The Creation of a Surplus Population

After World War II, but particularly after 1950, uneven sectorial development was to intensify in Canada. Consistent with their historical role as unequal and dependent junior partner of U.S. economic interests, the Canadian capitalist class, together with then capitalist state, facilitated the direct investment of billions of dollars in the primary extractive and manufacturing sectors by huge U.S. multinational corporations.25 The resulting changes--the rapid mechanization and economic concentration of the primary sector and the "deindustrialization" of the manufacturing sector (i.e. the loss of plants and jobs to the U.S. and other areas) represented severe distortions in the Canadian economy with profound social consequences.26

On one hand, over the span of just a decade, billions of U.S. dollars flowed into the development of resource industries to feed post-War recovery and expansion in the manufacturing centres of the U.S. and Europe. The task of the "industrialization" of resource extraction, which had for so long been delayed by the central Canada-based capitalist class (in its economic role as middleman between Canadian hinterland resources and foreign markets), was finally accomplished. However, what could have been accomplished gradually through internal Canadian development in the pre-1950's period was done rapidly and precipitously "from the outside", i.e. by U.S. capital. The human cost of this distorted pattern of development was immense. Employment shrank rapidly as in the span of a decade, mining, forestry, fishing and agriculture were transformed from what were in 1950 still heavily labour-intensive industries employing pre-industrial production modes to highly concentrated, capital-intensive industries utilizing large, expensive machinery and advanced production techniques. 27 In 1945, 30% of the workforce was in the primary sector; by 1969, only 10% was.28 Many jobs disappeared and for the ones that remained, employers demanded higher education levels than were possessed by a large part of the hinterland work force. The steepest decline was registered in agriculture, where factors like falling returns to farmers due to the growth of U.S. dominated processing industries, the competition of corporate-owned farms and the escalating costs of new mechanized farm implements combined to drive increasing numbers of small farmers off their land.29 (Actually, the rural depopulation process had been going on for many years; however, during the 1950's it accelerated.)

The rapid repulsion of labour from the primary sector throughout the 1950's produced a large, ill-educated and increasingly impoverished "surplus population" (i.e. surplus to the average needs of the economy) in hinterland areas. Journalist Barbara Moon wrote in 1961:

They are confined to the rude laboring jobs that are most apt to be seasonal-those in farming, mining, logging, trapping, fishing and construction. Their jobs, as the current unemployment crisis has made plain, are the first to vanish in a recession. Studies of change in the economy also show that the jobs they used to have may never reappear. "They frighten me", says Arthur Pigott, the new head of the Canadian Association for Adult Education. "They show that, sorted' by education, a whole group in modern society can, almost in one generation, get left behind, become surplus."30