out a number of sector-specific studies of the PEI economy,

outlining the problem of rural poverty and the condition of underdevelopment. But this work

had been somewhat piecemeal and relatively unsuccessful in accessing federal ARDA funds. In

1964 the Province began consultations with a private planning firm, Acres Research, about the

possibility of conducting a more comprehensive socio-economic study of the Island. A formal

research proposal was submitted in February of 1965 and the provincial Department of

Agriculture commissioned Acres to prepare a detailed appraisal of PEI’s resource development

potential.87

While Acres was undertaking this research, the provincial government began to build a

bureaucratic structure around the development planning agenda. A Rural Development Council

(RDC) was assembled to conduct public meetings across the Island, and a joint Federal-

Provincial Steering Group was developed to advise on development.88 While the development

plan is generally associated with the modernist ethos of Premier Alex Campbell (1966-1978), as

David Milne notes, it was his predecessor, Walter Shaw (1959-1966), more often associated

with the crisis of the family farm than with modernization, who greatly expanded state capacity

by building the foundations of a professional bureaucracy and unrolling a “managerial

revolution” of rational planning, expertise, and comprehensiveness.89 But when Campbell was

elected in 1966 it was with the CDP at the centre of his platform and under the banner of an

accelerated transition away from the ‘traditional’ Island way of life. As Milne points out,

according to the Plan, of the 6357 farming units on the Island the year Campbell was elected,

only “2500 were regarded as viable for planning purposes”; the argument, presented as a

86 Canada. Department of Regional Economic Expansion, 35–36. 87 Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, A History of the PEI CDP. 88 Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. 89 Milne, ‘Politics in a Beleaguered Garden’, 45. Hartwell Daley, who would become the director of research for Shaw, took a lot of inspiration from American rural development programs. He first brought to Shaw’s attention a development program from Perry County, Indiana reported in the New York Times on May 8, 1960 referenced in Milne, 46.

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scientific fact, being that the Island’s resources could not sustain nor be effectively managed by

more farmers than this.90

Federally, the Department of Forestry and Rural Development was created in 1965, assuming

responsibility for ARDA. The Fund for Rural Economic Development (FRED), established in

the following year (1966), would focus on specific regions facing widespread poverty and

“major problems of economic adjustment.”91 The new legislation stipulated that FRED funds

were to be allocated to support comprehensive development plans in designated Special Rural

Development Areas, characterized by low income levels, significant “adjustment problems,”

and “recognized development potentials.”92 The PEI Comprehensive Development Plan—

already in the early stages of discussion and research by this time—was one of five such plans,

alongside plans for the Interlake region of Manitoba, the Gaspé peninsula in eastern Quebec,

and the Mactaquac and Northeast regions of New Brunswick. The PEI plan was unique in that it

covered an entire province, constituting the only sub-national jurisdiction in North America at

the time to adopt a formal development plan as a guide to public expenditures.93

In the fall of 1966, a man named D.W. (Del) Gallagher was appointed to work with ARDA as a

representative of the PEI development initiatives.94 Gallagher assembled a team of high profile

economists and planners who he understood to be adequately modernist in their orientation and

willing to take the ‘bold’ approach he had in mind. The core planners were part of a new wave

of ARDA officials who favoured a truly comprehensive approach to planning, often at the

provincial level.95 And in the fall of 1967 Gallagher travelled to England and hired four hand-

picked economists who would become central to his planning team—the provincial crown

corporation called the Economic Improvement Corporation (EIC) that was formed in 1967 to

develop a formal plan.96 According to a history of the CDP written by the Atlantic Provinces

Economic Council for the government of PEI, the EIC, with Gallagher as General Manager and

90 Milne, ‘Politics in a Beleaguered Garden’, 70, note 19. 91 Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren, 83. 92 Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, A History of the PEI CDP, 6. 93 Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, A History of the PEI CDP. 94 It was decided at a meeting between representatives of ARDA, Acres, and the new provincial government in Charlottetown in November 1966 that Acres would not pen the actual plan. Rather, this would be a combined initiative of ARDA and the province. The Province assigned Gallagher to work with ARDA in this capacity. Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. 95 The history of the CDP assembled by the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council names the following people: Len Poetschke, Ted Duncan, George McClure, and Al Davidson . 96 Michael Lane, Richard Higgins, David and Stuart Shepherd. Atlantic Provinces Economic Council.

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a staff that would eventually exceed one hundred, played a role in the development process that

was perceived as “almost revolutionary.” These planners “saw themselves as social agitators,”

as they aimed “to initiate a massive institutional and structural change that would put Prince

Edward Island on its economic feet.”97

Gallagher himself had been working on the development plan for Northeast Nova Scotia

referenced in this chapter’s introduction before being recruited to work on the PEI plan.98 This

Nova Scotia plan was never implemented but it is instructive in its shockingly comprehensive

nature, its cold and technical language, and its attention to the potential for “widespread social

chaos and unrest” given the sweeping dislocation at its centre.99 The situation in Northeast Nova

Scotia differed in some important ways from PEI. In addition to the rural poverty and

underdevelopment of ‘traditional’ Maritime resource industries (fishing, farming, and forestry),

northeast Nova Scotia was also rapidly deindustrializing. This was coal country and by the mid-

1960s Nova Scotia’s coal industry was in a full-fledged state of crisis. Many factors had

contributed to what became known as the “Cape Breton coal problem”: a deep history of

militant labour organizing; rising competition from more accessible and less labour-intensive

sources of energy, namely petroleum; and changing geographies of oil production and

circulation within Canada including the expansion of Western oil, the construction of new

pipelines, exploration off the continental shelf and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the opening

of the Irving refinery and import terminal in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1960.100

Like other ARDA projects, the plan for northeast Nova Scotia was oriented toward the

rationalization of primary industries. In addition to the phasing out of coal production, this 97 Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, 38. 98 See mention in: Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, A History of the PEI CDP; Peter Clancy, ‘Concerted Action on the Periphery? Voluntary Economic Planning in “The New Nova Scotia”’, Acadiensis 26, no. 2 (1997): 3–30. 99 In various accounts of the planning process, much emphasis has been placed on this ‘culture’ of regional planning and Gallagher’s complimentary brazen character. 100 “The Cape Breton Coal Problem” would be the title of the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Cape Breton coal industry (the Donald Commission), published in 1966. In the mid-1960s, steel and coal together employed over one third of wage earners in the Sydney-Glace Bay area of Cape Breton. When, the Dominion Steel and Coal Company (DOSCO) announced its plans to phase out its Cape Breton coal production there was, unsurprisingly, major public outcry. In response the Federal Government appointed the Donald Commission to investigate the coal problem. Within the context of DOSCO’s withdrawal from the region the Commission proposed reducing production by half over the next six years and the complete closure of the Cape Breton coal mines within 15 years. This transition would be managed by a crown corporation that would acquire and manage DOSCO’s operations. In 1967 the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) was established to operate the mines, and the Sydney Steel Corporation (SYSCO) to operate the steel plant. James Richardson Donald, The Cape Breton Coal Problem (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1966).

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meant the consolidation of land holdings, the rationalization of production in agriculture,

fishing, and forestry, and, as a result, the “release of a substantial volume of low productivity

labour from conditions of underemployment.”101 According to a description of “The

Implications of Rationalization” in Gallagher’s files at the PEI Department of Development, a

predicted twelve thousand people, half of who were coal miners, “will no longer continue to be

locked into the primary extractive industries by the barriers of low income and low

productivity.”102 Targeted training would need to be provided to facilitate “adjustment” of not

only those who the research indicated as “becoming surplus” with the rationalization of primary

commodity production, but also “a substantial additional body of rural inhabitants who are

currently not considered viable in their present occupations.” The unviability of these rural

people was determined by “extremely low income from joint endeavours, extremely short-term

participation in the labour force, and a host of other factors and individual characteristics which

make it impossible for these persons to effectively support themselves in the rural

environment.”103 To this end, the document also outlined the plan for “geographic adjustment,”

emphasising the imperative of large-scale population mobility from peripheral and rural areas to

cities within the Pilot Research Area. The “resource adjustment” central to the plan would mean

that “in both agriculture and forestry…many of these rural persons give up, for payment, their

resources for the common good,” and that inshore fishermen “relinquish certain fishing rights in

the interests of both resource conservation and high resource yield.” In addition to the projected

increased demand for labour in the urban areas, “the release of the resource [that is, labour] will

remove much of the justification for the current pattern of population location in rural areas.”104

I do not know for certain why this plan was never implemented. Perhaps, within the context of

the crisis unfolding in Cape Breton in 1965, the federal government determined that such a plan

was too blunt an instrument with which to handle the situation. Or perhaps within the context of

the crisis and the Royal Commission the ARDA project simply fell to the wayside. The situation

in PEI differed. Most notably, the Island economy had not experienced the type of dramatic

industrial collapse seen in Cape Breton and, unlike Cape Breton, PEI was deemed to have

significant productive potential, most notably in agriculture and in potatoes in particular. But the 101 “The Implications of Rationalization,” 2. PARO, RG 33, Department of Development, First DoD Series – to 1970, Box 21, file 705 – Cape Breton Development Corporation. 102 “The Implications of Rationalization,” 2-3. 103 “The Implications of Rationalization,” 8. 104 All mining labour would be redirected “with a view to a more sensible utilization of the labour force.” “The Implications of Rationalization,” 18.

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logic so clearly laid out in the Nova Scotia planning documents did form the backbone of the

CDP: the notion that poverty was ‘trapping’ people in employment situations that kept them

poor; the notion that certain lives and places as “unviable”; the blatant characterization of

unemployed people as “surplus” and of mass unemployment as the “release of labour.” I dwell

on the Nova Scotia plan here not only because this was the radical context in which Gallagher

cut his rural modernization teeth, but also because it offers a rare honest glimpse into the ethos

of this era in development and labour policy: the understanding that the very purpose of places

and people was to serve as efficiently as possible as sites of capital accumulation and that it was

the state’s job to administer them accordingly. Within the context of welfare state expansion and

the assemblage of policies called the War on Poverty, this priority is easily overshadowed by the

government’s rhetoric of poverty alleviation and, therefore, bears plainly repeating.

Gallagher would go on to author the influential 1967 White Paper on Economic Planning and

Development on PEI, which was tabled in the legislature in April. The White Paper argued that

a “comprehensive rural development plan” was the required solution to the problem of

persistently low per capita incomes in PEI and it was from the White Paper that the province

created the EIC later that year. By the spring of 1968 planning was basically complete and the

planners made a presentation to the FRED Advisory Board in Ottawa in May of that year. One

month later Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government would be elected at the federal level, with a

promise to attack the problem of regional disparities as a central part of its platform. A major

government reorganization was quick to follow, in which ARDA and FRED were combined

with all other agencies involved in regional development.105 When the provincial and federal

105 This would ultimately become the Department of Regional Economic Expansion in 1969; in the meantime its title remained Forestry and Rural Development. Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, A History of the PEI CDP. Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE) was established in 1969 and was meant to coordinate the governments regional development agenda. DREE merged together all programs related to intra-Canadian development (ADA, ARDA, FRED, and the Atlantic Development Board, which became the Atlantic Development Council). Jean Marchand, the minister of the new department, stated that 80 percent of DREE spending was to be directed to areas east of Trois-Rivières. Emphasis throughout this period was on the threat that regional disparity posed to national unity. DREE relied on growth pole theory (which eventually led to the decline of the program as large urban centres began to figure into it) developed by Francois Perroux. The growth pole theory explained the persistent rural poverty of eastern Canada as rooted in the region’s lack of urban industrial centres: that is, people stayed in marginal rural livelihoods because there were not real urban alternatives available to them within the region. Manufacturing and processing development would, as such, be directed toward selected regional growth poles. Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren. These would be implemented through the special areas program and the Regional Development Incentives Act.

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governments signed the fifteen-year PEI Plan in 1969, responsibility for implementation and

oversight of the plan was passed to the newly formed provincial Department of Development.106

Once the Plan was completed and in motion, public relations became a central concern for the

Department of Development (DoD). As W.P. Skerrett, a communications specialist who would

end up producing educational films for the Department, explained, the fact that “Prince Edward

Island has one of the most traditional societies in Canada” would “create a natural barrier to

adoption of the Plan.”107 Skerrett advised that, given the steep task of changing “traditional”

attitudes, the DoD would require a communications strategy marked by “Saturation on

television and radio by commercials” designed to “involve people’s emotions with the…plan,”

“to create a positive favourable mood,” and “to take traditional population faster to their

moment of truth – commitment to participate.”108 Changes to the fisheries sector, in particular,

would be difficult to sell, as port and cannery consolidation (and closure) explicitly implied

relocation and dislocation for many and fishermen were understood to “like the freedom of their

present life, even with its low standard of living.”109 As one communications advisor clearly

characterized the importance of ‘touching the hearts’ of Island fishermen: “We are dealing with

‘people’ not statistics. We can offer them Grants and Mobility Programs, and show them on

paper that it is to their advantage to move to another location on the Island—but we can’t make

them. We have to persuade them that they want to.” 110 In the early stages the EIC ran a weekly

106 Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, A History of the PEI CDP. 107 Somewhat amusingly, according to Skerrett, this propensity to slow adoption of change was marked by a low technological level; low literacy and education levels; isolation and minimal communication with outsiders; “lack of economic rationality”; and “lack of the ability to empathize.” From a report entitled “Communication Methods for Prince Edward Island’s Comprehensive Rural Development Plan,” ii-iii. By W. Skerrett, BSA, MSA. PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 4, Files of Harry O’Connell – Public Sector Participation, File 2-7-1 – Public Information. The tentative working titles of the films were “Land Use Planning” and “Marketing” and were to be filmed August 15-31. Contract with W.P. Skerrett. Dated August 16, 1969. Re: Production of two half-hour films with the assistance of Cal Productions Ltd. for the Department of Development. PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 4, Files of Harry O’Connell – Public Sector Participation, File 2-7-2 – Contracts – Communication. 108 “Communication Methods for Prince Edward Island’s Comprehensive Rural Development Plan,” i-ii. 109 “Plan Promotion,” 2. Memo from Sonia MacRae to Harry O’Connell, June 9, 1969. PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 4, Files of Harry O’Connell – Public Sector Participation, File 2-7-1 – Public Information. 110 The language of “touching hearts” comes from Skerrett. “Communication Methods for Prince Edward Island’s Comprehensive Rural Development Plan,” 3. PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 4, Files of Harry O’Connell – Public Sector Participation, File 2-7-1 – Public Information. The quote is from: “Plan Promotion,” 2. Memo from Sonia MacRae to Harry O’Connell, June 9, 1969, PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 4, Files of Harry O’Connell – Public Sector Participation, File 2-7-1 – Public Information. This proposal explains the extra public relations efforts required in the fishery, including the suggestion that the DoD “enlist the aid of the fishermen’s wives” in convincing fishermen of the financial benefits of the Plan. “After all,” the author reasons, “is not the wife the ‘purchasing agent of each family? As such she knows only too well that $20 doesn’t go very far in the grocery store. Furthermore, women generally are much more mercenary than men—they like pretty clothes,

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television program and radio clips—first on private radio and eventually on the CBC—about the

details and progress of the Plan and collaborated on an episode of The Public Eye in 1968.111

The following year the NFB released a two-part series about the Plan entitled Ten Days in

September and Four Days in March.112 By the end of the decade, the Rural Development

Council was running twenty-nine Community Schools across the Island and doing extensive

outreach and the Public Participation and Involvement Unit submitted weekly progress reports

to the DoD.113

The fifteen-year CDP was the culmination of a period of intensive research into the socio-

economic status of the Island and its people. Sparked by the declaration of the Atlantic problem

in the Gordon Report, and spurred on by the War on Poverty, the productive reality and capacity

of the Island and its people had been heavily scrutinized over the previous decade. Through

tenure studies, property mapping, engineering studies, and socio-economic research, many hours

and resources had been spent documenting the Island’s productivity gap in great detail. In 1967,

Acres presented the findings of its extensive research to the Joint Federal-Provincial Research

and Planning Committee in the form of sectoral studies examining the current state of the

Island’s economy, problems with adjustment, the potential for growth, and concrete

development proposals.114 An Acres survey from mid-decade that investigated the state of the

modern homes and children who look just as good as any of their neighbours. My proposal is to aim a generalized ‘soft shell’ approach brochure right at the wives of the fishermen—we need all the help we can get,” 2. 111 Reference to the initial weekly television program is from: Second Annual Report: The Economic Improvement Corporation. For the year ending 31st of March, 1969. PARO RG33, Department of Development, First DoD Series – to 1970, Box 21, File 501 – EIC Board Minutes, etc. In a letter exchange between Gallagher and the Executive Producer of The Public Eye, Richard Neilson, Gallagher insisted on the importance of portraying the region’s poverty and the problem of “lack of opportunity.” Drawing a comparison to Kennedy’s War on Poverty in Appalachia, and invoking Michael Harrington, Gallagher insisted in a characteristic tone that Neilson consult Pépin’s Life and Poverty in the Maritimes, “If you would not feel it presumptuous of me and because I am most concerned that the Canadian community at large is brought to understand the truly serious nature of the problem here on Prince Edward Island and elsewhere in the Atlantic Region.” In response, Neilson tries to convince Gallagher to avoid selling the Plan as an anti-poverty program: “everyone in the Atlantic region is tired of seeing themselves pictured as poverty stricken…. A case can be made by the E.I.C. that it may create a viable and progressive economy in P.E.I. and that it could serve as a model for the rest of the Maritimes. This is a message that seems to me [sic] the country would like to receive and Maritimers would like to hear.” Letters dated August 22 & 29, 1968. PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 4, Files of Harry O’Connell – Public Sector Participation, File 2-7-4 – Correspondence – CBC. 112 Hart, Ten Days In September; Roger Hart, The Prince Edward Island Development Plan, Part 2: Four Days in March, Documentary (National Film Board, 1969). 113 Minutes of the 17th bi-weekly information session, May 28, 1970. PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 4, Files of Harry O’Connell – Public Sector Participation, File – Minutes – Information Sessions; PARO RG33, Department of Development, Box 5, Files of Harry O’Connell – Public Participation Sector, File – Public Participation & Involvement Unit. 114 Gallagher was clear that Acres would not be part of the planning process that was to follow. He saw their role as strictly research-based and, moreover, was unhappy with some of their work. In a letter from February 1968

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agricultural sector—presumably used to inform the final reports—provides a good example of

the scrutiny carried out at kitchen tables across the Island. On each farm surveyed researchers

took a detailed inventory of crops, buildings, livestock, machines, and home appliances. The

survey included detailed questions about training, access to technical information, family

structure, hired help, and finances. And commodity-by-commodity, it accounted for production,

expenses, and on-farm use.115

Researchers went on to conduct a variety of additional surveys, the results of which were used

as the database for many of the projects and programs in the Plan. This data was particularly

central to the work of the Land Development Corporation, which was responsible for acquiring,

improving, and selling land back to “viable” farmers.116 Research undertaken included (but was

not limited to) land tenure studies, agrometeorological studies, property mapping, engineering

studies, and socio-economic interviews. In 1967 a planning and research function was

established in PEI in conjunction with the federal Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources

and the Department of Regional Economic Expansion. The objective of this collaboration was

“to obtain information that would reveal resource management problems and support

Comprehensive Development Plan programs designed to improve productivity from the land-

based resources.” While the overall focus of this broad research agenda was to support the

program of Integrated Land Management central to the CDP, the planners sought out social, in

addition to physical data to “determine the relationships between landowner characteristics,

(education, family size, dependence upon welfare and non-farm income), and the possibilities

for land adjustment, housing, recreation, education, fisheries and forestry.” That is, they

explained, “Programs of land adjustment cannot be based solely on land characteristics, but

must take into account human capabilities, characteristics, and attitudes towards such

programs.”117

Gallagher explains to Premier Campbell that both his planning team and several provincial federal departments found some of this work to be of “poor quality.” PARO, RG33, Department of Development, First DoD Series – to 1970, Box 21, File 7021 – Acres Research Planning Ltd. 115 “Prince Edward Island Commercial Farm Questionnaire.” PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 30, Deputy Minister’s Files, Acres Files, Incl. Correspondence, File 127202 – Agriculture 1965-67 (Part 1) [labelled “Background material – Agricultural Sector (Acres)]. 116 Sharpe, A People’s History of Prince Edward Island, 208. See the Second Annual Report: The Economic Improvement Corporation. Year ending 31st of March, 1969. PARO RG33 - Department of Development, Box 21, first Department of Development Series – to 1970, File 501 – EIC Board – Minutes, etc. This report contains information on research undertaken by the EIC. 117 “Inventory – Maps and Reports – Land Use Planning,” Department of Development, 1969-1970. PEI Provincial Archives, RG25, Box 10, Series 36 – Alex B. Campbell, 1968-1969. “Appendix”

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As part of a Pilot Land Use Planning Project under the Canada Land Inventory, ARDA funds

were made available to enable the Policy and Planning Branch of the federal Department of

Energy, Mines, and Resources to conduct not only comprehensive mapping, but also socio-

economic interviews with all Islanders owning more than five acres of land.118 This survey

included questions about family structure, education, farm production and improvement, assets,

housing, hires, income (including off-farm), interest in leasing land, and welfare benefits. The

end of the survey focuses on the future of the farm and the question of adjustment, asking the

farmer about their plans for the farm: plans for expansion, interest in retraining, and interest in

selling their farm. It reviewed soil and water quality, erosion problems, and required clearance.

It inquired as to whether the farmer had accessed government loans. And finally, crucial

information for centrally coordinated land reform, the survey asked into the vision for the farm

upon the farmer’s retirement and the local value of good farmland and woodlot land.119 This

information fed into the database that informed the rational reorganization and consolidation of

the Island’s land base. Through computerized analysis the consultants declared that, if properly

reorganized, PEI agricultural productivity had the potential to increase 300 percent.120 Owners

of those farms deemed non-viable who “released” their land to the government for consolidation

would be supported by Manpower counsellors who would “prepare, assist and advise the farm

family of the alternatives available to them.”121

118 “Canada Land Inventory – Pilot Land Use Planning Project, Prince Edward Island.” PEI Provincial Archives, RG25, Box 10, Series 36 – Alex B. Campbell, 1968-1969. At times this is also referred to as the ADB Land Survey. According to Energy Mines and Resource data, there are approximately 12,000 property owners with holdings of 5 acres or more. Approximately 3,000 of these were absentee owners. See “Socio-Economic Data,” Land Development Corporation. “Appendix A: Property Owners Wishing to Sell,” 3. PARO RG33, Department of Development, Box 26, File 11-1-9 – ARDA – EMR Socioeconomic Study. 119 “Inventory – Maps and Reports – Land Use Planning,” Appendix, 1.Department of Development, 1969-1970. PEI Provincial Archives, RG25, Box 10, Series 36 – Alex B. Campbell, 1968-1969. 120 “Acres Official Feels Agriculture Production Can Increase On PEI,” Journal Pioneer, by Hartwell Daley, 13 December 1966. PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 30, Deputy Minister’s Files, Acres Files Incl. Correspondence, File 127202 – Agriculture 1965-67 (Part 1). 121 “Agriculture Sector Plan (Draft),” 28. PARO RG40, Cabinet Office, Records of the Department of Development Comprehensive Development Plan, Box 3, File 1.2.1 – Agriculture Sector Plan.

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Figure 2.3: Land use planning map. Image from a community meeting concerning the Canada Land Inventory Land Use Planning Project. In a local office of the Economic Improvement Corporation. The lines indicate non-adjacent land parcels owned or leased by the same farmer. Image taken from Ten Days in September, produced by the National Film Board of Canada.122

In this way the CDP unabashedly set out to consolidate land holdings, “liberate” small

producers’ manpower, and pave the way for agribusiness. As Edward MacDonald details, the

processes of consolidation and mechanization were underway before the signing of the CDP but,

urged on by this intensive effort and increasing emphasis on industrialization and processing, it

would not be long before the potato cash crop would come to dominate the landscape.123 With

advances in freezer technology and the post-war rise of processed and fast foods, governments

lured major potato processors to the Island and production shifted accordingly as farmers’ crops

came under contract with these powerful companies. Several frozen food companies had opened

plants on the Island in the early 1960s that processed a variety of vegetable and fruit crops,

including Seabrook Frozen Foods in New Annan in 1961 and BC-based Langley Fruit Packers

122 Hart, Ten Days In September, ~8:30 min. 123 MacDonald, If You’re Strong Hearted.

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in Montague in 1963.124 By the late 1960s, the North American market for frozen potato

products was exploding. In 1966, McDonalds began purchasing frozen French fries from J.R.

Simplot, the inventor of the frozen fry and Simplot quickly became the restaurant’s main

supplier of frozen fries.125 Within this context, in deliberating whether to subsidize the

establishment of a large-scale potato processing plant in PEI—part of the CDP vision for

modernization of the agriculture sector—the provincial government tried to recruit McCain

foods to set up such an operation on the Island in the fall of 1969.126 McCain refused, convinced

that the rapidly expanding frozen French fry market was saturated in Canada generally, and PEI

specifically.127 In 1971, Seabrook would go bankrupt and several years later C.M. MacLean

(who was already in the frozen food business) would buy and continue to operate the New

Annan plant with financial backing from K.C. Irving. The Irvings purchased C.M. MacLean

Ltd. in 1980, marking the beginning of Irving-owned Cavendish Farms.128 The Irving company

124 MacDonald. 125 Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Mariner Books, 2012), chap. 5. Simplot was in the minds of farmers as they considered the future of their trade under the modernization scheme. In a 1968 National Farmers Union submission to the Prince Edward Island government, outlining concerns about the rise of corporate farming in PEI and asking the government for their “philosophical approach…toward the future of farm people in the context of the newly proposed Economic Development Program,” the NFU includes an excerpt from their own newsletter profiling Jack Simplot, his operations, power, and wealth. “National Farmers Union Submission to the Government of Prince Edward Island. Charlottetown, PEI,” 7. PARO RG 33, Department of Development, Box 26, File 12-1-0 – Agriculture. 126 This is explained in a confidential letter from David Darlington (Economist) to Harrison H. McCain (President of McCain Foods, Ltd). November 10, 1969. PARO RG33, Department of Development, Box 26, File 012-001-000 – Seabrook Farms. In his response, dated November 13, Harrison McCain firmly explains that “Because the present Canadian Market for frozen French fries suffers from substantial over capacity, we would have no interest in becoming involved in a potato processing complex on P.E.I.” PARO RG33, Box 2, File 142 – Seabrook Farms. McCain would eventually open a plant in Borden, PEI in 1991. Daniel Stoffman, The Ground Up: Fifty Years of McCain Foods (McCain Foods Limited, 2007). The plant closed in August of 2014, putting 121 people directly out of work and giving Irving increased leverage with farmers and government—see, for example, the debate surrounding the drilling of deep water wells for irrigation. CBC News, ‘McCain’s PEI Plant Closure to Affect 121 Jobs’, CBC News, 7 August 2014, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/mccain-foods-closing-borden-carleton-french-fry-plant-1.2730051; Teresa Wright, ‘Moratorium on Deep Wells Needs to Go, Says Cavendish Farms’, The Guardian, 12 June 2014, online edition, http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/News/Local/2014-06-12/article-3760711/Moratorium-on-deep-wells-needs-to-go%2C-says-Cavendish-Farms/1. 127 Letter to David Darlington dated November 13. PARO RG33, Box 2, File 142 – Seabrook Farms. The contents of this file in general are useful for understanding this moment. 128 This history is somewhat complicated, and made more complicated by inconsistent spellings of “MacLean” throughout the available sources. Donald Savoie writes that “C.M. McLean” began freezing blueberries in Charlottetown in the early 1950s and then expanded to Springhill NS in 1961, before expanding into the frozen French fry business. He recounts that the company kept struggling despite these expansions and that K.C. Irving lent McLean money to support the business but by the mid-1970s it was clear that the business would have to be sold or go bankrupt. Mitch (son of C.M.) offered to sell to McCain Foods (who were already in the frozen fry business) but they did not want the failing business. The Irvings eventually took over the business, presumably partly on account of K.C.’s sunk investment. J.K. Irving would later say that the company had been involved in the business since 1973. Donald J. Savoie, Harrison McCain: Single-Minded Purpose (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013). During this time, rumours were also circulating and fears were mounting about land purchases that were happening around the areas of Freetown and Kinkora. Farmers and their supporters were worried that these processors were trying to take hold of potato production. In a brief presented to the Premier

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would focus exclusively on French fry processing, expand the plant significantly over the

following years, and, alongside McCain—who built and operated a plant in PEI from 1991 to

2014—retain duopsony control over the potato market through the next decades. Today Irving is

the largest private employer in the province and the private company continues to wield

incredible control over the Island’s political and economic landscape and its people.129

But in addition to these deep structural changes, the intensive research practices that formed the

foundation of this structural adjustment were productive on their own terms. For these detailed

and repeated examinations of people’s lives functioned to produce the very problem that the

Plan was heralded to solve: something called poverty. The discovery and diagnosis of poverty

that took place through this research—undergirded by the era’s general poverty rhetoric and a

zealous local public relations campaign—made space for ‘solutions’ to a sympathetic ‘problem’

that helped to reproduce a changing industrial landscape and new scales of labour flexibility. As

Timothy Mitchell has argued, “the economy,” “as a self-contained, internally dynamic, and

statistically measurable sphere,” was made in the mid-twentieth century.130 Mitchell illustrates

that it is through the practices of development themselves, carried out by surveyors, statisticians,

economists and other experts, that the bifurcated world of the “economic” and the “non-

economic” is brought into being. It was this binary parsing of socio-economic life that formed

the ideological foundation on which structural adjustment and rural modernization could unfold.

The very idea that people, places, and modes of socio-economic organization could exist

“outside the mainstream” of economic life had to be invented. In the case of rural modernization

planning and “comprehensive development,” it was the careful documentation and narration of

poor people’s lives that brought into being new categories of “non-economic” existence against

in 1973, political agitators “The Brothers and Sisters of Cornelius Howatt” speculated that C.M. MacLean was behind some of the purchases, backed by K.C. Irving, and had plans to buy 10,000 acres of land for potato production (their research suggested that Campbell and Burns has also purchased 2000 acres in the Kinkora area). The group drove home their concerns by invoking the Island’s fraught and maligned history of absentee landlord control: “We are reminded of a time more than one hundred years ago when Sir Samuel Cunard, the wealthy shipping magnate from Halifax, owned more than 250,000 acres of Island land, and his agents were forced to carry pistols for self-protection when they went into the countryside to collect rents from recalcitrant tenants.” See: The Brothers and Sisters of Cornelius Howatt, The Family Farm and the Future of Prince Edward Island: A Brief Presented to Premier Campbell by the Brothers and Sisters of Cornelius Howatt (Charlottetown, PEI, 1973). Savoie echoes this history. 129 John Demont makes this claim that the Irvings were the largest private employer in PEI in the late 1980s. John DeMont, Citizens Irving: K.C. Irving and His Legacy (Toronto: Doubleday Canada Limited, 1991), 177–78. In 2014, this remained the case. According to the company, the potato industry employs 12 percent of the local workforce. J.D. Irving Ltd., ‘Deep Water Well Irrigation’, § Standing Committee on Agriculture, Environment, Energy and Forestry (2014). I review these more contemporary dynamics in more depth in Chapter 5. 130 Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 4.

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which the need for mainstreaming was determined. Through surveys, mapping, and statistical

analysis, families became “poor,” farms “uneconomic,” and futures “unviable.” It was these

designations—not the real material deprivation people were experiencing—that justified the

dramatic reorganization of their lives.

Conclusion: The politics of viability and the circumscription of the future

Both the Nova Scotia and PEI plans offered land reform, rationalization, and dislocation as

necessary measures to fix the problem of low incomes. Poverty became the metric of

unviability; and unviability, the precondition for adjustment. The fact that “adjustment” was

predicated on—designed for—a large “release of labour” was never connected to the problem of

poverty. Rather, releasing people from unviable livelihoods was stated scientifically as a

requirement for growth. Within this context, poverty mattered because it was a waste of labour

and land, because it fragmented capital, or because, in the form of land-based livelihoods, it

gave people a degree of autonomy. By this measure, other forms of economic organization that

were equally, or more, exploitative were considered viable and, therefore, a “sensible utilization

of the labour force.”131

This evaluation of livelihoods and land-use was never concerned with the survival or wellbeing

of people. People and their livelihoods, rather, were evaluated as economic units. That is, while

characterized in absolute terms, the socio-economic practices slated for eradication were

evaluated as being “unviable” according to a normative and historically-specific set of

conditions: the unquestioned and inevitable expansion of industrial capitalism. But through the

persistent and detailed measurement of viability, this period of intensive research that served as

the foundation for the CDP was instrumental in producing the sort of marginality—marginal

farms, lives, communities—that would justify the drastic state measures taken to bring poor

people “into the mainstream” of economic life. The “saturation” of everyday life with messages

explicating the virtues of modern progress aimed to instil these categories and possibilities for

the future as common sense. By focusing here on what O’Connor would call “poverty

knowledge” and Mitchell, the “rule of experts,” I in no way mean to diminish the material

131 “The Implications of Rationalization,” 18. PARO, RG 33, Department of Development, First DoD Series – to 1970, Box 21, file 705 – Cape Breton Development Corporation.

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implications of this era of rural modernization.132 Rather, my assertion here is that the

ideological question at hand, about the concrete ways powerful interests curtail what and who

are understood to be possible parts of the future, is a crucial material question. The invention of

these new socio-economic boundaries (that is, what is economic or viable) were foundational to

the reproduction of new social and territorial relations of production, new working subjects, new

land uses, and new enduring understandings of the future.133

The declaration that certain lives and modes of economic organization have no place in the

future by virtue of being “unviable” was a useful metric developed in the War on Poverty to

help usher in new geographies of accumulation and labour flexibility. Taken together, the

policies discussed in this chapter functioned not only to maximize the productivity of land, but

also to regulate the national labour market within the context of agricultural modernization, and,

as we will see in Chapter 3, manufacturing, extraction, the threat of urban unemployment, and

the radical political imaginaries of the 1960s. The story of the CDP and the broader War on

132 O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge; Mitchell, Rule of Experts. One reason I have not focused on this is because, I think the story that could be told here through the lens of what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” has its political limits within the specific context of PEI land reform: in a place with a deep history of contestation over land and resistance to absentee and concentrated ownership of land, the impacts of consolidation on producers and working class people are well known and do not need to be rewritten by me. Harvey, The New Imperialism. By emphasizing how these projects at least tried to instill new ways of imagining the economic future, I am trying to highlight less familiar forms of power at work here. On landlord control and rural protest in PEI see Rusty Bittermann, Rural Protest on Prince Edward Island: From British Colonization to the Escheat Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 133 As Mitchell argues, the practices that form the economy represent and reproduce a dualistic organization of the world: inside and outside, public and private, national and foreign, nature and technology, productive and unproductive, and so on. The equation of poverty with a lack of capitalist economic expansion helped to produce a powerful and politically stifling binary between the (local, traditional) past and the (modern, expert-laden, outside-driven) future. David Milne has argued that PEI’s hegemonic “garden myth,” which presents Islanders with an “ideal picture of themselves as an independent agricultural people protected from the world in an unspoiled pastoral setting,” has led to the widespread characterization of CDP as a “nefarious plot” by expert consultants from away. Milne, ‘Politics in a Beleaguered Garden’, 49. At the same time as most critical accounts of the CDP have focused on the problem of ‘outside expertise,’ this work has ultimately been quite localist in its approach. (For less critical perspectives see MacLauchlan, Alex B. Campbell; and, in relation to the broader project of regional planning, Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren.) Some of these accounts have provided important detail about local impacts and resistance to this type of high modernist structural adjustment. On impacts see: Sharpe, A People’s History of Prince Edward Island; Smitheram, Milne, and Dasgupta, The Garden Transformed. On resistance: Verner Smitheram, ‘Development and Debate over School Consolidation’, in The Garden Transformed: Prince Edward Island, 1945-1980, ed. Verner Smitheram, David Milne, and Satadal Dasgupta (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed Press, 1982), 177–202; O’Connor, ‘Agrarian Protest and Provincial Politics’. This tendency to blame “experts” and “outside ideas,” Milne explains, has discouraged critical perspectives on local social and political relations and “has not encouraged either Island historians or the public to take internal class differences as seriously as they might.” Milne, ‘Politics in a Beleaguered Garden’, 68. On PEI and the pastoral see Judith Adler, ‘Tourism and Pastoral: A Decade of Debate’, in The Garden Transformed: Prince Edward Island, 1945-1980, ed. Verner Smitheram, David Milne, and Satadal Dasgupta (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed Press, 1982), 131–54; MacDonald, ‘A Landscape... with Figures’. On the politics of “Innocence” in another Maritime context see McKay, The Quest of the Folk; McKay and Bates, In the Province of History.

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Poverty illustrates the degree to which the restructuring of work and labour markets are

inseparable from the restructuring of land—in the case of Maritime land reform, this meant the

liberation of “stranded” manpower, land consolidation, and the industrialization of biological

resource industries. In the following chapter, I take a broader perspective on this relationship,

placing these same pools of surplus labour in relation to the ‘opening’ of the north and the

expansion of industrial mining. The “unviability” of certain people, places, and modes of

economic life were useful designation in serving both these changing geographies of

accumulation. While it was unviable for Maritime people to operate subsistence farms, practice

occupational pluralism, or cease working for the winter because it ‘trapped’ them in poverty, it

was wholly viable for these same people to work for low wages serving the urban middle class

in the seasonal tourism industry, to permanently move their families to industrial Ontario, or, as

we will see, to be ‘dispatched’ to a mining camp in Sudbury or the Yukon.

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3. Mining manpower: Crisis, mobility, and the national labour market

The immobility of the machines and constructed environment associated with such heavy industries as mining and manufacturing means that they cannot be moved without first destroying the value embodied in them. Indeed, it is only when the plant and mills associated with the industry are actually engaged and working that value can be created. Thus without active mining or manufacturing, they maintain a very low value. - John Bradbury, 19851 How do we work with mobility of workforce? We've had it for years. People from Newfoundland went down to New York and Toronto and built skyscrapers; many aboriginals from Ontario did the same thing. How do we get people from one part of the country to another…. I'm talking about people in Ontario and Quebec, how do we get them and encourage them to come out to Fort McMurray to take up these great jobs…?

- Conservative Member of Parliament, Brian Jean, 20112

Labour mismatch, matching crises

While Chapter 2 examined the ideological and material making of surplus labour through the

politics of viability, this chapter takes up the question of how, why, and to what end, the state

tried to mobilize this and other similarly surplus labour power. Examining the same period that

saw the War on Poverty rolled out nationally and an aggressive regional modernization agenda

that targeted eastern Canada, here I turn my attention to the changing political economy of

extraction in Canada during the 1960s. With the expanded production of new industrial materials

in the wake of the Paley Report came industrialization, automation, and the rise of bigger, more

capital-intensive mines. In both these expanding sectors of mining and declining sectors, like

gold, the industry was wrought with problems of labour retention and a mounting fear that the

lack of a predictable labour supply would financially devastate operations.

As early as the Gordon Commission, with the narrative of post-war prosperity entrenched in the

Canadian imagination and the Paley Report echoing through government policy, government

officials and representatives of the mining industry were drawing causal links between the

expanding urban economy in southern Canada and the threat of labour shortages in the

industrializing north. As opportunities expanded in post-war urban industries—manufacturing,

but also research and development—mining companies grew concerned about their continued 1 Bradbury, ‘International Movements and Crises’, 130. 2 Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Standing Committee on Finance, Minutes of Proceedings (1st sess., 41st Parliament, Meeting No. 22, 2011), http://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/41-1/FINA/meeting-22/minutes.

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ability to attract workers. As company executives recounted, work in the mines was increasingly

seen as physically and mentally gruelling, but also far removed from the modern, southern

(sub)urban life. As anxiety mounted about the mining labour shortage, industry complained that

workers from southern cities were unreliable, fickle, and unwilling to stay on the job. Crucially,

it was the supposed wealth of opportunities on offer in the southern cities that mining employers

deemed a threat to the reproduction of their workforce. If young men had alternatives, industry

feared, they would be unlikely to opt for northern mining work; and if they did, they’d surely

bring with them demands for competitive wages and the bargaining power that came with

knowing they had alternatives. That is, as employers understood it, barring some sort of crisis,

conditions in the cities were too good to incite workers to look northward for work. Mining

employers needed a more desperate pool of workers.

While the mining industry advocated for expanded immigration as an easy solution to its labour

woes, government officials worried that this would simply add to a national surplus of so-called

unskilled workers and exacerbate the problem of urban unemployment. As the President of

Cassier Asbestos emphasized to his audience at the 1967 National Northern Development

Conference, the capital intensity and high productivity of modern mining had dramatically

increased the financial stakes of having a reliable and available workforce.3 Meanwhile,

wielding its expanded research capacities and administrative reach, government maintained that

the labour shortage was simply a mismatch between labour supply and demand: a problem that

could be resolved domestically through the coordination of the national labour market and a

program of retraining, mobility incentives, and manpower counselling focused on high

unemployment regions within Canada. Bearing in mind the adjoined problems of idle rural

labour and unmanaged urban migration, government officials pointed to geographies of

“underemployment” where local labour had been rendered surplus by the decline or

rationalization of local resource industries. Within this context, different groups of rural and

peripheral ‘white’ domestic—in contrast to Indigenous and immigrant—workers became the

focus of government-coordinated recruitment efforts: workers confronting mine closures and

other forms of resource-based deindustrialization in their home regions and populations who had

been displaced through rural and regional modernization programs, like those explored in

3 National Northern Development Conference, Proceedings of the Fourth National Northern Development Conference (Edmonton, AB, 1967); George MacFarlane, ‘Too Few Incentives to Work in North, Mining Chief Claims’, The Globe and Mail, 2 November 1967, sec. Report on Business.

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Chapter 2.4

Within the enduring context of Canada’s staples-focused political economy, the federal

government’s dismissive orientation toward the concerns of the mining industry during a time of

rapid expansion should give us pause.5 It bears emphasising that the state’s resoluteness that the

mining labour shortage could be solved domestically came not from a place of benevolence or a

commitment to addressing the plight of the poor. The drive to usher poor white Canadian

workers into these modern industrial mines could perhaps be placed in the context of racial

resource nationalism; there is a longstanding tradition of Canadian nationalism that places

natural resources at its centre and upholds racial and colonial stories about who is entitled to the

benefits derived from these resources.6 But, my focus in this chapter lies elsewhere. Building on

the histories of rural modernization recounted in Chapter 2 and drawing on correspondence

between mining companies and government officials, media coverage of urban transience,

reports about national manpower mobility, and histories of anti-colonial struggle, this chapter

argues that a domestic resolution to the mining labour shortage was deemed useful by the

Canadian state in managing the contradictions of post-war economic transition: poverty and

maladjustment, social and political turmoil, and pervasive threats of economic disruption.

Behind the technical-sounding labour surpluses, shortages, and mismatches was a broader

anxiety about a set of crises stemming from the problem of ‘adjustment’ to post-war economic

change. As we saw in Chapter 2, by its very definition, the post-war doctrine of modernization

had marginalized certain people, places, and modes of life to the periphery of post-war progress,

producing new geographies of surplus: ‘stranded’ manpower, idle land, untapped resources, and

4 Despite being the subject of these recruitment efforts, white rural workers did not secure their position as “good” worker subjects until later, a contradictory designation that is historicized in more detail in Chapter 6. In the 1960s, rather, industry and government officials remained frustrated by these workers’ general reluctance to relocate thousands of miles for work and their supposed poor work discipline, attributed in some instances to deep regional histories of unemployment and, in others, to the supposed essential character of the peoples in question. Despite these complaints, and in contrast to agriculture, for which the federal government was preparing to institute transnational migrant work programs during exactly this period, government maintained that the mining labour shortage could—and would—be resolved domestically. Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes. 5 For a discussion of staple state theory and my engagement with it, see the Introduction. Important sources here include but are not limited to: Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada; Innis, The Cod Fishery; see also Clark-Jones, A Staple State; Watkins, ‘A Staple Theory of Economic Growth’; Watkins, ‘Staples Redux’. For an important critical engagement with the strand of staples theory that ran through the “new” Canadian political economy of the 1960s and 70s (focused on the “staple trap) see Kellogg, Escape from the Staple Trap. Again, see the Introduction for a discussion of these debates. 6 E.g. see edited collections: Baldwin, Cameron, and Kobayashi, Rethinking the Great White North; Sherene Razack, Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002).

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surplus production capacity. These new and exacerbated uneven geographies presented

governments with a certain set of problems—concentrated unemployment, destitution, unused

productive capacity, and so on—but also a potential solution. The state’s expanded capacity and

new practices of economic and labour market forecasting promised the potential to exploit and

coordinate these assorted surpluses to the end of maximising national productivity. In this way

the concerns that government officials expressed about the labour market and the attempts to

harness and control its unevenness were as much about managing land, resources, and capital as

they were about the problem of the labour.

The drive to coordinate the national labour market was informed, in part, by the politics of

viability explored in Chapter 2: idle land, ‘wasted’ manpower, and attempts to steer un- and

underemployed people into the “mainstream” of the country’s economic life. Related to this, in

developing national manpower policy, decision-makers were responding to their fear of rising

rural unemployment, a general trepidation about unmanaged migration, and a concern that, if

left to the forces of the market, rural poverty would continue to morph into concentrated urban

destitution and industrial unemployment as “transients” flowed into the cities.7 The urban crisis

unfolding in US cities would serve to remind decision-makers of the stakes. Further afield from

Ottawa, on the resource frontier, concerns about labour supply were not simply quantitative in

nature. As resistance grew to modernist resource development and northward expansion that

pushed deeper into Indigenous livelihoods and territories, the use of far-flung, disconnected,

transient populations to do the actual work of extraction introduced a possible solution to a

problem that was not only spatial in nature, but also social and political. In these ways, in a

comprehensive drive to contain turmoil, mobilize surplus, and expand extractive production, the

state capitalized on uneven development. In doing so it forged and managed relationships

between differently dispossessed peoples and places, exploiting spatial and social difference to

mitigate crisis.

The changing geographies of mining employment, as such, had a possible role to play in the

management of other far-flung crises. Not just idle capacity in mining production, but surplus

rural labour in far-away regions, southern urban unemployment, and a brewing atmosphere of

freedom struggle. In these ways, industrial resource extraction together with the regional

7 See S.D. Clark, The New Urban Poor (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978).

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modernization plans of the 1960s—comprised of land consolidation, rationalization, and

managed labour mobility—served as a “fix” to the adjoined problems of idle rural labour, urban

unemployment, and over-accumulated capital in mining. Ultimately, specific attempts to

redeploy unemployed workers from the periphery in the 1960s largely failed, as did the broader

project of labour market forecasting and coordination.8 But, at least for a time, federal state

actors held onto the idea that, combined, mobility, modernization, and the northward expansion

of resource extraction could constitute a ‘fix’ for an intersecting set of political and economic

problems. While this particular experiment failed, the idea that the staples-labour problem

might be resolved through state-facilitated matching of crises has remained entrenched. As we

will see in Chapter 4, similar anxieties about mismatches, shortages, and mobility barriers

continue to plague the extractive sector and federal policy-making today. And geographies of

economic crisis—unemployment, poverty, deindustrialization, and other forms of economic

marginality—persist as the ‘common sense’ solution to industry’s finicky needs. The logic that

underpins this way of thinking, from the era of Manpower Mobility to today, is that the human

potential to work is a national resource that should be mobilized according to national economic

priorities and the so-called national interest.

Sourcing manpower: The city and the “fringes of habitation”

The problem of how to recruit and retain staples labour was not new in the 1960s. As explored

in depth in Chapter 1, the northern climate, pronounced seasons, and the centrality of staples to

the Canadian economy had long meant that labour market activity was uneven both temporally

and spatially. Workers were needed irregularly, in certain places at certain times of year. What

happened of note in the 1960s was that policies of regional development, labour market

planning, and resource extraction were actively brought together through government policies

that shaped new resource geographies (namely the rise of industrial staples and the

industrialization of extractive, agriculture, forestry, and fisheries), but also new geographies of

labour focused on national coordination and controlled forms of mobility. Part and parcel of this

plan was a vision for northern expansion and nationally managed labour flexibility. In addition

to establishing access to natural resources, Canada’s regional planners, as illustrated in Chapter

2, were concerned that semi-subsistence economies were ‘stranding’ important sources of

manpower. While the country was urbanizing quickly in the post-war period and the relative

8 See Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’.

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importance of manufacturing and services was on the rise, so was industrial staples extraction.

These changing geographies of production demanded a national workforce that was suitably

flexible—geographically, temporally, and occupationally.

As we have seen, in the era of post-war modernization and economic expansion, the federal

government placed increasing emphasis on the “adjustment” of certain segments of the

population to these rapidly changing economic conditions. As discussed in Chapter 2, the

Gordon Commission shared this emphasis on adjustment, characterizing regional

underdevelopment and poverty as a barrier to national economic growth, and calling for targeted

state intervention where particular regions failed to adapt to the changing economy. The context

for the Gordon Commission was the rapid reorganization of the Canadian economy in the wake

of World War Two. The booming American economy’s demand for industrial materials had

spurred interest and investment in Canadian industrial staples. On one hand, the Commission

was established in response to growing concern over American control of Canadian resources.

On the other, what the Commission characterized as the problem of regional underdevelopment

existed within the broader context of uneven industrial expansion of the Canadian economy, not

only in the industrial areas of southern Canada, but also in new anticipated geographies of

northern resource extraction. With this uneven development came the paired problems of

manpower ‘surpluses’ and ‘shortages.’ Through the 1950s industry began to anticipate problems

in supplying stable labour to these new industrial geographies and demanded the Canadian state

work to shore up a workforce that was trained, mobile, flexible, and available.9

Early on, as government officials turned their attention to possible sources of labour, they

deliberated the potential of Indigenous workers to resolve the problem of labour stability in the

expansion of industrial extraction. The 1956 submission to the Gordon Commission from the

Indian Affairs Branch of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration dwelled on the

geographic proximity of Indigenous peoples to these new industrial sites, highlighting their

assumed knowledge of the land and minerals and emphasizing the government’s drive to bring 9 To provide just one concrete example, when the John Inglis Company expanded its operations in Hamilton its “nation-wide recruiting campaign failed to turn up enough skilled workers…[and] has led the firm to raise its wage rates and embark on a hiring program in England.” According to reporting in The Globe and Mail, the wages on offer were above the rates stipulated in the collective agreement. About the services of employment agencies, company’s manager of administration complained, “You can’t retrain quickly enough to meet immediate needs.” Wilfred List, “Can’t get skilled men, Inglis increases pay,” The Globe and Mail, November 26, 1966. LAC RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. Tanya Basok briefly addresses the impact that industrialization of southern Ontario had on the supply of local farm labour. Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes, 29.

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Indigenous people into the wage economy. Reflecting on the labour needed for the construction

of radar lines across northern Canada, the report claimed that, “Indians are happy and contented

when working in unsettled regions” and, as such, “present a much more stabilized source of

manpower than can be provided by bringing labourers from far-distant urban centres into

completely strange environments.” Urban southerners, conversely, were increasingly understood

as an unstable and unreliable source of labour, as these workers were known to crumble under

the harsh conditions of mining work and flee for the city when the going got tough. As the

report explained it, “In the more remote areas are found many features which, to labourers sent

in from urban areas, are undesirable and, at times, almost unbearable. These features include

insect pests, cold, lack of variety in food, isolation and little in the way of entertainment.” In

contrast, as government officials saw it, Native workers did not present the same threat of

disruption: “Indians usually accept these conditions without complaint and, as a consequence,

are no problem to their employers.”10

While the expansion of industrial mining did often rely on Indigenous knowledge and labour,

the value—or mere existence—of this expertise, skill, and work generally went un(der)-

compensated and unrecognized as a linchpin in the accumulation of mining capital.11 By the

mid-1960s, it seems that the government’s drive to help source mining labour was largely

focused elsewhere. While the Indian Affairs Branch of the Department of Citizenship and

Immigration imagined that Indigenous workers posed “no problem to their employers,”

employers didn’t share this perspective. Racist scepticism mounted about the possibility of

10 “Gordon Economic Commission Brief – Indian Affairs,” 6. As part of communication from H.M. Jones, Director of Indian Affairs, to the Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. January 10, 1956. Ottawa. LAC RG26, Vol. 83, File 1-24-39 (Part 1) – Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects – General File. Of the Department’s submission to the Gordon Commission, Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Laval Fortier explains, “It will be necessary to stress the importance of the part to be played by the Indian population in the opening up of the regions lying immediately north of the industrial and agricultural fringe. It should be clear to the Commission that the Indians could help the development as well as be helped by it.” “Memorandum to Director of Indian Affairs.” December 8, 1955, Ottawa. LAC RG26, Vol. 83, file 1-24-39 (Part 1) – Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects – General File. 11 See, for example Boutet, ‘Opening Ungava to Industry’; Cameron, Far Off Metal River; Harris, Making Native Space; Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. Liza Piper offers some interesting reflections on the ways that skill was unevenly recognized. Looking at the case of mid-twentieth century hard-rock mining around the large lakes of the Northwest subarctic, she explains that, while Native and Métis men worked in prospecting, the work they did was not recognized as prospecting, with its associations of skill and expertise. She writes, “To a certain extent, prospecting was seen as skilled, expert, and industrial work—and to that extent newcomers perceived Native and Métis men as unsuited to such labour and hence to the occupational class…. As understood mid-century, prospecting was not exclusively industrial work if it benefited directly from indigenous knowledge,” 121.

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integrating Indigenous workers and others on the “fringes of habitation” into the waged

workforce, especially in relation to the question of time, punctuality, and reliability.12

Throughout their correspondence with government officials about the escalating mining labour

shortage in the 1960s, employers invoked southern urban workers as the logical source of

labour. But, within the context of post-war affluence and expanding urban opportunities,

employers complained that conditions in the cities were increasingly such that workers there no

longer needed to seek out mining work. On account of this, as discussed in more detail later in

this chapter, these workers were not only seen as difficult to recruit, they had also developed a

reputation for being difficult to retain and prone to abandoning the job when better opportunities

arose. Given these dynamics, employers remained convinced that, barring some of crisis in

southern urban Canada, a stable source of labour was unlikely to become available

domestically.13

By the mid-1960s, many mining employers saw low-skilled immigrants as the solution to the

‘labour shortage’ in their industry. Employers perceived immigrant workers, who had

historically figured centrally in Canadian mining, as reliable and hard working: traits supposedly

in short supply amongst Canadian workers. Above all, employers complained of retention

problems above wages, and it was this stability that they sought from immigrant workers. In a

response to several inquiries from the industry, Minister of Manpower, Jean Marchand

explained that lowering the education requirements for immigrant workers entering into mining

would not solve the problem of labour instability because, especially in the case of remote

mines, immigrant workers, too, would quickly “drift off” to urban areas. Marchand explained,

invoking the problem of the unskilled unemployed, “this would only add to a difficult situation

since we already have too many undereducated people in the labour force who are posing a

problem from the perspective of retraining.”14

12 Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown, 33. 13 E.g. National Northern Development Conference, Proceedings of the Fourth National Northern Development Conference, 58. 14 Letter from Jean Marchand, Minister of Manpower, to V.C. Wanabrough, Managing Director, Mining Association of Canada. August 16, 1966, Ottawa. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. In the same file, see also a letter from Jean Marchand, Minister of Manpower, to R.J. Kilgour, General Manager, Discovery Mines Limited. August 16, 1966, Ottawa. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File.

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With immigrant workers off the table, the urban workforce unavailable, and racism keeping

Indigenous workers formally out of the industry, government zoned in on a different population:

the assumed white, rural, Canadian workers who had been rendered surplus by post-war

economic restructuring—rural modernization, rationalization, and urbanization—and the

otherwise long-term unemployed. If, through labour-market forecasting, training, and managed

migration, the state could usher these workers into the mines, this would not only address

employers’ complaints, it would also redirect these men from drifting to the cities—a well-

established path for the rural unemployed and source of growing government concern. State

officials maintained that industry’s labour needs could be met through better coordination of the

national labour market and a program of retraining, mobility incentives, and manpower

counselling focused on high unemployment regions.15

Coordinating manpower: Forecasting, productivity, and the promise of managed mobility

The 1960s marked a turning point in Canada for direct government involvement in the national

labour market to the end of reducing ‘waste’ and increasing productivity.16 As Karen R. Foster

has argued, an overall understanding of productivity that “rested on the notion and aggregate

statistical measurement of The (National) Economy” was not itself new in the 1960s.17 This

framing of productivity, which “emphasized the dire importance of scientific knowledge and

expertise in economic planning and policy” and sought buy-in by hitching productivity to

promises of prosperity, had dominated Canadian economic and political thought since World

War Two.18 One by-product of this analysis was a serious federal government concern with

‘under-employment’ as one of the country’s most pressing economic problems. Examining this

orientation in the work of the Interdepartmental Committee on Productivity Analysis, struck in

1949, Foster quotes a 1951 Committee report that explains productivity analyses as promising

for understanding “whether certain segments of the labour force might be encouraged to move

15 Throughout the 1960s, the percentage of immigrant workers in mining fell below the proportion for all industries nationally. Wallace Clement notes that between 1961 and 1971 the percentage of non-Canadian-born workers in mines, quarries, and oil wells dropped from 21.9% to 15.4%. In contrast, these same numbers for all industries in Canada were 21.7% in 1961 and 20.2% in 1971. Clement, Hardrock Mining, 89. 16 Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’. 17 Karen R. Foster, Productivity and Prosperity: A Historical Sociology of Productivist Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 99, emphasis added. 18 Foster, 99. In this section of her study, Foster is exploring these trends as they are exhibited in the work of the 1949 Interdepartmental Committee on Productivity Analysis, a sub-committee of the Committee on Economic Statistics, within the Bureau of Statistics.

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to actually or potentially more prosperous regions.”19 Foster spares no clarity in naming the

high-handed character of this thinking, concluding: “Thus, in the early days of aggregate

productivity research, the idea began to circulate that people could and should be shuffled about

to meet the needs of ‘the economy,’ a territorially bounded whole whose performance at the

national level was accepted as more important than the coherence and stability of everyday

life.”20

The rise of forecasting techniques in the 1960s would embolden these visions of national labour

market coordination. According to Foster, while the practice had been controversial in the

Canadian government, “by the 1960s, using statistics to predict the future had stepped over a

line from fantasy to facticity” and forecasting on the basis of statistical data became a “perfectly

acceptable practice for Canada’s statistical bureau.”21 This was especially the case for

employment and production forecasting. In the early part of the decade, government studies and

committees raised concerns about a disequilibrium between labour supply and demand, warning

of labour shortages, mounting unemployment, and compromised national productivity. Overall,

a failure of workforce ‘adjustment’ in the face of urbanization, industrial modernization, and

technological change were partly to blame. As the Senate Committee on Manpower and

Employment framed it: “[t]hese far-reaching changes have necessitated a general up-grading in

human skills, large scale movements between occupations, and a high degree of mobility of

labour between industries and between geographical areas. The economy and its manpower

have failed to adjust to these basic developments on a sufficient scale or with sufficient

speed.”22

In the name of Active Manpower Policy, the Department of Manpower and Immigration (DMI)

was established in 1966 and would bring a very comprehensive and calculative orientation to

managing Canada’s labour market.23 In contrast to the National Employment Service of the

1950s, which focused largely on job placement, the DMI ran counselling, training, and mobility

19 Sub-Committee of the Interdepartmental Advisory Committee on Labour Statistics. “The Measurement and Analysis of Productivity.” Report to the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Ottawa, September 1951, 2, RG17, vol. 3131, file 66-10. As quoted in Foster, 103–4. 20 Foster, 103–4. 21 Foster, 105. 22 Report of the Special Committee on Manpower and Employment, 2; as quoted in John Grundy, ‘Calculative Practices in Canadian “Manpower” Policy, 1965-1975’ (working paper, Microsoft Word file, 2013), 3. 23 G. P. A. McDonald, ‘Labour, Manpower, and Government Reorganization’, Canadian Public Administration 10, no. 4 (1967): 471–98.

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services out of its Canada Manpower Centres and invested heavily in building its research

capacity with the goal of being able to map and forecast job vacancies and skill shortages

nationally.24 It was within this context that government officials argued that the problem facing

the expanding post-war mining sector was simply a ‘mismatch’: surpluses of labour in some

areas as against shortages in others. That is, a problem of ‘adjustment’ that could be solved

through forecasting, planning, and coordination of the national labour market.

This conviction in the state’s ability to usher the victims of modernization into the mining

industry was part of a historically specific form of modernism—what David Harvey calls high

modernism—that reached an apex globally after World War Two.25 As Christopher Dummit

explains about the Canadian context, “After the war, Canadians retreated from much of the

emphasis on hyper-efficiency that had characterized the war years, but a widespread belief in

the possibilities and benefits of control remained.”26 Rooted in part in a reaction to the War and

the exploitation of new bureaucratic and techno-scientific state capacities, high modernism was

a vision that privileged universalism and that held that experts knew best. As a managerial

structure, it sought to measure and manage social, economic, and environmental life and to

coordinate the circulation of resources toward more efficient national productivity. Locally-

specific formations of this ethos ran straight through Canadian government policy: the state-

sponsored unrolling of industrial mega-projects related to resources, energy, and transportation;

the northward expansion of industrial development; the assimilationist 1969 White Paper on

Aboriginal Policy; the rise of federal-level regional planning; experiments in national manpower

planning; urban renewal and the restructuring of Canadian cities; and the dramatic expansion of

the welfare state.27 While high modernism is often associated with infrastructure, the built

24 Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’. 25 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; see also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 26 The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011), 9. 27 There is much written about these topics and I cover some of them in much more detail throughout the chapter. On industrial resource projects see, for example, Tina Loo and Meg Stanley, ‘An Environmental History of Progress: Damming the Peace and Columbia Rivers’, Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 3 (2011): 399–427; Daniel MacFarlane, Negotiating a River: Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014). On high modernism and industrialization in the north, examples include: Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik’, Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 3 (July 2009): 517–44; Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. On manpower planning see Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’. On federal-level planning: Cullingworth, ‘Regional Planning at the Federal Level’; Donald J. Savoie, ‘Reviewing Canada’s Regional Development Efforts’ (Submission to the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening our Place in Canada, March 2003); Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren. For an account of the White Paper: Arthur

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environment, and the drive to manage nature, this belief in control and administration very much

extended to the realm of social and economic administration, largely through mechanisms we

associate with Keynesian economic policy and the welfare state.28 This conviction in the state’s

prerogative and ability to manage not only encompassed many facets of social, natural, and

economic life, it also entangled them in new ways. Presented through the technical-sounding

language of shortages, surpluses, and mismatches, and the practices of forecasting and planning,

the state set to work coordinating and managing the inevitable crises and various resources

released through the post-war restructuring of land, economies, and people’s working lives. In

doing so, it forged new relationships between far flung places and otherwise disconnected

peoples.

