The Waffle and the National Question
By Mel Watkins
The 20th Anniversary of the Waffle
The Waffle and the National Question MEL WATKINS he Waffle Manifesto was entitled "For An Independent Socialist Canada." Its opening sentence reads: "Our aim as democratic socialists is to build an independent socialist Canada." The very essence of our position, of our politics, was the linking of independence and socialism, of the national question and the class question. John Bullen, in his splendid history of the Waffle, shows how that linkage was, in his words, the Waffle's "principal political tenet." In 1965 George Grant had written in Lament for a Nation that socialism could not be the salvation of Canada because Canadian socialist leaders "had no understanding of the dependence of socialism and nationalism in the Canadian setting." We were resolved to change that. We said that independence could only be achieved through socialism because the Canadian business class, and the political parties which represented Canadian business, could not be relied upon. "There is not now an independent Canadian capitalism and any lingering pretension on the part of Canadian businessmen to independence lacks credibility." With the passing of Walter Gordon, there are no longer even such lingering pretensions. We said an independent socialist Canada could be achieved through the NDP as the party of working Canadians. Yet on the national question and on the role of the trade union movement we truly waffled in the Manifesto. Under the influence of staff reps from international unions and of Ed Broadbent, the only elected politician involved
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in the Waffle in its early days (who abandoned us at the insistence of David Lewis), we called for more democracy in the labour movement and for workers' control, but we made no mention of the importance of an independent Canadian union movement. In the era of the American war in Vietnam and of the New Left as a global phenomenon, we translated anti-war and anti-corporate sentiment into Canadian nationalism, and we even tried to do it within a parliamentary party. We threatened the mainstream of moderate Canadian nationalists and brought about the creation of the Committee for an Independent Canada. For a brief and heady period, there were teach-ins across Canada in which an independent Canada was assumed, and the debate was about whether it should be a capitalist Canada or a socialist Canada. The 1970s are now seen as a nationalist interlude between, on one side, the era of special status for Canada within the American Empire of the 1950s and the 1960s, otherwise known as the great sell-out, and, on the other side, the Reagan-Mulroney era of the 1980s, with Canada (to paraphrase Stephen Clarkson) as exemplary client state. It was a decade brought to us by Pierre Elliott Trudeau of all people; fervid anti-nationalist though he was, he knew his priorities and was willing to tolerate a little Canadian nationalism the better to defeat Quebec nationalism. It was, incredibly, even brought to us by Richard Nixon who decided that a beleaguered America couldn't afford to treat us - as he saw it - so benignly and would grant us no further special status. Thus with Watergate about to burst, Nixon came to Ottawa in 1972 and unilaterally declared us independent! Lest we forget, these were the years of the Canada Development Corporation, of the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA) and Petrocan, and of the Third Option to lessen Canadian dependence on the US, culminating, postWaffle, in the National Energy Program. The Waffle contributed to the nationalist environment within which these things happened but, wanting more, much more, we were not impressed at the time and, I suspect, have been disappointed, though not all that surprised, that much of it didn't last. 174
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Relative to domestic ownership, foreign and American ownership in Canada fell in the 1970s and continued to do so into the 1980s; though it remains so high that Canada's right to be in the Guiness Book of Records as the ultimate comprador nation has hardly been put at risk. It should be conceded that none of us on the nationalist side anticipated this decline. And if, after the event, we have been slow to hail it, it is because we're not sure, given the context in which it happened, that it actually mattered. There were those who insisted that it proved that the Canadian business class, and the Canadian economy, were now more mature. The problem with that, however, was that trade dependency on the US grew at the same time, since the Third Option had failed miserably. We soon discovered that the new macho business class really just wanted protection against possible American protectionism. In the face of that threat it was Canadian workers and their unions which went nationalist, while Canadian business turned totally continentalist and dragged the whole country into free trade with the US. The Canadian business class, having opposed any policies that would have reduced our vulnerability and dependency, now argued that the only way to deal with them was to increase them. Ironically, it turns out that Canadian business had simply become mature enough to insist wholeheartedly on continentalism, and to have the cohesion and the clout to get its way. The key change, the true big reversal, was in the labour movement which moved away from international union dominance toward national unions, creating thereby a stronger base for the articulation of a nationalism that is, by its nature, left nationalism. If we waffled at the outset, we quickly made up for lost time; a Waffle Labour Caucus argued for Canadian unions, while Wafflers worked with the militantly nationalist Confederation of Canadian Unions in the Texpack and Artistic Woodworkers strikes. Indeed, having moved, we did so to the point that it became our undoing, for it was the international union leadership, in alliance with the Lewis family party establishment, that led the purge. By the time the Canadian labour movement itself became Canadian, which it unambiguously did with the
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breakaway of the Canadian Autoworkers in the 1980s, the Waffle was history. The 1980s has otherwise been a thoroughly miserable decade, of American truculence and bluster under Reagan and of Canadian retreat, first under Trudeau and then yet more so under Mulroney. The Free Trade Agreement was the culmination of this Canadian slide into colonial status. What did we learn about Canadian political economy from the Great Free Trade Debate, and from the federal election that became a veritable referendum on the issue, that may be germane to our assessment of the Waffle? We saw, as already implied, a stridently continentalist business class which was wholly and depressingly consistent with the Waffle's best analysis and worst fears. We likewise saw a unified, nationalist labour movement, to whose existence, I like to think, the Waffle had modestly contributed. We saw a bumbling NDP leadership that, hard though it was to believe, could not grasp the nationalist nettle of free trade as firmly as corporate lawyer John Turner and the Liberal party. In Abe Rotstein's memorable phrase, the NDP, unable as well to get anywhere in Quebec, demonstrated its inability to deal with the national question in either official language. Such apparently is the continuing cost to the NDP of our expulsion. Perhaps our leaving deprived the NDP of the continuing stimulus it needed to relate to Canadian, and Quebec, nationalism. We cannot rewrite history, not even our own slight role, but if our staying would have made the NDP more genuinely nationalist, I can almost be persuaded that we should have tried harder to stay. But the Free Trade debate also witnessed the creation of the ProCanada Network by a broad range of popular sector groups, and of a host of local coalitions against free trade. This represented a most impressive social movement. We old Wafflers should all be happy if future historians see the Waffle as an embryonic version thereof. Thus, although we lost on free trade, we saw remarkable evidence of a strong, left nationalist sentiment as recently as one year ago. Let us, by all means, emphasize the Waffle's contribution to that legacy. Tell me: who on the left has a stronger claim? 176