Parcel of Rogues: How Free Trade Is Failing Canada

Stewart K. Sutley is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science (a Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow) at
the University of Alberta.

Polemically partisan volumes on Canadian politics are a standard feature
of our literary heritage, and Barlow’s study is one of them. The
affinities between her volume and earlier works in this genre are a
weakness. However, its insights, of almost seerlike quality, are its
strength, and separate it from earlier examples of this style.

Barlow, in her capacity as National Chairperson of the Council of
Canadians, undertakes to expose the human and economic costs of the Free
Trade Agreement. Her study’s essence is to sketch a vision of life
under the fta that rivals official rhetoric, especially concerning
military industry, natural resources, and the environment, and to reveal
the full extent of the greed that animates corporations (both American
and Canadian) to destroy the Canadian sociopolitical fabric.

As a chronicle of woe, this study suffers from a persistent weakness.
The main adversary—the United States—is cast in dark, threatening
shadows; it is the “unknown other.” Barlow would have us peer
through her insights and see the omnipresent American menace, and its
allied, rapacious business friends. The image is carried by forceful and
angry words—words that lead us not to a conclusion, but to the
threshold of a resolution: to make a decision about our future as a
country, and about our identity as Canadians. This feature of the book,
timeworn and uninspiring through literary and political overuse,
reiterates the weakness of a polemic style. If we start out thinking of
America as the “unknown other,” when we reflect on ourselves as a
collective, Canada inescapably becomes the “unknown self.” In using
the contrast, Barlow has failed to create the basis for a Canadian
identity, which remains ambiguous.

Barlow makes up for her style’s weakness by infusing her book with a
remarkable prescience. She has tracked the fta’s trajectory through
its first two years, and uses this record with astonishing precision to
indicate its future manifestations. Those, of course, are occurring only
now. The startling correspondence between her predictions and current
realities creates in the reader a pervasive sense of powerlessness. This
book has been increasingly substantiated by time.

To her credit, Barlow has succeeded in outlasting the particular
occurrence that was the inspiration, positively or negatively, of her
message. This volume is destined to remain important for Canadians.