It’s a delicious if painful irony that it was the Left that warned about the dangers of economic integration with the U.S. decades ago.

In 1987 a broad coalition of organizations formed to fight Prime Minister Brian Muroney’s free trade agreement with the U.S. Realizing that integration with the American economy would lead to lost jobs and less political autonomy, they invited a broad spectrum of groups into the Pro-Canada, later Action Canada Network. Unions, churches, the Assembly of First Nations, the newly formed Council of Canadians and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women united across serious differences to jointly oppose Free Trade. The free trade agreement with the U.S. was the beginning of implementing neo-liberalism in Canada. Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher had done the job in the U.S. and England, but Canada remained a more social democratic country. Brian Mulroney set out to change that.

The co-chairs when I got involved were Maude Barlow, the leader of the Council of Canadians and a former Liberal and Tony Clarke who was at the time a senior staff person with the Conference of Catholic Bishops. This was during the pro-choice struggle and yet we managed to build a coalition against free trade at the same time as we were fighting each other in the streets over abortion. It was an extraordinarily diverse coalition that included nationalists who believed Canada was already too dependent on the US, labour who were most concerned with job loss in the manufacturing sector, feminists who focussed on female job loss and what would be a downward pressure on our social programmes, and I think it’s fair to say at the time none of the non-Indigenous groups were very educated on Indigenous issues. The divisions between the international and national unions was very deep but they managed to overcome them to unite against free trade

“We said then – and now are proven right- that integrating our economy into that of a super-power ten times our size was a mistake. In the 1970’s, manufacturing accounted for close to 25% of our GDP, now it’s down to 10%,” Maude told me recently. “Make no mistake president Donald Trump’s tariff threats are really about Canada’s resources, especially rare minerals and water.”

Marjorie Cohen, a feminist economist who was on the employment committee of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, NAC, did the work to show not only that women’s jobs, for example in the textile industry, would be lost but also that there would be pressure to cut back on our social programmes to be in line with the U.S. In retrospect, she had a clearer analysis of the impact of neo-liberalism than almost anyone else. NAC, the largest feminist coalition at the time, was actively involved in the free trade fight from the beginning. The Coalition against Free Trade in Toronto that preceded the ACN often met in the NAC offices in Toronto.

It was easier to build a coalition in those days both because there were more national organizations, the unions were more militant, and Maude Barlow was brilliant at dealing with differences at the table. But also, the differences were greater. One of the biggest divisions was between the Canadian Labour Congress unions that included many American unions, like the Canadian Auto Workers who later broke from the US union and is now Unifor, and a strictly Canadian labour movement organized by progressives in Quebec and English Canada that didn’t want to be part of big U.S. unions. But also, we were a little more enthusiastic about big debates, many of which happened but didn’t break up the coalition. Nevertheless, we all opposed free trade knowing that it would make us too dependent on the United States for everything.

The 1988 election became known as the Free Trade election because it was by far the dominant issue. During the leaders debate in 1988, John Turner, then Liberal leader said, “We built a country east and west and north. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we’ve done it. With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that, thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States and will reduce us, I am sure, to a colony of the United States because when the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow.”

With both the Liberals and the NDP opposing free trade, we won a majority of votes against the Free Trade Agreement in the 1988 election, but the free trade Tories won because of our undemocratic electoral system. By the time the Liberals came to power in 1994, Mulroney had just signed NAFTA, including Mexico in the free trade deal. The Liberals supported NAFTA even though they had opposed free trade in 1988.

The coalition we built against free trade morphed into the anti-globalization movement a decade later. Unions and young activists mobilized around the world against the institutions of corporate globalization. They argued that those institutions were taking power away from the nation state. While the target of corporate globalization was a good one, the nation states in the global north maintained their power and now we see a far right-wing president who seems intent on crashing the current system of international capitalism to suit his own quest for power and the interests of his billionaire bros. And as we see in the U.S. and European countries where far-right governments have come to power, we can’t really rely on the government to lead us out of this crisis.

There is no doubt that neo-liberal capitalism is in crisis, combined with the crisis of world governance through the continued insistence of most Western governments to support Israel despite the international courts’ charges of genocide. We are in the worst global crisis since the 1930’s. These are revolutionary times, but my fear is like in Germany and Italy in the 1930’s, it’s the fascists and alt right who will benefit because the Left is so weak. With the rapid transformation of the economic system into what Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis calls techno feudalism, the Left has been left behind, unable to envision a different future that could provide a decent living for everyone and divided by purist politics and in Canada by the ability of the Justin Trudeau government to co-opt most opposition from NGO’s.

Now that our economy is so integrated into the U.S. economy, Trump’s tariffs could be catastrophic both for Canadian and American workers. Jim Stanford, who was part of the anti-globalization movement as a researcher for the Canadian Autoworkers now Unifor, is writing some important pieces on how Canada can resist the tariffs. And Premiers, the federal cabinet and the soon not to be Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are holding emergency meetings and consulting with a special committee that includes business and labour. But we cannot rely on government, whoever is in government, to resist the changes that Trump is pushing.

We need another cross-sectoral, intersectional coalition of groups that can organize against the rise of fascism in the United States and possibly here in Canada. And a vision for what the future should look like. The Green New Deal was a good start but we need more.

Judy Rebick

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