Faith and Economics in Canada
A fun thing I like to do every now and again is to look back on old papers that I wrote, especially in my undergrad and grad school courses. I feel as though I am reading someone completely unknown to me! It is interesting to see where I came from, and what types of research assignments and studies prepared me for the work I am doing now.
I stumbled on one of these recently, a paper I wrote about faith and economics in Canada. I wrote this back during my M.A., in a course on post-Christendom and the Canadian context. The first part of the paper looks at the current state of the Canadian economy as a modern neoliberal economy. The second part examined the theological motivations behind the workers movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Winnipeg General Strike, etc.) I still find the topic quite fascinating. I saw that labour protesters described their movement using revivalist categories, as one might find among Methodists (many of them were Methodists). And of course, the father of medicare in Canada, Tommy Douglas, was a baptist preacher turned politician, who was influenced particularly by the themes of the social gospel.
My evaluation then was perhaps different than it would have been now, but I still think it is generally correct. Part of the Canadian experience is the close bond between church and state authorities, with the church often serving to legitimate state actions or political activities. This was the case when it came to the wars Canada engaged in, along with the rest of the British empire. My observation however was that the close bond between the labour movement and Christian themes could also potentially use the church to serve a political end, and is therefore something we find across the political spectrum.
My thinking on this is still largely the same, though I am a more sympathetic these days with the cause of the labour movement and the early days of the CCP/NDP parties. Having since read George Grant (Lament for a Nation), I do wonder if there was somewhat of a missed opportunity for the direction of Canadian society. Grant acknowledges that the workers movements and social democratic movements in Canada possess the genuine truth of socialist thought, a communitarian vision that he mourns in the now deceased conservatism of the first half of the twentieth century in Canada. I tend to agree with Grant and others that see the shift towards economic neoliberalism as a negative trend, one that is not quite conservative at all in the grand scheme of things. The workers movements of the twentieth century in Canada I think upheld what was valuable about the type of society Canada was at the time. Of course, as our history with Indigenous peoples can attest, it was a flawed society, and not one I would want to recreate in all details. Yet I cannot help but feel that a communitarian vision would help us to re-envision a cooperative relationship in this country, much more than the neoliberal society we find today.