Reckoning: The Political Economy of Canada

On the evidence presented here, one enormous problem facing our neighbour is a serious malaise in its manufacturing sector. No longer competitive in the world market, forced to buy more than it can sell, the United States nevertheless continues to bask in the glow of past glories rather than face its current problems head-on. It plans not; neither does it save. Leaning on economic theories that, some say, may never have had much validity, the United States borrows for its inflated needs while watching its rust belt expand.

The microchip, invented by an American, exploited by the Japanese, is seen here to have caused a second industrial revolution. The devastating effect on millions of human lives is shown in microcosm through interviews with some of the newly jobless in Hamilton, Ontario. Faces bitter, voices hopeless, they speak of a vibrant secure past having suddenly given way to a bleak present and an uncertain future; they fear for their children's prospects. Using the example of Japan as contrast, host James Laxer demonstrates that the cost of technological advances need not be so high if their effects are foreseen and planned for.

Boom and bust economic cycles are inevitable in countries that are dependent primarily on resource exports. Countries like Canada. And we've had our share: minerals, timber, wheat. Perhaps the most spectacular boom and bust experienced in Canada was that in Alberta oil during the seventies and early eighties. When the bust hit, with a drop in world oil prices, those business people who knew how to "ride a tornado" (as one Albertan described the experience) simply cut their losses and moved out and on. Many others were devastated, left with nowhere to go.

Using archival film footage, this hour-long documentary provides a gripping retrospective of United States-Canada relationships as personified by successive presidents and prime ministers. It becomes quite clear that our prime ministers, from John A. Macdonald down, have started their tenures on a sort of first-things-first basis by making overtures to their American counterparts. Attitudes and outcomes have varied widely, and this is what intrigues when seen in close-up.

This last hour of a five-part series offers no answers to Canada's economic troubles. But it does lay out, for the viewer's discretion, a summary of the facts at hand and some possible alternatives to marriage with the United States. Some of the facts are discomfiting. For instance, at roughly thirty percent, we're already more foreign-owned than any other country in the world. The good news in this film is that a great, stubborn, national pride in our cultural and social differences is alive and well.