The Structure
of Inequality
in Canada
LORIME R
I
Most of us are conscious that inequality has been
increasing in Canada over the past decade. Despite the
many government programs set up to address the
problem, more people than ever before are living below
the poverty line, with the young, women, and visible
minorities at greatest risk.
Richer and Poorer describes the problem of inequality
and explains why it is so hard to eradicate. It looks at
why government programs and policies ultimately do
not succeed in preventing gender, racial, or other types
of inequality, and it warns that without action, the
situation in Canada will only get worse.
ANTON L. ALLAHAR is the author of Sociology and the
Periphery: Theories and Issues and a professor of
sociology at the University of Western Ontario. JAMES
E. COTE is the author of Adolescent Storm and Stress:
An Evaluation of the Mead/Freeman Controversy.
Professors Allahar and Cote are the coauthors of
Generation on Hold: Coming of Age in the Late
Twentieth Century.
James Lorimer & Company, Ltd.
1-55028-610-2 paper
1-55028-611-0 boards
Richer and Poorer
The Structure of Inequality
in Canada
Anton L. Allahar
and
James E. Cote
James Lorimer & Company Ltd.
Toronto, 1998
© 1998 Anton L. Allahar and James E. Cote
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
James Lorimer & Company acknowledges the support of the Depart-
ment of Canadian Heritage and the Ontario Arts Council in the
development of writing and publishing in Canada. We acknowledge
the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing
program.
Cover design: Kevin O'Reilly
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Allahar, Anton L., 1949-
Richer and poorer: the structure of inequality in Canada
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-55028-611-0 (bound) ISBN 1-55028-610-2 (pbk.)
1. Equality — Canada. 2. Canada — Social conditions. 3. Canada
Social policy.
I. Cote, James E., 1953- . II. Title.
HN110.Z9S6 1998a 305'.0971 C98-930386-1
James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers
35 Britain Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 1R7
Printed and bound in Canada
Contents
Ackn owl edgments
Preface
1 Canada's Dominant Ideology
What Are Ideologies
Ideology, Inequality, and Order
The Functionalist Argument for Inequality
Individualism and Liberalism
Canadian Liberalism
Liberalism and Free Enterprise
Competition and Conflict
Limits of Liberalism
Conclusion
VI
ix
1
2
5
6
8
9
12
17
19
21
The Myth of the Classless Society
Accounting for the Myth of Classlessness
The Political Psychology of Control
Class and Occupation
Marx, Weber, and Class
The Capitalist Class or Bourgeoisie
The Middle Class or Petty Bourgeoisie
The New Middle Class or New Petty Bourgeoisie
Contradictory Class Locations
The Working Class or Proletariat
The Poor
Defining Poverty
What Being Poor Means
Conclusion
23
24
27
27
28
34
43
45
47
48
53
55
58
58
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance
Racialization
Visible Minorities
Historical Context
Race, Racism, Ethnicity, and Resistance: Definitions
Strategies of Resistance
Multiculturalism as Strategic Retreat
Unity in Diversity
Assimilation as Resistance
60
61
66
67
70
73
76
78
80
Selling Illusions 82
Resistance Through Violence: The Colonial Context 85
Violence as a Cleansing Force 87
Neo-colonialism and Violence: A Canadian Example 88
Conclusion 90
4 Gender Inequalities in Canada 92
Explaining Gender Inequality: A Materialist Approach 93
The Fundamental Division of Labour 94
The Private and Public Spheres 95
The Gendered Division of Labour: The Material Basis 97
The Gendered Division of Labour: Ideological Justification 101
Gender in the Late Twentieth Century 103
Why Gender Inequality Is "Good" for Capitalism 114
Conclusion 117
The Disenfranchisement of Youth
Division of Labour by Age
The Emergence of the Ideology of Youth
Talking Directly to Youth
Intergenerational Justice
Conclusion
121
123
139
141
143
145
The Faces of Inequality Under Capitalism 149
The Vertical Mosaic 150
Beyond Identity Politics: The Importance of Class 152
Blending the Generations in the Late Twentieth Century 154
Conclusion: Learning to Love Corporate Capitalism? 159
References 161
Diagrams and Tables
Table 2.1: Most Important Factors for Getting Ahead: Canada,
Great Britain, United States, Germany 26
Table 2.2: Basic Economic Criteria for Class Position 31
Diagram 2.1: The Edward and Peter Bronfman Group, Selected
Investments Resource Mining and Development-1996 38
Diagram 2.2: The Edward and Peter Bronfman Group, Selected
Financial Investments-1996 41
Table 2.3: Selected Occupations by Average 1990 Income and
Number 51
Table 2.4: Quintile Shares of Total (100%) Income in 1981,
1986, and 1991 54
Table 2.5: Lines of Income Inequality Developed by the CCSD
in 1994 56
Table 3.1: Ethnic Composition of Canada's Population in 1991 61
Table 3.2: Male Education, Occupation, and Income by Ethnic
Group in 1981 and 1991 63
Table 3.3: Rate of Participation of Visible Minorities and Other
Canadians in the Economy in 1991 64
Table 3.4: Education and Occupational Attainment of Visible
Minorities and Other Canadians in 1991 67
Table 4.1: Labour Force Participation Rates of Women by Age
and Presence of Children in 1981 and 1991 106
Table 4.2: Distribution of Occupations for 1982 and 1994:
Percentages of Women and Men Employed in Each Occupation
and Women as a Percentage of Employees in Each Occupation 107
Table 4.3: Real Average Annual Wages for Canadian Women
and Men, 1920-1990, and Percentage Difference 109
Table 4.4: Percentage of Earnings of Women Working Full-Time
Compared with Men, by Education and Age, in 1993 110
Table 4.5: Women as a Percentage of Full-Time University
Enrolment by Level and Year 111
Table 5.1: The Competition Ration: The Changing Proportion
of Adult Age Groups Between 1861 and 1991 125
Table 5.2: Change in Average Income, 1981-1991, Adjusting
for Inflation, by Age (%) 130
Table 5.3: Percentage of Young Men and Women Attending
School, 1921-1991 134
Table 6.1: The Post-Second World War Cohorts 155
Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge the contributions of our colleague and friend,
Edward Grabb, who was part of this project at its inception, but who
was called away to other pursuits. Ed was very constructive with his
critical insights and afforded generous access to his personal library.
We also wish to acknowledge Erin Chapman, a first-year UWO
student, for suggesting a wonderfully subtle design and drawing for the
cover of this book. Thank you "Chappie."
And finally, we wish to express our gratitude to Diane Young,
Lorimer's editor-in-chief, Scott Milsom, Harold Otto, and Cy Strom for
their patience and professionalism. This book is richer for their contri-
butions and those of the anonymous reviewers.
To our parents
Cynthia and Clifton Allahar
and
Jessie and Joseph Cote
and for
Anne and Aniisa, and Donna
"The fact is that poverty, as it has been traditionally under-
stood, has been virtually eliminated. It is simply not a major
problem in Canada" (Sarlo 1992:2).
"Poverty, clearly, has not been eradicated in Canada, and
its incidence appears to be increasing throughout the
1980s" (Marchak 1988:32).
Preface
This is a book about social inequality in Canada. The subject matter is
controversial because we live in a society that is in denial about the very
existence of inequality. Canadians strongly resist viewing their society
as one characterized by entrenched inequities. But when inequalities are
too glaring to be denied, major controversies develop around their ori-
gins, sources, explanations, and consequences. Who or what is to be
blamed?
Many readers might see themselves reflected in the following pages.
We, as sociologists, however, are not primarily concerned with individ-
ual stories or plights (or with the so-called experiential and postmodern
approaches to knowledge that emphasize individuality, personal choice,
and volition, all to the neglect of social structure). Rather, ours is a
social-structural, or materialist, approach, which stresses patterns of
inequality within, between, and among groups. So, although the experi-
ences of individuals are no doubt important to a total appreciation of the
consequences of social inequality, an analysis or full appreciation of
such experiences is beyond the scope or intent of this book.
To put it bluntly, there was never a time in recorded history when
Canada was free of social inequality. Ethnic, tribal, age, gender, re-
gional, class, and economic differences have been more or less the
constant condition of all who have inhabited this land, from earliest
times to the present. Our topic, therefore, is not new. New, however, are
the ways those inequalities manifest themselves today and the social and
institutional responses to them.
Today's patterns of social inequality in Canada are specific to this
country and have been conditioned by our unique historical experience.
In short, though Canada is part of an international network of economic,
political, and cultural exchanges, and though its attendant patterns of
social inequality might resemble those in other countries, they cannot
be reduced to those others, but must be understood on their own unique
terms. It is a contribution to such an understanding that we offer in this
book.
Even the most naive among us will agree that ours is not a world in
which all persons enjoy a fundamental condition of equality. In this
regard, Canada is very much a part of the modern community of nations,
wherein equality of condition has long since been abandoned as a central
claim that defines the system. In Canada, as elsewhere in the modern
world, children are not born equal to adults, women are not born equal
x Richer and Poorer
to men, black people are not born equal to white people, nor are the poor
born equal to the wealthy. Recognizing the myth contained in the Ameri-
can Declaration of Independence, which holds that "all men are created
equal," modern societies have dispensed with the claim that their citizens
are all born equal, and have instead pursued the somewhat more socially
and politically viable goal of assuring equality of opportunity. Since we
are not all born with equal opportunities in life, what is attempted is the
creation of specific social institutions and structures that aim to equalize
access to these opportunities.
Thus, while the entrenched racism and sexism of our society might
preclude talk of blacks and whites, or men and women, being born equal,
various social policies and programs such as employment equity, pay
equity, and affirmative action have been designed and implemented to
ensure that both blacks and whites, or males and females, will have the
same access to such public goods as housing, jobs, education, and legal
protection. But, as we will see, there is much debate over the desirability
and effectiveness of such policies and programs. Are inequalities based
on class, age, race, or gender built into the very fabric of our social
system? Or is the system's basic integrity intact, although perverted by
certain well-placed individuals with prejudicial and discriminatory be-
liefs? The answers to these questions depend on one's fundamental
conception of social inequality.
On the one hand, those who favour individualistic explanations will
argue that social institutions and structures are not to be blamed or
changed. In a free and open society committed to fair play, social
inequality is the result of individual, volitional behaviour: some people
merely choose to be lazy, and they cannot then expect to be able to boast
the same trappings of material success as those who are not. On the other
hand, there are those who prefer a structural explanation. For these
people, social equality is impossible so long as racist, sexist, ageist, and
classist policies and practices define and govern the operations of soci-
ety's major institutions and determine who has access to their benefits.
Regardless of how much individuals may want to participate, barriers
of class, race, age, and gender can work to frustrate them.
We have no wish to assert that individual choice or preference is
totally irrelevant, but we do point out that choices and preferences are
always fashioned within a social context and are subject to the structured
constraints of that context. To use an extreme example, no matter how
well-qualified and ambitious a young, black, working-class, Moslem
woman might be, her chances of becoming the Prime Minister of Canada
today are virtually zero. Age, racial, class, religious, gender, and other
differences will make her less acceptable than a middle-aged, white,
upper-class, Christian male who might be less qualified. That's the
reality in Canada at this moment.
Preface xi
In the following chapters we seek to trace the various patterns and
dimensions of inequality in Canada with a view to rooting them in a
critical, materialist explanation of our historical and contemporary con-
dition. We want to bring class back in to the picture. This is not to say
that all existing forms of inequality are reducible to class and economic
factors, but simply to acknowledge that in recent times, with the ascen-
dency of "politically correct" groups and claims for recognition of dis-
crete injustices, class explanations have been virtually silenced. Together
with an embrace of postmodernism, there has been a rejection of so-
called totalizing explanations of, and solutions for, society's ills (e.g.,
socialism) in favour of an ultra-relativistic, partial, and or parcellized
depiction of social reality.
Thus, as the theory and philosophy of liberalism, with its promise to
free the individual, have caught up with the liberal system, they have
encouraged the formation of a wide array of political groupings (e.g.,
women's groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, gay and lesbian
groups, the disabled), each of them claiming to be more wounded than
the other and each making a variety of demands for compensation on
the system. In the process, they give critical legitimacy to the system
and become committed to its survival, more or less in its present form.
Betraying a clearly reformist stance, politically correct and postmodern
politics eschew the type of radical prescription one would expect from
a class approach to dealing with social inequality in Canada. Although
we freely admit that there are inequalities by sex, age, and race or ethnic
origin that cannot be wholly or solely connected to class, we have found
that a class perspective is often able to shed compelling analytical light
on such inequalities. The social analyst neglects class at his or her peril.
