What’s good for the West, is good for Canada

“The myth actually teaches ‘what’s good for Ontario is good for Canada.’ And that myth, the foundation of Ontario’s place in the country, is what has been overtaken by history. Today, ‘what’s good for the West is good for Canada.’”

CALGARY

History tells us what happened, the great literary critic Northrop Frye once observed, and myth tells us what happens all the time. There is often a painful disconnect between historical changes and mythic expectations of continuity. This problem was recently illustrated in the response by our fellow citizens living in Ontario to two unrelated events: the closure of the Caterpillar Electro-motive Diesel plant in London and the publication of the 2011 population census report by Statistics Canada.

Closing the plant following a month-long lockout of 465 members of the Canadian Auto Workers was hardly a bolt from the blue. Caterpillar is a big, tough company. They are still in the business of making locomotives with labour costs about what they were willing to pay for the skills of Ontarians, but now they make them in Muncie, Ind., about 550 kilometres to the southwest. Such is the regrettable history of the event.

News reports in the Toronto Star, however, are all myth. Caterpillar was not making a normal business decision, nor were they merely nasty and mean. The move to Muncie created a national catastrophe. Worse, the Americans were stealing Canadian technology that had been subsidized with taxpayer dollars. Business, or rather, anti-business columnist David Olive proposed a solution: put up a tariff wall against Caterpillar and, because the oilsands rely on Caterpillar equipment, that might bring “tarsands production . . . to a halt.”

The flaw in Olive’s reasoning, Postmedia News columnist Andrew Coyne pointed out, is that the London plant was never Canadian and never received any subsidies. The point of Olive’s rant apparently was to take a swipe at the oilsands. And there lies the source of anxieties surrounding the census story.

The 2011 census showed officially what any Albertan who has visited Ontario in the past decade could see for herself. The growth rate in Ontario is below the national average for the first time in a generation. Infrastructure has not disintegrated to the extent it has in Quebec, but the place is badly in need of repair. In contrast, the population of the West is now greater than anything east of the Ottawa River, and the Prairies are fertile — very close to the demographic replacement rate without counting in-migration.

The Star cast this recent history into the traditional myth of Ontario-centrism, but first they invented an anti-myth. It was “too simplistic,” an editorial said, to declare that “Ontario’s day is over.” There is no “slide into irrelevance,” so that writing Ontario’s obit is “misguided.” But who dares speak these terrible things about our beloved Ontario? So far as I can tell, only the Toronto Star.

Next, they trotted out the helpful statistic that Ontario’s economy “dwarfs theirs,” which is to say, ours, in the West. To prove it, the Star noted that in 2010 Ontario accounted for 38 per cent of Canada’s GDP, whereas the West “totalled just 36 per cent.” Don’t you just love that word “just?”

They then explained how the unthinkable happened. The West has shown “it’s relatively easy to grow based on resource extraction,” but Ontario had the “much harder” task of actually working for wealth. Ontario has “kept the country growing,” and “through billions in annual wealth-distribution payments” has ensured our terrific public services. And they did it all because they have always “taken the wide view: what’s good for Canada is good for us.”

Well, not quite. The myth actually teaches “what’s good for Ontario is good for Canada.” And that myth, the foundation of Ontario’s place in the country, is what has been overtaken by history.

Today, what’s good for the West is good for Canada, and that means oilsands, potash, gas and uranium, not manufacturing locomotives in London.

The fact is, western resources do not extract themselves, as the Star seems to think. There is also the little matter of Ontario politics.

As National Post columnist Lorne Gunter reminded them, if Ontario persists in supporting the parties of old Canada along with their halfbaked notions of a subsidized green economy, hatred of Alberta oilsands and support for yesterday’s unions, why are they surprised when the kids move to Saskatoon and industrial jobs to Muncie?

Barry Cooper is a political-science professor at the University of Calgary. He wrote this for the Calgary Herald.