The notion of a “mismatch”—and the governance solutions that it implies—would become and

remain quite central to the government’s understanding of extractive labour. Through a system

of nationally managed manpower, the industrial staples frontier offered a potential outlet for the

problem of surplus rural labour and, as such a ‘repository,’ post-war mining offered certain

advantages. In contrast to agriculture, which would see the rise of bilateral temporary labour

agreements in the form of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program during this time, mining in

the mid-latitudes promised to operate year-round, providing a more viable sink for surplus

labour.29 Moreover, economic plans and projections emphasized the central role of industrial

resources in the country’s future. In contrast to the relative decline of agriculture, decision-

makers viewed industrial mining as a valued and expanding part of the post-war economy.

Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015), chap. 3. 28 See Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’. 29 Sociologist Tanya Basok has highlighted the role of seasonality in the history of Canada’s migrant worker programs. Using the example of seasonal migrant workers in the Ontario agricultural sector, Basok has argued that, especially in seasonal industries, employers often prefer temporary migrant workers not because they are cheaper or more convenient, but because the ‘unfreedom’ of these workers actually secures the profitability of their business. Unlike local workers, temporary migrant workers are bound to a single workplace and can be made to work whenever they are needed—a quality that is especially appealing in seasonal industries. While workers might be legally free to quit or to refuse work, mechanisms of control and the economic pressures economic pressures back home make them more willing to work under these conditions. Higher costs are easily made up in high productivity, compliance, and loyalty, reinforced through fear of being expelled from the program. Being separated from their families and communities means these workers have few commitments outside work and are, therefore, available for work at the drop of a hat. Many seasonal industries have come to rely on having access to this sort of highly predictable, controllable and, ultimately, disposable workforce. Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes. In the context of mining, some work would actually become more seasonal as mining and petroleum operations opened further north where industry was reliant on seasonal winter roads to access resources. As discussed in more detail in the second part of the dissertation, in the context of the Alberta oil industry, many of the jobs that today employ Atlantic Canadian workers are seasonal in nature. These jobs are largely in the petroleum services sector, are poorly paid relative to shift-work, often non-unionized, and run for only weeks or months during the winter freeze.

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Finally, given the anxiety about unmanaged migration of the rural unemployed into the cities

and the threat of concentrated unemployment, there was perhaps something enticing about the

remote nature of mining operations. While in Toronto, for example, there were established

networks and communities of rural migrants, the state-managed migration of workers from

diverse geographies into small dispersed mining communities surely offered these migrants a

social experience marked more by social fragmentation than connection.30

Somewhat paradoxically, while these particular concerns about the mobility and concentration

of surplus labour may have informed government decision-making, productivity in the mining

industry was plagued by labour agitation and class struggle throughout the 1960s.31 This

reflected, in part, growing union membership and labour unrest across the country. But the

concentration of workers in mines, mining communities, and a new industrial workplace posed a

particular set of problems to employers, and miners remained particularly militant throughout

this decade.32 Karen Foster has observed that, as the federal government zeroed in on an agenda

of productivity in the 1960s that hinged on the measurement and management of the “national

economy,” the longstanding focus on industrial relations as central to sustained growth was at

times sidelined.33 While the doctrine of productivity had guided federal policy since the interwar

era, through the 1960s “the whole ‘collaborationist’ model of productivity growth…had been

jettisoned in the process of folding productivity into the larger objective of economic growth.”

For Foster, this represented a change in broader conceptions of the economy and its governance

such that labour relations were no longer centrally understood as the “linchpin of economic

productivity.”34 By extension, government emphasis on the management of the ‘national

economy’ and of ‘national resources’ would, in moments at least, eclipse a more enduring focus

30 In her work on the historical labour geographies of the Ontario tobacco industry, Emily Reid-Musson has illustrated that the post-war ‘problem’ of the concentrated unemployed also existed within the agricultural industry and constitutes important historical context for the advent of Canada’s transnational agricultural labour programs. During the 1960s and 70s, it was common for migrants from eastern Canada to travel freely to Ontario in search of agricultural work. Examining the seasonal concentration of these ‘transient’ Canadian job seekers in agricultural towns, the hysteria surrounding the ‘transient’ problem, and the ways these workers agitated against their migrant precarity, Reid-Musson illustrates that their contestation and relative freedom offers an important backdrop to the creation of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. ‘Historicizing Precarity’. 31 Clement and Williams, The New Canadian Political Economy. 32 This is a rich history that is beyond the scope of this project, but Wallace Clement’s account of work and class struggle at Inco provides a wonderfully detailed account of the changes to the labour process and the social life of workers, and of the era’s fervent labour struggles. Clement, Hardrock Mining. 33 Foster, Productivity and Prosperity. 34 Foster, 145.

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on the labour-management compromise and longstanding anxiety about workplace disruptions

as a key barrier to economic growth.

But this re-orientation away from industrial relations as the “linchpin of economic productivity,”

as Foster proposes, did not signal a lack of concern with the general problem of unruliness and

productivity. Rather, it extended the problem and the state’s strategies for managing it. Within

the context of a managed national economy and coordinated manpower policy, the structures of

control and resistance, and the problem of unruliness, now reached far beyond the site of

production. Of course, as Marxist feminists have long argued, the terrain of political

contestation always extends beyond the falsely bounded ‘site’ of production, exploiting the

realm of reproduction in the service of capital accumulation.35 The shift that I want to highlight

here, drawing on this work, is a shift in the geography of the government’s analysis: from sites

of production to the uneven geographies of the nation-state itself. In this instance, the

exploitable ‘outside’ that government policies sought to capture is not unpaid reproductive

labour at the scale of the household, but the surplus of underdevelopment and underemployment

at the scale of the region. In this way, the interconnected problems (and, importantly, potential)

of surplus rural labour, concentrated urban unemployment, and ‘labour shortages’ in mining

were not separate from the threat of local labour militancy. Rather, they promised to both

compound it and resolve it. It was a long-distance struggle over surplus. A struggle that

encompassed not just sites of production, but also the rapidly changing regional sites of

reproduction, as exhibited in the government’s fantasy of extracting ‘unadjusted’ workers from

their communities and inserting them elsewhere in the national economy. This dynamic was

particularly visible in mining and the long-distance relationships that state actors tried to forge

between geographies of ‘under-employment’ and these extractive sites.

Northern expansion, industrial mining

As many historians of Canadian mining and northern development have illustrated, World War

Two marked a turning point in the development of the Canadian north. The 1960s, especially,

would be a time of northward industrialization and dramatic political economic reorganization

35 See, for example, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972); Leopoldina Fortunati, Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1996).

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in the mining industry.36 In particular, the decline of production in gold and other precious

metals, and the simultaneous expansion of less valuable but more capital- and infrastructure-

intensive base metals mining (including nickel, copper, zinc, and iron), carried out by wage

labour, would reorganize the geography of mining production.37

Figure 3.1: The expansion of select industrial staples production in post-war Canada38

36 In the research, people have bounded the geography of this change in various ways. For a general account see Morris Zaslow, The Northward Expansion of Canada 1914-1967 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988). For a history of the Provincial north see Coates and Morrison, The Forgotten North. On the Northwest Subarctic: Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. For a good account of changes in mining see Clement, Hardrock Mining. Emilie Cameron has written about the changing relations with and stories about copper as they both shape and undermine life in Kugluktuk, Nunavut. Cameron, Far Off Metal River see the discussion of mining in chap. 4. For the connection to militarization see P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Matthew Farish, ‘The Cold War on Canadian Soil: Militarizing a Northern Environment’, Environmental History 12, no. 4 (2007): 920–50. 37 Base metals are generally considered in contrast to precious metals. 38 Statistics Canada. Historical Statistics of Canada, Section P: Mining. Table P1-26 (Canadian production of principal metallic minerals, 1886 to 1975). https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-516-x/sectionp/4147442-eng.htm.

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Figure 3.2: The expansion of iron ore production in post-war Canada39

In historicizing the industrialization of the Canadian mid-latitudes, Liza Piper explains that, in

the nineteenth century, the Canadian Shield had presented a major obstacle to the northward

expansion of Canadian settlement.40 Failed attempts at agricultural colonization in Quebec and

Ontario had prompted the Dominion and the other provinces to recast the potential of the Shield

away from an agricultural frontier toward a resource frontier with significant potential in

forestry, mineral mining, and hydroelectricity. Mining continued to expand in the interwar

years. After World War One governments invested in surveying and increased demand for

mineral products led to increased prospecting. By the 1920s, improved means of transportation,

especially the airplane, increased the scale and scope of prospecting and continued to play a

central role in this expansion for the next two decades.41 Because base metals mining required

very cheap transportation to move low-value ore, expensive treatment facilities, and a large full-

time workforce, the expansion of these operations during the inter-war years was limited to

39 Statistics Canada. Historical Statistics of Canada, Section P: Mining. Table P1-26 (Canadian production of principal metallic minerals, 1886 to 1975). https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-516-x/sectionp/4147442-eng.htm. 40 Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. 41 Zaslow, The Northward Expansion of Canada.

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existing rail lines. Gold, conversely, did not face the same constraints and could more easily be

established and operated in regions that were more removed from existing networks of

transportation infrastructure; as a result, gold mining operations spread across Subarctic Canada

during this time.42

While base metals lost much of their value during the Great Depression, the opposite was true

for gold. In the 1930s, in contrast to the country’s generalized state of economic depression, the

northwest and other gold mining regions boomed with the northward flow of people out of the

agricultural economy, the rapidly rising price of gold, and the expansion of mining, forestry, and

fishing.43 Moreover, because of the lowered cost of exploration, profit margins increased, and

prospectors and mining companies expanded into the mid-latitudes.44 While gold was dominant,

some other mineral markets also remained steady or expanded for a time during the Depression,

namely radium on account of its expanding medical uses.45 By the late 1930s, global

rearmament reinvigorated the industry, triggering new rounds of base metals prospecting and

development. The search for domestic fossil fuels was also revived during this time, including

renewed efforts to develop the Athabasca oil sands by the newly arrived Athabasca Oil

Company.46 Invoking the resource nationalism of the day and the ever-present intertwining of

unemployment and the resource frontier, Morris Zaslow explained, “The mining industry of the

North in the thirties helped relieve the national gloom a little, breathing some hope into an

otherwise dejected people, and renewed their faith in Canada as a land of the future.”47 The

boom in gold petered out in 1939 when the onset of World War Two pulled the workforce south

into war-related production and the federal government deemed gold mining a non-essential

economic activity.48

42 Zaslow. 43 As Piper explains, gold is a rare commodity that gleans value from the conditions of generalized instability during periods of economic depression, as struggling national economies seek it out on account of its stability. This was especially true within the context of the gold standard. Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. 44 Piper. 45 Piper. 46 Zaslow, The Northward Expansion of Canada. 47 Zaslow, 129. 48 Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. The federal government implemented the Gold Mining Assistance Act in 1947, which kept mining communities from going under. But, overall, there was a shift in the post-war era away from specialized, high-grade properties (especially silver and gold) toward base metals and lower-grade properties: the Labrador Trough, the aluminum smelter in Kitimat, the nickel-copper deposit at Lynn Lake MB, the Inco mine at Thompson, Uranium City, and uranium mining at Elliot Lake. Coates and Morrison, The Forgotten North. The federal government lifted restrictions on private uranium prospecting in the early 1950s,

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Figure 3.3: Decline of gold production, first during World War Two and then in the 1960s49

The face of mining and northward industrialization would begin to change after the War.

Wartime fears about scarcity and energy security and the post-war demand for industrial

materials spurred an intensive period of research and investment in more remote and less

accessible sources of energy and other industrial resources. As discussed in Chapter 1, the

expansion of industrial staples production in Canada was framed by wartime scientific

advancement, the context of the Cold War and the Korean War, and post-war demand for

industrial materials. In 1953 the Northern Administration and Lands Branch was combined with

the Department of Mines and Resources to form the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural

Resources, which assumed responsibility for the administration of the Canadian north and the

vast potential resource wealth in the Precambrian shield. As Matthew Farish and Whitney

Lackenbauer explain, quoting Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, the change was made “to reflect

increased public interest in the north—‘an important part of the territory subject to the

triggering a boom; exploration and mining permits granted by the Atomic Energy Control Board increased steadily until 1955. Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. 49 Statistics Canada. Historical Statistics of Canada, Section P: Mining. Table P1-26 (Canadian production of principal metallic minerals, 1886 to 1975). https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-516-x/sectionp/4147442-eng.htm.

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sovereignty of the Canadian nation.’”50 The new department received increased financial

support and was tasked with expanding transportation infrastructure, facilitating resource

development, and spurring economic development in the north.51 According to Farish and

Lackenbauer, the 1950s were, “the apogee of Arctic modernization in both dream and

practice.”52

It is out of this context that, in the late 1950s, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s robust

resource nationalism emerged, perhaps best encapsulated in his “Roads to Resources” program,

designed to build transportation infrastructure into remote areas of Canada to facilitate access to

mineral and petroleum deposits. Between 1957 and 1958 Diefenbaker put forward his Northern

Vision, of which Roads to Resources was a central component, “recast[ing] the region as a rich

source of resources that would resuscitate the Canadian economy from recession.”53

Diefenbaker's Northern Vision, itself, produced little in the way of concrete action, especially in

the provincial (versus territorial) north.54 Regardless, much of the development he advocated did

eventually occur, triggered by the demands of the Cold War, the expanded demand for

consumer goods, and Canada’s perceived political stability. This economic expansion

50 Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism in the Arctic’, 525. These words, which paraphrase St. Laurent, are taken by the authors from the Annual Report, Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, Fiscal Year 1953–54, Ottawa, 1954, 9. 51 Isard, ‘Northern Vision’. In addition to interest in Canadian resources, in the first decade of the Cold War the Canadian north also became the interest of military planners and strategists. Post-war scientific expeditions in the north were largely funded by military sources, with an emphasis on winter warfare and the problems of survival and combat in non-temperate climates. The decade was marked by numerous northern military exercises, culminating in the Distant Early Warning Line radar project. See Lackenbauer and Farish, ‘The Cold War on Canadian Soil’. 52 Farish and Lackenbauer, ‘High Modernism in the Arctic’, 526. 53 Isard, ‘Northern Vision’, 21. The Northern Vision was part of Diefenbaker’s broader National Development Policy, on which he would campaign in 1957. The declaration delineated three Party planks—resource development, social equality, and government intervention—clearly tethering the expansion of the extractive state to the expansion of the welfare state. The National Development Policy was first outlined at the PC Party’s leadership convention the year prior in a Party “Declaration of Principles” written by Saskatchewan Party leader Alvin G. Hamilton. In a section worth quoting at length, the document reads: “We must embark on a national development policy that will strengthen Canada by strengthening all areas and groups and regions (which) must have equal opportunities to share in the National prosperity…(it will) develop natural resources for the maximum benefit of all parts of Canada; encourage more processing of these resources in Canada; foster the widest financial and other participation by Canadians in the development of our resources; promote greater opportunity and employment for a steadily increasing population...In order that a National Development Policy and a strong political state may bring equitable and increased advantage to all there must be a program of human betterment. This program will be a comprehensive contributory system that covers the aged, the unemployed, the sick, and the injured. It must be such a system that preserves the individual, the home, the volunteer group, the Provincial and Municipal powers. There must be incentive to encourage the individual to be a proud, participating member in a self-reliant society. When contributions cannot be made and where need exists our principles will guarantee assistance of the state.” Alvin Hamilton, “Unpublished Declaration of Principles by the Progressive Conservative National Convention,” as quoted in Isard, 31. 54 Coates and Morrison, The Forgotten North.

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transformed resource regions that had historically been considered unviable on account of their

distance from markets into viable economic spaces.55 Because these resources were often

removed from transportation networks and large-scale settlements they were expensive to

develop and operate; only large firms had the capital to develop and implement the technology

needed for this large-scale capitalist mining production.56

In his work examining the changing mode of production in Canadian mining generally, and Inco

specifically, Wallace Clement explains that, prior to the 1960s the company’s nickel mines had

seen next to no technological change and remained dominated by much less capital-intensive

and industrialized modes of production. Small crews of miners—largely unsupervised—were

responsible for the entire cycle of work, including drilling, blasting, removing ore, timbering,

etc.57 The late 1960s and 1970s were a notable time of rapid technological change in mining, the

goal being to reduce the number and autonomy of workers, to “use as much equipment and as

little labour as possible.”58 In response to oscillating labour needs, labour retention problems,

and a decade of serious labour militancy in the 1960s (centred on, but not isolated to Inco’s

Sudbury operations), management aggressively pursued mechanization and automation of mines

55 Coates and Morrison. 56 Clement, ‘The Subordination of Labour in Canadian Mining’. This technological change, in turn, undercut earlier and less capital-intensive forms of mining and dramatically changed the social relations of production in the industry. As Clement outlines, ‘pure’ petty commodity production hadn’t existed in Canadian mining since the west coast gold rushes of the late 1800s. After this period state policies facilitated capitalists’ access to and control over key factors of production, namely land, markets, and labour, allowing for the concentration of ownership over mining operations. But as Clement illustrates in detail, there was a long period of mining production that combined elements of petty commodity and capitalist production, in which workers retained some degree of autonomy and control over their work. Early capitalist mining production was organized around piecework (called tutwork), rather than wages, whereby work was auctioned to groups of miners who were, in turn, paid for the ore they produced. Under these arrangements, as Clement highlights, while the miners did not own the mine, they did work for themselves: a hallmark of petty commodity production. While this system was gradually replaced by the wage labour relation, bonus payments for productivity and a lax supervisory structure remained common until (and in some ways, including the bonus system, throughout) the intensified large-scale mechanization and automation of the industry. See also Clement, Hardrock Mining. 57 Clement, Hardrock Mining. Among the industrial materials outlined in the Paley Report that Canada was to provide to the US, nickel was “high on the list” on account of its strategic military significance. Clark-Jones, A Staple State, 119. As a result of Inco’s own marketing campaign in the 1930s and 40s, nickel had become widely used in the high-technology industries of industrialized economies and the mineral remained tightly intertwined with the American military. As Clark-Jones explains, “Since nickel would sustain ‘cold’ as well as ‘hot’ wars, it came closest to being what the American military termed a ‘true war metal,’” 123; quoting Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense, Annual Materials Conservation Report (Washington, DC, 1954), 4. As productive capacity across the mining sector became concentrated among a few powerful multinational corporations, nickel giant Inco grew to the largest mining firm in Canada, accounting for 30 percent of sales by 1974. 58 Clement, Hardrock Mining, 82. This increase in capital-intensity concentrated profits in the hands of the companies—between 1948 and 1973 the value of Canadian mineral production increased by almost eight times, while employment grew by only 25 percent—but it has also made the effective and timely provision of labour more economically significant J.A. MacMillan, G.S. Gislason, and S. Lyon, Human Resources in Canadian Mining (Kingston: Queen’s University, Centre for Resource Studies, 1977); cited in Clement, Hardrock Mining, 84.

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and, where possible, internationalization of operations.59 Starting in the mid-1960s, Inco

introduced hundreds of pieces of trackless diesel equipment into its mining operations, reducing

both the number and skill-level of workers required per unit of output as well as their control

over the production process.60

Automation, of course, rendered many miners unemployed. Throughout the 1960s, the

proportion of people employed in mining declined relative to the total labour force (from 1.3

percent in 1961 to 1.1 percent in 1971) and total employment increased by only one percent a

year.61 But these numbers tell only a partial story of the restructuring underway. Under the

Emergency Gold Mining Assistance Act, the federal government had been subsidizing Canada’s

gold mining industry since the end of the War: this had been in an attempt to slow the closure of

gold mining while new mining activity was established in its stead. By the mid-1960s, mining

officials were predicting the “final eclipse” of the industry.62 The simultaneous decline of gold

and rise of capital-intensive base metals mining wreaked havoc with the distribution of the

workforce as workers fled gold for the relatively regularized and well-paying jobs in base

metals. Inco’s operations, in turn, were plagued by staggering retention problems amongst the

population of ‘unskilled’ workers who, presumably, floated between industries and communities

in an increasingly national labour market.63 While the generalized problem of labour recruitment

in extraction remained across the sector, base metal mining’s diminished reliance on craftsmen

and tradesmen and the new just-in-time training regime made labour more replaceable. These

changes to the mode of industrial mining production, at least theoretically, opened new pools of

available labour and made it more feasible to exploit the country’s uneven regional geographies.

While workers from eastern Canada had long travelled out of the region to supply cheap labour

to the expanding industry of the day, with the notable exception of mass migration to the mills 59 See Bradbury, ‘International Movements and Crises’. 60 With automation and mechanization of mining came the rise of “modular training”—or “people technology,” according to Inco managers. See Clement, ‘The Subordination of Labour in Canadian Mining’, 144. First officially introduced in the Copper Cliff Nickel Refinery in 1972, modular training divides each operation into its discrete tasks and training is organized around the operation and maintenance of individual pieces of equipment. Individual workers can be retrained for different tasks as the need arises. In contrast to tradesmen, the ultimate result of modular training is to limit the marketability of workers’ skills and, subsequently, their ability to move between companies and industries. 61 Clement, Hardrock Mining. 62 Lyndon Watkins, ‘Canada’s Gold Mining Industry Believed Nearing Final Eclipse’, The Globe and Mail, 3 March 1967. 63 Clement, Hardrock Mining, 338–40; on the era’s politics of transience see Mason, Writing Unemployment; Reid-Musson, ‘Historicizing Precarity’.

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of New England and New York in the 1800s, these patterns had historically been concentrated

in biological natural resource industries and, as such, were dominated by seasonal production

cycles. In these instances, workers survived through mobile, seasonal structures of occupational

pluralism: travelling away for winter lumbering, for example, before returning home to plant

crops or to fish.64 Year-round extraction in the mid-latitudes, meanwhile, was subject to the

cycles of commodity markets and the “temporal rhythms of crises.”65 This temporality called for

a new form of flexibility.66 The introduction of capital-intensive production processes also

meant that rifts in the flow of production now came at a high cost. As a result, industry placed

an increasingly high premium on securing access to a workforce that was—or could be

constructed as—both flexible and reliable. As Bradbury reminds us in the quote at the

beginning of this chapter: “it is only when the plant and mills associated with the industry are

actually engaged and working that value can be created.”67 As the mining industry and

government officials cycled through different imagined pools of potential labour in their

deliberations about how to solve the mining “labour shortage”—from immigrants to local

Indigenous people to unemployed industrial workers to the rural dispossessed—the perceived

availability, flexibility, and reliability of these groups came under scrutiny and deliberation.

While employers advocated a quick fix to the problem through immigration, federal officials

remained preoccupied with the problem and the supposed potential of surplus Canadian labour.

Mining mismatch

By the mid-1960s the mining industry would reach a state of crisis over a shortage of both

skilled and unskilled labour. The devaluation of gold in the 1960s alongside the expansion of

capital-intensive base metals mining presented mine owners in these two branches of the metals

64 The historical structure of occupational pluralism in the region was largely comprised of some combination of farming, fishing, lumbering, and labouring, often overlapping with primary processing activities Pépin, Life and Poverty in the Maritimes; Sacouman, ‘Semi-Proletarianization and Rural Underdevelopment in the Maritimes’; see also Clark, The New Urban Poor. After the War, farming became a secondary activity but, according to Sacouman, the farmstead and the capacity for semi-subsistence remained central to the organization of economic life. The most dramatic example of this is perhaps the Harvest Excursion, which saw workers from eastern Canadian communities transported to the Prairies en masse for annual the grain harvest. See Cherwinski, ‘The Incredible Harvest Excursion’; Herd Thompson, ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’. On this history in mining see also Clement Hardrock Mining. 65 Bradbury, ‘International Movements and Crises’, 130, emphasis added. 66 Bradbury also highlights the connection between patterns of warfare and the nickel market. ‘International Movements and Crises’. 67 Bradbury, 130.

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mining industry with separate, but related anxieties about their ability to recruit, retain, and

control their workforces.68

Among skilled workers, the number of mining engineers graduating from Canadian universities

had plummeted as potential recruits were said to reject the idea of life on the frontier in place of

life in a suburban laboratory. As the Globe and Mail reported, when the Canadian Institute of

Mining and Metallurgy met in Toronto in the spring of 1965, discussions were dominated by the

sentiment that “the mining industry in Canada is losing a critical battle for engineers to…space-

age science,” meaning nuclear and space technology. According to one University of Toronto

professor, industry was finding it more and more difficult to “recruit adventurous and intelligent

young men” who “now seek their intellectual, if not physical adventure, in more glamorous

occupations from a safe social base in suburbia.”69

Among so-called low- and unskilled workers, industry employers also complained of serious

recruitment and retention problems. In gold mining in particular, as described in many letters

from mine operators to the federal government, transient workers had a tendency, once trained,

to seek out higher-paying work in base metal mining. The wages on offer in this sector were

relatively high, even compared to manufacturing; this, combined with the fact that levels of

formal education in the mining sector were still low, despite the opposite trend nationally, meant

that base metal mining remained one of the few occupations in which workers with low levels of

formal education could access decent wages.70 Moreover, employers insisted that it was

increasingly difficult to retain workers on account of both the grueling conditions of the work

and some workers’ seasonal obligations to farming or other occupations in their home

communities. In base metal mining, most notably nickel, this was also a period of serious labour

agitation and yearly strikes.71 Informed by Cold War politics, red baiting, and aggressive union

raids, the end of the 1950s were marked by bitter struggles to defend political unionism in the

68 In many ways, the interrelation of these employers’ labour woes echoes the dynamics that exist today between capital-intensive tar sands operations and the petroleum services sector: a dynamic that is explored in depth in the second half of the dissertation. 69 John G. Doherty, ‘Space-Age Science Saps Mining Manpower’, The Globe and Mail, 31 March 1965. 70 As Clement illustrates, the high wages on offer in base metals mining were in large part due to the prevalence of the bonus system in metals mining, which in the early 1970s accounted for about 10 percent of wages in mining. In 1971 almost two-thirds of miners had only public school education in contrast to one third of workers in manufacturing and just over one quarter of the overall national workforce over fifteen years. Clement, Hardrock Mining, 87–88 see also Appendices VI and VII, 367-368. 71 For an overview of strikes and lockouts in mining between 1948 and 1975 see Clement, 315. Major flashpoints at Inco occurred in 1958, 1966, 1969, and 1975.

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mining sector.72 As Clement recounts, the 1958 strike at Inco’s Sudbury and Port Colborne

operations precipitated the downfall of the radical International Union of Mine, Mill and

Smelter Workers—ultimately, raided by the United Steelworkers of America. While this

struggle sowed serious division in the mining labour movement, by the mid-1960s support was

consolidating again and yearly strikes grew in size and power.73

The combined problems of labour unrest and labour retention produced a context of serious

labour instability and unpredictability. Industry executives argued that this uncertainty was

compromising productivity in one of the country’s most important and expanding industries.

Within this context, complaints of a labour shortage served as shorthand for a qualitative, not a

quantitative problem: industry’s desire for cheaper, more controllable, and less free workers or,

what Nandita Sharma calls “a shortage of a particular kind of work force.”74 In response to this

instability and the subsequent pressure on wages, the mining industry pushed the federal

government to relax immigration regulations that restricted their ability to recruit immigrants

with low levels of formal education.75

72 Clement, Hardrock Mining. After a long struggle, Inco workers in Sudbury, Falconbridge, and Port Colborne finally certified in 1943 under the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill) and by the mid-1940s the union was active throughout northern Ontario and Quebec. By 1948, the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) began to target the Mine-Mill leadership and the United Steelworkers of America undertook a campaign to raid the union. Quoting Irving Abella, Clement explains that “the CCL… was ‘caught up in the frenzy of the Cold War…[and] sought to cleanse itself by ousting its left-wing unions. Aided by the greed of some unions anxious to take over Mine-Mill’s jurisdiction and by the desire of some partisans of the CCF to exorcise their left-wing opposition, the Congress had little difficulty in expelling Mine-Mill.’” Irving M. Abella, Nationalism Communism and Canadian Labour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973); as quoted by Clement, Hardrock Mining, 305. According to Clement, the bitter strike of 1958 weakened Mine-Mill and sealed the fate of its takeover. The struggle over the union’s autonomy continued for several years. It was banned from membership in the Canadian Labour Congress on the grounds of communist affiliations and its disputed jurisdiction. Finally, in 1967, the national and international offices of Mine-Mill merged with the Steelworkers. This struggle marked a crucial shift in mine unions, as “Militant political unionism changed to a form of corporate unionism” despite the continued presence of radical activists amidst their ranks. Clement, 310. 73 Notable strikes during this time include a three-week wildcat strike at Inco in 1966, followed only three years later by 128 day strike against the same company. Clement, Hardrock Mining; for a list of strikes see p. 315. 74 Nandita Sharma, Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 67; drawing on Tom Brass, ‘Review Essay: Slavery Now: Unfree Labour and Modern Capitalism’, Slavery & Abolition 9, no. 2 (1988): 183–97. 75 Part of the broad concern, shared by both industry and government but for different reasons, was the problem of idle labour amassing at the site of employment. This was especially acute in the context of expanding base metal mining. By November of 1965, accounts were surfacing about the terrible employment conditions in the Sudbury mines and Inco faced allegations that workers from the Maritimes who migrated to Sudbury in search of work but did not pass the company’s health examination or meet other employment requirements were being “dumped” in Sudbury, denied employment and a way home. Local 6500 of the United Steelworkers recounted that they had cared for more that fourteen hundred new Inco employees in the previous year, spending up to $32,000 for their food, lodging, and clothing. The Globe and Mail, ‘MacEachen Denies Maritimers Being Dumped in Sudbury’, The Globe and Mail, 1 November 1965. A more comprehensive approach to labour market management and manpower mobility held the promise of reducing this type of uncontrolled migration. For exchanges between industry and

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But government officials expressed concern that this would add to the national surplus of

unskilled labour, which was mounting in the post-war context of modernization and economic

restructuring. On the whole, from regional modernization to manpower planning, government

policy in the mid-1960s was aiming to do the opposite: to comprehensively manage national

surpluses, not compound them. Moreover, expanded state administrative and research capacities

ranging from employment and economic forecasting to welfare state programs promised to

render domestic populations governable in new ways—ways that echoed the mining employers’

fantasies of controlled workforce flexibility. The rural dispossessed, the unadjusted, and the

otherwise unemployed would be subject to the comprehensive programs of the new Department

of Manpower and Immigration. Through counselling, training, and mobility this surplus labour

was to be organized around the forecasted labour needs of the national economy. As is the case

with all unemployment programs that tie workers to the labour market, the state sought to

manage the national surplus under heavily controlled conditions rather than allow it to circulate

in the market as free wage labour. In this way, the federal government intended to use surplus

itself to create the conditions of unfreedom sought by industry.76

As John Grundy highlights, this problem of “disequilibrium” between labour demand and

supply and the need for more active labour market coordination to supplement Keynesian

economic policy had already been the subject of several other important reports in Ottawa. In

1961 and 1962 the Senate Committee on Manpower and Employment and the Committee of

Inquiry into the Unemployment Insurance Act, respectively, raised concerns about this issue.

The first two reports (1964, 1965) of the newly formed Economic Council of Canada would also

flag this concern, and, at the international level, the Organization for Economic Co-operation

and Development (OECD) would do the same the following year. These reports stressed that

this labour mismatch was entrenching a productivity gap in the Canadian economy by both

exacerbating structural unemployment and inciting wage and price inflation on account of

government officials about the labour shortage the possibility of lowering educational requirements see LAC RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File, including “Manpower and Immigration Policy.” Memorandum from the Mining Association of Canada addressed to Prime Minister, Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys, Minister of Labour, and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. January 17, 1966, Toronto, p. 2. Note that some of the individuals in these ministerial positions had changed after the November 1965 election. 76 On the relationship between surplus and unfreedom see Brass, ‘Review Essay’.

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regional and sectoral labour shortages. Urbanization and industrial modernization were

anticipated to only make the problem worse.77

In March of 1965, the National Employment Committee submitted a report to the Minister of

Labour about the state of the National Employment Service and Canada’s manpower policy.78

Reflecting on the changing structure of the Canadian economy, the Committee warned that

Canada was in “a critical stage in the development of her manpower policy. Technological

change and new tariff policies have raised the prospect of rapid change in occupational

requirements accompanied by problems of mismatching between the demand for and supply of

labour.”79 The report explained that Canada’s manpower policy had historically been directed

toward social welfare goals, and characterized the attention to mobilizing manpower in high

unemployment areas as a residue of this history. In contrast to this history, the Committee

advised, Canada needed to adopt an economic approach, focusing on “active” and “positive”

manpower policy.

The Committee urged the government to adopt a national perspective on manpower policy

focused on “the economic strength, stability, and growth of the nation rather than the relief of

certain handicapped or disadvantaged groups.” Canada’s policies, the Committee explained,

“should aim not primarily at the relief of idle labour reserves but at the development of an active

and productive labour force.”80 Among other recommendations, the Committee stressed the

imperative of geographic flexibility within the national workforce.81 Highlighting the lack of

77 Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’; Canada. Parliament. Senate. Special Committee on Manpower and Employment, Report of the Special Committee on Manpower and Employment; Canada. Committee of Inquiry into the Unemployment Insurance Act (Gill Committee), Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Unemployment Insurance; Economic Council of Canada, Annual Report for the Fiscal Year 1963/64; Economic Council of Canada, Second Annual Review: Towards Sustained and Balanced Economic Growth; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Manpower Polices and Programmes in Canada. 78 At the time, the members of the NEC were as follows: Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Manufacturers Association, Canadian Construction Association, Retail Council of Canada, Canadian Labour Congress, Confederation of National Trade Unions, International Railway Brotherhoods, National Council of Women of Canada, Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, Royal Canadian Legion, Canadian Welfare Council, Canadian Federation of Agriculture and Canadian Education Association. “Submission by the National Employment Committee to the Minister of Labour on Manpower Policy and the National Employment Service.” March 24, 1965. Ottawa. LAC RG26, Vol. 86, file 8-18-2 (part 1). 79 “Submission by the National Employment Committee to the Minister of Labour on Manpower Policy and the National Employment Service,” 1. 80 “Submission by the National Employment Committee to the Minister of Labour on Manpower Policy and the National Employment Service,” 2 81 The Committee emphasized the importance of anticipating and proactively addressing labour market problems

through programs such as the Technical and Vocational Training Assistance Act and the NES winter employment campaign and stay-in-school program. It recommended consolidating the government’s dispersed manpower

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financial support for manpower relocation, the Committee urged that, “In a country of Canada’s

size, financial considerations may be the decisive ones when workers are contemplating a move.

We know you share with us a conviction that a high degree of labour mobility is vitally

important in adjusting the labour force and the economy to structural changes.” In order to

overcome the historic ineffectiveness of the NES, a much more “coordinated, comprehensive

labour mobility program” was needed.82

Throughout, the mining industry made its manpower concerns known to federal officials and

demanded solutions. On April 6, 1965 representatives of the Canadian Metal Mining

Association met with the federal government to address the industry’s manpower problems. The

Association had earlier warned the federal Ministers of Labour, Immigration, and Mines and

Technical Surveys that the shortage of miners and skilled workers was limiting production and,

under the recommendation of the Association, the three departments set up a working committee

to explore solutions to the problem ranging from immigration to retraining to labour transfers.83

The following January, in a letter addressed to newly re-elected Prime Minister Pearson and the

same three ministers, the Mining Association of Canada highlighted the mounting severity of

the shortage, warning that: “The gravity of the situation will be realized when it is recalled that

the mining industry is the largest export industry in the country, being responsible for more than

30 percent of Canada’s total exports, and therefore the most important segment of the national

economy in winning foreign exchange.” Appealing to the need for immigrant workers, the letter

explained, “In the industry’s attempt to recruit men to maintain its labour force, it soon became

clear that men suitable for mining employment were not available in sufficient numbers in

Canada.”84

policy—which, at the time was split between the Departments of Labour, Citizenship and Immigration, and Northern Affairs and National Resources—and coordinating manpower policy with other economic policy. It urged the collection and analysis of better labour market information. And, finally, the Committee emphasized the importance of better training programs. 82 “Submission by the National Employment Committee to the Minister of Labour on Manpower Policy and the National Employment Service,” 8-9. The National Employment Service had been developed as part of the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1940. In its original form it was designed as a labour exchange, where employers registered vacancies and unemployed workers registered as a precondition to receiving UI benefits. As Grundy explains, “Perhaps predictably, given the prioritization of UI applicants in job referrals, the majority of employers did not register vacancies with the NES.” Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’, 78. Overall, the system was considered largely marginal and ineffective. 83 John G. Doherty, ‘Behind the Ticker: Meeting Set on Labor Lack’, The Globe and Mail, 6 April 1965. 84 “Manpower and Immigration Policy.” Memorandum from the Mining Association of Canada addressed to Prime Minister, Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys, Minister of Labour, and Minister of Citizenship and

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Three days earlier, Tom Kent, Deputy Minister of Manpower, had received a letter from

Chibougamau Mines complaining, similarly, that production had been “seriously impaired by

the shortage of labour that has persisted in this area for many months.” Referencing the specter

of the ‘mismatch,’ the letter concludes: “It is somewhat depressing to read that many Canadians

are suffering in ‘depressed areas’ when an excellent living can be provided by conscientious

workmen in Canada’s mining areas.”85 It was widely understood that the National Employment

Service had failed to respond to the needs of the sector, especially when it came to ensuring a

supply of low-skilled workers. As the Executive Vice-President of Kerr Addison Mines

explained:

Our attempts through the National Employment Service and the Department of

Immigration to obtain employees for training have not been successful. Sending

recruiting teams to areas where the National Employment Service stated there were

pools of unemployed has not resulted in obtaining a sufficient number of employees and

most of those who were hired have not stayed.

While there is a shortage of skilled tradesmen on a local basis in the mining

industry, our greatest need is for individuals who can be trained on the job to the semi-

skilled trade of a miner. This requires men who are physically rugged, who have the

ability to read and write and who have sufficient intelligence and co-ordination to be

trainable.86

From employers’ vantage point, moreover, it was imperative that they secure reliable workers

before spring, when past experience suggested that many workers would leave the mines to

Immigration. January 17, 1966, Toronto, p. 2. LAC RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. Note that some of the individuals in these ministerial positions had changed after the November 1965 election. 85 Letter from Chibougamau Mines Ltd. to Tom Kent. January 14, 1966, Ottawa. LAC RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. Note that the names of these government departments shift across the different letters I am addressing here. Government departments were in the midst of a major reorganization during this time. The creation of the Department of Manpower and Immigration had been announced on December 17, 1965. According to G.P.A. McDonald, orders in council for the reorganization were issued later in December 1965 and transfers started shortly after that. So, we can assume that in January 1966 these transfers were in process, hence the shifting department names to which these letters are addressed. McDonald, ‘Labour, Manpower, and Government Reorganization’. 86 Letter from J.H. Stovel, Executive Vice-President, Kerr Addison Mines Limited, to the Prime Minister, the Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys, the Minister of Labour, and the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. January 17, 1966. LAC RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File.

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return to their farms or summer construction jobs.87

Later that January, in a meeting between the representatives of the mining industry and the

Manpower Department, Kent promised to draw on the resources of the National Employment

Service to support the industry in addressing its manpower problems. Where individual

companies wanted to set up recruitment programs, the NES would help them do so by lining up

applicants, providing office space, and drawing on the Department of Manpower’s mobility

services.88

In the spring of 1966 the Manager of Renabie Mines addressed a letter to the Immigration

Branch of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration complaining that the company’s

labour turnover was higher than ever before and pleading for immigration reform:

We have been trying earnestly and regularly to advertise for Canadians from Winnipeg

to St. John’s, Nfld., but most of the men that we acquire have no education…and have

no trades training.

In addition to the above, most of these men do not have any goal in life. They

have no bank account. They are not saving to buy a farm or a small business. In fact,

they have no interest in tomorrow.89

In June of that year J. Bardswich, a consulting mining engineer from Sudbury explained to Jean

Marchand, Minister of Manpower, that the real problem in the industry was the “misuse of

manpower” due to lack of production innovation and manpower coordination: “Are we short of

manpower in the Mining Industry when we fail to use modern techniques to increase

productivity, when we have personnel working at 40% of normal due to lack of planning and 87 As the letter from Kerr Addison explained, “Delays in obtaining additional manpower will be disastrous to these mines. While the problem is not now as acute as in October, we know from previous experience that early each spring there will be many employees leaving to return to farms and some to their summer construction jobs.” Letter from J.H. Stovel, Executive Vice-President, Kerr Addison Mines Limited, to the Prime Minister, the Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys, the Minister of Labour, and the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. January 17, 1966. LAC RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. 88 “Re: Mining.” Summary of the meeting between representatives of the mining industry and representatives of the Manpower Department. January 26, 1966, Ottawa. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. 89 “Re: Immigrants for Renabie.” Letter from W.A. Moore, Manager of Renabie Mines Ltd., to Mr. J.F. Eckertt, Immigration Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration. May 18, 1966. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. Note that the name of the department would change to Manpower and Immigration.

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scheduling, and when we have labour turnovers of 400%. We’re more short of brains to correct

abuses than we are short of manpower.”90 In his response, Marchand enthusiastically agreed

with Bardswich, asserting that Canadian industry, as a whole, should devote more resources to

training Canadian workers and using the national workforce more efficiently. “It is my feeling,”

he explained, “that industry must now put as much, or more, resources into manpower planning

as it does, say, into market analysis or product development.”91

By the end of 1965 the federal government would commit to a more serious ‘active’ manpower

policy and it would go on to increase its management of the labour market throughout the years

that followed. Established early the following year, the Department of Manpower and

Immigration would, as its name suggests, explicitly coordinate manpower and immigration

policy for the first time. The passage of the Adult Occupational Training Act in 1967

empowered the new department to build an expansive system to manage the national labour

market so as to match the supply of manpower with the demand—quantitatively, qualitatively,

and geographically.92 Backed by labour and economic forecasting, a network of Canada

Manpower Centres would deliver coordinated counselling, training, placement, and mobility

services.93 Shorty after this, the National Employment Service was transferred out of the

Unemployment Insurance Commission and into to the new Department of Manpower and

Immigration. Manpower Canada became the new bureaucratic infrastructure assigned with

managing the Canadian labour force.94 The National Employment Committee would be renamed

90 Letter from J. Bardswich, J. Bardswich & Associates, Consulting Mining Engineers, to Jean Marchand, Department of Manpower Resources. Jun 23, 1966, Sudbury, ON. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. 91 Letter from Jean Marchand to J. Bardswich. July 5, 1966, Ottawa. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. 92 Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’, 80. 93 As John Grundy has outlined, ‘active’ manpower policy was officially adopted by the OECD in 1964 and advocated in a series Canadian studies in the early 1960s. These reports warned of a growing gap between the actual and potential productivity of the Canadian workforce and of a ‘disequilibrium’ between the skills and location of labour supply and labour demand. Active manpower policy aspired to resolve this mismatch problem through the national coordination and planning of the labour force. Through intensive research and forecasting, coordinated planning, mobility incentives, training and counselling services, active manpower policy was said to entail “the special advantage of being expansionist with regard to employment and production but anti-inflationary with regard to costs and prices.” Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, ‘An Active Manpower Policy’, Courier, 1964, 10; as quoted in Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’, 80–81. 94 In 1950 the Canadian Parliament ratified the International Labour Organization Convention (No.88) concerning the Organization of The Employment Service. Article 1 of the Convention reads: “The essential duty of the employment service shall be to ensure, in co-operation where necessary with other public and private bodies concerned, the best possible organization of the employment market as an integral part of the national program for the achievement and maintenance of full employment and the development and use of productive resources.”

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the Canada Manpower Advisory Council and would be tasked with “the responsibility to advise

the Minister of Manpower on all matters related to manpower policy.”95 The DMI opened a

series of local Canada Manpower Centres across the country, staffed by Canada Manpower

counsellors who provided a suite of therapeutic services to unemployed Canadians.96

Central to the new department was the Manpower Mobility Program (MPP), established in

December 1965 and designed to “help the economy make full use of Canada’s manpower

resources.” Through the provision of loans and grants to unemployed workers and their families

the MPP aimed at “moving the unemployed from areas in which they cannot find employment

to areas where they can.” In doing so, “It complements the government’s program of measures

to bring industry and jobs to low income, high unemployment areas.”97 Moreover, by 1965 the

federal government was already exploring ways to explicitly coordinate rural modernization and

land reform with the problem of surplus labour. In December 1965, for example, the

Department of Labour proposed a pilot training program for development areas that would work

alongside the manpower mobility program and the area development programs.98 To support

Quoted in “The Status of the National Employment Service within the Department of Manpower,” 1. LAC, RG26, Vol. 86, file 8-18-2 (part1). 95 Minutes of the 93rd meeting of the National Employment Committee. Department of Citizenship and Immigration. Vancouver, 22 and 23 March, 1966. LAC RG26, Vol. 86, file 8-18-2 (part 1). 96 As Grundy explains, the revamping of the old National Employment Service Placement Officer into the new DMI Manpower Counselor was a linchpin in the plan for national labour market coordination. Employment counselling was mean to “optimize efficiency and productivity of the national labour market by enhancing the vocational choices of service users through the provision of information and advice…. The Counselor was to serve as a relay point through which information about supply and demand in the labour market could be brought to bear on the occupational aspirations and decisions of young, predominantly white male citizens.” Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’, 82. 97 As described by W.R. Dymond, A.D.M., Program Development, to Tom Kent, Deputy Minister of Manpower, in a letter under the subject “National Employment Committee Minute 943 – Background paper.” June 10, 1966. LAC RG26, Vol. 86, file 8-18-2 (part 1). My impression is that these relocations functioned through a combination of counselling, placement services, and travel payments. According to a description by R.A. Jenness in 1974, The initial manpower program provided loans to unemployed workers and grants to unemployed workers with families who had been out of work four of the prior six months. These payments were to allow them to move to jobs in other locations if the Manpower Counsellor determined there was no possibility of placing him locally. Any worker who was a legal resident of Canada was eligible for assistance. The program was overhauled and expanded in 1967. Under these changes, the loans were replaced with grants on account of administrative challenges. The extended unemployment requirements to receive a grant were dropped, meaning that unemployed or underemployed workers could have their moving costs payed for (through grants) and receive additional allowances for re-establishment and housing. Exploratory grants were also available for workers who had no job set up: this would pay travel and up to one month’s living, allowing the recipient to search for work. Workers taking course under the new Adult Occupational Training Act could also receive travel grants for training. According to Jenness, different programs were available to recently arrived immigrants through a separate immigration program. R. A. Jenness, ‘Canadian Migration and Immigration Patterns and Government Policy’, The International Migration Review 8, no. 1 (1974): 5–22. 98 “Pilot Training Projects for Development Areas.” Technical and Vocational Training Branch, Department of Labour, Government of Canada. December 1, 1965. LAC, RG 26, Vol. 79, file 1-19-3 (Part 2) – Federal-Provincial

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their work the DMI invested heavily in building a labour market intelligence system that would

provide a national forecast of labour demand and supply. The Manpower Information System,

as it would come to be known, was heralded by the Minister as “the most comprehensive and

modern labour market information system of any industrialized country.” Built on the promise

of manpower forecasting, as the Minister explained it, the system was “designed to assist our

clients in knowing where the jobs are, where the workers are, and to identify current and future

manpower requirements.”99

The contested north, the urban crisis, and the “challenge of mid-Canada”

Meanwhile, the mining industry would begin to frame its own labour anxieties in geographic

terms. As they continued to complain of labour shortages for northern operations, these

industrialists began drawings links between their problems and post-war urbanization in

southern Canada. At the Fourth National Northern Development Conference, held in November

1967, Chairman W. S. Zeigler, explained in his opening remarks, “Perhaps the most pressing

problem that currently challenges Northern Development is the shortage of labor, skilled and

unskilled.” While the overarching goal of the Northern Development Conference series was “To

Further Stimulate the Orderly Development of Canada’s Northland,” the fourth iteration of the

conference focused specifically on “Man and the North” and was centrally concerned with the

question of labour.100 In his presentation on “Northern Manpower Needs,” the President and

General Manager of the Cassiar Asbestos Corporation, Brigadier John D. Christian, connected

the labour problem to post-war affluence in the cities: “the chief reason for the Northern

Manpower shortage,” he explained, “seems to be that there is no need for people to move and

nothing to attract them away from the big cities.” Painting an exaggerated picture of the post-

war good life, he went on, “All through the ages people have migrated as a result of political or

religious aggression, loneliness, hunger, unemployment, lack of opportunity, laziness and an

exceptional few from a spirit of adventure.” But “in this affluent society,” he concluded, “we

Conference, General File. The report explains, “The vocational and economic underachievement of residents in designated areas is caused in part by their lack of adaptation to the conditions of modern industrial society. Many are by-passed in the industrialization of an area because they lack the skills, attitudes and orientation required for full participation in the changing economy of their areas. Furthermore, there are few training programs in operation in these areas which are adapted to the peculiar needs of these people…” 1. 99 Otto Lang, quoted in J. Stefan Dupre et al., Federalism and Policy Development: The Case of Adult Occupational Training in Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 140; cited in Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’, 83. Lang would not become Minister of Manpower and Immigration until 1970. 100 National Northern Development Conference, Proceedings of the Fourth National Northern Development Conference.

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can expect only the adventurous few from the south to participate in the new development of the

North.” In addition to the challenge of recruiting the needed number of workers, this “new

development” would also place new qualitative demands on workers. Invoking the rise in capital

intensity and industry’s growing preoccupation with time discipline, Christian stressed, “The

pace of living has quickened, large tonnages are on the move and time, not the season, has

become important to the North.”101

While Christian suggested the solution was an “all out drive on training” people already living

in the north, in relation to what he called the “less integrated Indian,” he echoed the anxieties

that pervaded the industry about other sources of available labour who left the industry

seasonally to return to their farms or take up other work.102 “Our experience,” he explained,

speaking of Native workers, “has been that they work extremely well for three or four months

and then are gone for three or four weeks.”103 While ten years earlier the Indian Affairs Branch

of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration had explained to the Gordon Commission

that Indigenous workers posed “no problem to their employers,” by the mid-1960s employers’

racist scepticism consolidated at least partly around the question of time discipline.104 As the

General Manager of Giant Yellowknife Mines Ltd. told his audience at the Conference “Most

natives are not used to regular wage employment. (There is) a lack of appreciation of the

necessity of appearing for work everyday.”105 Assuming the universality of colonial and

industrial temporal structures, Christian placed the imperative of a punctual and reliable

workforce within the context of mining’s growing capital intensity: “In this day of big and

expensive equipment, tonnage schedules and high productivity, no one can afford the luxury of

no-show operators.”106

According to Frances Abele, in the wake of Diefenbaker’s “National Policy” the employment of 101 National Northern Development Conference, 58–59. 102 National Northern Development Conference, 61. 103 MacFarlane, ‘Too Few Incentives to Work in North, Mining Chief Claims’. Others highlighted the lack of motivation to “improve oneself financially.” 104 This sentiment was captured in Lucas’s 1971 study of Canadian single industry towns. In the study, he quotes a respondent describing the ‘problem’ of hiring the “local labour force,” explaining: “These people are used to being their own bosses and doing their work at their own time in their own way – as a result, in most instances they are not on time.” Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown, 33. 105 Quoted in MacFarlane, ‘Too Few Incentives to Work in North, Mining Chief Claims’. 106 National Northern Development Conference, Proceedings of the Fourth National Northern Development Conference; MacFarlane, ‘Too Few Incentives to Work in North, Mining Chief Claims’. On the social construction of temporality in capitalist social relations and the particular notion of industrial time see E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38 (December 1967): 56–97.

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northern Indigenous people in resource extraction figured centrally in government’s colonial

vision for social and economic development of the north.107 Prior to this, in contrast to

government policy vis-à-vis southern Indigenous peoples, Canada had had an official policy of

non-interference in the lives of northern Indigenous peoples and state’s presence had been

minimal.108 As Abele explains, the increased southern incursion that resulted from military

activity and Diefenbaker’s northern agenda raised awareness in southern Canada about the

plight of northern Indigenous peoples: the economic hardships of the declining fur trade, new

diseases spread from the south, and reports of starvation that were heavily-publicized. Within

the context of the expanding Canadian welfare state and the generalized southern prosperity of

the 1950s, government eventually responded by extending welfare policy northward. In her

overview of this broad history, Abele explains that nomadic and dispersed societies were

“induced and persuaded” to settle in low-rent government housing, the colonial education

system was expanded, and various welfare payment programs were rolled out.109 Importantly,

because the “difficult circumstances of northern Natives appeared to southern civil servants to

be a consequence of Native people’s unpreparedness for wage employment and the absence of

viable economic opportunities” government undertook systematic effort to push Indigenous

people into the wage labour market. “Jobs were to be provided, ultimately, in the mineral

extraction projects stimulated by the new National Policy.”110 In this way, as Abele argues, the

federal government’s joint aspirations of northern social welfare and resource extraction during

the post-war period were made compatible through visions of extractive employment.111

But the social geographies of northern resource extraction would change significantly just

months after the 1967 National Northern Development Conference. Robert Paine has identified

in this period a shift from a colonial relation in the north organized around the concept of social 107 Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions’. 108 Prior to the 1950s territorial power was held by bureaucrats in Ottawa and the only consistent local state presence was the Royal North-West Mounted Police. This was in contrast to Dominion policy toward Indigenous peoples in the south, which “had the official objective of making them ‘good, industrious and useful citizens’ by settling them on reserves and replacing the hunt with agriculture.” Abele, 312. But with regards to northern Indigenous peoples, as Kolausok explains, “According to the official views, it was impossible—and undesirable in any case—to integrate them into the wider Canadian society; therefore they should be left alone to pursue their traditional occupations on the land” Eddie D. Kolausok, ‘Boom, Bust and Balance: Life since 1950’, in Across Time and Tundra: The Inuvialuit of the Western Arctic, ed. Ishmael Alunik, Eddie D. Kolausok, and David A. Morrison (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2003), 162. 109 Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions’, 312; see also P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Daniel Heidt, The Advisory Committee on Northern Development: Context and Meeting Minutes, 1948-66, Documents on Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security (Calgary, AB: Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary, 2015). 110 Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions’, 314. 111 Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions’.

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welfare—what Paine calls “welfare colonialism”—to one marked principally by a drive toward

capital investment and resource extraction.112 When oil and natural gas were discovered at

Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in 1968, it sparked industry proposals for a multi-billion dollar pipeline to

transport natural gas down the Mackenzie River Valley, through Dene, Inuit, and Métis

homelands, to southern Canadian and American markets. Glen Coulthard notes that the high

cost of the project “would have established it as the largest private sector development project in

the history of Canada, and quite possibly the world.” The construction and operation of the

pipeline would have brought with it a whole collection of infrastructures, including roads,

airstrips, camps, gravel pits, storage sites, river crossings, and gas plants.113 The project was

championed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who compared the proposed pipeline to the

construction of the railway that had opened the West for settlement.114 Despite strong opposition

to the massive industrial project, and concern that construction of the project would destroy their

traditions and ways of life, the impacted communities were initially offered no means through

which to assert their position or concerns.

But by the end of the 1960s, federal attempts at northern industrial expansion that blatantly

dismissed the interests and rights of Indigenous peoples would be met with a resurgence of

Indigenous resistance—the culmination of the federal government’s approach to resource

development and northern administration spurred by World War Two and stretching through the

Diefenbaker-era Northern Vision.115 In 1967 the federal government had announced its plans to

transfer the government offices of the Northwest Territories from Ottawa to Yellowknife

without consulting the territory’s majority Indigenous population. As Coulthard explains, not

only did this move increase the size and power of the colonial Territorial government at the

expense of the majority Dene Nation’s power, it also served to dramatically grow the settler

population, which spurred new demands for northern economic development, including

expanded non-renewable resource development. The following year the discovery was made at

Prudhoe Bay. The government’s blatant disregard for northern Indigenous peoples’ perspectives

in pushing this extractive agenda forward sparked the formation of new Indigenous political

bodies and campaigns to “defend the interests of indigenous peoples against the vision of

112 Robert Paine, ed., The White Arctic: Anthropological Essays on Tutelage and Ethnicity (St. John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1977). 113 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 57. 114 Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions’. 115 Abele; see also Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks on this topic generally.

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economic and political expansion” being unrolled by industry and governments in the north.116

This organized pushback would ultimately lead to the formation of the Berger Inquiry to

investigate concerns about the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. The inquiry, led by

environmentalist and Native rights lawyer, Justice Thomas Berger, consulted expert witnesses

and nearly a thousand people who would be impacted by the project. The final report proposed

that no pipeline ever be built between Prudhoe Bay and the Mackenzie Delta, and that a ten-year

moratorium be placed on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline, allowing for the resolution of land

claims.117 This same period would see the Cree of northern Quebec mount a resistance against

the huge hydroelectric projects proposed for the James Bay region. These high profile struggles

over land, resources, and sovereignty would have a double effect: sparking a new generation of

activism and new levels of public awareness in settler society while, at the same time, spurring

the Canadian state to focus in on the ‘problem’ that Indigenous land rights posed to Canadian

resource development. Coulthard and others have illustrated how the “modus operandi of

colonial power” shifted in response to this wave of Indigenous resistance in ways that would

facilitate the state’s access to Indigenous lands and resources and the continuation of the

extractive agenda.118

116 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 58. In addition to the drive to ‘open’ northern Canada for the extraction of oil, natural gas, and minerals, Coulthard credits two other key events with galvanizing the era of Red Power activism beginning in the late 1960s. The first, which is widely understood as a turning point in the politics of the era, was the federal government’s release of the 1969 Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, which came to be known as the “White Paper” on Indian policy. The White Paper called for the wholesale assimilation of status Indians through the removal of the political and legal distinctions between First Nations and non-Indigenous Canadians as outlined in the Indian Act. In Abele’s words, the White Paper “was consistent with much of federal behaviour in the post-war period but inconsistent with the wishes of Indian people: it closed the book on the past, including existing treaties and outstanding disputes, and proposed instead the assimilation of Indians into the mainstream of Canadian society.” Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions’, 314. The second major event was the 1973 landmark Calder decision, involving a claim made by Nisga’a elder Frank Calder to his nation’s unceded traditional territories in north-western BC. Rejected by the lower courts, the case went to the Supreme Court of Canada, where the court recognized, for the first time, the existence of Aboriginal title, agreeing that, prior to contact, the Nisga’a had held the land rights they were claiming in court. The court was split, however, on whether the rights had been formally extinguished and the Nisga’a lost their case 4-3. But, while technically a defeat for the Nisga’a, the court’s recognition of Aboriginal title changed the political landscape and opened a new level of uncertainty about the question of land rights. As Coulthard argues, the invigorated Indigenous anti-colonial nationalisms that followed in the wake of these three events, forced colonial rule in Canada to undergo a major shift in its attempts to secure access to these lands and.

117 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Thomas R. Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, Vol. 1 (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1977). 118 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 4; see also Abele, ‘Canadian Contradictions’; Alan C. Cairns, ‘Citizenship and Indigenous Peoples: The Legacy of Internal Colonialism’, in The Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner (London: Sage, 2002), 119–30. These anti-colonial critiques of the Canadian staple state have centred the contested nature of these ‘public’ resources and helped us understand how economic policy has interacted with Aboriginal policy in an attempt to facilitate private access to Indigenous lands. Through this lens, assertions of Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction over these lands and resources come to pose a serious risk to

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These struggles being waged on the resource frontier were not isolated from the broader context

of global dissent, liberation struggle, anti-colonialism, and political tumult that ran through the

late 1960s. And this broad global context also informed what was unfolding in North American

cities.119 South of the border, protests against the Vietnam War intensified, and mounted atop

the crisis of deindustrialization and racialized geographies of poverty and unemployment, cities

raged in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination.120 Dissent and decolonial thought and

action also took hold, albeit unevenly, in Canadian cities and, as policy-makers watched the

urban crisis unfold, urban unemployment took on new political meaning.121

As we have seen, concern about unemployed people amassing in the cities was not new and had

been a key consideration in federal-level labour policy. The changing structure of the economy

had rendered many workers obsolete, and unemployment rates remained especially high

amongst so-called unskilled and undereducated workers. Crucially, Pearson’s plan for “full use”

of the national labour force included not just manpower planning, but coordination between

manpower and immigration and a sweeping review of the immigration system. The result of the

review was the 1966 White Paper on Immigration Policy, which for the first time lifted explicit

ethno-racial restrictions on immigration but retained restrictions on family sponsorships that had

the state in fulfilling this economic agenda by facilitating private access to these resource for extraction, circulation, production, and export. See Pasternak, Grounded Authority; Pasternak and Dafnos, ‘How Does a Settler State Secure the Circuitry of Capital?’ 119 As Mills summarizes: “In 1968, as war raged in Vietnam and protests continued against it, cities across the United States exploded in riots in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Machine guns were mounted on the White House lawn and the Capitol balcony as flames came within six blocks of the White House. In France, with the memory of the Algerian War still fresh, students and workers took to the streets and nearly toppled the French government, while student protesters in Mexico City were gunned down in advance of the summer Olympic games. In the summer of 1970, the Tupamaros guerrillas staged four kidnappings in ten days in Uruguay, Argentinean guerrillas kidnapped the country’s former president, American Black Panthers were making dramatic attempts to free prisoners, kidnappings were being carried out in Bolivia, and violence was breaking out in Northern Ireland and Basque Country.” Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 175–76. 120 See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 121 Decolonial thought was especially present in Montreal. Under the banner of national liberation, and forging links with decolonization struggles around the world and the Black Panther movement in the United States, the movement for Quebec liberation was at its height. This history is most often recounted through the armed struggle of the FLQ, specifically the events of the October Crisis. But, as Sean Mills illustrates, this singular attention on the dramatic events of the fall of 1970 has largely eclipsed the wide range of overlapping and intersecting movements that precipitated this moment and the radical ideological threads that joined them. Mills, The Empire Within; see also David Austin, Fear of a Black Nation (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2013).

