Since the beginning of the neoliberal era, Canada’s economy has become dominant in many ecologically destructive industries. This has upended traditional leftist analysis of Canada’s economy as one completely subservient to the United States. Canadian activists have begun organizing against them; international activists should do the same.

TD’s support for the project shouldn’t be surprising. As Canada’s economy now heavily relies on the finance sector and resource extraction industries, many corporations invest in such international projects. TD’s recent history exemplifies this. In 2004, it expanded into the United States and is now the nineteenth largest bank in the world. Many of Canada’s largest corporations followed TD’s lead and now wreak havoc across the globe.

In downtown Vancouver on September 12, activists in solidarity with the Standing Rock protesters occupied a TD Bank , one of several Canadian financial institutions backing the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).

Canada: Imperialist Power?

In the 1970s, Canada’s left was dominated by nationalist ideology that ran all the way from Pierre Trudeau’s governing Liberal Party to small Maoist sects that joined the New Communist Movement. This historical orientation left today’s activists ill-suited to fight corporate power on an international scale.

The radical version of the nationalist position argued that Canada was either a resource colony or an American dependency. Some went so far as to categorize Canada not as a core country, but as one languishing on the semi-periphery. Critics used phrases like “wealthiest colony” and “rich dependency” to describe the country. Canada’s economic development was argued to be stunted in manufacturing, dependent on American imports of its resources, and unable to chart its own economic destiny.

The Liberal government enacted a number of economic policies in the 1970s to improve Canada’s profile on the global stage. It tried to spur Canadian ownership in the petroleum industry and created the state-owned Petro-Canada. It also set up the Foreign Investment Review Agency to ensure that foreign investment benefited Canada. These policies did drive out foreign ownership, which peaked in 1970.

But in the 1980s, this left-nationalist view came under increased scrutiny. Paul Kellogg’s recent book, Escape from the Staple Trap, demonstrates that Canada has long been a major player in the global economy — and an imperialist country in its own right.

Left nationalism was always a mirage. Canada is a settler-colonial state with a subjugated indigenous population. The old nationalist narrative is insufficient to deal with an imperialist country that exploits the Global South and participates in military adventurism abroad under NATO and the United Nations.

In fact, as Kellogg argues, Canadian capital has used military parasitism to benefit from its close relations with the United States. This allows Canada to benefit from the global order of capital protected by the American military at minimal cost. Even with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s increases in military spending, NATO recently reported that Canada only spends 0.98 percent of GDP on its military — a bargain, to be sure, to enjoy the spoils of American military hegemony.

An examination of Canada’s economic history further shows that it was never an American dependent. After confederation in 1867, the National Policy — designed to lessen the country’s reliance on the United States — became Canada’s primary development plan. In the 1878 election, Conservative John A. Macdonald campaigned on this policy and defeated the pro–free trade Liberals.

Though met with some protests from farmers and regional interests, the National Policy built a high tariff wall to protect domestic industry. The government also completed a transcontinental railway to link British Columbia with eastern Canada.

The prairies were settled at a genocidal cost to indigenous peoples. The policy did not significantly differ from American industrializing strategies, which descended from Alexander Hamilton’s ideas. What was different was Canada’s integration within the British empire’s preferential trading system. It took until 1930 for the United States to become Canada’s top trading partner.

Further, Canada was arguably the world’s first branch-plant economy. To avoid tariffs, American companies set up branch plants in Canada to produce for the domestic economy — to both nations’ benefit.

The General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler plants around Toronto and in southwestern Ontario — only a short drive to the border — are legacies of the National Policy, which was slowly dismantled after World War II. The automobile industry became fully integrated in 1965, and in 1988, the nations agreed to a full free-trade deal.

That deal, however, didn’t signal Canada’s submission to its more powerful neighbor. The national bourgeoisie pushed hard for it. During stagflation in the 1970s, the Business Council on National Issues — today the Business Council of Canada — was formed in direct imitation of the US Business Roundtable.

The Business Council played a major role when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government pursued that first free-trade agreement with the United States. Clearly, Canada’s bourgeoisie was capable of articulating its own interests — which would be less likely if it were a resource colony or dependency of the United States.

Nevertheless, the feeling of Canada’s economic inferiority has lingered. Few iconic brands are globally recognized as Canadian. Despite a sizable amount of automobile production, Canada never developed its own national automaker. Even small countries like Sweden have produced more than one.

Major aerospace and transportation companies like Boeing and Airbus, for example, sell their products all over the world. But Canada’s Bombardier — which recently received bad press recently due to its delayed delivery of Toronto’s new streetcars — seems to need government aid every few years.

But Canada’s most powerful global corporations tend to be those that people don’t interact with directly. One look at the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) will show which Canadian corporations project the most misery and environmental degradation internationally.