Labour / Le Travail
Issue 91 (2023)

Editors’ Introduction / Mot du directeur

Deindustrialization in Canada: New Perspectives

Lachlan MacKinnon, Cape Breton University
Steven High, Concordia University

The post-1945 decades are frequently remembered as a period of unionized prosperity. The French call these years “les trentes glorieuses,” the British call them the “long boom,” and American historian Jefferson Cowie has referred to this period as the “Great Exception” in a longer history of capitalism.¹ Our understanding of these years as exceptional is only possible, however, with the knowledge of what comes next. The wrenching economic changes of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, which displaced millions of industrial workers across North America and western Europe, cast a long shadow in both directions. A growing number of historians, especially in the wake of the recent electoral breakthrough of right-wing populism in many countries, have therefore emphasized the centrality of deindustrialization to the history of the second half of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st.²

By “deindustrialization,” we don’t just mean the economic process of mine, mill, and factory closures. One of the great strengths of the deindustrial framing is the way it places “social and community factors alongside economic and political considerations of industrial change.”³ By deindustrialization, we are therefore speaking of a wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural process with no fixed end point. It is an unfinished history. Deindustrialization, writes American public historian Cathy Stanton, “is a ‘history’ that is so vast, so unfinished, and so woven into the present on virtually every level of our lives, that it seems unimaginable to me that anyone can think of it as history or past.”⁴ While these processes continue, it cannot be denied that workers and their organizations have faced significant personal, political, and cultural crises since the 1970s. Jackie Clarke describes such crises in terms of “visibility” and “invisibility”; alongside the unfolding of deindustrialization, industrial workers found themselves increasingly invisible – pushed aside in a public sphere that no longer focused its attention on their concerns.⁵

In 2016, two events signalled a return to visibility for deindustrialized regions and placed questions of class once again within the realm of popular discourse. First, in February, embattled Conservative prime minister David Cameron announced a planned referendum on Britain’s continued affiliation with the European Union. When the results of the referendum were announced in June, it was clear that the status quo relationship would soon be dramatically severed. Similarly, the election of Donald Trump in the United States in November had politicos across popular media scrambling to find an answer for the unforeseen results. In each country, media accounts abounded that described each event as a class-based backlash erupting from deindustrialized regions of the country, caused by the popular lack of attention to marginalized white working-class voters.

Such analyses frequently position the “left behind” as purveyors of racism and a countermovement to “identity politics.”⁶ The conflation of working-class political action with white political action served as a smokescreen; it allowed for deindustrialized communities and their residents – still struggling with the ravages of the neoliberal turn and the hollowing out of industrial communities – to be blamed for the regressive populist movements emerging in each country. Such claims were not ported by empirical evidence. Brexit was delivered, Gurminder Bhambra writes, “by the propertied, well-off, white middle class based in southern England, not the northern working-class who are more commonly held responsible.”⁷ Similar findings were reflected in later analyses of Trump’s largest demographic of porters.⁸

While the true shape of both the Brexit and Trump voter coalitions was being clarified in the pages of scholarly journals, media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic continued to trumpet the flawed justifications of working-class (read: white) alienation. Canadians have yet to experience the same sort of surprise that came with the sudden victory of the populist right across other parts of the Americas and Europe, but events within the country are increasingly being framed as part of this broader trend of (white) working-class resurgence.⁹ Perhaps predictably, Ross Douthat, writing for the New York Times, applied the same shopworn analysis in a February 2022 article discussing the Freedom Convoy and its basis for port in protesting Canadian anti-covid measures. The “new class war,” he writes, is reflective of a fundamental division between the “virtuals” and the “practicals,” revealing a gulf between those who work in the “mundane physical reality” and those who comfortably collect salaries within the virtual space.¹⁰

