REVIEW

Is Canada a force for good in the world, as many imagine?

A recommendation to read: Tyler A. Shipley (2020, Fernwood Publishing) Canada in the World: Settler capitalism and the colonial imagination 

By Charles Posa McFadden 2021-02-03

A dozen years of research and writing by its author has produced a potentially game-changing historical account of the nature and role of Canada in the world. Evidence that the ruling ideas of any society are ever the ideas of its ruling class is abundant in the case of Canada, as methodically revealed by Tyler Shipley. Even those of us who thought we knew the depths of depravity of our ruling class and the extent of its influence on our own imagination and behavior may find, as I have, that they have much to learn from this work. Perhaps the reader may also conclude that a future for humanity rests on our commitment to knowledge of the past and present of the capitalist countries we live in as a foundation for our actions to bring into being a more just, peaceful, democratic, and ecologically sustainable world. For Canadians, the study of this work by Tyler Shipley can be a game-changing event.

The illusion that Canada is basically a force for good in the world is meticulously dispelled by Shipley. Canada is defined by its history as a capitalist settler-colonial and imperialist state, one whose first foreign policy was the genocidal dispossession of the First Nations inhabiting this land, a practice its capitalist ruling class has continued at home and abroad to this very date. Our allotted role in this as workers and farmers has been to enrich our ruling class with our own labor and serve it in the dispossession of the world’s First Nations, at home and abroad. While there has been a continuing unwillingness of a minority of us to serve in these ways, an irreversible refusal of the majority to do so is long overdue. As Shipley underscores, the alternative is the continuing destruction of life on Earth, right up to the point where human life is no longer possible. The time to act is now.

In this work, Shipley leaves off where our future must begin. Beyond identifying the alternative to barbarism as “socialism” or “communism”, as others have done, Shipley offers no definition of this alternative, nor how to get there, at least not in this work. He defines Canada as a settler capitalist colonial and now imperialist state, concluding his historical analysis with the observation from personal experience that movements of resistance are not enough if there is to be a continuing future for humanity.

If there is a significant omission in this work, it is this failure to identify an alternative to Canada as a settler capitalist colonial state. Karen Howell McFadden’s and my collaborative work picks up where Shipley leaves off by drawing from nearly two centuries of prior efforts around the globe to define, struggle for, and create an alternative. We report the results of our reading in eleven brief arguments, grouped under the title, Achieving an Ecologically Sustainable Future, posted on https://greensocialdemocracy.org.

Given the contemporary level of science and technology, we have concluded that there is no ecologically viable alternative based on nation-states. Including Canada, nation-states are distinctly capitalist political entities, necessitated by capitalism and created by the capitalist class to meet its own needs. The only ecologically sustainable political alternative to the now global system based on capitalist nation-states is a global civilization based on equal stewardship responsibilities and usufruct rights, featuring democratic self-management from local to global levels.