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been established in 1962.122 Today, these changes are largely remembered for their turn away

from ethno-racial and national profiling and for opening-up of the Canadian immigration

system. But they also explicitly contracted the system to poor educated or unskilled people who

did not hold the promise of productivity. The report flagged sponsorship as a looming economic

and social problem, warning that unskilled and poorly educated immigrants would be locked out

of the labour market by technological change, relegated redundant and unemployed, and, in

turn, become a burden to Canada’s social welfare system. The new “points system” wove

together racist understandings of the “good immigrant”—worthy of entry on the basis of

productivity—with the state’s fear of mass unemployment. The fact that immigration to Canada

was largely urban added to policy-makers’ anxiety about the possible emergence of “ghetto-like

slums.”123 While immigration had “made a major contribution to the national objectives of

maintaining a high rate of population and economic growth,” the report explained, given the

declining demand for unskilled labour in the modern economy and the existent pockets of

persistent unemployment within Canada, restricting sponsorship served as a way to regulate the

surplus of increasingly ‘obsolescent’ undereducated and unskilled workers.124

These changes, in combination with new restrictions in Britain on non-white immigrants would

dramatically change the profile of immigration to Canada. Whereas people coming from Latin

America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East had comprised less than 5 percent of total

immigration in the 1940s, this number rose to 23 percent for the period between 1966 and

1972.125 As Sean Mills writes, “both theory and people travelled across the barriers separating

various parts of the world.” Montreal, especially, in the words of David Austin, became “a

122 The 1962 reforms, which did remove explicit references to ethno-racial and national preferences, maintained an official preference and (recruitment practice) for immigrants from “traditional sources” and limited the sponsorship rights of landed immigrants from outside Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, ‘Dismantling White Canada: Race, Rights, and the Origins of the Points System’, in Becoming Multicultural: Immigration and the Politics of Membership in Canada and Germany (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), 15–37. Immigrants from “preferred” countries, meanwhile, maintained those rights. 123 Canada. Department of Manpower and Immigration, White Paper on Immigration: Canadian Immigration Policy (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1966), 15; quoted in Triadafilopoulos, ‘Dismantling White Canada: Race, Rights, and the Origins of the Points System’, 29. 124 From what I have been able to find, surprisingly little has been written about this element of the reforms. For an account of this policy history see Triadafilopoulos, ‘Dismantling White Canada: Race, Rights, and the Origins of the Points System’; see also Bruno Ramirez, ‘Immigration, Class Recomposition, and the Crisis of the “Labor Market”: The Canadian Case’, Zerowork, 1980, http://zerowork.org/Z3RamirezImmigration.html. 125 Over the course of the 1960s, immigration from English-speaking Caribbean countries rose from 1% to 10% in 1971. Mills, The Empire Within. The Toronto metropolitan region was the destination for the majority of immigrants arriving in Canada in the 1960s, receiving 53.6% of the country’s immigration in 1969. While Italian immigration had received the most media attention in the past, by the mid-1960s Toronto was also home to an estimated fifteen thousand West Indian immigrants. Marquis, ‘Confederation’s Casualties’.

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hotbed of radical ideas.”126 Ultimately, as Himani Bannerji has argued, the influx of immigrants

from the global south alongside national liberation struggles in Indigenous nations and Quebec

would motivate the federal government’s introduction of multiculturalism policy in 1971, which

had the desired dampening effect on the radicalism of the 1960s.127

Meanwhile, hysteria about the urbanization of unemployed rural Canadians would reach a peak

at the end of the 1960s. The Globe and Mail reported in October 1970 that 5,600 migrants were

arriving in Toronto each year from the Atlantic Provinces and an additional 6,800 were settling

in the suburbs.128 In the fall of 1970 Mobility Counselling Services (formerly Travellers’ Aid)

opened the short-lived but well-used Atlantic Centre on Queen Street West in the

neighbourhood of Parkdale in response to a 1968 Social Planning Council report that focused on

the “problem character of migration from the eastern provinces.”129

In November 1969, in a speech to the Empire Club of Canada, a Toronto lawyer named Richard

Rohmer proposed a solution to what he saw as Canada’s looming urban crisis. Earlier that year a

group of scholars, government officials, and seventy of “Canada’s top industrialists” gathered at

Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario (then Port Arthur) to discuss something called the

Mid-Canada Development Corridor: a nationally coordinated high powered plan to settle and

develop the Canada’s mid-latitudes.130 The idea, which was Rohmer’s outlandish brainchild,

126 Mills, The Empire Within, 7; Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, 5. 127 The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000). On multiculturalism and the muting of radicalism in Toronto see Kanishka Goonewardena and Stefan Kipfer, ‘Spaces of Difference: Reflections from Toronto on Multiculturalism, Bourgeois Urbanism and the Possibility of Radical Urban Politics’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 3 (2005): 670–78. 128 Mary Kate Rowan, ‘Bad Image Hurts Those from East Coast’, The Globe and Mail, 19 October 1970. 129 Susan Anderson, ‘The “Windbreaker Group”’, The Globe and Mail, 24 August 1968. The Centre was an informal agency that “sought and found everything from jobs, boarding houses, and cheap social events to psychological services and hot meals for the never-ending flow of young men and women from the Maritimes provinces who continue to think of Toronto as the place to find their own pot of gold.” Barbara Bagnell, ‘Atlantic Centre in Trouble’, The Globe and Mail, 15 April 1971. The dynamic of eastern migration would be broadcast in the iconic 1970 film Goin’ Down the Road, which portrayed the experience of two unemployed young men from Nova Scotia in their attempt to find a better life in Toronto. Donald Shebib, Goin’ Down the Road, Drama (Evdon Films, 1970). 130 Attendees were met by dissenting Lakehead students, carrying signs saying “Mid-Canada Development Corridor – Another Rape of the North?” Rudy Platiel, ‘Group Calls Corridor Plan “Rape of North”’, The Globe and Mail, 19 August 1969; Rudy Platiel, ‘Citizen Group Plans Protest of Conference’, The Globe and Mail, 18 August 1969. The following October, at their national Congress, the Canadian Union of Students would adopt a resolution denouncing the plan as “structurally committed to exploiting Canadian land, people, and resources for corporate profit” and committing to a “massive effort” to “inform and counter” the concept “on every campus and in every school in Canada.” Canadian Union of Students, Policy Proposals: Canadian Union of Students, 1969 Congress,

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was premised on the assumption that Canada was “expected to become a giant among the

productive nations of the world” and that this growth was “inseparably linked with the

development of natural resources, transportation and defense in Mid-Canada.”131 “The only

additional requirements” as explained in the formal proposal prepared by Acres Research and

Planning Ltd., “are the human and capital resources which are necessary to develop the

country’s wealth.”132 Coordinated settlement of the “green north” was meant to solve this

problem.133 In his address to the Empire Club, Rohmer tied these promising geographies of

resource extraction directly to urban crisis. Quoting the report of the US National Commission

on the Causes and Prevention of Violence at length, he cautioned, “are we so smug to think it

can’t happen here?” referring to the uprisings and violence unfolding in American cities. “The

challenge of Mid-Canada can be met and the battle for Canada’s cities can be won by the same

means,” he asserted; “that is by the use of our knowledge, our intelligence, and our technology

to create both short and long range policies and plans for the orderly growth and development of

this nation.”134

When Rohmer presented the proposal for the Mid-Canada Development Corridor to Prime

Minister Pierre Trudeau in a 1971 meeting, Trudeau flatly rejected it.135 But Rohmer’s plan was

echoing—and finding an audience for—a logic that already laced government policy: that

mobility, modernization, and extraction could, to some degree, together offer a socio-spatial fix

to the urban problem, to so-called underemployment and “stranded manpower,” and to the land

and labour needs of a capital-intensive mining industry. If “stranded manpower” could be

liberated and systems of controlled mobility effectively established, not only could the state

supply labour to expanding industry, it could also help keep unemployed people from amassing

in the cities and shelter capital-intensive extractive sites from the radical imaginaries and

political struggles of the 1960s.s Standing Resolution adopted at the 33rd Congress (Port Arthur, ON, 1969), 23, http://www.studentunion.ca/cfs/1969/1969-09-cus-resolutions.pdf. 131 Acres Research and Planning, Mid-Canada Development Corridor: A Concept, 1967. 132 Acres Research and Planning. Rohmer had commissioned Acres Research and Planning Ltd. in 1967 to prepare a feasibility study. This is the same planning firm that had undertaken the sector studies for the PEI Comprehensive Development Plan. 133 Richard Rohmer, The Green North: Mid-Canada (Toronto: Maclean-Hunter Limited, 1970). 134 Richard Rohmer, ‘The Mid-Canada Development Corridor Conference: A Growing Force in a Growing Country’ (Address to the Empire Club of Canada, 27 November 1969), http://speeches.empireclub.org. 135 My impression is that Trudeau simply dismissed the idea on the spot, perhaps because he saw it as outlandish. In several media accounts, Rohmer is on record speculating that Trudeau rejected it along party lines. E.g. Tristan Hopper, ‘The Failed Plan to Develop the Canadian North’, Yukon News, 25 October 2008, https://www.yukon-news.com/life/the-failed-plan-to-develop-the-canadian-north/.

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Mining mobility

When the numbers were tallied after the Manpower Mobility Program’s first six months of

operation, nearly half of all recipients of mobility grants had entered into occupations in the

mining industry.136 The largest outmigration in geographic terms had been from the Atlantic

Provinces and Quebec while the largest inflow had been into Ontario, a trend consistent with the

key objective “to move workers from high unemployment [sic] to areas where workers are

required.”137 Moreover the data indicated that assistance was being provided to the “less skilled

younger workers with extensive unemployment experience,” and as such, was accomplishing

the goal of “penetrating the long-term unemployed.”138

In April 1966 the Manpower Mobility Program was expanded to provide special grants in areas

experiencing large-scale dislocation.139 When the San Antonio Gold Mine Company announced

the closure of its operations in Bissett, Manitoba, in April 1966, a temporary NES office was set

up to help transfer workers to other areas. Later that year, when Dosco Industries announced its

plans to close the Wabana iron ore mine on Bell Island Newfoundland, these workers also

became subject to these special provisions.140 The federal government would establish an inter-

departmental committee on Bell Island to discuss the possible “re-deployment” of manpower to

the Caland and Steep Rock iron ore mines in Atikokan, Ontario. Meetings were also held to

discuss recruiting unemployed ex-coal miners from Cape Breton to fill posts in logging,

136 This was followed by machine and processing trades and construction “National Employment Committee Minute 943 – Background paper.” Memorandum from W.R. Dymond, A.D.M., Program Development, to Tom Kent, Deputy Minister of Manpower. June 10, 1966. LAC RG26, Vol. 86, file 8-18-2 (part 1). In his letter, Dymond attributes the high proportion of mining labour to the “extensive recruitment drive” that had been put on by the International Nickel Company for its Sudbury mine. This reality was not unrelated to the serious labour strife than had beset the booming Sudbury-area nickel mines, where desperate workers from peripheral places were being used to dilute labour’s mounting power in the mines. Inco’s monopoly over the nickel market was being challenged in the 1960s and it undertook a program of restructuring that eventually let to relocating operations to Indonesia and Guatemala. For a variety of reason after sixty years of operation, Inco lost its position as world price leader in the late 1960s. See Bradbury, ‘International Movements and Crises’. Other analysis selectively excluded relocations to Inco operations for the reason that many of these moves were unsuccessful and, therefore, understood to skew the data; see “Factors Associated with Successful and Less Successful Moves Under the Manpower Mobility Program.” R.A. Jennes, Planning & Evaluations Branch, Program Development Service. April-June 1967. LAC RG26, Vol 149, file 8-35-13-5 – Manpower Mobility Program – Statistics. 137 A reflection again of Inco’s “extensive recruitment drive.” “National Employment Committee Minute 943 – Background paper.” Memorandum from W.R. Dymond, A.D.M., Program Development, to Tom Kent, Deputy Minister of Manpower, p. 2. June 10, 1966. LAC RG26, Vol. 86, file 8-18-2 (part 1). 138 “National Employment Committee Minute 943 – Background paper.” 139 Including Bissett, Manitoba and Bell Island, Newfoundland on account of gold and iron ore mine closures, respectively “National Employment Committee Minute 943 – Background Paper.” 140 “National Employment Committee Minute 943 – Background Paper.”

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sawmills, and plywood plants.141 That same summer plans were made to explicitly extend the

mobility program to apply to rural people who had been displaced from their land holdings by

rural modernization and land use adjustment programs under ARDA or FRED.142

But these administrative efforts to regulate the national labour ‘disequilibrium’ did not live up to

their tidy theorization. As one account in the Globe and Mail recounted, “Efforts to resolve the

labour shortage have resulted in a bitter impasse between the mine operators and the federal

Government…. An ambitious program by the Department of Manpower to recruit unemployed

Canadians for the gold mines has been almost fruitless. Miners without jobs in Cape Breton and

Bell Island, Nfld., seldom want to leave home.”143 As the Mining Association of Canada

explained, while fifteen mining companies quickly sent recruiting officers to Bell Island, their

efforts garnered “negligible” results. Recruiters complained that workers refused to accept the

reality that the local mine would close. Moreover, of the thirty-five workers who showed up for

interviews, many had been unemployed for long periods, had low levels of education, had large

families, and “appeared to be well over 40 years of age.” Ultimately, “a mere handful of men

appeared to be interested in moving to other employment.”144 In summarizing these failed

attempts to redirect mass unemployment, V. C. Wanabrough, Managing Director of the Mining

Association, explained, “mining companies continue to experience difficulties in finding in

Canada men of the right age and physical qualifications for mining employment, and even

where such men can be found, there appears to be a strong reluctance to move from one part of

Canada to another.”145 In November 1966, the Minister of the newly formed Department of

Indian Affairs and Northern Development reminded the Prime Minister of the threat posed by

the labour shortage to current mining operations—in this case, specifically in the Yukon—

141 “Current Manpower Situation and Operations Report.” Department of Manpower and Immigration – Manpower Division – Secretariat. Prepared for the Meeting of the National Employment Committee, Ottawa, December 6 & 7, 1966, p. 5. LAC, RG26, Vol. 149, file 8-37-4 – Operational Highlight Report (General File). 142 See “National Employment Committee Minute 943 – Background Paper.” This operations report from the following December also anticipates this amendment to include people rendered unemployed through ARDA and FRED programs: “Current Situation and Operations Report.” Department of Manpower and Immigration – Manpower Division – Secretariat. Prepared for the Meeting of the National Employment Committee, Ottawa, December 6 & 7, 1966, p. 6. LAC, RG26, Vol. 149, file 8-37-4 – Operational Highlight Report (General File). 143 “There are aches in the pit of a golden stomach,” Globe and Mail. By John G. Doherty. November 22, 1966. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. 144 “Experience of Mining Companies in their Recruitment Efforts at Wabana Mine, Bell Island, Newfoundland.” Memorandum from The Mining Association of Canada. July 1966. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. 145 Letter from V.C. Wanabrough, Managing Director of the Mining Association of Canada, to Jean-Luc Pépin, Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys. July 11, 1966. RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File.

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echoing what was becoming a familiar sentiment in government, “It seems almost ironic that we

should be threatened on the one hand by widespread mining unemployment in the Maritimes

and the serious shortage of mining manpower in the rest of Canada.”146

To better understand the prevalence of these failed placements, the Department of Manpower

initiated a national study of the manpower problem and set up regional committees of

Manpower staff.147 As part of this research agenda, the DMI, through the Manpower Mobility

Program, invested in research aimed at understanding the individual characteristics that resulted

in successful or unsuccessful relocation. Special studies were undertaken in which officials

followed workers who had been given Relocation or Exploration Grants through their

geographical and occupational transitions, focusing on “problems of adjustment” that led to

failed placements. The DMI also collaborated with ARDA to collect information about

relocations that took place as part of regional modernization programs.148

Over the spring of 1967 the Planning and Evaluation Branch conducted a broad survey of

“factors associated with successful and less successful moves” under the MMP. In addition to

geographic patterns of relocation, the study investigated personal characteristics of the mover

(age, marital status and family structure, education, and training), employment history, and

factors related to the relocation environment (distance of relocation, intra- versus inter-

provincial relocation, etc.). Officials hoped the research would “relate the success of the movers

to their characteristics as shown on the MMP application forms” in order to “pinpoint any of

those characteristics that are strongly associated with failures and so improve the selection

146 The United Keno Hill Mines had threatened to close, in part because of these industry-wide manpower problems. Letter from Arthur Liang, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, to Lester B. Pearson, Prime Minister of Canada. November 1, 1966, Ottawa. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. 147 Memorandum to the Minister re: Publicity about negotiations for the admission of Korean miners. From Tom Kent to the Minister of Manpower and Immigration. November 24, 1966, Ottawa. See also letter form G.G. Duclos, Assistant Deputy Minister and Director General, Manpower, to H.A.D. Scott, Director, Ontario Region, Manpower. October 5, 1966, Ottawa. LAC, RG26, Vol. 150, file 8-41-1 – Mining Industry – General File. 148 Much of this research on the qualitative dynamics of manpower mobility and the ‘problems of adjustment’ was carried out by the Manpower Supply Section of the DMI. One such study followed workers who moved from North Sydney to Kingston to work for the Dupont Company of Canada, in an attempt to document the socio-economic characteristics that let to failed placements. See “Program Development Service – Report of Activities.” Addressed to W.R. Dymond, Assistant Deputy Minister of Program Development, from J.P. Francis, Acting Director of the Research Branch. December 8, 1966. Ottawa. LAC, RG26, Vol. 149, file 8-37-2 – Reports – Program Development Service.

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guidelines.”149 Overall, the report explained that, “the reasons for success are more closely tied

to personal or work characteristics than to economic incentive or wage advantage.” That is,

while both successful and unsuccessful relocations were in the direction of higher wages, “the

most significant relationships among the factors contributing to the ultimate success or failure of

the moves, involved the work history of the client.”150 Laying the data out in a tidy table the

report illustrated the degree of “risk” associated with different types of mobility grant

applicants. At the highest risk of failed relocation were “unskilled” and clerical workers,

especially those who had been working in forestry and fishing, construction, mining, and

transportation before becoming unemployed. “Almost equally salient,” the report stated, “was

the number of times that workers had been unemployed in the three years prior to his application

for MMP assistance.”151

Because of insatiable demand in the “new extractive industries” for skilled and unskilled labour,

many recipients of relocation grants had been moved to small and medium sized resource towns

in northern or outlying areas. As the report explained, many of these communities were facing

“genuine labour shortages” due to “unfavourable living or working conditions [and] high

turnover or cyclical variations in the demand in the particular mineral, forest, or resource being

extracted.” Conversely, less than 15 percent of workers with relocation grants had moved to

metropolitan areas of over 100,000.152 But while over 70 percent of relocations into

manufacturing, trade, service, and printing and publishing were successful, only 42.6 percent of

moves into mining (excluding Sudbury) were considered so.153 As the manager of the Sudbury

149 “Factors Associated with Successful and Less Successful Moves Under the Manpower Mobility Program.” R.A. Jennes, Planning & Evaluations Branch, Program Development Service. April-June 1967. LAC RG26, Vol. 149, file 8-35-13-5 – Manpower Mobility Program – Statistics. Appendix IV. 150 “Factors Associated with Successful and Less Successful Moves Under the Manpower Mobility Program,” 6-7. Much of this research on the qualitative dynamics of manpower mobility and ‘problems of adjustment’ was carried out by the Manpower Supply Section of the DMI. One such study followed workers who moved from North Sydney to Kingston to work for the Dupont Company of Canada, in an attempt to document the socio-economic characteristics that led to failed placements. “Program Development Service – Report of Activities.” Addressed to W.R. Dymond, Assistant Deputy Minister of Program Development from J.P. Francis, Acting Director of the Research Branch. December 8, 1966. Ottawa. LAC, RG26, Vol. 149, file 8-37-2 – Reports – Program Development Service. 151 “Factors Associated with Successful and Less Successful Moves Under the Manpower Mobility Program,” 7. 152 “Factors Associated with Successful and Less Successful Moves Under the Manpower Mobility Program,” 5-6. 153 “Factors Associated with Successful and Less Successful Moves Under the Manpower Mobility Program,” Appendix 1, 4. These calculations (and some others) exclude Sudbury because the particular dynamics at Inco were thought to distort the numbers. During the first quarter 28 percent of the relocation grants were to work in Sudbury at Inco. But the turnover rates were “fantastically high,” with 80 percent of these recruits leaving their jobs and the area in the first six months and many leaving after only a few weeks (see page 4). See The Globe and Mail, ‘MacEachen Denies Maritimers Being Dumped in Sudbury’. Manpower planners in Ottawa understood the failure in Sudbury, at least partially, in terms of Inco’s aggressive recruitment practices. The manager of the Sudbury CMC

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Canada Manpower Centre explained in relation to Inco’s extremely high turnover, echoing the

findings of the survey: “many of these people appear to be drifters who had an unsatisfactory

work history in the past.”154

These evaluations of the Manpower Mobility Program lay bare two contrasting realities about

the government’s masterplan for surplus labour. First, to the degree that these programs were

successful—as measured through geography, occupation, and personal characteristics of

grantees—it allows us to peek behind the opaque curtain of technocracy and calculation and see

something about the overarching logic at work in this particular manifestation of modernist state

planning. Here, we see clearly displayed not only the drive to coordinate surplus and maximize

efficiency but also the degree to which this struggle over surplus entangled the management of

labour with the management of land, resources, and political imaginaries. As evidenced by the

pathways of these workers, these experiments in comprehensive planning were not only about

dispersing the unemployed, but also securing access to resources, controlling land, and

funneling peripheral people and places into futures the state deemed productive.

But secondly, these evaluations also reveal the failure of comprehensive planning. In his work

on high modernism, James C. Scott emphasizes the hubris with the state has undertaken

modernist improvement projects—an impulse on clear display in the case at hand.155 Canadian

bureaucrats and politicians not only assumed that they knew best how to organize lives, nature,

and economies. They also worked under the guiding assumption that people—poor and

variously marginalized people in particular—could and would be perfectly managed; that

through the right combination of incentives and disincentives, individuals and populations

would be persuaded to rationally line up behind an agenda of order, productivity, and

unquestioned capitalist progress.

This clumsy set of assumptions, unsurprisingly, made little room for the complex texture of

daily life, the communities in which “surplus labour” was embedded, and systems of value that noted that there was no “simple answer”: “Doubtless, housing, poor working conditions, the weather, unattractive landscape etc. all contribute to the cause but basically we would say that the men recruited were unsuited to the environment and/or the work.” He noted that, while Inco had had a high attrition rate in the past several years, it was increasing, suggesting that workers needed to be better selected and informed about what they would encounter (see pages 12-13). Recall also Inco’s early adoption of “people technology” to refine its labour process. Clement, ‘The Subordination of Labour in Canadian Mining’. 154 “Factors Associated with Successful and Less Successful Moves Under the Manpower Mobility Program,” 12. 155 Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

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deviated even slightly from the rational march of progress and the reification of waged work.

While the peripheral populations being recruited into the mining industry had certain

characteristics that fit with a program of national coordination—poverty and desperation,

concentrated unemployment, low education and “skill” levels, and a general dearth of options—

in other ways, it was exactly the fact that these populations were physically, economically, and

socially peripheral to the modern economy that made them problematic for employers. For these

were geographies that held traces of value systems and modes of economic life that stood, at

least to some degree, apart from the rapid teleology of industrial expansion that characterized

the mining industry and much of post-war Canada. Somewhat paradoxically, these workers’

precarious attachment to the waged workforce was at once the thing that made them desirable

and the thing that made them “risky.” On one hand, yes, this state of semi-proletarianization and

workers’ access to state benefits offered a pressure-valve that employers favoured, allowing

workers to go back to their home communities and other forms of subsistence when their labour

was not needed.156 But, these same qualities also meant that these groups of workers were not

wholly dependent on these long-distance wage labour markets and, as such, were more difficult

to manage and manipulate. That is, much to the frustration of employers and state planners, if an

unemployed worker in Cape Breton or Bell Island didn’t want to leave home, the conditions

were such that perhaps he didn’t need to. In this way, the fantasy of the nationally coordinated

and centrally managed national labour market came up against wildly contradictory

understandings of geography and work, non-monetary systems of valuation, and the actual

complexity of everyday lives.

Conclusion: Uneven development as socio-spatial fix

Ultimately, efforts to impose these types of legibility on the national labour market were undone

by a failure of effective forecasting and lack of statistical data.157 Regardless, throughout this

156 See Sacouman, ‘Semi-Proletarianization and Rural Underdevelopment in the Maritimes’. 157 As Grundy highlights, this technical failure was in addition to contestation on the part of equity-seeking groups who were largely cut out or disciplined by these programs. And, ultimately, neoliberal ethos would foreclose this type of coordinated state-led planning. As the global economic context began to change in the 1970s and the welfare state began to fall out of style, enthusiasm waned for large-scale labour market planning. While UI underwent a major expansion in 1971, the latter half of the decade saw the beginning of a long retrenchment of the program. After the 1970s expansion of UI, business and conservative think tanks sounded alarms about a crisis of UI abuse: rhetoric that was later used to justify lowering benefit levels and policing claimants. Unemployment came to be understood not as a structural problem, but as an individual choice, which could be blamed on work disincentives facing low-wage workers (including access to ‘generous’ benefits). Labour market policy came to focus on molding (and re-molding) the worker to the conditions of the market; the problem lay with the worker and the solution to unemployment was seen to lie in improving workers’ ‘employability’ through continual re-skilling,

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technocratic failure of manpower planning, the federal government upheld its modernist

ambitions, expanding the Manpower Mobility Program even into the late 1960s. As Grundy

recounts, during its first years of operation, the DMI largely failed to actually conduct any

forecasting and “by the early seventies, manpower forecasting had become a somewhat

discredited practice.”158 In its 1971 annual report, the Economic Council of Canada labeled

manpower forecasting still a “primitive art,” admitting that, “It is not possible to produce, with

any degree of confidence, forecasts of the needs for specific jobs in particular areas.”159 And as

global economic context began to change in the 1970s and the clench of neoliberalism tightened

around welfare state policy, enthusiasm waned for large-scale labour market planning. But,

while the fading efforts of 1960s active manpower policy were considered to have been largely

unsuccessful, the idea that state-managed uneven development could serve as a solution to the

staples-labour problem remained entrenched.

Throughout this chapter, I have tried to weave together a set of seemingly disparate crises:

stranded rural manpower, surplus capacity in mining, resistance to northern development, and

urban unemployment. In trying to connect the dispersed people and places at the centre of these

histories, my aim has been to illustrate how mobility, modernization, and extraction came to be

seen as together offering a socio-spatial fix to the adjoined problems of so-called

underemployment, the urban crisis, the needs of the capital-intensive mining industry, and the

radical imaginaries of the 1960s. Throughout the state’s attempt to manage these intersecting

crises, uneven national development emerged as both a problem and a solution. The necessarily

uneven geographies produced and exacerbated by the post-war doctrine of modernization and

urbanization shunted particular people and places to the periphery of post-war progress. But this

unevenness then opened new potential opportunities for exploitation—of marginal land and

labour—and the state’s expanded capacity promised the potential to realize this exploitation.

rather than through job creation or state interventions in structural unemployment. During this time, invoking the prevalence of voluntary unemployment, manpower services were reintegrated with UI in the formation of the Employment and Immigration Canada in 1977. The Department required claimants in high demand occupations to report to Manpower Centres for interviews about their job search efforts or participate in a placement drive, both of which could result in disqualification. By tethering access to specific behaviour, UI gained new powers when it came to individual discipline. Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’; Ann Porter, Gendered States: Women, Unemployment Insurance, and the Political Economy of the Welfare State in Canada, 1945-1997 (University of Toronto Press, 2003). 158 Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’, 8. 159 Economic Council of Canada, Design for Decision-Making: An Application to Human Resources Policies (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1971), 122–23; as quoted in Grundy, ‘Administering Employability’, 85.

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The management and exploitation of uneven development in the service of the staples-labour

problem is still central to the way Canada’s extractive workforce is imagined and managed.

Today, employers in extractive industries strive to harness what one major oil sands operator

described to me as “vulnerable talent”: workers facing poverty, unemployment, and a dearth of

options in their home communities. Fluid labour mobility is widely cast as always and only a

positive thing and the movement of labour from places of high unemployment into extractive

industries that are (periodically) hungry for workers is often described as a “win-win.” In

invoking this national labour flexibility, industry and governments employ the language of

mismatches, shortages, and paradoxes and the practices of forecasting, planning, and

coordination. In doing so, they render the complex and chaotic experiences of unemployment,

precarity, and mobility into a technical problem. Here, by looking at this contemporary dynamic

historically, I have tried to retrieve the drive for national labour flexibility from the grip of these

seemingly apolitical and technical narratives.

Like today, the hysteria around extractive manpower shortages in the 1960s belongs squarely

within the broader context of Canada’s extractive political economy, produced geographies of

poverty and underdevelopment, and ever-present struggles in the realm of the political

imaginary that were particularly potent in the 1960s. By the 1990s, with the further

consolidation of agriculture, the rise of the service sector, and the expansion of the Western

Canadian oil industry, the geographies of surplus, crisis, and uneven development would shift in

ways that continue to serve the extractive sector today. The next half of the dissertation takes up

these more contemporary geographies, examining how many of the same stories about labour

markets, workers, and the national economy continue to frame relations of extraction. The next

chapter stays with the theme of workforce management and calculation, examining the

dynamics of labour market planning, long-distance mobility, and market volatility in the

contemporary Alberta oil industry.

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Part II: Trajectories

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4. From “vulnerable talent” to just-in-time work: Building the talent pipeline

Everything depends on the workers—their wants, their needs, their safety. Controlling workers is like herding cats. They have to be housed, fed, paid, protected, cajoled, nursed, ordered, and, if need be, fired. Materials can be ordered months, even years, in advance; workers can’t. Steel can be stored in the snow; men can’t. Equipment prices can be discounted if bought in bulk. Men? No, manpower is the great unknown.

- Rick Ranson, Bittersweet Sands1 Industry has to have the ability to bring in workers and to shed those workers.

- Executive Director of industry-led construction organization

What to make of labour markets?

The first three chapters focused quite closely on the state’s fantasies, logics, and mechanisms for

imagining and coordinating labour markets. Using a genealogical approach, I have tried to move

between detailed historical accounts and the present moment to offer a sense of how these

stories live on and continue to play an important role in shaping the material and ideological

contours of staples labour. The second half of the dissertation shifts focus toward what I am

calling trajectories. Looking more directly at the present, these chapters examine a somewhat

dispersed set of stories that frame contemporary pathways between east and west: stories about

the national labour market, the rural economy, and workers themselves. Picking up on many of

the themes from the first section, my focus here is more directly on how the contemporary

version of a more generalized phenomenon—the flexible mobilization of marginal workers in

the staples economy—comes to be understood as normal. Throughout the next three chapters I

loosen (but do not lose) my focus on the nation-state, to examine also the stories and logics of

employers, employment counsellors, local economic planning, media, and workers themselves.

Since the high modernist experiments in labour market coordination, the fraught politics of

labour shortages and mismatches in staples industries have carried on. While the overt fantasy

of state coordination has certainly subsided, as we saw in these early chapters, the Canadian

welfare state persists as a mechanism for labour market coordination and continues to shape

national ideologies about work, productivity, and the use of ‘national’ resources. Since the rise

of the oil sands and Stephen Harper’s promise that Canada would become an “energy

1 Rick Ranson, Bittersweet Sands: 24 Days in Fort McMurray (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2014), 7.

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superpower,” industry and government concerns about finding, acquiring, and mobilizing the

right workers have been front and centre. Industry reports, media, and government

communiqués have issued both warnings and strategies for refining the “people supply chain,”

fixing the skills and labour “crunch,” and resolving the labour “mismatch.”2 As we have seen,

governments and elected officials have picked up on this theme, pondering how to, in the words

of Conservative Member of Parliament, Brian Jean, “get people from one part of the country to

another….” As Jean explained, “I’m talking about people in Ontario and Quebec, how do

we…encourage them to come out to Fort McMurray to take up these great jobs…?”3 In the

years that followed, the Harper government would mobilize austerity, welfare policy, and

immigration in an attempt to foster workforce flexibility and make Canadian uneven

development and geographies of unemployment work for oil sands expansion. In 2013, when

Jason Kenney was appointed Minister of Employment and Social Development, he flagged this

‘problem’ almost immediately, promptly tweeting that he would: “work hard to end the paradox

of too many people without jobs in an economy that has too many jobs without people.”4

I had been tracking the debates about the Alberta labour shortage—which I explain in some

detail below—since the early 2010s, but I started to think harder about the way labour markets

and labour mobility are narrated when I travelled to Alberta late in my research to try to get a

grasp on how people in the oil industry (both conventional and oil sands) think and talk about

this workforce. During these interviews with employers, as I detail throughout this chapter, they

were quite clear about their use of uneven development and both seasonal and concentrated

unemployment in the ways they target and recruit labour. But their stories about how these often

distant and very social geographies could be translated into fluid mobility and economic

efficiencies varied somewhat dramatically—most notably across the conventional oil industry

and the oil sands. Employers on the conventional side and in petroleum services were far more

likely to tell me stories about individual workers, to discuss the challenge of being away from

2 Deloitte, Balancing the People Equation: How Enhanced Collaboration Can Help Solve Labour Challenges in the Oil Sands (Deloitte & Touche, 2013); Ernst & Young, Human Resources in Canada’s Oil and Gas Sector; Hussain, ‘No Quick Fix for the Labour Crunch: CAPP’; Atunes, ‘Don’t Be Fooled by 7% Unemployment: A Labour Shortage Is Coming’; Kenney, ‘Ensuring Canada’s Continued Economic Success’; Janet Lane and Jeff Griffiths, Matchup: A Case for Pan-Canadian Competency Frameworks (Calgary: Canada West Foundation, 2017), http://cwf.ca/research/publications/matchup-a-case-for-pan-canadian-competency-frameworks/. 3 Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Standing Committee on Finance, Minutes of Proceedings. 4 E.g. Atunes, ‘Don’t Be Fooled by 7% Unemployment: A Labour Shortage Is Coming’; Kenney, ‘Ensuring Canada’s Continued Economic Success’; Kenney, ‘I Will Work Hard to End the Paradox of Too Many People without Jobs in an Economy That Has Too Many Jobs without People. #shuffle13’.

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home, to talk about the places workers were from, and to share specific anecdotes (e.g. about

helping someone travel home for a funeral). On the oil sands side, the story I heard was quite

grand: national in scale, far more abstracted from specific places and people, focused on the

calculations and forecasting of workforce planning, and explained using more technical

language. Given the very different structures of these distinct parts of the industry, these

differences make sense. They arise from their different scales, temporalities, geographies, and

degrees of capital intensity. But, hearing these dramatically different stories about what labour

mobility actually looks like got me thinking about how standard representations of labour

market dynamics, problems, and solutions—shortages, mismatches, paradoxes, pipelines—are

profoundly dehumanizing, cleansing a fundamentally social process of any actual human life.

One morning on this research trip, in the atrium of a downtown Calgary skyscraper, I asked a

human resources manager specializing in recruitment strategies for an oil sands operator to

introduce me to the company’s workforce planning process. In a whir of jargon and positive

spin, he got right to it. “We spend a lot of time understanding, I would say, not only the ones

and zeros of what the workforce needs to look like in the short term,” he told me, “but we also

spend quite a bit of time looking at what we call our long range plans, or our strategic workforce

plans.” As the references to ones and zeros continued, I asked for more details about what this

meant on the ground. He delved into an example of what the company’s planning strategy

would look like for a new project. After identifying the “critical talent segments,” he explained,

the human resources department collaborates with the respective leadership teams within the

company to identify specific recruitment needs:

Where do we think we need to find talent internally? Which of these roles could we fill

externally? We do all the research to show, you know, where this talent is available in

Canada, and we bring that into the conversation. So, when a leader says, we know we

can’t fill it internally. And we’ll say, well, if we actually look at the supply data we

know that there are pockets of this data available in these locations across Canada; and

then, what would be our opportunity to potentially draw on that pocket? So, do we want

to fly a plane in to pick people up? Do we want to work through another method to get

them to travel or come to work? And those…kinds of things.

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“And what sort of data are you looking at then?” I asked. “When you say the data would be

available in particular parts of the country, would that be as a result of, say, a mass layoff, a

mine closure, or—”

“So we do that on a regular basis,” he answered. “Vulnerable talent, we call it vulnerable talent.

It’s just our own terminology. And, essentially, it’s just constantly scanning the marketplace to

identify mines that are closing, talent that is becoming available, operations that are slowing

down. So, we try to understand all of that.”

Vulnerability here is a slippery word. Not to be mistaken as a benevolent attempt to employ

“vulnerable” people, this reference to vulnerability signalled economic vulnerability and, as a

result, vulnerability to recruitment. The company sought out these landscapes of concentrated

unemployment not simply because, in these places, “talent” was “becoming available.” They

pursued these places also because, by virtue of the vulnerability of being unemployed, these

people could be compelled to travel for work—in a way, of course, that was financially and

logistically acceptable to the company. Here, dressed up in bizarre array of sanitized

descriptions, was something of the human side of these labour markets. A subtle

acknowledgement not only that social geographies shape markets and mobility, but also, that, if

they want certain access to workers, employers must engage with these geographies.

Listening to this, I thought back to a specific story from my research in the national archives that

had stuck with me. I came across the story when reading records about agricultural labour

mobility programs from the 1960s; in particular, a file I that included a variety of

correspondence between employers, managers of Canada Manpower Centres (CMCs), and

government officials. The basic discussion—both within many of these letters and also across

the various documents—was to do with the pros and cons of different pools of seasonally

available labour. In this context, that included different groups of domestic workers, students

(some internationally recruited), workers from the US, and workers from the Caribbean who

were being recruited through the Canadian government’s new seasonal agricultural labour

program. Among the domestic workers were those recruited through CMCs located in Quebec,

Newfoundland, and the Maritime region: generally, unemployed workers who were to be

matched with available work (in this case, seasonal work elsewhere) and supported in their

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relocation to take up these jobs.5 The small number of documents in this file say little about the

broader functioning of the program (something I actually know little about), but the letters in

this file have stuck with me because they illustrate the deeply human character of labour

markets. This is an example of state-coordinated labour mobility; but the chaos, contradictions,

and, at times, comedy of the seemingly simple task of coordinating people—unemployed and

economically marginal people, in particular—for purposes of work resonate.

One letter sent to Ottawa from the Manpower Centre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, recounts

the detailed tale of two men who were dispatched to Ontario for farm work. After landing at the

Ottawa CMC, only one man was offered work and at wages much lower than he thought he had

been promised. With but this poor offer on the table and no work for the second man, after one

day in Ottawa they travelled by train to Toronto to stay with family before returning to New

Glasgow. In a letter from the CMC in Midland, Ontario, the Centre manager tells of two

workers from Gander, Newfoundland, who arrived in Orillia, Ontario with travel warrants for a

train service from there to Midland that had never existed. A long letter from the CMC in

Oakville, Ontario, recounts a dispute between a local farmer and a surly-sounding worker from

Alma, Quebec. The farmer complained of his recruit’s poor English, tendency to sleep late,

frequent long-distant phone calls, and poor attitude: when asked to clean out the cattle stalls, the

worker declared, “it stinks.” After only one week on the job, the he threatened to quit, preferring

to seek work as a truck driver. When informed that Manpower could not help him do this, he

returned to Alma. A particularly memorable memo from the Ottawa CMC in May 1968 tells the

story of Robert Jones who had been dispatched to Ottawa by CMC Cornerbrook, where, as an

inexperienced farm hand, he was placed on a local farm. The following day, Jones returned to

the Centre, explaining that the farmer could not actually hire him because he (Jones) had a fear

of cows. “It was indicated that at this time all available farm work involves cows,” explains the

manager in the memo. “Therefore, as a result of Jones’ fear of cows, coupled with his

inexperience, no suitable farm employment was presently available.” Jones indicated that he

would make his way to Guelph, Ontario, as he had relatives in that town.6

5 As I have noted previously in the context of mining employment, employers did not generally have positive feelings about workers recruited through Canada Manpower Centres. They were, after all, registered with their local CMC on account of their unemployment and were therefore understood to be poor quality workers. 6 These letters are all from: LAC RG118, Vol. 244, file 9-6-4 (Vol. 59) – Farm Workers from Quebec and Maritime Region and Newfoundland. See also (in the same Volume) file 9-6-1 (Vol. 21) – Agriculture – (Farm) Labour – General Policy.

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As I sat in that Calgary skyscraper learning about oil sands labour markets, I tried to find the

story of the man who was scared of cows: to get past the ones and zeros and see the social

dimension of these labour relations. While they were glaringly obvious in some ways—most

notably, in the company’s pursuit of concentrated economic vulnerability—these labour market

dynamics, recruitment practices, and mobility patterns were narrated through alienating and

abstract language that made them difficult to see. My focus in this chapter is on this disjuncture:

between the idea of the labour market as an objective matter of calculative coordination and the

messy realities of the everyday people and social relations that constitute these markets. These

little anecdotes from the archival record are useful because they lend texture to the story that

labour markets and labour mobility are fluid and seamless things. Through the state’s intensive

efforts at coordination and, in contrast, the banal but intimate details of these obscure lives, the

labour market comes into view as neither fluid nor abstract. Rather, in these detailed accounts of

Canadian bureaucrats’ desperate attempts to manage the national labour market by connecting

those in need of work with those offering it, the pesky realities of people’s (migrant workers,

farmers, and Manpower workers) biological and social existences pave the way with hiccups:

personalities, fears, language, bodily rhythms, sensitivities to smell, administrative errors,

attachment to place and people. The banal and random nature of these hiccups combined with

the state’s seeming incompetence gives these stories an air of absurdity—and some are funny—

but here I want to take them seriously as indicative of the ways labour markets are actually

constituted, as indicative of what labour markets actually are. In this way, this chapter throws

into question these clean, objective, and scientific representations of the labour market so as to

highlight the social basis of working lives that this technical narrative obscures.

Against this pervasive common sense talk of labour shortages, I examine the ways that industry

structures and represents various solutions to its problems of labour acquisition, from the

infrastructure of labour delivery to the recruitment of “vulnerable talent.” I argue that, while

many of these measures have certainly facilitated industry’s access to new pools of workers,

they are not simply driven by a shortage of local labour or an attempt to drive down wages by

expanding the labour pool. They are also, across their diversity, attempts to secure certainty:

certain access to workers; certain delivery of labour; certain productivity and efficiency; certain

reliability; and, above all, certain reproduction of this carefully managed workforce across the

seasons and the “slumps” that characterize oil activity in Alberta. Ultimately, this certainty for

industry is built on intensifying uncertainty for workers. But the sanitized story of the labour

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market and the fluid movement of workers make these social dynamics difficult to see:

naturalizing these dramatic pathways, masking the contingent nature of the work, and discretely

downloading the volatility of the market off of industry and onto workers.

I begin by reviewing some background on the Alberta labour shortage. The bulk of the chapter

examines the work and mobility regimes of, first, rotational fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) camp-based

oil sands work and, second, (mostly seasonal) work in conventional oil and petroleum services.

While I have tried to offer a detailed account of how these workplaces are actually organized

and what mobility and work in this industry means in the daily lives of workers, I also attend to

the way that industry’s search for certainty gets storied: in the tar sands, through labour

shortages, workplace safety, and talent pipelines; for seasonal employers, through strong social

relationships and mutual loyalty. But, across their differences, these stories serve a similar

purpose.7 Workers make this clear when they collectively sum up the range of their jobs, skill-

sets, temporalities, and wages as simply “out west”: a status that signifies not a particular job or

even a particular place but, rather, absence, wages, and the challenge of “riding out” inevitable

periodic “slumps.” These representations underscore the degree to which, for both mobile

workers and employers, the common feature that traverses these employment relationships is

irregularity: irregularity of rotations and cycles, but, more importantly, seasons and “slumps.”

The possibility of accommodating this irregularity—in Alberta oil today, but also across much

broader historical geographies of extraction, as the first half of the dissertation explores—is the

promised virtue of east coast labour that this diversity of employers is always chasing.

Energy superpower, labour market panic

Industry and government anxiety about shortages and mismatches of workers and skills reached

an apex of sorts in the early 2010s, but warnings about the problem of labour acquisition had

started several years earlier. When Alberta’s unemployment fell below 4 percent in 2005, local

policy makers sounded the alarm about an impending labour shortage and called for a labour

7 For this reason, throughout the chapter, I move somewhat fluidly between different types of labour: between oil sands and conventional; between construction, production, and maintenance in the oil sands; between drilling and oilfield services in conventional petroleum. I do try to make clear distinctions where it matters: for a seismic employer turning to east coast fishing communities in search of seasonal winter employees, for example. But, there are many ways in which the differences between different parts of the sector, and even other resource sectors, are not central here.

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force development plan.8 The following year, the Conference Board of Canada issued an

incredible prediction that Alberta would be short 332,000 workers by 2025.9 In 2006, Alberta

launched a ten-year workforce development strategy with the goals of improving labour market

research and increasing labour supply, skill, and productivity.10 Framed by the province’s rapid

economic growth and impending Baby Boomer retirements, the strategy generally—and the

elements focused on the energy sector specifically—emphasized the importance of attracting

interprovincial and international mobile workers, but also increasing labour force participation

rates amongt local underrepresented groups.11 The problem of labour recruitment was

understood to be exacerbated in the energy sector by whole series of other factors: intra-and

interprovincial competition, disinterest among young workers in joining the industry, increased

skill requirements, the inflated local cost of living, the sector’s perceived instability, difficult

working conditions, and a lack of quality labour market information, among others.12 Workplace

diversification strategies were meant to confront these problems by targeting ‘underutilized’

groups for training and recruitment including interprovincial migrants and immigrants; First

Nations, Métis, and Inuit workers; people with disabilities; people with low literacy; women;

and older workers.13

Companies developed their own recruiting practices in keeping with these strategies, but also

demanded targeted policy changes to address the labour bottleneck in the province’s economic

development. Employers assured governments and the public that the labour crisis was

temporary—a simple problem of lagging adjustment within a context of rapid industrial

8 Canada. Alberta., Understanding Alberta’s Labour Force: Looking to the Future, Discussion Document (Edmonton, AB: Government of Alberta, 2005). That year, the Alberta government forecasted that 400,000 jobs would be created in the province over the following decade but only 314,000 workers would enter the workforce, leaving a gap of 86,000 workers. Government of Alberta. Alberta Human Resources and Employment, Alberta’s Occupational Demand and Supply Outlook, 2005-2015 (Edmonton, AB: Government of Alberta, 2005); cited in Government of Alberta. Alberta Human Resources and Employment, Building and Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce: Alberta’s 10-Year Strategy (Edmonton, AB: Government of Alberta, 2006), http://work.alberta.ca/documents/BETW-strategy.pdf. 9 Alicia Macdonald, Alberta’s Labour Shortage: Just the Tip of the Iceberg, Executive Action Report (Conference Board of Canada, 2006), http://www.conferenceboard.ca/e-library/abstract.aspx?did=1711. 10 Government of Alberta. Alberta Human Resources and Employment, Building and Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce. 11 Government of Alberta. Alberta Employment and Immigration, A Workforce Strategy for Alberta’s Energy Sector, Building and Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce: Alberta’s 10 Year Strategy (Edmonton, AB: Government of Alberta, 2007), employment.alberta.ca/BI/3282.html. 12 Government of Alberta. Alberta Employment and Immigration. 13 E.g. Government of Alberta. Alberta Employment and Immigration; Government of Alberta. Alberta Employment and Immigration, Employing a Diverse Workforce: Making It Work (Edmonton, AB: Government of Alberta, 2008). These are just two industry-wide examples; this trend appears in the workforce planning documents of most industry players, including companies, government agencies, and other industry organizations.

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growth—and that exceptional policy measures designed to induce flexibility and ease

recruitment were only stop-gap solutions within a longer-term strategy. Most notable were

perhaps the dramatic changes to the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program. In 2006, in

response to rapid growth in certain sectors and regions of the Canadian economy, including

resources and construction in Western Canada, the newly elected Conservative Harper

government expanded the Low Skill Pilot Project of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program,

which allows employers to recruit migrant workers for so-called low skilled occupations.14 In

addition, the government also developed a list of “Regional Occupations Under Pressure,”

focused on Alberta and British Columbia, that enabled employers in these regions to fast-track

their applications for migrant workers.15 These decisions were part of a broader trend to

prioritize flexible and temporary labour over permanent migration, internationally and

domestically.16 Alberta employers celebrated their expanded access to this just-in-time

14 Prior to 2002, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (which is separate from the older and more well-known Seasonal Agricultural Worker and Live-in Caregiver Programs) was used to attract highly skilled workers. In 2002 the government introduced the Low Skilled Worker Pilot Project to the TWFP, dramatically expanding the range of occupations through which workers could enter Canada on a temporary, restrictive work visa. In the wake of these changes, targeted at low-skilled and unskilled workers, the number of temporary foreign workers entering the country has risen quickly and dramatically. The number of workers entering Canada through this restrictive program swelled, nearly doubling between 2006 and 2013, when it surpassed 100,000. Canada. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Research and Evaluations Branch, Canada Facts and Figures: Immigrant Overview, Temporary Residents, 2014 (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2015), http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/pdf/2014-Facts-Figures-Temporary.pdf; see also Alberta Federation of Labour, Temporary Foreign Workers: Alberta’s Disposable Workforce, The Six-month Report of the AFL’s Temporary Foreign Worker Advocate (Edmonton, AB: Alberta Federation of Labour, 2007), www.alf.org. In 2012, amidst the chaos of the omnibus budget bill, the Conservatives introduced reforms that made it legal to pay temporary foreign workers up to 15 percent less than the prevailing wage. Leaning on the lingering financial crisis and using familiar logic, Human Resources Minister, Dianne Finley explained, “We are taking action to ensure that the temporary foreign worker program support [sic] our economic recovery and effectively responds to local labour market demands.” Toronto Star, ‘Two-Tiered Wage System Announced by Tories’, The Toronto Star, 28 April 2012, online edition, https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2012/04/28/twotiered_wage_system_announced_by_tories.html. When the TFWP fell out of public favour after several high profile media scandals in 2014, the Canadian government contracted the program in step with changing public opinion. Outlined in a document entitled “Putting Canadians First,” the 2014 changes to the TFWP specifically focused on low-skill work in high unemployment regions, forcing workers out of positions some had held for years and presenting many with the risk of deportation. Canada. Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, Putting Canadians First: Overhauling the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, WP-191-10-14E (Ottawa, 2014), http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2015/edsc-esdc/Em4-1-2015-eng.pdf. 15 Jason Foster, ‘Making Temporary Permanent: The Silent Transformation of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program’, Just Labour 19 (Autumn 2012): 22–46. 16 The constraints of temporary immigration programs are important to consider both in direct oil employment and in occupations that support this industry—namely social reproductive work. Sara Dorow has chronicled the global division of labour that underpins the Fort McMurray economy more broadly, emphasizing that flexible work structures in the oil industry are reliant on care and service work done overwhelmingly by women of colour, many of who are working under the constraints of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and the Live-in Caregiver Program. Sara Dorow, ‘Gendering Energy Extraction in Fort McMurray’, in Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracy in Canada, ed. Meenal Shrivastava and Lorna Stefanick (Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press, 2015), 275–92; Dorow, ‘The “Elastic” Oil Sands Commute(r): The Uneven Work of Mobility’; Sara Dorow, Marcella S. Cassiano, and Chad Doerksen, ‘Live-in Caregivers in Fort McMurray: A Socioeconomic Footprint’, On

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workforce. Facing language barriers, restricted access to social programs and education,

compromised legal status, limited freedom of movement, restrictions on changing employers,

and the pervasive threat of deportation, this workforce is vulnerable to wage theft, safety

violations, and other workplace abuses. In the oil sands context, the vulnerability of workers

was made visible in 2007 when two Chinese employees of Sinopec Shanghai Engineering

Canada working on the CNRL Horizon site were killed when the roof of a storage tank under

construction collapsed.17

Reports and research continued to surface claiming a crisis of labour availability, and these

claims continued to spawn exceptional policy measures meant to temper the crisis, including

measures targeting workers in other parts of Canada. In its 2008 survey of the Canadian

economy, the OECD flagged the labour shortage in Alberta explaining that, “The challenge for

the oil sands sector is not only to find the right skills to cope with the complexity of the projects

being undertaken but also to attract these people to Fort McMurray in the remote Wood Buffalo

region.”18 In addition to the measures outlined in the provincial workforce development

strategy, the OECD pointed to the potential for employment insurance reform to help address

the labour shortage. The report suggests that regionally uneven entrance requirements (based on

local labour market conditions) “can retard economic adjustment by encouraging individuals to

remain in regions with poor economic conditions.”19 One month later, conservative think tank,

the Fraser Institute, released a report called “Eliminating barriers to labour mobility,” focused

on increasing employer access to skilled workers in the oil sands industry.20 In addition to trade

certification requirements and limitations to international trade agreements, the report, again,

flags employment insurance as a “barrier” to market-driven labour mobility. The concern

persisted through the global financial crisis of 2008. Ernst & Young declared, “While much of

the world is understandably focused on today’s fluctuating economic conditions, there is a

looming demographic and labour market crisis in the oil and gas sector that has the potential to

the Move Partnership (Edmonton, AB: Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, 2015), www.onthemovepartnership.ca. 17 David Thurton, ‘Fatality Inquiry into Death of Chinese Worker at CNRL Site Slammed by Labour Group’, CBC News, 23 March 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fatality-inquiry-fort-mcmurray-chinese-cnrl-death-2007-1.4037203. 18 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Economic Surveys: Canada 2008 (OECD Publishing, 2008), 107. 19 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 107. 20 Gerry Angevine and Graham Thomson, ‘Eliminating Barriers to Worker Mobility: Increasing the Availability of Skilled Labor in Alberta’s Oil Sands Industry’, Fraser Alert (Fraser Institute, July 2008), www.fraserinstitute.org.

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shake the very foundations of the industry.”21 This report held that, while the “skills crunch” is a

familiar problem on account of the industry’s cyclical character, beginning around 2009, the

problem became “deeper and more systemic than anything the industry has grappled with

before.”

For a time, companies did try to recruit workers to the Fort McMurray area. At least some

companies offered housing support and other incentives to encourage workers from elsewhere to

resettle locally. They invested heavily in local amenities including parks, recreation centres, and

sports facilities. As I explore below, the emphasis in the industry, especially for construction,

would eventually shift toward FIFO (fly-in, fly-out) and BIBO (bus-in, bus-out) arrangements.

Forty-seven has been widely quoted as the impressive number of private airstrips that dot the

Athabasca oil sands region, although most of the air traffic is concentrated among the biggest of

these airports.22 Between 2004 and 2008, the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo’s shadow

population living in project accommodations (work camps) more than tripled, rising from 8,668

to 28,784 before peaking at 51,101 in 2014.23

If you build it, they will come: The infrastructure of labour delivery

“I stayed at almost every fucking camp in Fort McMurray, yep,” Pierce recalled, when I asked

him about camp life. I sipped my black coffee as I listened, trying to relax into the conversation.

I had known Pierce a bit as kid: the older brother of one of my friends and classmates. He had

responded to one of my postings on Kijiji, which was the only way I found any real success in

recruiting interviewees anonymously. We were surprised to see each other when I rang the

doorbell and he answered the door of this big old Charlottetown house where he was house-

sitting for a friend. It had been years since we had seen each other and now, here I was, asking 21 Ernst & Young, Human Resources in Canada’s Oil and Gas Sector. 22 See PressProgress, ‘No Regs Anytime Soon, but Tar Sands Workers to Double by 2016’, PressProgress, 20 December 2013, http://pressprogress.ca/no_regs_anytime_soon_but_tar_sands_workers_to_double_by_2016_internal_docs/; Mika Rekai, ‘The Crowded Airspace over the Oilsands’, Macleans.Ca, 25 March 2013, http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/welcome-aboard-air-congestion/; Susan Andre, ‘Disaster Waiting to Happen?’, Alberta Oil Magazine, 21 July 2014, https://www.albertaoilmagazine.com/2014/07/wild-skies-oil-sands-airways/. 23 In the following years, the numbers would fluctuate. After dropping slightly during the financial crisis (25,413 in 2010) the shadow population rose to 51,101 in 2014 before falling to 43,084 in 2015. Note, however, that prior to 2012, the shadow population numbers were comprised solely of camp accommodations (number supplied by the Oil Sands Developers Group). Numbers for the years after 2012 include the full diversity of the shadow population: camp accommodations as well as all urban and rural accommodation facilities throughout the Municipality. Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, The Municipal Census 2015 Report (RMWB, 2015), www.rmwb.ca/census.

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him to let me peer into his life. He, honestly, didn’t seem to mind though. When I thanked him

at the end of the interview he got up from the table and said he should be the one thanking me:

he had appreciated the opportunity to talk—to vent—about it. That, in and of itself, should tell

me something, he insisted.

Pierce went out in the early days of the oil sands boom and considered himself to be one of the

lucky ones: he managed to actually get jobs and make money, and he did pretty well at staying

healthy, out of trouble, and away from drugs. Others he knew had not been so lucky. He had

originally gone out to pay down student debt from a university degree he had not finished.

During the years he spent working in Alberta—working odd jobs at first, then driving heavy

haulers, and, ultimately, surveying—he had experienced a fleeting highlife and had managed to

pay off his loans. But his Alberta work experience had translated into little else. At the time of

our interview, he was back on the Island (his preference), unemployed, bouncing between

house-sitting gigs, and still without the university degree he had since tried a couple of times to

complete. Without a degree, the going wage for the key skill he had learned out west—

surveying, which is often seasonal work—was fifteen dollars an hour. As he embarked on the

challenge of reinventing himself, he was acutely aware of how much the passing years had made

this process harder. Looking back at the experience now, he seemed sort of worn down by the

whole thing: the physical demand of the work and the commute, the constant movement, the

danger and risk, and, ultimately, coming down hard off the short financial high.

“I was pretty much tired of it from the first day,” he explained about the year he spent

commuting back-and-forth from PEI. “I was flying out of Moncton,” he told me—a two-hour

drive and forty-five dollar bridge toll away. “So I had to go to Moncton, and then you get on a

plane, and you can’t drink on the plane, number one—so that's my big problem,” he says,

laughing. “Then, number two, you’re sitting, just with all these other oil dudes, all going back to

work. No one really wants to be there. It’s a long flight. And then you get there, and you’re just

like a cow: getting off the plane, they funnel you towards the bus, you get on the bus, they take

you to your place, you’re given your card, you go to your room. And you’re at work the next

day, like a good cow.”

I had seen parts of this routine pilgrimage many times on my travels between Toronto and PEI.

Most flights between the Maritimes and Fort McMurray go through Toronto. At Toronto’s

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Pearson Airport, flights to the Maritimes are often clustered in the small gates at the end of the

airport, so we all mix together while we wait. While Pierce had been commuting during a period

when it was more common to offer charter flights directly from the Maritimes, it eventually

became more standard for companies to fly their “metal” between only a handful of closer

airports in the western provinces and their private aerodromes peppered throughout the oil sands

area. For Maritimers who commute directly to site, this usually means flying through Toronto to

Edmonton or Calgary on a commercial flight before boarding a company plane. At the Toronto

airport, east coast oil workers are easy enough to pick out: their combined demographics, dress,

etiquette, and lack of belongings clearly signal their strange state of being rural, working class,

and habituated to commuting by airplane. The physical toll of the shift they are leaving or the

emotional weight of returning to work adds to this visibility. Going in either direction, they

often have their hats low, hoods up, and eyes closed in an effort to shut the world out or maybe

just get some rest.

When I finally laid eyes on an actual oil sands aerodrome, I thought back to Pierce’s description

as workers filed off the company plane and onto the bus. It was a simple and banal scene. As he

had described: rote circulation, just like cows. But perhaps it is in the banality of this circulation

that this image garners its power. For each one of these bodies has been funnelled into that line-

up through a complex array of factors. Each one carries relationships, plans, and mixed

emotions. Each one has a strategy for making it through the next two weeks until they are

funnelled back here where they will board a plane and be reinserted into their lives. It was

certainly not my place to project tragedy onto any of these people, but as the last one boarded

the bus and they set off for camp, I thought about how Pierce had been thankful for the rare

opportunity to vent. For many of these workers, their decisions to work here are ever fragile,

having grown from a place of deep uncertainty about the right course of action. Damned if you

do, damned if you don’t, workers set off trying to make things right by trading higher wages for

health, relationships, and, most of all, time. Workers carry this uncertainty—alongside isolation,

fear, fatigue, despair—but they tend not to talk about it. Many are shy about their ambivalence

and struggles. I think this is largely because their framework for understanding these difficulties

is, it seems, almost always individual. The culture of hard work, rhetoric of good fortune, and

mythology of this place mask the deep historical geographies of these pressure cooker feelings.

Disinvestment, ecological crisis, and austerity, embodied but not usually named. All of that was

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packed into this simple line-up of slumped men with backpacks, boarding a bus in the Boreal

forest. Perhaps not tragic, but certainly fraught.

I wasn’t the only one taken by the aerodromes. In the early days of the boom, as the world

watched the Fort McMurray phenomenon come to life, journalists flooded into town to

document the bitumen rush. By and large, they delivered the typical boomtown tale:

sensationalist accounts of human hardship in a place on petro-infused overdrive.24 In addition to

the predictable and distorted emphasis on drugs, crime, and sex, the mechanisms of the

population boom—the region’s mushrooming “shadow population” and the growing

infrastructure and transportation networks that rhythmically delivered it and took it away—drew

curiosity. The first company aerodrome was built in 2005 by Canadian Natural Resources

Limited to service the first phase of the Horizon Project. As more projects came online further

afield from Fort McMurray, other companies followed suit. This proliferation of landing strips

around the Athabasca oil sands region added to the spectacle: the dramatic event of workers

being robotically shuttled around; the bare bones reproduction; the imagined young and reckless

men willing to trade their normal lives for a quick fortune. Like the mines themselves, for those

who do not work there, work camps are black holes. Because access is tightly restricted, much

of what they must be like is left to stories and imagination. They are stark, unfamiliar, and

miserable sounding places where the mechanics of certain daily reproduction have been

streamlined. Small rooms where you can never leave your belongings between rotations; private

security and drug dogs; regulated consumption, behaviour, and mobility; stiff competition for

coveted internet bandwidth; an unsettling concentration of stressed-out men; and, one can only

presume, a stark sense of being extracted from society. Workers took to calling one of the

largest camps, Imperial Oil’s Wapasu camp, “Wapatraz.”

For the oil sands industry, these spaces of labour circulation are seen as keystones in the broader

successful functioning of their operations. The minable area of the oil sands is located north of

Fort McMurray, along the final section of Highway 63, the only all-weather road between Fort

McMurray and the province’s southern road networks. Often clogged by super-wide loads of 24 E.g. Deborah Tetley, ‘Sex, Drugs and Alcohol Stalk the Streets of Fort McMurray’, Calgary Herald, 22 October 2005; Martin Patriquin, ‘Scenes from a Boomtown’, The Globe and Mail, 26 January 2006, online edition, https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/scenes-from-a-boomtown/article1093807/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&reqid=%257B%257Brequest_id%257D%257D; The Economist, ‘Boomtown on a Bender: The Downside of Explosive Growth in Northern Alberta’, The Economist, 28 June 2007, https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2007/06/28/boomtown-on-a-bender.

