The Making of Post-War Canada

Terry A. Crowley is an associate professor of history at the University
of Guelph, and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of
Equality.

This sociological analysis of postwar Canada provides a largely
statistical examination of major trends in labor reproduction and the
family, changing demography, an evolving welfare state, immigration, and
the recruitment of labor and capital. Adopting a semi-Marxist economic
framework, the author argues that the country is moving toward greater
corporate concentration.

Li’s attempts to identify the distinguishing features of advanced
corporate capitalism and their effects on society lead to some
questionable conclusions. For example, women’s labor-force
participation is seen as a boon to business in that lower earnings
subsidize the process of capital accumulation. Decreases in fertility
are similarly interpreted as resulting from the contradictions of the
wage economy rather than as flowing from a more complex nexus.

Since all these social and economic trends were observable earlier in
the century, what changed after 1945? A chapter on organized interests
and collective claims provides a brief summary of initiatives in the
domains of women’s rights, multiculturalism, Native peoples, French
Canadians, and visible minorities. An element of human agency is thereby
introduced, but it is one that sits uneasily with the deterministic
elements in Li’s portrayal of the making of postwar Canada.