From the Great Depression to the high-tech age. Learn the language of money, markets and work that explains how Canada built, lost and reinvented its economy.
These terms were extracted from Canadian History: Post-Confederation by John Douglas Belshaw, eCampusOntario (originally published by BCcampus, 2016) which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The Canada-US Automotive Products Agreement was signed in 1965. It removed tariffs on vehicles and automotive parts traded between Canada and the United States, creating a much more dynamic Canadian automobile sector and improving the trade deficit in the sector.
Strategies to counter American influence in the Canadian economy included Roads to Resources, tariff arrangements like the Auto Pact, and the establishment of FIRA.
Canada's central bank, introduced by R. B. Bennett, January 1935, as part of a federal government economic intervention.
He introduced the Bank of Canada and the Canadian Wheat Board, but did not pursue economic pump-priming or efforts to spend his way out of the crisis.
18 June 1935; a violent confrontation between striking Vancouver dockyard workers and a force made up of city police, provincial police, and RCMP.
Conditions that led to the Battle of Ballantyne Pier were unfolding even as the Trekkers left Vancouver.
24 October 1929 (a Tuesday) was the day the New York Stock Exchange crashed, beginning the decade-long Great Depression.
When trade on the New York Stock Exchange crashed on Black Tuesday, 24 October 1929, the die was cast.
Sunday at daybreak, 19 June 1938, while the Vancouver Police peacefully evacuated the Art Gallery (occupied by unemployed protesters); the RCMP stormed the Post Office with tear gas and truncheons. A window-smashing campaign followed and, hours later, a demonstration of support took place at an East End park where 10-15,000 locals gathered. Many were hospitalized that day.
The Regina Riot and Bloody Sunday were merely the worst episodes in a long decade of street battles between various police forces and the unemployed.
Meaningless routine work, associated with "work relief" for the unemployed, intended to keep them busy but not necessarily productive.
But the unemployed in the Relief Camps mostly performed meaningless routine work, colloquially referred to as boondoggles.
Established in July 1944, a system of institutions, principles, and processes by which the international monetary system could be managed. The Bretton Woods system lasted until 1971, when the United States ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold.
In the middle of a devastating World War, Western, Allied governments met at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire to identify the tools necessary to rebuild the liberal democratic and capitalist order, assuming they could beat the Axis Powers.
Civic projects that re-purpose (sometimes at enormous cost) or rehabilitate industrial spaces for post-industrial use.
These brownfield projects re-purpose and rehabilitate industrial spaces for post-industrial use.
Canada's Marketing Board for wheat and barley was introduced by R. B. Bennett in July 1935 as part of a federal government economic intervention.
He introduced the Bank of Canada and the Canadian Wheat Board, but did not pursue economic pump-priming or efforts to spend his way out of the crisis.
A combination of institutions that enable the buying and selling of money through instruments like loans and securities.
Some of the principal features of capitalism are reviewed as well, including capital markets and business cycles.
A telecommunications system involving a wireless connection. Cellular telephones first became available to the public in the mid-1980s.
It is now, along with cellular communications, the largest communication infrastructure in existence.
Federalism as a dynamic process of decentralization and recentralization, or centrifugal versus centripetal forces.
Second, they created significant tensions within Canadian federalism, increasing demands for decentralized authority or, what was called at the time, centrifugal federalism.
An economic order in which government is the principal buyer of goods produced, for itself or for distribution. See demand-led economy.
Even agriculture recovered nicely in this command-led economy, as did the federal government-sponsored efforts to industrialize food processing.
In late 20th century post-secondary education, the search for opportunities to develop revenue streams by taking new ideas to market.
The post-secondary sector responded with increased investment in the “mobilization of knowledge” and commercialization.
Products that last a long time and which consumers do not have to buy often; for example, cars, furniture, and appliances.
By the mid-1950s, the Canadian economy was well into a new industrial revolution during which consumer durables intersected with popular culture.
A result of population growth and an economic downturn at the end of the Napoleonic Wars; tariffs and restrictions were imposed on imported grain (to Britain), which increased prices in an attempt to give domestic producers an edge.
The depression at the end of the Napoleonic Wars provoked the British Corn Laws.
In the late 20th century, the idea that the economy was shifting away from an industry-dominated model to one in which ideas and creativity would matter more.
From about 2001, the knowledge economy and the creative economy are presented as heirs in a long succession of economic engines.
The process of moving away from an old-style industrial order, which typically involves the shuttering of declining industries.
Regardless, the move away from an old-style industrial order — a process called deindustrialization — was clearly underway.
An economic order in which the free market dominates and in which industries and consumers are the principal buyers of goods, thereby determining what goods will be produced. See command-led economy.
This was much closer to a command-led than a demand-led economy.
Colloquial term for "relief" or welfare payments.