As a result of these ongoing circumstances, the editors of this special issue of Labour/Le Travail recognize a new urgency in taking stock of the scholarship relating to deindustrialization in Canada and pushing toward a broader recognition of the existing and continuing crisis. Our contributors demonstrate how scholars within this historical subfield have begun to question the periodization of deindustrialization and consider the multiplicity of its impacts in the longer term. We hope that this will promote greater attention to deindustrialization as an ongoing function of global capitalism. This special issue joins an upsurge in critical scholarship in this area, evidenced by the recent publication of thematic issues in such journals as Le Mouvement social, the Journal of Working-Class Studies, and Labor, as well as new research initiatives such as the sshrc-funded transnational partnership project “Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time” (depot), of which four of the seven contributors published here are part, including ourselves.¹¹ depot brings together researchers, industrial heritage museums, labour archives, and trade unions across western Europe and North America to study the political history of industrial closure.

Deindustrialization is an integral part of capitalism.¹² The dominant bifurcated view of the postwar era as a period of prosperity followed by crisis – though accurate in the aggregate – risks submerging the fact that postwar prosperity was geographically uneven and cut short in some areas. Drawing on examples from across Canada, we can see that the periodization of this process unfolds at different rates. British Columbia’s boiler and engine industry, for example, went into decline early in the 20th century.¹³ Huge swathes of the Maritime provinces deindustrialized in the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁴ Indeed, as Jane Reid and John Reid reveal, regional deindustrialization in the Maritimes unfolded on a near-cyclical basis. After the Depression years came a brief revival, followed by the quick succession of collapse in coal and steel, compounded twenty years later with the decline of state-ported tertiary manufacturers through the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁵ But even in prosperous Southern Ontario, we saw the emergence of “depressed areas” such as Windsor after Ford’s 1951 announcement that it would move its auto-assembly operations to Oakville.¹⁶ Accordingly, we would caution against presenting the late 20th century as the historical bookend of the industrial age, as some have suggested.¹⁷ After all, the world has not deindustrialized – things are still being made, just somewhere else.

Indeed, the radical restructuring of the international division of labour initiated by trade liberalization under the Kennedy (1963–67) and Tokyo (1973–79) rounds of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt), as well as the free trade agreements that followed, fundamentally altered the industrial geography of the planet. Capital moves, of course, and the places to which it moves nearly always feature lower-wage workers, few employment and safety protections, and overall lower rates of trade unionism.¹⁸ As geographer Doreen Massey pointed out in her classic study, “a country’s internal economic geography reflects its place in the international political economy, the international division of labour.”¹⁹

These sweeping changes had tangible consequences for many Canadians. According to the published reports of Statistics Canada, manufacturing as a share of total employment fell from 22 per cent in 1973 to 15.3 per cent in 2000 and just 10.3 per cent in 2010. In 1993 alone, 880,000 Canadians lost their jobs to restructuring.²⁰ Only 16.9 per cent of these men and women found new full-time employment in the first six months, and only 40.8 per cent had done so after two years. Seventy-five per cent of all the mills and factories operating in Canada in 1961 were closed by 1991.²¹ Another study found that one million manufacturing jobs present in 1973 were gone by 1996, or two-thirds of the total.²² Other jobs were being created, of course, but not usually ones that paid the same wages or were located nearby. Increasingly, Canadian mills and factories have relatively short working lives – a fact that has profound consequences for working-class communities.

There is a gendered dimension to these systemic shifts. Indeed, the industries that have received some measure of protection in trade negotiations proved to be those most significantly associated with cultural conceptions of the male breadwinner. Female-dominated industries like textiles and clothing – in which 40 per cent and 75 per cent of workers were women, respectively – were swiftly traded away. This pattern struck Québec particularly hard as these two sectors once represented 23 per cent of manufacturing employment in the province, compared with 8 per cent in Ontario and 12 per cent for Canada as a whole. Political economist Rianne Mahon could therefore speak of “tariff-induced deindustrialization” in her 1984 study of Canada’s textile industry. The sexual division of labour, defined by Joy Parr as the “sum of the sex-labelling of specific tasks,” must therefore be taken into account when we speak of the timing and geography of deindustrialization.²³

