Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is The Red Eye Podcast, produced at the studios of Vancouver Cooperative Radio. In our episode today, James Mingy talks with Jim Stanford about the life and legacy of Canadian economist Mel Watkins. On April 2, Mel Watkins died age 87. Mel Watkins was a political economist at the University of Toronto, as well as an activist and writer.
Speaker: In the late 1960s, he was founder and co -leader with James Laxer of The Waffle, a left -wing political formation within the NDP that advocated for an independent socialist Canada. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has just re -released The Staple Theory at 50, reflections on the lasting significance of Mel Watkins' A Staple Theory of Economic Growth, which is a collection of essays edited by Jim Stanford.
Speaker: Jim Stanford was formerly an economist with uniform and is currently the director for the Center for Future Work. He's also the Harold Innes industry professor in economics at McMaster University. Jim Stanford joins me from his home in Vancouver. Hello, Jim. Hello, James. Mel Watkins was a friend of yours. Can you tell us a little bit about your friendship with him?
Speaker: Yeah, he was certainly a friend and a mentor and an inspiring figure in my life and obviously many other progressive Canadians' lives. I met Mel when I was working for the Canadian Auto Workers, the union that then became part of Unifor.
Speaker: I was doing economics work arguing for various policies like independent Canadian ownership, strategies to develop different value -added industries in Canada rather than relying just on resource extraction, fairer approach to fiscal policies, trade policies, etc.
Speaker: Mel Watkins had been a leading progressive voice in economic debates in Canada, and he and I got to know each other. He provided some great input to different work that I was doing. I went and helped him teach some of his courses when he was still teaching at the University of Toronto. And then we actually got kind of jointly involved in various political initiatives. So he was a friend, a comrade, and a mentor, and I'll miss him a lot. Back in 1963, Mel Watkins wrote what
Speaker: seems to be a seminal article on the Staples Theory of Economic Growth. Can you tell us a little bit about what that article was and what is the Staples Theory of Economic Growth?
Speaker: Yeah, Mel was early in his academic career when he wrote that. He had come back to Canada after doing his PhD in political economy at MIT in the States. And this was actually a pioneering effort because he took work that had been done earlier in kind of the Canadian political economy tradition. The best known name, of course, is Harold Innes, who was the University of Toronto scholar who kind of developed the Staples theory of economic development
Speaker: In a showed that Canada's development over the decades, he was writing in the 20s and the 30s, had been led by an overlapping series of waves, he called them, waves of staples development, different staples products.
Speaker: starting with fish on the East Coast, and logging, and then minerals of different types, agricultural products, all resource -based, all produced in Canada, but then exported to a foreign power, a foreign power that had, in a way, undue influence over Canada. First, that was Britain, of course, but later it was America. And Harold Innes had showed how Canadian economic history could be understood through those waves,
Speaker: Well, Mel Watkins came along a generation later and kind of modernized and updated Innes's original theory about staples, thought through the economic analytics of it, identifying both the pros and the cons, the opportunities and the risks of being so dependent on staples production and export.
Speaker: and then showed how it really did explain Canada's unique structure and unique role in the global economy there in the 60s and the 70s. Mel of course was very concerned with the influence of foreign investment in Canada's economy and in Canada's politics.
Speaker: And he linked that quite strongly to our over -reliance on staples production and exports. And that article, I think, has a lasting value and relevance. Over 50 years later now, it still helps to understand why Canada is so trapped in over -reliance on different staples exports. Of course, nowadays,
Speaker: petroleum is the dominant one, and we can still learn from it. It was an amazing contribution that Mel made. In the late 60s, Watkins formed and co -led the Waffle faction within the NDP, which formed around the Waffle Manifesto. Can you tell us about that manifesto and a little bit about the Waffle in general?
Speaker: Yeah, well, and there was a kind of an evolution in Mel's politics. After that 1963 article, he then became quite involved in some act of federal government policymaking. He worked with Walter Gordon, who was kind of a liberal nationalist figure within the liberal government of Lester Pearson at the time.