The central aim of this book, therefore, is to show that, when all is
said and done, and even after race-, gender-, and age-based forms of
inequality are honestly and seriously addressed, class is still demonstra-
bly at the centre of most attempts to describe or explain social inequality
in Canada today. The various forms of inequality (class, race, gender,
and age) do not operate in isolation, but are intertwined with and overlay
one another. Sometimes they mutually reinforce and exacerbate the
overall problem of inequality at both the individual and group levels. At
other times these forms can cancel each other out, producing cross-pres-
sures and mixed loyalties among people. It is important to recognize the
fact that there are many "folk" or commonsense assumptions about the
advantages or disadvantages of certain individuals and groups that will
not stand up to close scrutiny. These are politically dangerous, because
they distract attention from more meaningful attempts to remedy the
problems of inequality by producing wrong-headed, even counterpro-
ductive, beliefs or policies regarding the motives, sources, and conse-
quences of inequality.
xii Richer and Poorer
This said, Chapter 1 introduces our subject matter and pays special
attention to the question of ideology. In many respects, this is the
theoretical and philosophical foundation for the main arguments pre-
sented later. After providing a definition of "ideology" and outlining
the ways it functions to organize our everyday perceptions of, and
engagements with the world, we go on to consider Canada's dominant
ideological orientation. We consider the complementary political and
economic ideologies of liberalism and free-enterprise capitalism. Of
particular significance here is the attempt to ideologically reconcile the
contradictory claims of freedom and equality within a system that is
itself structurally unequal.
Chapter 2 is concerned with class inequality and poverty. We provide
a discussion of the major competing definitions of class and consider
the ideological and political implications of accepting one over the other.
We also tackle the notion of Canada as a basically middle-class or
classless society and examine the reasons why liberals would favour
such a view of society. We examine some of the main definitions of
poverty and their ideological implications. Does it, for example, make
sense to speak of poverty as an absolute phenomenon in a country as
regionally diverse as Canada? Or should poverty be defined relative to
the standards of a given province or local community? Here we will
contrast two ideologically opposed positions (the conservative Fraser
Institute in British Columbia and the left-liberal Canadian Council on
Social Development) and assess their merits and drawbacks. We con-
clude with a description of the contemporary Canadian class structure
and call for a definition of class that is flexible enough to accommodate
the complex and changing realities of a modern economy and polity.
Chapter 3 takes up the issue of ethnic and racial inequalities and offers
definitions of these thorny concepts. It also explores the different ways
in which the concept of "race" can be manipulated either to resist or
mollify the deleterious consequences of racism. Like racism itself, re-
sistance to it can be seen as a political act that is intimately tied to the
wider cultural forces that frame it. We examine three conservative and
reformist strategies of resistance that have been put to work in Canada.
Where they have been successful (as in the case of
for
example) they have become a defining part of the dominant political
culture. It is our contention, however, that no understanding of "race" and racism as major social problems can afford to neglect their economic and class underpinnings. In Chapter 4 we treat the issue of inequality between women and men. With the possible exception of racial inequality, few topics currently generate as much political interest, debate, or acrimony as this one does. Given the amount of attention the topic has recently received, one would think that we would have moved further towards a consensus about how society should be more equitably structured. Yet, the persistence of
Preface xiii
gender inequities makes the problem appear intractable in certain ways,
and at times Canadians as a whole seem to be confused when "gender"
is at issue. It is within this context of intractability and confusion that
we analyze the structure of gender relations in Canada, with a view to
helping men and women recognize some of their common interests and
so develop the political will to resolve this important issue. We argue
that, in order to act upon their common interests, men and women must
understand who actually benefits from gender inequalities and tensions.
The focus of Chapter 5 is somewhat different than that of previous
chapters. In contrast to the widespread concern during the 1980s and
1990s over racial and gender inequalities, concerns over intergenera-
tional inequalities have been relatively muted. Even among those most
affected — young people themselves — there seems to be a lack of
widespread, genuine interest in understanding what lies behind growing
inequities among age groups that ostensibly share equal Canadian citi-
zenship. Certainly there is disaffection among some young people and
concern among some adults, but it often seems to be poorly informed
and diffusely directed. Many people still prefer individualistic over
structural explanations of inequalities, and it is within this context of
relative indifference and misdirected explanations that we offer a re-
view and analysis of intergenerational relations that we hope will help
young people (and others) recognize some of their common interests and
better understand their life-chances and relations with other age groups.
In Chapter 6 we discuss the different faces of inequality in Canada
and ask the reader to reflect on the country's future. We direct attention
to our society's youth, who embody all the contradictions of ethnic,
gender, class, and age discrimination, and who, by virtue of their age,
have the most compelling reasons for addressing them. The Canada of
tomorrow belongs to them, and if the divisions and inequalities that
scarred previous generations are to be erased, they are the ones who will
have to do it. The challenge they face, however, is that of reconciling
the structural and necessary inequalities of capitalism with the social
and environmental imperatives of the twenty-first century. If they are to
rise to the occasion, they must develop a greater class awareness of their
responsibilities, and of their society's place in the global system.
Canada's Dominant
Ideology
Social reality is never objectively accessible to the observer. It is
always viewed through a set of screens or filters. Those screens or
filters are called ideologies and represent the subjectively accumu-
lated "baggage" of knowledge and experience everyone brings to a
social encounter. Ideologies mediate between the observer and the
thing being observed. Nobody is free of or above ideology because,
as subjective beings directly involved in making sense of our worlds,
all human beings produce, and live in, a world of subjective meaning,
a meaning that makes sense to them, even if to no one else.
Given this, it is clear that not all people will have the same
understanding of the same event. At a football game, for example,
two spectators who cheer for opposing sides will not have the same
reaction to a referee's decision about a foul. A foul the referee misses
is unlikely to be interpreted as a foul by the supporter of the team
that commits it, but to the other team's supporter, it will be glaring.
This is what team loyalty is about, and it is a reasonable way to
approach the question of ideology.
As systems of beliefs and ideas that mediate contact with social
reality, whether at the global or local level, ideologies are of many
types and contain both psychological and sociological elements.
Thus, in the football example given above, loyalty relates to the
psychological "need for belonging" that all humans feel as well as
to the social demands and constraints of group membership and
identification. There are religious ideologies such as Christianity,
political ideologies such as democracy, and economic ideologies
such as free trade. White supremacy is a racial ideology, just as
patriarchy is a sexual ideology.
2 Richer and Poorer
What Are Ideologies?
Every ideology has several dimensions. Although they overlap and
are mutually reinforcing, these dimensions can be analyzed sepa-
rately. The first of these is the cognitive dimension, which is the most
important to an understanding of what ideologies are and how they
function. This dimension refers to the complex mix of knowledge
and belief in all ideologies. It is complex because while knowledge
is verifiable using logic and the scientific method, beliefs are not.
Beliefs are often based on myths that in no way correspond to reality,
and are accepted simply because the believer wants to believe them;
no proof is needed. This can be seen in the religious ideology of
Christianity, where the believer accepts Christ, along with such sto-
ries as the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion and Ascension into Heaven,
the Garden of Eden, and Noah's Ark.
Similarly, to understand the separation of knowledge and belief,
we can look at the political ideology of patriotism during war. Con-
sider the 1991 Gulf War between Iraq and the American-led allied
forces. It is true that Iraq had invaded Kuwait; it is true that Saddam
Hussein is a dictator and that Iraq is not a democratic country; and
it is true that Iraq has used poison gas on its Kurdish citizens. But
the Gulf War also highlights many myths about the United States:
the myth that all citizens of the United States are created equal and
enjoy equal freedoms; the myth that the United States is the world's
leading defender of democracy; the myth that its involvement in the
war was not motivated by economic and political self-interest. Fur-
ther, what the myths do not say is that, before it invaded Kuwait, the
United States had trained, armed and supported Iraq in its war against
Iran for eight years; that Iraq's oil is vital to American prosperity and
industry; that Kuwait was not, and has never been, a democratic state;
and that the United States has a history of installing and supporting
dictators around the world. But the average American citizen does
not see these facts as relevant; nor are they ever talked about in the
media, which encourage citizens to believe the myths of their coun-
try.
For a Canadian example of this separation between knowledge
and belief or myth, we can look at the conquest of the Native peoples.
It is true that the Natives were different from the settlers (or pioneers)
and that they were perhaps hostile at times to those who invaded their
lands, abused Native women, and stole their property. It is also true
that the Natives did not have the same religious belief systems as the
Canada's Dominant Ideology 3
settlers. But that the "red men" were godless, that they were sly,
uncultured savages, and that they attacked and scalped innocent
settlers without reason, is the stuff of myth and legend. These are
politically manufactured images that serve the purposes of those who
benefited from the Conquest and the pillage of the Natives. Many of
these images remain with us today. That is why, in any armed
conflicts between the two groups, if the settlers won a battle, the
history books recorded it as a glorious victory. But when the Indians
were triumphant, it was deemed a bloody massacre. This is not to
say that the existence of such myths is either bad or good: it is merely
to acknowledge that every society is founded upon, and is saturated
with, myth.
The second characteristic of ideology is its appeal to emotion and
sentiment. Those who adhere to ideologies are often blindly passion-
ate and emotional about their beliefs, and their actions can appear
irrational and capricious to non-adherents. This can be seen when
passions of national identity are stirred over war, where intense
feelings of attachment can lead to wholesale slaughter of other hu-
man beings simply because a call to arms was issued in the name of
the nation. At a somewhat less violent level, these emotions can also
be seen at such events as the Olympic Games and other international
sporting competitions where national flags, anthems, national col-
ours, and various other symbols of patriotic identification and com-
mitment are fiercely displayed and defended.
A third characteristic of ideologies is the fact that they embody
value judgments. They seek either to endorse or to challenge an
existing system of social relationships and institutions. When we
refer to Canada's economic system as one of "free enterprise," we
emphasize the great value we place on all aspects of freedom. By
contrast, and sticking with the value we place on freedom in the
West, American President Ronald Reagan described the former So-
viet Union as an "evil empire" bent on the destruction of the "free
world." The concern with "freedom" thus expressed is meant as a
critique of those other social systems that are purportedly unfree and
whose citizens are less fortunate than those who live in the West.
Ideologies also usually imply a call to action. If we take the
ideology of feminism, for instance, it is not sufficient for an adherent
to be a feminist in name only. Being a feminist means practicing
gender equality and promoting it wherever possible, while combating
sexism. It is rare to encounter an ideology that doesn't prescribe a
course of action aimed at correcting wrongs or deficiencies in a given
4 Richer and Poorer
social system. Even the philosophy of a group that calls itself REAL
Women, which is opposed to feminism and in favour of the tradi-
tional gendered division of labour, can be seen as a call to action —
in this case, conservative action.
By extension, then, one can speak of conservative ideologies,
which seek to maintain the status quo, radical ideologies, which
attempt to overturn the status quo, and reformist ideologies, which
tinker with or propose small-scale changes within the existing sys-
tem. Thus, as we have said, the ideology promoted by REAL Women
is conservative, while Marxist feminism is an example of a radical
ideology, and liberal feminism is reformist because, instead of de-
veloping a fundamental critique of capitalism, liberal feminism in
Canada merely seeks changes to help women do better within the
existing set of social arrangements.
Finally, all ideologies have what is called a societal base. They
are rooted in social groups and serve their interests. Individuals might
hold certain ideologies, but they do not develop them; not even Marx
could be said to have developed "Marxism," nor Christ Christianity.
In this fashion it is possible to specify various groups in society —
women, blacks, industrialists, labour unions, and so on — identify
what their principal interests are and discover the ideologies associ-
ated with them. For it is in the ideology of the group that one will
find its philosophy or statement of purpose, its values, and its direct-
ing motives.
In sum, therefore, we might say that ideologies are systems of
emotionally charged beliefs and ideas that mediate between individu-
als and groups, on the one hand, and "social reality," on the other.
In the process they magnify certain aspects of that reality and stress
to the observer those things that reaffirm the observer's beliefs and
ideas. Thus, the liberal-democrat holds the regular election of politi-
cal leaders, the freedoms of speech, movement, association and so
on, to be defining features of his or her society. But ideologies also
mask or minimize those negative aspects of social reality that the
observer is reluctant to acknowledge. So, to turn to the above exam-
ple again, those aspects of liberal democracy that underline its com-
patibility with social inequality (e.g., ghettos, racism, sexism, youth
exploitation, support for non-democratic governments and unjust
wars) never figure in the liberal-democrat's description of his or her
society. And, as we shall see, to the extent that they are even acknow-
ledged at all, they are cast as non-systemic, as aberrations, or as the
failures of individuals. Such aspects of liberal democracy are masked
Canada's Dominant Ideology 5
because they do not accord with the image of society that the holder
of the ideology wishes to entertain or project.
Ideology, Inequality, and Order
Because inequalities in any social system have the potential of pro-
ducing conflict and disrupting public order, they need to be politi-
cally managed. So, we will examine the ways in which their objective
existence is dealt with ideologically in a liberal democratic country
such as Canada. We will also speak to questions of power and
legitimacy, as well as to the fact that, depending on the political
circumstances surrounding any debate over inequality, the individual
and social-structural explanations will vary. Canada is a country
where white, male, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, wealthy, middle-aged,
and older heterosexuals hold power in the leading institutions (and
are generally seen to do so legitimately for historical reasons). There-
fore, it is these individuals and the class(es) they represent who often
define the "true" nature of social inequality. These people draft the
laws on behalf of the wider society, and, as a consequence, they are
most responsible for shaping the ways the average citizen perceives
her or his society. It therefore stands to reason that such laws, the
policies they uphold, and the images they project, will be conserva-
tive.
