In the 1970s, most of the post-war certainties collapsed. Twenty-seven years after the United Nations conference at Bretton Woods had settled the U. S. currency as the basis by which all money was measured, Washington suddenly devalued its dollar. Gold would no longer be worth us$35 an ounce. Two years later, the United States accepted defeat in Vietnam, though the ultimate humiliating fall of Saigon was deferred for two years. American prosperity slid away from the industrial northeast, leaving a residue of poverty, pensioners, and pollution. Asian nations of the Pacific Rim took over the industries that U. S. capital had abandoned. A business-backed research group, the Club of Rome, predicted the imminent depletion of most of the world’s resources. In Europe and North America, a combination of unemployment and inflation—stagflation— seemed to defy the old Keynesian claim that economies could be “managed” into equilibrium. Once again, economics had become “the dismal science”; some of its practitioners turned to worship older doctrines.
As a trading nation, Canada felt the instability of the U. S. dollar, the protectionism of American and European governments, and its own dependence on resource exports. Crop failure made the Soviet Union, as well as China, a customer for Canadian wheat, but such markets were precarious. So was the boom in British Columbia coal and timber. On the whole, Canada’s growth in the 1970s was as expansive as before, but there was no accompanying sense of confident well-being. As the baby boom came of age, three million extra Canadians joined the labour force, an increase of one-third. Among women, the increase in labour-force participation was double the rate for men. Not only could they now defer or avoid child rearing, but inflation made two incomes necessary for the lifestyle most families demanded. The poverty of most single parents and the elderly, most of them women, made pension and family-law reform urgent priorities. At the same time, while Canadians demanded better homes and filled them with new electronic gadgets, governments no longer seemed to have the resources to cope with costly problems or even to maintain the health and educational institutions created in the 1960s.
Politicized by near-defeat in 1972, Trudeau’s strategy was to hold power with ndp backing, to put his philosophical principles in storage, and to demonstrate that he would protect people from inflationary pressures. When food prices rose in the wake of huge Soviet grain purchases in 1972-73, the government offered bread and milk subsidies and a Food Prices Review Board to scold alleged profiteers. Since the board’s villains included the government’s new marketing boards, farmers would at least know whom to thank for their higher prices. Economists condemned the meddling with free markets, but David Lewis and his New Democrats were content.
Politics, not conventional economics, also dictated the Liberals’ effort to insulate Canadians from the 1973 oil price shock. Angered by the falling value of the U. S. dollars that paid for their oU, and then by the Western world’s backing of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the Arab-dominated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (oPEc) proceeded to quadruple the cost of a barrel of crude oil. As winter approached, the Trudeau government promptly provided subsidies for eastern-Canadian oil imports, financed by a tax on western-Canadian oil and gas exports to the United States. A longer-term government strategy extended western oil supplies to the Quebec market, created a government-run oh company, encouraged conservation, and promoted Arctic and offshore petroleum exploration. A 320-kilometre (200-mrle) limit, claimed but sparingly enforced by Canada’s tiny navy and coast guard, belatedly offered the offshore fishery a chance to protect its dwindling fish stocks.
The success of opec reinforced the comforting lesson that inflation was beyond Canada’s control. Instead, tying wages, pensions, and government payments to a rising consumer price index seemed a painless way to protect people from rising prices. In 1974, the finance minister, John Turner, even borrowed a Tory idea and indexed tax payments. While spending climbed, the government’s revenues would not. It was a certain recipe for a huge deficit, but voters made no complaints. After two months of unwonted charm from Trudeau, bleak warnings from the Tories, and protests from the ndp, voters on July 8 gave the Liberals 141 seats, the Tories 95, the Creditistes 11, and the ndp a mere 16, half their 1972 contingent. David Lewis lost his seat.
Trudeau had not reproduced his 1968 triumph. A solid Quebec and most of Ontario and New Brunswick could dominate Parliament, but across the West, Liberals took only 13 seats, 8 of them in British Columbia. Since 1968, Trudeau’s support on the prairies had fallen from a third to a quarter of the electorate. Though a Liberal victory had been predicted by the opinion polls, the vast majority of westerners had refused a lift on the bandwagon. Like Rene Levesque’s followers, western Canadians were fed up with their place in Confederation, though their concerns and their solutions were very different.
