Canada's National Questions, Free Trade and the Left

Abstract

It is now more than 30 years since the launch of the bilateral:anada-U.S. Free TradeAgreement (CUFTA), predecessor to the multilateral North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA) and the (now abandoned) Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). For a generation,these "free trade" initiatives provided an important part of the framework in which politicalmovements developed in Canada, engendering debates and controversies which continue to thisday. When a new moment of trade politics emerged with Donald Trump's challenge to NAFTA,some veterans from those earlier anti-free trade battles were unable to see the new, whitenationalist terrain upon which Trump was operating. This article - organized principally aroundthe author's own engagement with the anti-free trade movements of the 1980s - suggests that thisinability to see clearly the new context of anti-free trade politics was rooted in the incomplete andcontradictory left-nationalist theory which underpinned most anti-free trade politics of that earlierera. The article suggests that while there are national questions in Canada - in particular thoseassociated with Indigenous peoples and with Quebec - the attempt to articulate a parallel "nationalquestion" in Canada as a whole has proven to be impossible.