We get a sense of the enormity of these changes in an oral history interview with Denise Tanguay-Dufault, who worked for Dominion Textile in Montréal, first at its Hochelaga mill and then its Mont-Royal plant. Both closed beneath her:

Mais j’ai trouvé ça d’valeur pis quand qu’ça fermé là, le Textile là, à Mont-Royal, on était assez débiné! On était débiné, on perdait notre travail. On était prêtes à travailler nous autres. On perdait notre travail. Qu’est-ce que tu veux, ça marchait pu là parce que les Chinois avaient envahi l’marché. … Y ont commencé par fermer Hochelaga, la plus grande là, plus vieille aussi. Écoutez, y avait Hochelaga – ici, à Montréal – y avait Hochelaga, Merchant, Mont-Royal, trois, plus une à Frontenac, mais à Frontenac ça là, j’pense que c’était juste du traitement de fil quand il le r’cevait là. OK. En tout cas, y avait quat’’ grosses usines qui employaient beaucoup d’gens, beaucoup, beaucoup d’gens. Quand ça fermé, ça fait du chômage … Ça fait du chômage, ça pas d’bon sens. Pis les gens qui travaillaient dans l’textile avaient pas une grosse instruction. Y allaient travailler au coton. On travaillait au coton. Y appelaient ça : « la coton»!²⁴

Oral history offers a different way of knowing and has proven central to the study of deindustrialization in the English-speaking world, revealing the lived interior of these sweeping changes. Hundreds of interviews with displaced industrial workers are now archived in public institutions across Canada. At Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, for example, you can hear the recorded oral histories of displaced Montréal-area textile, glass, steel, and railway workers, Southern Ontario auto-assembly and parts workers, and Northern Ontario paper workers. There are also dozens of other interviews focused on deindustrializing urban neighbourhoods, including the multiracial Montréal neighbourhood of Little Burgundy, and on geographic mobility of workers today.

Historians and other scholars have understood the destructiveness of industrial decline as a process of socioeconomic ruination. Sociologist Alice Mah speaks of industrial ruination as a “lived process.”²⁵ It is a form of slow structural violence, “an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”²⁶ First the factories close, and then nearby stores, taverns, schools, and churches close as people move away.²⁷ Public services are cut. By the 1980s, governments were more willing to “‘tolerate’ or accept as inevitable and ‘natural’ levels of unemployment two or three times that which would have been politically tolerable in the immediate postwar period.”²⁸ Those economically and geographically left behind are older, poorer, and less educated. They have few options. This process of emptying out can occur at the scale of the neighbourhood, village, city, or even region.

Regional underdevelopment rather than deindustrialization has traditionally been central to understanding Canada’s economic history. Canadian commenters often described a nation reliant on the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” rather than factory or industrial workers. The “boom-to-bust” cycle of the resource frontier therefore structured our national understanding of economic change in ways that differed from those in western Europe. Yet, as Steven High details in his own contribution, it was in view of this cycle that the “deindustrialization thesis” was first formulated by Canadian left nationalists in the Waffle movement of the early 1970s to explain capital flight and disinvestment. The sense that American-based multinationals favoured their own was seemingly confirmed by the protectionist policies of US President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. Canadian economic dependence on the United States was thus perceived by many as primarily to blame for manufacturing job losses, be it due to the “strategic aim” of the US government or the ways that US multinationals organized their operations and made decisions. As Robert Laxer wrote in (Canada) Ltd., the deindustrialization thesis offered both an analysis and a political strategy at a time of national crisis.²⁹

Technological changes influenced these processes but perhaps did not represent the sort of primary explanation for economic change that is commonly ascribed in the popular press.³⁰ Rather, the development and implementation of new technologies across industries were themselves deeply embedded within corporate decision-making, which also employed capital flight and disinvestment in the effort to redefine relations of production. Leslie Erlich and Bob Russell expanded on this notion in a 2003 article in Labour/Le Travail, writing of employment security on the Canadian National Railway.³¹ Job losses skyrocketed in the 1950s alongside the shift to diesel from steam, which reduced the number of employees necessary to operate a train and lessened the number of stops the train would need to make to water and refuel, hitting rural communities hard.

