Gordon Laxer

University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Sociology

Canada faces an existential question. If the U.S. becomes a dictatorship under Trump, how can we maintain democracy in Canada?

How Canadians should prepare for Trump winning the U.S. presidency election in November 2024.

The Hogue Commission on foreign election interference unfairly excludes an investigation of Big Foreign Oil’s political meddling. Big Oil are the most insidious & most effective foreign-funded meddlers in Canadian politics.

Since Brian Mulroney's death, observers have been evaluating his legacy. He was prime minister of Canada from 1984 until 1993. My op ed contends that the near universal praise for his legacy in initiating the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA is unwarranted. It put a stake through Canada’s earlier ethos of a caring sharing society & regres...

Canada’s apex oil and gas lobby group may rue the day it made foreign-funded political meddling a public issue. China’s election interference sparked outrage in Canada. But China’s ability to sway a broad spectrum of Canadian voters is far weaker than the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producer’s (CAPP) foreign-funded political interference. Th...

My op ed in the March 6, 2023 Toronto Star on why we need an independent, non-partisan public inquiry into foreign election meddling that goes far beyond China. Powerful, non-government foreign entities, including foreign-influenced corporations, regularly intervene in our elections. Their meddling is more effective than China’s because they hire C...

This article challenges the standard explanations for why Canada incurred so much foreign ownership and control over its economy at such an early point in its history and remained a resource-exporting economy with a truncated manufacturing sector. The standard explanations are that the high tariffs of the Canadian National Policy (1879-1930) induce...

Canada's geographic isolation is good, so long as the U.S. is a friend. But if it becomes a full-on dictatorship and tries to bully Canada into submission, then the world’s longest undefended border becomes a severe liability. Canada would lack defences against an autocratic U.S. government because it has so integrated its economy, media and milita...

This article explores the anti-globalism potential of left nationalisms. The latter involve attachments to and support for the (relative) sovereignty of the political community to which one belongs. Since nationalisms get most of their content through the political associations they keep, left nationalisms are those that seek deep democratic transf...

While the Battle of Seattle immortalized a certain image of anti-globalization resistance, processes and agents of contestation remain sociologically underdeveloped. Even with the time-space compression afforded by new information technologies, how can a global civil society emerge among multi-cultured, multi-tongued peoples divided by miles of spa...

This paper critically examines the assumptions of the advocates of “globalization” and develops an alternative that is the polar opposite. The first half of the paper challenges the following assumptions about “globalization”: that national sovereignty is eroding for all countries; that the level of transnational ownership is higher now than in the...

Alberta’s 2021 public inquiry into “anti-Alberta energy campaigns” targeted a molehill. Tasked with investigating the vast sums that allegedly flowed from U.S. foundations to Canadian environmental groups, inquiry commissioner Steve Allan followed the trail of money and found a pittance. If, as Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage stated, the aim o...

L'article d'opinion traite de la publication de mon article de recherche "Posing as Canadian. How Big Foreign Oil captures Canadian Energy and Climate Policy". Cela révèle l'hypocrisie des grandes sociétés pétrolières étrangères à propos du filet de financement étranger des environnementalistes alors que les grandes sociétés pétrolières au Canada s...

https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-its-big-oil-not-environmentalists-who-are-foreign-funded

Does Canada want to be an innovation-based economy or a resource-based economy? Unfortunately, we can’t be both. Canada suffered the decimation of its innovation-based economy, centred in manufacturing, in the first decade of this century. Having never heard of Harold Innis, the Economist magazine, coined the term “Dutch disease” in 1977 to describ...

Before the ‘Battle in Seattle’ imprinted the image of young anti-globalization activists confronting riot police and shutting down international trade negotiations, the MAI died in October 1998 when France and then Canada pulled out of the talks. The MAI’s defeat was the first time that citizens’ movements punctured the aura of the inevitability of...

Introduction to the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology special issue on Globalization. Volume 32:3 August 1995. pp 247-251. peer reviewed. I was the special issue editor.

The report examines the financial and environmental impacts of the Canadian government's purchase of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline and its expansion.

A new Report I co-wrote on how NAFTA 2.0 will, if not altered, lock Canada and its NAFTA partners into high carbon emissions for decades. The report was written by leading Political Economists in Canada, Mexico and the US for the Council of Canadians, the Sierra Club U.S. and Greenpeace Mexico. It's gotten good media play in Canada, the U.S. and Me...

Investments in Alberta's Sands have bled red ink since the international oil price crashed in 2014. This report examines whether the market will close the Sands, likely abruptly at some point, or whether the Alberta and federal governments will pro-actively manage the transition to achieve a soft landing for Sands workers and other Albertans.