A key strategy employed to defuse potential conflict is the attempt
to explain away social inequality as a naturally occurring phenome-
non. This is important to emphasize, because although we speak of
social inequality, there are those who assume that some forms of it
are natural. Such people tend to think and speak of the natural
superiority of one race or sex over another. We know, however, that
while nature might make people short and tall, black and white, male
and female, and so on, the natural differences between them are
simply that — natural differences. There is no such thing as "natural
inequality" — it is an oxymoron! Only in society are evaluations
made that hold that it is better to be white than black, better to be
male than female, and so on.
These social evaluations are at the base of all social inequalities.
To take a social contrivance — for example, the poor performance
of blacks on a white-biased IQ test — and make it out to be part of
the natural order of things is ideological. It masks the fact that certain
privileges accrue to those with power, who are able to deflect public
attention from themselves by promoting the erroneous idea that so-
cial inequalities are naturally conditioned. Since nature has no con-
6 Richer and Poorer
sciousness, motives, or intentions, the disadvantaged really have no
one to blame for their predicament. Thus, in the above example of
the IQ test, the wider racism of the society — which consigns more
blacks than whites to inferior education, to lower paying jobs, to
crime-ridden neighbourhoods and to frequent confrontations with the
police — is easily cast as a racial problem and not one of class
because racial problems are so much more visible than the effects of
class. Blacks may be seen to be disproportionately involved in crime,
but the class explanation might well be far more compelling.
The variables of gender and age could easily be substituted for
race here. Race and gender have recently been high on the political
agenda (though age has not) and they have tended to overshadow
class. Our argument, though, is that (a) class inequality is fundamen-
tal, and (b) most other forms of inequality are best understood as
deriving from class. But this does not mean that race, gender, and
age are less real or less important than class. It is essential to under-
stand both how present patterns of social inequality came about (the
historical context) and the justifications (ideologies) that have been
invoked by the privileged as a means of discounting them. This is
the intellectual challenge to be met, and it must precede any attempt
to remedy the ills of social inequality.
The people in authority have a political stake in promoting the
view that inequalities in society are natural. If this is not done, if
inequality is understood to be imposed by the powerful and privi-
leged, the underprivileged could be incited to revolt. The disenfran-
chised are more likely to accept that theirs is a deeply divided society,
while the privileged will want to nurture beliefs and ideas that seek
to portray a more egalitarian view of the society. The rulers or
oppressors, who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo,
dismiss the claims of the ruled or oppressed as unrealistic, "Utopian,"
while the latter attack the authorities' views in defence of the order
of things as "ideological."
The Functionalist Argument for Inequality
Another political strategy for dealing with the potentially disruptive
consequences of inequality is to claim that inequality is positive and
desirable. In sociology this is best represented by the functionalist
school of thought, which dominated sociological thinking in the
1940s, 1950s, and part of the 1960s. According to functionalism,
social inequality is a fact of life. It has existed in all known human
societies and is therefore thought to be inevitable. In any society,
Canada's Dominant Ideology 7
functionalists contend, there is a wide variety of jobs that need to be
performed, and some of these are understandably more important or
crucial for the survival of the society in question. Further, human
beings have different natural talents and abilities and, if the most
talented and able are to be recruited to the most important positions,
a system of unequal rewards is necessary to motivate them to pursue
the types of education and training necessary for the system's sur-
vival.
In this view, unequal rewards include such things as income,
power, and prestige. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers, for example,
are deemed to perform more important functions than nurses, teach-
ers, and garbage collectors. And, functionalists also claim, apart from
the fact that not everyone has what it takes to be trained as a doctor
or engineer (the in-born talent and ability), those who are so blessed
must undergo longer periods of training and education than is nec-
essary for a nurse, teacher, or garbage collector. To encourage the
doctor or lawyer to make the necessary sacrifices and undertake the
long and costly training, society must offer handsome rewards. Thus,
unequal rewards, which over time can be expected to lead to various
other forms of social inequality, are seen as not only inevitable, but
also as good and necessary.
Herein lies the ideological message in functionalist thinking. If its
logic is accepted by the poor and disadvantaged, it becomes a politi-
cal weapon in the hands of the wealthy and privileged. The latter
have to feel neither guilt about their comforts nor apprehension about
being assailed by the majority. They do not have to answer questions
about who defines the importance of different functions, about how
in-born talents are measured, about the vital importance of garbage
collection and other menial jobs in any society, or about the fact that
privilege breeds privilege. So the children of the wealthy, who can
afford the education and training, and whose parents have the appro-
priate social and business contacts, will themselves come to fill the
"functionally most important jobs" in the future. In the meantime
they will continue to derive benefits from the poor, or the "poverty
industry," which generates billions of dollars worth of jobs and
salaries for doctors, lawyers, judges, police officers, prison guards,
social workers, and assorted governmental bureaucrats and civil ser-
vants, not to mention the ordinary people who work as cooks, clean-
ers, gardeners, carpenters, plumbers, and so on, in the prisons,
hospitals, half-way houses and other institutions that warehouse the
poor. And, poverty also ensures that there will always be individuals
8 Richer and Poorer
eager to do the dead-end, low-paying, dirty jobs that exist in any
society. This theme will be revisited when we come to deal specifi-
cally with poverty in Chapter 2.
Individualism and Liberalism
To the extent that one can identify a dominant ideology in Canada,
we would point to a combination of individualism and liberalism. By
dominant ideology we mean the conventional wisdom, the taken-for-
granted aspects of daily life that most Canadians can be assumed to
share. But like any ideology, the dominant ideology does not have
to be "true," does not have to be spoken, does not even have to be
consciously acknowledged. It simply has a mass appeal and is deeply
ingrained in the value and belief systems of the population at large.
Liberalism appeals to the idea of freedom and the aspirations of
the French revolutionaries of 1789. In fact, their cry for liberte, or
freedom, from the restrictions of a crumbling feudal order embodied
the very sentiments and meanings conveyed by the modern-day use
of the term "liberalism." Recalling the earlier discussion of the rela-
tionship between ideology and myth, we can say that the ideology of
liberalism plays upon the myth of freedom and elevates it to the
status of a key or sacred tenet of any civilized society. In doing so,
freedom is made virtually synonymous with two other watchwords
of the French Revolution: "fraternite" and "egalite." Indeed, along
with freedom, fraternity and equality can be seen to comprise the
core values of liberalism. But critics point out that these core values
just might be contradictory, for a free society is one in which differ-
ences, especially individual differences, are permitted to flourish.
This could, and does, lead to marked social and economic inequali-
ties. Equality, on the other hand, is a levelling philosophy; it is not
tolerant of differences that could lead to inequalities. We will return
to this point when we examine the way liberalism deals with the
contradiction.
According to some commentators, the free or liberal society is one
that permits its citizens three key freedoms: free choice, free compe-
tition, and free markets. Implicit in each of these is the notion of
equality. In other words, not only are people free to choose and free
to compete, but this competition is among equals who supposedly
have equal access to the market and equal access to the information
that will enable them to make informed choices. But, in order to
complete the sketch of liberalism, there is another important ideo-
logical element that must be added: individualism.
Canada's Dominant Ideology 9
Like liberalism, individualism was born with the demise of feudal
society and the rise of industrial capitalism in the West. It refers to
the social and political developments that released the individual
from the constraints of community and from laws based on custom
and tradition. It makes the individual master of his or her own destiny
and gives each one a sense of personal responsibility for the conse-
quences of his or her actions. Individualism also acknowledges the
different "rights" that modern society grants the individual: the right
to free speech; the right to free association; the right to free worship;
the right to own property; the right to be free from arbitrary arrest;
the right to due process before the courts of law, and so on.
The supreme expression of these individual rights is the lib-
eral-democratic notion of "one person, one vote." It is an equalizing
philosophy to the extent that the richest and poorest individuals in
such a society are purported to have an equal say in who will govern
them, and according to what rules and laws. Even though ordinary
citizens know that this is not necessarily so, it is part of the myth that
most individuals are prepared to entertain in a liberal-individualist
society such as Canada, which is presumed to be free, and a place
where people are individually free to pursue their life's goals.
When Canadians describe their political system as "democratic,"
they presume that it is, and always has been, both free and equal. But
the freedom referred to stemmed from the dismantling of feudalism
and the liberation of individuals from a paternalistic system in which
custom, tradition, status, and the authoritarian allocation of work
were the norm. Individuals were free to move around, to leave their
communities, and to work for anyone who would offer them a job,
but there was nothing equal about the system. Nor is there now. In
Europe, the freeing of the individual came about 100 years before
the system of one person, one vote was added to the liberal society.
Even after democracy was added, it still did not mean all individual
citizens were equal. Many different groups within society still did
not have the right to vote: women, the unemployed, the unpropertied.
Canadian Liberalism
In Canada, liberal philosophy and ideology permeate the society's
thinking. (The clearest and most thorough treatment of Canada's
ideological perspectives, their sources and differences, is to be found
in M. Patricia Marchak [1988].) Canada is very different from the
United States where the word "liberal" has negative connotations,
and is at times even synonymous with radicalism and political irre-
10 Richer and Poorer
sponsibility. Politically speaking, Canadians see liberals as moder-
ates, lying somewhere between the conservative right and the social
democratic left. It is clear that these terms must be defined in context,
for in the same way that "liberal" has two distinct meanings in the
United States and Canada, so too social democracy, which is Can-
ada's left-wing position, will not be seen as left at all in a country
such as Cuba, where left means socialist. The New Democratic Party
(NDP) in Canada, both federally and provincially, is firmly commit-
ted to the maintenance of capitalism, and this disqualifies it from any
claim to being socialist in the strict meaning of the word. But just as
the majority of Americans have no problem referring to liberals as
radicals, so too most Canadians have no difficulty seeing the NDP
as socialist. To use a cliche, it is all relative.
According to the liberal perspective, society is a collection of
individuals, each of whom ought to be free to pursue his or her
individual goals. The most efficient way of ensuring this is the "free
market" system, in which government should have only a regulatory
function. Coupled with liberalism and individualism are two other
related core values of the system: (1) utilitarianism, according to
which the pursuit of individual self-interest will produce the greatest
good for the greatest number, and (2) "materialism," the relentless
and seemingly unlimited drive of individuals to acquire material
possessions, which in turn are used as measures of personal achieve-
ment and social success.
As we will demonstrate in Chapter 2, liberals prefer not to speak
of social classes. They generally deny the existence of class divisions
in society but are prepared to acknowledge that inequalities may exist
between blacks and whites, men and women, young and old, and so
on. Conservatives, on the other hand, readily grant that social class
divisions are real, but they see them as just and proper. Theirs is an
elitist position, in which the more highly placed classes are good for
society. In true paternalistic style, those classes are said to look after
the interests of the "less fit" classes. For their part, socialists agree
with the conservatives that classes do exist; however, they do not see
this as good. Instead of justifying class inequality, they advocate its
eradication.
But our main concern here is with liberalism, the most extreme
form of which is known as "libertarianism." Though all the main
political parties in Canada are steeped in the liberal philosophy,
libertarian philosophy and ideology come closest to the politics of
today's Progressive Conservative and Reform parties. As the noted
Canada's Dominant Ideology 11
Canadian sociologist M. Patricia Marchak observes, to libertarians,
"social inequality is not only inevitable because people are geneti-
cally unequal, it is also desirable because the most talented provide
leadership that permits others to survive." A truly liberal govern-
ment, then, will not interfere with the workings of the free market
system by taxing the rich to support the poor or by developing a
burdensome welfare system that acts as a disincentive for the talented
to exercise their talents. Instead, in its purest form, liberalism pro-
motes the survival of the fittest and subscribes economically to the
pay-as-you-go formula. Thus, those aspects of the public economy
that are government controlled will be privatized and commodified,
and state subsidies will be removed from such areas as health care,
education, housing, transportation, and public utilities. Even such
essential institutions as psychiatric hospitals and prisons can be
turned over to private interests.
This is where one can distinguish among the main political parties
in Canada, or among what might accurately be termed the various
branches of Canada's single political party. Although they are all
committed to free enterprise capitalism and subscribe to liberal phi-
losophy and ideology, they tend to focus on different aspects of
public life. For example, the privatization and commodification of
social services referred to above is closely associated with the Re-
form and Progressive Conservative parties' sense of liberalism, while
the Liberal Party, which sees equality of condition as unattainable,
is more likely to embrace equal opportunity policies and to retain
subsidies for economically less well-placed groups. The New Demo-
cratic Party (NDP) is close to the Liberal Party in its espousal of
liberalism, but it is far more concerned with pursuing equality of
condition in the long run, and it supports equality of opportunity as
an interim measure. The NDP is also not averse to having the wealthy
pay more taxes than the poor. But this is all to take place within the
framework of free enterprise capitalism and the preservation of pri-
vate property rights. Socialism, in the strict sense of the word, is not
an option, even for the NDP.
Although there is a single political party known as the Liberal
Party, all of the others are deeply committed to the core values,
beliefs, and practices of liberalism. These incorporate individualism
and egalitarianism, the sanctity of property rights, and the legitimacy
of the profit motive, as well as the right to different rewards for
different levels of individual talent, ability, and private knowledge.