At the same time, they demanded that Ottawa address a problem that was clearly national in scope and made worse (in the case of many provinces) by the presence of migrant and out-of-province workers looking for relief or dole.
A late 20th, early 21st century investment frenzy based on advances in Internet-based commerce that burst with the collapse of the market in 2000, crippling growth in the sector for several years.
The century ended with the dot-com bubble crisis that marked the end of a stunning run for Internet investors.
Describes the drought conditions that occurred across the prairies and plains of North America in the 1930s and the concurrent poverty associated with the economic depression.
The 1930s Depression is profoundly and deeply associated, in the popular mind, with the prairie Dust Bowl, one of the greatest environmental catastrophes in Canadian history.
Refers to programs and policies geared to redistribution of wealth between provinces to ensure a comparable level of services and quality of life in all parts of Canada.
The NEP stirred up a hornets’ nest of constitutional disputes, did little to support energy self-sufficiency, plunged Ottawa into debt, and undermined the principle of equalization payments.
Other industries are developed or expanded to help to link a product or staple export from the suppliers to the customers, as part of the distribution chain, for example, transportation, grain elevators, and port facilities.
Sometimes economists call grain elevators, transportation, and port facilities forward linkages.
Between Canada and the United States; signed in 1988, brought into effect in 1989; the FTA created a single market for most goods and services.
This shift would culminate in a major free trade agreement with the United States in 1988, crafted by Tory Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
A movement among city planners beginning in the late 19th century imposed order on new communities, including extensive greenspace and boulevards. A garden city is simultaneously modernist and antimodernist.
The new aluminum smelting town was designed along the lines of a garden city.
In monetary policy, the linking of a nation's currency to the value of gold, which is also called the gold exchange standard. Canada (and Britain) abandoned the gold standard at the start of the First World War, resumed using the system in 1926, and then left it permanently in 1929.
Efforts to determine the safest kind of currency preoccupied policy-makers through the late 19th century, and the alternatives of the gold standard, silver, and paper were the focus of front-page debates for decades.
The value of all goods produced in a country during a specified period of time.
So each depression was followed by a recovery that quickly moved upward fast enough to match previous levels of production and growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
As opposed to "have" provinces, the prosperity of "have-not" provinces is below the average for the country as a whole; equalization payments were designed to address these inconsistencies.
In some quarters — the Atlantic provinces in particular — the limited impact of industrialization has led to less of a roller-coaster ride in the marketplace, but a lower level of prosperity overall.
Homeless men's camps, usually in marginal spaces in cities and towns, proliferated during the 1930s Depression.
Conflict erupted in 1931, and again in 1933, in public demonstrations and around homeless men’s camps also called hobo jungles.
A view of the post-industrial economy in which digitized information is the basis of a new economic order.
The information age required different strategies.
Created at Bretton Woods in 1944 to work with the World Bank to reinvigorate post-war economies by achieving currency stability, stimulating international trade, and rescuing national economies in distress.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were two institutions that emerged from Bretton Woods.
Named for the British economist, John Maynard Keynes, it broke with orthodox thinking by advocating government spending during downturns so as to stimulate the economy; these principles also encouraged aggressive taxation during times of prosperity to offset recovery-era spending. Resisted and rejected by orthodox economic thinkers and conservatives who deplore the idea of a large, bureaucratic, and interventionist state.
What had changed was this: Keynesian economic principles had found widespread support in Canada.
In the late 20th century, the trade in intellectual property and educational property; the preeminence of technological and other kinds of knowledge and information as economic drivers.
These also were flagships of what was called the knowledge economy.
The period of economic and demographic growth that coincides with the coming to office of the Laurier Liberals in 1896; concludes in 1912-14.
Edwardian Canada’s own “Indian summer,” the Laurier boom, arose because of consumer demand across the newly-settled Prairies.
An interwar-era political common front in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia that argued for greater federal support for the regional economy.
A fleeting but vocal Maritime Rights movement caught on in the interwar years, but resulted in few concessions from Ottawa.
Also called the European Recovery Plan (ERP), an American program giving billions of dollars of aid to rebuild European economies after WWII, in part to restore markets but also to offset the appeal of Communism.
Thse two goals weren’t necessarily at odds: Canada sold billions of dollars’ worth of materials to the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, which was a stimulant to economic growth.
The system of economic relations established between European empires and their colonies; emphasis is on the use of merchants in the home country to establish production in the colony of largely unprocessed goods that would be shipped to the home ports; leaves colonies economically dependent and underdeveloped.
It operated on principles associated with mercantilism.
In macroeconomics, the theory that the money supply and central bank policies are key to understanding inflation and fluctuations in GDP. By controlling the money supply, monetarists argue, one can contain inflation. One instrument for achieving these goals is to raise interest rates — making money more expensive — and thereby reducing its velocity. Monetarist policies were introduced along with austerity measures in Britain under the Thatcher government from 1979. Similar efforts (without austerity) were attempted in the United States under Ronald Reagan. Both were influential on Canadian fiscal policy.
