Welcome to week four in Paul 1030F, A Beginner's Guide to Canada, and this is our final lecture before the test, the first test, and you'll be able to write the first test this Friday, October 6th. anytime starting at 6 in the morning. It's a one hour test. It's based on all the lectures that we've had so far from week one to week four and all the readings as well. And it has 60 questions, so it's about a minute per question and you are to complete that on OWL anytime starting at 6 6 a.m.
On Friday October 6th And you're not supposed to do complete that test with any aids. It's just basically or any help It's basically a test test for you to see how much you've learned in the class so far. So make sure You complete that test on Friday.
It has to be written on Friday October 6th on OWL So what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about Canada's political economy. And we're going to focus specifically on something that Harold Innes developed, a famous Canadian political scientist. He developed this theory called the Canadian political economy.
called Staples Theory to describe Canada. And a lot of people really believe that if you want to understand our economy, if you want to even understand our political system and how our political and economic system intersect. and interact with each other to structure a Canadian life, then you need to understand Staples theory and the way in which our country was built upon Staples. So that's what we're going to do today. So last week we focused on the Canadian political system.
We spent some time talking about Canada's democracy, its democratic system, and we learned that Canada's democratic system actually scores quite highly. relative to other countries in the world. Maybe not as highly as some Canadians might expect and hope, but still quite highly compared to most other countries in the world. Then we spent some time looking at the Canadian political...
system. We learned about how much of Canada's political system is borrowed from the United Kingdom. So specifically for instance our Westminster parliamentary system.
You know the way in which our executive and our legislature and our judiciary function. Which is actually quite different from the United States. Whereas we did borrow some things from the United States and specifically we borrowed our system of federalism. Our federal system. Which the Americans, some people argue, you borrowed from the Haudenosaunee, the indigenous communities that straddle sort of in Quebec, Ontario, New York areas of Canada, the United States that we know today.
So after providing a very high level overview of our Canadian political system, we then looked at the nitty gritty of our democratic system. And we wanted to see, okay, look, these are how our institutions work, but how well do they work? And we found some compelling evidence, I think, that as good as our... system is relative to the rest of the world, it still suffers from a number of important problems and we focused on basically two, right?
We focused on the concentration of power problem that despite democracy and supposedly we all have the right to vote and we all have a say and we all have the right to influence our government, in fact, the way in which our system is designed and the way in which it occurs in practice is that a lot of power is concentrated in a small group of people, the prime minister and his or her cabinet. nine unelected Supreme Court judges, that small groups of individuals seem to have a significant amount of power in our system. Of course, the other issue is that we've seen a decline in political participation problem, that Canadians are participating less and less in the formal aspects of our political system, especially in voting, for instance. And maybe Canadians are participating less.
participating in other ways, such as political protests. But in general, in terms of the formal participation in our formal democratic system, Canadians seem to be doing less of it over time. And these are potentially important. These are potentially troubling trends that speak to a weakening democratic system, that perhaps our democratic system is becoming less legitimate. It's losing its legitimacy.
Perhaps you know some of the Trends we talked about in terms of public opinion and our values, that those are going to decline as well. That perhaps we're eventually going to lose our confidence in our government and our political institutions. Perhaps we're no longer going to be as deferential to our political institutions. And in fact, in the last several years, especially post-COVID, we've seen some of these trends a little bit, especially in terms of declining confidence and also less deference to our political leaders. If we look at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
some of the vitriol that he has had to endure, especially in 2023, you wonder about whether or not Canadian values are changing. There's a number of YouTube clips you can go on and see a number of news reports that talk about some of these very almost American-style confrontations between the public and Canadians with protesters. So there's one example in Belleville, Ontario, where they show... The prime minister trying to meet people in Belleville only to be accosted by a number of protesters who are shouting all sorts of very strong language and sort of vitriol, all sorts of nasty names and accusations towards the prime minister.
And so, you know, post-COVID, we're seeing more of this than we had seen in the past. And maybe that's a function of some of the things we talked about, the concentration of power and some other kinds of trends. So our political system is a very important part of how Canada functions.
It speaks to the kind of values we have, the kind of values we might develop. It speaks to the kinds of laws and policies that we get. It speaks to the kind of discourse we have as Canadian citizens, in terms of how we speak to each other, how we speak to elites, how do we speak to authority figures. The political system of any country is very important for structuring...
sort of the life of the citizens who live there. It speaks to the kinds of who wins and who loses, who are the people who are going to dominate and control in society and who doesn't. Of course, equally important to that political system is our economic system, right? And some people even argue that the economic system is more important than our political system, that in fact our political system is designed to serve and protect the economic system.
You know, there's a... It's sort of a saying that is said in a number of countries about how money makes the world go round. That really, for most people, our primary impulse is to make money. It's all about getting more wealth in most countries. And so the economic system determines who gets what.
It determines who are going to be the powerful and who are going to be the not. It determines how much inequality there's going to be and how much equality. It's going to determine how our political system functions. Some people argue that a political system is mainly about distributing power and ensuring that the very wealthy and the very powerful continue to have that position over time.
So in the last couple of weeks, I've talked a couple of times or I've mentioned a couple of times a phrase, and that phrase is political economy. And political economy is a... is actually a subject of study.
If you take courses in economics or if you take courses in political science, there's a field of political economy. For instance, in our department, Professor Adam Harms is one of our full-time faculty members who teaches political economy and does a lot of research in political economy. So it's a field of study, but it's also a theoretical set of concepts and tools that allow us us to understand societies.
And so, you know, the political economy sort of refers to the intersection of politics and the intersection of economics, and how that intersection of politics and economics structures all aspects of life in a society. So today I'm going to build on the reading. So the reading sort of gives you an overview of what political economy is, what Canadian political economy is, a number of concepts.
and variants and themes and ideas. And so we're going to talk a little bit about what political economy is, what are some of the main concepts. So I'll review some of the stuff from the reading.
Then we'll talk about how it applies to Canada. We'll talk about how, in particular, Staples economy is the concept that most people think captures the nature and development of Canada. And we'll look at some of the effects of Staples theory or some of the effects of the Staples economy on life in Canada over time. So that's what we're going to do today.