The liberal sees education as a central mechanism for the distribution
12 Richer and Poorer
of rewards: if education is a means to mobility and if it is equally
accessible to all regardless of race, gender, age, or class, then those
at the bottom of the social scale have only themselves to blame for
their plight. This is a wonderful device for distracting the most
disadvantaged in society from the sources of their disadvantage.
Once they buy into the ideas of liberalism and individualism and
accept that individuals have different amounts of natural talent and
ability, and once they accept the claim that the system, including the
educational system, is free, fair, and open, then their lack of success
is simply their own fault. Of course, those whq understand the world
structurally and see the social system as biased along lines of class,
race, gender, age, and so on, will have to be discredited as poor
losers, as lazy and shiftless, or simply as political opportunists. The
task of discrediting them falls largely to key socialization agencies
in the society (school, church, family, and media), which embody the
ideologies of, and are controlled by, the dominant classes.
Liberalism and Free Enterprise
To describe Canada's economic system as one of "free" enterprise
is to betray its liberal assumptions, including the myth that the vari-
ous economic actors, from the largest transnational corporations to
the smallest individual entrepreneur, share a fundamental condition
of freedom and equality in the marketplace. As an economic system,
capitalism is founded upon a basic inequality between those who own
private or productive property, such as factories, farms, businesses,
and corporations, and those who do not and so must sell their labour
power to the owners of productive property in order to survive. The
term "private" property must be distinguished from personal prop-
erty. Private property is used to generate profits by employing wage
workers or charging rent to users. Personal property, on the other
hand, does not generate profits. A person's car is her or his personal
property. However, if the owner charged someone to ride in it, it
becomes a taxi and is regarded as private property, and the owner is
required to pay taxes on the income generated.
In some circumstances, social inequalities can represent a threat
to social order. So, how are social inequalities perceived by, and
explained to, Canadians? If Canadian society is indeed marked by
entrenched and systemic inequalities, why is the population, gener-
ally speaking, so orderly?
The answers to these questions must be sought in the overlapping
dominant ideologies of free enterprise capitalism and liberal democ-
Canada's Dominant Ideology 13
racy in Canada. Capitalism itself implies a basic, structured inequal-
ity between owners and non-owners of productive property. It as-
sumes the existence of at least two classes with opposing interests:
one that lives off profit and exploitation, and the other that depends
on wages. But this type of structured inequality is not generally
offensive to the population at large, owing to the widespread ideol-
ogy of equal opportunity within Canada's liberal, individualist,
democratic social and political system, and owing also to the confu-
sion this ideology produces in the mind of the average citizen. Con-
tradictory uses and understandings of the terms "democracy" and
"equality" add to the confusion.
For example, during the Cold War those who lived in the West
and in the so-called free world were given to believe that their forms
of social, political, and economic organization were superior, mor-
ally and otherwise, to all others, especially to the Communist regimes
of China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, and also to those in
the poorer countries of the Third World. Free enterprise capitalism,
which, as we have said, does not claim equality among its various
economic actors, nevertheless implied vaguely (and incorrectly) that
anyone who was hard working and wanted to get ahead had equal
access to the market. The idea of "equal access" was presented in
such a way as to lead people to believe that they were equal as human
beings. This was ideological and illusory. Although the political
system is portrayed as a free contest among equals, each having one
vote to cast, the economic system is driven by competition and
inequality of access to material resources. This is the essential defi-
nition of capitalism: it is a system premised upon the fundamentally
unequal ownership of property and the means of production. Without
that inequality, capitalism would not exist.
We also know that the economic decisions taken by major corpo-
rations and large business interests in a capitalist society will cru-
cially affect the lives of all citizens; and herein lies a central
contradiction between the political and economic claims of the sys-
tem in a country such as Canada. Liberal democracy is premised on
the belief that one-person-one-vote will always produce the demo-
cratic outcome of "majority control." By extension, when the econ-
omy is governed by democratic principles and involves free actors
with equal access to resources, the expected result is that of a bal-
anced social order in which decisions are democratically made in the
best interest of all. The combination of liberal democracy and free
14 Richer and Poorer
enterprise is thus promoted as ideal for any society. However, the
ideology masks several facts that need to be underscored.
In spite of what we are told, we know that the Canadian constitu-
tion does not require leading economic institutions to subject them-
selves to popular majority control. To the extent that those economic
institutions influence all aspects of the daily lives of citizens, and to
the extent that governments are dependent on them for taxes and job
creation, among other things, they are able to dictate terms that make
them independent of government management. This being the case
in liberal democratic states, governments do not actually govern at
all. It is the shareholders and boards of directors of major corpora-
tions who have the main say in the economic management and
direction of society. As a result, the legislation passed by government
(e.g., minimum wages, acceptable pollution standards, taxation lev-
els and exemptions, interest rates, and investment incentives) must
take into account the wishes of these powerful economic actors.
There is still more to criticize in the myths of equality and majority
rule contained in the ideology of liberal democracy in Canada. Gov-
ernment ministers and leaders of political parties are not democrati-
cally chosen, in the strictest sense of the word. The prime minister
or premier of a province is put forward by the members of his or her
own party, as is the slate of candidates vying for political office.
After the election, it is the PM or premier who appoints the Cabinet.
Unless one is a member of the elected party, then, one has no voice
at the party convention that chooses the leader, who then ultimately
becomes leader of the government. Members of government, there-
fore, are not really freely selected by and from the population at large.
And the costs of running a successful campaign are well above the
financial means of most Canadians. Successful politicians either
have a great deal of private wealth or are able to attract handsome
campaign contributions — usually from the very same corporations
and businesses in whose interests they are expected to act once
elected. These facts are not emphasized by those who tout the supe-
rior political morality of liberal democracy.
The contradictory claims of liberal ideology are never openly
acknowledged or discussed by either the rich and powerful or the
mass media that have accepted the core liberal values of the culture.
The limits of individualism are never questioned, equality of oppor-
tunity is assumed to neutralize or minimize the worst consequences
of inherited inequalities, freedom is presumed to be uniformly dis-
tributed, utilitarianism is felt to produce the greatest good for all, and
Canada's Dominant Ideology 15
materialism is portrayed as the natural engine that motivates human
beings economically. And so the average citizen, who has been
socialized by the mass media, the prevailing religious institutions,
the school and university systems, and narrow political discourse,
falls into line. He or she is likely to endorse the social, economic,
and political structure, and to justify existing inequalities. Alterna-
tives are defined as out of the question.
Communism and socialism are premised on contrary ideological
claims. They stress the importance of economic equality and seek to
level economic actors by concentrating ownership of all productive
property in the hands of the state. As well, communist and socialist
leaders remove the political option of voting for competing candi-
dates or parties. Communist regimes of the past were criticized in
the West as being economically equal only to the extent that the
majority of citizens were reduced to a basic equality in poverty.
Politically, they were said to be undemocratic and afforded their
citizens no political voice, so there was no political equality.
The ideological function here was clear. As bad as life might have
seemed to the average person in the "free world," their counterparts
in the "unfree world" were far worse off in every respect. This fuelled
a deep sense of patriotism in the countries of the West during the
Cold War, which continues even today. Leaders of liberal-demo-
cratic, capitalist countries are thus able to preserve their own legiti-
macy by trading on the emotions and sentiments of their dominant
ideologies, ensuring the allegiance even of those who suffer the
greatest inequalities.
The power of liberalism and individualism is brought further into
play by "blaming the victim," suggesting that present inequalities are
justified because if people really wanted to work hard and improve
themselves they could do so. No systemic injustice explains their
inequality; instead, those who do not get ahead have failed them-
selves. What is more, they themselves believe this to be so. Because
beliefs are central to ideologies, and because they influence people's
perceptions of what is real, they play a key role in people's behav-
iour. Political manipulation of beliefs, therefore, cannot be ignored
in any effort to account for social order and social control in any
society, whether liberal-democratic or not.
Along with the strategies of invoking the "communist scare" and
"blaming the victim," another ideological tactic employed to deflect
potential conflict can be termed "blaming nature." This involves the
use of so-called science in support of racist, sexist, and ageist doc-
16 Richer and Poorer
trines. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, writers such as
Herrnstein and Murray claim that blacks, for example, are not as
intelligent as whites because of their genetic inheritance. Similarly,
Rushton and Ankney claim that women are not as smart as men; they
have smaller brains and are naturally more emotional than rational.
Others claim that young people are governed by hormones and sub-
ject to periods of storm and stress that require their confinement in
various social institutions and their denial of certain privileges. Ide-
ologies that use naturalistic explanations for social inequalities serve
an important political function. By invoking nature and playing down
the social or class roots of inequality, the privileged are able to deny
responsibility for the existence of inequality. This is politically very
useful, for if inequalities are not seen as natural, but rather as imposed
by the powerful, making people accept them becomes much more
difficult. Perception of inequality and resentment of it could easily
fuel unrest and threaten to disrupt the social order.
Liberal democracy is the political counterpart of the economic
system of free enterprise capitalism in Canada. And this is where the
contradiction between freedom and equality is thought to be re-
solved. Realizing the existence of wide inequalities in society, those
responsible for deflecting disaffection and manufacturing the consent
of the governed masses have abandoned the myth that "all men (and
women) are created equal" or share what is called equality of condi-
tion. In its place they have instituted the ideological notion of equal
opportunity, which says that, even though there are extremes of
super-rich and super-poor, and even though some are naturally infe-
rior to others, the broad commitment to equal opportunity for all
guarantees that everyone has the same chance to get ahead on the
level playing field called the free market. To this end there are a
series of laws and policies, acts, regulations, and commissions, both
governmental and private, aimed at ensuring employment equity, pay
equity, gender and race equity, affirmative action, and so on.
The ideological underpinnings of social inequality cannot be ig-
nored, for, among other things, they serve the political functions of
social order and control. We are referring here to a fundamental
concern that arises in all treatments of social inequality: its conse-
quences. Do human beings acquiesce in conditions of extreme in-
equality? How extreme is extreme? And, is social inequality an
objective fact, or a subjective perception? Clearly these are empirical
questions that will require empirically situated answers. For the mo-
ment, though, some theoretical reflections are in order.
Canada's Dominant Ideology 17
Competition and Conflict
From the foregoing it is clear that competition among various groups
is part of any liberal, market society, and this is not in itself a bad
thing. Competition ensures a certain degree of rational planning and
leads to excellence. Just as athletes get better with good competition,
so too, the various producers within a competitive economy will have
to strive for excellence if they are to remain viable. In the process,
they seek out better raw materials, develop better production meth-
ods, and generally offer a better product for the price, and even a
better price. Given the rules of supply and demand, a system of what
economists call "perfect competition" will also regulate the prices
sellers can reasonably charge for their product. Competition thus
leads to excellence, from which the whole society can expect to
benefit.
Competition occurs virtually at every level of society and at all
times. People compete for jobs, credit and other financial opportuni-
ties, housing, education, consumer markets, government grants and
subsidies. There is competition for votes at election time. This is a
good and healthy feature of any society, so long as the competition
takes place among equals, and everyone is permitted at least a token
share. But when competition is perceived to be unfair, the potential
for conflict is introduced.
And so, in Canada's liberal, free enterprise system, which we have
argued is neither free nor equal, the managers (government, the news
and entertainment media, and religious, economic, and other leaders)
must create the illusion of freedom and equality in the minds of the
general public. Otherwise, they face the possibility of conflict and
large-scale political mobilization against the status quo. By defini-
tion, the privileged groups in any society will have an interest in
avoiding conflict that might challenge their power and affluence,
while the less privileged will understandably have an interest in any
conflict that might upset the balance of power and improve their own
position. To preserve their social privileges the managers must get
to the public's consciousness and channel it in such a way that
inequality is not made to seem unfair or unjust. This is where soci-
ety's managers use ideology, both to reassure themselves and to
convince the public of "the justice of their injustices."
Often, as the situation in Canada shows, these strategies are suc-
cessful, especially when they are combined with some measure of
social and occupational mobility. If such mobility is completely
/ 8 Richer and Poorer
blocked, as in the former apartheid system in South Africa, political
instability can become widespread. As long as the black majority in
South Africa accepted their imputed inferiority and did not seek
equality, competition over scarce resources was non-existent. For
decades South Africa had a fair measure of social stability, supported
by the world's leading liberal-democratic countries, such as Canada,
the United States, and Britain. But as the modern age began to catch
up with South Africa's fascist regime, as the "pass laws" that re-
stricted geographic mobility and a whole series of other measures
that limited occupational mobility and entrenched white power and
privilege began to crumble, the pace of overall mobility quickened,
and overt conflict became widespread.
Because occupational and geographic mobility are incompatible
with a system of hereditary rank, once initiated, they can lead to the
rapid dissolution of conventional notions of hierarchical authority
and control. While human beings are capable of accepting a certain
degree of myth and self-delusion, there is a point at which the
discontinuity between beliefs and realities becomes too stark, and the
myth is shattered.
Wide extremes in material wealth can be ideologically justified
by referring to differences in personal effort and achievement only
if a significant number of citizens experience some connection be-
tween their efforts and the rewards they receive. As a belief system,
liberalism is most vulnerable whenever disparities in wealth become
too great. It is therefore important to remember that when the chan-
nels for personal advancement are open and widely used, social
inequity of condition can be widely accepted.
