This uneven sectorial development, with its profound economic and political consequences, has interacted with uneven regional development. That is, the capitalist class, concentrated in the central Canadian Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa "golden triangle", have cooperated as junior partners of U.S. economic elites in, locking eastern and western Canadian hinterlands into the role of supplier of staples like timber, pulp, minerals, fish, wheat, petroleum, etc. for the huge U.S. market, and to a lesser extent, the relatively underdeveloped central Canadian manufacturing sector.15 This can be termed regional underdevelopment because as the capitalist classes of both countries have extracted the surplus created by workers in Atlantic Canada, the Prairies, Quebec, the-North and rural Ontario, they have (through financial and political means) blocked the formation of local processing and manufacturing industries and other business activities in those areas which would have had the effect of diverting or capturing some of the outflow of value. Without stable and self-sufficient economic patterns, the hinterland regions have tended to prosper during periods of intensive resource exploitation and to stagnate afterward.16

These interacting patterns of sectorial and regional underdevelopment have retarded the development of education in Canada, and particularly in the hinterland regions. Let us examine how this has come about.

The Underdevelopment of Education in Canada

Industrialism provides a spur to the growth of schooling by increasing the demand for skills, including cognitive ones, in the labour force. Because of the relatively weak position of industrial capital, this stimulus has not been as strong in Canada as in other Western countries.17 For example, we have seen that Canada did not develop a vigorous indigenous manufacturing sector. As well, until the 1950's, the resource sector has not developed capital intensive extractive techniques. That is, the natural resources of the hinterlands-e.g. timber, minerals-were so abundant, so accessible and of such high quality that investors ignored the certain prospect of depletion and scarcity. Instead of gradually increasing capital investment ratios to make use of more efficient and productive technologies, they continued to utilize the more wasteful but more immediately profitable labour-intensive production techniques.