Compared with the United States, Canada’s rate of unionization has held up remarkably well. It declined from 38 per cent of the workforce in 1981 to 32 per cent in 2012: a drop of just 6 points. The US rate, which was historically higher than Canada’s, has collapsed to just 12 per cent.³² When we dig a little deeper, however, it becomes clear that Canada’s rate of unionization has remained relatively high because of the fact that 71 per cent of the public sector is unionized. In the private sector, the rate had declined to just 16.4 per cent in 2012. As a result, trade unions staggered from one tragedy to the next and entire unions passed out of existence.³³ Mergers between unions were one response to the crisis; breaking away from US-based internationals was another. Studies of the labour movement such as Sam Gindin’s book The Canadian Auto Workers speak to the ways that “divergent strategies” in the face of deindustrialization drove a wedge in international unions as the US-based leadership embraced concessions and the Canadian-leadership counselled defiance: “The American leadership of the uaw chose to sell concessions, and their demoralized membership acquiesced. The Canadian section rebelled, and that rebellion ultimately led to the formation of a new union – that of the caw.”³⁴ Many scholars blame the “accommodationist stance” of the trade union movement for its failure to resist deindustrialization.³⁵ The juxtaposition of American “business unionism” and Canadian “social unionism” has therefore been a staple of labour studies, but trade union history is more complex than this sweeping opposition suggests.

High’s 2003 book Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt compared the political responses to industrial closures on either side of the Canada-US border in the Great Lakes region.³⁶ Wrapping themselves in the Maple Leaf, Canadian trade unionists cast the struggle as one pitting Canadian workers against American bosses. For a time, it was effective in politicizing the issue of plant closings at a time when US unions were being decimated. The divergent political environments prevailing in the two countries were on display when the Canadian government insisted that Chrysler, one of the big three automakers, make massive new capital investments in their Canadian production facilities as a condition of getting bailed out in 1980. The US government made its own bailout conditional on wringing more wage and benefit concessions from American workers. These differing approaches reflected diverging political environments on either side of the border. Dimitry Anastakis and Steven High, however, disagree as to why this was the case.³⁷ While Anastakis, in a 2007 article in Urban History Review, emphasized the far-sightedness of Canadian policymakers, High points to political pressure from below, from a militant trade union movement that regularly wrapped itself in the Canadian or Québec flag during these years. Either way, no Canadian auto-assembly lines closed during the 1980s, at a time when the industry was in a state of free-fall in the US Rust Belt. This is no longer the case, of course, as Canada’s auto sector was hit hard in the early 2000s with a rising Canadian dollar resulting from oil exports. Canadian manufacturing employment dropped from 1.98 million in 2001 to just 1.48 million in 2016.³⁸

The economic situation would have been even worse in Canada had not governments stepped in to save Canada’s aeronautics industry in the 1970s, as well as a number of steel mills, paper mills, and other sites of production – running them under public ownership or facilitating employee or community buyouts. Jack Quarter’s 1995 book Crossing the Line, the first major study of these efforts, rightly emphasizes the importance of the 1972 closure of Canadian International Paper’s Temiscaming, Québec, paper mill.³⁹ Only after the Ottawa River was blockaded by fishing boats, which prevented the company from moving its logs downriver, did the firm acquiesce to a sale. Employee-owned Tembec was born, and with it, its founders became worker-ownership evangelists arriving as white knights at other major plant closings with decidedly mixed results.