After the Sands sets out a bold strategy using deep conservation and a Canada-first perspective. The goal: to end oil and natural gas exports and ensure that all Canadians get sufficient energy at affordable prices in a carbon-constrained future. The book is in print and available from https://douglas-mcintyre.com/products/9781771621007. It can als...

Since the mid-1970s, many writers on the political Left have essentialized nationalisms, much like many writers on the Right have essentialized socialism. In this chapter, I argue that not all nationalisms are alike and not all should be dismissed out of hand. On the contrary, in an era in which the United States has reasserted its claims to a new...

DISTINCT STATUS FOR QUÉBEC: A BENEFIT TO ENGLISH CANADA

Although Canada has lots of oil, Canadians will increasingly be unable to use most of it. Canada’s conventional oil and natural gas have already passed their peaks. Yet under NAFTA, Canada cannot stretch out dwindling stocks for Canadian needs by cutting exports. Instead, more than half of its annual natural gas production has to be made available...

When Stephen Harper was prime minister of Canada, he bragged that Canada was a new ‘emerging energy superpower’, and a secure source of almost limitless energy resources. This chapter discusses whether it is more accurate to describe Canada as an energy superpower or a U.S.-resource satellite?

This chapter looks at cycles of global economic integration and renationalization (or deglobalization). I contend that hyper commodification has been strongest in phases of global integration and that, in contrast, the renationalization of economies has produced the most conducive conditions for decommodification. I outline a radical strategy for...

Examines key dimensions of the current assault against communal resources by relentless commodification and privatization. The chapter explores ways in which progressive projects of "reclaiming" the commons involve confronting the capitalist drive to commodify all aspects of existence, including human body parts, water, labour, knowledge, and even...

In the 1960s, the left branded US imperialism the major enemy of social justice in the world. Such talk faded after the war against Vietnam and almost disappeared after communism fell in Eastern Europe. It’s not that the American brand of informal empire disappeared. It continued through US influences on other states’ policies, the sway of US corpo...

Recently, a literature has grown around the building of what has been variously called a global civil society, transnational social movements or globalization from below, as an alternative to corporate globalization. This paper examines a different alternative radical transformative nationalisms, coupled with international solidarity. In this persp...

Growing concerns about the lack of real democracy, increasing inequalities, re-colonization and ecological crises associated with what is called ‘globalization’ have focused attention on alternatives. Are forces of resistance to globalization emerging that are capable either of reversing it, or shaping it in less destructive ways? We are sceptical...

The dominant historical models that explain Canada’s staple-exporting, branch-plant development are examined and found wanting. The Staples perspectives of Innis and Mackintosh and the new political economy approach of Clement, Naylor and Watkins all assume that Canadian development has been determined by geographic, economic, and external factors....

This article discusses the export of Canadian nationalist/internationalist resistance to corporate globalization by examining the international leadership of Canadian social movement leaders in defeating the OECD’s Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1998. The MAI’s defeat was the first major setback for the institutionalization of corpor...

The article proposes asymmetry for Quebec within Canada and explores conditions that would render such an arrangement politically viable. The formation of a tripartite alliance of English Canada, Québec, and First Nations, would be more conducive to countering neo-liberal globalism.

Benjamin Barber établit un lien entre la mondialisation des entre‐prises et la résurgence des nationalismes ethnoculturels. Selon lui, ces deux phénomènes affaiblissent la démocratie. Barber ne parle pas des effets de la mondialisation sur l'autre aspect du nationalisme — le nationalisme civique, Aetatisé, qui prédomine dans les démo‐craties comme...

Compares the movements of opposition to Canada joining the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement with movements of opposition of Sweden to joining the EU.

This is my reply to several academics who reviewed my book "Open for Business. The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada". Oxford Univ. Press 1989 in the Canadian Journal of Sociology's symposium on the book. This article discusses their reviews, explores the turning points in Canadian history, and discusses the role of human agency in making intend...

The writing of Canadian economic history has never been neutral. There have always been conflicting perspectives, emphasizing different factors and coming to different conclusions. This chapter discusses five main approaches to the writing of Canadian economic development before 1991, when this book was published. Some perspectives assumed that the...

This is a book review of my 1989 book "Open for Business. The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada".

This paper explores the schizophrenic character of Canadian political economy. Use of the same Marxist vocabulary cannot hide the existence of two very different perspectives under the rubric ‘political economy.’ On one side are nationalist idiographic historians who focus on Canada's dependent position in the world economy and assume that Canadian...

My Book Review of Pentland's pathbreaking book in Labour/Le Travail

Book Review