If Ottawa misunderstood the West, understanding was never easy. Dramatic changes in the region produced contradictory messages. Painful transformations are easier if someone else can be blamed: a distant federal government was a traditional Prairie scapegoat. Often, it was western radicals who defended nostalgic visions of rural community life, while prairie right-wingers demanded sweeping changes, Nowhere were changes more apparent than in the West’s basic industry, agriculture. If the family-owned farm remained the basis of production, machinery and productivity had transformed it into a million-dollar enterprise, covering thousands of acres. Success depended on scientific and financial skill as well as on the traditional partnership of nature and hard work. While wheat remained the staple, wise farmers had diversified into canola, flax, and, when climate and irrigation permitted, vegetables. Huge farms brought depopulation: three-quarters of a million prairie people left the land after the war. The familiar infrastructure of a horse-drawn era—villages, rail lines, grain elevators—was obsolete. No longer was the landscape shaped by the fifteen-mile range of a team of horses and a loaded wagon. In 1933, 5,758 grain elevators had broken the prairie skyline; by 1978, almost half of them were gone. Between 1940 and 1980, the rural share of the prairie population fell from 60 per cent to 30 per cent.
By the 1970s, business had replaced farming as the dominant prairie preoccupation. Winnipeg, Regina, and Saskatoon more than doubled in population; buoyed by oil and gas revenues, Calgary and Edmonton grew sevenfold, to populations of 800,000 each. By 1981, both of them had surpassed Winnipeg, becoming competing regional metropolises. Over the mountains, western growth and Pacific markets helped make Vancouver a city of more than a million people. All of this was possible because of diversification far beyond agriculture and its related industries. Until 1947, Alberta had supplied about 10 per cent of Canada’s gas and oil. The Leduc oil field discovery brought billions of dollars in investment and a swift takeover by the multinational corporations that dominated the Western world’s oU industry. By 1970, Alberta’s production could have satisfied the entire Canadian market, although it made more economic sense in a continental industry to export it to the United States. Alberta’s neighbouring provinces strained to match its good fortune. Saskatoon proclaimed itself the potash capital of the world; Regina boasted a steel-making complex serving the region’s pipeline needs; nickel mines at Thompson and Lynn Lake gave Manitoba a claim to diversification.
Prairie politics were tied to development strategies. The claim that Manitoba Tories had been swindled by foreign development of a forest-products complex at The Pas had helped the ndp win power in 1969. So did resistance to ambitious hydroelectricity developments on the Nelson River by Native and environmental groups. The continuing
In the midst of the 1970s energy crisis, it seemed sensible to build a pipeline down the Mackenzie Valley to bring oil from proven and future finds—but not before Native people had been consulted. Their views, collected by Mr. Justice Thomas Berger in countless small communities, shelved the project. Local rights and Native claims were beginning to be taken seriously.
Resource debate helped defeat the ndp in 1977 and, in turn, the resurrected Tories in 1982. In Saskatchewan, the statistics of rural depopulation had helped defeat the CCF in 1964; a determination to control the province’s potash industry helped restore the NDP to power in 1971. That year, Peter Lougheed annihilated Alberta’s Social Credit regime by articulating a provincial concern about the long-term future when the oil and natural gas were gone. Wealth had not made prairie people forget the Great Depression or their vulnerability as primary producers.
Outsiders might find little in common between Lougheed, with his background in professional football and Calgary boardrooms, and the soft-spoken socialism of his Saskatchewan neighbour, Allan Blakeney. Certainly, oil magnates preferred the freewheeling style of Edmonton to the regulatory caution of Regina. What both provinces shared with most of the Canadian West was a determination to control their own natUral resources and, so far as they could, their economic destiny. Nothing in their history had persuaded westerners that their interests were much safer in Ottawa and Toronto than in New York or Houston.
Trudeau’s intervention in the 1973 oil price shock made obvious sense in eastern Canada. Why should Canadians suffer from a foreign cartel when Canada had enough domestic oil to be free of opec machinations? Taxing energy exports to the United States to subsidize consumers temporarily dependent on opec supplies was no injustice to Americans or Albertans, though it was a splendid demonstration, particularly to Quebecers, of some of the practical benefits of Confederation. And why should Alberta expect to profit from the new world prices when those were the work of a monstrous international extortion? The entire country would benefit from oil policies that had made Canada self-sufficient. Alberta itself would share in a billion-dollar project to extract usable fuel from the vast tar-sands deposits near Fort McMurray, as well as access to new Quebec markets. Promoting frontier oil exploration and a federally run oil corporation, Petro-Canada, should have made sense, east and west.