The existing scholarship in Canada includes four book-length studies of individual factory closures, starting with J. Paul Grayson’s 1985 Corporate Strategy and Plant Closures: The skf Experience, which found that the Scarborough ball-bearing plant was a victim of a changing international division of labour and the “export of jobs” that resulted.⁴⁰ Then, in 1994, David Sobel and Susan Meurer published Working at Inglis: The Life and Death of a Canadian Factory, about an iconic Toronto appliance maker. Sobel and Meurer were able to accompany workers during the plant’s dying days, conducting interviews and taking photographs.⁴¹ More recently, High’s One Job Town and Lachlan MacKinnon’s Closing Sysco explore two closures in depth: those of a paper mill town in Northern Ontario and a steel mill in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.⁴² These two books stepped beyond the scope of plant closure to examine the multi-faceted impacts of deindustrialization in the rural resource frontier, contextualized these experiences in the longer history of Canadian capitalism and settler colonialism, and considered the long shadow cast by industrial decline in the years and decades following the issuance of final layoff notices.⁴³ There are also a number of local studies of deindustrializing towns or neighbourhoods. For example, Tracy Neumann compared the urban politics of deindustrialization in Hamilton, Ontario, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, whereas Alissa Mazar examined the rise of casino politics in Windsor as a response to lost industrial jobs.⁴⁴

The regional development paradigm, so strong in the 1960s and 1970s, gave way to community adjustment of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1981, for example, the federal government pivoted away from regional development as a one-size-fits-all approach and toward the localized delivery of “community adjustment” for hard-hit industrial towns and cities in any region. The first ten towns to be designated included four in Southern Ontario: Brantford, Kitchener-Waterloo, Chatham, and Windsor.⁴⁵ The new community-based approach to adjustment included a portable wage subsidy to employers of displaced local workers for twelve months anywhere in Canada. There was also funding for the bridging of displaced workers to retirement.⁴⁶ If regional development had been a response to perceived underdevelopment, worker and community adjustment was a response to industrial closures. In this context, the government’s continued subsidization of the regional redistribution of industrial jobs was increasingly controversial in the deindustrializing heartland. There were also increasing questions about its effectiveness. Aerovox Canada, a subsidiary of a US conglomerate, closed its Hamilton plant in the mid-1970s, laying off 275 mostly female workers, after it got a federal regional development grant to relocate production to Amherst, Nova Scotia. A few years later, this footloose company moved again.⁴⁷

Despite early resistance to industrial closures, Canadian governments increasingly accepted deindustrialization as inevitable and so focused their energies on worker adjustment and retraining as their primary strategy. Critics have called adjustment programs “an ideological smokescreen for attitude adjustment,” individualizing the problem of structural change and the violence that is built into it.⁴⁸ As Jennifer Stephen writes, “labour adjustment programming is also one means of depoliticizing, defusing the risky situation of looming permanent mass unemployment.”⁴⁹

It must be said, however, that deindustrialization is not limited to manufacturing plants in industrial towns and cities. In 1987, there were an estimated 1,000 single-industry towns across Canada.⁵⁰ Hundreds of resource-dependent communities in the provincial norths, across the prairies, and along the coastlines have lost their major industry. The 1993 cod moratorium, for example, “wrenched away the economic underpinning of the local social structure” in rural Newfoundland.⁵¹ Rosemary Ommer’s depiction of Rosie’s Cove, Newfoundland, taps into a pathos shared across the deindustrialized world:

What we see on the wharf today in 1996 are not nets being hung up to dry, or people leaving the fish plant at the end of a shift. We see boats beached and upside down on the slipway, unattended; we see crab and lobster pots, not nets, on the wharf. The single boat out there at the headland is catching crab … and the longliners in the summer are taking tourists out to watch the whales. Plants are idle most of the time. … Meanwhile a whole culture, one in which ecology and economy worked hand in hand, is dying before our eyes.⁵²