We suggest that competition will lead to conflict in a lib-
eral-democratic, free market system where the following related
conditions obtain: (a) the resources over which competition occurs
are scarce; (b) access to those resources is perceived to be unequal
and unfair; (c) the idea of equality is implanted among the less equal,
thus raising their hopes of improvement; (d) traditionally privileged
groups resist attempts to equalize the terms of competition; (e) oc-
cupational and geographic mobility have called into question tradi-
tional explanations of inequality; and (f) the liberal promises of
freedom, equality, and fairness are not matched by people's everyday
experiences.
Canada's Dominant Ideology 19
Limits of Liberalism
As we have been arguing, the practice of liberalism, whether in
Canada or elsewhere, is riddled with many contradictions: freedom
versus equality, individual versus society, private pursuit of profit
versus public good, property rights versus human rights, and so on.
In all of this, the free market, where individuals meet and compete
on an equal footing, is seen as the most efficient way of ensuring
individual freedom, economic and otherwise. Its supporters take a
very dim view of state involvement in the management of the econ-
omy. The economic philosophy of laissez-faire was built on the
assumption that the market could regulate itself. Adam Smith's "in-
visible hands" of supply and demand would guard against overpro-
duction, overpricing, and abuse of the consumer. In the process,
individuals would be free to realize their dreams, but they must also
be prepared to accept individual responsibility for their actions on
the market.
It did not work quite that smoothly. The obvious inequalities and
unfreedoms in society led to a situation in which the rich and pow-
erful became richer and more powerful at the expense of the poor
and powerless, who, over the years have grown poorer and more
powerless. As a consequence, the absolute freedom of capital to
pursue profit wherever it chooses, and to exploit the labour power of
whomever it chooses, regardless of socioeconomic, political, or en-
vironmental consequences, had to be tempered. There were limits to
growth. Since inequality of power, wealth, and prestige came to be
accepted as undeniable facts of life, the poor and underprivileged
needed assistance if they were to participate in the "free" market
economy, and the owners of capital needed to assist them. The levels
of education, skill, and intelligence of the workforce are directly
related to the type of technology it can operate, which in turn is
related to the type and quality of product that can be manufactured.
The Canadian economy, then, is only as strong as its workforce.
An illiterate and ignorant workforce is in nobody's interest; and
to participate in today's highly competitive economic markets, with
their sophisticated, computer-enhanced technologies, requires a wide
variety of education, skills, and training. Even at the lower levels,
these come with high price tags. Who would organize such an edu-
cational system? Who would cover the medical costs for working
people and others? Who would protect the weak and infirm, and
those with disabilities? Who would assure affordable housing for the
20 Richer and Poorer
poor? In short, who would be responsible for defending the most
disadvantaged in the "survival of the fittest" contest that a true free
enterprise, capitalist system implies? Who would pay for it? And
how?
The answers lay in the creation of the welfare state and the mas-
sive public service. This was a state that had a direct economic stake
in the provision of public education, public health care, the setting
of a minimum wage, the regulation of profits, pollution, and envi-
ronmental degradation, and the development of legislation aimed at
fair employment practices and equal opportunities for all citizens.
The welfare state also grew to be the major employer of labour in
leading industrial societies. Governments in Canada (as elsewhere)
became directly involved in banking and other financial investments,
bought outright or had controlling shares in certain resource-based
industries, developed numerous marketing boards and controlled
Crown corporations such as the post office (federally) and Ontario
Hydro and the Ontario Lottery Corporation (provincially). And it is
all paid for with tax dollars.
At the dawn of the new millennium, the liberal state and society
globally find themselves under serious attack, not so much from their
traditional rivals on the left, as from the "new" right. By "left" we
mean socialist, as opposed to social democratic, forces. Social demo-
crats, we have already argued, simply represent a subvariety of lib-
erals. The socialists, however, are rather silent since 1989 following
the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent disintegration of
the Soviet Union, not to mention the return of capitalism to Russia
and its cautious welcome in China.
The new right is a powerful and fast-growing neo-conservative
movement, most clearly identified in the United States with Christian
fundamentalism and the so-called moral majority. It stresses corpo-
rate or collective sentiments as opposed to individualism, embraces
biblical teachings and admonitions, and is highly critical of the lib-
eral society and its value system. In Canada, it is best exemplified
by the Vancouver-based Worldwide Church of God and its very
influential publication, The Plain Truth.
The new right blames all the ills of modern society on the liberal
state and its commitment to freeing the individual and granting a host
of individual political rights without demanding reciprocal responsi-
bilities. Thus, it blames liberalism and the practices of the liberal
state for the following: high rates of bankruptcies and business fail-
ures, soaring unemployment and underemployment, declining belief
Canada's Dominant Ideology 21
in God, family disintegration and a lack of respect for parents and
authority figures, a vanishing sense of patriotism, drug and alcohol
abuse, soaring violent youth crime, exorbitant school dropout rates,
epidemic levels of teenage pregnancies and routine abortions, and
even poverty. Too much reckless power has been invested in the
individual, and this has led to a society of chronic complainers where
several generations of people on welfare confidently demand hand-
outs from the state, are quick to claim their rights have been denied
or violated, and are eager to sue the authorities.
To the new right, the excesses of liberalism are responsible for
"political correctness," which allows fringe groups and disaffected
individuals to feel politically empowered to demand redress. Along
with the state, the main institutional targets of the new right are
universities, the mass media, and labour unions. Universities, they
feel, have grown too large and are too costly. Further, they provide
a safe environment to question the sanctity of tradition and to criti-
cize privilege. The social sciences, arts, and humanities, where little
of practical value to society is learned, but where students are taught
to be irresponsible, are the main offenders. The news media are seen
as responsible for challenging government through investigative re-
ports that expose corrupt politicians and religious authorities, and for
calling into question the contradictions of the democratic process and
undermining confidence in the system and its elected guardians. And,
the entertainment media glorify violence, sex, drugs, and a way of
life that goes counter to the values of community, tradition, and God.
For their part, unions are blamed for pampering labour, protecting
inefficiency, and ruining the competitive ethos so necessary to drive
the system of free enterprise.
The new right is uncompromising in its attack on welfare sector
civil servants, women and single mothers, minorities, unemployment
insurance and the unemployed, minimum wage legislation, rent con-
trols, the handicapped, and unions. It generally speaks for big busi-
ness, but can also be seen to speak to the poor about their need for
restraint and sacrifice, as did one British Columbia cabinet minister:
"Having programs in support of single mothers causes mothers to be
single and need support" (Marchak 1988:190).
Conclusion
The system of free enterprise and welfare capitalism in Canada is
experiencing a deep crisis of legitimacy. It has produced and ossified
certain forms of inequality that are now turning in on the system.
22 Richer and Poorer
Internally, it faces criticisms and challenges from average citizens,
from the traditional left, and from the new right. The liberal-demo-
cratic ideology made promises of freedom and equality, and the
people are now asking that society deliver on those promises. But
politically, economically, and even morally, the system is appearing
to falter. Canadians, however, are still firmly committed to the liberal
philosophy, even if its practice is not without contradictions and
reversals. Its attractiveness lies in the fact that it holds out hope and
acknowledges that the system is not perfect, but at the same time
suggests that it is perfectible.
Thus, on the eve of the new millennium, as the country continues
to wrestle with the uncertainties of global restructuring, the challenge
of perfectibility is there to be taken up by all Canadians. But they
must first address what we have identified as four of the most press-
ing forms of inequality. These relate to class, "race" (ethnicity),
gender, and age (youth).
The Myth of the Classless
Society
Canadians like to think of themselves as a "nice" people, not given
to extremes. For examples of racial apartheid they like to point to
South Africa, never at their own system of reserves for Natives.
Poverty and hunger are to be found in India and Africa, never in the
Maritimes, Northern Ontario, or even in the ghettos of our large
cities. In foreign policy, the former Soviet Union, and at times even
close allies such as the United States and Great Britain, are criticized
as political and economic bullies, but Canadians are usually less
eager to draw attention to the nefarious activities of the First Cana-
dian Airborne Regiment in Somalia or the exploits of Canadian banks
and multinational corporations in the Third World.
This is all quite understandable. People cannot be expected to
portray themselves or their societies in unflattering terms. Thus,
based on a 1977 survey of ethnocentric attitudes among Canadians,
well over 60% of the population felt that "Canada may not be perfect,
but the Canadian way has brought us about as close as human beings
can get to a perfect society" (Driedger 1989:328). In other words,
although most Canadians agree that ours is not yet a perfect society,
we see it as capable of perfection, and until that time arrives, we take
comfort in knowing that it is certainly better than most others; and
we are correct. According to the United Nations Human Develop-
ment Report, which ranks countries in terms of progress made to-
wards the overall improvement of the lives of its citizens on a variety
of social, economic, political, health and nutritional indices, Canada
is the best country in the world in which to live. Over the past six
years (1992-7) it has ranked first five times and second once (to
Japan in 1993) on the "Human Development Index."
By any measure, this is an enviable record; and it is one, among
many others, that gives Canadians reason to be proud. It also predis-
poses us to view our society in rosy terms, as being devoid of major
24 Richer and Poorer
divisions and disparities, as being generally classless. This feeds the
liberal ideology that embraces the idea of equality and eschews
attempts to characterize ours as a class-divided society. In this chap-
ter (and the rest of the book generally), however, we will challenge
the view that class analysis is no longer relevant to a society such as
Canada's, and we attempt to bring class back into focus.
Accounting for the Myth of Classlessness
When Canadians are asked to identify their class affiliation they are
likely to answer either that there are no classes in Canada, or, in order
to avoid standing out from the "majority," to identify themselves as
middle class. This is a curious contradiction, a seeming willingness
to engage in self-delusion. Surely most Canadians are aware of the
existence of great differences in income, lifestyle, and power. The
key question, then, is how are those differences accounted for by the
average citizen who is uncomfortable with thinking of his or her
society in class terms? The answer lies in the liberal ideology, which
explains social inequalities as stemming from individual effort (or
lack thereof), and not from structured class relations. Self-delusion
and the myth of classlessness are not difficult to understand in a
consumer society where material possessions and some degree of
mobility are within the reach of the average citizen. Also, the theme
of individualism runs through popular stories about stout-hearted
pioneers and intrepid fur traders in a rugged land, and about those of
humble origins who have risen to the top by dint of hard work. It is
also the stuff of history books, television movies, and common po-
litical commentary.
As a popular historian, Pierre Berton is an ideal representative of
this type of myth making. Such books as The National Dream and
The Last Spike have romanticized the past and fuelled a powerful
blend of nationalism and individualism in the average Anglo-Cana-
dian. They also tend to distract from class aspects of conflicts that
have marked the country's history (settler versus Native, French
versus English, the Metis Rebellions led by Louis Riel), in favour of
cultural and ethnic explanations premised on the savagery of the
Natives, the intransigence of the Metis people, and the noble efforts
of settlers who tamed a wild frontier. By downplaying class, these
histories and myths paint a picture of a benevolent colonial past in
which "cultural differences" were amicably settled and all parties
joined in common purpose to build a united Canada. To speak of
class inequality in Canada and to imply that behaviour is somehow
The Myth of the Classless Society 25
determined or structured by "invisible" class forces is held to be a
denial of the basic freedoms and openness that are hallmarks of the
system. This is why, in the public mind, class-based explanations of
behaviour are generally resisted.
The fact is, however, that there are many class and economic
inequalities in Canada, some more glaring and consequential than
others. The problem for the liberal, though, is that where classes are
deemed to exist they automatically imply the existence of domina-
tion, exploitation, and conflict. It is quite revealing to note what
Canadians, who typically deny the existence of class, see as the
recipe for advancement in life. In a 1996 study that sought to assess
the requirements for "Getting ahead around the world," Carleton
University political scientist Jon Pammett compared some of the
leading capitalist countries (Canada, Great Britain, the United States,
and West Germany). He found that "individual drive and initiative"
were the most important factors identified by respondents from all
countries (see Table 2.1). Specifically, Canadians ranked ambition,
good education, hard work, and natural ability as the major keys to
success. This fits neatly within the liberal-individualist ideology
according to which individuals are largely, if not solely, responsible
for their life situations, and individual characteristics are perceived
as the most important determinants of any patterns of inequality that
do exist.
Pammett made no attempt to tie "good education" to class back-
ground and paid no attention to those who might work hard and still
not have much to show for it, and in his study the notion of "natural
ability" is never examined. The enjoyment of class privilege is
treated simply as a matter of luck: "Giving a boost to this personal
initiative and achievement would be the luck involved in being born
into a wealthy or well-educated family" (Pammett 1996:72; emphasis
added).
Invoking the notion of "luck" here is of particular relevance to the
discussion of ideology and social control. As soon as individuals
begin to explain their subordinate positions in society as a function
of "bad luck," or as having been dealt a rotten hand by "nature," the
task of social control is virtually complete. By removing responsi-
bility for their condition entirely from the realm of human agency,
those in control, those who promote the idea that luck and fate can
explain social advantage and disadvantage, escape unscathed. The
ideology of classlessness persists and the status quo is left intact.