Speaker: and began to work with Gordon around exploring some of the problems of foreign investment and foreign control of our economy. Watkins was the intellectual force behind what then became known as the Gordon Report in 1965. Now, as it turned out, the Liberal government federally didn't end up acting on a lot of Gordon's recommendations. That sounds like a familiar story, of course.
Speaker: And so Mel's own politics kind of became more radical. And he became very active in the NDP and then within the NDP in a kind of tendency within that party that was focusing on foreign control and its dangers and proposing some very radical responses to it, including nationalizing key industries, charting an independent Canadian foreign policy. We were still very much under the thumb of the Americans at that stage.
Speaker: and developing a more kind of equitable collectivist tradition in our economy. He worked very closely with James Laxer, another political science or political economy academic. They were the co -leaders of it. They got a lot of support at the time. It was a very radical period, of course, in the late 60s.
Speaker: They end up nominating James Laxer to run for leader of the NDP. He ended up going up against David Lewis at that time. They had a pretty good campaign. They generated a lot of debate. They ended up getting about a third of the vote.
Speaker: in that leadership race. But when the kind of establishment of the party prevailed in that convention, they then came to see the waffle as a kind of destructive faction and eventually threw the leaders out of the NDP. The waffle tried to carry on for a period as a kind of independent political sort of sub party. It wasn't really a party, but it did run candidates in its own name.
Speaker: But that kind of petered out and eventually Mel ended up rejoining the NDP and actually ran as an NDP candidate a few times later in his life.
Speaker: Also in the 1970s, I think Mel Watkins moved up north for a time to work with the Dene Nation and something that's now called the Berger Commission, which I don't think a lot of people remember anymore. But can you tell us a little bit about the Berger Commission and Mel Watkins' contributions to it?
Speaker: Yeah, Mel had, I think, a very far -reaching and multidimensional and very holistic vision of inclusive, sustainable, equitable development for Canada. And from very early on, he was very concerned about the oppression and exploitation of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the very negative fallout from our sort of colonial, our colonial approach to regional development.
Speaker: And so then he made a huge personal contribution to the fight against a pipeline. So there again, that in a way is a precursor of issues to come to the fore now. This was a proposed pipeline, never built.
Speaker: Take a huge reserves of natural gas that had been discovered in the mckenzie delta in the northwest territories and basically ship it to america so in a way it was a precursor to the big debates over bitumen pipelines that we're having in canada now.
Speaker: and reflecting the same forces of staples over -dependence and American domination and positioning Canada as a source of energy rather than as a full -fledged economy in its own right. So there was a natural synergy between that fight and Mel's concern with the over -reliance on staples of Canada's whole economy.
Speaker: He got very involved. Justice Thomas Berger was a judge who'd been appointed to inquire into the different aspects of the pipeline and give the government advice. And he had a very lengthy inquiry. It was kind of a historic moment. And again, sort of like Mel did with Walter Gordon a decade earlier.
Speaker: Mel was kind of an intellectual force behind that whole exercise. And in the end, the pipeline was never built. It was defeated both by economics and by resistance of the indigenous peoples who live up there. And then that started a whole subsequent
Speaker: engagement by Mel with indigenous issues fighting against Canadian colonialism and also linking it all to environmental sustainability. In his latter years I'd say Mel's main priority was around climate change and sustainability and so it's interesting to see the the course that his whole life traversed you know from economics and political economy
Speaker: solidarity with indigenous peoples and environmental struggles as well. It's remarkable that one man could have so much impact in so many different fields. I know Mel Watkins quite proudly described himself as a nationalist and
Speaker: Of course, nationalist movements have been on the rise in the last couple of decades around the world. How would you describe the way Mel Watkins' description of nationalism compared to, say, that of right -wing parties around the world?