The moratorium can usefully be understood within a deindustrial framework, given the consequent societal pain, outmigration, and depopulation of rural Newfoundland and Labrador. Displaced fishers and fish factory workers were provided $382 per week, depending on experience, until money ran out in The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (tags), but in exchange had to enrol in counselling and training. Historian Sean Cadigan has challenged the “tragedy of the commons” discourse that essentially blames Newfoundlanders for squandering the resource. Cadigan saw this instead as the erosion of moral economy understandings – due to the state-led modernization of the fisheries – that placed limits on resource usage: “The moral economy of rural Newfoundland should not be romanticized: it was self-serving and imperfect in many ways. People used moral regulation of access to natural resources to ensure that the material basis of their communities would persist, not out of some benign respect for nature, but out of a selfish interest in their own welfare, and that of their children.”⁵³

Up to the present, Canada’s resource industries have largely been approached in terms of a regional “boom-to-bust” framework rather than one of deindustrialization. Regional resource economies are extremely susceptible to volatile commodity prices and resource exhaustion. These were economically dependent places, subject to decisions made outside the region. Geographer John H. Bradbury made a strong case that “resource towns should not be viewed simply as separate or isolated communities, or as company towns. Rather, they are integral parts of what has become a global system of resource extraction.”⁵⁴ Bradbury and Jeanne M. Wolfe undertook important research in the early 1980s on the crisis in the iron ore mining region of Northeastern Québec and Labrador, tying it to a wider political economy.⁵⁵ More recent studies, such as John Sandlos and Arn Keeling’s work on Cominco’s 1988 closure of its zinc-lead mine in Pine Point, Northwest Territories, have extended the analysis to the impact of industrial colonialism on Indigenous peoples.⁵⁶ Another article by Keeling, focusing on Uranium City, Saskatchewan, criticized the “quixotic government efforts to implant an outpost of industrial modernity.”⁵⁷ Whereas the history of mining is at the heart of deindustrialization studies in western Europe, it remains peripheral here in Canada.⁵⁸

There is likewise a distinct scholarship in economic geography on the late 20th-century restructuring of Canada’s forestry industry. Roger Hayter’s research on British Columbia’s forests, frequently co-authored with Trevor Barnes, stands particularly tall in this field.⁵⁹

Restructuring began with automation in the late 1960s, and paper mill closures began in the early 1990s. According to Hayter, Canada’s forestry sector has been tarred with the same brush as has stigmatized other so-called sunset industries: “The distinction between sunrise (youthful) and sunset (mature) industries rests on an interpretation of industrial evolution in which the various stages in an industry’s life cycle such as birth, youth, maturity, old age, and death are distinguished primarily by technological characteristics.”⁶⁰ One sees here the deindustrializing life course being imposed on an industry heretofore associated with cyclical boom-and-bust.

Given the erasure that accompanies industrial closure as buildings are demolished and records shredded, industrial and working-class heritage emerged as a key concern during the latter half of the 20th century.⁶¹ In Canada, as elsewhere, we saw at least three variants: (1) industrial heritage, with its focus on preserving the material vestiges; (2) ecomuseums, with their focus on working-class territories; and (3) workers arts and heritage, with a focus on workplace and trade union history. Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

The industrial preservation movement began in the United Kingdom, given the centrality of the Industrial Revolution in the national history of that country, and the first International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage (ticcih) conference was held in Lyon, France, in 1981. Industrial heritage sites in Canada, under the auspices of Parks Canada, are few and far between. What few there are, such as Montréal’s Lachine Canal, focus on “birthplace of industry” narratives that locate industrial work in the more distant past. These sites often fail to include deindustrialization in the interpretative frame – or gentrification and the longer history of class conflict, for that matter.⁶² To some extent, industrial heritage around the world has served to “soothe concerns” and thus has played a “crucial role in depoliticizing industrial decline.”⁶³ Industrial heritage was approached, to varying degrees, as a form of compensation for industrial decline and the mass displacement of industrial workers.⁶⁴ Whereas other countries have nominated industrial areas to unesco for consecration as World Heritage Sites, not so Canada – though Arvida, Québec, looks like an increasingly likely possibility.

