Most decades after the Second World War opened or closed with a recession. The 1990s recession was deeper and longer than any since the 1930s, and it affected many of its victims almost as cruelly. Mass layoffs, plant and mine closures, and corporate “downsizing” raised unemployment rates well into double digits by 1991. The young were shut out of jobs; older workers found that they were too old to be hired again. Falling revenues deepened government deficits, and cutbacks often seemed to target the recession’s victims. Ontario, hard hit when the Free Trade Agreement decimated its protected industries, suffered added losses when Ottawa cut transfers to the richer provinces. For a time, links to Asia protected British Columbia’s prosperity. Then, as the rest of Canada recovered, Asia’s financial collapse in the mid - 1990s made the West Coast a collateral victim. Markets for its wood, coal, and fish declined sharply.
The 1990s were rich in ecological gloom. Newfoundland’s ancient cod fishery finally collapsed after decades of overfishing; Pacific salmon was close behind. Billions of dollars were diverted to support families ruined by other predictable ecological disasters. Forest industries complained of competition from fast-growing trees closer to the tropics and cut back on reforestation. Ecologists battled almost in vain to save old-growth forests. Meanwhile, prairie grain farmers protested their vulnerability in a subsidy war that only the United States and the European Union could afford as world wheat prices plummeted. Farmers across the prairies and in Ontario who diversified into hog rearing denied that the accumulation of waste products might affect supplies of drinking water. The scandal exploded in the small Ontario town of Walkerton in the spring of 2000 when thousands fell ill and seven died from E. coli infection.
Economic recovery began in 1993 and accelerated as laidoff workers, jarred by the Liberals’ tightened employment insurance rules, felt obliged to accept minimum-wage jobs without benefits, security, or overtime premiums. For the most part, union bargaining power faded, and even when recovery began in mid-decade, strikes remained rare. Admirers and critics attributed the improved business climate to the 1989 Free Trade Agreement, reinforced by nafta and the the newly powerful wro. If North America was to be a “level playing field,” economists predicted, American interests would prevail but Canadians, if liberated from high taxes and trade unions, could prosper in market niches. A Canadian dollar worth barely two-thirds of its American counterpart increased Canadian exports of goods and services, and the United States finally began to rival neighbouring provinces as a market. Growing sales brought growing dependence on a single foreign market. Traditional corporate names—MacMillan-Bloedel, Eaton’s, Seagrams—vanished into bankruptcy or, more often, into multinational deals, to be replaced by Weyerhauser, Sears, Wal-Mart, or The Gap. The merger plans of four of Canada’s large chartered banks were halted only because they had rudely failed to consult Paul Martin, the finance minister, and then because of an indignant public outcry.
Throughout the decade, Canada’s economy moved away from resource industries and manufacturing and towards information management. A well-developed telephone system became the backbone for a wired world of facsimile transmission and networked computers. TIuge sums were spent on communications infrastructure. In a single decade, the compact disc came and virtually left in favour of the still newer Internet. Canadians had never been more connected with each other and the world, though critics noted that the same citizens who had such limitless access to information and to each other had seldom professed to feel more isolated. Security in a job well done—a fundamental of Canadian middle-class life for much of the twentieth century—also faded, even in the public service. A decade of economic liberalism and shrinking general affluence stretched the divide between expectations and realistic possibilities. The 1980s had fostered a growing gulf between rich and poor and an apparent loss of faith in institutions and values that once had distinguished Canadians from their powerful neighbours. These trends continued into the 1990s. Canada, some citizens told pollsters, was worth keeping only if it gave them prosperity. From this perspective, had Canada failed the First Nations, single mothers, the unemployed, and a growing army of homeless, some of them full-time workers who could not afford shelter in Calgary or Vancouver on their minimum wages? The loudest protests came from the rich, who could have made even more money if only they had been Americans.
World History