An American version associated with monetarism and the trickle-down effect was led by President Ronald Reagan and, almost inevitably, was branded Reaganism.
Controversial legislation introduced under Pierre Trudeau’s administration in 1980-1985. The thrust of the policy was to secure Canadian oil for Canadian markets in eastern Canada (hitherto dependent on cheaper — but, in the context of the second OPEC shock, insecure — imported oil). Prices for Albertan oil in Quebec would be lower than in the United States (to which most of Canada’s oil was sent), which meant lower profits in the oil patch.
The return of the Trudeau government (restored after a 9-month Conservative administration under Joe Clark) was quickly followed by the introduction of the National Energy Program (or NEP).
An ideological position that favours smaller government, deregulation, freer trade, and lower taxes; and is tied to monetarism.
These perspectives derived from a set of ideas known as neo-liberalism that came to be known almost instantly as Thatcherism.
Term used to describe the Prairie provinces following their move from a monocultural economy based almost entirely on grain production and export to an economy with diverse and more valuable bases.
At the same time, the oil economy in Canada was becoming stronger, and economic and political power was shifting to what was commonly called the New West (see Section 8.10).
1994; trade pact with the United States and Mexico. Expands on the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed in 1988.
Mulroney and Campbell had negotiated a successor treaty to the FTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which added Mexico to the partnership.
Established by the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 that brought together the Treaty of Brussels nations (Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France), Canada, the United States, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Italy, and Portugal as a mutual defense league — an attack on one would be an attack on all.
Canada engaged directly in recovery efforts in Europe for this reason, while establishing a role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as an instrument for economic regeneration.
Manufacturing of goods or parts in another country.
The old industrial order was retreating in the face of off-shore production and outsourcing.
Shorthand for Alberta’s oil industry, from mining and processing to sales and financing, from the field to the head offices in Calgary and Edmonton.
This explosive demographic growth was spurred by economic expansion, most of which occurred in the oil patch.
Beginning in June 1933, the Relief Camp Workers’ Union mobilized the unemployed in British Columbia to abandon the camps and put their issues directly before Prime Minister Bennett, travelling across Canada on railway boxcars. The Trek started in Vancouver but was stopped in Regina and culminated in a riot.
The On-to-Ottawa Trek set off from Vancouver on 3 June 1935 but was stopped in Regina, the site of the RCMP headquarters.
Established in 1960 as a regulating body for the oil industry’s biggest producers, most of which were located in the Middle East and Africa. By 1970 decolonization had advanced so far that emerging countries sought greater control over the value of their oil exports. OPEC responded by setting higher prices, which triggered the first “oil shock” of the decade.
In October 1973 OPEC raised the price of oil by 70%, imposed an embargo on sales to the United States, and cut output.
The export of jobs; part of the process of deindustrialization.
The old industrial order was retreating in the face of off-shore production and outsourcing.
A suite of agreements between employers, unionized workers, and the state in 1946; allowed for “responsible” labour activity while prohibiting excessive militance; committed employers and the state to recognizing unions and supporting the checkoff of union dues. See Rand Formula.
In 1946 the Rand Formula staked out a new relationship between labour, capital, and government, which confirmed a post-war settlement that stabilized industrial relations.
Allowed unions for the first time to engage in widespread organization and to bargain collectively for job contracts.
Probably no period in human history has witnessed such a concentrated attempt to plan and shape the national and international economy as the years after 1944.
The strategy pursued by some provinces to become more substantial players in their jurisdictions by investing in economic expansion and engaging in a growing number of social programs. Associated with the post-WWII period.
Just as “nation-building” was a feature of the first 50 years of the Dominion, province building became a dominant feature of the political economy after 1950.
Based on a landmark legal ruling by Mr. Justice Ivan C. Rand, the Rand Formula provided unions with a pathway to gain legitimacy and long-term stability if, but only if, they agreed to conduct themselves “responsibly.”
The Rand Formula (1946) provided unions with a pathway to gain legitimacy and long-term stability if, but only if, they agreed to conduct themselves “responsibly.”
Also Reaganomics; associated with the neo-liberal (also neo-conservative) goal of reducing the size of government, expenditures of government, and size of personal and capital gains taxes; tied, as well, to monetarism.
An American version associated with monetarism and the trickle-down effect was led by President Ronald Reagan and, almost inevitably, was branded Reaganism.
Generally a down-cycle in economics characterized by price inflation, rising unemployment, industrial failures, and lower household income.
An economic recession in 1973 suddenly made new money more attractive, whatever the source.
1st of July 1935, at the conclusion of the On-to-Ottawa Trek, a rally called by the Relief Camp Workers’ Union in Regina’s Market Square culminated in a confrontation between the Trekkers and their supporters and the RCMP.