For its part, the ecomuseum movement emerged in France in the ruins of industry. The first such industrial ecomuseum was created in Le Creusot in 1971 and was a new kind of participatory museum, without artifacts, that promised to “provide a framework of local and even national regeneration.”⁶⁵ It had a strong democratic impulse and affirmed local activism.⁶⁶ According to Saskia Cousin, the ecomuseum “ne s’adresse pas aux ouvriers mais veut concerner la ‘communauté tout entière,’ ‘les habitants.’”⁶⁷ Montréal’s Ecomusée du Fier Monde was founded in the city’s deindustrialized, but now highly gentrified, Centre-Sud (South-Central) district in 1980.⁶⁸ Other neighbourhood-based initiatives, like the Archives Populaires de Pointe-Saint-Charles, share a similar politics.

Finally, the idea of workers heritage emerged in Ontario during the early 1990s, with the financial port of the short-lived provincial ndp government. The Ontario Workplace Heritage Program of the Ontario Heritage Foundation gave out four grants in 1994, totalling $100,000, for a video and booklet titled “Preserving Workers Heritage in Ottawa”; a video tour called “Mapping the Workers’ City” in Hamilton; an audio documentary, “History of the Labour Movement in Northern Ontario”; and a video marking the 13th anniversary of the postal workers’ strike.⁶⁹ As Robert Kristofferson wrote at the time, the Hamilton “Workers’ City” project “was based on the concern that the rapid erosion of the city’s industrial base and surrounding residential districts is endangering the heritage of its working people, not simply in an enclosed museum, but also out on the streets where the history was made.”⁷⁰ The Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (owahc) was incorporated in 1991 and moved into Hamilton’s former Customs House, officially opening in 1996.⁷¹ owahc aims to preserve and display the “heritage of Ontario’s workers and their unions.”⁷² These examples of relatively successful initiatives should not distract from the fact that most grassroots efforts end in failure – as was the case in Sydney, Nova Scotia, where steelworkers were unable to gain port for the establishment of a steel museum.⁷³

What, then, do the contributors to this special issue offer to the study of deindustrialization and Canadian labour history more generally? Our contributors seek to reconfigure the history of industrial and sectoral decline in Canada through the lens of deindustrialization studies. In adopting a variety of standpoints – including textile workers in Montréal and assembly line workers at an electronics factory in Nova Scotia, among others – we might consider how the political economy of deindustrialization has impacted working-class life. Importantly, taken together these contributions also call for a reassessment of the periodization of deindustrialization. While our authors position their case studies in the late 20th century, several feature instances where deindustrialization occurs in the aftermath of earlier cycles of capital extraction and closure. In this sense, we recognize the ways in which deindustrialization is not located within a fixed moment in time but occurs as a component part of ongoing capital movement and accumulation.

In the first article of our special issue, Steven High explores the radical origins of the deindustrialization thesis of the 1970s and 1980s. It has become standard for authors in the field to refer to the work of American economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, whose foundational work The Deindustrialization of America was one of the first texts to name and challenge the emerging industrial crisis. High’s piece traces the Canadian dimensions of these early theorizations and reflects on the ways that left nationalists in Canada adopted specific national understandings of the crisis – rooted in earlier scholarship by authors like Harold Innis – to explain the political economy of deindustrialization on this side of the border. His approach sets the stage for the conversation that unfolds throughout each of the pieces in this special issue, building a theoretical framework that helps to bridge the gap between local case studies of industrial decline and broader discussions of global political economy.

This notion of contextually informed deindustrialization scholarship is also essential to Fred Burrill’s contribution, which provides a robust account of deindustrialization in the francophone working-class neighbourhood of Saint-Henri in Montréal. The neighbourhood has rarely been the primary unit of study when it comes to examinations of industrial decline, and Burrill’s piece provides an opportunity to gauge the impact of factories and closure on the surrounding residential areas. Further, he expertly positions social movements that erupted during the 1970s within a much longer history of working-class and shop-floor militancy dating back to the 1940s and reveals the near-century-long tradition of local activism within the neighbourhood. Based around the theoretical conceptions of class de- and re-composition, the piece extends this focus to the present, offering context for the ongoing anti-gentrification movement.