Speaker: Oh, that's a really good question, James, and very timely as well. Of course, in recent years, the whole concept of nationalism has been hijacked by right wing populists and even right wing fascists, really. So it kind of has become a dirty word. Mel, of course, never thought of it in that sense. You know, his vision of nationalism was one of a struggle for greater Canadian independence and greater Canadian
Speaker: balance in our economy coming out from under the thumb of American domination. And in that context, I have no doubt that nationalism was a progressive force and can remain a progressive force. Frankly, I'd like to see some of the goals of nationalism taken back from the populist right and sort of rediscovered for progressive purposes. Of course, nationalism has to be expressed in an internationalist way. And I don't see that as a contradiction at all.
Speaker: We're struggling for a better deal from the global economy, just like the others around the world are, and we can do it in solidarity. It can't be xenophobic, it can't be anti -immigrant, but I do believe that there is a progressive core of the argument that Canada can and should be a more full -fledged, independent, developed, diversified country.
Speaker: And in that regard, I think Mel's optimism that nationalism could be a progressive force was justified. And I hope that will show that it has a continuing relevance in that progressive sense.
Speaker: We've sort of been touching on this throughout our whole discussion, but can you maybe describe in a little more detail what sort of a legacy did Mel Watkins leave with the Staples -Siri, the Waffle, and his work with the Dene up north?
Speaker: Yes, it's amazing again, as I mentioned, the number of different issues and movements that Mel made a difference in and touched people and inspired them. And I do think his legacy is multifaceted and very powerful. There's lots of people in different areas of progressive life in Canada who have been touched and inspired and strengthened by Mel's work, both as an intellectual and as an activist and political leader.
Speaker: myself included. I would say, James, one of the most lasting things I got from Mel was sort of his sense of humility and, in a way, self -criticism and willingness to change over time. And that's something that I will be inspired by and hope to emulate.
Speaker: You know, the issues that he addressed, as I mentioned, evolved through his life. He wasn't kind of stuck on one hobby horse. He also updated his own thinking through life. I discovered that when I edited that collection that you mentioned in the intro of essays marking the 50th anniversary of his famous Staples article. And we invited him to do an epilogue or a rejoinder in that collection.
Speaker: And he ended up being remarkably self -critical of what he had written in 1963, even though the rest of us were all talking about how relevant and timely his argument from 1963 still was. And he pointed out that he wasn't sufficiently aware of the dimensions of colonialism and indigenous struggles.
Speaker: and the climate change angle. So, you know, in a way, here we were celebrating him and he was cautioning us, you know, don't get carried away, folks. That wasn't the be all and end all. We have to be constantly pushing our arguments and our politics forward. And I think that spirit of self -criticism and self -development is one that personally I have been very inspired by.
Speaker: Noam Chomsky famously described the responsibility of intellectuals as one to speak the truth and expose lies. Would you say Mel Watkins lived up to that? Oh, absolutely. And in another Chomskyan sense, he was very much what we sometimes call an organic intellectual. He was a powerful writer and theorist. His work has been influential around the world. There's other countries where progressive economists learned a lot from Mel.
Speaker: But he was never above it all, he was never sitting in an office at the university, he was always in the thick of it. Whether that was the waffle movement or standing on the front lines of protests and blockades. And that combination of progressive intellectual inquiry,
Speaker: with ongoing activist commitment, I think is one that obviously Chomsky also embodies and that is a great tradition of being an organic intellectual. It's been really great to have a chance to speak with you, Jim. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, James, and thanks for giving some time to Mel's legacy so that everyone nowadays can understand what he gave us. Thank you.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Jim Stanford, director of the Center for Future Work. He's also the author of the books Paper Boom and Economics for Everyone. The collection of essays, The Staple Theory at 50, Reflections on the Lasting Significance of Mel Watkins' A Staple Theory of Economic Growth, edited by Jim Stanford, is available on the CCPA's website, policyalternatives .ca. The Red Eye podcast is produced at the studios of Vancouver Co -op Radio,
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