On the face of it, the Regina Riot seems extraordinary, but in the context of the Dirty Thirties, it was not.
The federal government‘s response to the massing of unemployed single men in Vancouver early in the 1930s Depression; in 1932, a nationwide system of generally quite isolated camps run by the Department of National Defense that became hotbeds of radical opposition to government inaction on the economic crisis.
King's response was to reintroduce the hated relief camps, albeit with some slight improvements and significantly more isolation than before.
At the end of the First World War, Germany accepted responsibility for acts of aggression leading to the conflict; the Treaty of Versailles (1919) ordered Germany to make extensive payments as a consequence. Both the idea of war guilt and reparations became a contentious issue in Germany; the country’s inability to pay the enormous reparations fees led to severe international economic instability, particularly when Germany sharply devalued its own currency to pay the debts more easily.
The system of mutual dependence produced by Germany’s obligation to pay reparations after the Great War meant that all countries had a significant stake in what was occurring in Weimar.
Former heavy manufacturing regions that have experienced deindustrialization.
The decline of the old heavy manufacturing sector led to the creation of a rust belt.
Those parts of the economy that support the financing, governing, feeding, administering, training, and health of the rest of the economy and the population. Examples include government bureaucracy, education, restaurants, police, and financial services. Also called the “tertiary sector,” as distinct from the primary (resource extraction) and secondary (processing and manufacturing) sectors.
Part may be explained, as well, by the enlarged share of GDP captured by other sectors, including the service sector.
Term used to describe the concentration of high-technology industries in the Bay Area of California, particularly after the 1970s.
Late 20th century entrepreneurs, cabinet ministers, and local governments wished to emulate the success of California’s Silicon Valley.
Stagnant economic growth coupled with persistently high rates of inflation.
By the 1970s, Canada was facing the dilemma of stagflation — stagnant economic growth coupled with persistently high rates of inflation.
The staples theory argues that an economy dominated by valuable and traditional commodities will be shaped — in terms of the larger economy, the polity, and the society — by the needs and nature of the primary staple(s). Also a model for understanding the political economy of a country in which staples are fundamental to the export economy. An approach developed by historians Harold Innis and W. A. Mackintosh.
It examines the most commonly used theoretical model of the Canadian economy (the staples model) because of its implications for the economy in the past and the present.
A leading economic and military power with a nuclear arsenal; a cold war era term applied mainly to the USSR and the United States.
In contrast, the United States was indisputably the world’s greatest economic and military power — the first “superpower.”
Simultaneously the approach taken by and leadership style of British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and the array of anti-trade union, pro-free market policies and economic philosophies that were popular in the Conservative Party from the 1970s through the 1980s; contains some elements of neo-liberalism and what has been described as Reaganomics.
These perspectives derived from a set of ideas known as neo-liberalism that came to be known almost instantly as Thatcherism.
In neo-liberal economics, particularly Reaganomics, the idea that reducing taxes on the wealthy and corporations will result in their increased profits "trickling down" to lower socio-economic classes. Referred to also as "free market economics" and "voodoo economics."
An American version associated with monetarism and the trickle-down effect was led by President Ronald Reagan and, almost inevitably, was branded Reaganism.
Victory in Europe Day, 7 May 1945; marked the end of WWII in Europe.
Those tensions boiled over in Halifax when Victory in Europe Day (VE-Day) celebrations turned into riots.
The growing sense from the mid-20th century of the four western provinces that Canadian political machinery and culture favoured Ontario and Quebec and that federal economic policies were devised to favour central Canada over the West.
The much more successful government of Brian Mulroney, from 1984 to 1993, depended heavily on western alienation for its success.
Labour disputes launched by workers without the authorization or permission of the union leadership; an unofficial strike that does not follow the established procedures for taking industrial action.
Throughout the 1960s, a series of protracted wildcat strikes in both the public and private sectors led to a formal inquiry — the Task Force on Labour Relations (1968).
Created at Bretton Woods in 1944 to work with the International Monetary Fund to reinvigorate post-war economies. Dominated by the United States, it was used also as an instrument to reduce communist influence in western Europe.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were two institutions that emerged from Bretton Woods.
Alternatively, World Exposition, hence “Expo”; first organized in the mid-19th century to showcase industrial and technological advances; the first “Expo” was hosted in Canada in 1967 at Montreal, by which time the fairs were more about national showcases and culture; Canada’s only other Expo was held in Vancouver in 1986.
Consolidating the remainder of the land represented a challenge that was solved by hosting a World’s Fair — Expo 86.
A network of information connected via the Internet; emerged in the late 1980s.
The Internet went from being a modest structure in the 1970s and 1980s to the World Wide Web — invented in 1989 and launched in 1991.