Lauren Laframboise’s study of Montréal’s garment industry likewise positions labour activism and gender at the centre of the analysis. Interrogating the 1983 strike of Montréal’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, this article traces the evident divisions between the rank and file – comprised largely of older women from immigrant backgrounds – and union leadership. Drawing upon the campaign of the Comité d’action des travailleurs du vêtements, Laframboise positions deindustrialization at the intersection of feminist and community-based activism. Further, she extends her analysis to reveal the ways in which women in Montréal’s garment industry bore the brunt of economic restructuring – a necessary feminist intervention that has largely been absent in a field that has historically focused on experiences of decline in industries that predominantly employed men.

Articles by Lachlan MacKinnon and Peter McInnis each explore how consecutive waves of deindustrialization in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, were shaped by earlier experiences of decline. MacKinnon’s article examines the history of the Clairtone Sound Corporation – a Toronto electronics company that relocated production to Stellarton, Nova Scotia, in 1964. The emergence and subsequent collapse of Clairtone unfolded alongside the final stages of a major wave of closures in the coal industry, which MacKinnon contextualizes through a discussion of regional economic development strategies, labour conflict, and the ultimate closure of the firm in the early 1970s. Then, McInnis extends this conversation to explore issues of cultural representation; the Nova Scotia Museum of Industry, the central focus of his article, represents the uneasy convergence of deindustrialization and commemoration. The museum, opened during the industrial crisis, struggles to balance accounts of workers’ resistance and struggle alongside positive representations of economic development.

Adam D. K. King draws out similar representational aspects of deindustrialization in his piece on Sudbury. Drawing on oral histories from former workers, King argues that narrative accounts of class conflict in Northern Ontario are too frequently expunged from public history sites related to industrial history in favour of nostalgic reflections that correspond closely to the desires of regional tourism agencies. In particular, he focuses on the example of Dynamic Earth, an attraction that includes a tour of a defunct nickel mine and presents a partially sanitized history of Sudbury.

Turning our attention to the High Arctic, Tee Wern Lim, Arn Keeling, and Terre Satterfield explore elements of mine closure in the North. The article reckons with the question of deindustrialization and Canadian colonialism and asks, how have Indigenous communities experienced mine closure in ways unique to their mixed economies and deep connection to place? In this case study of the Nanisivik lead-zinc mine, the authors reflect on immediate responses to closure and trace longer-term impacts using oral history and public hearing records to explore Inuit experiences of deindustrialization in the years following the closure of the mine and the community that was built around it.

Although they revolve around vastly different geographies, the articles in this special issue contribute to the theorization of deindustrialization in several important ways. Considering deindustrialization in Canada requires special attention to the ways that local and national contexts influenced how the industrial crisis unfolded. In Nova Scotia and Sudbury, this meant the careful negotiation of industrial decline, dominant conceptions of Canadian regionalism, and the intervention of heritage and public history sites in the aftermath of closure to reconcile the industrial past with a forward-looking tourism/service economy. In Montréal, our authors examine how specific activist histories and social movements combined to inform direct action and militancy during the 1970s. In all cases, these are processes that occur on Indigenous lands and within an overarching context of settler colonialism; recognizing this reality and examining how Indigenous communities have experienced deindustrialization will be central in further studies of this topic. At the same time, High’s contribution reminds us that these local and national contexts must also be positioned transnationally. After all, global movements of capital ensure that deindustrialization does not occur just once but again and again. Coming to terms with this means drawing out the connections between local experience and global political economy, and we are hopeful that this collection represents one step toward that objective.

How to cite:

Lachlan MacKinnon and Steven High, “Deindustrialization in Canada: New Perspectives,” Labour/Le Travail 91 (Spring 2023): 13–30. https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v91.004

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