Not for Export: The International Competitiveness of Canadian Manufacturing. 3rd ed.

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada, Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s, and
Global Spin: Probing the Globalization Debate.

This is a timely update of Glen Williams’s admirably realistic
overview of the hothouse growth and development of an industrial
manufacturing sector in Canada. The middle of the volume retains the
acute historical analysis from the earlier editions of the 1980s. Fresh
material on more recent developments has been added at the beginning and
at the end.

From John A. Macdonald to the present, Williams argues, the key to
Canadian industrial-development policy has been a strategy of “import
substitution” that “transferred northward a share of U.S. production
which, although truncated, was roughly proportional to Canada’s
population.” The policy has evolved historically—from Canadian
“national” tariffs to British “imperial preference” to
“continental rationalization” in North America. Yet to no small
extent has this evolution merely adapted the original
import-substitution strategy to the changing realities of the global
economy. The strategy has created manufacturing employment within Canada
that might not otherwise have existed. But it has also bred an anaemic,
technologically dependent industrial base, obsessed with the local scene
and unable to compete effectively in the world at large.

Apart from what Williams characterizes as some “exceptional firms
(for whom another study needs to be written),” there is much
unvarnished truth in this argument. On some accounts one virtue of the
new free-trade agreements of the late 1980s and 1990s was that they
would push the manufacturing sector in Canada in bolder directions. But
there is more than a little truth in Williams’s scepticism on this
point as well: “many of the ‘fundamental adjustments’ needed to
address the ‘chronic’ problems of Canadian manufacturing ... have
still to be made.”

At the same time, some will still wish that Williams had written the
study of exceptional firms he points to before formulating his current
unlikely conclusion. He is now urging that the progressive way ahead is,
in effect, to abandon the quest for a stronger indigenous Canadian
industrial culture, and work instead for the transformation of NAFTA
into a “Community of the Americas,” modeled on the social dimension
of the European Union. In fact this is probably an even more utopian
project than anything ever dreamed of by the economic nationalists of an
earlier era. Those who continue to believe in the importance (and
realism) of a Canadian national economic future can nonetheless still
learn a lot from this tight and provocative book.