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massive equipment, frustrated and impatient drivers might make dangerous passes and speed to

make up lost time. Especially on the sections heading south from Fort Mac toward Edmonton,

workers coming off theirs shifts—perhaps tired, wired, or intoxicated—rush to get home or nod

off behind the wheel. Locals had been rallying to have the highway twinned for ages. At the

time I was there, construction was finally underway on the most isolated 240 kilometres section

south of Fort McMurray, known locally as the Highway of Death. The section running north of

town toward the mines was already nearly complete. Heading northward, at Fort McMurray the

highway passes through town and then follows the Athabasca River for another 85 kilometres of

paved road—passing by the recognizable scarred landscapes of the bitumen mines, tailings

ponds, and upgraders, as well as several deceptively discrete-looking in-situ facilities—before

turning to dirt and, eventually, muskeg, which is only passable by ice road in the winter. The

first two (and oldest) mines, the Suncor Millennium Mine and Steepbank Extension and the

Syncrude Mildred Lake Mine, are located right off the highway, about 30 and 40 kilometres

north of town: commutable distance. The other mines are further north, 80 kilometres or more

from town, and sometimes well off the main highway along industry-owned gravel roads. The

commutes along this northern stretch of the highway are infamous. Before the road was

twinned, the drive to the more northern sites was said to take up to three hours each way. In this

way, the fact of routine traffic jams stretched out the relative distance of the otherwise

proximate Fort McMurray. This dilemma spurred innovations in workforce planning and

delivery, leading to the eventual introduction of on-site aerodromes and modular work camps as

a strategy to short-circuit the highway problem.

Recounting this sequence of events, a human resources executive for one of the oil sands

operators explained that the problem stemmed from the delicate relationship between shift

schedules and fatigue. “So, if you’re living in Fort Mac and you’re spending six hours travelling

every day,” he explained, setting the scene, “and you’re working anywhere from a ten to a

twelve hour shift, you don’t have enough time to rest. We knew that. So we did a number of

unique things to get around the highway.” In the industry this problem is called “fatigue risk”:

the elevated risk of accidents and mistakes as workers tire and their reaction time, memory,

focus, and decision-making are impaired. There is a whole spinoff industry that has grown up

around “managing” this heightened risk in industries including air travel, trucking, and twenty-

four-hour shift-work operations like the oil sands. Strictly managing commutes is one way to do

this. In the case at hand, if workers were commuting back and forth to Fort McMurray,

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mitigating these risks associated with tired workers would have meant eating into the working

day, which is understood as a non-option in a twenty-four-hour operation.

This particular company had first experimented with using helicopters and hovercraft to

transport people between Fort Mac and the worksite before settling on the combination of a

landing strip and worker camps. While widely associated with the oil sands, this model of

labour delivery, generally called fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) or long distance commuting, is actually a

somewhat longstanding feature of Canadian staples labour. In Canadian land-based resource

industries, the practice dates to the 1970s.25 Prior to this, industry had largely relied on the

construction of “new towns” adjacent to their operations. These towns took a number of forms,

but the general formula was the production of a ‘complete community’ that could reproduce

itself for (so long as industry was concerned) at least the lifetime of the project.26 Capital’s

abandonment of many of these towns during the decline of what Hayter and Barnes call

“resource Fordism” marked an important turning point in the organization of resource labour in

Canada.27 Beginning in the 1970s, this “new town” model began to give way to what Keith

Storey calls a “no town” model: an arrangement based on camp accommodations, long-distance

commuting, and a rotational rhythm (e.g. two weeks “in”, two weeks “out”).28 The shift to camp

and commute arrangements was a partial solution to the ‘problem’ that permanent settlement

posed to industry: that in investing in the social and physical development of resource towns,

capital introduced limits to its own flexibility.29 Capital’s pursuit of flexibility, of course, also

posed a very real human problem here. The deindustrialization of these resource towns

devastated many communities and lives, but I am not convinced that the shift to new labour

strategies was in any way a response to this social devastation. According to Storey, the general

context for this shift was the extension of mining activity into more northern regions, a

corporate focus on lean and flexible production, and a general withdrawal of state investment in

the infrastructure investments required by these resource towns.30 But the shift to mobile work

structures certainly had the effect of diffusing the particularly intense and visible social fallout

of remote deindustrialization—while, importantly, introducing a whole host of new and less

25 See Storey, ‘The Evolution of Commute Work’. 26 See Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown. 27 Hayter and Barnes, ‘Canada’s Resource Economy’. 28 Storey, ‘The Evolution of Commute Work’. 29 David Harvey has written extensively about these ideas. See, for example, Harvey, ‘The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: Toward a Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory’. 30 Storey, ‘Fly-in/Fly-Out’.

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visible problems for local communities (both sending and hosting) and social reproduction.

Storey and Heather Hall have recently called this more recent dynamic “dependence at a

distance.”31 The first operation to use a camp/commute system in Canada was the Asbestos Hill

mine in the Nunavik region of northern Quebec in 1972. Since that time, variations on this

theme—with camps sometimes located near or even in established towns—have become

standard across the industry.

This is a common account of extractive labour history in Canada and the rise of FIFO—that

there was a shift from stable communities to systems that allowed companies to import labour

and skirt longer-term investments in resource towns.32 This account makes sense from certain

vantage points: from the perspective of “new town” communities or from within the extractive

sector itself, for example. But the use of mobility to solve problems of irregularity—both

temporal and spatial—in Canadian resource industries has a deeper and more varied history than

FIFO and this notion of a ‘shift’ in workforce structure gets somewhat muddied when we

consider, especially, sending communities with longer histories of mobility. This perspective

informs this dissertation overall and I come back to these ideas later in the chapter. But, first,

with this caveat in mind, there are some ways that the detailed qualities of FIFO can help us

think about the specific context of the oil sands. Importantly, in addition to the more obvious

spatial features of FIFO—transportation between the worksite and a different designated pickup

point according to a rotational schedule and the accommodation of workers near the worksite

while on their rotations—Storey identifies the temporal extension of the workday, usually to

twelve hours, as a core characteristic of this employment structure.33 These twelve-hour

workdays, enabled by new spatial strategies that reduce travel time and mitigate fatigue risk, are

central to the twenty-four-hour temporalities of these capital-intensive operations.

It took me some time to see that, as a cost-saving strategy, FIFO was perhaps as much about

time as it was about workers’ wages and fireability. When I set out to understand why

companies were turning to east coast labour, I focused on the financial efficiencies they might

derive from this workforce specifically. This was partially informed by the incessant talk of the

region’s crippling labour shortages said to be driving up wages. I figured that an influx of 31 Storey and Hall, ‘Dependence at a Distance’. 32 E.g. Storey, ‘Fly-in/Fly-Out’; Storey, ‘The Evolution of Commute Work’; Ryser, Markey, and Halseth, ‘The Workers’ Perspective’. 33 Storey, ‘The Evolution of Commute Work’.

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workers explicitly recruited from depressed regions would drive down inflated wages and

increase worker discipline. I also assumed the fact that these workers’ lives were rooted

elsewhere would make them easier to periodically fire. Both advantages rest on what we might

clumsily call the separation of the ‘realm’ of social reproduction (workers’ home communities,

where they have family, other work, and access to government benefits) from that of production

(the work site).34 The financial advantage is compounded by the disparity in housing costs,

government benefits, and wages between the two regions and the availability of complimentary

seasonal work—meaning not only that workers are willing (often keen) to work for less, but also

able to reproduce themselves and their families on far fewer resources. I wondered, too, if

mobile workers might be understood as more fireable because, under FIFO, companies, the

region, and the province could externalize (at least some amount of) the periodic problem of

unemployment, which would serve not only the public purse, but also local industry loyalty. But

against these explanations is the problem of cost: carting workers across the country and

reproducing them with room and board is expensive. So, when I sat down with employers I

expected to hear about how the system pays for itself in wage savings and easier layoffs.

These general themes ran through my interviews. Often, the rise of long-distance hiring is

simply explained as a necessity: due to a chronic shortage of local labour, employers explain

that they were forced to go further afield and shell out bonuses in the form of flights and camp

services in order to attract much-needed workers who were not available locally. In the oil

sands, where the labour market is very competitive during boom times, employers sought to

dilute or avoid local competition by increasing and diversifying the labour pool they were

drawing from. In conventional and petroleum services, employers often explained that local

workers had been sucked up by better paying jobs in the oil sands; they needed access to

workers willing and able to get by on lower wages and what is often seasonal work. For them,

inter-regional disparities in living costs and expectations were key. Across the industry explicit

recruiting of “vulnerable talent” from areas of high unemployment is seen to bring further

advantages. Many employers perceived workers’ lack of other options as a source of flexibility

and, sometimes, loyalty. Employers broadly understood these mobile workers to work hard,

34 I separate these ‘realms’ here for simplicity’s sake. But, as feminist geographers and political economists have made clear, they are co-constituted and inseparable. See Cindi Katz, ‘Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction’, Antipode 33, no. 4 (2001): 709–28; Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie A. Marston, and Cindi Katz, ‘Life’s Work: An Introduction, Review and Critique’, Antipode 35, no. 3 (2003): 415–42. The significance of this entanglement for our specific case should be clear by the end of the chapter.

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work for less, and come back after layoffs. But, when it came to the specifics, I heard

conflicting reports about whether mobile labour was ultimately cheaper.

In the oil sands specifically, thinking about FIFO through the highway problem—the linked

factors of commuting time, working time, and fatigue risk—opens up a different vantage point

on the dilemma of labour recruitment and circulation.35 This perspective reframes industry’s

concerns away from basic questions about negative costs associated with labour power to

questions concerning how labour acquisition and mobilization fit within the broader logic of

accumulation in these remote and capital-intensive operations. For example, by holding workers

in nearby camps at the end of their shifts, employers are able to not only mitigate costly delays

due to traffic congestion or weather; in eliminating the daily commute, they are also able to, as

Storey notes, lengthen the working day without increasing the perceived risk of an accident,

either during or after working hours. This advantage is compounded by the opportunity camps

afford companies to extend a level of control over workers’ daily reproduction that ensures they

show up for their next shift “fit for duty.” The central concern here is perhaps not simple costs

but, rather, reliability.

This was evident when, in 2015, as Fort McMurray was reeling from plummeting oil prices and

mounting joblessness, Suncor announced that its new Fort Hills mine was going to operate as a

camp-based fly-in, fly-out project.36 Despite growing rates of local unemployment, the company

purportedly skipped over the Fort McMurray labour market and began recruiting directly in

Edmonton, Calgary, and out of province.37 Suncor justified this on account of the site’s remote

location, 90 kilometres north of the city. Using the same logic that had informed the earliest

aerodrome construction, a company spokesperson told local media, “It’s not practical or safe for

daily commuting.”38 Most new projects had been put on hold during this period and Fort Hills,

anticipated at the time to start producing oil in early 2017 (though it would not until January

2018), presented locals with a rare opportunity for potential work in a dried up marketplace. It

35 Priorities and strategies also differ between companies and subsectors. Understanding these dynamics demands some attention to the material specificity of their operations. 36 Vincent McDermott, ‘Suncor Defends Commuter Policy for Fort Hills’, Fort McMurray Today, 5 November 2015, http://www.fortmcmurraytoday.com/2015/11/05/suncor-defends-commuter-policy-for-fort-hills. 37 Kelly Cryderman, ‘Suncor Changes Policy to Encourage Hiring for Fort Hills in Fort McMurray’, The Globe and Mail, 11 November 2015, online edition, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/suncor-changes-policy-to-encourage-hiring-for-fort-hills-in-fort-mcmurray/article27210504/. 38 McDermott, ‘Suncor Defends Commuter Policy for Fort Hills’.

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was only after pressure from local politicians and businesses that the company agreed to find a

“mechanism to move people to the site” from Fort McMurray.39 This example lays bare that the

dynamics underpinning oil sands labour regimes are more complex than a shortage of local

labour or simple cost savings. While FIFO is often understood as a concession that employers

must make to deal with local labour market challenges, here we see that distance, in and of

itself, is not necessarily a problem. While long-distance labour recruitment expresses itself as a

spatial solution to a spatial problem (a lack of local labour), what the concern over commuting

and traffic circulation illustrates is that employers’ core dilemma is the entangled problem of

time. That is, even if workers are available locally, flying them in and holding them in camp

might be worth the extra cost because it works, in essence, to secure temporality. This

arrangement allows employers to encapsulate workers within a structure of industrial time

through the duration of their rotations and, in turn, to guard against delays, accidents, or

disruptions caused by traffic, weather, fatigue, family, or myriad other factors this system strives

to externalize. In this way, if employers can create the conditions for the speedy, regular, and

reliable circulation of labour power between various far-flung communities and the site of

production, long-distance labour relations might actually have advantages.40

39 Cryderman, ‘Suncor Changes Policy to Encourage Hiring for Fort Hills in Fort McMurray’. 40 In considering these questions of geography and capital circulations, what matters is not simply distance but the relationship between space and time. As Marx elucidated, distance is irrelevant if it can be made to take less time—and, as David Harvey emphasizes, drawing on Marx, if it can be overcome with regularity and reliability. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nicolaus Martin (London: Penguin, 1973), 538; Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 377. Capitalists’ drive to “annihilate… space with time,” as Marx described it (reflected in oil sands employers’ concern with the regular and reliable delivery of labour) has to do with what Marx called the turnover time of capital: the time between the initial outlay of capital (as money) and the moment that surplus value returns to the capitalist in the form of profits. Grundrisse, 539. Marx understood this as a process of capital circulation. This is not a simply physical or geographical circulation (though it has geographical implications) but circulation through different phases or forms: at its most basic, money capital is used to produce commodities which are then sold on the market for expanded money capital (profit), expressed by Marx in Volume 1 of Capital as M-C-M’. This formula can then be expanded to account for capital’s movement through other forms including labour power, the factors of production, and transportation (e.g. of commodities to market). As Marx explains in Volume 2 of Capital, The turnover time of capital in a given production context is the amount of time it takes capital to circulate through these forms. Capitalists seek advantages by increasing the speed at which capital circulates through both the production process (e.g. technological innovation, coordination, cooperation) and the sphere of circulation (e.g. transportation innovation or measures to speed up sales, like marketing campaigns). Both scenarios increase the velocity of capital circulation, thereby decreasing turnover time, freeing up resources for further use. While the circulation of capital is not the same as the circulation of things (goods, workers, raw resources, money), these two modes of circulation have an important relationship. The character of capital circulation and capital’s ability to circulate depend on the phase. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (New York: Vintage Books, 1977); Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Classics, 1992). As Harvey explains, only in the commodity form is capital circulation defined by the geographical mobility of goods. See Harvey, The Limits to Capital, on these ideas see Ch. 12. But the peculiar thing about the relationship between commodity circulation and capital circulation is that, in each phase of capital circulation, even if commodities, workers, money, or raw inputs might be on the move physically, capital itself is locked or frozen until the moment it can transition from one form (e.g. commodity) to the next (e.g. money). In this way, as Harvey explains drawing on the Grundrisse, the spectre of crisis—the failure of capital to circulate—is

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“Twice as safe, twice as productive”

If FIFO is, in part, a measure to secure time, this imperative follows workers the whole way

through their rotations: in transit, in camp, on the worksite. Camps are strange spaces in that sit

awkwardly between work and life. Time here is tightly tailored, partly through pure fatigue and

partly through careful regulation. Workers I spoke with recounted how twelve hour shifts left

them with little time or energy to do more than eat, make a phone call, and sleep. And workers

are also contained by the structure of camp life itself, through strict limits on their mobility,

behaviour, and consumption. Access to the camps is restricted: workers might have to swipe

multiple times or pass through secure entrances to get in and move around the camp. Private

security polices the grounds and are said to regularly search peoples’ rooms and cars. Most

camps are strictly dry and violation of these and other camp rules can quickly get you sent

home. Camp life is threaded through with measures to carefully balance the physically taxing

character of workers’ jobs with measures to ensure their daily regeneration. That is, what

happens (and does not happen) in camp is designed to facilitate and secure that happens during

working hours.

constant and inherent. According to Marx, capitalist crisis is always rooted in this failure to move through and between phases. See Harvey, Ch. 3. This is a familiar idea: excessive inventories, for example, represent a failure of commodity capital to be realized as money capital; unemployment represents a failure of productive capital (labour power) to be realized as commodity capital. But, beyond the problem of crisis, this matter of capital’s suspension in (or between) each phase of circulation brings to the fore the question of time: in an everyday way, time spent in each of these phases is simply lost, or, in Marx’s words, it “passes by unseized.” Grundrisse, 546; as quoted in Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 86. Velocity—the speed with which capital can move through these phases—is, as such, paramount to not only the aversion of crisis but also generalized accumulation. This pursuit of velocity is rampant in the oil sands industry. Mines operate 24-hours a day and back-to-back shifts run 12-hours. Rhythms of work set by the oil sands operators and downloaded onto subcontractors so that shifts and timelines work in lock step. And beyond the immediate realm of production, workers circulate in and out of camps, camps are constructed and dismantled as the workforce rises and falls, equipment is trucked in and out as it is needed, and companies strive to shape workers’ bio-social rhythms by regulating consumption, mobility, leisure, and sleep. And a backdrop of incessant industry anxieties about the capacity of national pipeline infrastructure to efficiently bring their product to international markets underscores the point: idleness is lost profit. Everything rushes to the point of exchange. Anticipating and overcoming barriers to smooth and speedy circulation of capital, as such, comes into view as an inherent and necessary part of the drive to accumulate. Within the context of a capital-intensive industry like the oil sands, the consequences of delays or time not otherwise “seized” are amplified. As is common to say, these projects are too big to stop. As market conditions have worsened in recent years, companies are scrambling to drive down operational costs by reorganizing shift schedules, eliminating flight payments, cutting back on camp services, and pursuing automation (e.g. see Suncor, ‘Autonomous Haul Trucks’). Whether through just-in-time delivery of workers themselves, or through generalized measures to secure and speed up production—carefully coordinated shift scheduling or the regulation of workers’ sleep and consumption—guarding against disruptions and reducing turnover time are top of mind.

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In recent years, the close regulation of workers throughout their rotations has increasingly been

framed in terms of workforce safety. While safety and productivity were historically understood

as conflicting goals in industrial construction and extraction, this has changed dramatically as

safety has come to be seen as a source of productivity: a shift encapsulated in an initiative from

the Construction Owners Association of Alberta to become “Twice as Safe, Twice as

Productive.”41 Servicing high risk industries like twenty-four-hour heavy industry, air travel,

and trucking, companies specializing in 24/7 “workforce solutions” offer technological and

management measures that stretch the social and bodily monitoring and regulation of workers

around the clock. “Safety doesn’t clock in and it doesn’t punch out,” reads the 2016 annual

report from the safety association for the Canadian upstream oil and gas industry: “It’s 24/7.”42

Safety concerns and the subjects of safety training are broad and varied, but in twenty-four-hour

industrial operations like the oil sands a core component of the concern about safety pivots on

the problem of worker fatigue.

Workforce housing, accommodation, and travel logistics are often marketed as part of this

broader drive to mitigate fatigue risk. Camp providers emphasize the dangers associated with

commuting, for example, and the imperative of keeping workers close to the worksite between

shifts so as to ensure they have adequate time to unwind and sleep. Major US camp provider,

Target Logistics, has branded its product “the Economics of Comfort.”43 “The proven idea that

investing in the comfort and safety of your workforce will pay big dividends down the road,”

explains the Senior VP of Business Development in one of the company’s promotional videos,

referencing reduced attrition costs, increased productivity and performance of the workforce,

and reduced fatigue- and nutrition-related on-site incidents. “We have the unique responsibility

to care for your worker the other twelve hours that they’re not on the job,” he explains,

clarifying that productivity matters around the clock. “By reducing risk and increasing your

41 Construction Owners Association of Alberta, ‘Twice as Safe, Twice as Productive’, COAA, 2018, https://www.coaa.ab.ca/twice-as-safe-twice-as-productive/. 42 Enform, Enform 2016 Annual Report, 2016, http://www.enform.ca/aboutus/publications/publications.cf. The organization has since merged with the Oil Sands Safety Association and been renamed Energy Safety Canada. See http://www.enform.ca/. 43 Target Logistics, ‘The Economics of ComfortTM Case Study by Target Logistics and Client’ (Target Logistics Management LLC), accessed 12 March 2018, https://www.targetlodging.com/content/documents/pdfs/Target-Logistics_EOC-case-study_2013.pdf; Christopher Wanjek, Workforce Housing and Feeding Solutions for Health, Safety, Productivity and Morale, Target Logistics White Paper (Target Logistics Management LLC, 2013), https://www.targetlogistics.net/content/documents/pdfs/white-papers/WorkforceHousingandFeedingSolutionsWhitePaper.pdf; Target Logistics Management, ‘Target Logistics: Turnkey Workforce Housing’, Target Logistics, 2018, https://www.targetlogistics.net/.

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return, Target Logistics is changing the way industry thinks about workforce housing. Where it

was once just the cost of doing business, we’ve turned it into an operational strategy that

actually contributes to your bottom line.”44 Other measures marketed to monitor and mitigate

fatigue span shift scheduling, workforce optimization software, and a wide range of tracking

technology. Firms offer consulting services that aim to assess fatigue risk, develop customized

fatigue risk mitigation systems, and implement fatigue-related training. Technological solutions

are generally understood as only one component of more comprehensive and holistic fatigue

risk management systems that might also emphasize qualitative interventions like education and

shifts in workplace culture.45

This broader focus on fatigue risk management is underpinned by a growing array of specialized

technologies available on the market to measure and manage worker fatigue. Companies have

adapted technologies developed for military, transportation, and warehousing purposes and

applied them to travel, scheduling, sleep, and the monitoring and management of workers on-

shift. Vancouver-based company, Fatigue Science, for example, has adapted technology

developed by the US Army (to predict reaction time, lapsed judgment, and fatigue risk) for use

in other industries including high-risk industrial occupations and elite sports.46 Their product has

workers wear wristbands around the clock that track and quantify their sleep. At its most basic,

workers are to use a mobile app to set personal goals to improve their sleep habits. But the

company has also developed a biomathematical fatigue model that uses this data to predict

worker fatigue. Drawing on a range of factors—sleep quantity, time of day, sleep debt, wake

episodes, and so on—the model produces individualized real-time and predictive Alertness

Scores, assessing fatigue impairment across the duration of a given shift. This enables

employers to predict when workers are at heightened risk of accidents—and associated costly

delays—due to fatigue. Using the same algorithm, the company has also developed a Fatigue

44 Target Logistics Management, The Economics of ComfortTM by Target Logistics, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=104&v=lAFXt6LpxJw; see also Nancy H Rothstein, Optimizing Sleep for an Optimal Workforce in the Oil, Gas and Mining Industries, Target Logistics White Paper (Target Logistics Management LLC, 2013), https://www.targetlogistics.net/content/documents/pdfs/white-papers/OptimizingSleepForAnOptimalWorkforceInTheOil-GasAndMiningIndustriesWhitePaper.pdf; Wanjek, Workforce Housing and Feeding Solutions for Health, Safety, Productivity and Morale. 45 E.g. see: Caterpillar Safety Services, Reducing Fatigue Risk: Optimize Technology and Culture to See, Mitigate and Manage an Invisible Threat (Caterpillar, 2016), http://www.cat.com/en_US/articles/solutions/safety/whitepaper2form.html; Circadian, ‘Circadian: 24/7 Workforce Solutions’, accessed 11 March 2018, http://www.circadian.com/index.php. 46 Fatigue Science, ‘Fatigue Science: Predictive Fatigue Management for Industry and Elite Sport’, Fatigue Science, accessed 11 March 2018, https://www.fatiguescience.com/.

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Avoidance Scheduling Tool, designed to identify and mitigate fatigue risk through strategic

scheduling design. Whether or not this particular tool is used in the oil sands context, I do not

know, but these tools and the market for them illustrate the normalization of very intimate

modes of monitoring.

One of the first high profile technological experiments in the oil sands to roll out under the

auspices of safety and fatigue risk occurred in the spring of 2015: Shell Canada introduced a

pilot program to place mandatory electronic trackers on 1,500 contractors undertaking

maintenance work in its Albion Sands mine.47 The specific technology—radio-frequency

identification (RFID)—is common in shipping, transportation, and warehousing and had long

been used in the oil sands to track equipment, assets, and repairs. But this was the first time it

was being used on oil sands workers.48 “The trackers are crazy, yes,” confirmed Pierce when I

asked him about it in an online message. He explained that they would only apply to contractors,

though. “So you don’t have to expect uproar…because if you did, everyone would just be fired,

there’s line ups waiting to take their jobs.” As the company explained it, the trackers, which plot

workers’ location and movement, would be used for the dual and inseparable goals of increasing

operational efficiency and improving worker safety through, for example, allowing managers to

spot a fatigued driver.49 In keeping with what other workers had told me, Pierce confirmed that

employers had been “leaning toward more control through safety” for a number of years and, as

such this particular move did not ultimately surprise him. “I do like the emergency button,” he

said, “but probably not the main reason for all this… As many oil workers know… It’s not a

secret a lot of people do as little as possible… Not working is a skill all by itself!” Other oil

sands operators followed suit, implementing similar systems. And, after the massive Fort

47 For a detailed and more historical study of RFID and other tracking technology as it is used to monitor and discipline workers in the UK and US context, see Anja Kanngieser, ‘Tracking and Tracing: Geographies of Logistical Governance and Labouring Bodies’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, no. 4 (2013): 594–610. 48 Todd Coyne, ‘Is Tracking Workers With RFID a Safety Breakthrough, or an Invasion of Privacy?’, Alberta Oil Magazine, 19 August 2015, https://www.albertaoilmagazine.com/2015/08/is-tracking-workers-with-rfid-invasion-of-privacy/. 49 CBC News, ‘Shell Albion Sands Workers Will Soon Carry Electronic Trackers While on the Job’, CBC News, 19 March 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/shell-oilsands-workers-to-carry-electronic-trackers-on-the-job-1.3001658.

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McMurray wildfire of 2016, the importance of RFID technology was reinforced when it was

credited with ensuring worker safety during the evacuation.50

But RFID is just one example in a broader trend. Even when Suncor announced in January 2018

that it would introduce 150 autonomous heavy haul trucks to its company-operated mines, the

company emphasized this as a breakthrough for innovation and safety. Quoting the Chief

Operating Officer, Mark Little, the company press release asserted, “Safety is our number one

value at Suncor.” Little explained, “Autonomous haulage systems reduce interaction between

people and equipment, which decreases incident rates and injury potential—helping us ensure

everyone goes home safely at the end of every day.”51 The dark irony of this statement was

framed by the fact that the automation of these heavy haulers was set to eliminate a net four

hundred Suncor positions. Never going to work is, I suppose, the ultimate assurance against

workplace accidents.

These are complicated issues for workers. They know firsthand the risks related to worksite

safety and overall wellbeing in this line of work: serious threat of industrial accidents, the

danger of falling asleep on a twelve-hour shift, the risks that arise when working with dangerous

machinery begins to seem mundane, and the struggles with mental health that pervade the

industry. I interviewed workers who had nodded off behind the wheel of a heavy hauler.

References to workplace accidents and sometimes death were not uncommon in my interviews;

nor were stories of friends who had run up against serious problems with addiction, mental

illness, or suicide. Workers are intimately aware of the dangers of the job and the taxing,

isolating lifestyle. But when it comes to industry’s high profile hand wringing about safety,

most are acutely aware that concern with their fatigue, mental health, and general wellbeing is

ultimately profit-driven: lost time is expensive.

In this way, safety gets entangled in a host of other measures to control the workforce across

production and daily reproduction, all with the aim of securing temporality. The FIFO structure

figures centrally here. Oil sands operators seek control and certainty the whole length of the

their workers’ circuits: “If you’re an individual who lives somewhere in northern BC,” one 50 The Canadian Press, ‘More Oilsands Workers Wearing Electronic Trackers after Fort McMurray Wildfire’, CBC News, 13 April 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-oilsands-wildfire-radio-trackers-workers-1.4069230. 51 Suncor, ‘Autonomous Haul Trucks’.

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employer explained, “…and I’m giving them an allowance each month that is meant to get them

to their local airport to fly them in…what’s stopping them from pocketing that money

and…driving all night to get to site? Now you have no control over that scenario,” he

concluded. “If we’re able to actually bring them on our own metal, then we have more

control…. You don’t have all the control; that will never happen. But you start to introduce

some limits and mitigate some risks from a safety perspective.” Employers track these concerns

in the other direction too, considering the length of the drive home once a worker lands in their

local airport after a long shift and a long flight, for example. As we will see, this is only one of

the ways that measures to mitigate risk, secure temporality, and bolster employer certainty

follows these workers all the way home.

Waiting for work: The temporalities of “Winter War”

But many mobile Maritime workers do not work within the context of highly regulated tar sands

temporalities and are not engaged in the regular commuting that characterizes FIFO. If we are to

believe industry lore, the oil sands are somewhat of a sideshow in the whole history of “east

coasters” working “out west.” There are certainly plenty who are employed directly by oil sands

operators, or work for contractors in construction, production, or maintenance, but the longer-

standing link with the region lies elsewhere. The general story is that beginning in the early

1980s and ramping up throughout the 1990s, a series of factors—agricultural industrialization

on the Prairies, the urbanization of Prairie youth, persistent unemployment on the east coast, the

eventual collapse of the cod fishery, and changes to unemployment insurance policy—coalesced

to funnel east coasters westward. Here, they would take up work cutting seismic lines, driving

vacuum trucks or working on the oil rigs, replacing the Prairie “farm kids” and other groups

who had traditionally travelled for these seasonal jobs. In the Prairies, urbanization, a growing

emphasis on post-secondary education, and the rise of the knowledge economy meant that local

demographics that might have historically entered into resource work began to pursue other

options. And, as activity ramped up in the oil sands, those well-paying, year-round jobs sucked

up the local extractive labour and, in the relatively poorly paid parts of the petroleum industry,

recruiting at a distance took on new significance.

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The temporal problem in conventional oil and gas and petroleum services is different from that

of the oil sands operations.52 While daily operations in the oil sands are tightly regulated and the

planning orientation is long-term, because petroleum services companies often work on

contracts and much of the work is seasonal, they must build flexibility into their operations in

different ways. Start dates shift depending on weather and market conditions and employers

struggle to build employment structures that will ensure a reliable workforce year after year.

Within this context, workers are often needed at the drop of a hat and, as such, possibilities for

workforce planning are limited at best. In the oil sands, conversely, through every phase—

construction, production, and maintenance—work rarely stops; as we have seen, workforce

recruitment and delivery is abstracted and meticulously planned so as to avert disruption. In

conventional petroleum, far more so that in the oil sands, production is often dictated by the

limitations of nature. Vast areas of northern Alberta are only accessible for exploration, drilling,

and maintenance activities during the winter months, when machinery can be brought in over

ice roads that traverse the frozen muskeg. Within this context, employers have found that close

relationships—both between workers and between employers and workers—and committing to

a core of experienced workers serves them well as a way to absorb uncertainty and irregularity

and to cope with the competitive character of the industry.

Petroleum services encompasses a wide array of employment and employment structures. Some

of the workers I interviewed work year-round—for example, driving trucks for environmental

services companies—but many worked seasonally. These “Winter Warriors” work in diverse

parts of petroleum services, on rigs, in seismic, or driving service trucks, for example. At the

beginning of each season they wait at home to be called out once freeze-up arrives. Usually

around the New Year, after the Christmas season has ended and people are more prepared to

leave their families, workers travel west. Many workers drive the 5000 kilometres to Alberta,

with towns sometimes travelling in convoys. The season lasts about three months and the pay is

generally low: some seismic companies and workers quoted me a starting hourly wage of just

over twelve dollars. The combined low wages and short season mean that Albertans can hardly

52 This is a somewhat clumsy categorization. The structure of the Alberta petroleum industry can be broadly divided between the conventional oil and gas and oil sands. Both can be divided further into exploration, upstream (production), midstream (processing and transportation), and down stream (refining and marketing). Petroleum services generally refers to the specialized services and equipment needed for in the upstream oil and gas sector. In this sense, depending on the service, many oil services companies work in both oil sands and conventional petroleum. Moreover, throughout my research many of my interviewees also categorized exploratory work (e.g. surveying and seismic) as petroleum services, which I am doing here.

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afford, let alone desire, to take these jobs. But east coasters make it work through a combination

of their lower cost of living, relative access to EI, access to summer work, and, for many,

simpler needs. This ability to absorb, and sometimes even prefer, seasonality adds to their

coveted status and reputation for reliability. Moreover, east coast workers are known to

enthusiastically clamour for as many workdays as possible. Things are supposedly changing

with the growing emphasis on safety, but some workers I interviewed recounted times when

they had worked upwards of ninety days on end before being forced to finally take a day off.

For the most part, these intense schedules suit these workers, not only because they are ‘there to

work,’ but also because the real money is made working overtime. For those who come home at

the end of every season, it is to be with family but also to work. It is common for Winter

Warriors to work seasonal complements: winter out west and summer back home, fishing or

working construction, for example. This pattern is especially notable in fishing communities,

where workers will actually pursue work out west as a way to finance their ability to fish lobster

back east. For some of these workers, the ultimate goal is to buy their own fishing fleet (license,

boat, and gear)—which, I was told, now runs upward of half a million dollars—and commit to

this line of work full-time.

In this context of unpredictability, my questions about workforce planning often elicited

chuckles and eye rolls. The culture of recruitment and planning is informal and ad hoc, in part

because of the industry’s unpredictability but also because the workforce is established,

longstanding, and reliable. Among the virtues of hiring from smaller rural communities,

employers I interviewed explained that not only did these workers tend to be older, more

serious, and less interested in taking time off once they arrive in Alberta; but some reported that

the widespread involvement in Alberta oil in these small communities created a sort of

collective accountability and heightened reliability. “A lot of people, half their family’s out

here…” explained the human resources representative for a geophysical services company,

“…usually, you’re able to keep them on a longer time period if they know someone, rather than

if they come out here not knowing anyone.” This trend was reflected in my conversations with

workers out east. For many of them, their decisions to go west were informed by cousins,

brothers, and friends who also often helped them land a job. Companies told me that word of

mouth was their best recruitment tool and that it was older workers from smaller rural areas

entrenched in these networks that had been coming back to these same companies for, some

said, as long as twenty years.

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But employers also emphasized the importance of building and maintaining their own close

relationships with workers—and helping meet their complex needs that come with working

mobile—as a way of ensuring ‘good workers’ come back year after year. Today, it is in

conventional oil and gas and petroleum services where employers have the most intimate and

long-standing relationships with specific workers and specific east coast communities. Several

companies I interviewed estimated that 65 or 75 percent of their workforces were “east coast.”

For some, this meant a high percentage of their workers (or particular segments of their

workforces) came from a single east coast town. Some of the employers I interviewed had

invested significant time and money travelling to these communities, generally for recruitment,

but these trips could also be ways of investing and demonstrating commitment. One employer—

one of the rare petroleum services firms that, at the time, was offering a rotational work

structure—explained that, when he visited one community on a recruiting trip, he and his

partner “wanted to make sure that we got the exact same perspective that our employees had.”

He described how they mimicked the commute: “we worked all day, we jumped in a car, drove

to the airport, took the midnight flight, flew down, got there” and then tacked on another long

drive before reaching their hotel. “I can’t remember how many hours it was, but it was just

phenomenal by the time we went to bed,” he said. Another HR rep explained that she builds

trust by heading out into the field with their seismic crews, trudging through the deep snow and

cold, side-by-side with the workers. “I think I gain the respect of the employees,” she explained.

“They know who I am; they’re more willing to ask me questions or bring up concerns to me and

build that actual human relationship.” She assured me, referring to cold outdoor work: “I’m not

made for that! But it definitely builds relationships.” Many explained the important role of

social media in allowing them to maintain personal links with their workers and keeping in

touch in the off-season or during periods of slow activity.

These relationships extend beyond employees, too. Ruby, an employment counsellor in western

PEI, embodies these links more than most. As she explained it, “You know, some companies, I

got to know the owners and their wives, and I pray for them at night and we thank them at

thanksgiving dinner and—oh my god, it’s weird.” Speaking of her family, she said, “we all wear

the clothing and it’s like—oh my god—and they’re a part of our family!” Representatives from

these particular companies had visited her community and met her family. “My mother prayed

for them one night because they were having a hard time, one company. And it’s funny how it

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goes! I mean, you get connected.” As we spoke, she explained her mission to make Alberta

more visible in her community, to emphasize workers’ accomplishments, and to build a sense of

local pride. She had given presentations in the local elementary school to show kids where their

dads were going and to highlight their accomplishments.

Figure 4.1: Two clocks display local time and Alberta time in the employment resource centre where Ruby works. Photo by the author.

To help demystify “out west,” she kept an Alberta map in her office illustrating specific

worksites and maintained a Facebook page where she posted pictures from Alberta, weather

reports from home, and inspirational quotes. Having realized her goal of building professional

links with Alberta employers and getting locals hired, she was now focusing on normalizing it:

“How can I connect the community pride and how can I make the 3000 miles smaller, shorter,”

she explained. When I asked her if she had been out there to see things for herself, she told me

not since she was young: she didn’t like to fly. “I’d like to go, I really would like to go. I mean,

get in the trucks—when they send me pictures and they’re doing the convoy, when they all

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come home at the end of the season from the oil patch to the head office, and they send me these

pictures…. Ah geez, I’m sick I want to be there so bad.”

Figure 4.2: A display of the two main ‘local’ industries at the employment resource centre where Ruby works. Photo by the author.

For employers, these close relationships make it more possible to plan across the irregular

rhythm of this work. As in the oil sands, employers in conventional petroleum also place a

premium on reliability and regularity, but for different reasons. Many of these jobs involve long

trips into remote locations; especially since the season is short, when workers quit in the middle

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of the job, it is slow and difficult to replace them. Employers dread this sort of lost time, given

the limited working period of three months or less. For this reason, employers place a premium

on experienced, focused, and reliable workers whom they feel they can trust. Once they find

these workers, they invest in ensuring they come back year after year, whether that means

facilitating more employment from their communities, being flexible about scheduling,

promising time off at Christmas, ensuring they go home before the beginning of the fishing

season, or formally laying them off near the end of the drilling season so they will be able to file

EI claims once they get home.

While workforce planning in conventional and petroleum services is structured more through

personal relationships and networks than high level, scientific-sounding planning, employers

across the oil industry face the shared problem of irregularity. Securing the talent pipeline

means not only ensuring the smooth circulation of workers through the transportation and

production process (including its seasonal variations) but also, more importantly, retaining them

through periodic crises. Crisis is woven into the fabric of the oil industry, and when prices dip

firms are quick to shed assets, including workers. Workers who have been in the business for a

while have all been through it. The lucky ones ride it out, maybe with a reduction in workdays;

others are sent home to wait until things pick back up or simply never called back at the end of

the summer or days off. For employers, while periodic mass layoffs might offer a quick fix to

sliding oil prices or a way to appeal to shareholders, they can pose a longer-term challenge to

the talent pipeline. The pretense of calculability begins to unravel when we move outside the

tightly regulated temporality of daily production. Within the context of this longer and more

volatile temporality, employers struggle to ensure their workforce is promptly available when

production ramps back up.

The long game and the talent pipeline

Near the end my interview with the human resources manager who I quote at the beginning of

the chapter, I asked him directly about this problem of volatility. In slumps like the current one,

how do they make sure the workers will be there when they need to hire them again? “Well, I

mean, I don’t know if we do anything specifically, to be honest with you,” he considered my

question before explaining: “I’d say the big thing is that we don’t want to turn off our early

talent.” Giving me an example, he said: “[W]e might not be hiring engineers, but we’re still

hiring engineers in training…. We may not be going out of our way to hire mid-career process

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operators, but we’re still working with a joint industry partnership around how do we provide

more opportunity for people coming out of school with their process operator to get their steam

tickets.” These problems were less pressing when it came to the operational roles—the workers

on the actual mine site. In cases where operations were already running (in contrast to those in

the planning or construction phases), layoffs tended to focus on supervisory and office positions

because the actual operations are too expensive to “turn off.”53 But his comments about not

“turning off early talent” are important regardless, because they reflect the oil sands industry’s

preoccupation with the “long game,” a fact that gets easily lost in the fast-paced whir of FIFO

and camp life, the restlessness of the market, and the shifting workforce. He explained:

It’s a long game, right? The game is not a year, and decisions around reductions in

workforce, that’s a lot of optics. How do we make it look to our shareholders like we’ve

cut costs and all those things…. But those are short-term scenarios. It will not change

that we have talent segments in our organization that are going to be critical over the

next ten, twenty, fifty years, and if we don’t continue to build that pool of talent at the

base, we’re going to struggle tremendously at that level. So, it’s a long game. You’ve got

to keep that talent coming. And the economy will turn; it always does, right? … So,

you’ve just got to be set up well enough to ride it out, keep building that talent low down

so that you can keep bringing them in and building that pipeline.

The object of calculation and control looks really different from this perspective than it does

from the vantage point of shift scheduling or safety planning. Here, it is not the bare-bones

circulation and reproduction of abstracted labour power, but the formulation and reproduction of

a workforce over the long run.54 While the technical and abstracted language (“pipelines” of

53 As he elaborated: “But, unless there’s a decision to actually turn down the amount of production, which would have to be a very significant scenario for that to happen, you need x number of individuals to operate your equipment. So, those roles just don’t turn off. And when they do, it’s big. There’s something really, really serious that’s going on to turn those ones off.” 54 This overall orientation toward managing the labour supply and the specific reference to the “talent pipeline” echo broader trends in human resources and workforce management. In recent years, the rhetoric and strategy of human resources and workforce management has drawn more explicitly from principles and language of supply chain management. This is perhaps most obvious in the principle of workforce optimization and the proliferation of algorithmic scheduling software that has emboldened employers’ ability to schedule workers’ shifts on a just-in-time basis. But the logic extends beyond matters of scheduling into the broader arena of workforce development and labour acquisition. The broad dynamic said to be governing this problem in North America—as the prevalent talk of labour shortages, skills gaps, mobility barriers, and market rigidities make clear—is a disconnect between the available workforce (dictated by education and training, population distribution, worker decision-making, and social reproduction generally) and employers’ rapidly changing needs. In 2014, for example, as part of a broader

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“talent”) certainly gives the impression that industry and companies have authority over this

process, the long game is played in arenas where industry doesn’t have even the pretence of full

control: in distant communities, school systems, and, above all, in workers’ own ways of

thinking about their futures. As he had explained to me earlier in the interview, intervening in

workers’ home communities is an important part of building the talent pipeline. After

identifying target communities for recruitment, the company engages their “branding team” to

develop a concrete strategy for targeting potential workers and starting to build community-level

links to the industry. “We want to evaluate the schools in those areas,” he offered the example

of post-secondary education: “the tools that they’re trying to give students, are they applicable

to us? Are there things that we can do to influence those programs potentially?” When I asked

him about intervening in public schools, he told me it’s not a current practice but confirmed that

this type of thing could have an important role to play in long-term planning. Referencing the

company’s approach to recruiting in First Nations communities, he asked, rhetorically: “How do

we start to generate some of that conversation, even at the high school level: to make them

aware of the opportunity” and, in turn, the skills they would need to pursue it. He saw these

targeted community interventions as part of a “long-term talent strategy.” Not only for recruiting

workers but, especially in contexts where the company planned to fly in a plane, as a way of

mitigating the inherent riskiness of these arrangements:

If we decide that we’re going into a community, that we’re going to fly our own metal in

and we need to have a certain number of shifts on that plane in order to remain cost

effective. If that falls off or…if industry picks back up in that area…and we’re unable to

and ongoing initiative, the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation proposed a new demand-driven approach to “closing the skills gap” in the US economy: an approach they called “talent pipeline management.” Drawing on the principles of supply chain management, this orientation recasts employers as the “‘end customers’ of education and workforce partnerships.” Through a system of talent pipeline management, “education and workforce providers” would be rapidly responsive to “employer partner” needs. Employers would manage demand by communicating with their “pipeline partners,” drawing on dynamic short-term forecasting to “ensure the appropriate number of people are in the pipeline at any given point in time.” US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Managing the Talent Pipeline: A New Approach to Closing the Skills Gap (US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, 2014), 3, 16, https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/talent-pipeline-management. But, while “talent pipeline management” is, perhaps, a new way of representing the problems and solutions of workforce development and flexibility, as Deborah Cowen has argued, they have deep roots in war and imperialism: in not only sustaining militaries for war, but in enabling processes of colonization, settlement, and land dispossession. For a broader discussion of these themes see: Cowen, ‘Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance’; Deborah Cowen, Glenda Garelli, and Martina Tazzioli, ‘Editors’ Interview with Deborah Cowen’, South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 2 (2018): 397–403. For a more focused analysis of business logistics see Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics. Along the same lines, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten root modern logistics in the Atlantic slave trade: “the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak.” Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 92. In other words, the problem of moving, managing, sustaining, and exploiting people is not a new matter for logistics thinking.

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fill that plane—the other individuals that are still committed to us, we’re still committed

to them. And so, your cost profile increases significantly.

The hubristic logistical logic underpinning these sentiments is that employers can secure a

workforce across not only distance and time, but also myriad other factors: young people

deciding what to do with their lives, workers leaving the industry in pursuit of other work, or

employment returning to a de-industrialized area. In this way, the oil sands “talent pipeline”

traverses not only distance but also vastly different realms: at one end, the bare biology of

workers’ sleep schedules and the coordination of flight schedules and fleets; on the other end,

everyday life, social reproduction, and decision-making as it goes on in workers’ home

communities across changing political economic conditions and opportunities. While control is

never perfect, as we have seen, in transportation and camp logistics, industry has developed

many elaborate tools to secure certainty in these realms: efficient and predictable transportation;

assurances against interruptions from weather, traffic, or hangovers; mitigation of costly

accidents through fatigue monitoring and on-site accommodation; increased productivity of

individual workers achieved by structuring and monitoring their lives in camp. But at the other

end of the talent pipeline, in the realm of workers’ home communities and everyday lives, to

strive for certainty in the long game means reaching into differently intimate realms for which

these types of tools don’t exist. Here, despite the sanitized descriptions, against the risk of an

increased “cost profile,” it is workers’ educations, desires, and decisions that become the source

of potential risk and the object of desired control.

As we have seen, across the oil industry, in their search to secure against the volatility of the

market, to “build that pipeline,” employers must enter into this realm, where they come up

against the messy stuff of people’s everyday lives and desires. I am reminded here of Robert

Jones and his fear of cows. Labour markets are made of people: no matter the resources,

knowledge, and intensive coordination, that fact renders them, ultimately, uncontrollable and

unpredictable. We see this reality in employers’ attempts to court communities, to play the long

game. It is, first and foremost, for these very human reasons—not a lack of labour market data,

infrastructure, or proper scheduling—that labour is not perfect mobile, that work and workers

are mismatched, or that markets are plagued by paradoxes. But this reality that employers, too,

are vulnerable—especially in a seasonal, volatile, and spatially fixed industry like oil—is easily

lost in the story of the labour market.

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Conclusion: Seasons, slumps, and the search for certainty

The brutality of the oil field is feast and famine. And when you get to the point where you’ve got to turn it off, you turn it off. Some of the companies—I have friends that have walked into work and their boss looked at them and said, ‘Your wages just got cut 25 percent.’ And there’s no conversation. It’s, ‘Deal with it, it’s done, or there’s the door.’ It’s just, it’s the brutality of it. It’s you can’t sustain what you can’t sustain. You need the people to grow the business, to maintain the business. And once you get to that level, then those extra people gotta go. Because industry just keeps going like this, right?

- Representative from an oilfield service company

In retrospect, I was originally tipped off to the centrality of time to mobile employment

structures by the workers I met: their visceral explanations of having more and more time

sucked out of them; their descriptions of waiting in limbo to be called back to work after a

layoff; the slow, suspended time of a commute after a string of long work days; their ability to

carefully coordinate seasons across oil, EI, and fishing; the contradiction between the

temporality of home and the temporality of work. While the way time is organized varies across

jobs and different parts of the sector, the temporality of mobile work across all its elements is

gruelling. For these workers, travel or commuting time can range from one to several days as

they traverse three or four time zones; workdays stretch twelve or more hours; workdays pile up,

thirty, sixty, or even ninety in a row; camp-time between shifts is consumed by fatigue and the

activities of bare-bones reproduction—eating, sleeping, and maybe a phone call. Time figures

centrally, if variably, in the ways mobile workers cope with distance, isolation, and monotony.

Some retain the connection to home by tracking or distorting the time of work while others

emphasize the importance of being fully present in the job so as to lose track of time. People

talk of working overtime to help pass time. What no one wants is empty time. Despite the

glaring centrality of distance to the structure of their jobs, these were all stories about time: its

acceleration, unevenness, disappearance, and accumulation under someone else’s control. In

short, an imposed drive to restructure lived time as petro-time and, in turn, workers’ own

struggles to defend, reclaim, and, through their own little tricks, cheat time.

This is, in fact, the same process that industry officials mapped out for me when I asked them

about workforce planning and recruitment. But I did not recognize it at first because it looks

awfully different as something lived rather than calculated. In concert with its logistical feats to

overcome distance, the twenty-four-hour tar sands work regime, in particular, is marked by

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attempts to meticulously calculate, coordinate, and secure time. Operations run around the clock

on twelve-hour shifts. In camp workers’ consumption, behaviour, mobility, and sleep are

regulated and policed. And, increasingly, companies flirt with new ways to monitor workers

across the work-rest threshold. In the oil sands, at the centre of industry’s obsession with safety

and their awkward attempts at manpower planning is an overwhelming concern with lost time.

In conventional oil and gas, conversely, Maritimers’ reputed ability to bear lost time makes

them desirable. They wait at home for their call, endure a three-month work season, disappear

when it is over, and return again when they are called the following year. Above all, the ultimate

temporal challenge is to secure a workforce across the chaos of the market: to bring workers in

and to shed those workers. This is the ultimate promised virtue of the east coast worker. A

structural advantage derived from the geographies of social reproduction that frame these

workers’ lives: seasonality, occupational pluralism, government benefits, divergent values

systems, and the normalization of irregular and long-distance work.

I was in the middle of my field research in the Maritimes when oil prices began to plummet in

2014. Talk circulated about people coming home from out west and Alberta license plates

started to dot the PEI roads. Some workers I interviewed had already been laid off; others were

living the familiar and collective stress of wondering if they would be next. Having spent the

previous years preparing a project that examined the expansion of the oil industry and the

mobile labour regimes that underpinned it, I dreaded what this shift meant for my research. At

the time, most industry people were still brushing the low prices off as a normal market “dip.” If

this is an inherent part of the business, I asked employers, what do you do to ensure your

workforce is there when prices eventually “bounce back”? Mobility offers a partial answer. As

one oil sands operator proclaimed, from an employer’s perspective, a mobile workforce “is the

ideal way to deal with the spikes.” As he posited, mobility is a sign of flexibility: “If you can

adjust to the fact of being mobile, then you’re more than likely to be able to offset those

[spikes]…because you find other industries to be able to get a job if you’re mobile.”

I had conceived of this project under the assumption that the normalization of long-distance

recruiting was connected to the exceptional character of the oil sands: its combined rapid

growth, enormous scale, and relative remoteness. But in exceptionalizing this industry I was

looking past the much longer practice of employer and state-induced mobility for natural

resource industries, often meant to accommodate seasonality, cyclicality, and remoteness.

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Through this longer history industry and state actors have sought solutions to the problem of

predictable periodic unemployment in these industries: the parallel problems of being able to

reliably access a workforce when needed, disperse it when not in use, and avoid paying for its

social reproduction between seasons and market fluctuations. At different moments and through

different tactics, governments and employers have repeatedly tried to reach into communities of

poor and unemployed workers and, in precise and coordinated ways, ‘match’ these workers in

time and space with industries in need of labour. Bringing workers in from faraway

communities—especially if those communities were subsistence or semi-subsistence-based, as

they often were—offered a solution rooted in distance, seasonality, and occupational pluralism.

The failure of these workers to live up to their roles in these attempts at national coordination,

however—by virtue of, for example, not wanting to leave home, quitting or losing their assigned

jobs, or wandering off to the city—have been a constant reminder of the problem of labour

power’s humanity to such a hubristic type of plan.

The stories of today’s resource workers are at the centre of a similar dynamic. In the face of

market volatility, structures of social reproduction that enable workers to be flexible come to

entice industry as a source of potential security. The “feast and famine” of the oilfield means

that, even if mobile workers are not the first to be fired when the market dips (though they

certainly sometimes are), they might suddenly lose access to paid flights, camp

accommodations, and days of work as rotation schedules change. During inevitable periodic

layoffs, workers wait in a suspended state, hoping to get called back and not wanting to pursue

work at home in case they do. If they want to go back, they need to be available; and so they

wait on the verge of leaving for a job that does not exist. If they want to maintain good

employment relations at home, they need to be careful not to burn bridges by accepting work

and abandoning it the minute they get called back west. And the fact that Alberta employers

have entered so deeply into the lives of whole communities means that the impacts of this

uncertainty and periodic unemployment are diffused through daily life in many parts of the

region.

It is easy to be taken by the incredible scale and technological grandeur of the oil sands industry:

the imposing landscapes of industrial infrastructure; the dense networks of air traffic; the

extensive patterns of circulating workers; the shift scheduling; the fatigue monitoring. And it is

easy to neatly slot workers into this image, to assume that, driven by the cues of the labour

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market, encouraged by data, industry planning, and specialized infrastructure, groups of workers

move through labour markets in a way that can be calculated, predicted, and controlled. The real

just-in-time character of the mobile oil worker, however, is not across shifts, but across seasons

and slumps; not organized through scheduling and aerodromes, but through factors well outside

the immediate control of these companies. But the opaque language that narrates the national

labour market—from mismatches and mobility barriers to vulnerable talent and talent

pipelines—is misleading. It tells a story of seamless mobility that masks the contingency of the

talent pipeline across all its diversity—for workers and employers. It obscures the fact that

industry’s access to certainty when it comes to the reproduction of its workforce is built on

seizing certainty from workers.55 But it also masks the way that, in investing in that talent

pipeline—when a slashing crew is 75 percent from Burgeo or a service company’s drivers are

80 percent from western PEI—employers build their own vulnerability: to workers finding other

options or developing different ideas about their futures.

For me, it took looking at the Fort McMurray spectacle to turn my attention all the way around,

back toward the east—to that slippery end of the talent pipeline—for a more meaningful

explanation of the pressures and forces through which Maritime workers move into these

industries. There, rooted in the banal and messy realities of daily life, was a complex of

historical geographical factors that range from the construction of worker identities to the

dismantling of local industries to a contradictory welfare state that has helped to prop up

extraction. And at the centre of this complex is a quiet struggle over the normalization of long-

distance work, irregular employment, a meek sense of entitlement, a persistent dearth of options,

and ideas about the future. Even within the context of layoffs, workers list off benefits alongside

the stress and uncertainty: above all, the gift of more time at home in spite of the blow to their

incomes. That’s just the oil patch, they repeat over and over. Workers have come to expect that

they will be periodically dropped out of this system and, when that happens, it is on them to pick

up the pieces. In this way, in addition to the political economic structures—access to EI,

summer work, a lower cost of living, and structures of household and community support that

reproduce daily life while these workers are gone—the normalization of crisis for workers and 55 In general, employers seem concerned that if prices stay down too long, workers might find new jobs or even new careers, making them unavailable to the petroleum industry in the future. When activity started to pick back up after the 2015 slump, stories circulated about workers who, after such a difficult downturn, were reluctant to trust industry with their livelihoods. See, for example: Kyle Bakx, ‘Laid-off Oilpatch Workers Not Flocking Back to Jobs in the Sector’, CBC News, 5 April 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/oilpatch-employees-layoffs-hiring-1.4054555.

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their communities has helped endow the industry with a form of regularity. The following two

chapters examine these processes in detail.

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5. “The Mighty Island”: New stories and old economies on the potato periphery

I can stand here today and tell you that in five years’ time we have become the top producers, in Canada, of crops for processing.

Freighters are tying up at our wharves, loading with frozen food and seed potatoes and then carrying them to foreign markets.

- PEI Premier Alex Campbell, 1967, speech introducing the Comprehensive Development Plan1

Because farming and fishing and that has become so mechanized, everybody can’t farm and fish. So, we have to diversify our economy and that’s why the provincial government really got strongly into aerospace and IT. And so they’ve really promoted those two industries and supported them through programs and that in the hopes that people will stay and work in those industries.

- Staff member, rural development, PEI government

Since the early 1990’s, the province’s economy has undergone considerable growth particularly in high knowledge sectors such as: aerospace and defence, bioscience, and information communications technology. As these sectors have grown, our need for primary industries has faded. There is little to suggest these trends will not continue.

- Website of Innovation PEI2

Skinners Pond, 2015

It was a comically PEI scene. I made the long drive to the western tip of the Island on a sunny

spring day, headed for an interview in Skinners Pond: the birth-place of Stompin’ Tom Connors.

It was the kind of drive on the kind of day that convinces me this is the most beautiful place.

The coast in that area is largely bare of trees and the combined exposure and harshness of the

now-waning winter—what had been the snowiest winter on record—was evident. Despite the

eighteen-feet of snow that had fallen, the windswept fields were largely bare, burnt red against

the blue sky with the expanse of the frozen Gulf of St. Lawrence in the background. It was the

kind of scene that had been represented so many times in fantastical portrayals of the Island.

Appreciating the visual spectacle always feels a bit like reproducing the cultural one. I pondered

my familiar concern that I was chasing some imagined authentic place rather than the Maritime

region as it actually existed in 2015. Maybe, as local politicians and planners liked to claim, the

1 Alex B. Campbell. ‘Introduction: The Comprehensive Development Plan’. Speech, 1967. Alex B. Campbell Collection, http://alexbcampbell.ca/islandora/object/abc%3A765. 2 Government of Prince Edward Island. Innovation PEI. ‘Strategic Sectors’. Innovation PEI. Accessed 19 August 2018. http://www.innovationpei.com/strategicsectors.

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future was urban and highly educated, more than it was rural and resource-based. But then

again, invented authenticity and actual reality are not so distinct in a place like this.

I had met Rolland, the man I was on my way to interview, at a community forum I had co-

organized about labour mobility in wsestern PEI. The idea behind the event was to bring

together locals navigating outmigration to Alberta with workers who had come to PEI through

the Temporary Foreign Worker program to work in this part of the Island’s lobster processing

plants. The number of transnational migrant workers on the Island generally had increased

somewhat dramatically since the early 2000s: as a percentage of the total workforce, more than

any other province between 2002 and 2012.3 Workers arrive through both the Seasonal

Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) and the low-skill stream of the Temporary Foreign

Worker Program (TFWP). Across these two groups, most of these workers are employed in so-

called low-skill and seasonal occupations, primarily in fish processing and agriculture.4 For visa

and financial reasons, even though their work is seasonal, fish plant workers in the TFWP often

find themselves in Canada year-round, often in small rural and remote communities with little or

no recent history of immigration.

Our goal in bringing these two groups together was to explore the common forces driving them

from their home communities, to dispel some common myths about the Temporary Foreign

Worker Program, and to build on other ongoing efforts to support these migrant workers within

the context of a community where the imagined ‘racial diversity’ has historically been largely

limited to a division between Catholics and Protestants. Structural factors certainly function

(and are perhaps intended) to maintain a social distance between migrant and local workers—

employer control, the threat of not being re-hired, isolated housing, the distribution of hours

between locals and migrant workers. As Josie Baker highlights in her study of temporary

migrant work programs in PEI, in some cases, workers have faced racism and isolationism in

3 Canada. Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada: A Look at Regions and Occupational Skill (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2015), www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca. 4 In 2011, there were 230 hires approved in PEI through the SAWP and 460 through the TFWP. At the time, agricultural workers arrived primarily from Mexico and Jamaica and most were men, while workers who arrived through the TFWP came from a variety of countries, primarily in Asia, and in fish processing, most workers hired were women. In addition to fish processing, workers who enter through the TFWP have also worked in potato processing, trucking, nursing homes, and service work. This information comes from the following comprehensive and community-based study on the temporary foreign worker program in PEI: Josie Baker, Changing Hands: Temporary Foreign Workers in Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, PEI: Cooper Institute, 2012), https://www.cooperinstitute.ca/Migrant-Workers.

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these rural communities.5 Other communities have supported migrant workers through

friendship and charity: sometimes advocating for better housing, offering transportation or

language support, coordinating food donations, or simply fostering friendship. These gestures,

where they have happened, certainly speak to the existence of some connections between local

communities and migrant workers. But, in the context of our forum, while migrant workers

employed in local lobster processing plants participated in the dozens and readily talked through

their experiences of mobility with a keen sense of the global forces shaping their lives, with a

few exceptions, local mobile workers simply didn’t show up.

Lobster processing is gruelling work. Workers spend long hours standing on a concrete floor

and leave at the end of the day with swollen hands from handling shells. The wages are low

(though they vary between unionized and non-unionized plants), the season is short and intense,

and the rhythm of work sometimes unpredictable: employers want the work done when the

catch comes in. Depending on stocks and weather, the work fluctuates and can be delayed or

extended; workers might leave for the plant in the morning not knowing what time they will be

back home. Many younger local workers cannot afford to work a job with this sort of structure.

Fourteen-hour shifts pose major financial and logistical challenges for childcare, for example,

and social reproduction generally. Migrant workers, conversely, separated from their families

and anxious to earn as much as they can in the short season, are not only able to absorb this

uncertainty, but they are usually happy for the long hours and physically more up to the task on

account of their age. Rolland, a middle-aged man from a nearby town, had been one of only

several locals who had turned up to the forum. He himself had been a lobster fisherman before

he sold his gear to go out west. His wife continued to work in lobster processing. As he would

explain to me in our interview, at the forum he had withheld much of what he had wanted to say

and his wife had opted not to attend on account of her general frustrations related to the arrival

of migrant workers in her plant.

In retrospect, it was probably naïve to expect productive discussion across the chasms of race,

class, and gender that separated the two groups of workers we tried to bring together. This is the

poorest part of the province: remote, relatively poor agriculturally, historically Acadian, and

now, like most rural regions, dealing with outmigration and an aging population. The lack of

5 Baker.

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participation from local workers and families was consistent with the broader social silence

(from governments, publics, and workers) about the prevalence and experiences of local mobile

workers—a complex dynamic at the centre of this entire dissertation and one that, for many of

the workers I interviewed, is deeply informed by their own gendered histories of employment

precarity. And for people living locally who don’t work away, fish processing is understood as

one of the few opportunities for local employment, especially for women. The arrival of

international migrant workers—in this particular community, mostly women about my age from

the Philippines—had certainly stirred anxieties about job security that sometimes get pinned on

workers rather than employers.