26 Richer and Poorer
Table 2.1
Most Important Factors for Getting Ahead:
Canada, Great Britain, United States, Germany
1987 and 1992
Important
Factors
Canada
1992*
Great
Britain
1987 1987
United
States
1992 1987
West
Germany
1992 1987
INDIVIDUAL
Ambition
Natural
ability
Hard work
Good
education
1
4
3
2
2
4
1
32
3
4
1
2
1
4
2
3
2
4
1
3
2
3
4
1
2
5
4
1
CONNECTIONS
Know right
people
Political
connections
Political
beliefs
5
8
11
5
11
10
5
11
13
5
7
11
5
8
12
5
8
9
3
9
11
BACKGROUND
Well-educated
parents
Wealthy
family
6
7
6
7
6
7
6
8
6
7
6
7
6
7
DEMOGRAPHICS
Gender
Race
Religion
Region
9
9
12
10
9
8
13
12
9
8
12
10
9
10
12
12
10
9
11
13
11
10
12
13
10
8
12
13
* no 1987 data are available for Canada.
Source: Pammett (1996: 70).
The Myth of the Classless Society 27
The Political Psychology of Control
In Chapter 1 it was argued that a society characterized by extremes
of wealth and poverty would likely be unstable. But in Canada, a
country in which great wealth exists alongside abject poverty, insta-
bility is not much in evidence. Why is this so? The answer lies in the
fact that the dominant ideology of liberalism manages to mask reality
and convince citizens that they live in a middle-class society with
few extremes. The dissonance produced when official ideology does
not accord with perceived reality is thereby eliminated, for there is
no problem if citizens are given reason to believe the claims embod-
ied in the public ideology and if the public presentation of the "facts"
accords with the internal realities of private life. The manufacture of
consent by those in control of the dominant institutions must there-
fore aim at getting members of the society to see and interpret the
evidence or facts of inequality in a manner that is not likely to be
disruptive of the social order.
As we will see, this idea, or more accurately, this illusion of
"mobility," is a crucial part of the engineering of control and stability
in Canada. It is integral to the discussion of class and to the common
confusion between class and occupation that we so often see.
Class and Occupation
For sociologists who studied the patterns of inequality in the early
phases of capitalist development, the notion of class was a fairly
uncomplicated one. People could be easily identified by what they
did, and the economic roles of merchants, traders, factory owners,
planters, slaves, factory workers, landlords, peasants, and so on were
clear and largely distinct from one another. Class assumed a primary
economic character that reflected the relatively simple and clear-cut
divisions of labour at the time.
With the further development and sophistication of capitalism,
however, the picture began to change and the political aspects of
various economic undertakings became salient. Colonial law gave
certain political rights to favoured classes, labour unions gained
legitimacy, and governments began to play a more active role in
regulating the economy. Planters became heavily indebted to mer-
chants (who also served as sources of credit), and sold their proper-
ties to them and the merchants became merchant-planters; slaves
were emancipated and converted to wage workers with very different
legal rights and responsibilities; peasants became integrated into the
28 Richer and Poorer
system of market exchanges and produced both subsistence and cash
crops; landlords became capitalists, and capitalists became landlords;
and with the development of corporate capitalism and the rise of joint
stock companies, capitalist owners, managers, and workers, all of
whom could own stock in the company, started to blurr the lines of
class demarcation. There followed developments that saw one indi-
vidual owning 10% of one company, 30% of another, and 60% of
yet another. It was no longer a simple matter to identify what people
did and deduce their class affiliations on that basis.
But the matter is even more complex than this. For example, it is
not possible to argue that two carpenters who each make $40,000
belong to the same class simply because they both do the same type
of work and make the same amount of money. If one is the owner
of a small carpentry business and the other is an employee of a large
carpentry firm, they may very well have the same level of income,
but they will have quite different class and economic interests, dif-
ferent legal liabilities, and very importantly, different political ori-
entations to capital and labour. To begin to analyze class inequality,
then, we must first agree on a definition of class that (a) is applicable
to the modern era of capitalism in Canada, (b) takes into account the
complexity of contemporary occupational specializations, and (c)
goes beyond the purely economic to embrace the political dimension
of class identity and action.
Marx, Weber, and Class
Two of the most influential sociological approaches to class are those
developed by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Max Weber (1864-1920).
Our definition of class will begin with Marx and then incorporate
Weber's contributions, which build on Marx, and which are able to
broaden Marx's treatment of the topic, given that Weber lived in a
later period of capitalist development and witnessed changes Marx
could not reasonably have foreseen. We are convinced that a critical
integration of the class treatments of these two figures is far more
advantageous than subscribing to the facile political oppositions that
later commentators have constructed to divide Marxian and We-
berian sociology.
This is not to say, however, that Marx and Weber were political
soulmates. We do not wish to give the impression that Marxian and
Weberian sociology are always and everywhere compatible, or that
they even share a common political vision for society; far from it.
Marx wanted capitalism to be replaced by socialism, which he felt
The Myth of the Classless Society 29
would be more humanistic, while Weber was most pessimistic about
the promise of socialism. The latter felt that as bad as capitalist
bureaucracy was, socialist bureaucracy would be far more confining.
Thus, while they both had serious criticisms of capitalism they did
not advance the same solutions to its ills, and Weber's eschewing of
radicalism is far more appealing to the liberal and in keeping with
the general Canadian denial that theirs is a society of class divisions.
As a humanist, Marx was concerned with the elimination of capi-
talism, which he felt dehumanized workers and other subordinate
groups and classes. A general improvement in the living and working
conditions of the working class, the most numerous segment of the
society, was Marx's goal, and so his treatment of class was bound
up with his theories of revolutionary social change. In Marx's dis-
cussion of capitalism, class was understood primarily as a function
of property ownership. He felt that the basic class distinctions were
those between the owners (bourgeoisie) and the non-owners (prole-
tariat) of private or productive property. It is important to point out
that Marx never saw capitalism as comprising only two classes. For
him the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were merely the principal or
defining classes of capitalism.
Ours is a structural understanding of class, and we are primarily
concerned with the ways in which classes relate to one another. By
this we mean that class is a relational concept; classes only exist in
relation to other classes. Thus, one can only speak of a ruling class
to the extent that there is a ruled class over which it exercises
domination. Classes, therefore, are seen as "empty places" (struc-
tures) that are only incidentally occupied by specific human beings.
So we are less concerned with the actual human beings involved than
we are with the structured relations among the classes.
Under capitalism, ownership of property is integral to class struc-
ture. Property rights are legal rights, enforced either by society or the
state, by either custom or law. To this extent, property is an accepted
social contract or agreement that sets and maintains specific relations
between people. As W. Clement put it, property "is the right [to]
control the use or benefit to which ownership is put... [Property] is
the right to the use or benefit of things, tangible or not, enforceable
by law. This is why Marx argued that property and class relations
were synonymous. If the law protects property as a set of rights as
described above, it will defend one segment of society to the detri-
ment of another. The law, therefore, which can legitimately call upon
state apparatus (e.g., courts, judges, police, and prison guards) to
30 Richer and Poorer
enforce property claims, finds itself in a structural contradiction
between its commitment, on the one hand, to fairly represent all
classes in society, and to defend only those with claims to property
on the other hand. Thus, Marx also described the state in capitalist
society as a class state. Class and property are intricately intertwined,
and Marx felt that the only way to abolish class and class privilege
was to abolish the private ownership of property.
The fact that private property guarantees the right to control the
fruits of ownership, tangible as well as intangible, has implications
for the labour of non-owners of property. Thus, when the survival of
the non-owners compels them to work for those who have accumu-
lated capital and who own property, the owners are said to have a
legal right to the labour of the non-owners. By extension, it stands
to reason that those who own no private property, the workers, will
have no property rights or legal claims on their employers. As was
discussed in Chapter 1, private property is property used to generate
income (such as lands, farms, factories, capital, and machinery), and
is not to be confused with personal property such as one's car or
one's house, things that are used purely for personal ends. Thus
understood, "property" is particularly important in light of the legal
rights it confers upon its owners.
Clearly the entire system, whose sole raison d'etre is the pursuit
of profit, will be geared legally to the exploitation and alienation of
the worker. There is no such thing as "capitalism with a heart," for
the capitalist who fails to compete effectively, to produce quality
goods at the lowest possible cost, to corner the market and get the
upper hand on competitors, will not be a capitalist very long. The
idea, then, is to get as much product out of the worker for as little
pay as the society and the law permit. This is the idea of exploitation,
which is intimately tied to the process of alienation: workers' loss of
control over (a) their own labour power, (b) the fruits of their labour,
and (c) the very conditions under which they labour.
The basic division between owners and non-owners is very gen-
eral and does not capture the complexities and variations in the actual
amount and kind of property owned. It makes little sense to argue
that a person who owns a factory, employs 150 workers, and pro-
duces a million dollars worth of commodities each year, is in the
same class as one whose factory employs 15 workers and produces
a mere hundred thousand dollars worth of commodities. The eco-
nomic risks associated with the former enterprise are far greater, as
are the amount of profits and the economic and political reach of the
The Myth of the Classless Society 31
Table 2.2
Basic Economic Criteria for Class Position
Bourgeoisie Petite
bourgeoisie
Proletariat
LABOUR POWER
Sale of
Purchase of
No
Yes
No
No
Yes
No
CONTROL OF LABOUR
One's own
Others'
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
No
No
SOURCE OF LIVELIHOOD
Wages
Capital
No
Yes
No
No
Yes
No
Source: Wright and Perrone (1977:34).
owner. As a defining feature of class, therefore, property ownership
is a variable category which also brings with it variations in the
degrees of power and control over (a) the means of production, (b)
the labour process, and (c) labour itself; property grants autonomy
in decision making, puts the owner in the position of exploiter instead
of exploited, and enables the owner to avoid the alienation that
non-owners face.
Marx was fully aware that the use of mere ownership of property
as the sole criterion for class membership was insufficient. He there-
fore added another class to the basic bourgeois-proletarian dichot-
omy: the petite or petty bourgeoisie. This class's ownership of capital
and productive property qualifies it as bourgeois, but its scale of
operation is smaller, and its professional and managerial sectors
exercise less power and control over the economy than large-scale
capitalists. Nevertheless, as we will see later, the petty bourgeoisie
occupies a crucial place in the Canadian class structure. This is the
so-called middle class to which so many Canadians claim member-
ship, and it is made up of small business proprietors, independent
commodity producers such as farmers, artisans, and other self-em-
ployed persons, and those in the management and professional sec-
tors.
32 Richer and Poorer
At this point, it will be useful to introduce Weber and some of the
modifications he offered to the basic Marxian schema of classes.
Accepting the fundamental Marxian position that property ownership
is a key feature of class identification, Weber went on to examine
some of the other significant aspects of class in modern society,
where the vast majority are propertyless. He focused in particular on
power and the fact that there are non-economic (non-property)
sources of power. For Weber power was simply the ability to issue
a command and have it obeyed, even if it goes against the will of the
person or persons commanded to execute it. Power, and the legiti-
mate use of it, which he called authority, is inherent in the bureau-
cratic structure of modern society. Those who are wealthy and own
vast amounts of property are not necessarily the only or the most
powerful people.
The Prime Minister of Canada offers a good example. He is
ostensibly the most powerful person in the country, yet his power
does not reside in his wealth or property holdings. Rather, it comes
from the bureaucratic structure of the political process, which gives
political power to individuals on the basis of such things as cultural
capital: their level of acquired skill, knowledge, and formal educa-
tion, their peer-acknowledged accomplishments in their chosen field,
their communication ability and charismatic or public appeal, and
the general scarcity or availability of these qualities on the open
market. That the Prime Minister is privately wealthy is incidental to
the fact that he wields such great power. Less extreme examples will
involve ministers and deputy ministers, university presidents, and
even union leaders. Governments, universities, and unions are all
bureaucratically structured organizations, and in order to move up in
them, educational credentials, skill and knowledge, cultural capital,
and other personal attributes are more relevant than property owner-
ship or large bank accounts.
This is not to say, however, that property and wealth are not
necessary; instead, it is to acknowledge that, in a critical analysis of
power in the modern, bureaucratic world, they are not sufficient. In
today's society, life generally goes on in large, formal, bureaucrati-
cally structured organizations where power is supposedly won in an
open, competitive contest. We are born in hospitals, educated in
schools, worship in churches, work in offices, join unions, vote for
politicians, and our children play little-league sports. Each of these
activities is hierarchically structured: power flows from the top down
and decision making rests with managers, principals, bishops, presi-
The Myth of the Classless Society 33
dents, bosses, captains, and so on. All these people supposedly derive
their status and power from their knowledge and ability to help the
organization reach its stated goals. They wield varying amounts of
power bestowed on them by the position or office they hold in the
bureaucratic structure, so they are able to command different in-
comes.
In such a system, a privately wealthy individual, for example, who
hires an unqualified son or cousin as her accountant or business
manager will not survive in the cut-throat market economy when
pitted against others who hired qualified accountants or business
managers on the basis of their education, skill, and knowledge. Henry
Veltmeyer, a sociologist at St. Mary's University, notes that only
about 25% of the corporate elite, those who really oversee and run
the capitalist economy, come from the most privileged upper class.