It did not. Angry westerners argued that Ottawa had never intervened to save them from the world price of cars, overcoats, or anything else produced in Ontario or Quebec. Holding down prices for a depleting resource robbed future generations of money that otherwise would have poured into Alberta and Saskatchewan Heritage Funds. Without foreign investment, there would have been no energy industry in the West. As it was, production from proven sources had now passed its peak. Frontier oil would be an enormous gamble to find and a near-impossibility to deliver. The fatuity of Ottawa’s dreams was underlined when plans for a Mackenzie Valley pipeline to transport natural gas and, later, oil from the Arctic Ocean to Alberta were scuttled after a royal commission headed by Mr. Justice Thomas Berger endorsed the claims of northern Native groups and their southern sympathizers. Inuit and Dene—words that now supplanted the older, white names of “Eskimo” and “Indian”—suddenly found themselves with the leverage to stop northern development until their own rival political and territorial demands had been satisfied. While Native groups demanded control of resource policies in the North, prairie governments fought to retain the powers they had struggled to acquire in 1930. Saskatchewan’s government lined up with Alberta’s Conservatives when the Trudeau government attempted to scuttle ndp plans to nationalize the provincial potash industry.
Claims of rich offshore Atlantic oil deposits turned even impoverished consuming provinces such as Newfoundland and Nova Scotia into allies against Ottawa. Newfoundland’s brash Premier Brian Peckford borrowed Heritage Fund money from Alberta to sustain his fight against Ottawa’s claim to the ocean shelf. British Columbia, with its own share of natural gas and its own offshore dreams, completed the hostile provincial phalanx.
Ottawa also found itself trapped by dilemmas that westerners themselves hesitated to face. During the late 1970s, prairie farmers enjoyed some of their richest years in history, but they might have been richer still if their products had not been snarled in an overload, obsolete transportation system. Economists had an easy explanation: the obligation to ship wheat at 1897 prices, set by the Crow’s Nest Pass Agreement, was aU the argument railway managers needed against modernization. Yet farmers and their political representatives defended the “Crow rate” with all the passion owed to a sacred regional totem. Counter-arguments—that higher freight rates would compel farmers to sell their grain as feed for western cattle—were not designed to win farm votes. Federally purchased hopper cars did not smooth the steep Rocky Mountain grades or expand Vancouver’s clogged grain terminals, though their manufacture did create some jobs in Nova Scotia.
Oil prices, freight rates, and business arguments inflamed the West’s view of Confederation. The truth was that a region with a sense of its own economic power wanted respect and influence. When corporate headquarters, fleeing Quebec nationalism, leaped over Toronto to erect their huge glass towers in Calgary, westerners were properly gleeful. Politicians and financiers wanted regional banks and stock exchanges. They rejoiced in local multimillionaires—Fred Mannix, Jim Pattison, Peter Pocklington, Murray Pezim—and accused their eastern critics of jealousy.
Far from wanting out of Confederation, most westerners believed that they were excluded from their rightful influence. Constitutional reforms that would have given only Quebec and Ontario a veto on future amendments, proposed by Ottawa in 1971, symbolized an outdated Canadian political order. Alberta, insisted Peter Lougheed, had as much right to a veto as any of the central provinces, and it was not his view alone. As for the bilingual, bicultural fixation of Trudeau’s Ottawa, such ideas could be positively harmful to a region acutely conscious of its many competing linguistic, ethnic, and cultural groups.
By 1979, when Fougheed, Blakeney, and the West seemed to have reached some accommodation with Ottawa on energy costs, a fresh opec initiative virtually tripled energy prices. In an election year, the Trudeau government responded as it had in 1973, subsidizing the importing provinces at the expense of Alberta. This did not save the
Liberals, but it left a bitter legacy that foe Clark’s short-lived Tory government would not be able to overcome. Caught between Lougheed’s intransigence and the obduracy of Ontario's Progressive Conservatives, not even an Alberta-born prime minister would be able to survive. When, on February 18, 1980, Quebec and Ontario voters made Pierre Trudeau prime minister again, bitterness between East and West came close to a political flashpoint.
World History