But beyond the immediacy of job security, many of these communities are grappling with the

more existential anxiety of outmigration and decline. Local fish plants in this context, are often

understood as the backbone of local economic life. In recent years, plant owners have been

increasingly adamant that they are unable to staff their plants locally due to an aging workforce,

declining population, and locals’ disinterest in these seasonal low-wage positions. These

annually declared labour shortages, which seem to now be a permanent feature of the seafood

processing industry, are said to threaten plants’ financial sustainability. As Baker explains,

where this reliance on the local plant is recognized, communities have generally welcomed

migrant workers. Importantly, however, because their contracts are seasonal, migrant fish plant

workers have historically had very little access to permanent residency. As Baker writes, “These

‘temporary’ workers are…being used as the long-term solution for a permanent problem.”6

Migrant workers’ perceived willingness (structurally formed through restrictive work permits

that tie workers to a single employer) to do this poorly paid, seasonal, and gruelling work, is

seen as a potential solution to a chronic labour shortage and rural decline; but there is no

concrete pathway to realize any long-term security for either these workers or these

communities.

Governments have set the tone for policy-making by population panic, reframing local political

economic problems as problems of population numbers. In the context of fish plants and more

generally in the economy, this reliance on population dynamics as an explanation for economic

dynamics has encouraged ways of thinking that link outgoing and incoming groups: positioning

6 Baker, 12.

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outmigrants as economic problems and downloading responsibility for economic growth onto

newcomers (who, in turn, become economic problems if they leave). This manufactured

connection has encouraged a very economistic perspective on both in- and out-migration, but it

has also been a powerful distraction from the more complex and more meaningful political

economic dynamics that inform these movements. Most workers going west were never destined

for fish plants: fish processing has historically been segmented by race, gender, and class and

has relied on hiring ‘marginal’ workers who lack mobility or other options as a way of securing

labour and profit.7 Most people leaving these communities for the west are men, many of whom

have trades, different career trajectories, and different ideas about their futures. And, more

generally, people who choose to leave are doing so in search of something other than seasonal

poverty wages. Their lack of interest in fish plant work is not the result of their departure but,

more likely, part of the cause.

Similarly, as many others have documented, employers’ and governments’ drive to “bring in”

migrant workers is not a simple matter of replacing people, but a different and highly restrictive

labour relation that ties these workers to these employers. This just-in-time workforce has

particular appeal to employers and governments in the case of seasonal industries, where start

dates fluctuate and periodic layoffs are a certainty.8 That is, despite the rhetorical emphasis on

retention and growth, local governments’ concern about people leaving (and coming) is

selective and, ultimately, narrowly economic. Outward mobility might be good if it involves

remittances, for example; just as permanent residency for fish plant workers might be bad if

meant they could transition into teaching, accounting, or other jobs they are qualified to do. The

actual structural relationship between these workers is about political economy, not population

numbers. Their lives are linked through a shared local context of permanent precarity for

workers and concentrated political economic power among a few employers; their respective

abilities to respond to that situation, unevenly curtailed by citizenship, race, and gender.

Structurally, their different, tiered, migration pathways are a symptom of this structure, not a

solution to it. But blaming local labour market problems on outmigration has helped to strip

these local struggles of their context, causes, and culprits. Rather than grapple for something

7 See Christine Knott, ‘Contentious Mobilities and Cheap(Er) Labour: Temporary Foreign Workers in a New Brunswick Seafood Processing Community’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 41, no. 3 (2016): 375–98. 8 See Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes.

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deeper, harder to imagine, and far less attainable, population—numbers, mobility, and

makeup—slides into place as a way people struggle over economic change.

When I sat down to interview Rolland days after the forum, his attempt to explain his wife’s

anger reflected this in many ways. His explanation meandered from how hard it was to get a job

locally, to whether migrants could and should access EI, to crime, to the inflating value of these

locally low wages once they were sent home as remittances, to rural decline generally. Waning

access to EI had aggravated the situation, pressuring local workers into looking for low waged

work at the same time as plants were increasingly hiring internationally. “One time a house used

to be worth money here,” he explained, reflecting on the general state of rural economic

depression. “But there’s no people buying; just retirement people from away…. That’s what a

lot of people are mad about! They’re coming here, taking money, and going back home,” he

said, awkwardly lumping wealthy retirees from off-Island in with migrant workers in local

plants. His sense of local economic policy as overwhelming extractive—of labour, people,

culture, place—was palpable. “You know what I mean? That’s my opinion. But I’m the same

way too: I go to Alberta, bring it here too!”

That Rolland’s ideas wandered between different processes, stories and culprits as he attempted

to explain the local sense of insecurity is understandable. Deciphering what are fundamentally

global structural changes from the perch of one’s own life is always hard: probably all the more

so if that perch is in Skinner’s Pond. But here, in this tiny rural community, far removed from

the official centres of globalization, transnational migration pathways came and went, global

commodities markets and shifting trade networks dictated the pace of local work, changing

weather patterns and warming oceans were reorganizing economic life, and policy-changes that

had the power to pull your livelihood out from under your feet seemed to come down from on-

high. To make matters more intense, in communities like Rolland’s these palpable-but-obscured

changes were compounded by a deeper underlying anxiety about what was to come. The degree

to which local livelihoods were being undercut on multiple fronts opened some gaping questions

about the community’s future. These sorts of circumstances—structural changes we can feel but

not see, existential anxieties, and an dearth of imaginable futures—are fertile ground for stories:

digestible explanations that might lend some clarity to our experiences. And here, population—

not globalization, corporate consolidation, deepening inequality, or environmental change—had

settled in as a sanctioned and hegemonic explanation of the problem. The sanctioned solution, as

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we explore in this chapter, concerned itself not at all with actual conditions of uncertainty and

insecurity. What was needed was a new economy: the Island—and its people—needed to

change.

These are the official stories. But stories are contested territory. And that afternoon, sitting at his

kitchen overlooking the Gulf, Rolland circulated between stories that were sanctioned—like his

meandering concerns about circulating people and money—and stories that were not. He posed

hard questions about the direction of development and refused the common sense notion that

certain old ways had to be packed away. Rolland’s frustrations were surely informed by his own

need to leave in order to find work. Like most of the mobile workers I interviewed, he had very

mixed feelings about going west. The change had certainly offered him some things, but he also

pined for what had been lost—the changes that had sent him west to begin with. On the one

hand, he explained, “I like to go because the money is decent. It’s a boost. To me it’s a head

rush, that’s what I call it. Going to the plane with a suitcase, going to work!” He laughed at the

absurdity of the scene. “But once I’m there two weeks,” he continued, “I want to come home:

‘What the hell I’m doing here? What the hell I’m doing here?’ But, like, right now, I’m craving

to go back. But, I don’t want to go. You know what I mean?” In general, he seemed to think that

the growing number of people leaving signaled a bigger problem. “I shouldn’t have to do this!”

He laughed again. “I never done it twenty years ago! Why am I doing it now?” Over the course

of his working life he had watched the consolidation of an economic agenda that had done little

to enhance security and certainty for him or the people he loved. Rather, as he understood it, the

changes he had seen undermined the livelihoods, opportunities, and futures of people like he and

his wife while prioritizing the interests of local elites, business owners, and affluent visitors. As

a result, when he looked around his community, he saw a place that was hollowing out: local

economies, communities, and inter-generational families increasingly replaced with a dizzying

and palpably impermanent circulation of capital, labour, and wealthy seasonal residents building

up the coastline with cottages larger than most local homes.

Rolland grew up in a nearby town. He dropped out of school around age sixteen to fish with his

father before returning to finish grade twelve several years later. “In them days it was good

money, fishing,” he explained. “My father used to make good money cod fishing, and when the

bottom fell out of it, it was only lobster left.” After the cod stocks collapsed and the fishery

closed in the early 1990s, his father fished mackerel and lobster for a time and, eventually,

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lobster alone. What had been a more robust and crisis-proof multi-species fishery was

winnowed down to a single species with a two-month season. This increased reliance on

lobster—historically a more supplementary fishery, especially in parts of the region outside of

PEI—was a trend across the Maritimes after the federal government began restricting the

groundfisheries. This contraction of the fishery had rippled through local life. “People don’t

understand that stuff…. At one time, in July, everything was going around here. Now there’s

nothing,” he lamented. “You go down to the harbour in July last year? You didn’t see one boat!”

When I asked him if the cause had been the cod collapse, he explained that is was more complex

than the decline of one species or one industry: a whole structure of intersecting species and

employment opportunities had been dismantled. “No, it wasn’t only cod. There used to be moss

and everything,” he said, referring to the Island’s Irish moss harvest, which had been a globally

significant source of commercial carrageenan until it was outrun by globalization, aquaculture,

and over-harvesting in the 1990s.9 “Now there’s nothing! Look at the farmers! There’s no

farmers up here! There used to be a lot of farmers here…. When I was fishing with my father I

used to come home and go work in [sic] the farm, part-time.” With these changes in the fishery

and the consolidation of land and farming operations, he explained, drawing a link between

declining petty production and declining local employment, many people now had to drive an

hour to Summerside or two hours to Charlottetown for work. “Some of them just had to move

because it’s too hard! You fall asleep at the wheel.” For a time, he had tried a daily commute to

work shifts on a mussel farm but had to quit for that very reason.

Reflecting on this broad economic restructuring, Rolland explained, “You see—to me, PEI is a

retirement place. That’s my feeling. People come here to retire. It shouldn’t be like that…. You

tell that to a politician [and they tell you], ‘Oh no! It’s for the best!’ I said, ‘Open your eyes

[laughs]!’ You know? ‘Open your eyes and look back at twenty-five years ago!’” I asked him if

things had really been better then than they were today. “There was no—no worry about

tomorrow,” he explained. Historically, fishing had not been lucrative for his family, but their

needs were met and, maybe more importantly, they experienced only a fraction of today’s

crushing economic anxiety related to debt, oil prices, and consumer culture. As he remembered

it, they had a modicum of control over their lives. While he did not know exactly what had

caused the changes he observed around him, local resource industries had been transformed in

9 Thierry Chopin and Paul Ugarte, ‘The Seaweed Resources of Eastern Canada’, in Seaweed Resources of the World, ed. A. T. Chritchley and M. Ohno (Japan International Cooperation Agency, 1998), 273–302.

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ways that incentivized people like him, who had been owner-operators, to sell and seek out

waged work. Rolland had purchased his father’s fishing gear in the late 1990s and fished it for

ten years. He had pieced together his livelihood by helping a friend fish snow crabs in the early

spring, then taking his boat to eastern PEI to fish mackerel for a month, then fishing the fall

lobster season back home on his own license, and, finally, heading to Nova Scotia to band

lobsters before coming home by Christmas for the winter. “It wasn’t the money part,” that had

spurred him to sell; “It was just working, working, working and not getting nowhere in life.”

Rising gas prices, debt, and being at the mercy of the bank compounded the feeling. Just as men

were starting to trickle out of his area down the road to Alberta, he, too, sold his gear, paved his

driveway, built himself a porch, and a couple of years later (sometime around 2008), flew out

west with a friend.

I dwell here on the story of Rolland’s life, not because it is representative of all mobile workers

or even all the mobile workers I interviewed, but because I think it is useful in navigating our

way through the murkiness of the stories about local economic change. Through his own stories,

Rolland outlined how the systematic dismantling of a complex way of life—at once, social,

economic, and ecological—that came to tie a place like Skinners Pond to a place like northern

Alberta. While he struggled to explain the mechanisms of this reorganization—emphasising the

confusing way structural change is palpable at the same time as it seems invisible—he knew that

local industries that had sustained communities like his had been restructured so as to become

unviable. That change, he made clear, was the product of active decision-making and

development policy, not some inevitable process of decline. In this way, Rolland’s account of

things consistently contested the teleology of “progress.” Consolidation, modernization,

urbanization, and rising productivity had not worked in his favour. And while the old days of

multi-species fishing supplemented with farm or forestry work was no golden age, he held it up

as an economic structure that had made room for him and the place he lived. He did not preach

“going back,” but highlighted its virtues and worked to distinguish between the hardship of the

fishery in general and the structural crisis of the past twenty-five years. In contrast to the

pervasive common sense assertion that certain economies, places, and ways of life were routine

casualties of ‘development,’ he refused to accept that the new geographies of hardship that

surrounded him were somehow natural. In this way, narrow as it may have been, he pointed to

the persistent possibility that things could be different.

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How to know an economy?

I have spent much of this research process frustrated that I do not understand what is actually

happening in the local economy. The rise of extreme labour mobility, the palpable impact of the

EI cuts, the 2013 lobster strike, and stories like Rolland’s point to a state of persistent socio-

economic distress. While much of this dissertation focuses on more obscured pressures that

structure patterns of extractive labour mobility (gendered and classed subjectivities,

unemployment policy, produced knowledge related to productivity and labour, industry

recruitment practices) the most immediate explanation that workers often gave me for why

people are leaving was much more straightforward: money. Most workers pointed to the gaping

difference in wages and available work, explaining that the combination of seasonality, low

wages, and mounting barriers to EI were rendering it increasingly impossible to make ends meet

locally. The volatility of the oil industry—made clear again most recently and most intensely in

2015—further compounds this precarity. But, these suggestions of structural insecurity sit

alongside a structural silence regarding the lives of working, poor, and unemployed people

locally. I learned this quickly. When I first began my research I casually called the relevant

departments in each Maritime provincial government, asking for any data they had collected on

the growing phenomenon of inter-provincial employment. For the most part, the response I

received was confusion: Statistics Canada collects data on interprovincial migration, I was

told—migration being a totally different demographic process than the one I was inquiring

about (and one that is well documented and very publicized). Not only did governments lack the

data needed to understand and respond to the growth of inter-provincial employment, it was

evidently not widely perceived as a matter of urgent policy concern. And alongside this silence,

in place of a story about socio-economic distress, is a different story of the local economy. This

is a tale of real-time economic renewal: the latest in a long tradition of promising to make things

anew since it became clear that the region was ‘lagging’ the rest of the country in the post-war

period. Earlier versions, as we have seen, emphasized modernization and industrialization of

primary resource industries. The new version holds that the region is entering a new economic

era focused on innovation and entrepreneurialism.

When I started writing this chapter, my goal was to work through the ideological haze about the

local economy in order to assemble an account of the political economic shifts that are

pressuring people to leave. Given the divergence between the official tales of the ‘new’ local

economy (innovative, knowledge-based, and different) and the stories I was hearing from

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workers and employers in Alberta that linked those industries to persistent seasonal resource

industries out east, I especially wanted to understand what was happening in the primary

resource industries. Was I being romantic by pursuing interviews with people like Rolland? Or

was the combined persistence and restructuring of local resource industries actually helping to

create a class of mobile workers? And so, I sifted through data, made graphs and calculations,

and tried to objectively map how local lives have been made more precarious over the past thirty

years. But, the more I pondered this question, the more I realized that shifts in the stories about

“the economy”—how it gets talked about, represented, imagined, and curtailed—are an

important part of how economic restructuring and the reorganization of people’s lives play out

on the ground. I needed to look at the haze. Because how we come to know what the economy

is—and what it can and cannot be—helps to shape and reproduce the realities through which we

live it. And so, reflexively informed by my own difficulty parsing fact from fiction, this chapter

examines the parallel restructuring and re-narration of the Maritime economy since the 1980s,

focusing most closely on the case of PEI.

The chapter has three main components. I begin by reviewing the story of the new economy as

represented by government officials and official plans. The following section picks up on the

theme of economic ‘viability’ introduced in the first half of the dissertation, contextualizing the

turn to entrepreneurialism and innovation, and the powerful rhetoric of small business within the

broader history of regional planning. The third component of the chapter looks specifically and

the shifting political economy of two main natural resource industries in PEI—potatoes and

lobster—emphasizing the growing importance of processing, and processors’ increased

concentration of wealth and control. Despite all the talk of economic transition and moving on

from the old economy, primary resource industries are not in straightforward decline. What has

changed, rather, is primarily the distribution of wealth and power within these industries. The

state-backed concentrated power of major processors has left producers and local economies

vulnerable to these companies and served to undermine the autonomy that Rolland pined for

when he reflected on the Island’s past. These political economic shifts have been accompanied

by a discursive shift that has served to naturalize the resultant flexibility and insecurity.

Contrary to the narrative of rural reinvention, the new economy, and fundamental change, this

direction in economic planning remains informed by principles of consolidation,

corporatization, and exploitation that have threaded through the region’s economic history since

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the post-war period. And now, as then, this is an economic development agenda that favours

productivity over wellbeing, competition over meaningful social development, and regional

business interests over poor and working class people. Ultimately, these shifts in the region’s

political economy and political ecology and the resultant new forms of structural precarity have

been made to ‘fit’ with the increased national focus on extraction and the rise of the tar sands

beginning in the 1990s. As seasonal employment becomes precarious in new ways—at the same

time as it endures—it both makes workers available and sustains the long-distance systems of

social reproduction that allow them to travel.

But mixed and contradictory stories about what the local economy is make the drama and

intensely exploitative character of these political economies difficult to see. The constant

assertion that things are fine, changing, or the way they’ve always been leaves people grappling

for explanations as to why, for them, things are so hard. In this sense, the narration of the

economy—what it is and what it could ever be—actively frames not only how the present is

understood but also how we allow ourselves to imagine the future.

“Our need for primary industries has faded”

Rolland was not the only mobile worker I interviewed who laid out the ways local restructuring

had helped pave the way to Alberta for members of his community. Told through the stories of

their own lives, these workers explained clearly that social, ecological, and economic

transformations in a place like PEI were inseparable from the social, ecological, and economic

transformations unfolding in northern Alberta and other centres of major resource development.

And, as an unprecedented region-wide lobster strike laid bare in 2013, climate change was

bringing the crisis full-circle, back home to the Gulf of St. Lawrence where fishing livelihoods

were being put further at risk by warming waters and changing weather patterns. Crisis and

uncertainty in local resource industries—historically produced through industrialization,

environmental change, market volatility, warming waters—shored up a labour force that Alberta

employers in conventional oil and gas, other seasonal parts of the sector, and other western

resource industries were crying for. And this was no secret on their end either: employers did

not take for granted their ability to hire seasonally, pay relatively marginal wages, and have

confidence that their seasonally laid off workers would return the following year. This state of

affairs depended on the permanent precarity in these workers’ lives and a structure of

occupational pluralism comprised of winter work in Alberta, summer work at home, and EI to

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fill in the gaps. Not everyone who went west worked seasonal complements—many worked on

rotation or migrated more permanently, for example—but it was a system of sorts that was

explained to me by both employers in Alberta and planners and employment counsellors in the

Maritimes. These workers’ skill-sets, work ethic, willingness, seasonal availability: they fit with

Alberta, these people told me.

This relationship between socio-ecological crisis in the Maritimes and the social reproduction of

the western oil industry would hardly be notable were it not for the audible silence from local

decision-makers. The consolidation of farmland, the enclosure and industrialization of the

oceans, and the privatization of public space and common resources are well documented as

global trends pushing small primary producers off the water and land and into wage labour

markets around the world. A global “contraction of the right to subsist,” scholars have called

this global re-organization the “new enclosures”: a gesture to the enclosure of common

agricultural lands in England beginning in the fifteenth century, theorized by Marx as

capitalism’s moment of “original accumulation.”10 Scholars have explored the ongoing process

of enclosure, including the resurgence and changing forms of “accumulation by dispossession”

within the contemporary context of neoliberal globalization.11 Importantly, both Marx’s work

10 Midnight Notes Collective, ‘Introduction to the New Enclosures’, Midnight Notes 10 (1990): 2; see also Massimo De Angelis, ‘Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of Capital’s “Enclosures”’, The Commoner 2 (September 2001); Marx, Capital, Volume I. While enclosure has become a common term to describe the dissolution and privatization of social entitlements, in late fifteenth and sixteenth century England “‘enclosure’ was a technical term, indicating a set of strategies the English lords and rich farmers used to eliminate communal land property and expand their holdings. It mostly referred to the abolition of the open-field system, an arrangement by which villagers owned non-contiguous strips of land in a non-hedge field. Enclosing also included the fencing off of the commons and the pulling down of the shacks of poor cottagers who had no land but could survive because they had access to customary rights.” Enclosure literally meant enclosing with a hedge, ditch—or some other barrier that would prevent the passage of people and animals—as a mark of ownership. The enclosure of agricultural land rested on the argument that enclosures produced agricultural efficiency by overcoming the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 69–70. 11 See Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968); Harvey, The New Imperialism. Harvey’s argues that these processes occur far beyond proletarian struggles at the point of production, through new regimes of privatization that enhance and expand capital’s ability to circulate. Harvey explores the contemporary role of finance and credit; the privatization of what he calls ‘common property rights’ (state pensions, welfare, national health care); the manipulation of crisis in favour of capital; and neoliberal rollbacks generally. The engagement with these expanded notions of primitive accumulation in geography has been wide; to name but a few examples, scholars have examined neoliberal governance regimes including life patents and genetically modified organisms, water privatization, and fisheries rationalization. Scott Prudham, ‘The Fictions of Autonomous Invention: Accumulation by Dispossession, Commodification and Life Patents in Canada’, Antipode 39, no. 3 (2007): 406–429; Karen Bakker, ‘The “Commons” Versus the “Commodity”: Alter-Globalization, Anti-Privatization and the Human Right to Water in the Global South’, Antipode 39, no. 3 (2007): 430–455; Becky Mansfield, ‘Property, Markets, and Dispossession: The Western Alaska Community Development Quota as Neoliberalism, Social Justice, Both, and Neither’, Antipode 39, no. 3 (2007): 479–499. On the question of how capital has rendered ‘external’ resources into capitalist surplus, feminist geographers and autonomist feminist Marxists have highlighted the gendered and racialized forms of accumulation

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and these more recent studies illustrate that the general process of enclosure functions to

transform the productive capacity of both nature and labour into the building blocks of capital

accumulation, enclosing not only the means of survival (land, water, resources), but also the

capacity to work. At its simplest, this is the production and regulation of surplus population or

what Marx called an “industrial reserve army” of labour: unemployed people separated from

their means of subsistence, compelled to seek waged work for lack of other options.12

In the case at hand, the repeated, varied, and dispersed rounds of enclosure and accumulation—

locally, for example, through changes to agricultural and fisheries regulations, the state

supported consolidation of processing power, EI cuts, and employer recruitment, but also further

afield, for example in transnational migrant’s home communities—might be understood as

accumulation by “extra-economic means.”13 Understanding someone like Rolland, or Clayton

(Chapter 1), or Alistair (who we will meet in Chapter 6) within the context of these broader

political economic transformations demands a networked and layered analysis. The rise of

westward migration, the local arrival of transnational migrant workers, and the increase in

wealthy seasonal residents are interlocking changes, derived from racial imperialism,

environmental catastrophe, and shifting local and global political economy. At home, the

declining feasibility of rural primary resource work—and, by extension, rural economies—

forms the local backdrop to these shifts. Better wages promised new life options for (at least

some of) those who could get to Alberta; small plots of coastal agricultural land became more

profitable to sell than to work; and, as I remember it, when the first reports surfaced of Russian

associated with reproductive labour and argued that control of women’s bodies and unpaid labor has been foundational to primitive accumulation. E.g. Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community; Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1999); Federici, Caliban and the Witch. It is based on these varied forms of accumulation that Jim Glassman proposes the concept of accumulation by “extra-economic means” in order to encapsulate “the entire panoply of forms of accumulation by means other than expanded reproduction.” As Glassman explains, drawing on Richard Walker’s work, historical study of California agricultural labour: “labor has consistently been made available under conditions of insecurity and overabundance through ‘extra-economic’ means,” from political and military interventions in migrants’ home countries and communities to union-busting, recruitment practices, and government lobbying by powerful producers Jim Glassman, ‘Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by “Extra-Economic” Means’, Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 5 (2006): 617, 619, emphasis added; Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York: New Press, 2004). 12 Marx, Capital, Volume I, 784. 13 Having said this, I don’t intend to tell a story of primitive accumulation. I think we can, and should retain the distinct nature of primitive accumulation while still understanding it as a contemporary and ongoing process. I am somewhat weary of Harvey’s collapsing of the privatization of state pensions with, for example, the theft of land. While both are predicated on separation of people from the means of production, these are differently violent processes that are distributed unevenly around the globe along lines of race and gender.

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workers arriving in rural PEI in the mid-2000s, a workforce that had historically been feminized,

marginalized and variously racialized became even more so and, especially among younger

people, the sentiment that “anyone who’s anyone goes west” was cemented.14

Despite the clarity with which these varied structural changes were layered and linked through

Rolland’s life and stories, according to the official narrative of the Island economy, he was the

wrong person for me to be interviewing. On a summer afternoon in 2014, Wade MacLauchlan,

past-president of the local university who would go on to become provincial premier, explained

this to me: “I think one of the biggest challenges or problems in getting at the economy—not

just of rural, but of the region—is that…we operate by some quite heavy conventions that are

mainly not borne out in people’s real lives. Or that are on fairly shaky ground,” he clarified. I

had sought out MacLauchlan to ask him about a regional conference, called the Georgetown

Conference, focused on “redefining rural” that he had co-chaired the previous summer. He

continued: “So, one example would be every person who’s in elected office at the provincial

level in Prince Edward Island will tell you that agriculture is the backbone of the PEI economy

where somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of it is the service economy.” The persistence of

this outdated idea, he posited, had hindered good policy-making and timely adaptation to a

changing economic world. He explained, “maybe the people that are trying to make rural

communities continue—or for that matter, the region—might have been better off two

generations ago to say: ‘It’s a service economy; how can we make a go about it?’”

The Georgetown Conference, as he described it to me, had brought together “doers and

producers” in an attempt to highlight and share information about community-based efforts to

confront the region’s rural socio-economic and demographic challenges. Positioning itself

against doomsday narratives of regional failure and histories of destructive government

dependence, the conference was framed as an attempt to think rural revitalization anew: as

something we can do for ourselves.15 Among a diverse array of participants and speakers, the

conference had featured rural revitalization superstars the likes of Zita Cobb and Michael Smith,

locally born entrepreneurial types who have brought their fortunes back to the region and made

major investments. For Cobb, this had been in high end and art-based tourism and social

14 For important historical perspective on social difference, labour exploitaion, and the political economy of Maritime fish processing, see Knott, ‘Contentious Mobilities and Cheap(Er) Labour’. 15 See http://thegeorgetownconference.ca/archived_page/why-georgetown/.

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enterprise on Fogo Island, Newfoundland; and for Smith, in food-based tourism, most recently

on PEI. Cobb, a multi-millionaire who made her fortune as a top tech executive, especially, has

become a regional development sweetheart. Her projects are held up as examples of successful

and, crucially, imaginative rural revitalization that capitalizes on—but escapes the limits of—

traditional production. Cobb’s initiative quickly received international attention and Fogo Island

became a miracle case of sorts: a remote island that had resisted forced resettlement under the

government of Joey Smallwood only to suffer the incredible blow of the cod collapse,

successfully revived.16 If it could happen there it seemed there must be hope for anywhere.

“Another thing that we often think about the economy,” MacLauchlan continued his reflections,

“…is that there is some kind of solution that is going to ride over the hill. And that, generally,

brings trouble. Whether it’s the notable frauds or the fairly difficult-to-sustain things like a call

centre here or there,” he elaborated, referencing the local proliferation of call centres in the

16 E.g. Karen Burshtein, ‘Fogo, Newfoundland: The World’s Wildest Arts Scene?’, The Guardian, 27 June 2011, online edition, sec. Travel, http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2011/jun/27/canada-newfoundland-fogo-island-inn; Brandy Yanchyk, ‘Tycoon’s Lifeline to Canadian Island Prompts Mixed Reactions’, BBC News, 18 September 2011, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14939474; Jim Lewis, ‘The Possibility of an Island, in Canada’, The New York Times, 16 March 2012, online edition, sec. T Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/t-magazine/the-possibility-of-an-island-in-canada.html; John Walters, ‘Can an Inn Save Newfoundland’s Fogo Island’, Newsweek, 18 September 2014, https://www.newsweek.com/2014/09/26/can-inn-save-newfoundlands-fogo-island-271129.html; The Canadian Press, ‘Like a “Miracle”: Fogo Island Inn a Lucrative Success on Canada’s Eastern Edge’, CTV News Atlantic, 4 June 2018, https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/like-a-miracle-fogo-island-inn-a-lucrative-success-on-canada-s-eastern-edge-1.3958021. In the 1950s, the residents of Fogo Island successfully resisted the Smallwood (provincial) government’s efforts at resettlement. In the mid-1950s 90 percent of Newfoundland’s population still lived in outport communities; the resettlement program (which evolved into the 1960s and reached a more organized and hubristic form in 1965 with the federal-provincial Household Resettlement Program) was an attempt by the new provincial government to “rationalize” population distribution by concentrating people in growth centres that were meant to develop industry. John C. Kennedy, ‘At the Crossroads: Newfoundland and Labrador Communities in a Changing International Context’, Canadian Review of Sociology / Revue Canadienne de Sociologie 34, no. 3 (1997): 297–317; Miriam Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times: Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934-1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). A decade later, the island would become know for its successful participation in the National Film Board’s Challenge for Change program. As part of the program, over the course of three years, extension workers from Memorial University and filmmaker Colin Low shot 27 films with the community, documenting the socio-economic context of their lives and concerns about the future. On the whole, the films were meant to help islanders confront these challenges and to work together to revitalize the fishery and advocate to government officials. The films were used to mediate internal divisions in the community and screened to government as a way to foster communication with the island’s people. This experiment set a precedent for the use of film in community development that known as the “Fogo process” and was used as a model. The project was in part driven by concerns (from Don Snowden, director of extension services at Memorial) that a report from the Economic Council of Canada had focused on urban poverty. Peter K. Wiesner, ‘Media for the People: The Canadian Experiments with Film and Video in Community Development (1992)’, in Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, ed. Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker, and Ezra Winton (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 73–102.

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1990s that was hailed as the arrival of the knowledge economy.17 “And I don’t think it’s easy,

but I think that anything that really works has to be, I’ll call it, indigenous. I don’t know if it

helps to use that word.” Whether primary production—longstanding and historically

dominant—registered here as an “indigenous” component of contemporary Island capitalism, I

did not know. But, somewhat paradoxically, Cobb’s injection of Silicon Valley wealth seemed

to.

Elaborating on the problem of awaiting outside solutions, MacLauchlan explained, “The other

thing that has also done a lot to determine, not just the economy but how people think or hope

about the economy, is the idea that politicians and bureaucrats can help.” With a laugh, he said,

“And help, generally, seems to come with some notion that its counterpart is helplessness.

That’s not saying anything that I’m sure is not wildly apparent.” He went on to explain that

people expect too much in the way of what he called welfare. “I don’t mean social assistance,”

he clarified, “but that government will put its hand into the mix in a way that will subsidize or

supplement or lift up and make everything work. And that produces all kinds of dependence,

probably the least insidious of which is economic.”

The following year, MacLauchlan was elected provincial premier on an economic development

platform emphasizing business development, expansion of global market access, an aggressive

plan for population growth, and an embrace of an innovative and export-oriented economy.

Echoing economic policy trends that have circled the globe, his Liberal government promoted

the promise of innovation, culture, and human capital, holding up individual entrepreneurialism

and business development as the way of the Island’s economic future. The new economic

development plan that has since been released, “The Mighty Island,” emphasizes, among other

17 By way of personal anecdote, I remember when the call centres arrived. It must have been when I was in junior high school; my older brother’s friends got summer jobs in these new offices. This was a shift from the normal available work in the big three industries: tourism, agriculture, and fishing—though most of our friends worked in tourism. I imagine the prospect of an office job was enticing at first: less physical, more technological, etc. But I also remember how quickly they started complaining, mostly about the tedium and their sore necks—perhaps also abusive callers and low wages. Beginning in the 1990s, telephone call centres popped up across Canada, but they were especially concentrated in areas of high unemployment and a relatively educated workforce. In 2005 there were, on average, 6.7 call centres per 10,000 business entities in Canada; in PEI there were 15.8 and in New Brunswick there were 13.1. Richard Vincent and Larry McKeown, Trends in the Telephone Call Centre Industry, Analytical Paper Series, Service Industries Division, Catalogue no. 63F0002XIE — No. 053 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, Government of Canada, 2008), http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/63f0002x/63f0002x2008053-eng.pdf; see also Tom Good and Joan McFarland, ‘Call Centres: A New Solution to an Old Problem?’, in From the Net to the Net: Atlantic Canada and the Global Economy, ed. R. James Sacouman and Henry Veltmeyer (Aurora, ON: Garamond Press, 2005), 99–113.

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things, the importance of nurturing entrepreneurship, labour force development to meet

employers’ needs, innovation hubs and business incubators, improved access to global markets

and export expansion, infrastructure development, and building a global place brand.18

Understood as a linchpin of economic expansion, the growth plan and an associated population

strategy emphasize the urgent economic threat of high outmigration rates twinned with an aging

local population. Both plans underscore the imperative of population growth through immigrant

and youth retention and the repatriation of “skilled expatriate workers and entrepreneurs” who

have left the Island to live elsewhere.19

Neither the growth plan nor the population strategy makes much mention of what might be

considered the Island’s ‘traditional’ industries: agriculture or the fishery. At least not in any way

that is easily recognizable. The growth plan makes occasional reference to expanding the “food

sector,” including “a food incubation building, cold storage facility, and global trade

opportunities.” The seafood-processing sector is highlighted in a coded reference to the

Temporary Foreign Worker Program: “Work with the Government of Canada to ensure that our

seafood sector has access to the labour it requires.” And seasonal workers in general are invoked

in a commitment to “Engage with industry to find collaborative employment opportunities for

seasonal workers in all seasons and across different seasonal sectors.” There is no reference to

the phenomenon of inter-provincial employment; there is no mention of unemployment; and

there is no engagement with the realities and social challenges of “adjustment” as they were so

clearly laid out in the lives of Rolland and his wife—or so many other people struggling to make

their way in the “new economy.”20

None of this was much of a surprise. Over the past decade, similar growth, prosperity, and

“repatriation” strategies have popped up across the region.21 In step with broader trends, in

18 Canada. Prince Edward Island, The Mighty Island: A Framework for Economic Growth in Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, PEI: Government of Prince Edward Island, 2017), https://www.mighty-princeedwardisland.com/economic-framework. 19 Canada. Prince Edward Island, Recruit, Retain, Repatriate: A Population Action Plan for Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, PEI: Government of Prince Edward Island, 2017), https://www.mighty-princeedwardisland.com/population-action-plan. 20 Canada. Prince Edward Island, The Mighty Island: A Framework for Economic Growth in Prince Edward Island, 11, 9. 21 E.g. Canada. Prince Edward Island. Office of Bioscience and Innovation, Island Prosperity: A Focus for Change (Charlottetown, PEI: Government of Prince Edward Island, 2009), http://www.gov.pe.ca/photos/original/IPS.pdf; Canada. Prince Edward Island, The Mighty Island: A Framework for Economic Growth in Prince Edward Island; Canada. Prince Edward Island, Recruit, Retain, Repatriate: A Population Action Plan for Prince Edward Island;

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recent decades, economic development rhetoric in the Maritimes has emphasized, urged

transition to, and celebrated a new economy. Urged by local governments, business interests, the

federal National Research Council, and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (the federal

agency responsible for Atlantic development since the late 1980s), and framed by anxieties

about depopulation and lagging productivity, this vision has emphasized knowledge, innovation,

and competitiveness in a global marketplace.22 In PEI, building on regional development

programming, since the early 1990s emphasis has been on aerospace and defence, bioscience,

and information and communications technology (other “strategic sectors” include renewable

energy, financial and business services, and marine). In this sense, MacLauchlan’s plan follows

neatly from his predecessors’, including the previous plan released in 2009, which set ambitious

goals for expanding in these areas.23 Broadly, these plans convey that moving into the new

economy means ‘moving on’ from the old one. As the website for Innovation PEI, the

province’s economic development corporation, explains, “As these sectors have grown, our

need for primary industries has faded. There is little to suggest these trends will not continue.”24

Rural, as the Georgetown Conference suggested, was being reinvented.

Canada. Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia Commission on Building Our New Economy, Now or Never: An Urgent Call to Action for Nova Scotians, 2014, https://onens.ca/img/now-or-never.pdf; Canada. New Brunswick. Department of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour, New Brunswick Population Growth Strategy, 2014-2017 (Fredericton, NB: Province of New Brunswick, 2014), http://www2.gnb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/petl-epft/PDF/PopGrowth/PopulationGrowthStrategy2014-17.pdf; Canada. New Brunswick, The New Brunswick Economic Growth Plan (Fredericton, NB: Province of New Brunswick, 2016), http://www2.gnb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/eco-bce/Promo/EconomicGrowthPlan/PDFs/EconomicGrowthPlan2016.pdf; Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, ‘Atlantic Growth Strategy’, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, 20 October 2017, http://www.acoa-apeca.gc.ca/ags-sca/Eng/atlantic-growth.html. 22 More broadly, in its emphasis on entrepreneurialism, innovation, and private sector development, the official vision of Atlantic Canada’s economic future was, of course, not unique. By the 1990s, the knowledge economy had taken the world of North American economic planning by storm and in the decades that followed the assertion that ideas and creativity could replace nature and labour as the source of value became somewhat hegemonic, including in declining resource communities. E.g. on the case of B.C. forestry communities see Nathan Young, ‘Radical Neoliberalism in British Columbia: Remaking Rural Geographies’, The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie 33, no. 1 (2008): 1–36. 23 The 2009 plan introduces its major goals as follows: “A nationally recognized centre of biotechnology excellence with 2000 employees; An information technology sector that will be recognized for its innovative capacity; Continued cultivation of our thriving aerospace industry; Increased emphasis on environmentally-friendly energy sources.” Explaining the character of the transition, the report reads: “In the past, our wealth has been drawn from the resources of our land and surrounding waters. To ensure continued wealth, we must strengthen the new factors of competitiveness in today’s economy—people and technology—and apply them across the full range of our economy.” Canada. Prince Edward Island. Office of Bioscience and Innovation, Island Prosperity: A Focus for Change, 3, 6. 24 Innovation PEI, ‘Strategic Sectors’, Innovation PEI, n.d., http://www.innovationpei.com/strategicsectors.

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Thirty years of a new economy

The changes that Rolland had experienced over the course of his working life can be traced

through the past thirty years of regional, economic, and resource development policy. While

1960s-style modernist planning explored in Chapters 2 and 3 fell out of favour beginning in the

1970s, obsession over the problem of Maritime underdevelopment did not. In step with global

governance trends, the emphasis of economic and development policy shifted away from direct

state intervention in the organization of the economy, prioritizing entrepreneurialism and

competition and emphasizing the market’s distributional power.

The changing structure of government agencies and departments responsible for regional

development reflected this, moving away from both direct government programming and

approaches to development organized around local or regional interventions. The growth poles

orientation and had emerged in the 1960s quickly led to a diffusion of development spending

and demand from other regions and, in the early 1970s the Department of Regional Economic

Expansion (DREE) was decentralized and the Special Areas program was scrapped. In 1982

DREE was dissolved and replaced with the Ministry of State for Economic and Regional

Development (responsible for federal-provincial agreements) and the Department of Regional

Industrial Expansion (DRIE; the federal-regional industrial incentives program). Part of DRIE’s

official activities included partnership with industry throughout the range of the Department’s

activities, from policy-development to program delivery.25 The Ministry would be short-lived,

disbanded only several years later. Neither did DRIE last long. According to Donald Savoie, the

department was begrudged by Atlantic business interests as slow and overly bureaucratic and

quickly came under criticism for investing primarily in southern Ontario and Quebec. In 1986,

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced the creation of a new regional development

agency—the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA)—and a new approach to regional

development. DRIE was dissolved the following year.26

25 Library and Archives Canada, ‘Department of Regional Industrial Expansion Fonds’, Online inventory for Library and Archives Canada, 19 March 2008, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/pam_archives/public_mikan/index.php?fuseaction=genitem.displayItem&lang=eng&rec_nbr=39&rec_nbr_list=39. 26 Savoie, ‘Reviewing Canada’s Regional Development Efforts’; Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren. The creation of ACOA was part of a broader restructuring of how regional development was organized in the federal government. Similar agencies were developed for western Canada and certain northern regions: The Federal Economic Initiative for Northern Ontario (FedNor) was created to promote economic development in northern Ontario; the Department of Western Diversification was created to support business development in the four western provinces. The Federal Office of Regional Development-Quebec would be created in 1991. Guy Beaumier, Regional Development in

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Before its dissolution, the Minister of DRIE had convened a federal-provincial Task Force on

Regional Development. In its final report the Task Force asserted that federal attempts to reduce

regional disparities had thus far been unsuccessful. By Savoie’s account, the report made the

case that the fiscal transfers that had historically been used to address regional inequality

targeted only the symptoms of the problem and not the causes. Rather than dependence, those

on the receiving end wanted “more opportunity for self-reliance.”27 Attempts to draw in

investment had not worked, nor had the programs generally helped lagging regions to generate

wealth internally. Development programming had lacked focus and long-term vision and had

come to generate unrealistic expectations of government’s power to resolve this particular

problem.28

In order to develop ACOA’s mandate, Mulroney ordered consultations throughout the Atlantic

region and appointed Donald Savoie, a scholar of public administration who frequently advises

governments and is the established voice on issues of regional underdevelopment, to lead them.

Reflecting on the consultations, Savoie emphasizes the local business community’s insistence

that government should streamline cash grant programs, hand responsibility for them to the

provinces, and reserve one-time grants for new business development.29 As Savoie explains it,

businesses wanted access to knowledge, technology, and research capacity, especially related to

product development and packaging. In his final report on establishing ACOA, Savoie’s

recommendations reflected these concerns, laying out a vision for the agency that emphasized

the importance of internal growth and funding for business development, in contrast to historical

forms of government support—or, as he explicitly framed it, dependency.

As Karen R. Foster explains it in her study of ACOA and genealogy of the “productivity”

doctrine in Canada, quoting Savoie’s 1987 report: “He claimed to have found…‘a deeply felt

desire to break away from dependency on government,’ as well as wide recognition ‘that the

Canada, Updated edition (original report November 1988), 88-13E (Ottawa: Library of Parliament, Research Branch, Economics Division, 1998), http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/CIR/8813-e.htm. 27 Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren, 140. 28 The report that Savoie is drawing from here, Report of the Federal Provincial Task Force on Regional Development Assessment, was submitted to the Annual Conference of First Ministers, Toronto, 26-27 November 1987. Canada. Department of Regional Industrial Expansion, Report of the Federal-Provincial Task Force on Regional Development Assessment (Toronto: Annual Conference of First Ministers, 1987); as referenced in Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren. 29 Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren.

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dependency syndrome offers little prospect for improving economic opportunities, particularly

for a new generation.’”30 In Savoie’s words, the report recommended “a strong emphasis on

entrepreneurship, the development of new endogenous companies, the enhancement of existing

businesses, the development of new products, and the expansion into new and international

markets.” The report also advocated the development of “Centres for Entrepreneurial

Development…to encourage universities in the area to develop entrepreneurship and small

business courses in their business schools, to put in place an outreach program and contact-

referral services, and sponsor a series of seminars on entrepreneurship.”31 The report urged

federal-provincial business-development agreements and encouraged the agency to pursue

additional measures to support regional businesses, including market development, research and

development, human-resources development, and community development.32 Positioned clearly

against historical fantasies of magical solutions ‘riding over the hill’ to save the region (to use

Wade MacLauchlan’s characterization), Savoie’s report insisted that it was the people

themselves who would have to “provide the energy, skills and the imagination.”33 As ACOA’s

first five-year report to Parliament would later explain, “One of the major objectives set for

ACOA was to encourage the people of Atlantic Canada to accept greater responsibility for the

region’s development.”34

The federal government would accept most of Savoie’s recommendations. ACOA was

established to wield authority over regional economic development measures, including

planning, coordination, and implementation, and would make federal policies work in the name

the region’s economic development. Its mission was, “To foster, in a strategic partnership with

the people of Atlantic Canada, the long-term economic development of the region through the

renewal of the Atlantic entrepreneurial spirit.”35 And when it came to developing specific

ACOA programming, as Savoie states, “one thing was clear. Any new measures would have to

be geared toward the private sector, with a strong emphasis on small business and established,

30 Donald J. Savoie, Establishing the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (Ottawa: Office of the Prime Minister, 1987); as quoted in Foster, Productivity and Prosperity, 163. 31 Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren, 149–50. 32 Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren. 33 Savoie, Establishing the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, 33; as quoted in Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren, 148. 34 Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Five-Year Report to Parliament, 1988-1993, 1994, http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2016/apeca-acoa/C89-1-4-1993-eng.pdf. 35 Quoted in Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, 7.

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as well as aspiring entrepreneurs.”36 Thus was laid the fundamental ideological foundation upon

which regional economic development would unfold—or at least be narrated—over the coming

decades.

The Action Program that followed was designed to contribute to business development directly

and indirectly: through grants to municipalities and other non-profits to support business

growth; by making direct contributions to industrial activities including manufacturing,

processing, and repair and maintenance; by funding tourism projects; by strengthening the link

between research institutions and industry; and by subsidizing the costs of a range of other

initiatives including modernization, expansion, product development, and so on.37 In the first

year of the Action Program, while the great majority of applications and grants were for small

projects (valued at less than $200,000), a full 50 percent of allocated funds went toward just 5

percent of approved projects.38 That is, for all the emphasis on small business development—

and while the largest number of grants went to small projects—the Agency quickly ensured

there was plenty of room for and financial commitment to the region’s few large and powerful

companies.

In ACOA’s first five-year report to Parliament (submitted in 1994), for example, the agency

reviewed the development impacts on a selection of economic sectors across the four provinces:

tourism in Cape Breton; software development in Nova Scotia; softwood milling, salmon

aquaculture, and information technology in New Brunswick; high tech firms in Newfoundland;

and biotechnology and food processing in PEI. In reviewing changes to PEI’s food processing

sector, the report explains that ACOA and the province together had levered $100 million into

the industry, including funds to develop waste treatment facilities (owned by a provincial Crown

agency) that had enabled major expansion of processing production. Employment in processing

had increased by 40 percent, the percentage of potato acreage being processed had increased by

50 percent, and exports now accounted for 95 percent of production. The “Fixed Link” to New

Brunswick, construction on which had begun the previous year, was anticipated to further

enable additional growth and further increase the province’s competitive position.39 Thirty years

later, that pattern would continue. In the Agency’s up-to-date list of grants and contributions 36 Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren, 153. 37 Savoie offers a much more detailed account of this on page 154 of Visiting Grandchildren. 38 Savoie. 39 Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Five-Year Report to Parliament, 1988-1993.

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over $25,000 since 2006, the top recipients include J.D. Irving subsidiary Atlantic Wallboard

Limited Partnership ($35 million in 2006 to construct a gypsum wallboard manufacturing plant,

conditionally repayable); Sydney Ports Corporation Inc. ($19 million in 2011 to dredge the

Sydney Harbour, non-repayable); Michelin North America (Canada) Inc. ($10 million in 2006

to develop and implement innovative manufacturing equipment, unconditionally repayable);

Forest Protection Limited ($10 million in 2014 for suppression of a Spruce Budworm outbreak,

non-repayable); Grieg NL Nurseries Ltd. ($10 million to build a recirculating aquaculture

system for Atlantic Salmon, unconditionally repayable); several amounts of $10 million (non-

repayable) to New Brunswick Regional Development Corporations; and regular payments every

three years of just under $10 million (non-repayable) for the Atlantic Canada Tourism

Partnership Agreement.40 Other notable non-repayable contributions went toward delivery of the

Halifax International Security Forum and a series of payments every three years to Springboard

Atlantic Inc., which “provides strategically positioned resources to Atlantic Canadian

universities and colleges alike, helping them transfer both knowledge and technology into the

private sector.”41

Moreover, as Foster highlights, while the official rhetoric certainly emphasizes the imperative of

internal growth and self-reliance, this contradicts the parallel premium placed on fostering

global competitiveness, export-oriented commodity production, increased access to international

markets, and, an ever more central tourism sector that has long courted middle class wealth from

away.42 As Foster explains, “governments have thus made it their job not to protect or increase

the prosperity of their people, but to help them gain a competitive edge—even if it means lower

wages and less work, at least in the short term—against ‘low cost’ producers in other

countries.”43 That is, rather than a source of local empowerment, this rhetorical emphasis on

self-starters and internal growth might be better understood as a response to historical structures

of government investment that prioritized employment or the distribution of economic activity

into and across the region. Even if, as I argue in the early chapters, these modernist policies

were ultimately invested in growing productivity by minimizing waste and increasing efficient 40 ACOA releases this information through proactive disclosure. The data begins on May 31 2006 and continues to be updated every three months. Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, ‘Disclosure of Grants and Contributions over $25,000’, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, 15 October 2012, http://www.acoa-apeca.gc.ca/eng/Accountability/ProactiveDisclosure/GCAwards/Pages/Home.aspx. 41 Springboard Atlantic. ‘About Us: The Story’. Springboard Atlantic: Atlantic Canada’s Commercialization and Industry Liaison Network, 2018. http://springboardatlantic.ca/. 42 Foster, Productivity and Prosperity. 43 Foster, 157.

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use of ‘national resources,’ state management of unemployment and unemployed people was

central to this agenda. In the new model, employment is said to come through creatively making

yourself fit into an increasingly global and quickly changing world: through creating your own

job. Regional unemployment in the 1960s and 1970s would have been considered a problem of

population adjustment; today it has been clearly redefined as a problem of individual

adjustment.

One final contradiction that needs highlighting is the assumption that the regional economy

could (and should) move ‘beyond’ the historical centrality of natural resources. ACOA’s five-

year report to Parliament for 2003-2008, reflects back on the rise of the new economy in the late

1990s, explaining: “globalization and the rise of the knowledge-based economy were pushing

Atlantic Canada toward what economist Michael Porter and others called the new ‘paradigm of

competitiveness.’ Prosperity in this new economy would be based on productivity, rather than

on labour or natural resources.”44 The assertion that innovation, knowledge, and

entrepreneurialism could exist apart from—rather than simply reorganize—nature and human

labour courses through the rhetoric shared by ACOA and regional economic planning

documents. But the nature of this innovation is driven by industry, much of which is rooted in

the very industrialized and corporatized “traditional” resource sectors of agriculture and fishing

(broadly understood here to include aquaculture). The emphasis on knowledge and innovation

obscures the structural changes that have happened within these industries, focusing on a small

group of highly educated workers and business elites at the expense of the majority workforce

that reproduces this economy (through what is often seasonal, low-wage and difficult work) or

has been on the receiving end of its restructuring. This orientation structurally locks low-wage

workers into the economic future while discursively writing them out. In combination with the

pervasive story that people can and should make their own jobs, this lets governments off the

hook for unemployment and job creation and, in a context of high unemployment, seasonal

work, and ecological precarity, chips away at a waning sense of public entitlement to state

initiatives and resources.

44 Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Five-Year Report to Parliament, 2003–2008 (Moncton: Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, 2008), 5, http://www.acoa-apeca.gc.ca/eng/publications/ParliamentaryReports/Pages/5YearReport_Intro.aspx.

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In reviewing ACOA’s history, I do not mean to over-emphasize the agency’s power in

reorganizing the local economy. Rather, I have simply tried to detail the taking-hold of a

regional economic and planning ideology that continues to frame development planning and

discourse.45As the examples above illustrate, this orientation is two-pronged and contradictory:

at once endorsing consolidation and corporatization while preaching the importance of small

business development and entrepreneurialism; pushing the imperative of endogenous growth

while organizing the economy increasingly in relation to global markets; declaring the sun has

set on local primary resource dependence while restructuring these industries to meet the

demands of powerful producers and processors; pursuing repatriation of “skilled expatriate

workers and entrepreneurs” while supporting the mobility of local labourers; scorning regional

‘dependency’ on government while endorsing regional dependency on volatile and far flung

extractive industries; opposing magical solutions that come “over the hill” while simultaneously

courting private sector solutions and welcoming them in when they arrive. That is, at the same

time as it helped reorganize wealth and power on the ground, ACOA narrated a new economy

that had understandable appeal: one that would, with some effort and imagination, liberate the

region from the drudgery of the past, from dependency, poverty, isolation, physical work, and a

reliance on natural resources.

A new economy of natural resources

Of course, MacLauchlan was not wrong when he pointed to the rise of the service sector in the

Island economy, nor, by certain measures, the decline of agriculture. Across North America, the

trend over the past thirty years has been a decline in the production of material goods and a rise

in service sector employment and Maritime Canada is no exception to this. In 2016, 74% of the

PEI labour force was concentrated in the broadly defined services-producing sector: an increase

of just under 10% since the mid-1970s. A more detailed look at the structure of the wide-

ranging service sector illustrates that much of this expansion has been in public administration,

health and social services, and education, for example. The celebrated “new industries” of

finance, real estate, science and technology, and culture, are growing, but remain relatively

marginal in terms of employment. Other significant service sector employment exists in

accommodation and food service and retail trade—overall, poorly-paid work, much of which, in

this context, is likely seasonal. Combined, these accounted for almost 20% of total employment

45 It is beyond the scope and purpose of this dissertation to review a complete history of ACOA specifically or neoliberal regional development more generally. For a detailed history see Foster, Productivity and Prosperity.

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in 2016. As farms have become bigger, fewer in number, and more capital intensive,

meanwhile, direct employment in agriculture has declined by more than 50% over the past 30

years, from over 10% in the mid-1980s to under 5% in 2016.46 Service-producing industries are

equally significant to the provincial GDP as they are as a source of employment. But, again, this

activity is dominated by real estate (largely owner-occupied housing), public administration,

education, and healthcare and social assistance, which together account for almost half of

economic activity.47 Information and communications technology services, to take an example

from the celebrated “new economy,” have more than doubled since the 1990s, but account for

less than 4% of GDP (as measured by industrial output).48 Manufacturing accounts for 10%; and

while durable goods manufacturing is certainly on the rise, this is still dominated by non-durable

(largely food) manufacturing. In 2016, food manufacturing together with crop and animal

production accounted for 8.6% of provincial industrial activity.49 In sum, while the service

sector dominates in terms of both employment and contribution to GDP, this activity is

concentrated in and around housing and the public sector, not the sorts of industries advertised

in the region’s economic plans.50 Sectors like aerospace, bioscience and pharmaceuticals, and IT

have seen growth, but they remain somewhat marginal. And, while employment in agriculture

has certainly declined, this has been a longstanding trend since agriculture began to mechanize

more intensely and the farm population plummeted in the decades after World War Two, from

46 Statistics Canada. Table 282-0008 - Labour Force Survey estimates (LFS), by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), sex and age group, annual (persons unless otherwise noted), CANSIM (database). Accessed December 15, 2017. 47 Other significant services-producing sectors include retail trade (7.1%) and finance and insurance (5.5%). 48 These calculations are made using Statistics Canada’s measure of GDP by industry. Statistics Canada. Table 36-10-0402-01 (formerly CANSIM 379-0030) - Gross domestic product (GDP) at basic prices, by industry, provinces and territories (x1,000,000), chained (2012) dollars. Accessed November 13, 2018. For an explanation of this approach to calculating GDP (the production approach) in contrast to the income and expenditure approaches, see: Statistics Canada. ‘Gross Domestic Product’. Statistics Canada, 11 September 2018. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/13-607-x/2016001/174-eng.htm. 49 For example, pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing increased from 0.2% to 1.5% of GDP between 1997 and 2016: a huge increase, but still relatively marginal. The same general pattern exists in some other expanding parts of the new economy (e.g. computer systems design, which increased from 0.1% to 0.8% for the same period). While other growing areas of the new economy have been relatively stagnant as a percentage of industrial activity: e.g. information and cultural industries (increased from 2.9% in 1997 to 3.1% in 2016), or aerospace product and parts manufacturing (remained unchanged as a percentage of industrial activity, from 1.6% in 1997 to 1.5% in 2016). Statistics Canada. Table 36-10-0402-01 (formerly CANSIM 379-0030) - Gross domestic product (GDP) at basic prices, by industry, provinces and territories (x1,000,000), chained (2012) dollars. Accessed November 13, 2018. 50 Moreover, this concentration of public sector employment is a hallmark the “Maritime problem,” supposedly signalling another way the local economy has not overcome its past. Critics have long chastised the region as dependent on the public sector for job creation: part of its broader failure to foster the private sector growth that might pull it up by its bootstraps.

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almost half the Island’s total population in 1951 to 10% by 1981.51 Food manufacturing,

conversely remains a significant and growing part of the provincial economy.

But there are other ways to think about what constitutes “the economy.” Since the 1990s, these

repeated declared arrival of the new economy has been paralleled by a dramatic reorganization

of natural resource industries that has profoundly changed the political economy of the province

and the region more generally. As agriculture has become more monocultural and industrial, and

as both agriculture and fishing have become more processing-intensive and export oriented—the

distribution of wealth and power along the continuum of the production process has shifted: put

simply, more concentrated at the top. The situation in the fishery is less extreme, on account of

the protected status and ongoing dominance of the inshore owner-operator fishery, but the

pattern holds there too.52 The potato industry is dominated by a small number of large and

powerful companies while seafood processors are more numerous and include small and

medium-sized firms alongside large ones.53 In both potatoes (in PEI) and the inshore lobster

fishery (across the Atlantic region), government regulations have been in place since the 1970s

and 1980s to protect the existence of independent owner-operators and prevent consolidation

and corporatization of the industries.54 As such, as a generalization, in both industries processors

tend to purchase raw products from these independent producers, rather than owning and

operating agricultural or fishing operations themselves.

To a degree, this structure continues to characterize both industries, but there are various ways

that processors have slowly extended their reach into the realm of growing and harvesting. This

is most palpable in the case of potato production, where farmers enter into contracts with the

51 This data is compiled was part of the Prince Edward Island 43rd Annual Statistical Review. This particular data is from the Census of Agriculture, Agriculture-Population Linkage Data, Statistics Canada. Canada. Prince Edward Island. Department of Finance, Prince Edward Island 43rd Annual Statistical Review: 2016 (Charlottetown, PEI: Government of Prince Edward Island, 2017). 52 An examination of changes in the forestry sector would enrich this analysis from a regional perspective. 53 See Canadian Industry Statistics – Businesses, Seafood Product Preparation and Packaging – 31171 and Frozen Food Manufacturing – 31141, Industry Canada. Accessed December 23, 2017. 54 Since the 1970s, there has also been a year-round offshore lobster fishery off the Georges Bank in southern Nova Scotia, which is not subject to these regulations. The offshore Lobster Fishing Area (LFA) 41 is the only LFA with a year-long season, a quota, and no trap limit. All eight offshore licenses in the (all in Lobster Fishing Area 41) are owned by Clearwater Seafoods Limited Partnership. Through these licenses, the company is permitted to harvest 720 tonnes; it does so using one industrial trawler. Paul Withers, ‘A Line in the Ocean and Clearwater’s Monopoly over 720 Tonnes of Lobster’, CBC News, 29 March 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/clearwater-seafood-offshore-lobster-monopoly-investigation-1.4596922; Gilles Thériault, John Hanlon, and Lewis Creed, Report of the Maritime Lobster Panel (Maritime Lobster Panel (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island), 2013), https://novascotia.ca/fish/documents/Maritime-Lobster-Panel-Report-NOV1.pdf.

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processors that stipulate the nature of the product they must deliver as well as certain

requirements related to the conditions of production. But this consolidating power extends more

broadly into communities’ economic, social, and environmental wellbeing: through the

existence (or not) of secure employment opportunities, increasing exposure to agro-chemicals,

or the lived vulnerability of corporate dependency. More fundamentally, as producers and

communities have become increasingly dependent on these firms for their ongoing existence,

the companies have used this vulnerability to secure political power. While producers are not

mobile, processors certainly are. Communities know from experience that if processors come up

against obstacles to smooth and profitable production, they are willing and able to relocate.

It is beyond the scope of this project to properly trace the consolidation of power among the

region’s top food processing companies (in the potato industry, this task is complicated by the

fact that the Irving and McCain companies, which dominate the region, are private family firms

that are very secretive about their operations). But we can gain a crude sense of this shift by

tracing both the reorganization of these industries and the redistribution of wealth across

exports, sale of the raw product, and wages. By this measure, rather than focus on the number of

workers directly employed in agriculture and the fishery, or the contribution to provincial GDP,

we can attend to the accumulation of wealth and the associated accumulation of power as an

indication of these industries’ significance. Below, I provide a brief account of the restructuring

of potato and lobster production and processing and track some key implications for the

distribution of wealth and power.

Potatoes

Today, potato processing dominates the Island’s agricultural political economy. Potato

production there has a long history: PEI historian, Edward MacDonald, marks the embrace of

seed potato production in the 1920s as the early genealogy of this “specialization,” first in seed

potatoes and later in processing potatoes.55 The consolidation and mechanization of agriculture,

too, was a somewhat long and gradual process. While already underway before the

Comprehensive Development Plan, the CDP era solidified this trend, laying the foundation for

the growth of the processing industry and the domination of a potato cash crop produced

specifically for processing. In the post-war period, technological change had improved the

55 Edward MacDonald reviews some of this early history. MacDonald, If You’re Strong Hearted.

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prospects for freezing potatoes and, as the market for processed and fast foods grew, the PEI

government worked to draw regional processing businesses to the Island (see Chapter 2). The

McCain family had been in the potato processing business since the 1950s, and over the next

decades McCain Foods would grow into one of the largest frozen food companies in the

world.56 Recall from Chapter 2 that when the province tried to recruit McCain Foods in 1969,

Harrison McCain refused, convinced the frozen French fry market in Canada, and PEI

especially, was saturated.57 The Irving family, conversely—who were regionally powerful but

not invested in potatoes at the time—would make a quiet and sly entrance into the industry in

the years that followed. In the early 1970s, C.M. MacLean purchased the bankrupt Seabrook

Frozen Foods with financial backing from K.C. Irving. Then, in the late 1970s, rumours began

to circulate that the Irvings were buying up PEI potato land. In 1977 they were said to have

invested in C.M. MacLean Ltd., PEI’s largest potato buyer and only processor, purchasing the

company outright two years later.58 This marked the beginning of Irving-owned Cavendish

Farms Ltd. and the Irvings’ incursion into the potato processing business.

Locally, the new Irving enterprise would compete with McCain in the global frozen French fry

business, drawing on provincial and federal government support and encouragement to expand

its operations extensively over the following years. When the federal government announced the

closure of the air force base in Summerside, PEI in 1989, the provincial government sought out

the food processing industry as a solution to the evaporation of 1,300 jobs. While attempts to

court other companies were unsuccessful, the Irvings responded to the prospect of $40 million

in federal grants (which was later withdrawn) with a proposal for a new plant that would double

the Island’s potato processing capacity. The prospect of Cavendish Farms’ further incursion into

56 Robert Nielson, ‘McCains’s Equals Spud Power’, Atlantic Insight, December 1979. 57 This is explained in a confidential letter from David Darlington (Economist) to Harrison H. McCain (President of McCain Foods, Ltd). November 10, 1969. PARO RG33, Department of Development, Box 26, File 012-001-000 – Seabrook Farms. See also the response from Harrison McCain, dated November 13: PARO RG33, Box 2, File 142 – Seabrook Farms. By the time of the CDP the potato processing industry, which, with the rise of fast food was increasingly centred on frozen potato products, was already established and powerful in the region: the near exclusive domains of the McCain family business since the 1950s. Stubbornly headquartered in the small town of Florenceville, in the Saint John River valley of New Brunswick, the family company had become a powerful regional force and by the late 1979s McCain Foods (like the Irving companies, a secretive private firm) was growing into one of the largest frozen food companies in the world Nielson. According to a profile in Executive magazine from 1967, the McCain’s already operated the third largest frozen vegetable business in the world. W. J. Crichton, ‘The McCains’, Executive, September 1967. 58 Kennedy Wells, ‘Irvings and Potatoes? Rumors Are Flying’, Atlantic Insight, March 1980; DeMont, Citizens Irving: K.C. Irving and His Legacy; Savoie, Harrison McCain; for additional context and background see also The Brothers and Sisters of Cornelius Howatt, The Family Farm and the Future of Prince Edward Island: A Brief Presented to Premier Campbell by the Brothers and Sisters of Cornelius Howatt.