Most came from certain law firms, universities, and other institutions
that serve to guarantee, in place of membership in the upper class, a
commitment to its core values. While it is true that money can buy
a superior education, it does not always work this way. Many who
hold very powerful and prestigious positions in society come from
humble or modest backgrounds. One recent study has shown that
almost 35% of Canada's corporate elite come from the middle class,
and over 5% from working-class backgrounds. Within the Canadian
bourgeoisie, analyst Dennis Forcese shows, there is a measure of
mobility; but is it as free as we are generally given to believe (Forcese
1997:55)? Or is it illusory and ideological, not what it seems?
In outlining Weber's logic we have moved our focus from Marx.
The distinctions we are beginning to make have more to do with
people's occupational statuses than with their class affiliations. Crit-
ics on the left view these distinctions as ideologically conservative
and see those who follow Weber as resisting the controversial and
highly politicized term "class" that is associated primarily with
Marx. In place of "class" such Weberians prefer Weber's notion of
"status" which is supposedly achieved simply by changing one's
pattern of consumption and one's lifestyle. And those critics are
probably correct. The challenge, however, is to combine class and
occupational divisions in our discussion so that we can use the
variety of occupational distinctions that characterize contemporary
society not only to describe the society, but also to help explain its
workings. To do so we will retain the Marxist definition of class and
use Weber to distinguish occupational groupings within classes.
Whereas Marx looks at class as it is linked to property and exploita-
34 Richer and Poorer
tion, Weber observes how occupational status and prestige are dis-
tributed throughout the society, and thereby avoids having to deal
with the inherently conflictual nature of class relations. The political
implication of adopting a pure Weberian understanding is that it
tends to portray modern capitalism and its managerialist ideology in
softer terms as a type of society in which individually achieved
occupational mobility is a matter of personal effort and simple gra-
dations in income.
The hired accountants or business managers of a small firm or a
multinational corporation are employees of capital; they are techni-
cally non-owners of property, non-capitalist in terms of their class.
But they are powerful, well-paid, and enjoy high status. So how do
we reconcile the Marxian and Weberian approaches in this analysis?
Without becoming too technical, we propose to rely on Marx's cate-
gories of bourgeoisie (the capitalist class), petty bourgeoisie (the
middle class), and proletariat (the working class), as designating the
principal class divisions in society, with all their economic conse-
quences and political implications. We use Weber to talk about
occupational differentiation within the classes. Our purpose here is
not to set up a political and ideological contest between Marx and
Weber, but rather to bring class back into the analysis of social
inequality in Canada and to examine the ideological aspects of such
inequality. Thus, one of our concerns will be to see the extent to
which occupational differentiation is used by those in authority, and
accepted by the average citizen, as proof of Canada's open class
system. We will contend that, to the extent that there is mobility, it
is occupational, not class based.
The Capitalist Class or Bourgeoisie
The capitalist class, or what Marx called the bourgeoisie, can be
subdivided into several sectors depending on what one wishes to
highlight. One of the more traditional divisions contrasts the big,
resident Canadian monopoly capitalists with the far less powerful
fraction of capitalists who are junior partners of foreign (mainly
U.S.) capital. Within the Canadian capitalist class, there are indus-
trial, financial, and commercial sectors, whose dominance is well
established in such areas as banking and insurance, transportation,
utilities and real estate, media and telecommunications, mining, im-
port, export, and retail sales. Ignoring for the moment the consider-
able influence of foreign capital on the economy, these are Canada's
The Myth of the Classless Society 35
monopoly capitalists, who, together with their executive assistants,
control the lifeblood of the country.
Although it is not directly relevant to our present analysis, it is
important to point out that we are not dealing here with a homoge-
neous capitalist class. Each of these sectors can be broken down
along such lines as extent of economic ownership, scope of opera-
tions, amount of control of a given enterprise or area of the economy,
degree of autonomy in decision making, management and direction
of the enterprise, and so on. However, since there is a great deal of
sectoral overlap in both their operations and the patterns of owner-
ship and control, and since our main aim is simply to describe this
class, we will speak of the capitalist class as a whole.
At its most extreme, the capitalist class comprises the super-rich
and powerful families in Canada, what Peter C. Newman has written
of in The Canadian Establishment. It includes such names as the
Bronfmans, Thomsons, Desmarais, Westons, Irvings, Eatons, Reich-
manns, and Blacks. In numerical terms, the super-rich do not exceed
2% of Canada's population and there is a core group of fewer than
one thousand that owns outright 80% of all corporate stocks and
bonds in the country. The extreme lifestyle of this group is never
visible to ordinary Canadians: their private yachts, private clubs,
private deals in private boardrooms, private jets to private destina-
tions, and most importantly, their huge private profits, insulate them
from public gaze. This is why most Canadians are able to think them
away so comfortably when constructing their image of a classless
society. As we will see, their "invisibility" as a class in the public
mind is matched only by the "invisibility" of the super-poor.
While reliable data on the combined wealth of the Canadian capi-
talist class are not easily available, few will doubt the immense
fortunes they command. It has been estimated that only twelve fami-
lies and five conglomerates control one-third of all corporate assets
in Canada, while eight corporate conglomerates control about 80%
of the 300 companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. It has
also been estimated that, in broad class terms, the Canadian popula-
tion is made up of 26.5% middle class, 63.7% working class, 8.7%
lower class (including the poor and unemployed), and a mere 1.1%
upper class. (Russell 1994:78)
The inordinate economic might of the capitalist class, and its
ability to affect the economy as a whole, is central to any assessment
of social inequality in Canada. But since economics alone does not
tell the full story of control and is not the only dimension of inequal-
36 Richer and Poorer
ity, it is equally important to stress the political clout of this class.
Because of their family connections, huge campaign contributions,
their employment of such a large part of the workforce, their ability
to move huge sums of money in and out of the country and affect
national interest rates, and even the overall employment levels, no
government can afford to ignore the demands or wishes of this class.
So it is not difficult to accept the fact that wealthy capitalists will
also have direct links with political elites and decisive input into the
governance of the country. For, linked in a complex pattern of social
and familial relations, intercorporate ownership, and joint director-
ships on the boards of various corporations, these large capitalists
can elevate themselves to political power and so control the state
apparatus. They form an invisible government, what Marxists call
"the ruling class." All of this calls into question the notions of
political democracy and equality that are the cornerstones of Can-
ada's liberal ideology and philosophy.
A perfect example of the implications of such power and control
was reported by Diane Francis in Controlling Interest: Who Owns
Canada? It relates to a former New Brunswick premier, Louis Ro-
bichaud, who recalls a conversation with a son of billionaire K.C.
Irving: "My father never lost a New Brunswick election in his life,"
the son boasted, although everyone knows that he had never sought
political office. "But for years," Francis continues, "Irving could
make or break politicians" in a province where "the Irving family
virtually is New Brunswick's private sector."
With the rise of corporate capitalism it is quite difficult, if not
pointless, to try to identify the actual owners of the largest corpora-
tions, or to separate the class interests of the owners from those of
their surrogates: directors, vice presidents, chief executive officers,
chairpersons and managers. For in the modern corporate world it is
often the case that owners are also employees of a business, and top
managers own corporate stock, earn shares as part of their regular
pay, and sit as directors on corporate boards. Industrialists, finan-
ciers, and managers are simply fragments of the capitalist class and
can be expected to act in concert to protect and advance their com-
mon long-term interests.
Trying to trace direct ownership becomes very tangled, because a
parent company is often owned by one or more finance or investment
companies that are themselves owned by other finance companies.
And the parent company in question can own 20, 50, or 100 other
companies, each of which can own, fully or partially, another hun-
The Myth of the Classless Society 37
dred or so companies, which again can own, fully or partially, other
member companies, and on and on. In the age of multinational or
transnational capitalism and globalization, ownership patterns have
become amazingly intricate, and increasingly concentrated in fewer
hands. Diagrams 2.1 and 2.2 show the widely diversified 1996 assets
of the Bronfman family — a case in point.
The Bronfmans are a Canadian dynasty that in 1983 controlled
some 700 companies with combined assets of over $56 billion. And
while not all the country's corporate empires are family controlled,
such empires are not unimportant. In 1983, for example, six families
(Weston, Black, Desmarais, Irving, Thomson, and Bronfman) owned
or had control of more than 1300 of Canada's largest corporations.
Today, the Bronfman family is represented by two trusts: the Peter
and Edward Bronfman Trusts and the Charles and Edgar Bronfman
Trusts. In the late 1980s, Edper Investments, which owned or con-
trolled 184 companies, gave the Bronfmans 41.5% in powerful Bras-
can, which itself had a 39.2% share of Noranda, which in turn
controlled 154 companies and had a 41.1% share of MacMillan
Bloedel with its 27 companies, and so on. Formerly known as the
Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Company, Brascan became a
true mega-corporation with an agglomeration of assets and liabilities
that ranged from Rio de Janeiro's plush, five-star Hotel Interconti-
nental to the Toronto Blue Jays baseball club, Laura Secord, the
Great Canadian Soup Company, and the Great Lakes Power Corpo-
ration. Its board members also sat on the boards of, and thus control-
led, such corporate powerhouses as Norcen, Trizec, Consumer's Gas,
Noranda, Hiram Walker-Gooderham and Worts, Dofasco, and Lig-
gert and Myers, among many, many others.
All of this led analyst Diane Francis to comment that Canada's
exceedingly high degree of economic concentration means that
"everything from your glass of orange juice in the morning, to the
clothes you put on, to the office where you work, to the department
store and mall where you shop, to that after-work beer and a night
at the ball game — are likely to be produced by these families and
conglomerates."
To get a better feel for the skilful antics involved in this world of
high finance, takeovers, mergers, buy-ins and buy-outs, amalgama-
tions, and privatizations, we can refer to the machinations of another
powerful family, the Reichmanns, who owned Canada's largest pri-
vate development company, Olympia and York Developments Ltd.
In 1979 Olympia and York went after English Property Corp. Ltd,
40 Richer and Poorer
Britain's third-largest property company, which in turn controlled
Trizec Corp., Canada's second-largest public real estate company.
At the time Carena-Bancorp, owned by Edward and Peter Bronfman,
was part of Trizec and gave the Bronfmans voting control of the
latter. In a deal worth over $157 million, the Bronfmans chose not
to oppose the takeover bid of English Property by Olympia and York,
but they managed to retain management control of Trizec, while
agreeing to share ownership of it with the Reichmanns.
The complexities do not end here. There are many levels of deci-
sion making within and among subsidiary firms and enterprises: for
example, directors, vice presidents, chief executive officers, chair-
persons, managers, supervisors. Generally speaking, major decisions
relating to the direction of the firm, new initiatives, buying and
investing, or selling off of holdings are made by the boards of
directors concerned. As we know, however, board members, who can
also be owners or shareholders in the company, are appointed by the
corporate owners and are directly responsible to them. Board mem-
bers in turn appoint VPs, CEOs, chairpersons, managers, and other
functionaries, and all decisions must reflect the interests of the own-
ers of the parent company at the top.
Capitalist control of the economy is thus maintained via a complex
network of overlapping and interlocking directorships on the boards
of leading industrial and commercial enterprises, banks, insurance,
trust, mortgage, and investment companies, and in other important
economic sectors. Over recent decades numerous studies have shown
how very little the picture of capitalist ownership and control of
major institutions in the Canadian economy has changed. Focusing
on concentration of ownership in Canadian-owned corporations,
John Porter, author of the well-known book, The Vertical Mosaic
(1965), found that between 1948 and 1950 some 985 individuals,
Canada's economic elite, held directorships in the 170 dominant
corporations, banks, and insurance companies in the country. An-
other study that examined the concentration of economic power in
Canada (Ashley 1957) found that in 1955, 97 individuals who held
directorships in the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada,
the Canadian Bank of Commerce, and the Bank of Nova Scotia, also
shared among them 930 directorships in other corporations in other
sectors of the economy. Porter's best-known student, Wallace Clem-
ent, found similar and increasingly dense patterns of corporate and
directorship links among the leading banks and insurance companies,
The Myth of the Classless Society 41
Diagram 2.2
The Edward and Peter Bronfman Group
Selected Financial lnvestments-1996
(Numbers in brackets indicate percentage ownership.)
Trilon Financial
Corp. (64.5%)
London Insurance
Group Inc. (53%)
London Life
Insurance Co.
(98.1%)
Trilon BanCorp
(100%)
London General
Insurance Group
Inc. (100%)
London Life
Financial Corp.
(100%)
Trilon Securities
(100%)
Trivest Insurance
Network Ltd.
(100%)
LonLife Financial
Services (100%)
Trilon Investment
Corp. (100%)
Royal LePage Real
Estate Management
Services (75%)
Source: "Intercorporate Ownership-1996" Statistics Canada #61-517-XPB (pp.
5-7).
42 Richer and Poorer
trust and mortgage companies, utilities, mining, resource, and manu-
facturing sectors.