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potato processing prompted a bidding war of sorts between the two companies and the PEI

government.59 McCain eventually opened a plant in Borden, PEI in 1991, but Irving opened a

second plant in 1996 that dramatically increased its capacity and the company’s operations

remained dominant on the Island as it consolidated increasing control over policy, production,

and daily life.60 In 2014 Cavendish farms claimed that the potato industry directly and indirectly

accounted for 12% of total provincial employment and represented $1 billion of direct and

indirect economic benefit. Quoting numbers from that same year, the company stated that it

purchased just over 50% of the Island’s annual potato crop: 46,000 acres and over 1.3 billion

pounds.61 Cavendish Farms remains the largest private sector employer in the province and,

according to the company, the fourth largest producer of frozen potato products in North

America.62

While the trend toward an industrialized and monocultural potato cash crop was already

underway, it solidified and intensified with the growth of processing. This began to take shape

in the era of the CDP, but really exploded into its current form beginning in the 1990s. In terms

of the reorganization of farming itself, this transition has broadly mirrored agricultural

restructuring across North America: fewer, larger, and more capital-intensive farms. The

number of farms on the Island decreased from 7,335 in 1961 to 3,154 in 1981 to 1,845 in 2001,

while the average area per farm rose from 131 acres to 222 to 350 over the same years before 59 DeMont, Citizens Irving: K.C. Irving and His Legacy. 60 Cavendish Farms, ‘Our Story’, Cavendish Farms, 2018, https://us.cavendishfarms.com/en/our-story/; Daniel Stoffman, The Ground Up: Fifty Years of McCain Foods (McCain Foods Limited, 2007). While Irving has been dominant in the PEI context, McCain has consistently been a larger frozen food business than Irving. But Irving’s overall operations (divided into J.D. Irving, Irving Oil, and Ocean Capital investments) are larger and vaster. A crucial component of their empire is their near-total control of New Brunswick media, including ownership of all English-language newspapers. As early as 1970, the Davey Committee (Special Senate Committee on Mass Media) focused in on the Irving media problem, calling New Brunswick a “journalistic disaster area.” Canada. Parliament. Senate. Special Senate Committee on Mass Media, The Uncertain Mirror (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1970), http://www.albertasenator.ca/flashblocks/data/BT%20Media/Davey%20Report%20Vol%201.pdf. In 2006, the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, in a review about the state of Canadian news media, wrote the following about the Irvings’ monopoly ownership of the New Brunswick media: “The Irvings’ corporate interests form an industrial-media complex that dominates the province. According to one source it includes more than 300 companies, has an estimated net wealth of $4 billion and employs 8 percent of the New Brunswick labour force. To give a frame of reference, the federal government in 2004 employed 1.9 percent of Canada’s labour force. And because the Irving interests are privately owned, they do not even have to provide the level of public reporting that publicly traded corporations are required to provide. This situation is, as far as the Committee could determine, unique in developed countries.” Canada. Parliament. Senate. Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communication, Final Report on the Canadian News Media (Ottawa: Senate of Canada, 2006), https://sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/391/tran/rep/repfinjun06vol2-e.htm. For a more detailed account of Irving power and media ownership see Jacques Poitras, Irving vs. Irving: Canada’s Feuding Billionaires and the Stories They Won’t Tell (Toronto: Viking, 2014). 61 J.D. Irving Ltd., Deep Water Well Irrigation. 62 J.D. Irving Ltd.

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reaching to 425 acres in 2016. Total farm acreage has decreased noticeably also but less

dramatically: from 960,157 acres (1961) to 699,367 (1981) to 646,137 (2001).63 Note that, on

account of the regulations against consolidation, PEI farms remained significantly smaller than

the national average (which was 676 acres in 2001 and 820 acres in 2016, for example)—a fact

we will revisit below.64 Between 1961 and 1981 the farm population on PEI decreased from one

third to 10% of the total population, falling to 4.5% in 2001.65 Throughout this time, potato

acreage increased substantially. While the total acreage under crops did not change from 1961 to

1981, the percentage of this acreage seeded as potatoes did: an increase in total seeded potato

acreage from 46,200 (1961) to 64,000 (1981) to 107,000 (2001). The intensification of potato

production also rose. Between 1961 and 1981, potato yield per harvested acre increased from

165 to 253 hundredweight.66 By 2001, potatoes accounted for 25% of acreage under crops and

one in every thirteen acres of total land in the province.67

63 Canada. Prince Edward Island. Department of the Provincial Treasury, Historical Statistics of Prince Edward Island, ed. H. Speirenburg (Charlottetown, PEI: Government of Prince Edward Island, 2007), http://www.gov.pe.ca/photos/original/pt_historical.pdf. The original source of this data, as referenced in the above report, is Prince Edward Island Statistics: Past and Present, Table 43 (1921-1986); Statistics Canada, 1991, 1996 and 2001. Censuses of Agriculture. 64 Statistics Canada. Table 004-0204 - 2016 Census of Agriculture, tenure of land owned, leased, rented, crop-shared, used through other arrangements or used by others, every 5 years, CANSIM (database); Statistics Canada. Table 6 – 2001 Census of Agriculture, land tenure, by province, Census Agricultural Region (CAR) and Census Division (CD). Accessed December 4, 2017. Passed in 1982 as a response to growing concern about corporate concentration of agricultural land (see Chapter 2) the Lands Protection Act continues to regulate the amount of land that can be owned by a person or corporation. The Act limits corporations (with at least three shareholders) to owning no more than 3,000 farmable acres and individuals, no more than 1000. However, enforcement of the Act has not always been effective. Prince Edward Island Lands Protection Act, c. L-5, s. 2 (2016). http://www.irac.pe.ca/document.aspx?file=legislation/LandsProtAct.asp. In 1999, for example, J.D. Irving, Limited had holdings of 5,600 acres. The provincial government ordered the company to report on its land holdings by 2008; when the company failed to do so it was fined under the Act. CBC News, ‘IRAC Orders Disclosure of Irving Land Holdings’, CBC News, 21 December 2006, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/irac-orders-disclosure-of-irving-land-holdings-1.604904; CBC News, ‘Irving Fined under PEI Land Act’, CBC News, 11 March 2008, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/irving-fined-under-p-e-i-land-act-1.734448. 65 Canada. Prince Edward Island. Department of Finance, Prince Edward Island 43rd Annual Statistical Review: 2016. 66 Statistics Canada. Table 001-0014 - Area, production and farm value of potatoes, annual, CANSIM. Accessed December 4 2017. Note that in 2001 this number was much lower (172 cwt), thought it would rise again the following year to 280 cwt. In the fall of 2000, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found an isolated case of an infectious soil-borne potato fungus in one PEI potato field. The disease, known as “potato wart” or “potato canker” does not pose a threat to human health, but makes the product commercially valueless. In late October, the United States Department of Agriculture implemented a ban on shipments of raw PEI potatoes into the country. The ban remained fully in place until April 2001, when it was relaxed, before being lifted in August of that year. Uncontaminated potatoes pile up and went to waste, and the value of exported raw potatoes for the first eight months of 2001 fell by almost two thirds. Canada. Prince Edward Island. Provincial Treasury. Economics, Statistics and Federal Fiscal Relations Division, The Prince Edward Island Economy Progress Report, 2001 (Charlottetown, PEI: Government of Prince Edward Island, 2001), http://www.gov.pe.ca/photos/original/pt_ecoreport_01.pdf. 67 Prince Edward Island. Provincial Treasury. Economics, Statistics and Federal Fiscal Relations Division; Statistics Canada. Table 5 – 2001 Census of Agriculture, land use, by province, Census Agricultural Region (CAR) and Census Division (CD). Accessed December 4, 2017.

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The export of frozen potato products really began to rise in the mid-1990s, and since this time

the value of these exports has exploded (see Figure 5.1). The value of frozen potato exports

increased from $23.1 million in 1990 to $63.1 million in 1996 before more than doubling to

$152.7 million the following year, after the expansion of Cavendish Farms’ processing capacity.

While these exports were to 21 countries, 90% were destined for the United States. In 2016 the

province exported $283.7 million of frozen potatoes, a 56% increase over 2011 and a 350%

increase from 1996.68 In 2016, frozen potato products accounted for 21.5% of the total value of

provincial exports.

Figure 5.1: Frozen potato exports from PEI, 1990-2016, adjusted to 201669

By way of contrast to the growth of exports, for the period between 1996 and 2016, farm cash

receipts for potato production (which in 2016 accounted for a whopping 78% of crop receipts)

68 Government of Canada, Trade Data Online. Hs 200410 - potatoes, frozen - prepared/preserved without vinegar/acetic acid, Canadian total exports, Origin Prince Edward Island, 1990-2016. Accessed December 5, 2017. All adjustments for inflation were made using the Consumer Price Index (CPI): Statistics Canada. Table 18-10-0005-01 Consumer Price Index, annual average, not seasonally adjusted. Accessed August 21, 2018. 69 Government of Canada, Trade Data Online. Hs 200410 - potatoes, frozen - prepared/preserved without vinegar/acetic acid, Canadian total exports, Origin Prince Edward Island, 1990-2016. Accessed December 5, 2017. Adjusted for inflation (to 2016) using: Statistics Canada. Table 18-10-0005-01 Consumer Price Index, annual average, not seasonally adjusted. Accessed August 21, 2018.

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increased 26%.70 Nor did wages reflect the growth in value generated by increasing processed

food exports. Broadly, between 1997 and 2016 the median hourly wage for PEI workers

increased only 25% and from 2011 to 2016 it increased just over 4% (in 2016 dollars). While

data is not available for frozen food manufacturing specifically, we can see from that

manufacturing wages as a whole (durable and non-durable) are lower than the provincial

average. In 2001 average hourly earnings for employees paid by the hour in food manufacturing,

including overtime, were $12.49. The same number for 2010 (the most recent year available),

adjusted for inflation, was $14.24.71 Moreover, we can assume that at least some components of

processing-related work are seasonal. Stories circulate of workers travelling from other parts of

the region to ‘pick rocks’ at harvest time or do other short-term jobs during peak season. High

local unemployment rates and waning access to EI for seasonal workers, therefore, figure as

important context that frames these low wages.

These numbers alone offer a broad sense of the dramatic changes to the political economy of the

potato industry in PEI in the last two decades. But combined with what we know of the specific

social relations behind this graph—namely the dominance of one processor who, as the single

buyer, has monopsony control over much of the potato crop and disproportionate importance in

the labour market—they paint a picture of extraordinary political economic importance rapidly

concentrated in one company. The place of agriculture within the local economy can only be

understood with these details in mind. This concentrated power has, of course, not gone

uncontested, but contestation is fraught in the context of such material dependence. Perhaps

equally as powerful, as I discuss in the conclusion to this chapter, this political economy has

been an impressive force in helping to create and sustain contemporary understandings of what

local economic “viability” can look like.

Lobster

The fishery is a slightly less straightforward story. It is difficult, and for the most part, probably

not useful, to make grand generalizations about the restructuring of the Atlantic fishery. The

industry varies across the region in terms of dominant species, social history, geography,

70 Statistics Canada. Table 002-0001 - Farm cash receipts, annual (dollars), CANSIM (database). Accessed December 16, 2017. 71 Statistics Canada. Table 281-0030 - Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH), average hourly earnings for employees paid by the hour, by overtime status and detailed North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), annual (current dollars). Accessed December 17, 2017.

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industrialization, and the balance of in- versus off-shore activity. Today, the uneven impacts of

climate change and warming waters add another layer of differentiation. In many parts of the

region lobster had historically been a supplementary fishery to fishermen’s main work: one of

many productive inshore fisheries that would supply fishermen with work over the course of

months. Over the past twenty-five years, a number of factors have increased the relative

importance of the lobster fishery. The collapse of the North Atlantic cod stocks in the early

1990s, in particular, spurred new interest and dependence on the lobster fishery as an alternative

source of income in parts of the region where the increasingly valuable Homarus Americanus

was plentiful, most notably the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence and the southern coast of Nova

Scotia.72 In Prince Edward Island, the fishery has long centred on (though not been isolated to)

lobster and has remained predominantly inshore. As such, broader ecological impacts aside,

many parts of the Island fishery were much less directly impacted by the collapse of cod than

other parts of the region. Broadly, many of the techniques, technologies, and social geographies

that define the fishery here remained much more consistent than in other primary resource

industries that have experienced more intensive modernization.73 But, here too, the general

decline of species diversity—most notably, in some communities, the decline of the Irish moss

harvest, which one fisherman I spoke to described as having been his community’s “oil”—has

shifted the political economy of the industry in processors’ favour. Barriers to entry, rising

operational costs, and reliance on a single species have made fishermen more vulnerable to

processors. This trend has intensified in recent years as warming waters have dramatically

increased annual lobster landings in Canada’s Atlantic fishery without a parallel rise in prices.74

72 J. David Flint, ‘A Different Way of Talking about Fish: Coping with Limited Access to Fish Stocks under a New Regime of Conservation’, in Transforming the Local: Coping Strategies and Regional Policies, ed. Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt and Nils Aarsæther (Copehagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2001), 147–60. 73 For an explanation of the changes see: Canada. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, A Brief History of the Lobster Fishery in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence (Moncton, NB: Gulf Region, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, 2012), http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/201/301/weekly_checklist/2012/internet/w12-51-U-E.html/collections/collection_2012/mpo-dfo/Fs149-6-2012-eng.pdf. 74 Research from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has drawn connections between warming waters and increased landings. Canada. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, ‘Snow Crab and Lobster in Hot Water!’ (Government of Canada, 15 May 2014), http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/science/publications/article/2014/05-15-14-eng.html; Kathy Ehman, ‘Lobster Stocks Appear Healthy According to DFO Scientist’, The Eastern Graphic, 5 July 2017, online edition, http://www.peicanada.com/eastern_graphic/article_35dff97e-60ec-11e7-b273-07bfbd57b187.html; Paul Withers, ‘Crawling in Crustaceans: Scientists Study Link between Warmer Ocean, Booming Lobster Population’, CBC News, 18 January 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/lobsters-nova-scotia-atlantic-warming-increased-population-1.3940107. 2016 saw record-breaking deep-water temperatures for the Scotian Shelf and Gulf of St. Lawrence, with parts of the Scotian Shelf three degrees above the 30-year norm. P.S. Galbraith et al., Physical Oceanographic Conditions in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 2016, Research Document 2017/044 (Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat, 2017), http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/mpo-dfo/Fs70-5-2017-044-eng.pdf; Paul Withers, ‘Ocean Temperatures around Nova Scotia Hit Record Highs: DFO Report’, CBC News, 25 August 2017,

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Modernization—consolidation, automation, and technological change—has been less linear and

more contested in the fishery. Unlike potatoes, processing is a fundamental feature of the lobster

industry. Because lobster is highly perishable and difficult to ship live, innovation in processing

methods is longstanding and inseparable from development of the commercial fishery and its

specific techniques, gear, and regulations.75 Techniques and technologies have certainly

changed (most notably the rise of freezer technology and most recently innovations that have,

remarkably, dramatically increased the global circulation of live lobster by facilitating air

transportation) but it has been a more gradual process than in potato processing. This also means

there is a long history of processors exerting control over inshore fishermen. For example into

the 1960s, despite the owner-operator structure, processors extended credit for fishing supplies,

repairs, or winter survival. Often barely able to settle their debts, fishermen were kept in a “form

of peonage and dependence” by these companies.76 Also in contrast to potato processing, which

has historically been dominated by large private firms, small fish processors have persisted

alongside large firms, often outperforming them.77 The inshore fishery also has a notable history

of fishermen-owned cooperative processing plants that developed beginning in the 1920s as a

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/ocean-temperatures-around-ns-hit-record-highs-says-report-1.4261462. This has not been a straightforward win for lobster fishermen. For one, prices have not kept pace with the increase in landings. Secondly, if we take a broader perspective, the environmental vulnerability of the situation becomes clear. Further south, lobster populations have undergone dramatic and devastating transformations in the other direction: collapse. Beginning in the 1990s, the lobster industry in New York and southern New England collapsed almost completely. Between 1996 and 2014 in New York, for example, lobster landings dropped by 97.7%, leaving lobster fishermen scrambling to find another way to make ends meet. In 1999, after a sudden mass die-off in the lobster population in the Long Island Sound, 70% of lobster fishers in the western Sound lost 100% of their fishing income for that year. Nancy Balcom and Penelope Howell, Responding to a Resource Disaster: American Lobster in the Long Island Sound, 1999-2004, CTSG-06-02 (Connecticut Sea Grant, University of Connecticut, 2007), https://seagrant.uconn.edu/2007/10/12/summary-report-on-long-island-sound-lobster-die-off/. During roughly the same period, Maine’s landings increased by over 200%. The population itself is not disappearing, but shifting northward in response to warming waters. Emily Greenhalgh, ‘Climate & Lobsters’, Climate.gov: National Oceanic and Atmostpheric Administration, 6 October 2016, https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-and/climate-lobsters#. But recent research suggests that over the past decade the surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine—which stretches from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to southern Nova Scotia to the Bay of Fundy—increased faster than 99% sent of the surface temperatures on the rest of the planet. Andrew J. Pershing et al., ‘Slow Adaptation in the Face of Rapid Warming Leads to Collapse of the Gulf of Maine Cod Fishery’, Science 352, no. 6284 (2016): 809–12. 75 Canada. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, A Brief History of the Lobster Fishery in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. 76 Canada. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 17. 77 See Gene Barrett and Anthony Davis, ‘Floundering in Troubled Waters: The Political Economy of the Atlantic Fishery and the Task Force on Atlantic Fisheries’, Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’Études Canadiennes 19, no. 1 (1984): 125–137.

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response to poverty and merchant control.78 Some of these plants are still operating as

cooperatives today.

Governments have long appealed to centralization as the solution to the persistent economic

crises of the Atlantic fishery. In the heyday of rural modernization, government attempts at

rationalization varied across the region and across fisheries, but generally focused on increasing

the efficiency of harvesting, improving and expanding processing, and overall

industrialization.79 According to Barrett and Davis, DREE funnelled over $64 million into the

fish processing sector between 1974 and 1982 alone.80 As with rural modernization generally,

rationalization of the Atlantic fishery was usually framed as community development project

that would improve incomes and the viability of the sector by reducing the number of people

fishing.81 Fishermen’s pervasive suspicion of this agenda was understood as part of the broader

local culture of underdevelopment. Under the PEI Comprehensive Development Plan, the

scheme to rationalize the fishery, consolidate ports, and reduce the number of fishermen by two-

78 See Coady, Masters of Their Own Destiny; Croteau, Cradled in the Waves; Sacouman, ‘Underdevelopment and the Structural Origins of Antigonish Movement Co-Operatives in Eastern Nova Scotia’. I discuss the Antigonish Movement in Chapter 2. 79 The most discussed, contested, and studied is surely the case of the Newfoundland fishery and the legacy of modernization, outport resettlement, and the eventual collapse of the groundfishery. Here visions of a centralized, modern, and vertically integrated fishery long lived awkwardly alongside concern for the fate of small-boat fishermen and the communities they sustained. See Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times; Gerald Sider, Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking of Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003); Dean Bavington, Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). For local studies that explore similar themes in Maritime fisheries see Joan Marshall’s work on Grand Manan, New Brunswick and Kennedy Wells on Prince Edward Island. Tides of Change on Grand Manan Island: Culture and Belonging in a Fishing Community (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); Kennedy Wells, The Fishery of Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed Press, 1986). 80 Barrett and Davis, ‘Floundering in Troubled Waters’; drawing on Canada. Task Force on Atlantic Fisheries, Navigating Troubled Waters: A New Policy for the Atlantic Fisheries : Report of the Task Force on Atlantic Fisheries, ed. Michael J. L. Kirby (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1983). 81 This orientation would continue to rear its head, notably in the 1983 report from the Task Force on Atlantic Fisheries, also known as the Kirby Report, which proposed a combination of restrictions on catch potential and a new form of privatization through a transferable quota system as a mechanism to increase efficiency, reduce the number of fishermen, and rationalize the industry. Under this scheme, small boats in the inshore fishery would be incentivized to sell their licenses. As Barrett and Davis note, the quota regulations targeted the largest of the independent vessels—those most directly in competition with corporate fleets. In relation to the small operators anticipated to exit the fishery, the authors explain that “the Task Force did not speculate either on the character of alternative employment in fisheries-dependent communities or on the consequences of inevitable outmigration for the socio-economic topography of coastal communities.” Barrett and Davis, ‘Floundering in Troubled Waters’, 130. Most recently, concern about the future of the fleet separation and owner-operator policies were raised again, after the Harper conservative government released a discussion paper called “The future of Canada’s commercial fisheries” in 2012 that made no mention of these regulations. Canada. Task Force on Atlantic Fisheries, Navigating Troubled Waters; Canada. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, The Future of Canada’s Commercial Fisheries (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2012), http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/448047/publication.html.

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thirds was anticipated to be one of the most challenging parts of the plan to implement.82

Despite their meagre earnings, fishermen were understood as staunchly independent and

attached to the freedom their work allowed them. In 1974, after very little had been

accomplished, the plan to rationalize the inshore fishery was dropped by the Joint Advisory

Board, who justified their decision on the basis that rationalization “runs counter to the concept

of viable rural communities.”83 This decision signals over 50 years of political debate about

whether the inshore fishery should be rationalized to make it more industrially unviable or

preserved as form of indirect social policy.84 In this way, the historical poverty and remoteness

of inshore fishing communities, alongside fishermen’s storied independence and attachment to

their way of life have at least partly stymied the consistent stream of modernization plans that

has flowed since World War Two.

One of the most notable and region-wide legacies of this debate is perhaps the enduring

protection of the inshore fishery against corporate consolidation and control. Two key

regulations, the fleet separation and owner-operator policies, are together designed to preserve

the independence of the inshore fishery and to prevent processing companies from buying up

and consolidating licenses. The policies date to the 1970s and 1980s respectively and are unique

to the Atlantic Fishery (in stark contrast, the Pacific fishery features high levels of corporate

control). The fleet separation policy restricts the corporate ownership of inshore licences. The

owner-operator policy, meanwhile, stipulates that the owner of the licence must be the one to

actually fish it. The policies intend to keep separate the harvesting and processing components

of the industry and are often explained as designed to reserve the benefit of the fishery for

fishers. While widely credited with preserving the socio-economic existence of rural fishing

communities around the region, this structure has also benefited processing capital. For smaller

processors that contract directly with fishermen, these independent harvesters continue to absorb

82 When the Plan was launched in 1969 it proposed a consolidation of landing ports (with improvements to be concentrated in 14-20) and canneries, and a dramatic contraction of the number of Island fishermen from about 3000 to 1000. Canada. Department of Regional Economic Expansion, Development Plan for Prince Edward Island: A 15-Year Federal-Provincial Program for Social and Economic Advancement; Wells, The Fishery of Prince Edward Island. 83 Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, A History of the PEI CDP as quoted on p. 88. The APEC report here is referencing the Joint Advisory Board meeting of November 28, 1974. The provincial government instead pursued a lobster license buy-back program as a mechanisms to increase the incomes of inshore fishermen. Notably, this APEC report “ characterizes the original plan as bearing some similarities to the “notorious scheme” to depopulation and resettle Newfoundland outports. Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. 84 See Flint, ‘A Different Way of Talking about Fish’.

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the costs and risks of harvesting. Big processors have historically pursued this advantage by

attempting to contract out to smaller firms.85

But alongside and despite these protections, a series of factors have combined to invest

processors with increasing power. In 1968, Limited Entry Licensing was implemented across

the Gulf lobster fishery, in effect capitalizing lobster licenses and dramatically increasing the

value of a fishing fleet. Subsequent related policies to rid the fishery of part-time fishermen with

other employment (the Moonlighter Policy) and license buy-back programs in the 1970s

resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of licenses. Between early 1970s and early 1980s,

the number of lobster licenses decreased by almost 3000 in the Maritimes.86 The subsequent

collapse of the groundfishery and additional buy-back programs in the wake of the Supreme

Court’s Marshall Decision (as part of the process to establish a federally-regulated Aboriginal

commercial fishery) would have further decreased the commercial licenses available to non-

Aboriginal fishers relative to the demand.87 Taken together, these dynamics contributed to an

astronomical rise in the value of commercial licenses and the overall cost of entering the

fishery—estimated by one of my key informants to be about $500,000 in PEI. This challenge is

compounded by the short length of the season and the lack of species diversity. Making up the

cost of operation in just two months is challenging and the shortage of other viable species

means there is little security if lobster has a bad season. Alongside these changes have been

parallel transformations on the processing side.

Like in agriculture, provincial governments have courted processors in an attempt to expand

local processing capacity.88 By some accounts, consolidation in processing and the growth of

85 Barrett and Davis, ‘Floundering in Troubled Waters’. 86 Canada. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, A Brief History of the Lobster Fishery in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. 87 For an account of the high profile conflict over fishing and sovereignty that took place between the English and Mi’kmaw communities of Burnt Church and Esgenoôpetitj, New Brunswick in the wake of the Marshall Decision see Sarah J. King, Fishing in Contested Waters: Place and Community in Burnt Church/Esgenoôpetitj (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). For the broader significance and details of this landmark case trial and for detailed treaty history see William C. Wicken, Mi’kmaq Treaties on Trial: History, Land, and Donald Marshall Junior (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 88 During the 1970s and 80s, governments undertook initiatives to expand plant capacity in the province. A 1994 study of PEI fish processing capacity indicated that plants were operating at 22 percent capacity. After the Department of Development identified this as a priority, the government approved a crown corporation called PEI Business Development Inc. to make a $7 million preferred share investment and $7 million term loan guarantee to support the amalgamation of nine seafood processing companies in the formation of Polar Foods International Inc. By the time the company went into receivership in 2004, it had cost $31 million in public money. At this point, Ocean Choice International purchased the package of assets. Canada. Prince Edward Island. Office of the Auditor

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big processing companies has increased the price-setting power of processors and brokers in the

region.89 Moreover, there has been a rise in new types of contracts between license-holders and

processors (or another third party), sometimes called “trust agreements” or “controlling

agreements,” that blatantly violate the owner-operator policy. Within the context of fishermen

facing huge financial barriers to entering the industry, processors have started backing them

financially.90 In these situations, fishermen are at the least indebted to a given processor, and

most likely also obligated to sell their catch to that processor. As Flint notes about the situation

in Southwest Nova Scotia, this is sometimes at a discount. There are also rising reports of large

firms buying licences from owner-operators and operating them under their names. Fishermen

technically own the license, but the boat usually belongs to the company that buys the catch and

often imposes limitations on license transfer. For the most part, fishermen are staunchly opposed

this trend.91 They fear that the lobster fishery—the real last bastion of the independent fishery—

will go the way of other fisheries with Individual Transferable Quotes, in which license holders

lease their licenses to processors. The DFO has been responding to this through policy and,

more recently, enforcement and license forfeiture, but industry has pushed back and the issue is

now making its way through the courts.92 This trend is likely to get worse as older fishermen

retire and new entrants struggle to afford licenses.

General, Government’s Involvement with Polar Foods International Inc. (Charlottetown, PEI: Government of Prince Edward Island, 2004), http://www.gov.pe.ca/photos/original/ag_polar_rep.pdf. Seven years later, Ocean Choice shut down its plant in the small community of Souris, PEI, putting 300 local people out of work. When it re-opened several years later, it was as a subsidiary of the San Diego-based Center for Aquaculture Technologies and reported having 21 employees, about half of whom were from PEI. Krystalle Ramlakhan, ‘Aquaculture Research Centre with International Contracts Now Operating on PEI’, CBC News, 7 December 2016, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/aquaculture-research-centre-technologies-fish-health-1.3885940. 89 There is debate over the degree to which regional companies are price-setters. As one key informant explained, “Most of the processors are price-takers, not price-makers.” Historically most price setting happened in New England. But fishermen have complained of this trend and, based on my interviews, there have been instances of large companies financing small processors. For some of these dynamics and fishermen's voices see: Thériault, Hanlon, and Creed, Report of the Maritime Lobster Panel. 90 Flint, ‘A Different Way of Talking about Fish’; Canada. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, A Brief History of the Lobster Fishery in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. This information was also garnered from interviews with key informants. 91 One study of Lobster Fishing Area 26A, referenced by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, indicated 96.6 percent support among fishermen for concept of the owner-operator structure. Stuart Beaton, ‘Intergenerational Succession in the Inshore Fishery of Atlantic Canada’ (Masters thesis, Australian Maritime College, 2003); as referenced in A Brief History of the Lobster Fishery in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, 17. 92 Canada. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, A Brief History of the Lobster Fishery in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence; Thériault, Hanlon, and Creed, Report of the Maritime Lobster Panel; Paul Withers, ‘DFO Cracks down on Fishing Licences It Says Are Fronts for Corporations’, CBC News, 22 September 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/dfo-fishing-licence-crackdown-1.4303419; Paul Withers, ‘Continuing Battle for Control of Canada’s Last “independent” Fishery’, CBC News, 20 December 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/controlling-agreements-lobster-fishery-1.4457002.

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In the processing sector, meanwhile, rather than a product of low wages, gruelling work, and

seasonality, a perennial labour shortage is narrated as the product of aging populations, the rise

of the knowledge economy, youth outmigration, and an increase in employment opportunities in

western Canada.93 In keeping with the historical trend of concentrated marginalized labour in

this industry, governments have responded to the crisis of labour availability by pursuing new

pools of surplus labour.94 The PEI government has staunchly defended its flexible access to

third world labour markets to meet the needs of fish processors.95 Between 2005 and 2012 the

number of workers arriving in Atlantic Canada through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program

more than tripled and the increase in PEI was higher than any other province in the region.96

While these workers are concentrated in so-called low-skilled occupations, during my research,

it was not unusual for me to meet migrant workers in fish processing (a ‘low-skill’ occupation)

who are highly educated and skilled. The provincial government has also partnered with

industry to developed a project called “Team Seafood” that offers scholarships to high school

and university students who take jobs in fish processing during peak season; “it’s a bit of an

untapped market,” explained the Executive Director of the PEI Seafood Processors Association

in the media.97 And a legislative standing committee has even pointed to newly arrived Syrian

refugees as a potential solution to fish processing’s perennial labour shortage, suggesting those

93 Processing was always a problematic job creation strategy. While initially understood as an influx of modern “good jobs” (especially for women) to rural communities, those who had other options quickly moved on and the workforce quickly became dominated by different waves of migrant labour—over the decades, a mix of both immigrant and domestic migrants—and chronic problems with labour recruitment. See Knott, ‘Contentious Mobilities and Cheap(Er) Labour’. From the 1960s, when the expansion of processing was a core and well-publicized priority for the provincial government, the archival record suggests that processors were already complaining about chronic manpower problems. In a meeting of co-op fishermen in the spring of 1967, for example, the concerns of longest standing cooperative cannery were summarized in the minutes. Manpower was “becoming scarce” and “low prevailing wages in the fish plant are not attractive to youth and out-migration from the area is heavy.” Meeting minutes. Meeting of the co-op fishermen. May 4, 1967. Hotel Charlottetown, Charlottetown. PARO, RG33, Department of Development, Box 30, Deputy Minister’s Files, “Acres Files, Incl. Correspondence.” 94 For a case study that examines the history (and present) of race, mobility, and exploitation in fish processing in the Maritimes see Knott. 95 The Canadian Press, ‘PEI Premier Wants “flexibility” to Keep Foreign Workers at Fish Plants’, CTV News, 24 March 2015, http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/p-e-i-premier-wants-flexibility-to-keep-foreign-workers-at-fish-plants-1.2295764. 96 Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, ‘APEC Report Highlights the Growing Role of Temporary Foreign Workers in Atlantic Canada’, press release, Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, 21 May 2014, https://www.apec-econ.ca/about-us/news/view/?do-load=1&news.id=116. 97 Canada. Prince Edward Island. Department of Workforce and Advanced Learning, ‘Join Team Seafood’, Government of Prince Edward Island, 13 March 2017, https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/en/information/join-team-seafood; Angela Walker, ‘PEI Seafood Processors Hope Cash Bonus Will Entice Student Workers’, CBC News, 1 April 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/seafood-fish-plants-students-campaign-money-1.3516364. In 2017, for its second season the Team Seafood project received $125,250 in federal funding to expand the project. Canada. Prince Edward Island, ‘Team Seafood Expands Student Jobs’, Press release, 13 March 2017, https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/en/news/team-seafood-expands-student-jobs.

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seeking work be urged to look to farms and fish plants.98 The federal government has also

emphasized the role of regional EI access in incentivizing local workers to stay home and

unemployed rather than seeking available fish processing work, pitting rural unemployed white

workers against migrant workers and shaming people for not taking any job available.99 At stake

in filling these jobs is said to be the very wellbeing of these communities, as fish plants are often

the major or only local employer. But governments have repeatedly shored up processors’

access to flexible seasonal labour in ways that are extractive to the core.

By way of contrast, today, lobster is Canada’s most valuable seafood export, with total export

value exceeding $1 billion.100 Like potatoes, the value of processed lobster exports has increased

dramatically since the early 1990s (see Figure 5.2). Maritime lobster has risen to global

prominence within the context of a growing middle class in Asia, technological innovations that

allow for increased global circulation, and the decline of other species. While processed lobster

dominates exports, live lobster now also circle the globe in growing numbers. The majority of

PEI’s lobster exports are processed, and of these, more are frozen: in 2012 live lobster

accounted for only 10% of total lobster exports by value.101 As in the potato industry, the value

of exports has far exceeded growth experienced by harvesters or waged workers. In 2016, PEI

exported $204.1 million worth of processed lobster: a 89% increase over 2011 and a 126% 98 CBC News, ‘Fishing and Farming Good Option for Syrian Refugees, Says Legislature Committee’, CBC News, 4 December 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/syrian-refugees-recommended-work-in-fishing-and-farming-1.3350306. 99 In the fall of 2014, then Minister of Employment and Social Development, Jason Kenney, paid a visit to Charlottetown. After a recent overhaul of the Temporary Foreign Worker program, seafood processors in the Maritime region were anxious about their ability to fill these seasonal, low-paying, physically gruelling jobs without access to the migrant workers many of them had depended on for years. Kenney had come with evidence in hand that the workforce was indeed available locally; the problem, Kenney predictably claimed, was that local workers were simply not working. The new data from Kenney’s office supposedly indicated that for each month in 2013, hundreds of Islanders who identified as ‘fish plant workers’ and ‘labourers in fish processing’ were collecting employment insurance, the implication being they were voluntarily unemployed. After describing temporary foreign workers in Canada as subject to “a kind of quasi-indentured status”—an about-face for the chief architect of Canada’s reformed immigration system which, among other things, dramatically privileges temporary migration over permanent immigration—Kenney went on to explain the joint nature of the government’s restructuring of the TFW and EI programs: [W]hat we’ve been trying to do through all of this – the TFW reforms and the EI reforms – is to encourage folks applying for EI more actively to search for and accept available work in their area, and to encourage employers more actively and deliberately to recruit from the domestic workforce.” Teresa Wright, ‘Q&A: Employment Minister Jason Kenney on EI and TFW’, The Guardian, 19 September 2014, online edition, http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/News/Local/2014-09-19/article-3875241/Q%26amp%3BA%3A-Employment-Minister-Jason-Kenney-on-EI-and-TFW/1; Teresa Wright, ‘PEI Companies Hiring Foreign Workers While Islanders Collect EI: Kenney’, The Guardian, 19 September 2014, online edition, http://theguardian.pe.ca/news/local/pei-companies-hiring-foreign-workers-while-islanders-collect-ei-kenney-97412/. 100 Canada. Fisheries and Oceans Canada, ‘Lobster’, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, 6 March 2015, http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fm-gp/sustainable-durable/fisheries-peches/lobster-homard-eng.htm. 101 Thériault, Hanlon, and Creed, Report of the Maritime Lobster Panel.

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increase over 1996 exports. We can draw the same inferences here about the relative stagnation

of processing labour as we did in our discussion of potato processing above. Looking at a single

year (2015-2016), the value of frozen potato exports increased 14% and the value of processed

lobster exports increase by 13%. Provincial wages, meanwhile, increased only 1%.102

Figure 5.2: Processed and live lobster exports from PEI, 1990-2016, adjusted to 2016103

The fishery remains a major source of employment throughout the region. In 2015 57,709

people were employed in fishing-related activities in Atlantic Canada: 33,306 in harvesting

(which accounts for owner-operators and waged harvesting work), 22,723 in processing, and

1,680 in aquaculture. For the same year, 5,902 people were employed in fishing-related work in

102 Government of Canada, Trade Data Online. Hs 200410 - potatoes, frozen - prepared/preserved without vinegar/acetic acid, Canadian total exports, Origin Prince Edward Island, 1990-2016; Hs 030612 - lobsters, (homarus spp) – frozen, Canadian total exports, Origin Prince Edward Island, 1990-2016; HS 160530 - Lobsters - Prepared or Preserved, Canadian total exports, Origin Prince Edward Island, 1990-2016. Accessed December 17, 2017. Statistics Canada. Table 282-0072 Labour Force Survey estimates (LFS), wages of employees by type of work, North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), sex and age group, annual. Accessed December 16, 2017. These numbers are all adjusted to 2016 dollars using the CPI. 103 Government of Canada, Trade Data Online. Hs 030612 - lobsters, (homarus spp) – frozen, Canadian total exports, Origin Prince Edward Island, 1990-2016; HS 160530 - Lobsters - Prepared or Preserved, Canadian total exports, Origin Prince Edward Island, 1990-2016; HS 030622 - Other Lobsters Nes - Not Frozen, Canadian total exports, Origin Prince Edward Island, 1990-2016; HS 030632 - Lobsters, live, fresh or chilled, Canadian total exports, Origin Prince Edward Island, 1990-2016. Accessed August 8, 2018. Adjusted using: Statistics Canada. Table 18-10-0005-01 Consumer Price Index, annual average, not seasonally adjusted. Accessed August 21, 2018.

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PEI: 4,002 in harvesting in 1,494 in processing, and 410 in aquaculture.104 Seasonality is a

central feature of all work in the fishery, including processing. Depending on the plant, work

peaks during lobster season and is supplemented with other species to extend the season. But as

species diversity has decreased, so too has the length of the processing season. Again, waning

access to EI, the relative shortage of other employment, and fluctuations in prices, landings, and

processing work exacerbate the problem of low wages.

Figure 5.3: Lobster landings in Canada and PEI, 1990-2015105

Between 1996 and 2015, PEI lobster landings increased by 79.2% and total lobster landings by

127.6% (see Figure 5.3). Much of this increase has been in the last ten years, which is widely

attributed to warming waters. Between 2013 and 2015 alone total landings increased 21.7%.

Prices have not kept pace. The 60.9% rise in total value over the same time is more an indication

of how low prices have been. As landings began to rise around 2005, total value began a

sustained decline. This situation continued, reaching a head in 2013 when—in what several

104 Fishing-Related Employment by Industry and Province, 2013-2015, Fisheries and the Canadian Economy: Employment. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Government of Canada. Accessed December 23, 2017. 105 Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Economic Analysis and Statistics. Commercial Fisheries, Seafisheries Landings. Accessed December 22, 2017. Adjusted using CPI.

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people told me was an unprecedented action—lobster fishers across the region pulled their boats

off the water, refusing to fish for prices they said would not even cover their operational

costs.106

Perhaps more significant, across both the lobster and potato industries, is the volatility that is

evident across all of these charts and both these industries. Both lobster and potato processors

acquire the great bulk of their raw products from independent producers rather than company-

owned vessels or agricultural operations. It is these producers and waged workers who bear the

costs and risks of this volatility while processors work to stabilize their operations through

price-setting, by sourcing products from elsewhere, or by relocating their operations. The

volatility of these markets combined with processors’ increased political power to secure their

own interests from governments leaves producers and workers facing increasing degrees of

uncertainty. In the fishery especially, the high cost of operations combined with the short season

means that one year of low prices can be devastating. For waged workers whose low wages

offer them little buffer, decline of species diversity, austerity measures, and plant closures

compound a general atmosphere of rural economic uncertainty.

When Rolland looked around him for an explanation as to why he and his neighbours were

going west, this was the structural shift he was seeing: an ever-intensifying bifurcation of

control for a few and uncertainty for everyone else. As he articulated, on the other end of the

consolidating power in local primary resource industries are new structures of work and labour

flexibility. Through the detailed stories of his own working life, Rolland lucidly articulated that

the pressures pushing people west did not derive from simple decline of the traditional primary

resource sectors in the Maritimes. Instead, he illustrated the systematic dismantling of a

complex way of life in which livelihood security for people like him had historically been

established through species diversity, occupational pluralism, and ownership of your own

primary means of production, buttressed—increasingly, over time, as this structure began to

topple—by unemployment insurance. Importantly, those industries had not declined. On the

contrary, the figures reviewed above speak to their enduring and consolidating economic and

political power. What has all but disappeared, rather, are the key features that had offered some

protection for small producers and harvesters—against market volatility, bad seasons, species

106 For an account of the strike in historical context see: Morton, ‘Historicizing the Lobster Fishery Tie-Up’.

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decline, and other economic and environmental risks. Rolland and others I interviewed struggled

to explain the mechanisms of this reorganization but were clear in its effect: people like him had

been systematically made more vulnerable to risk, more marginal, and more likely to sell,

supplement with work elsewhere, or avoid the industry altogether.

Putting the Maritime problem to work: Permanent precarity and periodic mobility

While, in some ways, this account of local resource industries is certainly a story of political

economic change, in other ways it is a story of continuity. The industries, rhythms, and

structures of mobile work have shifted, but as we have seen throughout this dissertation,

occupational pluralism, including mobile and inter-regional forms, is a longstanding feature of

the region’s economy. This reality, importantly, is rooted not only in the uneven character of

capitalist development, the rise and fall of distant extractive markets, or the staples-labour

problem, but also in the region’s own economic structure: a state of permanent precarity that has

both consistently produced surplus labour and periodically reabsorbed it.

Almost 40 years ago, James Sacouman advanced a theory of Maritime semi-proletarianization,

drawing attention not to the decline of petty production, but to its “stubborn” persistence as the

basis for the production of surplus labour.107 As he explained it, this was, first, through the

ongoing presence of the farmstead, which supplemented waged-work with subsistence

production, effectively suppressing wages; and second, where commercialization had taken

place, through the particular structure of industrializing primary industries, which were

organized largely around the family farm or small producer, but under the thumb of a powerful

few corporations that dictated production conditions and, as such, had the power to reorganize

familial relations of production. Writing in 1980, Sacouman points to the rise of near monopoly

and monopsony conditions by the likes of the McCain Corporation who, rather than concentrate

land under corporate ownership, “[left] the family farm in place to produce the majority of

product while radically altering social relations within it.”108 In this way, distinguishing between

indirect and direct capitalist underdevelopment, Sacouman highlights the role of private

companies in maintaining but actively underdeveloping petty production, as well as the role of

“subsistencization” (welfare and other state assistance) in perpetuating this process. This form

of semi-proletarianization, and its central role in the reproduction of surplus labour, was also

107 Sacouman, ‘Semi-Proletarianization and Rural Underdevelopment in the Maritimes’. 108 Sacouman, 237.

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common in petty fisheries and forestry production. As such, rather than emphasize the decline of

petty production, or attribute its staying power to “rural sclerosis,” what is at issue for

Sacouman, is the “capitalist underdevelopment of these activities through the truncation, yet

maintenance, of the domestic mode of production.”109 This simultaneous truncation and

maintenance has facilitated structures of occupational pluralism, rendering the region not only

productive, but also absorptive of surplus labour during periods of crisis.110

Throughout my work on this dissertation, I have struggled with the question of the Maritimes as

what Marx called and “industrial reserve army” or “relative surplus population”: “a mass of

human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own

changing valorization requirements.”111 In many ways, this is the obvious explanation. But

within the context of incomplete industrialization, petty production, persistence of independent

owner-operators, occupational pluralism, and structural dependence on government transfers, it

felt simplistic and over-determined to package these messy and diverse economies into such a

unified and teleological story. Sacouman borrows from this idea, but laces it with a level of

complexity vis-à-vis production and class relations that speaks to exactly these concerns. He 109 Sacouman, 236, emphasis added. The “rural sclerosis” reference is from: Pépin, Life and Poverty in the Maritimes, 193 as quoted by Sacouman. 110 To help illustrate this point, Sacouman notes that the only times that eastern Nova Scotia had seen absolute population growth were during the two depressions of the 1870s and 1931. He explains (drawing on David Frank) that while rural male Cape Bretoners provided most of the male unskilled labour for the industrial expansion of the coal boom from about 1890-1913, “many of these people returned to their rural roots during the BESCO crisis of the 1920s and the general depression of the 1930s.” Sacouman, ‘Semi-Proletarianization and Rural Underdevelopment in the Maritimes’, 237 note 12. Marjorie Griffin Cohen has also documented the central place of subsistence production in the process of capital accumulation. Through an explicitly feminist lens, Cohen argues that the productive relations of the household occupy a central place in the history of economic development. In her examination of the role of women’s work and semi-proletarianization in supporting industrialization in Ontario during the nineteenth century, Cohen points to the “formative nature of household activity in shaping the economy,” arguing that “an understanding of the market is not possible without reference to the basic unit of production – the family.” In a similar way to Sacouman’s argument, Cohen illustrates how a double economy existed, consisting of both subsistence production and market-oriented production. Within this scheme, “Women’s labour…was critical to capital accumulation. To the extent that women’s productive efforts sustained the family in its basic consumption needs, male labour was free to engage in production for exchange on the market” and “to the extent that the total income from market production need not be expended on consumption, accumulation of capital in the family productive unit could occur.” Cohen’s attention to the details of the reorganization of household production and her emphasis on gender and power in the domestic sphere bring to the fore crucial aspects of this double economy that are largely missing from Sacouman’s analysis. Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Women’s Work, Markets, and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 6–8. For a more theoretical analysis of the domestic division of labour in relation to so-called productive labour, the work of the Italian autonomist feminists Liapoldina Fortunati, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Sylvia Federici are indispensable, as is the related work of Selma James and the International Wages for Housework campaign, which grew out of the Operaismo movement in Northern Italy and to which many Italian feminists were central. Fortunati, Arcane of Reproduction; Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community; Federici, Caliban and the Witch; Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012); Silvia Federici, ‘Wages against Housework’, in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 1975). 111 Capital, Volume I, 784.

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proposes that most Canadian political economy has failed to account for the actual variety of

class relations that exist across regions in Canada. His and other critical political economic

studies of the Maritimes from this time emphasized the importance of broadening working class

analysis, including through examinations of more diverse class relations; the social, cultural, and

political—in addition to economic—factors of class struggle; and the broader context of uneven

capitalist development that inform these struggles.112 Regional underdevelopment, Canada-wide

(increasingly, international) geographies of accumulation, and the full range of class struggles,

that is, can only be understood by accounting for capitalist dynamics across and between a broad

range of class relations, including petty producers and conditions of semi-proletarianization.

As we have seen throughout this chapter, the structure of primary production in the Maritimes

has indeed changed since the 1980s. The structure of the local economy has shifted such that

subsistence is no longer the defining feature of this dynamic. And new structures of mobility

and precarity—most notably, seasonal industries’ embrace of the Temporary Foreign Worker

Program—have shored up seasonal production and flexibility in new ways. But, while enabled

by new factors and geographies of exploitation, the longstanding, particular, and untidy

structure of surplus population and flexible labour that Sacouman highlights has not

fundamentally changed. The flow of workers westward—and their periodic return home—is still

commonly explained in relation to the ebbs, flows, and ongoing permanent precarity of east

coast resource industries. This relationship is especially stark in fishing communities where the

working season is short, the industry is volatile, EI dependence is high, and local opportunities

outside primary resources are limited. One person I spoke with who had worked in the

provincial government explained that, not only has a recent run of poor fishing seasons made

these men available for winter work out west, but employers see them as fit for the job: they can

work machinery, they’re self-starters, they’re used to working alone. Laying out the broader

connections between shifts in fishing, oil, and EI, they explained:

…when the bills are piling up and you want to keep your fishing fleet, guess what: you

go out west. And fishing kind of worked into it…in that they would work out west all

winter and then come home and fish in the spring and then, by September be ready to go

back out west again…. You know, EI was a strong policy change that, you know, now

112 Sacouman, ‘The “Peripheral” Maritimes and Canada-Wide Marxist Political Economy’; see also Sacouman, ‘Semi-Proletarianization and Rural Underdevelopment in the Maritimes’.

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you have to—at one time, you went on EI and that was the end of that. But now…there’s

a lot more demands on retaining your EI. So, they just kind of went, ‘It’s not even worth

it! I’ll just go out west.’

It is in these types of towns where Alberta seismic companies talk of hiring 70 or 80 percent of

their slashers, where local people talk of men leaving for the west annually in convoys, where

fathers and nephews and brothers make the trip together, where daily life is fundamentally

framed by the drilling season and the ebbs and flows of the oil market. In these places, it is

common for men to work oil in the fall and winter and return to work the fishing season in the

spring. Others, like Rolland, have opted to avoid the fishery altogether.113 And as we have seen

structures of interprovincial occupational pluralism are buttressed by changing labour relations

at home. The restructuring of local natural resource industries reviewed here is historically

rooted in the persistence of widespread unemployment and the availability of surplus labour.

Low-paying, seasonal, and flexible structures of work that characterize these industries are

dependent on the reproduction of this reality. And with the increasing relative importance of

processing, this continues to be the case. As Gene Barrett and Anthony Davis pointed out over

thirty years ago, “Small rural communities of high unemployment form the backdrop for a

fragmented fish processing industry”: the specific sub-regional geographies of poverty have

been useful to processors.114

Increasingly, this vulnerability is shaped not only by global commodity markets and networks of

trade, but also by globalizing networks of social reproduction. Within these communities it is

the labour of more economically marginalized groups who are generating these profits.

Historically, these groups have included women, immigrants, and locally racialized groups.

Today, as geographies of local rural poverty are complemented by other intersecting socio-

economic positions, they have come to also include older workers, migrant workers, students,

refugees. The relationship between these groups of people in communities like Rolland’s has

often been narrated through a story of population: employers need to hire transnational labour

113 When I interviewed Ed Frenette, one of the original organizers with the Maritime Fishermen’s Union in the 1970s and past Executive Director of the PEI Fisherman’s Association, he rhetorically asked: “I mean, who wants to go in and lose money right off the bat? So, so many of them have headed west, right? To work in the oil sands or other industries out there.” This was particularly palpable, he explained, when it came to corks, or helpers: “there’s a shortage of those. I see now in Nova Scotia, even some fishermen have brought in temporary foreign workers to work as crewmembers on inshore vessels. It’s not a large number yet, but it’s happened.” 114 Barrett and Davis, ‘Floundering in Troubled Waters’, 133.

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because locals are leaving, aging, or are otherwise unavailable. The realities prompting ‘locals’

to opt out of these jobs are not queried, nor is the exacerbation of these conditions by these

intensified structures of flexibility—most of all, for migrant workers themselves. The tidy

explanation of replacement—that transnational migrant workers offer a sort of solution to the

problem of rural decline—distracts from the real function of these relationships: tiered

flexibility structured through race, gender, and citizenship that temporarily resolves employers’

refusal to extend wages beyond the shifting temporality of seasonal production. As is the case

throughout the histories of resource labour we have encountered in this dissertation, racial,

gendered, and regional segmentation of staples labour is an inherent part of these industries in

all their diversity. For Rolland and his family, it happens on both ends. While Maritimers have

been praised for their flexibility out west, through a modified version of the same process, his

wife frets she will become the opposite at home. Hierarchies of desperation, formal restrictions

on mobility, uneven access to welfare state benefits, complementary seasonal employment,

diverse modes of social reproduction, and workers’ own stories about who they are all

contribute to shaping these intersecting mobility and employment structures.

It is important to understand these structures as fundamentally relational. But these are not

relationships of ‘replacement’: not replacement at work, nor replacement at a population level.

The relationship, rather, is a relationship of crisis. Rural decline is not a problem of population,

but of political economy. And building deeper levels of labour exploitation and flexibility

exacerbates, rather than alleviates this problem—unevenly, but ultimately for all workers in

these economies. In her legitimate fears for her own future, a long-time local fish plant worker

whose husband is unemployed or out west might not see the near-unthinkable realities facing

her neighbour: perhaps a 30 year old Filipina woman who is trained as an accountant but has

decided to leave her kids for a small, white community in rural PEI, where she works alongside

this local neighbour, seasonally, packing lobster. There is certainly a hierarchy of vulnerability

here, but the crises of social reproduction that all these workers face also link them together.

These connections through crisis are an important part of what sustains the profitability of these

industries, not any meaningful ‘viability’ of these communities. But, though it may often go

unseen, they also form the basis of some social commonality.

Contrary to popular (and contradictory) representations, capitalism has not turned its back on

this region, nor has the region been made anew. Relative to the rest of the country, the

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Maritimes remain overly rural, seasonal, unemployed, and poor. Industrialization and

urbanization are slow-moving trends, but primary production and rurality have remained

undeniably and oddly persistent. At the same time, new structures of precarity in one place or

for one group of workers are shored up by even greater insecurity for another. From Manila to

Skinners Pond to Fort McMurray, differently organized circulating and seasonal working lives

are made to work together in the reproduction of these industries. That is, centring the diversity,

complexity, and situated lived reality of class struggles remains as relevant today as it was in

1980. And critically interrogating and dismantling the stories that get told about regional

political economy is an important part of delineating this complexity. The twinned stories of the

new economy and the simple life are the latest in a tradition of post-war economic declarations

that obscure both the ways in which things have actually changed—namely consolidated

corporate control and increased socio-ecological precarity—and the degree to which they have

not—most evident in persistently low incomes, high unemployment, and seasonality.

Conclusion: Narrating economies, foreclosing questions

When McCain closed its plant in Borden, PEI in August of 2014, putting 121 people directly out

of work, Irving was able to consolidate their negotiating power with farmers and government.115

Mere hours after McCain announced the closure, Irving was threatening its willingness to follow

suit if the government failed to lift a controversial moratorium on drilling deep-water wells that

Irving had been pursuing for irrigation.116 This manipulative turn of events is hardly remarkable.

In the early days of DREE, federal and provincial governments invited this relationship:

cognisant of the region’s increasingly uncompetitive position, they courted these companies

with promises of public money.117 In a profile of the McCain family in Atlantic Insight from

1979, Harrison McCain responds to a question about why the company should receive public

support for its local operations. When asked if he would have continued to expand the company

115 CBC News, ‘McCain’s PEI Plant Closure to Affect 121 Jobs’. 116 The Guardian, ‘Cavendish Farms Warns It Faces Same Challenges as McCain Foods’, The Guardian, 7 August 2014, online edition, http://theguardian.pe.ca/news/local/cavendish-farms-warns-it-faces-same-challenges-as-mccain-foods-97168/; see also Wright, ‘Moratorium on Deep Wells Needs to Go, Says Cavendish Farms’. 117 Surely cognizant of the threat they might flee the region in search of bigger markets and better production conditions, governments used development grants and other financial incentives to encourage them to stay and expand production. During the days of DREE, both companies had received grants from the department. According to reporting on the potato industry in Atlantic Insight magazine, by 1979, McCain had received over $8 million in DREE grants, most of which was for plant expansion in New Brunswick. Nielson, ‘McCains’s Equals Spud Power’. By the time the Irvings purchased C.M. MacLean’s PEI potato processing operations in 1979, the latter company had taken out $2 million in provincially-backed loans and been promised $4 million in DREE grants. Rob Dykstra, ‘How to Handle a Hot Potato’, Atlantic Insight, July 1981.

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absent the funds, he explained, “Likely I would, yes, but not necessarily in New Brunswick.

You know we have factories in England, Australia, Quebec City and Vancouver; so why do it in

New Brunswick? If we were building a factory today, to make frozen pizza, say, would you

build it in New Brunswick? No, you wouldn’t, and nobody else would either.”118 The region’s

chronically high rates of poverty and unemployment are core features of these companies’

political economic position there and industry has historically used this socio-economic

precarity to nurture a regional dependency and consolidate political power. From DREE to

ACOA, successive development agendas have paid them to continue doing so. Today, in an

effort to transform economic marginality from a liability into a competitive edge, governments

advertise the region’s business-friendly and low cost conditions—among other things, a thinly

veiled celebration of low wages, high unemployment, labour discipline, and governments’

willingness to prioritize private interests.119

But within the broader context of local arrested development, depopulation, and increasingly

extreme mobility, the historical power of these processors to reorganize agricultural production

and increase dependency and vulnerability remains shrouded in tales of innocence and change.

Concentrated wealth and power in resource production has benefited from ongoing

representations of these industries as small-scale, locally based, family operations—

representations officially reproduced through tourism. Conversely, the story of the new

economy, reproduced through economic planning and government rhetoric, has helped to

obscure the material needs and concerns of actual small-scale producers through common sense

suggestions that they are destined to decline or simply false romantic or historical

representations. These distortions are compounded by the simple fact that concentrated power in

a small place keeps people in line. Speaking up, people know, can cost jobs, benefits,

relationships, and reputations. Moreover, the long history of disinvestment and poverty, the

longstanding practice of public shaming for dependency and lack of productivity, and an

increasingly anaemic local sense of entitlement have all led people to keep quiet—generally—

for fear of losing what they have.120

118 Nielson, ‘McCains’s Equals Spud Power’, 57. 119 Canada. Prince Edward Island. Innovation PEI, ‘The PEI Advantage’, Innovation PEI, 20 November 2015, https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/en/information/innovation-pei/pei-advantage; KPMG, Competitive Alternatives: KPMG’s Guide to International Business Locations Costs, 2016 Edition (KPMG LLP, 2016), https://www.competitivealternatives.com/reports/compalt2016_report_vol1_en.pdf. 120 This dynamic is nicely articulated by activist Sharon Labchuck, as she is quoted by Jamila Abassi: “The issue is very complicated and of course involves the usual government and corporate players. But the social situation,

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These matters are made more complicated by the fact that rural production and rural people in

PEI have now been subject to five decades of organized commodification.121 The state-protected

persistence of independent production and a tourism industry rooted in imagined rural

authenticity have together carefully maintained a landscape and imaginary of idyllic family

farms and small harbours. This landscape is real in that many families still rely directly and

indirectly on agriculture and fishing for the bulk of their household income. And it is imagined

in that producers are not so independent or numerous as they seem, nor is life so idyllic. But this

façade of innocence and independence is core to the PEI product and Islanders have been

consistently enrolled in producing and performing it as a matter of both economic and cultural

life. From its origins as an organized industry in the 1960s, in addition to remaking the

landscape itself, the tourism industry enrolled everyday people as responsible for producing the

‘authentic’ rural experience that middle class tourists arriving on the Island were seeking.122

Working in the industry, participating in political actions that leverage tourism, or simply

observing daily life at the height of the season will quickly reveal the degree to which this

largely unspoken expectation of collective good behaviour remains entrenched and observed.

Living and working in this context makes the line between the truth and fiction of local political

economy difficult to discern.

particularl to PEI and potentially other small places, plays a very important role in perpetuating the poisoning of the Island…when people speak out in a small place like PEI here’s what happens: a man might be a welder of farm machinery, if he speaks out he will be boycotted; the woman may be shunned at the next Women’s Institute or church meeting; your brother’s wife’s sister’s cousin may lose her job at the processing plant if you protest; you definitely will not get the seasonal provincial flagging job with Highways (and therefore will not get the requisite number of weeks for unemployment insurance)… There is very little public protest.” Email correspondence with Sharon Labchuk, as quoted in Jamila Abassi, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green : People, Potatoes, and Pesticides on Prince Edward Island’ (Masters thesis, Concordia University, 2004), 103, https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/7842/. 121 This marks the moment that tourism emerges as an industry, according to Judith Adler: centrally organize, coordinated, and formalized by the state. Adler, ‘Tourism and Pastoral’. 122 As Judith Adler explains it, when plans for expansion and formalization of the tourism industry were laid out in the Comprehensive Development plan, it was with an understanding that the Island—and the people who lived there—needed to be managed so as to produce the rural ‘authenticity’ sought by middle-class urbanites. Adler details various conflicts over government attempts to condition the landscape accordingly: an attempt to ban the spread of manure near popular tourist routes during the season was unsuccessful; proposals for additional national parks were fought and defeated; and farmers scorned as paving and infrastructure development was made to serve tourists rather than their own needs. But Islanders themselves were also enrolled to curate the tourist experience: “tourists were repeatedly referred to as ‘guests’ or ‘visitors’—never as ‘customers,’ ‘buyers,’ or ‘patrons’…. Conceived as customers, they would have moral claims primarily upon those to whom they give their business, but described as guests they have, by centuries-old tradition, moral claims (to help, generosity, friendly welcome) upon an entire ‘host’ community.” Adler, 134.

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Despite the haziness of these fantasies and the pervasive social silence, there have, of course,

always been local people questioning and challenging the direction of local economic

development. Most notably, people have challenged the changing farming practices that have

accompanied the growth of potato monoculture, the processing industry, and pressures on

producers to meet quotas set out in their contracts.123 Fish kills due to pesticide runoff have

become annual events and local communities are increasingly concern about the population-

scale health impacts of widespread pesticide exposure.124 These concerns are compounded by

the potato industry’s clear entrenchment in local politics. In 2016, for example, activists and

community members raised concerns when two major players in the potato industry were

appointed to the provincial health board.125

When people dare to publically name names or even just ask questions, the same old stories are

put to work to try to silence them. Government officials and business interests—or even regular

people whose jobs depend on the reproduction of the industry—characterize critics as unrealistic

and scared of change. The status quo of corporate industrial monoculture is positioned clumsily

against an unproductive past of poverty and hardship to which no one wants to return. This is

what happened when concerns surfaced in the early 2000s that concentrations of rare cancers in

parts of the Island might be linked to pesticide exposure. At the time, the president the PEI

Potato Board told The Globe and Mail: “We have some extremists who see the thing as

everybody should have a cow, a chicken, a goat and a few potatoes and live like we did 150

years ago. That isn't going to happen.”126 In the realm of primary production, in other words,

there is no alternative.

123 See Abassi, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green : People, Potatoes, and Pesticides on Prince Edward Island’. 124 According to provincial government data, there have been 51 documented fish kills on PEI since 1962 that were “either proven to be or suspected to have been caused by pesticides”: generally because pesticides were applied to crop land before intense rains. The following website includes reporting of these individual events: Canada. Prince Edward Island. Department of Communities, Land and Environment, ‘Fish Kill Information and Statistics’ (Charlottetown, PEI: Government of Prince Edward Island, 2018), https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/en/information/communities-land-and-environment/fish-kill-information-and-statistics. 125 The appointments included Blaine MacPherson, a potato farmer and former vice-president of Cavendish Farms, and Warren Ellis, a well-know businessman and former potato farmer who had notoriously pled guilty to violations of the Federal Fisheries Act and Provincial Crop Rotation Act in connection with two major fish kills several years prior. Kerry Campbell, ‘Environmentalists, Opposition Take Aim at Health PEI Appointments’, CBC News, 6 June 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/environmentalists-opposition-take-aim-at-health-pei-appointments-1.3618590; CBC News, ‘Potato Farmer Fined after Pleading Guilty to Barclay Brook Fish Kill’, CBC News, 30 October 2014, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/warren-ellis-fined-70-000-after-prince-county-fish-kill-1.2818976. 126 Martin Mittelstaedt, ‘“Pesticides Are What Is Killing Our Kids”’, The Globe and Mail, 6 December 2006, online edition, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/pesticides-are-what-is-killing-our-kids/article18179217/.

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In the Maritimes, the particular emphasis on a reinvented and entrepreneurial region obscures

not only the persistence of primary production but also the very real struggle over its place in

the region’s future and the nature of the socio-ecological relations that will reproduce it. Trends

of consolidation and corporatization that have caused both social and ecological upheaval go

largely unmentioned in the sorts of official economic visions reviewed above. Concentrated

wealth, reliance on exploitative labour regimes, and the environmental and health “externalities”

that underpin this system are omitted from the picture, as is the prospect of these industries as a

source of (actual and potential) widespread, meaningful, decent employment. Primary

production factors into economic planning and rhetoric from the perspective of economic

growth, not employment and livelihoods: to ensure that industry has access to “the labour it

requires,” that global trade is unhindered, or that technological innovation continues. In a move

reminiscent of the War on Poverty, the emphasis on reinvention relegates the “old economy” to

the realm of the unviable. Structures of primary production that have existed historically—

owner-operated, small scale, cooperative, destined for local markets, and so on—remain equated

with the past and its proponents, romantic, unrealistic, or scared of change.

The doctrine of the new economy, meanwhile, is focused elsewhere: images of high tech

laboratories, modern office spaces, diverse young workers, and well-dressed business people

promise a world of work that is new, intellectual, and stimulating. Those being officially

beckoned back for “repatriation” in these plans are the entrepreneurs and the “top talent,” not

the people who are already circulating and, in doing so, shoring up local economies: the oil

workers who are sending cheques home and paying big taxes or migrant fish plant workers who

have been bizarrely burdened with the moral responsibility of sustaining rural communities. The

policy emphasis is resolutely on “growing the economy.” Whether and how this much

celebrated growth materializes in the everyday lives of poor, migrant, working class, or

unemployed people—whether mobile or trying to stay—is a matter of secondary concern. The

problem, from this perspective, is not one of local precarity, poverty, or quality of life; from this

vantage point, perched above “the economy,” flexibility, mobility, low wages, and coordinated

seasonality are understood as assets.

The stories Rolland told me of his recent working life reflected this. They were so circuitous

they were sometimes hard to follow. His account of trying to find work out west involved false

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starts, financial risks, low wages, lay-offs, and premature trips home. In the years since he sold

his fishing gear he had not only driven trucks in Alberta, but had told me about working fishing

crabs, on a PEI mussel farm, and on a shrimp freezer trawler of the coast of Labrador. His

stories were centrally characterized by mobility, volatility, uncertainty, and personal risk. What

he might have made up in wages, he lost in control, time, relationships, and a clear sense of the

future. He described months on end with no secure income, the internal emotional battle of

depending on government benefits, and his fear for the mental health of his neighbours who

were experiencing similar challenges. That is, even though he was no longer fishing, many of

the negative hallmarks of the supposedly overcome “old economy”—natural resource

dependence, seasonality, occupational pluralism, unemployment, EI-dependence, persistent

poverty—remained central features of Rolland’s working life. Emphasizing the new economy

narrates all of this out. It obscures a structure of flexibility, mobility, and exploitability that was

working for local governments and business interests both near and far. Like the others that had

come before it, this declared dawn of a new economic era set the tone for what change could

look like, forestalling questions like Rolland’s about how rural might be reinvented differently.

The final chapter builds on the political economy examined here by returning to the workers

who have been squeezed out of it. I consider a set of powerful and contradictory stories about

“east coast” workers that variably pathologize and celebrate their imagined collective work

ethic. Importantly, and in relation to the restructuring reviewed above, these stories function not

only to stigmatize and isolate these workers, but to also constrain the ways that workers think

about their own futures.

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6. Dump truck destiny: Work, whiteness, and whittled futures

Putting whiteness to work

In March of 2015, New Brunswick Conservative Member of Parliament John Williamson sent

sparks flying when, while speaking at a conference, he responded to a question about labour

shortages in local meat packing and processing by saying: “it makes no sense to pay whities to

stay home while we bring in brown people to work in these jobs.”1 Williamson’s comment was

widely condemned as racist, prompting him to issue an apology for his use of “offensive and

inappropriate language.”2 But, while Williamson apologized for his language, the reaction to his

comments stemmed perhaps more from what he had suggested about race and work rather than

simply from his choice of words. He not only pointed to the racialized system of labour

exploitation at work in the region (organized through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program),

but also hitched the ‘problem’ of employer’ demand for migrant labour to the ‘problem’ of

white unemployment. Above all, I think it was Williamson’s reference to “whitie” that likely

struck many Maritimers. As critical scholars of whiteness have explained, part of the power of

whiteness and white domination is that whiteness, in its historically and geographically specific

forms, often escapes recognition as a racial category.3 In this sense, especially in a place with a

somewhat undeveloped public discourse about race and racism, naming whiteness as a racial

category might feel unsettling to white people—perhaps so much so that it managed to eclipse

in offensiveness the concrete racist policies constraining the rights and material wellbeing of the

migrant workers (his “brown people”) to whom Williamson referred. More specifically, in his

diminutive pejorative (“whitie”), Williamson’s comments perhaps raised so many eyebrows

because he named not only whiteness, but the uncanny matter of white poverty.

While not usually framed in terms of race, Williamson’s whitie is actually a familiar figure in

the Maritimes. That the MP needed only this simple shorthand to convey his point—that a

distinct longstanding white population assumed to live in this region is lazy, unemployed, and

averse to work—speaks to this familiarity. A constitutive element of the Maritime problem, 1 CBC News, ‘Criticism Widens over “whities” Quip by NB MP John Williamson’, CBC, 10 March 2015, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/john-williamson-faces-heavy-criticism-after-whities-comment-1.2988674. 2 Jamie Long, ‘Harper Urged to Remove MP over “whities” Comment’, CBC News, 12 March 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/harper-urged-to-remove-mp-john-williamson-over-whities-comment-1.2992300. 3 See, for example, Robin DiAngelos concept of white fragility. Robin DiAngelo, ‘White Fragility’, The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 54–70.

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governments have long mobilized the failure of the “Maritimer” as the basis for improvement

schemes, austerity measures, and work discipline. This failure is conveyed through accounts of

the lazy, defeatist, state-dependent individual who is stuck in place and opposed to change. This

is, as the story goes, a backward, unproductive, and folksy place; one that is stuck in time, as the

region has failed to ever industrialize, urbanize, or become properly modern. Through the

longstanding reality and high profile stigmatization of the region as dependent—on EI, on

equalization payments, on the productivity of other provinces—the problem of Maritime

poverty gets framed as a national problem, imbued with a politics of panic, resentment, and

moral evaluation that moves from the centre (urban, industrial, or extractive) to the periphery.4

In this way, high profile accusations of “Maritimers” as lazy and dependent are familiar and,

understandably, against this long and tired history, people in the region are quick to react. These

accusations are indeed racialized. As others have noted in studies of white poverty, these are

common qualities attributed to the various typologies of rural poor whites across North

America: rednecks, hillbillies, swamp Yankees, and the like.5 While in the Maritimes I have

almost never seen these accusations openly framed in terms of race, as Williamson’s words (and

the public’s sensitivity to them) made abundantly clear, the problem of Maritime failure is a

problem of distinctly white failure. My interest in forefronting whiteness here lies not in an

attempt to reify the region’s (false) construction as hegemonically white, nor as an assertion that

these stories or struggles matter more than others, nor, finally, as an attempt to eclipse white

advantage.6 My interest, rather, is in examining how these racialized constructions of workers—

4 For some examples see: CBC News, ‘Harper Plans to Battle “Culture of Defeatism” in Atlantic Canada’; Grant, ‘Stuck in Place’; Jennifer Hoegg and Terry Roberts, ‘Mills Calls for Changed Attitudes to Save Atlantic Canadian Economy’, The Kings County Register / Advertiser, 9 October 2013, http://www.kingscountynews.ca/News/Local/2013-10-09/article-3422120/Mills-calls-for-changed-attitudes-to-save-Atlantic-Canadian-economy/1; Jane Taber, ‘Proposed Changes to EI Perturb Atlantic Canada’, The Globe and Mail, 18 May 2012, online edition, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/proposed-changes-to-ei-perturb-atlantic-canada/article4186856/; Wente, ‘Is the PEI Woman Who Was Denied EI a Victim?’ 5 For a study of the “redneck” discourse in the US context and dynamics of rural restructuring see Lucy Jarosz and Victoria Lawson, ‘“Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks”: Economic Restructuring and Class Difference in America’s West’, Antipode 34, no. 1 (2002): 8–27. In her study of post-Civil War northern travel writing about white poverty in the US south, Jamie Winders explains writers’ attempts to grapple with the paradox of white poverty: the challenge to the assumed link between whiteness and economic privilege. Speaking directly to the theme of poverty as white failure, she writes, “The presence of abject rural poverty graphically exposed the spectre of failure in all whites, North or South.” Among other things, northern writers tried to distance themselves from southern poor whites by asserting that white poverty was geographical in nature: a problem of the south; something that could not happen in the north. Jamie Winders, ‘White in All the Wrong Places: White Rural Poverty in the Postbellum US South’, Cultural Geographies 10, no. 1 (2003): 57. 6 The construction of the Maritimes as white has been most closely documented in the Nova Scotia context. See, for example: McKay, ‘Tartanism Triumphant’; McKay and Bates, In the Province of History; Catriona Sandilands, ‘Cap Rouge Remembered? Whiteness, Scenery, and Memory in Cape Breton Highlands National Park’, in Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada, ed.

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including, in this case, rural, male resources workers—serve to formulate particular kinds of

political subjects, both on the job and in political life more generally.

David Roediger has argued—drawing on the foundational work of W.E.B Du Bois and James

Baldwin—that whiteness operates not only through the dispossession of people of colour, but

also by encouraging white people to accept lives of misery: by curtailing the political imaginary

of variably disadvantaged groups of white people who come to identify with white power at the

expense of their own interests.7 In trying to make sense of Maritimers as a distinct group of

flexible extractive workers, whiteness offers an entry point into longstanding dynamics of race-

making pervasive in staples history that have, on the one hand, pitted workers against each

other, obscured bases of solidarity, undermined collective material wellbeing, and, on the other,

fostered an identification with these industries. With these dynamics in mind, In this final

chapter, I take up the question of how, for workers, a 5000 kilometre trip west into gruelling,

remote, and isolated work comes to be seen as a solution to the problem of seasonal

unemployment and low wages at home. In considering this question, I focus on several powerful

narratives about this group of workers and their work ethic that hinge on racial, geographical,

and gendered explanations of their ‘natural’ inclinations: toward, as the case may be, laziness,

greed, and irresponsibility or discipline, reliability, and physical outdoor work. I draw on

interviews with employers and employment counsellors, media representations, and workers

own reflections to consider how these narratives function to shape and constrain not only

workers’ senses of self, but also their political imaginaries. I argue that, despite all the

challenges of oil work, the interplay of stories that simultaneously pathologize and celebrate

these workers has encouraged their attachment to resource frontier as a pathway to a better life.

While earlier chapters focused more on the ways stories about economies, markets, and the

nation have framed and curtailed what are understood as viable options for the future, this

chapter moves into the realm of worker subjects and subjectivities to consider how these

workers have been constructed as a distinct group and how they come to understand themselves

vis-à-vis these stories about who they are. In this way, this chapter is concerned with the broader

Andrew Baldwin, Laura Cameron, and Audrey Kobayashi (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011), 62–82. On race and planning in Halifax see: Jennifer Nelson, Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Ted Rutland, Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 7 This theme runs through Roediger’s work. He makes this point explicitly, drawing on the work of W.E.B DuBois and James Baldwin, in the following discussion: David Roediger, ‘Whiteness in the Time of Trump’ (Brown University, Providence, RI, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96m8FzPkUIc.

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ways that the production of social difference is foundational to the reproduction of capitalist

relations and geographies.

The body of this chapter focuses on two contrasting—but, I will argue, conjoined—

characterizations of the Maritime worker: at home, the lazy Maritimer (poor, white, rural,

entitled), strategically contrasted against the productive and disciplined transnational migrant

worker; and, out west, the “good” worker (poor, white, rural, appreciative), strategically and

variably contrasted against “local” workers who have more options and higher expectations, and

Indigenous workers, said to be unreliable. My interest is in how the interplay between these

subjectivities—a sort of precarious privilege—serves to regulate the political imaginaries of

workers themselves: to curtail the way a good life or a good society comes to be imagined, to

enable the jump from low wages, seasonal unemployment, and employment insurance at home

to “good jobs” out west. My argument is that the way that Maritime workers have established

themselves as “good workers” in seasonal, peripheral, and relatively low-paying corners of the

Alberta oil industry is the product of not only political economies of decline, seasonal economic

activity, and employment precarity at home, but also of a longstanding story that they are lazy,

undeserving, and destined to failure. These contradictory and shifting stories not only enable

exploitation by fostering flexibility and work discipline, they also obscure the underlying

conditions of uneven development, programs of rural restructuring, cuts to government benefits,

and meager sense of entitlement that are informing the movement of these workers into these

industries. In this way, these stories reproduce the extremely narrow idea that these workers are

destined to these places and this work; that these jobs mark success; that there is nothing on

offer at home; and that to pose any of these questions is to stand between them and the one

option for security they have finally found. At issue here is not only the reality that these jobs

don’t solve these problems—while many have certainly found some measure of temporary

financial security, the oil industry is extremely volatile and marked by regular layoffs and

financial uncertainty, family stress, pervasive mental health struggles, a strained social

environment at work, and long commutes. But beyond this, these factors are actively facilitating

the reproduction of an economic system that has material implications far beyond the lives of

this particular group of workers. It is in this sense that I want to examine the stories about who

Maritime workers are. Not to dispel them or argue they are not true, but to critically interrogate

how they strategically reproduce and mobilize social difference in the service of, first and

foremost, an extractivist future.

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From Whitie to Winter Warrior

Williamson’s blunder came and went and I carried on with my research. But just one month

later I would find myself reflecting back on his words as I listened to a very different story about

Maritimers’ work ethic. “You know, one thing that always bothered me about how people look

at rural PEI, saying we’re lazy” explained Ruby, the employment counsellor in rural PEI who

we met in Chapter 4. “Sweet God, the people here aren’t lazy. I wish I could slow them down

sometimes.” In contrast to the tendency to pathologize the region and its work ethic, Ruby was

clear that she wanted me to hear a positive story about the relationship she had fostered between

her community and employment opportunities away. Sensitive to the pervasive negativity and

stories of family breakup, she wanted to emphasize how she had seen workers gain confidence

and new life skills, in addition to being able to provide more security for their families back

home. Ruby was in the camp that saw the rise of work out west as what she called a “win-win

situation”: she could help locals find work, get off EI, and expand their horizons, while

connecting Alberta employers with “the best clients in the world.” Explaining how she had

marketed her clients in the early days of recruitment to Alberta, Ruby recounted that she had

told the companies: “I have the men that work outdoors, work long hours, safety-oriented, after

eighteen hours they ask for another eighteen hours. These guys don’t sleep—want to eat, but

they’ll do anything!” Sure enough, her strategy worked. At the time of our interview, she had

developed close relationships with companies that were loyal to hiring from her small

community year after year. Later in the interview Ruby reflected on the recent fall in oil prices,

explaining that her clients would adapt by looking for work on farms in Alberta and

Saskatchewan, on the Muskrat Falls hydro development in Labrador, and on the “Irving

contract”—likely referring to the company’s deal with the federal government to build a new

fleet of Arctic offshore patrol ships in its Halifax shipyard. “These guys are built to work

outdoors. It’s in their blood!” she exclaimed. Circling back to their success out west, Ruby went

on: “….if it’s minus-forty or if it’s plus-twenty they don’t care! They just work, and they seem

to do it well. You know, and like I said, if you can run a fishing boat safely, or if you can run a

farm safely, then you can go out west and you can do it all.”

Shortly after my meeting with Ruby I flew to Alberta where employers would repeat similar

stories about “east coast” workers being a natural fit for this remote, outdoor, physical, and often

seasonal work. As Ruby had explained to me, her seasonal workers, who tended to fish at home

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in the summer and then drive out west for the drilling season, liked to call themselves “Winter

Warriors.” Here in Alberta, in the corners of the sector where Ruby’s clients had been so

successful—often driving trucks in the petroleum services sector—these men were praised as

dedicated, reliable, flexible, and focused. In preparing to interview employers out west, I hadn’t

been sure how my questions about Maritime workers would land. On the east coast, Alberta

employment is fact of daily life, but on the other end, Maritime workers comprise but a small

fraction of people flowing into these industries for work. But as I made my way between

industrial parks on the outskirts of Calgary, Red Deer, and Edmonton I hardly had to explain

myself: “east coast” workers, I was quickly told, were a familiar and longstanding class of

recruits with an aptitude for the work. Explanations for this fit hinged on certain historical and

material factors: the region’s farming and fishing traditions, the collapse of the ground fishery in

the early 1990s, the rural way of life, seasonal cycles of employment that matched the demands

of the oil industry, and east coast people’s modest material expectations which allowed them to

cope with seasonal work and relatively low wages. But these explanations also inevitably relied

on a more abstract claim that as a distinguishable group, these men were somehow naturally

inclined toward this type of work; as Ruby had framed it, it was “in their blood.”

These narratives about “east coast guys” as good workers stand in stark contrast to the familiar

stories of Maritimers’ aptitude for laziness and unemployment. But even in their inconsistency,

they are joined in their appeal to racial thinking as a way of understanding—and enforcing—

work ethic. Staples labour in Canada is deeply structured by race thinking. Throughout my

conversations with industry representatives I heard commonsense assertions about how different

groups of workers—cartoonishly divided into awkward categories including “Alberta,” “east

coast,” “temporary foreign workers,” and “Native” workers—were predisposed to different

strengths and weaknesses. Racist stereotypes about workers and racial segmentation of labour

markets is, of course, not the exclusive domain of resource industries.8 But, part of what struck

me about the casual appeals to these categories was that I had seen them before—in archival

records related to manpower planning and seasonal unemployment from the 1960s and in old

studies of Canadian staples industries. Fifty years later, in their search for the “good worker”—

always firmly juxtaposed against his opposite—employers were still cycling through many of 8 There is a huge literature that explores the relationship between the production and regulation of social difference (including but not limited to race) and the history and structure of capitalist accumulation. Of note, Lisa Lowe’s recent work explores these themes across a sweeping history of colonial capitalism. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents.

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the same invented groups.

In the mid-1960s, for example, when the Canadian government first started recruiting and

admitting seasonal agricultural workers from the West Indies as a solution to what growers saw

as problems of labour recruitment and retention, employers expressed their concerns about

workforce reliability in similar ways. Like extraction, management concerns with regard to

agricultural labour are framed by the staples-labour problem. Agriculture in Canada is seasonal

in addition to being spatially fixed and, unlike extraction, the perishability of crops makes the

problem of timing all the more pressing. Employers want to have workers on hand when crops

need harvesting while avoiding the problem of accumulated unemployment before or after the

working period.9 The irregular and concentrated demand for large amounts of labour makes this

difficult and has meant that agricultural production in various places and crops has drawn on

mobility as a solution to this problem: including rural white transients (some recruited through

government employment programs), Indigenous workers, Americans, students (including from

Europe), and by the mid-1960s, workers from the Caribbean.10 In their support for this new

program, employers emphasized the reliability and productivity of Caribbean workers as a

solution to the poor quality of domestic workers. As one Manpower consultant summarized a

meeting with the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, growers felt particular

contempt from “French workers” from Quebec, and also bemoaned the poor quality of

Newfoundlanders and French (European) students. Domestic workers recruited through Canada

Manpower Centres, especially, were “the bottom of the barrel type.”11 Letters sent to the federal

government from growers in support of the new transnational recruitment program variably

emphasized these same concerns about Quebecois, Atlantic, and also Native workers—who, as

one employer lamented, “gradually disappeared during our most critical time.”12 The Manpower

consultant’s report from the Growers Association meeting recounted that growers urged the

continuation of recruitment from the Caribbean because, “regardless of how many persons

9 On the politics of domestic transient labour in Ontario tobacco farming during this period and their connection to the rise of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program see Reid-Musson, ‘Historicizing Precarity’. On the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program more generally see Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes. 10 For government and employer records and correspondence that illustrates some of this detail see, for example the records in LAC, RG118, Vol. 244, file 9-6-1 (Vol. 21) – Agriculture – (Farm) Labour – General Policy. 11 Report on meeting of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, 7 November 1968, Ontario Food Terminal. Report dated 12 November 1968. LAC, RG118, Vol. 244, file 9-6-1 (Vol. 21) – Agriculture – (Farm) Labour – General Policy. 12 Letter to Gordon Bennett, Assistant Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Food, from J. Gordon Barker, Robinson & Associates, Clarksburg, Ontario. November 21, 1969. LAC, RG118, Vol. 244, file 9-6-1 (Vol. 21) – Agriculture – (Farm) Labour – General Policy. There are a number of letters to this effect in this file.

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might be reported as being available for work in South Western Ontario, there will still be a

shortage of good workers when they are needed.” Explaining that domestic workers perform

poorly for lack of interest in this type of work, the consultant recounted, “One representative

estimated, and the others agreed, that to keep 250 jobs filled during the peak season, in excess of

900 workers would be needed – a turnover of 3 to 1.”13 Employers appealed to government

officials that Caribbean workers were not only more reliable but also more productive.

It was during this same period that Rex A. Lucas published his detailed study of Canadian single

industry towns, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown, in which he profiled a different body of staples

labour: construction workers building mills, dams, rail yards, and resource towns.14 Often

located in sparsely populated areas and demanding only temporary labour, as Lucas outlines, a

variety of construction and related workers with a variety of skills “converge upon these areas

for diverse reasons.” Lucas divides the construction workforce into ten different groups,

spanning mobile (full-time) construction workers, “get-rich-quick” workers, tradesmen and

skilled workers, immigrant newcomers, marginal farmers, and the “local labour force,” among

others.15 It’s a fascinating break-down of a segmented workforce that details different structures

of pluralistic employment across great distance, the interlinking of different skill-sets and forms

of marginal economic activity, experiences of permanent mobility, and what Lucas understands

as a deep connection between peoples on the socio-economic periphery of Canadian capitalism

and the reproduction of resource industries. His accounts of the more marginal segments of this

labour force, especially, attend to this type of detail. For example, writing about the group he

calls “bunk house based workers”—solitary and socially disconnected men who live

permanently on the resource frontier—he argues:

They carry out tasks that few others are willing to do, such as pot-washer, dishwasher,

general kitchen help, and the dirtiest labouring jobs. Little is known about the origins of

these career lines or how they end. It can be argued that Canada owes the development

of its resources to the work of these perpetually marginal bunk house men who are able

to live forever in social privation on isolated construction sites.16

13 Report on meeting of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. 14 Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown. 15 Lucas, 26–34. 16 Lucas, 34. Emphasis is mine.

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In his discussion of the “local labour force,” Lucas asserts that these construction booms often

offer the first chance at regular waged employment for local peoples in regions that have been

historically removed from industrial development. Listing off a motley crew of “locals” he

writes: “The very marginality of bush-workers, farmers, Indians and others who live on the

fringes of habitation leads to great difficulties in integrating them into even the workforce of the

seasonal construction industry.” In an explanation that echoed themes from my own interviews,

he quotes a research respondent as telling him, “These people are used to being their own bosses

and doing their work at their own time in their own way…. The notion of punctuality is quite

foreign…. They are pretty good workers although they are not dependable.”17

But it is Lucas’s account of the “marginal farmer” and his role in single industry town

construction work that is most striking in its detailed resemblance to contemporary explanations.

Noting that these men constitute the “bulk” of workers on many construction sites, Lucas writes:

“These men consider themselves farmers and are land based. They come from marginal rural

areas characterized by unemployment or under-employment. Traditionally, their way of life has

consisted of subsistence farming, with forays into the work world to augment their cash

incomes.” He lists cutting pulp wood, working country roads, and other unskilled work as

examples of these complementary seasonal jobs. These workers, Lucas notes, “are useful to the

construction industry” on account of two qualities in particular. First, they are available

seasonally in a rhythm that complements the demands of the construction industry. And second,

they are semi-skilled: “Although they cannot read blueprints or work at jobs demanding

sophisticated skill they provide ‘common sense,’ ‘good solid rough carpentry,’ and they are

‘good with their hands.’”18

Lucas explains that “Each province has a large reservoir of workers of this type,” but notes the

particular stereotypes that supervisors draw about eastern Canadian workers. Again, these

quotes from his research are almost indistinguishable from my own. Quoting one supervisor,

Lucas writes: “French Canadians, Newfoundlanders, and Maritimers live in a different type of

atmosphere and tend to want to work on the seasonal level and then return home for one reason

or another.” A quote from a different contractor, worth repeating at length, explains:

17 Lucas, 33. 18 Lucas, 29–30.

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To many, this is their way of life. Newfoundlanders, for instance, are used to working

six months of the year and they don’t want to work any longer. They keep one eye on

their bank account and one eye on their unemployment insurance book. This goes not

only for the people of Newfoundland but also New Brunswick, the north shore, the south

shore (of the St. Lawrence) and parts of Nova Scotia. They don’t want to work twelve

months. They keep a little house and family at home and they can eat regularly; their

food is good basic stuff—it isn’t high cost—and many can live quite happily on what

they can earn in a season, the baby bonus, and unemployment insurance. This pattern, as

long as it lasts, fits our needs.19

In my own research, as I heard similar matter-of-fact statements of this type of labour

segmentation, I reflected back on these older accounts. As these examples make clear, this

cartoonish triad of poor white, immigrant, and Indigenous workers as the ‘viable’ options for the

seasonal, difficult, and often ‘unskilled’ work in Canadian staples industries has a long history.

These racialized imaginaries of who constitutes the “good” resource worker serve as a powerful

ideological foundation on which the reproduction of flexible, exploitable, and mobile Canadian

staples labour rests. As these two separate accounts of staples labour illustrate, these racial

tropes are variably enduring and shifting across contexts, time, and group: the enduring

narrative of Indigenous workers as unreliable; the shifting narrative of marginal white workers

as both averse to work and a good ‘fit’ for seasonal remote work. It also makes clear the deep

relationality between these groups of workers and the stories about them. As east coast workers,

as a group, move between east coast communities and extractive industries, they are compared

to and pitted against other racialized groups of workers on either end. In contrast to

Williamson’s whitie—shamed at home for failing to work and triggering the ‘need’ for

transnational migrant workers—these workers are celebrated by certain employers in Alberta as

offering advantages over other groups. They move from positions of racialized failure to

racialized success. These racial dynamics—as clear in these historical examples as they are in

Williamson’s comments—are key to understanding the interplay of race, nation, and staples

labour in Canada. They lay bare how “racial knowledge” actively structures these labour

markets, but they also also signal resource work as an important site through which race, nation,

19 Lucas, 30.

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and associated subjectivities are actively made.20

In the case of east coast workers, these shifting racial stories pit them not only against other

workers, but also against themselves, the specter of their own failure always underpinning,

informing, and framing their ability to ‘succeed’ on the resource frontier. We can get a sense of

this from these historical examples: the contrast between these workers’ reputations across these

two industries or the ways that the desirability of the resource town construction worker is, in

many ways, predicated on his economic marginality. Today, this interplay of subjectivities

continues, structured through a similar set of contradictory stories: on the one hand, of failure

and delinquency, and on the other, of discipline and usefulness. For the unemployed Maritimer,

contemporary stories of pathology emphasize laziness, dependency, and a ‘culture’ of poverty.

Pathological stories of those who have made it to Alberta emphasize greed, bigotry, and the

inability to manage money. It is against these pervasive stories of undeserving white poverty

that the story of the “good” east coast worker finds its power.

The remainder of the chapter looks concretely at the interplay between some of the most

common shifting stories about these workers. Drawing heavily and directly from my interviews,

I try to convey some of these stories as they operate in workers’ experiences of work and daily

life. As I hope these examples illustrate, across their diversity, these pathologizing stories are

productive. Most obviously, they erode workers’ sense of entitlement, urge them to cling to a

workplace that values them, and cultivates work discipline, industry loyalty, and competition.

But, deeper than this, these stories about workers’ confined futures also work to confine their

economic and political imaginaries.

“Look what those lazy Maritimers are doing!”: Unemployed and undeserving

As I explain in Chapter 1, the year I began my research was marked by the most severe overhaul

of Canada’s employment insurance program since at least the 1990s. The changes, in particular,

targeted what were characterized as repeat users, sending east coast communities, where

seasonal work is widespread, reeling. Here communities have long used EI to make do between

different types of seasonal employment and people quickly began to worry that without access

20 My use of the idea of racial knowledge here comes from the work of Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger. For a fascinating study of how “racial knowledge” has historically figured centrally in the management of labour in the United States see: Esch and Roediger, ‘One Symptom of Originality’.

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to this longstanding component of the local economy, people would be forced to leave. EI—also

commonly called “pogey” or simply “unemployment”—is sort of a banal part of daily life in a

place like PEI. Compared to other places I’ve lived in Canada, it’s both more visible and,

locally, less stigmatized. And so, when the cuts were announced in the lead-up to my first

research trip, I didn’t properly appreciate the degree to which both the seasonal worker and the

seasonal EI recipient were somewhat established bogeymen in national political debates about

work and the welfare state. The most common characterization pivots on the region’s

widespread problem of dependency and, as Stephen Harper famously diagnosed it in 2002, a

resulting “culture of defeatism.”21 This is Williamson’s “whitie”: a delinquent breed of

Maritimer who works under the table, not at all, or just enough to earn their “stamps” before

spending the rest of the year lazily and voluntarily unemployed, drawing unemployment

insurance.22

In Canada generally public and policy anxieties related to seasonal economic and employment

fluctuations are longstanding. In relation to the Maritimes specifically, the ‘problem’ of seasonal

unemployment has figured at the heart of the region and its people’s perennial failure: to work,

produce, develop, contribute. As we saw in the first half of this dissertation, since the post-war

period, the region’s ‘unviable’ seasonal economies have been poked and prodded by federal and

local policy-makers in at attempt to industrialize local industries and eradicate—or at least

regulate—the problem of seasonal unemployment. These economies have long histories of

occupational pluralism. Historically, many local workers travelled within and outside the region

and between industries with the ebb and flow of demand for ‘unskilled’ and manual labour. But

these patterns began to shift with the uneven industrialization of natural resource industries and

post-war urbanization. The hard-won 1950s era extension of unemployment insurance eligibility

to seasonal workers and fishermen, who had originally been excluded, would help to fill in this

gap and, at least for a time, provide a basic level of material security for workers and their

21 CBC News, ‘Harper Plans to Battle “Culture of Defeatism” in Atlantic Canada’. 22 “Stamps” as a signifier for unemployment insurance is rooted in an old system of tracking working time and eligibility for insurance. Insured workers each had a booklet into which employers would put stamps to indicate an amount of time worked. The UIC then used these records to determine eligibility. While this recording system was phased out long ago, the reference to stamps is still sometimes used to signal EI eligibility. See: L. Richard Lund, ‘“Fishing for Stamps”: The Origins and Development of Unemployment Insurance for Canada’s Commercial Fisheries, 1941-71’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 6, no. 1 (1995): 179–208.

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families.23 With ongoing mechanization of agriculture, forestry, and other natural resource

industries, unemployment benefits soon assumed a critical role in the region’s economy.24

While seasonal workers are fully entitled to these benefits, as individuals and a group, they have

often been characterized, including by policy-makers, as abusing the system.25 The seasonal use

of EI sits uneasily against the imaginary that this is an insurance program. For seasonal workers,

yearly unemployment is a certain reality and, as such, insurance against their unemployment

contradicts actuarial logic. While the Canadian EI system is not actually rooted in actuarial

principles, this has been an enduring topic of debate and appeals to actuarial logic are

periodically mobilized in arguments for limiting the insurance of seasonal work.26 Today,

despite years of cuts and regulatory tinkering that has made it harder for seasonal workers to

access benefits, they have never been categorically cast out of the system.

The inclusion of seasonal workers under the EI system was a gradual and somewhat haphazard

process; coverage for fishermen, in particular, incited anxieties about the nature of seasonal

work and its insurability, raising questions and deliberation about the applicability of insurance

to work that is not only reliably seasonal, but largely independent from the wage-relation. Policy

makers remained ambivalent about the answer to this question even by the time the fishing

benefit was first introduced in 1957, calling for a review and reconsideration of the program

details after a two-year trial period.27 When the UI program was put under the microscope—and

23 Lund. 24 Fishing provides perhaps the clearest example of this and, because fishers constitute a distinct class of claimants with a unique benefit, it is easy to track. Soon after the inclusion of the fishing industry in the program in 1957 (on the heels of an expansion that included other seasonal workers), L. Richard Lund remarks that Newfoundlanders would say: “fishermen no longer fish for fish, but for unemployment insurance stamps.” “More than just a colourful exaggeration,” he explains, “such comments reflected an innate understanding of how important qualifying for UI benefits would become for anyone hoping to make a living in Canada’s commercial fisheries.” By the mid-1980s, he notes, full-time fishermen on the east coast would earn 23 percent of their income from UI; in parts of Newfoundland and Labrador the number was as high at 44 percent. Lund, 180. 25 This is certainly the case today and was a theme that surfaced repeatedly in my interview and contemporary research. The archival record suggests, however, that this is a longstanding trend, surfacing, for example, in the 1961 submissions to and hearings for the Inquiry into the Unemployment Insurance Act (Gill Commission). In a submission to the Committee dated November 16, 2016, for example, Svanhuit Josie notes that seasonal workers, and fishermen in particular, are commonly accused of draining the UI fund. See also reports, in the general notes from the hearings, of unfounded accusations of UI abuse targeted at seasonal workers. LAC, RG 33, Vol. 8 (Series 48), File 8-1 (Vol. 1) – Hearings – General. 26 See William E. Schrank, ‘The Failure of Canadian Seasonal Fishermen’s Unemployment Insurance Reform During the 1960s and 1970s’, Marine Policy 22, no. 1 (1998): 67–81; Campeau, From UI to EI. 27 Seasonal occupations that were originally excluded were gradually brought under the Act throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s: lumbering and logging in British Columbia in 1946; transportation by water in 1946; stevedoring in 1948; and lumbering and logging nation-wide in 1950. See “The Scope and Effects of

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then on the chopping block—in the widely publicized 1994 Liberal review of Canadian social

security, the government identified seasonal use of what was then called Unemployment

Insurance as a central concern.28 Threaded through with the era’s ethos of limiting government’s

role in managing social risk and the market, the final report explained, of UI: “Often, the

program discourages adjustment. For example, UI does not encourage unskilled workers in

seasonal industries to improve their skills during periods of unemployment. Short periods of

work, alternating with periods of UI benefits, appears to be the only choice for them, and thus

becomes a way of life.”29 This familiar characterization of the EI “way of life” would become a

mainstay for governments, private industry, and media in churning up public anxieties about

welfare cheats and drumming up support for austerity. When the federal Harper Conservative

government attacked the EI system in 2012, the seasonal worker would again play a starring

role.

As reviewed in more detail in Chapter 1, the 2012 EI overhaul was wide-ranging and included a

host of measures limiting access to the program.30 The centrepiece, which targeted repeat users,

was a change in the meaning of “suitable employment” that would require workers to seek out

and accept work further from home, at lower pay, and in some cases, in totally different

Unemployment Coverage for Fishermen: With Special Reference to Modified or Substitute Schemes,” Economics Service, Department of Fisheries of Canada, May 1962. LAC, RG 33, Vol. 15, File 3-1-11 (Vol. 1), Committee of Inquiry – Unemployment Insurance Act – Study No. 11 – Application of Unemployment Insurance to Fishermen. But, special off-season benefits for seasonal workers were not introduced until 1950. Under these rules, seasonal workers could apply for “additional” benefits in the off-season, which were funded 20 percent by government. According to Georges Campeau, when a new Act was passed in 1955, seasonal workers were fully integrated in the UI scheme as eligible for regular benefits. Campeau, From UI to EI. Once seasonal workers were incorporated into the regular benefit stream the government stopped funding these additional benefits. The fishing benefit was introduced somewhat tentatively in 1957 after much deliberation about whether and how insurance should or could apply to fishermen. In the lead-up to the fisheries benefit the Unemployment Insurance Commission acknowledge the income problem facing fishermen but deliberated whether insurance was the right mechanisms for addressing it on account of fishermen’s ambiguous employment status, independence, non-wage based employment relationships, and predictable annual fluctuations in income. When UI was extended to fishermen in 1957, it was understood was one of several possible schemes, and the Commission advised a trial period of two years in order to allow timely re-evaluation and potential modification of the program. See generally LAC RG 27, Vol. 3456, File 4-2-5-7 (part 1), including: “Unemployment Insurance for Fishermen,” Unemployment Insurance Commission, Ottawa, May 16, 1955; Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Unemployment Insurance Plan for Fishermen. Ottawa. November 9, 1956; and three different memoranda introducing the Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Unemployment Insurance Plan for Fishermen, issued between November 6 and 22, 1956. Department of Labour, Research and Economics Branch. 28 Lund, ‘“Fishing for Stamps”’. 29 Improving Social Security in Canada: A Discussion Paper. Human Resources Development Canada. October 1994. 30 These changes to the EI system were part of the Harper governments 2012 Budget Implementation Bill, which was 450 pages long and amended 70 pieces of legislation. For details see Porter, ‘Austerity, Social Program Restructuring, and the Erosion of Democracy’.

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occupations.31 Of particular concern to seasonal workers was the threat of EI disqualification for

workers leaving “permanent” (i.e. year-round) employment for seasonal work. This stipulation

was anticipated to affect claimants who would now be required to take off-season work at 70

percent of their previous wages. If these jobs happened to be permanent, and if workers chose to

return to their previous seasonal work at the start of the season, communities speculated that

workers risked disqualifying themselves from accessing EI benefits should they be laid off in

the future. While the government equates “permanent” work with year-round work, many

people consider seasonal work to be their permanent work.32

The widespread sentiment that these changes were actually meant to usher seasonal workers into

the labour market was justified. Prior to the changes the Ministry of Human Resources

commissioned a study in high unemployment areas of Eastern Quebec and Atlantic Canada to

investigate the relationship between access to EI and workers’ likelihood to move to a region

with lower unemployment rates. Using logic reminiscent of the 1990s War on Welfare, the

premise of the study was the “considerable concern that the EI system inhibits geographic

mobility from high unemployment regions to low unemployment regions.”33 Like previous

studies, this one provided little evidence that reduced access to EI would actually encourage

people to relocate. As the research results detailed, while many workers had thought about

relocating, they named the cost of moving, uncertainty, lack of formal training, and ties to

family and community as barriers to doing so. In fact, for those considering moving, access to

this small amount of money might provide them with the resources they needed to actually do

so.34

31 The overhaul also closed local processing centres, subjected claimants to new forms of monitoring, and concentrated new powers in Cabinet. For a closer examination of the specific reforms see Porter. 32 In February 2013 the federal government ramped up EI fraud investigations. Service Canada employees peppered the country, showing up unannounced at the doors of EI recipients, government forms and interview questions in hand. As later revealed by a Service Canada whistleblower who sacrificed her job in the process, the federal government had set a quota requiring bureaucrats to “recoup” almost half a million dollars in EI payments—fully funded by workers and employers since the federal government ceased its support for EI in 1990—from recipients each year. Donovan Vincent, ‘EI Fraud Investigator Axed for Leaking “Quota” Details’, The Toronto Star, 24 October 2013, online edition, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/10/24/ei_fraud_investigator_axed_for_leaking_quota_details.html. 33 Sage Research Corporation, Study on Geographic Mobility. 34 Documents obtained by Dean Beeby, CBC News, through Access To Information and Privacy request to HRSDC, no. A-2012-00141, A-2012-00011.

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Meanwhile, national mainstream media celebrated the overhaul, and people and places

associated with EI became the subjects of national scorn. Media blamed seasonal EI for trapping

people in place, keeping afloat unviable rural communities, cramping Canada’s national

productivity, and forestalling the fluid mobility of labour.35 And as the ‘debates’ about seasonal

unemployment and EI dragged on over subsequent years, the Conservative government began

blaming EI recipients for supposedly forcing Maritime employers to hire migrant workers

through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). In the fall of 2014, then Minister of

Employment and Social Development, Jason Kenney, paid a visit to Charlottetown to ward off

employers’ anxieties about a labour shortage in fish processing resulting from recent restrictions

on the TFWP. Kenney claimed the workforce was indeed available locally. He announced that

new data from his office indicated that throughout 2013, hundreds of Islanders who identified as

“fish plant workers” and “labourers in fish processing” had been sitting at home collecting

employment insurance.36 It was the following March, that MP John Williamson made is

comment about “brown people” and “whitie.”37

Throughout my research I collected an arsenal of similar examples that pathologized seasonal

workers, scorned their access to EI, and pitted them against migrant workers. When, a year and

a half after the EI changes were implemented, I sat down in Ottawa for an interview with Mary-

Lou Donnelly, who was then the Employment Insurance Commissioner for Workers, I was keen

to press for details about the way seasonal workers were understood inside the bureaucracy.38 In

addition to interviews with workers and EI recipients in the Maritimes, I had been working for

the year prior with the PEI Coalition for Fair EI and seasonal worker access to the program was

at the centre of our concerns and our work. “When I’m talking to people in communities about

their experience with EI, I hear two things, often from the same people,” I explained to the

Commissioner. “One, ‘If only those people in Ottawa understood what life was like in the

35 Wente, ‘Is the PEI Woman Who Was Denied EI a Victim?’; Kline, ‘Jesse Kline’; Crowley, ‘EI for Seasonal Workers Is a Corrosive Economic Policy’; Grant, ‘Stuck in Place’; Boesveld, ‘Is the EI System Making It More Attractive to Not Work?’ 36 Wright, ‘Q&A’. 37 Long, ‘Harper Urged to Remove MP over “whities” Comment’. 38 The Canada Employment Insurance Commission, made up of representatives from business, labour, and government, plays a role in overseeing the EI program, including monitoring and assessment. See: Government of Canada. ‘Canada Employment Insurance Commission (CEIC)’. Employment and Social Development Canada, 13 September 2018. https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/corporate/portfolio/ei-commission.html.

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Maritimes they never would have made those changes.’ And then three seconds later they’ll say,

‘But the changes weren’t really a matter of misunderstanding; they were intentional and they

knew—they were meant to force us to move to Alberta’ or whatever it might be.” Reflecting on

her sense of the government’s motivation, and her own understanding of EI and seasonal work,

she explained her interpretation of the changes.

Commissioner: I’ll tell you why, from my perspective, that the changes were made….

So, for years and years it morphed into…a supplement…. I support workers when

they’re in between jobs, and this is to smooth it out. But that’s part of the problem: that

it was allowed to morph into a salary supplement or an income supplement. And, when

Diane Finley—and Diane Finley told me this story herself—when she was Minister of

HRSDC—it was under Diane Finley that I was hired—and she told me that, just after

these changes, she said, “I went to Newfoundland, and I visited a small community, and

it was a fishing community, and the mayor was taking me around. And the fishermen

were on EI, and there was a fish plant down the street and they had twenty-five

Temporary Foreign Workers.” And she said, “Why are there Temporary Foreign

Workers there? Why aren’t the fishermen in the fish plant?” And the mayor said to her

“Well, they already did their work! It’s time for them to rest….” Her example was a very

simple example, and it is more complicated than that and I understand that it’s more

complicated than that. For example, the seasons may have overlapped. You know, the

fishermen could have still been fishing and the fish plant people need them right now,

sort of thing. There are all kinds of different scenarios that could have happened. But,

that was the feeling within government. That was absolutely the feeling! “Look what

they’re doing! Look what those lazy Maritimers are doing!” That was the feeling. And

so they made those changes.

Katie: So that was palpable and overt rationale for those changes? Because there’s often

a feeling in seasonal economies, like, we feel attacked by these changes. Am I a

conspiracy theorist? Is it just that the changes are meant to, sort of, push everybody back

into the labour force more quickly and, because these economies are seasonal, it’s

especially palpable for us? But, it sounds like what you’re saying is that there was

actually some deliberate orientation towards those economies in trying to, in between

seasons, push people back into the labour market.

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Commissioner: Absolutely.

Katie: And that that wasn’t a side effect.

Commissioner: Absolutely.

Katie: That was actually deliberate.

Commissioner: Absolutely, absolutely. And not unrightly so. I absolutely support

workers. But, I do not support EI as an income supplement. I do not! Does something

have to be done about seasonal workers? Maybe it does! Maybe we need to look at

seasonal workers and say ‘what can we do for seasonal workers?’

I had sat at the kitchen tables of local seasonal workers as they laid out the new financial gaps in

their futures and told me, with great anxiety, that Alberta might be their only option. They

described to me how, to maintain their EI, they periodically had to travel around town in the off-

season, documenting their efforts to “look for work”—a demeaning experience anywhere, but

especially in a seasonal economy where there is no work. Perhaps in theory EI is not an income

supplement but decades of government policy have, in practice, rendered it a supplement: a

crucial one on which entire communities depend. While, as I argue in Chapter 1, governments

had been reaping the benefits of this precarious insurance since almost the advent of the EI

system, they had, for seemingly equally as long, been piling blame onto individual seasonal

workers for abusing a system for which they paid and to which they had rightful access.

What often goes unmentioned in the caricatures of seasonal claimants is the fact that many

mobile resource workers are also seasonal workers. The familiar image of the mobile Maritimer

is of the rotational worker who travels on a regular schedule between home and the oil sands.

But most men I interviewed had never worked these jobs. Most who worked in the construction

trades were largely employed working plant construction, turnarounds, and maintenance—also

in the oil sands but according to a different and less regular rhythm (e.g. thirty-five days in camp

working on a job, but actually working ten and four). But the most common type of worker I

encountered is the Winter Warrior, who works seasonally in the petroleum services sector filling

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various positions in seismic, drilling, and trucking. Most of these workers travel seasonally to

Alberta for only the most active part of the drilling season. For some, this was simply the entry-

level job available to them; others saw this as a chance to make use of their Class 3A driver’s

license or other transferable skills from fishing, farming, or local construction experience. Some

workers explained to me that east coast workers preferred this arrangement to rotational work

because it allowed them to spend months at a time at home.

In stories that echoed Rex Lucas’s 1971 observations about construction workers in resource

towns, the usefulness of these workers’ seasonality, economic marginality, and access to EI was

reflected back from the companies I interviewed in Alberta. Representatives from one petroleum

services company explained to me that most of their “east coast workers” were seasonal saw

operators: the slashers and mulcher operators who clear seismic lines. The chattiest of the three

men in the interview explained, “traditionally…chainsaw operators have either been Native or

east coast. And the culture of the east coast has been you heat with wood, you cut wood, you

know how to run a chainsaw.” He estimated that, as of 2015, about 75 percent of their saw

operators were east coast workers. Explaining to me how the changing length of the season was

impacting the nature of the work, he describe how, when industry had operated six months of

the year, workers “could make enough money working for us for that period of time…they

didn’t really need to do anything else” in the off season. Because of climatic changes that have

delayed freeze up and changing regulations related to caribou migration that bring the season to

an end around mid-February, he explained the dramatic reduction in available work:

So, if it doesn’t freeze until December or sometimes early January, we’ve got a month-

and-a-half of work for people and that’s it. That changes who wants to come and work.

If you’re an Albertan, or someone who could maybe get a steady job, they’d probably

rather have that job…. But, if you’re east coast, where EI is, you know, it takes less to

qualify, there may be other fishing opportunities, then, we can get those guys. You

know, it’s easier for them. And they count the days that they need in!

The “days they need in” here refers to the number of workdays needed to qualify for EI back

home. As my interviewees explained, once those days had come and gone, “they would say,

‘No, no, I’ve got to go home now. I’m done.’ It’s not that they were done working; they were

just done!” I clarified, “And they wanted a layoff?”

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Interviewee 2: Yeah, so they could collect.

Interviewee 3. Yeah, you had to give them a layoff.

Katie: And did you?

Interviewee 3: Of course! We’d do anything for these guys! Are you friggin’ kidding

me? Well, of course!

Interviewee 2: We need them back when their EI runs out.

They continued to describe to me in fascinating detail how the structure of their industry and

informal employment practices had evolved alongside and in response to changes to EI, the

restructuring of the east coast economy, the disparity in prevailing wages and the cost of living,

and a different cultural politics of work and obligation that meant their mobile workers would

always prioritize returning home. When I asked them more directly the role that EI plays in their

industry, they explained that it allowed them to absorb the problem of seasonality. The talkative

one explained, “I think if you thought about it a little bit more, I mean in reality, for our

industry, it’s—it’s a benefit. Because we only usually need them for a hundred days.” Deeper

into the interview, he expanded on the nature of this relationship:

And you’ve got to remember too, how many people really want to work three months of

the year? In what generally you would consider a labour-intensive, shitty job. You get

paid reasonably well. I mean, most of our guys, I know they’re between four and six,

seven-hundred dollars a day for that kind of work. But, who wants to live in a communal

camp? You know? Who really wants to do that?

…. We’re not offering them benefits because they’re not full-time employees. We can’t.

So when you think about that, we’re not getting PhD students, we’re getting people that,

a lot of times, are kind of on the fringe…. A lot of these guys don’t have a big future.

That’s why, I think, east coast people—it actually does work so well for them. They have

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access to cheap housing; they have access to EI; they come out here and they can make

descent money. But, they’re not your engineering guys. You know?

But even beyond seasonality, oil and gas is a volatile industry. As workers repeatedly told me,

uncertainty, lulls, and periodic layoffs are somehow a normal part of life: “That’s part of the oil

patch. It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer or if you’re a labourer. That’s just the oil patch,”

one worker had told me, back in PEI. Unemployment is woven into the fabric of the business

and, while most pronounced among seasonal workers, EI was a part of life for many of the men

I interviewed. Workers expressed a range of relationships with and feelings about EI: some

understood it had a practical role to play in their lives, while others referenced their “stubborn”

refusal to draw. Some people expressed both feelings, endorsing the general view that “That’s

just like insurance—when you put insurance on your car? You don’t go to work? That’s just

backup,” while at the same time indicating their refusal to seek government support. For the

most part, their sentiments around EI reflected the stigmatizing narratives more than they did the

usefulness of the Winter Warrior. That is, despite the structural role EI plays in reproducing

parts of the Alberta oil industry—work they generally took pride in—it was distain for being

rendered reliant or trapped by EI that surfaced in workers’ references of the program.

Stigmatizing characterizations of EI, seasonality, and dependency are, of course, harmful in the

stories they perpetuate about work and workers: demonizing the unemployed, parsing the

deserving from the undeserving, reifying work, blaming individuals for the fallout of the market,

and solidifying a delinquent ‘other’ against which different groups of workers are contrasted and

disciplined. Among other things, these narratives mask the crucial structural position that EI—

and these workers’ access to it—plays in sustaining the resource sector and its demand for

flexible, mobile labour. But it was the way workers, themselves, reiterated these normative ideas

about work, productivity, and self-sufficiency that struck me most. It seemed that, in attempting

to escape the incessant pressure of the pathologizing stories, workers were at times embracing

these pathologies as real, in ways that impacted their sense of who they were and what they

might expect from the future. In this way, I wondered if workers’ own drive to be free of these

stories paradoxically served to shore them up. Seeing this brought into focus the co-constituted

character of these subjects: that the usefulness of seasonal workers and their access to EI is

bolstered through stories that cast them as useless. The relentless pressure of this stigmatizing

story, it seemed, had emboldened workers’ attachment to the common sense ideas at the story’s

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core: that dependency is bad and hard work is good; that the alternative to poverty is mobile

resource work; and that, no matter their sacrifices, the volatility of the market, of the ways their

own marginality had been exploited, when their success out west comes crashing down, they are

responsible for their own fate.

Pricey new pickups and big-ticket items: Employed and irresponsible

Sure enough, in the winter of 2014, while I was in the midst of research, oil prices started to fall.

At the beginning of 2015, companies began announcing plans for layoffs and the Canadian

Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors predicted in January that there would be twenty-

three thousand fewer jobs in their industry that year.39 Workers who had been laid off described

to me the experience of living a suspended life, not wanting to commit to anything at home so

that they would be free to go back to Alberta when prices rebounded. Many who were still

managing to hold onto their jobs explained the thick sense of anticipation among their co-

workers. “I mean, it’s something that my wife thinks about too” explained Darcy, a thirty-seven

year old scaffolder who I interviewed in March 2015, “but, I mean, not as much as I do,

probably, seeing it in the eyes, in the faces of the guys that I work with that know that they’re

probably the next one on the list out, right?” Darcy and his wife had been seriously thinking of

relocating their family to Alberta; earlier in the conversation I had asked him how he was

navigating the drop in prices in light of these possible plans. He explained, over the phone from

his camp room, “Well, I mean, I’ve been through it twice now…. I never really thought much of

it after the first until now that we’re into this again. And it sort of makes you wonder, you know,

am I, are we safer in PEI than being out here and taking the chance of being out of work and

having a big mortgage?” We talked a little more about managing this uncertainty and I asked

him:

Katie: Did it used to feel that way? Did it used to feel like, you know, there’d always be

work, it was solid?

Darcy: Yes, yes. I always felt that way, that it was solid.

39 Geoffrey Morgan, ‘Nearly 23,000 Jobs Linked to Oil Drilling Industry to Be Slashed This Year, Group Says’, Financial Post, 22 January 2015, Online edition, http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Nearly+jobs+linked+drilling+industry+slashed+this+year+group+says/10751701/story.html.

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Katie: So this is the first time you’re starting to question that?

Darcy: Well, the last time, like I said, I was fortunate enough to fall into another job.

And this time, I’m seeing the company that hired me on the last time when things were

bad—they already laid off two hundred guys, so.

Katie: Are you worried that prices aren’t gonna come back up?

Darcy: Oh, I know prices are going back up. I’m not worried about that. I mean—but,

it’s just how long. How long is it gonna—it could be another four or six months, you

know? And when the company starts—it costs more to produce the oil than the oil is

worth, there’s gonna be more cutting.

This was the common narrative: it’s not a matter of if, but when prices rebound. “How long has

oil stayed down over the years?” explained another worker, Doug, over the phone, “It doesn’t

stay down, and when it goes back up, it’ll go back up even higher…. I might be being naïve, but

I can’t see where the demand has really slipped that much.” Another worker, Alistair, who had

recently been laid off on account of the slump, reasoned: “Well, people that’s been in the

business for a while, they say things will change. It’s always like a wave: it goes up and down,

up and down.”

But this time the cycle seemed to drag on longer. When I travelled to Alberta in the spring of

2015, I encountered massive equipment auctions and work camps being disassembled. The

impact was palpable. Within this context I was shocked by how often I continued to hear this

mantra-like line about the inevitable rebound. In August the Canadian Association of Petroleum

Producers announced that the total number of layoffs in the Alberta oil industry had reached

thirty-five thousand.40 By the end of the year, social services and crisis lines were reporting

increased demand and the Alberta Chief Medical Officer was reporting a 30 percent increase in

the province’s suicide rate.41 As the low prices crept into 2016, the newly elected federal Liberal

government of Justin Trudeau scrambled to contain the mounting crisis. When the government 40 Tracy Johnson, ‘Alberta Has Lost 35,000 Oilpatch Jobs, Petroleum Producers Say’, CBC News, 31 August 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/alberta-has-lost-35-000-oilpatch-jobs-petroleum-producers-say-1.3208717. 41 CBC News, ‘Suicide Rate in Alberta up 30% in Wake of Mass Oilpatch Layoffs’, CBC News, 7 December 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/suicide-rate-alberta-increase-layoffs-1.3353662.

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tabled its first budget in the spring it focused attention on Canadian resource regions: offering

“stabilization” payments to Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador and extending EI benefits

by five weeks to twelve EI regions that had seen “a sharp and sustained increase in the local

unemployment rate without showing significant signs of recovery.”42

Over the course of this build-up, reports started to circulate about the far-reaching effects of the

crisis. Reporting, mostly from Newfoundland and Cape Breton, asserted that that the slump was

“leav[ing] the east barrelling out of control.”43 These reports often recounted individual stories

of hardship and offered impressions of the carefree days of past associated with Alberta wages.

One such report explained, “Many young workers head to Fort McMurray…lured by big

paychecks awaiting at oilsands projects clustered around the city.” These workers, “often buy

the big-ticket items like snowmobiles, boats and new houses.”44 In one particularly somber

account from St. John’s, the reporter describes an auction lot as “The contents of a family’s

life—an oven, a side table, old magazines—are unloaded from a truck into a yard overflowing

with pickups, snowmobiles, motorcycles, boats and trailers.”45 A report from central

Newfoundland describes the downfall of a laid-off truck driver: “‘There’s nothing more to sell.

Declaring bankruptcy just about broke me.’ He now drives a $350 Ford Focus and spends his

days searching for a job—any job.”46 A full-length piece in Maclean’s magazine titled “The

death of the Alberta dream” opens with the story of a twenty-five year old engineering

technologist from Pictou, Nova Scotia, preparing, out of financial desperation, to list his dirt 42 Canada. Employment and Social Development Canada, ‘The Government of Canada to Strengthen Employment Insurance’, Press release, Canada News Centre, 30 March 2016, http://news.gc.ca/. The regions named in the budget were: Whitehorse, Nunavut, northern British Columbia, northern Manitoba, northern Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, northern Alberta, southern Alberta, northern Saskatchewan, Calgary, Saskatoon, and Sudbury. Canada. Department of Finance, Growing the Middle Class, Budget (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2016), www.fin.gc.ca. Edmonton, Southern Interior British Columbia, and Southern Saskatchewan were later added to the list. See: The Canadian Press, ‘Trudeau Announces EI Benefits Extended to Three Western Regions’, Global News, 13 May 2016, http://globalnews.ca/news/2700899/trudeau-announces-ei-benefits-extended-to-three-western-regions/. In addition to a stabilization payment, the fiscal measures extended to Newfoundland and Labrador included a deferral of provincial loan payments. Canada. Department of Finance, ‘Government of Canada Helps Newfoundland and Labrador Through Hard Times’, Press release, 25 May 2016, https://www.fin.gc.ca/n16/16-069-eng.asp; Canada. Department of Finance, ‘Minister Morneau Announces $250 Million Stabilization Payment to Alberta’, Press release, 23 February 2016, https://www.fin.gc.ca/n16/16-027-eng.asp. 43 Sunny Freeman, ‘Oil Crisis Leaves the East Barrelling out of Control’, The Toronto Star, 13 February 2016, online edition, https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/02/13/oil-crisis-leaves-the-east-barreling-out-of-control.html. 44 Greg McNeil, ‘Canadian Oil Sands Woes Reach Far-Flung Eastern Shores’, Reuters, 19 March 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/canada-oilsands-workers-idUSL1N0V521Y20150319. 45 Freeman, ‘East Barrelling out of Control’. 46 Terry Roberts, ‘Going Bankrupt a Bitter Pill for N.L. Worker in Wake of Oil Price Collapse’, CBC News, 14 February 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/casualties-collapse-bankruptcy-1.3441695.

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bike on Kijiji for $4,400.47 Casual references to vehicles, “pricey new pickup trucks,” “toys,”

and “big-ticket items” being put up for sale were commonplace.48

It was good to see the fallout of this flexible work regime represented in the media. Oil in

general, and Alberta in particular, are often understood as a saving grace in Atlantic Canada;

surely all the more so in areas that have recently experienced large-scale deindustrialization and

mass unemployment, including Cape Breton and Newfoundland. The degree to which these

workers’ lives and this region were entangled in the chaos and crisis of the global oil market

was an important thing to highlight. But by selectively focusing on the highest earners and

emphasizing these workers’ material bounties—trucks, quads, boats, snowmobiles, and

houses—these stories fed into the stereotypical and misleading representation of the young

mobile oil worker who makes more money than he knows what to do with and spends it

recklessly on consumption rather than provision. There are rarely children in these stories, let

alone dreams of sending them to university or college; there is rarely paid down debt, including

workers’ own student debt; or a serious account of the barriers of inter-generational poverty.

This villainous representation perhaps reaches its apex with the categorization of housing as a

“big-ticket item” rather than a basic need, a provision, or, at the least, that symbol of upward

mobility that working class families have often chased. But beyond a mere misrepresentation of

who these workers are, how much they earn, and what they plan to do with their money, this

story of the reckless and irresponsible spender reproduces the tired old idea that poor people

can’t be trusted. Even when they have money—whether welfare or wages—they waste it.

Rather than a problem of this volatile employment structure and perilous economic development

strategy, laid off workers’ inevitable fall into dependency signals something is wrong with them.

Certainly, some mobile workers have this experience of financial freedom. Pierce, who we met

in Chapter 4, had fit this stereotype for a time, driving a hauler in the mines in his mid-twenties.

“It was awesome. I was the man [laughs]. I was fuckin’ rich!” He remembered, fondly, “all my

47 Jason Markusoff, ‘The Death of the Alberta Dream’, Maclean’s, 6 January 2016, http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-death-of-the-alberta-dream/. 48 Susan Ormiston, ‘Newfoundland’s Oil Ripple Effect: As Prices Fall, Commuting Workers Stay Home’, CBC News, 6 October 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/newfoundland-s-oil-ripple-effect-as-prices-fall-commuting-workers-stay-home-1.3256430; Terry Roberts, ‘Bursting of Alberta’s Oil Bubble on Display at St. John’s Airport’, CBC News, 16 February 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/airport-st-johns-alberta-downturn-1.3443452; Roberts, ‘Going Bankrupt a Bitter Pill’.

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buddies were making over a hundred-grand a year.” Alistair, who had recently been laid off

from a similar job, explained, reflecting on his lay-off:

I had money in the bank, which is amazing. And, after that five years went by, I was

thinking, jeez, I can’t walk away from this. It’s like a bad drug, actually…. Yeah, it’s like

an addiction. I’m thinking, OK, right now I’m laid off ‘cause things slowed down a lot,

and I’m drawing EI…. I miss the money. And I miss the freedom. We used to go out to

eat all the time. Go out, spend, spend, and still have lots of money…. Plus I was still able

to save money, and make all my bills, and we can go on trips and stuff, and—but now

it’s just like ughh, I feel I’m tied down and I can’t afford the luxuries that I want to. But

it’s good too. It’s a reality check, because you’ve got to realize there are rainy days. You

can’t live in the moment forever.

But even among the higher earners I interviewed, this normalization of joblessness figured

centrally in their relation to their earnings and to their identities as workers. Workers who

understood themselves as responsible did not feel free to spend their money at will and took

pride in their ability to get through periodic downturns on their savings. Those who failed to

save for the inevitable “rainy day” sometimes expressed regret, responsibility, or a feeling that

they had learned a deserved lesson. This division was often recounted by workers and others as

a matter of age, and some of the workers I interviewed who identified as older—a somewhat

murky category that sometimes had more to do with being a father than with actual age—took

care to distinguish themselves from the younger workers they associated with reckless spending.

For example, Doug, a fifty-seven year old man who worked in camp maintenance recounted,

speaking of the “young guys”: “the first thing they do is go out and buy a sixty thousand dollar

truck; they all do it, all the young fellas in my crew do it.” Later he explained the uneven impact

of the current layoffs: “…unfortunately a lot of those guys are going home with no money

because some of them were young guys and they didn’t get it. Some of the older guys, it won’t

affect them because they were paying off debt and putting their money away, but these young

guys were buying the new trucks and partying and all that.” Workers’ own tendency to recount

this story surely stems partly from compassion and concern for their young co-workers. But,

many workers are also keen to distance themselves from the interrogation and scorn that has

focused on their spending habits.

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But, most workers I interviewed worked in construction, trucking, or seismic and likely did not

make this kind of money. These workers were more likely to explicitly set themselves apart

from the stereotype of huge earnings, alluding more often to their efforts to provide basic things

for their families or attain basic income security. Darcy, the thirty-seven year old scaffolder

explained: “retirement is gonna be big for me; I want to enjoy myself when I retire, right? I

don’t want to be worried about where the money’s gonna come to, you know, from week-to-

week.” Marking a distinction between what he saw as excessive and moderate earnings, he

clarified, “I mean, I’m nowhere near rich now, or nothing, but I mean, someday I hope to be

well off, right?”

Others described much more precarious experiences of travelling to Alberta in search of work,

only to find intermittent and unpredictable employment opportunities. Rolland, the older

francophone (Acadian) worker from Chapter 5 who sold his fishing gear to go out west after

seeing his neighbours “making a good dollar” described his first time out: after four months of

false leads (which he attributed in part to ageism) and off-and-on work, trying to support himself

there and his household at home, he ran out of money and patience and took the bus across the

country home. One young worker I interviewed, who had never left the PEI, travelled to Calgary

and was ‘fired’ and sent home before ever being formally hired. Reporters rarely write about

these stories.49

What I am at pains to illustrate, and what these media accounts do not overtly convey, is the

common sentiment that these workers had it coming. The casual public scrutiny of workers’

decisions to buy “big-ticket items” was so pervasive and common sense that it took me some

time to actually see it. I mention this because it speaks to the power of this story. But one day, I

49 The media’s propensity to casually throw around lazy stereotypes and mistruths is perhaps partly spurred by an absence of readily available (or at least widely cited) data about this type of inter-provincial employment. As I explain in Chapter 5, when I first began my research I naively called around to the relevant departments in each Maritime provincial government, asking them to share the data with me I had assumed they were collecting. For the most part, I was simply redirected to Statistics Canada numbers on interprovincial migration, which is a different process from the one I was asking about: one that is regularly documented and widely reported on. The main source of data on inter-provincial employment—which one bureaucrat did refer me to—is: Christine Laporte, Yuqian Lu, and Grant Schellenberg, Inter-Provincial Employees in Alberta, Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2013). See also René Morissette and Hanqing Qiu, Interprovincial Employment in Canada, 2002 to 2011, Economic Insights (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2015). Among my interviewees—workers, government officials, bureaucrats, reporters, service providers—some did (and some did not) have a strong sense of the scale and impact of this labour mobility from the vantage point of everyday life in their own communities. Few had a clear picture of what was happening at a population level and many decision-makers did not express that this gap in knowledge was a pressing problem.

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did, on the phone with a friend and local labour leader in PEI. As we mused about the crisis and

the predicament of so many families who had reorganized their lives around this industry, she

repeated the familiar phrases about toys and spending. When I asked her if she felt it was really

fair to blame unemployed workers for their fate, she drew on these stories to explain her

feelings. I had so much political trust in this person; the fact that I was having this conversation

even with her stuck with me as indicative of how deep this common sense ran. Throughout the

crisis, as I moved between the Maritimes, Alberta, and Toronto, it sometimes felt like

scrutinizing the spending habits of these workers had become a national pastime. All so the

imagined national “we” could point to the toys and say: “See! They didn’t deserve their job

when they had it. And they certainly don’t deserve our support now that they’ve lost it!”

This is the same old anxiety, suspicion, and moralizing scorn that is always launched at the

undeserving poor: about spending habits, consumption, addiction, greed, laziness, and cheating.

This anxiety is most familiar within the context of restrictions and regulations surrounding

government assistance, including the tightening rules of the Canadian EI system reviewed above

(see also Chapter 1). The regulations themselves are emblematic of anxieties and assumptions

about how poor people relate to work and money. Subjecting people to elaborate scrutiny before

they can access benefits suggests they are trying to cheat and forcing people to work for welfare

or to document their job search efforts suggests that they would not work without being forced

to. Scholars have written about the disciplinary impact of this rhetoric; when poverty is reduced

to what Michael Katz calls a “problem of persons” it isolates, divides, and teaches a collective

lesson about individual effort and personal responsibility.50 This theme ran across many of my

interviews, including, as we have seen, with workers themselves. Ruby described helping young

workers stay out of financial trouble as part of her job: “Oh, I growl at them a lot! The younger

generation. I’m not nice! I’m their mother! They get slaps, they get sent to the credit union—go

and learn how to do your accounts or whatever.” As workers rehearsed back to me throughout

many interviews, job loss and uncertainty is a normal, predictable, accepted part of the work. It

was on them to learn to manage it and failure to do so was their responsibility. The casualness

with which this was often asserted was especially jarring within a context already marked by

intense flexibility: normalized seasonal employment, long-distance commuting, and long

periods away from home.

50 Katz, The Undeserving Poor, 3.

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But while the central ‘problem’ with the undeserving poor is usually unemployment, the

peculiar thing about the figure of the oil worker is that he is undeserving even when he has a

job. We might explain this through the caricature itself: in failing to responsibly save for

cyclical periods of unemployment, when he inevitably loses his job he reverts to the scorned

cycle of government dependence. But this condition of the oil worker as always undeserving—

of not only government support, but also work and wages—also has something specifically to

do with the nature of the oil industry. The Maritime mobile oil worker is at once always a

worker and always unemployed, two subjectivities that are entangled and co-constituted. They

must be at once flexible, mobile, disciplined, and willing to upend theirs lives for work; while at

the same time able to cope with regular periods of downtime and lost wages. They are at once

indispensable and dispensable—or, indispensable in their dispensability. As a manifestation of

the undeserving poor, the solution to the problem of the mobile oil worker is not simply

employment, but incessant flexibility. These stories about their irresponsible spending contain

this subject fluidity: the fact that he fails even when he works signals that he can never be

flexible enough. By displacing the chaos of the oil market onto the worker, this story normalizes

unemployment and individualizes poverty. This not only breeds resentment and division, but,

again, undermines workers’ own sense of entitlement: workers focus on their individual task of

managing their insecurity, rather than assert their collective right to more stability. In this way,

the answer to these pathologizing stories is not in proving oil workers are earning less and

spending more responsibly, but in refusing the downloading of this responsibility to begin with.

“They just work, and they seem to do it well”: Disciplined and reliable

As I spoke to more workers I got a concrete sense of how these pathologizing stories facilitate

this downloading of responsibility. In doing so, they have helped to create a different

characterization of Maritime workers: as the employment counsellor Ruby had described them,

“the best clients in the world” who “work outdoors, work long hours, [are] safety-oriented, after

eighteen hours they ask for another eighteen hours.” In being made to take responsibility for the

chaos of the market, the figure of the Maritime worker could shape-shift from a failed worker

marked by dependency and delinquency to good worker marked by discipline, reliability, and

flexibility. The interplay between these two characterizations has concrete benefits for the

industry. In my experience interviewing Alberta employers and others invested in the industry,

the sector’s exploitation of regional poverty and national uneven development is widely

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acknowledged—recounted as something more matter-of-fact than political, and only thinly

veiled through terminological tricks like “vulnerable talent” and “win-win situation.” In

sourcing labour from high unemployment regions and economies characterized by seasonality,

employers exploit the geographic difference in cost of living, workers’ access to EI in their

home communities, and the complex geographies of social reproduction that sustain these

workers and their ability to travel. But this direct material benefit to employers is complemented

by a less obvious benefit: the ways stigma, punitive poverty policies, and the discourse of

undeserving poverty serve as, in the words of Michael Katz, “powerful incentives to work,

whatever the wages and conditions.”51

While employers occasionally told me that east coast workers had a “sense of entitlement”—

knowing that, without them, Alberta oil would unravel—workers’ words expressed something

different. They sometimes suggested they didn’t deserve it; they recounted bosses holding their

precarity over their heads; they explained the importance of keeping quiet on the job; and they

reminded me of the unprecedented opportunities this work had offered their communities. This

precarious sense of deservedness was most palpable in the loud social silence surrounding the

pervasiveness of this work regime. As Eric, who works on a seismic crew, explained to me,

“Well, when I saw your ad on Kijiji I was very interested because there’s something kind of

hush-hush about it all. Like, you can do this if you want to do it but nobody’s going to talk

about it.” He was not the only worker to highlight the rare opportunity our interview had offered

to talk about this part of his life. When I asked him what he made of this silence, he speculated

on several causes: Fort McMurray’s reputation as a “hive of scum and villainy”; shame

associated with collecting unemployment insurance in the off-season, sometimes while working

under the table; not wanting to revisit the misery of the work; the cultural politics of masculinity

and class. But at the end of the interview, he came back to this question and offered these

reflections:

Eric: The only thing I might add about the silence is that a lot of people that go out there,

especially from here and this area, you can get good work out there that you can’t

necessarily get here. So a lot of the people, that I’ve met at least, would be—how do I

describe it—they’re not higher levels of society. They’re not the kind of people that

51 Katz, 2.

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would engage in discussion. Not society in general, but some of the people that are going

out. So, I couldn’t see most of the people that I work with ever even considering having

any kind of social interaction or discussion about this sort of thing.

Katie: Yeah, most people I’ve interviewed say, “Most people I know don’t want to talk

about this.” And also don’t want to talk. Are not, sort of, expressive—

Eric: Yeah, well that’s it. Exactly. There’s a lot—and this goes back to the oil and gas

industry really has a masculinity complex…. So, one of the virtues is the silence: you go,

you do your job and don’t complain.

…If you run into someone from Newfoundland or Cape Breton, I mean, some of those

people are very talkative and, you know, very expressive and whatnot. But they would

never—but they’re kind of at the bottom of society, you know? They’ve been on EI all

their life, they’ve worked crappy jobs. They found this; they’re not going to write to

newspapers or, you know, or do whatever—

Katie: Do you feel it’s kind of like people almost feel like they’re gaming the system of

life or something?

Eric: YEAH!

Katie: And if they make it known they’ll lose their chance?

Eric: That’s a—yeah. Actually, yeah.

Katie: Sometimes I wonder that, because it’s like, “I’m earning above my class.”

Eric: Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. I’ve had that anxiety myself. Coming back, especially

applying for jobs—it’s too good to be true! This is like free money…

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…And so you don’t, yeah, you don’t want to bring attention to that fact. Because

certainly, at the very least, people will be jealous and won’t like you, but at the worst it

will be taken away from you.

In this short exchange, Eric laid out the powerful structures through which people come to enter,

experience, and understand their working lives. As we talked, he stitched together a link

between, on the one hand, inequality, unemployment, and stigma attached to government

dependence; and, on the other hand, the ways workers think and talk (or, in this case, don’t talk)

about their lives. These narratives that workers develop about their lives and their futures, he

thought, were shaped by experiences of poverty and precarity, but also by workers’ sense that

they were cheating some sort of pre-established script for their lot in life. Even if they were

paying for it with health, relationships, and time. He spelled out how intertwining anxieties and

socialized behaviours related to gender, class, and geography are enacted, in this case, as silence

and work discipline, in an effort to hold onto something you have always been told you do not

deserve. By laying out some concrete implications of the pathological stories described above—

Maritime workers as lazy, undeserving, and irresponsible—Eric pointed directly to their

productivity. It is, of course, a boon to industry when workers “do their jobs and don’t

complain.” But, as he indicated, the power of these stories extended beyond the workplace, into

workers’ communities and home lives, where, by Eric’s account, they generated silence and

guardedness.

In this way, the pathologizing and othering practices that circulate about these workers actively

help to formulate them as “good workers” in Alberta. As these men travel from east to west they

move (somewhat precariously) between these two inseparable subjectivities. In my interviews

with employers, recruiters, or counsellors, I rarely heard mention of the familiar tropes. Rather,

often with reference to the same political economic details (seasonality, unemployment, primary

resource industries) east coast workers were more often celebrated in these interviews as an

excellent ‘fit’ for the industry. Among the companies I interviewed in the petroleum services

sector, many of which drew heavily and deliberately on “east coast” labour, these workers are

variably heralded as “good” on account of their discipline, stamina, seasonal availability, and

capacity for outdoor work. Importantly, this characterization had become a point of pride and

self-identification for many of the men I interviewed. They often explained to me how they

liked the physical challenge of the job, the extreme environments, and the frontierist feelings

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they got from traveling to remote locations. Some (often sheepishly) admitted how much they

liked the feeling of doing ‘men’s work,’ relishing the boost to their sense of masculinity and

associated social value. But this was not without self-consciousness about the contradictory and

complex social positions they occupied in this work. Workers variably flagged the skewed

gender dynamics and pervasive sexual violence in resource economies, the global geographies

and racial dynamics of the job site, or the feelings of transgressing their own environmental

ethics by working on these projects. These different ways of placing themselves at work existed

side-by-side.

This process of self-understanding in relation to work, ability, and social value is entangled in

and reproduced by the powerful characterizations that circulation about these workers and

industry’s declaration of their commitment, discipline, and ‘fit’ for the job. There are certainly

enduring political economic factors that formulate these workers’ ‘fit’ for certain parts of the oil

industry. Some of my interviewees drew thoughtful and insightful links between ecological,

economic, and policy changes across vast geographies: the general prevalence of seasonal

summer employment in Atlantic economies, but also the collapse of the ground fishery in the

1990s and the major overhaul of the EI system during the same period. As earlier chapters

illustrate, the regulation of east coast economies and livelihoods have been powerful factors in

formulating a mobile and flexible staples workforce. And throughout these explanations, work

ethic was also attributed to geographical, ‘cultural,’ or, racialized imaginaries of rural white

masculinity. But as Eric’s reflections make clear, this celebration needs to be understood in

relation to parallel longstanding stories of undeservedness. The power of his observations lie in

so clearly illustrating how material insecurity, but also pathologizing stories about

unemployment and entitlement, have formulated his co-workers’ senses of themselves as

workers and their concrete behaviours both on and off the job. These identifications are always

constructed relationally. Here, they take shape in contrast to the pathological paths—whether

dependency, unemployment or irresponsible spending—that these workers themselves have not

taken. Rather than contradictory, then, these stories are co-constituted: the good worker comes

into being only through the work of the pathologizing tales.

In the spring of 2015, shortly before I left PEI for Alberta, I sat down for a coffee with Alistair,

the heavy-equipment operator who had been laid off in the crash. We had kept in touch since

our interview and I wanted to get an update on his job search and catch up before I left. I picked

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his brain about the complex world of Alberta trade unions, asked him how I might get a real

human on the phone at the construction firms I wanted to interview, and got logistical advice for

my upcoming research trip. After some time, I asked him how the job search was going. Badly,

was the short answer; and it had dragged on long enough that he had started looking beyond

Alberta. One main advantage to working in Alberta, he explained, was the relative ease of the

commute. Other, smaller energy and extractive worksites were harder to get to, meaning

travelling to-and-from work would eat up even more of his valuable time off. He talked me

through his job search process, his daily routine, and the websites like “InfoMine” that he used

to look for work. He knew of possible upcoming work on the Keeyask hydroelectric project in

Manitoba and on the Muskrat Falls project in Labrador, he told me, listing off some other

resource projects whose development he was following. “I hate participating in the destruction

of the earth,” he reflected, thinking about these jobs. As he talked me through his job prospects,

hopping from industrial project to industrial project across the north, he casually detailed a

picture of the Canadian resource landscape. As I listened to him uneventfully funnel himself

into a future at once narrowly confined to the cab of a dump truck and spread thousands of miles

across the Boreal forest, I saw clearly how, in addition to material factors pushing workers west,

their own understanding that their futures lie on the resource frontier—and only on the resource

frontier—is an indispensable factor in the reproduction of this workforce.

The formulation of this ‘fit’ between these workers and flexible, physical, outdoor, seasonal,

remote, resource work is both imagined and material. We have seen the role of vilification in

invoking this relationship: by reminding workers that they haven’t made it, that they do not

deserve it, and that, at any moment, they might well lose it. But also, when employers,

counsellors, or workers themselves assert that east coast men are a natural fit for the rigs or that

this type of work is in their blood, they hitch the material realities of seasonal unemployment

and economic depression to workers’ real but constructed subjectivities as constrained by and

lived through (and surely also against) rural, white, working class masculinity. The rehearsal of

this place-based propensity toward discipline and flexibility in grueling environments is an

important part of the creation of this fit: workers are told again and again that this is where they

belong. In this way, east coast workers’ constrained subjectivities and understandings of their

options develop not only relationally with other workers, but also through the fraught interplay

of contradictory stories about who they are. Always on the precipice of failure, stigma and

pathologizing tales—in addition to punitive welfare policy and geographies of decline—inform

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how workers might come to narrowly cling to the resource frontier as a source of security, a sign

of success, or a measure of their value.

Conclusion: Stories, subjects, and attachment to extraction

Especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as US president, white poverty has become

the subject of heightened interest, intrigue, and anxiety in North America. Widely blamed for

Trump’s win, stereotypical accounts of reactionary and racist poor whites from select poor and

deindustrialized regions drew attention away from the broader social and spatial geographies of

Trump support and, more importantly, the material reasons why some poor whites saw little

worth defending in the Democratic Party under Hillary Clinton. As journalists and academics

have turned their attention to the so-called “white working class,” they have often downloaded

the problem of whiteness onto the poor. As Barbara Ellen Smith, Jamie Winders, and David

Roediger, among others, have remarked in popular reflections on this moment, in the wake of

Trump’s win, it was common for journalists to venture into what they proclaimed to be “Trump

country”—Smith and Winders highlight Appalachia—in search of what they imagined to be the

quintessential Trump voter: white, poor, rural, racist, and mysteriously voting against their own

interests.52 J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land

(both published in 2016) rounded out this growing genre of writing with (very different) book-

length examinations of the similar groups and similar questions.53 This dissertation is clearly not

about Trump or the US context, but this growing fascination with white poverty is instructive.

For one, this implied equation of the working class with white male victims of

deindustrialization rehearses the longstanding erasure of women, migrants, and people of colour

as the majority (and more precarious) working class. But my interest here is on the way

attention has settled on poor and working class whites as a mystery, a quintessential other,

something near-impossible to understand. Because this should be a red flag: groups of people,

historically, have been spun as “others” for the distinct purpose of forestalling mutual

understanding and political unity among peoples with shared interests.

52 Barbara Ellen Smith and Jamie Winders, ‘The Trump Effect? Whiteness, Masculinity, and Working-Class Lives’, AntipodeFoundation.Org (blog), 8 August 2017, https://antipodefoundation.org/2017/08/08/the-trump-effect/; David Roediger, ‘Who’s Afraid of the White Working Class?: On Joan C. Williams’s “White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America”’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 May 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whos-afraid-of-the-white-working-class-on-joan-c-williamss-white-working-class-overcoming-class-cluelessness-in-america/. 53 J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016); Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016).

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This is surely not the intention of many of these writers. Hochschild’s account (in her words, an

attempt to cross over the “empathy wall” that divides the US ‘left’ and ‘right’), for one, is a

tender, compassionate, and engaged ethnographic study focused on southwest Louisiana, which

boasts some of the poorest and most environmentally devastated parts of the United States. She

really seems to want to understand what for her is a cultural gulf between her world and the

world of her poor, white, rural, conservative research participants. But I think it’s misguided to

treat this as a question of culture. Hochschild, by her own admission, comes to this project from

the liberal academic bubble of her hometown Berkeley, California. It could be a matter of

writing to her (presumably urban, liberal) audience, but her lack of exposure to rural poverty

seems to show throughout the book as she struggles to understand her subjects’ support for the

oil industry, suspicion of government, and trepidation about immigration. Rather than take

seriously the historic failure of government to protect people from environmental catastrophe,

the desperate need for employment, and the lack of a unifying (most obviously, class) politics

apart from race, nation, and religion, Hochschild settles on an explanation rooted in something

far more abstract: what she calls the “deep story” of how her subjects understand their place in

US society. But the idea of the deep story and the whole premise of the empathy wall begin

from an assumption of pre-established difference: something not fully explainable through an

examination of history. Hochschild certainly grapples with the messy interplay of stories,

material life, and subjectivities throughout the book, but this dynamic falls away in the

conclusion about the deep story. Rather than look for the universals that might ground her

analysis more firmly in material factors—the desire to secure a paycheque and pass a good

future on to your kids—her conclusions, however sensitively, seem to be about a somewhat

static other side of American life.

I am not trying here to pick on Hochschild. There is much to admire about this book, not least of

which is her honest effort to do this difficult research in a way that honours her research

participants’ ideas and dignity. But I do think that, as critical scholars, we need to go deeper.

This reflection comes in part from what I learned reading Strangers in Their Own Land.

Hochschild doesn’t explicitly address this, but one of the things the book left me thinking about

was the power of stories about social affiliation, common cause, and subjectivity. The absence

of a class-based story—and the way this gets filled in with stories of national, racial, gender, and

religious affiliation—was palpable throughout the book. But rather than query and historicize

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that absence, Hochschild near naturalizes these other affiliations: affiliations and identities that,

in contrast to class, are ideological at their base.54 Those selective stories of social affiliation, of

course, have concrete effects in the world; so too, do the stories we tell as researchers. Poor rural

white people are not mysterious. We should stop telling stories that embark from that

assumption and, instead, do the hard work of rooting our stories in historical geographical detail.

The fascination with the “white working class” has often pivoted on the question of why

members of this imagined group support political ideologies and policies that run against their

own interests. These investigations take aim at a supposedly puzzling contradiction between this

group’s interests and its actions. Lauren Berlant has examined this dynamic from a different

vantage point, delineating the ways everyday attachments (to work, people, food, love, ideas of

the ‘good life’) both make life bearable and undermine the possibility of making it better.

Working with the concept of “cruel optimism” Berlant argues that, attachments become “cruel”

when the object of your desire “actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.”55 But

rather than settle on contradiction as an explanation for this, Berlant pursues an analysis that

takes these desires as seriously as it does their power to cause harm and reproduce the status

quo. In a world marked by incoherence—between the promise and the outcome, between who

you are and who you are said to be, between stories about ‘the economy,’ the ‘national interest,’

and your everyday life—incoherent desires, aspirations, and attachments perhaps make perfect

sense. Just like the contrasting stories that circulate about them, the workers I interviewed often

had their own dual narratives about their work. In one of these narratives they are proud and

energized to talk about their earnings, skills, generosity, productivity, and new experiences. The

other narrative houses a very different set of truths: isolation and loneliness, family breakup,

struggles with mental health, periodic unemployment, and pervasive uncertainty. Often I would

not hear the latter narrative if I did not explicitly ask. It would be easy here to emphasize

contradiction, but Berlant’s ideas suggest a different explanation. As Berlant notes, capitalism

not only organizes the everyday, but also disorganizes it. These types of attachments are driven

by a fear of loss: of status, meaning, resources, or hope. The ability to momentarily retreat into a

fantasy that hard work leads to upward mobility, that extraction offers a way out of

intergenerational poverty, or that remote resource work bolsters your social value offers a

reprieve from this chaos—a brief and perhaps fanciful reprieve, but a reprieve all the same. And

54 For a good explanation of this see Fields, ‘Ideology and Race in American History’. 55 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1.

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so when workers explain their work-lives in a bifurcated way that parses their feelings of power

from their feelings of dread or, in the case of Eric’s stories, by staying silent about both their

pride and their fears, maybe these are not contradictions; maybe, rather, they are subtle attempts

to carve out space for control.

For Maritime workers, the paired and inseparable stories of stigma and celebration formulate a

form of cruel attachment: manifest most immediately in the form of work discipline and

reliability, and more broadly and powerfully, through fostering a political imaginary that clings

to extraction—in all its volatility and destruction—as the only way out. Pinning this on

contradiction glosses over the powerful work of stories in formulating peoples’ dreams and

hopes in ways that align with a narrow set of interests, even when those very people might be

ambivalently or inconsistently committed to those dreams. Noting this won’t resolve to cruel

character of these attachments: the power of cruel optimism lies in the fact that hopeful fantasies

are as necessary as they are destructive. In the case of these workers, silence and carefully told

stories about their working lives might serve them in the very short term. But as it becomes

increasingly clear that the good life won’t be found on the oil frontier, attachment to this fantasy

is increasingly toxic—for workers, impacted communities, and the planet. If we pass this off as

contradiction we miss the details of how this attachment is made. Patiently trying to see how

incoherence makes sense, at the least, lends due complexity and specificity to the lives we are

examining. But it might also, to perhaps be cruelly optimistic, point to ways that a different set

of stories might help engender a different set of attachments and, ultimately, outcomes.

Critical studies of whiteness have often emphasized how race serves to disrupt class-based

ideals and structures of solidarity.56 This is certainly part of my concern. But the commonality

and solidarity at stake extends well beyond this. Think, for example, of the incredible display of

solidarity that coalesced at Standing Rock around opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline in

2016.57 There was surely some sense of common cause here rooted in class structure and

identity, but more palpable than this were shared concerns for Indigenous self-determination, 56 See, for example: Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. This work, importantly, builds on the insights of W.E.B. Du Bois; see, for example, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1998). For broader studies of race, racialization, and work, see: Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Esch and Roediger, ‘One Symptom of Originality’. Key global studies that examine these questions historically include: Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra; Rediker, The Slave Ship; Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents. 57 For background on and analysis of these events see Jaskiran Dhillon and Nick Estes, eds., Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).

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treaty obligations, human rights, the preservation of land and water, and fate of the planet in the

face of ever-expanding fossil fuel production. These are the bases of mutual understanding,

solidarity, and support that are also at stake in the stories and practices that pathologize white

rural workers, naturalize their place in extraction, and obscure the historical geographies that

have framed their turn to these industries. Stories that ‘other’ the so-called white working class

actively work to undermine these bases of social commonality. The point, I should explicitly

state, is not to single out the suffering of poor whites, nor is it to obscure the brutal ways that

Indigenous peoples, people of colour, and migrants, are and have long been violently ‘othered.’

Through looking at the specific case of the ‘white working class’ and resource economies my

aim, rather, has been to take a step back from direct dynamics of oppression and to think about

subjects and subjectivities as always relational. I have tried to highlight ways that these stories

and processes of subject formation are productive in their capacity to divide, discipline, and

smother political imaginaries that might break through race, nation, and narrow ideas about

work and the economy.

The realistic possibility that mobile oil workers would stand shoulder to shoulder with others in

opposing the source of their livelihood is, at best, an open question.58 Where I have encountered

them, I have clung to examples of this happening. But, in subtler ways, it was certainly not

uncommon for workers I interviewed to express ambivalence about their work, in relation to

their personal and families lives, but in more systemic ways too. Workers variably came out to

me as environmentalists, talked about how the destructive character of their work weighed on

them, or anxiously tried to distance themselves from (including by warning me about) the

bigotry and gender violence that some explained as pervasive in the industry. How much to

make of these comments, I don’t know. But I do know that without a sense that there are other

options, the chances that these feelings might translate into anything concrete get a lot slimmer.

Yes, workers are ambivalent about working in this industry, but the factors that send them there

are powerful, deep, and multi-faceted. These workers certainly cling to these jobs because of

dismal material conditions at home—rural decline, low wages, seasonal work, and an official 58 It warrants stating explicitly that, overall, Canadian building trades unions are among the strongest supporters of the extractive economy. This is captured, for example, in their unflinching support throughout recent pipeline debates. When the Canadian government announced its purchase of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, Canada’s Building Trades Unions asserted that this was “a nation building exercise of the highest order.” Canada’s Building Trades Unions, ‘Government of Canada Steps up for National Interest’. In contrast, see the example of Iron and Earth: an organization led by oil sands workers advocating for justice for energy workers and others impacted in the transition away from fossil fuels. The organization was established in the context of falling oil prices and job loss in 2015. See http://www.ironandearth.org/.

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economic vision that does little to change this in the lives of these workers. But their grip only

tightens when they are told on repeat that, for them, this is the only other option. Understanding

the complex of factors informing the group-differentiated turn to this difficult, distant, and

destructive work requires refusing the stories that it is somehow the obvious outcome for white,

rural working class men—a natural inclination, a product of greed, a way to feel manly, a salute

to the nation. That the resource frontier comes to feel like their very narrow destiny certainly

turns on structures and subjectivities of gender, class, geography, education, and race. But these

subjectivities have histories and geographies and are always in the making—including through

the stories and experiences that structure work, unemployment, everyday life, and desires for the

future. Understanding how these workers end up so far from home demands a careful look at the

historical geographies of decline and, inseparable from this, the stories that frame these men,

including in their own minds, as destined to this (and only this) future. Escaping the staple state

requires escaping these stories.

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Conclusion: The value of unviability

Crisis is not objectively bad or good; rather, it signals systemic change whose outcome is determined through struggle. Struggle, which is a politically neutral word, occurs at all levels of society as people try to figure out, through trial and error, what to make of idled capacities.

- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag1

In late July of 2018, Cavendish Farms, the frozen French fry operation owned by J.D. Irving,

announced plans to close its fresh potato packing facility in O’Leary, PEI. In recent years, Irving

has been pushing the provincial government to lift environment restrictions on high capacity

farm irrigation wells, claiming the lack of irrigation is reducing local yield and forcing them to

import potatoes from elsewhere for their PEI processing operations. In keeping with this

complaint, the company blamed the O’Leary closure on low yields. Making the link to irrigation

explicit, the press release about the closure asserted: “The Island cannot afford to have its largest

export product entirely dependent on rainfall.”2 O’Leary is small Anglophone community in an

economically depressed region of the Island. In 2016 the population was 815 people with a

median household income of $38,000 compared to $61,000 for the province.3 The loss of forty

local jobs in this small town will surely be widely felt.

But Premier Wade MacLauchlan’s response, as it was reported in the local news, was to claim

that he was “confident in that region and generally in the province” and to note that the forty

jobs lost represent only one percent of the 4,200 new full-time jobs that have been created in

PEI in the past two years. “That’s the nature of a dynamic province,” he said, reminding the

public that J.D. Irving companies had also announced plans to hire up to 400 people in PEI over

the next several years.4 According to Irving, they forecast 584 PEI hires between 2018 and

2020: 347 at Cavendish Farms and the remainder largely at Kent Building Supplies. These

1 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 2 As quoted in: PotatoPro, ‘Cavendish Farms Closes Fresh Pack Facility on PEI: Not Enough Potatoes on the Island’, PotatoPro.Com, 30 July 2018, https://www.potatopro.com/news/2018/cavendish-farms-closes-fresh-pack-facility-pei-not-enough-potatoes-island. 3 Statistics Canada. 2017. O'Leary, COM [Census subdivision], Prince Edward Island and Prince Edward Island [Province] (table). Census Profile. 2016 Census. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 98-316-X2016001. Ottawa. Released November 29, 2017. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E (accessed August 10, 2018). 4 Jim Day, ‘Province’s Dynamic Economy Will Offset O’Leary Plant Closure: Premier’, The Guardian, 2 August 2018, online edition, http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/news/local/provinces-dynamic-economy-will-offset-oleary-plant-closure-premier-230895/.

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numbers are part of a broader forecast for 10,400 total new hires during this time, 1,700 of

which are the result of new growth, over 2,500 of which will be students, and only 600 of which

will be skilled trades. In PEI, the positions will be largely in plant operations and retail,

respectively.5

O’Leary is exactly the kind of community that is fretting about declining population. It is

exactly the type of place that MacLauchlan speaks of when he asserts the region’s need for a

labour regime like the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in order to sustain the seasonal

economies that underpin these sorts of places—places, we are told, whose economies are failing

because ‘local’ people are not only aging but also leaving. In those moments, local fish

processing plants are the backbones of these communities: restrictive, low-wage, migrant work

regimes are held up as the only way to keep these places alive. From this vantage point of

community decline and rural outmigration, the closure of this packing plant should cause major

concern.

But in his comments about Cavendish Farms, the Premier made brutally clear that the concrete

wellbeing of these particular places and the people who live there, temporarily or permanently,

is not the crux of these concerns about the fate of local economies. Whether in the government’s

fretting about labour shortages or its seeming lack of concern about the packing plant closure,

the basis of concern is not daily life but, rather, the economy. The actual detailed experiences of

people’s material everyday lives, their fears and hopes for their communities, their plans for

their futures: all this can, it seems, be swiftly dismissed, replaced with an appeal to abstract

economic success.

The Premier’s reaction to the plant closure—a story of economic success amidst social

upheaval—hinges on a remarkable gap between the narration of the economy and people’s lived

experiences. The textures of everyday life here are but a by-product of economic priorities and

their abstract promise of growth. There is but one way forward; through a binary caricature of

how the world could be organized, this type of story tells us that the alternatives are unrealistic,

undesirable, unviable. Irving against economic stagnation; the ‘new economy’ against a past of 5 Terrence McEachern, ‘J.D. Irving Looks to Hire 594 on PEI’, The Guardian, 29 January 2018, online edition, http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/business/jd-irving-looks-to-hire-594-on-pei-181573/; J.D. Irving Ltd., ‘J.D. Irving, Limited Forecasts Over 10,400 Hires Over the Next Three Years (2018 and 2020)’, press release, 25 January 2018, https://www.jdirving.com/BlogPage.aspx?id=4810&blogid=74.

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unviable primary production; extreme forms of mobility against unemployment; growth against

decline.

An enduring relic of post-war high modernism, these types of hubristic and detached

declarations take their cues from spreadsheets and calculations. But while they appear to be

scientific assessments of something objective—productivity, labour shortages, excess

processing capacity, or lost revenue—they are, in effect, declarations of a different kind of

value. This is not the type of value Irving fails to realize when the potato yield is low. It is,

rather, the amorphous type of value that is taken from a person or a place when they are tossed

aside in the pursuit of higher yields, more productivity, greater flexibility, and the realization of

a very narrow spreadsheet type of value. The pursuit of capitalist value can never be

disentangled from forms of value woven into its edges, but capitalists and governments have

certainly tried to align them: by hitching workers’ sense of worth to the success of their

employers; by justifying personal loss in the name of provincial prosperity; or by celebrating the

uninterrupted expansion of the oil economy as a matter of national interest. The Premier’s

comments about Cavendish Farms are part of this longstanding and fraught struggle to map

value—both what value means and who and what are valued—onto the specific contours of a

capitalist economy.

Since World War Two, planning, unemployment, and labour market policy have worked very

hard to discipline unruly ideas and practices of value in the Maritimes. This is most visible in

the state’s post-war modernist efforts to remake economies and workers through intimate

scrutiny of people’s lives and heavy-handed socio-economic reorganization. These programs to

consolidate land, free “stranded” manpower, and coordinate the national labour market created

dramatic material changes in east coast communities. Since the 1950s, for example, constantly

shifting EI regulations have made seasonal employment periodically more or less possible. In

the 1960s, the planned consolidation of PEI farmland shifted not only the way that land was

used but also how Islanders’ working lives were structured. These changes impacted how and

whether people could make a living here. And, by undermining small-scale production,

disrupting structures of occupational pluralism, and regulating unemployment they also made

Maritimers ‘available’ in new ways for periodic work away.

But policies aimed at modernizing local economies and populations also broadcast a powerful

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and enduring story about what types of people, places, labour, economies, and values could be

part of the future. Planners and economists declared that other modes of life were unviable: too

seasonal, too slow, too small, too rural, too disorderly, too unproductive. Through this story,

they recast the value of these people, places, and modes of social reproduction in narrowly

capitalist economic terms. By juxtaposing a future of modernization and mobility against a past

framed by poverty, these promises of development and change seized on people’s hopes for a

better future for the purposes of making one that was narrowly capitalist: whether in the

Maritimes, on the resource frontier, or in the abstract space of the “national economy.” In this

way, at the base of post-war efforts to remake the Maritimes was a drive to align everyday

people’s aspirations, imaginations, and collective priorities with an agenda set by those who

increasingly held control over their lives.

Today, viability remains a powerful logic in the ongoing debates about the ‘underdevelopment

problem’ in the Maritimes. Sometimes the official local rhetoric of viability is rooted in

entrepreneurialism and the knowledge economy. Often the ‘viable’ options are contrasted

against leaving for Alberta: fracking or Alberta; Energy East or Alberta; high capacity wells or

Alberta. But across these differences in what east coast viability looks like, there is a consistent

pattern. The solution to the Maritimes is always to conform itself more closely to the ideals of a

capitalist economy: more innovation, more extraction, more flexibility, more growth.

For mobile workers, the viable option is leaving over, as they often explained it, seasonal low

wage work, EI, multiple jobs, or simply not having enough. As the possibilities for local

economic life have narrowed, new geographies of long-distance, flexible, and volatile work

have become remarkably normalized in both practice and thought. Bolstered by this

normalization, their neighbours, recruiters, and the story of their natural ‘fit,’ east coasters who

have been squeezed or opted out of the ‘viable’ futures at home have hit the road in search of a

place where they can see themselves: Alberta oil, Muskrat Falls, the Ring of Fire, pipeline

projects, and so on. The lived experiences of this precarity and mobility, of course, vary; but the

collective mantra is ‘this is just the way things are.’

Politicians and industry boosters have exploited this sentiment, pointing to job creation and

impacts on far away places to claim these extractive projects are in the national interest.

Meanwhile, in pursuit of “vulnerable talent,” Alberta employers target high unemployment

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areas for recruitment, governments work to build more flexible labour markets, and, through it

all, east coast workers are praised for their work ethic and ability to bear seasonal layoffs and

market turbulence. The geographies extend far beyond the Maritimes, but the story is the same:

a viable workforce, valued for its flexibility. And in the pursuit if this flexibility, again,

employers and governments work to map value, highlighting workers’ contributions to the local

economy and newfound sense of confidence or the new opportunities this work afforded their

kids. Or, as local governments tend to do, staying stunningly silent on the myriad ways these

employment structures also upend other forms of value, realized through being present in

relationships, having control over your time, and being home.

Figure 7. 1: J.D. Irving scripts the viable future on this and other billboards along New Brunswick highways.6

The narrow story of viability preys on workers’ sense that there is no alternative to leaving in an

attempt to consolidate support for development agendas that promise the possibility of work,

especially when that possible work is at (or, at least, closer to) home. Empowered by a narrow

set of stories about what the economy can be, industry boosters with an interest in this region

work to leverage the fatigue of family separation and long-distance employment. The same 6 Image from: CTV Atlantic, ‘NB Companies Hope Hiring Frenzy Will Put a Dent in Unemployment Rates’, CTV News Atlantic, 15 July 2013, https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/n-b-companies-hope-hiring-frenzy-will-put-a-dent-in-unemployment-rates-1.1368281.

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uneven development that has tethered Maritimers to distant geographies of extraction comes to

inform the politics of development at home.

This dynamic has, for example, been on clear display in recent debates about oil and gas

infrastructure and production in Atlantic Canada: from hydraulic fracturing, to offshore drilling,

to pipeline construction. In the 2014 New Brunswick election, Premier David Alward’s

Progressive Conservative Party ran ads claiming that a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing

would constitute a “moratorium on jobs and a moratorium on families being together,” implying

that the expansion of this extremely risky and employment-poor industry—which had already

been the subject of strong local resistance by the Elsipogtog First Nation and allies in the

summer of 2013—was the only possible alternative to travelling to Alberta for work.7 In one

video from his election campaign he is giving a speech to the New Brunswick Chamber of

Commerce; behind him a big screen projects the words, “putting our resources to work.” Alward

ties his agenda of hydraulic fracturing development directly to the possibility for people away to

come back home:

New Brunswick is at a crossroads. Do we listen to those who say “no” to the very same

opportunities that have created the strongest economies in North America? Or do we, as

a population, say yes. I’m saying yes: to the development of domestic natural gas; and

yes to the opportunities that will bring our people home and help us build a better

tomorrow in New Brunswick.8

Alward was not successful in his fracking push. But when New Brunswickers voted in the

Gallant Liberals with their promise of a fracking moratorium right on the heels of Nova Scotia’s

ban, the internet and national media unleashed a slew of vengeful tirades asserting that, if the

have-not Maritime provinces were unwilling to develop natural resources on their own

jurisdiction, they should lose their access to crucial federal equalization payments. As one

editorial from The Globe and Mail expressed the punitive sentiment: “No Fracking, No

Cheque.”9 When voters pushed back against the extractive imperative, that is, they were met

7 Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick, Away, Election campaign radio advertisement, 2014, In author’s possession. For a detailed account of this struggle at Elsipogtog, see: Howe, Debriefing Elsipogtog. 8 Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick, Putting Our Resources to Work, Election campaign advertisement for David Alward, 2014, In author’s possession. 9 Morgan, ‘Fracking Opponents Should Stop Biting the Hand That Feeds’.

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with reminders of the region’s dependence, assertions of its failure to contribute to national

productivity, and an appeal to undermine its social reproduction. If you are poor and

unproductive, this reaction made clear, you don’t get to choose what your future looks like.

These dynamics would carry on with the more recent debates about oil pipeline expansion.

When the federal government announced its plans to purchase the Trans Mountain Pipeline and

its planned expansion project from Kinder Morgan in the spring of 2018, Irving responded in

step, urging the feds to consider doing the same for the Energy East proposal, which had been

withdrawn by TransCanada in fall 2017.10 Workers are always pawns in these stories: their

limited options are leveraged to garner support for projects that will never live up to the

promises to bring them home.

Over the years, workers have certainly adapted to this story in their own strategies of social

reproduction. Recall employment counsellor Ruby’s explanation that, in the face of falling oil

prices, her clients were finding work in Prairie agriculture, on the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric

project, or on Irving’s Arctic patrol ship contract in Halifax. Or Alistair, who was hopping his

way across northern industrial projects on various job search sites, looking for his next gig after

being laid off out west. These dramatic decisions, so casually taken, cannot be fully understood

by looking simply at political economic change. Those changes are certainly powerful forces in

formulating people’s actions and desires; but they are always experienced within the constraints

of the everyday stories that narrate what is possible, where, when, and for whom. While the

uneven and racialized topographies of poverty lubricate extraction’s ability to take hold in

communities like these, whether through mobility, transportation infrastructure, or extraction

itself, it is the circumscribed story of the future—capitalism or misery—that works to normalize

its grip.

In research on the Canadian staple state, labour has often been naturalized. But, as this

dissertation illustrates, resource workers and extractive labour markets are only formulated

through intensive intervention and regulation. By examining staples economies through the

production of labour markets and the vast geographies at their base, this dissertation assembles

an analysis of Canadian extraction that centres uneven development, manufactured decline, and

10 See, for example: Risdon, ‘N.B. Tries to Revive Energy East Pipeline’; Veinotte, ‘New Push for Energy East Pipeline Is Needed’.

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circumscribed economic imaginaries in far-flung places. In so doing, my main contribution has

been to move toward a Canadian political economy that integrates the welfare state and the

social regulation of poor people and places with a political economic analysis of territory and

resources. In this sense, this dissertation denaturalizes extractive industries and labour markets,

emphasizing the Canadian state’s multi-faceted role in managing their reproduction through the

regulation of both land and labour. In documenting these connections both historically and

geographically, this dissertation has opened up a much broader shared lineage between resource

geographies, settler colonialism, and the regulation of work and poverty in Canada. I have

gestured to the lineage between the histories examined here and the deeper historical

geographies of staples-based poverty regulation. Research into these earlier historical

geographies would enrich our understanding of the pivotal but obscured role of poverty and

labour regulation in the historical geographies of settler colonialism and staples accumulation in

Canada.

But, these crucial connections between poverty regulation and geographies of staples

accumulation, I have found, rest not only on the cold contours of uneven development. The

state’s ability to put unevenness to work relies at least as deeply on its ability to narrate the

economic future in narrow terms, to discipline unruly forms of value, and to map everyday

people’s sense of possibility onto the contours of capitalist accumulation. By tracing the

historical geographical processes through which these incredible social, economic, and

environmental geographies come to be understood as normal, I offer a critical and historically

grounded account of this normalization.

But, what I want to state explicitly in these closing pages is this: the very fact that this

normalization is notable is, in and of itself, remarkable. Uneven development, urbanization, and

migration are facts of capitalist economies. In most places—and certainly of so-called declining

places—moving for work is not only unremarkable, but expected. In the Maritimes, the

normalization of long-distance temporary work is only possible because people have historically

refused to normalize an action that is often understood as the inevitable course of economic

history in places like this: leaving for good.

In the Maritimes, like in many other places, we see clearly that capitalism’s story of

inevitability—inevitable urbanization, concentration, growth, development—hasn’t unfolded

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neatly or completely. People sustain commitments to other logics and modes of life. Place,

relationships, history, and obligations to other forms of work take people’s stories and life

pathways in other directions: away from the predetermined script of development, growth,

mobility, and progress, and away from the unrelenting principle that people and places should

be put to ever more productive use. And, against the strong stigma that flows from these

expectations of improvement, people here continue to work seasonally, to defend the right to be

compensated when not in the formal workforce, and to forcefully expect to live in the place they

call home—no matter its “unviability.”

That is, within this story of dramatic labour mobility and normalized volatility is a different

story. This is a story in which constantly striving to “adjust” to a changing economy, as planners

in the 1960s would have said, is not normal; in which being more productive is not always

better; in which being made to move for work is dramatic, unordinary, and, for many,

unacceptable. Above all, it is a story in which we are allowed to, and should, expect something

different: the ability to work seasonally, to be with family and community, to make a living

locally, to subsist regardless of ‘productivity’ and ‘progress.’ And it is a story that flips crisis on

its head. Because, while the enduring economic marginality of this place has most often been

cast as the source of its constant crisis, and while industry has certainly put this marginality to

work, as both workers and employers I interviewed were acutely aware, it is also a source of

security. While this security may no longer flow from the widespread presence of the

subsistence farmstead, people stay or return here because, relative to centres of capital

accumulation, here they still have land to live on, normalized access to state resources when

they are unemployed, networks of support and kinship, attachments to other forms of work and

social reproduction, and a social context in which working sometimes, seasonally, or not at all is

not a measure of your worth.

The chapters of this dissertation have traced the actors, processes, and stories that have created,

managed, and sought to suture the disjuncture between capitalist value and these other, deviant

forms of valuation—that have tried to map not only mobility and labour power, but imaginaries,

desires, and workers’ self-understandings onto the narrow contours of capitalist development.

But the story I have told is not simply about a struggle over what work, economies, and

development will look like. It is also about an ongoing struggle over how to recognize crisis.

The Maritimes as constant crisis is a commonsense story in Canadian media, policy making, and

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the social imaginary. This story circulates as tales of dependency, waning regional productivity,

parasitic “have-not” provinces, and, most recently, mobile workers who take from but don’t

invest in the communities where they work. According to this familiar story, the disjuncture is

the crisis: not enough work, productivity, flexibility, development, growth. Not enough

valuation of capitalist value. But the banal facts of daily life—of staying put and returning

home, of asserting the right to be paid when not in the formal workforce, of continuing to invest

in seasonal, land-based economies—refuse the notion that life here is the crisis. For workers and

communities, conversely, the region’s perennial failure to be perfectly capitalist has repeatedly

been an antidote to capitalism’s certain crises. It is the very features that make this place

marginal that have cradled people during depressions, slumps, and market chaos. It is the

region’s very lack of progress that has historically made it a place where people, everyday life,

and land can, against the odds of the system, sometimes be idle.

My point is not to deny that there is crisis in the Maritimes but, rather, to question the character

of this crisis. For, the commonsense story of regional crisis—the Maritimes as underdeveloped

and underproductive—has obscured the ongoing social crisis it has helped to reproduce. This

story of constant crisis has helped to normalize decades of intervention, management,

exploitation, and extraction aimed at inducing mobility, opening new markets and extractive

frontiers, and exploiting land and labour. These interventions have spurred social crisis after

social crisis: pressure to leave, poverty and rising inequality, warming oceans, the prioritization

of accumulation and investment over the everyday lives of ordinary people. These are the

familiar facts of crisis as it is lived. My point is to elevate these crises while questioning the

crisis character of capitalist failure.

In framing common sense claims about the economy as stories, my intent throughout this

dissertation has been to liberate how we might think about policy makers’ swift declarations that

the only future is one that pursues incessantly more capitalist growth. In their combined factual

delivery and radical implications, these declarations are remarkable: David Alward’s comments

about fracking, Wade MacLauchlan’s comments about Cavendish Farms, or Jason Kenney’s

comments about national labour market paradoxes. My point is not to claim that these

statements are untrue, but to unsettle their authority, to make visible their narrators and these

narrators’ interests, and to denaturalize the processes that they render natural—whether

unemployment, mobility, ecological destruction, colonial violence, or incessant economic

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growth. The telling of these stories is so laden with calculation and expertise, that it is easily

rolls over stories of crisis that people know and live: that losing your job is catastrophic, that

mobility is not seamless, that extraction is a shortsighted and violent way to build an economy,

and that there must be another way to do things. By claiming a monopoly on crisis, the story of

the economy undermines and belittles these lived stories. It intrudes in moments of quiet

vulnerability when a person might feel like this can’t be the way things are supposed to work

and asserts that, this is what it looks like to progress.

The investment in telling these repetitive and narrow stories about what these people, places,

and economies are and can be indicates the political importance of this narrative terrain. In

calling these declarations stories I am calling into question their performed objectivity in an

effort to remap this narrative space with the myriad other stories that already exist about what

these people, places, and economies are and what they could be. I am trying to pry open

imaginative space in which other futures—futures that might already exist—are wholly viable.

I opened this dissertation with a story about a man I met on the plane who kept his wristwatch

set to Atlantic Time while away at work. I imagine, to him, his little trick with his watch served

a simple purpose: to reliably transport him back to this other world, where the people he loved

were going about their unremarkable daily routines; to simply bring him closer while he had to

be away. But that moment has stayed with me because this simple action somehow encapsulates

the complex intimacy between the two ends of his journey. On one end, the calculative value

that pays his bills; but on the other, an enduring attachment to a world at once ‘unviable’ and

valuable and the persistent possibility of a different future there. What constitutes the crisis here

is open to question.

In the quote that opens this conclusion, Ruth Wilson Gilmore states that “crisis is not

objectively bad or good” but, rather, signals systemic change. The outcome of that change, as

she explains it, comes through the struggle of people working to “figure out, through trial and

error, what to make of idled capacities.” While Gilmore’s emphasis is on the struggle over how

to use those idled capacities, the struggle here is more basically about how the commonsense

story of crisis gets told. The tension in the anecdote above and the struggle that runs through

these chapters, rather, is over whether idled capacity is a crisis to begin with. For, in this anxious

moment of climate chaos, brutal inequality, and unfulfilled promises of reconciliation, to

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withhold time, resources, and labour from capital’s grip is to contribute to the solution, not the

crisis. I have no prescription for a different economy. I offer, rather, the much more humble

observation that this quiet, everyday refusal to normalize a logic of progressive extraction,

concentration, and use is part of the answer in these dark times, not part of the problem. But,

desiring a different logic isn’t enough. As I hope this dissertation has made clear, while other

forms of valuation persist, people are often stuck in a system that makes realizing them

impossible. Building, defending, and reproducing a world in which these deviant imaginaries

can be actualized—in which futures don’t have to be out west, in which work doesn’t have to be

extractive—is a collective responsibility with a collective benefit.

For decades, futures systematically foreclosed in the Maritimes have been enrolled in the staple

state: above all by helping to shoulder its repeated and certain crises. The commonsense story

that the region is a problem is the foundation of this logic. Through this story, the Canadian

state, industry, and workers themselves have variably fostered flexibility and normalized

volatility to shore up this chaotic economic order. But enduring modes of economic life that

deviate from capitalism’s golden rule of incessant productivity—seasonal, family-based, rural,

government-supported or otherwise—flip the script on crisis. For, if being idle, rooted, or

productive of something other than profit is to be a crisis, it is capitalism’s crisis. Imagining,

practicing, and affirming modes of economic life that refuse to be the solution to this problem,

including ones that are already present, cultivates this region’s ability to refuse extraction.

Liberating this place from the confines of this narrow future makes way for more meaningful

solutions to the pressing material problems that poor, migrant, working class, and unemployed

people there are facing. But cultivating this ability to opt out of extraction also liberates us all a

little bit by, every so slightly, loosening capitalism’s grip on the social and ecological future.

339

Archives, Interviews, and Bibliography

Archives and collections Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Ottawa, ON

Department of Finance Fonds (RG19) Department of Citizenship and Immigration Fonds (RG26) Department of Labour Fonds (RG27) Unemployment Insurance Commission / Unemployment Insurance Advisory

Commission Fonds (RG50) Department of Employment and Immigration Fonds (RG118) Department of Regional Economic Expansion / Department of Regional Industrial

Expansion Fonds (RG124) Canadian Labour Congress Fonds (MG28-I103)

Prince Edward Island Public Archives and Records Office (PARO), Charlottetown, PEI

Premier’s Office Fonds (RG25) Department of Development Fonds (RG33) Cabinet Office Fonds (RG40) Walter R. Shaw Fonds (Accession 3688)

Prince Edward Island Collection, Robertson Library, University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PEI Interviews Politicians & government appointees

1. Anonymous, Member of Parliament, Personal Interview, July 25, 2013. 2. Wayne Easter, Member of Parliament for Malpeque, Personal Interview, August 7, 2013,

Hunter River, PEI. 3. Wade MacLauchlan, President Emeritus, University of Prince Edward Island, future

Premier of Prince Edward Island (February 2015), Personal Interview, June 11, 2014, Covehead, PEI.

4. David MacDonald, Mayor, Town of Souris, Personal Interview, October 21, 2014, Souris, PEI.

5. Mary-Lou Donnelley, Commissioner for Workers, Canada Employment Insurance Commission, Department of Employment and Social Development, Personal Interview, June 5, 2015, Gatineau, QC.

Planners, civil servants, economic development experts

6. Anonymous, Cape Breton Regional Municipality, Personal Interview, December 4, 2014, Sydney, NS.

7. Sidney Reid, Cape Breton Partnership, Personal Interview, December 4, 2014, Sydney, NS.

8. Anonymous, Government of Prince Edward Island, Phone Interview, January 27, 2015.

340

9. Anonymous, former Employment Insurance Consultant who worked for the Department of Human Resources and Social Development Canada (and its predecessors) in Employment Insurance for 31 years, Personal Interview, April 2, 2015, Charlottetown, PEI.

10. Lance Wilson, Senior Manager, Labour Force Development, Alberta Jobs, Skills, Training and Labour, Government of Alberta, Personal Interview, May 14, 2015, Edmonton, AB.

11. Sue Welke, Executive Director, Workforce Initiatives, Alberta Jobs, Skills, Training and Labour, Government of Alberta, Personal Interview, May 14, 2015, Edmonton, AB.

Labour and community organizers

12. Lori MacKay, President, Canadian Union of Public Employees Prince Edward Island, Personal Interview, Jul 29, 2013, Email and Personal Correspondence 2013-2015. Charlottetown, PEI.

13. Anonymous, elected official, labour organization in Maritime region, Personal Interview, December 5, 2014, NS.

14. Craig Walsh, Business Agent, United Food and Commercial Workers, Personal Interview, January 21, 2015.

Community members and key informants

15. Clayton MacKinnon, Bay St. Lawrence Volunteer Fire Department Fire Chief, Warf Manager for Victoria Co-operative Fisheries, Personal Interview, August 8, 2013 and December 2, 2014.

16. Anonymous, member of community impacted by Employment Insurance reforms, Personal Interview, November 26, 2014, PEI.

17. Anonymous, member of community impacted by Employment Insurance reforms, Personal Interview, November 26, 2014, PEI.

18. Anonymous, member of community impacted by Employment Insurance reforms, Personal Interview, November 28, 2014, PEI.

19. A casual ride-along tour of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, December 2014. 20. Anonymous, Fisher, Personal Interview, December 16, 2014. 21. Anonymous, Fisher (owner-operator), Personal Interview, January 20, 2015, PEI.

Employment counsellors and other front-line workers

22. Betty Gordon, Employment Services, Anonymous organization, Personal Interview, March 11, 2015, Charlottetown, PEI.

23. Sherri Barrett, Director of Employment Services, Anonymous organization, Personal Interview, March 11, 2015, Charlottetown, PEI.

24. Ruby Arsenault, Office Manager-Employment Coach, Tignish Employment Resource Centre, Personal Interview, April 9, 2015, Tignish, PEI.

25. Sharon Horne, Executive Director, Rural Community Learning Inc., Personal Interview, April 20, 2015, Alberton, PEI.

26. Valerie Gallant, Employment Coach and Facilitator, Alberton Employment Resource Centre, Personal Interview, April 20, 2015, Alberton, PEI.

27. Allan Fraser, Employment Counsellor, Career Development Services Inc. – PEI, Personal Interview, April 22, 2015, Charlottetown, PEI.

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Education and training 28. Anonymous, Programming director, post-secondary institution in Maritime region,

Personal Interview, April 17, 2015. 29. Anonymous, Program Manager, post-secondary institution in Maritime region, Personal

Interview, April 17, 2015. Transportation sector

30. Doug Newson, Chief Executive Officer, Charlottetown Airport Authority, Personal Interview, October 9, 2014, Charlottetown, PEI.

31. Monette Pasher, Executive Director, Atlantic Canada Airports Association, Phone Interview, October 16, 2014.

32. Anonymous Chief Executive Officer of local airport, Email Correspondence, April 2015. Building trades

33. Anonymous, Canada’s Building Trades Unions, Email Correspondence, October-November, 2014.

34. Anonymous local managers, Atlantic Canada Regional Council of Carpenters, Millwrights, and Allied Workers, Email Correspondence, October 2014.

Petroleum and petroleum services

35. Anonymous, petroleum services-based company, Personal Interview, May 5, 2015, Calgary, AB.

36. Anonymous, petroleum services-based company, Personal Interview, May 5, 2015, Calgary, AB.

37. Anonymous, human resources specialist, oilsands operator, Personal Interview, May 5, 2015, Calgary, AB.

38. Anonymous, senior official, petroleum industry organization, Personal Interview, May 6, 2015, Calgary, AB.

39. Anonymous, petroleum services-based company, Personal Interview, May 6, 2015, Calgary, AB.

40. Anonymous, petroleum services-based company, Personal Interview, May 6, 2015, Calgary, AB.

41. Anonymous, petroleum services-based company, Personal Interview, May 6, 2015, Calgary, AB.

42. Anonymous, Operations Manager, petroleum services-based company, Personal Interview, Red Deer, AB.

43. Anonymous, President, oilfield services-based company, Personal Interview, May 14, 2015, AB.

44. Shannon Mansfield, Human Resources Generalist, Geokinetics Inc., Personal Interview, May 28 2015, Calgary, AB.

45. Carol Howes, Director, Petroleum Labour Market Information (PetroLMI) Division of ENFORM), Personal Interview, May 29, 2015, Calgary, AB.

46. Anonymous, human resources specialist, oilsands operator, Personal Interview, May 28, 2015, Calgary, AB.

Experts

47. Anonymous, economist, Phone Interview, July 26, 2013. 48. Anonymous, fisheries law expert, Phone Interview, July 29, 2013. 49. Anonymous, community historian, Personal Interview, August 18, 2014.

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50. Ed Frenette, Commercial Fisheries Liaison Coordinator, Mi’kmaq Confederacy of Prince Edward Island, Personal Interview, December 16, 2014, Charlottetown, PEI.

51. Anonymous, labour market consultant, Personal Interview, April 16, 2015, Charlottetown, PEI.

Mobile workers Thirteen interviews with workers from Prince Edward Island who self-identified as “working out west” or having worked out west. These interviews were conducted in person and on the phone. In cases where workers wished to be left anonymous, the location of the interview is omitted below in order to preserve anonymity, as some interviews were conducted in very small communities.

52. Anonymous, Personal Interview, February 12, 2015 53. Anonymous, Phone Interview, February 19, 2015 54. Anonymous, Personal Interview, February 20, 2015 55. Allison Macdonald, Personal Interview, February 25, 2015, Charlottetown, PEI 56. Anonymous, Phone Interview, March 1, 2015 57. Anonymous, Personal Interview, March 12, 2015 58. Anonymous, Phone Interview, March 15, 2015 59. Anonymous, Personal Interview, March 31, 2015 60. Anonymous, Personal Interview, April 1, 2015 61. Anonymous, Personal Interview, April 9, 2015 62. Anonymous, Personal Interview, April 9, 2015 63. Terry Larkin, Personal Interview, April 18, 2015, Charlottetown, PEI 64. Anonymous, Personal Interview, April 28, 2015

Other This research also involved many email, phone, and in-person exchanges that did not constitute interviews including with: local academics, journalists and documentarians, community and labour organizers, government bureaucrats, representatives of community organizations and NGOs. I also attended meetings and community events. Participant observation and action research This research is also informed by regular involvement with two community initiatives related to local labour justice: one project to defend local access to employment insurance and one project working to support international migrant workers living in local communities. Broadly, this involved meeting, research, strategizing, and organizing concrete actions. In addition to participating in the general everyday labour of these projects, throughout this work, I also attended community events, facilitated discussions, wrote media articles and public education materials, met with workers, and helped to organize, promote, and run political actions and community forums.

343

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