In the 1980s, Diane Francis, who focused less on corporate and
directorship links, chose to highlight the leading family dynasties of
Canada and came up with a similarly dismal picture of economic
concentration. In 1986, she began Controlling Interest: Who Owns
Canada?, with a quotation from the president of Cadillac Fairview
Corp., who feared that "in a number of years there will be six groups
running this country." She then went on to offer a very pessimistic
economic forecast for Canada, pointing to the existence of 32 para-
sitic family dynasties more interested in enriching themselves by
taking ever-larger pieces of the Canadian economic pie than in en-
larging that pie for others to share. And they do this with the full
blessing of Parliament and the courts, which understand very little
about economics, and which are consequently powerless to stop their
mergers, takeovers, buy-outs, and assorted other economic machina-
tions. In the process they smother small businesses, chase away new
capital, sacrifice Canadian jobs, and abuse taxpayers who end up
footing the bill for their gambles. Francis commented, "Without
regulation, Canada's corporate barons have played fast and loose
with tax and securities laws, and sometimes their actions have bor-
dered on theft," though arrests and convictions are rare. Thus, as
Forcese pointed out in his 1997 The Canadian Class Structure:
"unlike the wage earner, the accumulated wealth of the upper class
is not disclosed, and generally not taxed."
Into the 1990s, when unemployment rose sharply, and when those
still employed had their salaries frozen for three and four years, the
wealthy in Canada continued to enjoy one of the lowest rates of
taxation in the world.
Findings such as these make one gasp at the thinking of most
Canadians, who seem to believe that the shareholders of these large
corporations are numerous and broadly representative of the total
population. Nothing could be further from the truth, but governments
willingly cooperate in such concentration of ownership and perpetu-
ate the popular fiction, because the state in capitalist society has two
principal responsibilities: first, to ensure the long-term reproduction
of capitalism and capitalist institutions and, second, to protect the
interests of the various fractions of the capitalist class. Viewing class
in structural terms, therefore, the very senior levels of government,
including the high-level state bureaucrats such as the prime minister,
the provincial premiers, members of federal and provincial cabinets,
The Myth of the Classless Society 43
senators, and directors of Crown corporations, should also be seen
as part of the capitalist class, because they play such a crucial role
in regulating relations between capital and labour, and because they
have a clear commitment to the maintenance of capitalism and those
who benefit most from it. Because our analysis is focused less on the
personalities of these individuals than on the structural positioning
among classes in society, it is not difficult to see how the offices
occupied by state bureaucrats can cast them in a clearly antagonistic
role when dealing with labour. Although these individuals hold po-
litical power only temporarily, after they leave office they revert to
their socially privileged, bourgeois class pursuits, cancel their blind
trusts and re-join at very senior levels the large corporate firms they
came from — to carry on business as usual. Their role in the picture
of social inequality in Canada is unmistakable.
The Middle Class or Petty Bourgeoisie
The big capitalists might be in a league of their own. There is,
however, another class of property owners that cannot be left out of
any analysis of social inequality in Canada. This is the middle class,
or the petty bourgeoisie. As we will see, when Canadians claim to
belong to the middle class, it is in part this large, ill-defined, amor-
phous group that they have in mind. We say "in part" because there
are some strata of the proletariat or working class that shade into the
middle class and confuse the picture. This confusion is directly
related to the distinction between "class" and "occupation" and feeds
into the myth of mobility that the average Canadian employs in his
or her denial of entrenched social inequality in the society: "Because
working Canadians are a stratified social class, with gradations of
income and benefit associated with different jobs, the class character
of society is less apparent and certainly not clear-cut" (Forcese
1997:42).
During the period when Marx wrote, the petty bourgeoisie was
largely composed of independent commodity producers: farmers,
fishermen, artisans, and other class groupings that were characteristic
of a feudal-agricultural order. They were distinguished by the fact
that they owned their own productive property, usually land and
simple agricultural, fishing, or mechanical implements, and subsisted
without having either to buy or sell wage labour. Family labour and
self-exploitation were central to their economic pursuits.
Marx felt that, faced with the march of industry and the spread of
capitalism, this class of independent commodity producers was
44 Richer and Poorer
doomed to disappear. The history of small fishers, farmers, and
artisans in Canada partially bears Marx out on this score. In the
fishery this is clearly evident as big ships with modern technology
and huge capacity are able to process and package their catch while
still at sea, not to mention the prohibitive costs associated with
helicopters that target schools of fish from the air, Japanese drift-net
fishing, and so on. In agriculture, with increased competition from
large, mechanized, and capitalized operators, members of this class
have lost control of the land and have either converted to wage work
on farms now owned by big capital or, more often, moved to urban
areas seeking to sell their wage labour. While about 40% of Canada's
active labour force was employed on the land at the turn of the
century (Johnson 1979:94), by 1995 the figure was only about 3%
and agricultural unemployment stood at a mere 0.17%. These statis-
tics show a clear desertion of the agricultural sector by those who
had become displaced by large, capital-intensive farm operations
(Statistics Canada Cat. 71-201).
Proletarianization is the process whereby a person or population
moves from a situation of self-sufficiency in the ownership of the
means of production to reliance on wages and employment by others
for survival. This process has been constant in the history of all
capitalist societies as property ownership has become more concen-
trated in fewer hands and ever-larger segments of the population have
become propertyless.
The pressures placed on the family farm by big banks have been
well publicized for many years, and as increasing numbers of them
declare bankruptcy the process of proletarianization simply acceler-
ates. In 1984, for example, out of a total agricultural labour force of
491,000 (Statistics Canada Cat. 71-201), 51% were self-employed
(Statistics Canada Cat. 71-582). Increasingly, small primary produc-
ers, caught in a cost-price squeeze and mortgaged to the hilt, are
forced to abandon the family farm or the inshore fishery.
The Canadian petty bourgeoisie has traditionally included two
other groups, small, retail business sector and a variety of inde-
pendent, skilled, and semi-skilled trades. The former is made up of
"mom and pop" grocery stores, pet stores, second-hand and repair
shops, local restaurants and coffee houses, pawnbrokers, and a host
of other small business ventures. Independent entrepreneurs in the
latter sector include truckers with their own rigs, taxi drivers who
own their own vehicles and plates, carpenters, plumbers, electricians,
auto mechanics, barbers and hairdressers, cobblers, tailors, and seam-
The Myth of the Classless Society 45
stresses. Very much like the independent commodity producers of
this class who fell victim to the corporate capitalist penetration of
agriculture and fishing, these two groups are also under severe eco-
nomic pressure. For example, as the powerful Beckers, Mac's Milk,
and 7 Eleven chain stores have all but eliminated the corner grocery
store, Canadian Tire, Speedy Muffler, and Quality Lube have come
to replace the local auto repair shop. Meanwhile, McDonald's,
Wendy's, and Burger King have sounded the death knell of thou-
sands of family-owned restaurants.
The New Middle Class or New Petty Bourgeoisie
As the structure of Canadian society has changed dramatically in the
past half century, so too has its middle class. This class has now
expanded to incorporate an array of occupations that reflect changing
economic realities. Thus, whereas the traditional middle class of
farmers, fishers, and artisans were described as "bourgeois" because
they owned productive property, they were different from capitalists
in that they did not employ or exploit wage labour. The new middle
class, on the other hand, is only defined as property owning to the
extent that technical skill, specialized knowledge, and professional
training are seen as "property" to be bought and sold on the open
market. This is where Weber's concern with marketable skills and
their role in enhancing life chances comes into the picture. To Weber,
one's social class position is conditioned largely by the forces of
supply and demand. In the bureaucratic society Weber envisaged,
"ownership" of skill and know-how were key determinants of in-
come, power, control, status, and occupational mobility.
Another thing that distinguishes the new middle class is that they
are professionals, in the fullest sense of the word. In Marxist terms,
they are the "surplus class" of unproductive workers, as opposed to
the manual working class that produces the goods and wealth on
which the capitalist system actually runs. As business people, mid-
dle-range politicians, office managers and assorted white-collar pro-
fessionals, this large and growing sector comprises the functionaries
of capitalism. They help the capitalists make their profits and ensure
the continuity of the system. Their jobs are seen as careers, they earn
salaries as opposed to wages, and they have a fair measure of per-
sonal flexibility in their daily schedules. Given their generally pleas-
ant conditions of work, the great deal of autonomy that comes with
their jobs, their tremendous control over the labour (and lives) of
others beneath them in the bureaucratic hierarchy, and the fact that
46 Richer and Poorer
their salaries as unproductive workers are higher than the economic
contributions they make to the society, members of this new class
fraction are neither alienated nor exploited.
The professional sector of the middle class includes highly trained
and skilled members of the professions, both self-employed and
salaried: doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, accountants, re-
search scientists, university professors, consultants, and even certain
high-profile journalists. As professionals, their power is not derived
from personal, material wealth. Rather, it resides in their specialized
knowledge and technical expertise, which are in high market de-
mand. They are all certified by institutions of higher learning, hold
membership in professional associations, and are usually subject to
codes of conduct drawn up by their respective professional commu-
nities. It is not unusual for them to earn salaries in the six-figure
range and to enjoy lifestyles corresponding to their earning power.
They have a large measure of autonomy and flexibility in their jobs,
retain control of their working conditions, and are fairly politically
conscious of their interests as a group. Through their associations,
they are capable of cohesive political action.
There is also a related managerial sector made up of highly paid
managers of industrial, commercial, financial, and other related en-
terprises. Generally sporting MBA, MSc (Management), Certified
General Accounting, and law degrees, they usually earn annual sala-
ries running from $70 or $80 thousand to over $200 thousand, live
in houses that cost between $350 and $500 thousand, drive cars worth
between $60 and $80 thousand, own power boats and yachts valued
at over $100 thousand, take frequent luxury vacations, and, in short,
lead unbelievably affluent lifestyles.
Very much like their professional counterparts, these people,
whose "property" is limited to their managerial skills, specialized
knowledge, and administrative know-how, clearly do not belong to
the class of rich capitalists. Their power and control of decision
making, though by no means negligible, are delegated by others and
circumscribed by the company that hires them. It is also unlikely that
they can wield enough economic clout and political cohesion as a
class fraction to significantly affect the economy at the national or
even the provincial level.
Consistent with our use of power and control, whether derived
from property or marketable knowledge, as criteria for membership
in the new middle class, we can also include middle-range members
of government and the civil service: deputy ministers and their ap-
The Myth of the Classless Society 47
pointees, members of Parliament and provincial legislatures, manag-
ers and heads of special commissions, judges, and career military and
police officers of high rank. While, on one hand, they obviously do
not have the same amount of power, status, income, and influence as
prime ministers, premiers, cabinet members, and directors of Crown
corporations and so do not qualify for membership among the rich
capitalists, on the other hand, they are not exactly powerless; indeed,
they are far from it.
Marx was correct about the decline of the traditional middle class.
But it seems that Weber was more insightful about the new middle
class, which is growing quickly at the professional and managerial
levels, largely because of the expansion of the welfare state, the
wider provision of social services, and the increasing involvement of
government in the economy through various marketing boards. As
the state bureaucracy expands, the power and control of decision
making among this sector of the middle class can also be expected
to grow.
Contradictory Class Locations
A considerable amount of interest has been generated about the
political inclinations of the new middle class. If they do indeed form
a class that is politically conscious, organized, and capable of mobi-
lizing its members in the sense we have been discussing the concept,
can we identify what their interests are? Are their interests the same
as those of the bourgeoisie? Do all members of the middle class, as
owners of small property and holders of a certain degree of power,
have a uniform relationship to working-class politics?
These are complex questions for which no simple answers will
suffice, but some insight can be gained from Eric Olin Wright, who
uses the concepts of "contradiction" and "control" to analyze class
relations and politics. Along with the basic antagonisms among
classes, Wright noted that some class sectors, particularly those of
the new middle class, have stood in a contradictory or confused
relation to the larger class structure. By this he meant that the politics
of a class sector would be indecisive and reflect the unclear position
occupied by that sector in the opposition between capital and labour.
For example, using the strict property definition of class, Wright has'
found that managers, who are non-property owners employed by the
capitalist, are by definition proletarian (waged workers). At the same
time, their relatively high salaries derived from the exploitation of
workers, and their greater autonomy and control over the means of
48 Richer and Poorer
production, make them an ally of capital. They thus occupy an
ambivalent and contradictory position between the capitalist and
working classes. Similarly, factory supervisors, who have only mar-
ginally higher incomes than workers, but who also engage in some
physical production and have control of the labour process, also
occupy an ambivalent position between the middle and working
classes. Then there is the small employer torn between the middle
class and the capitalist class.
The picture became even more complex when Wright distin-
guished among different degrees of control over investments, the
means of production, the labour process, and labour itself. He then
introduced the "contradictory class locations" of top managers, mid-
dle managers, technocrats, and foremen or line supervisors, all of
whom have some degree of control over aspects of these productive
resources. Contradictory classes show mixed patterns of control and
authority that can easily degenerate into such an array of subclasses
that analysis becomes trivial or meaningless. We suggest that, instead
of trying to figure out all the combinations and permutations of these
contradictory class positions and relationships, it is easier to treat
them, not as classes or class sectors, but simply as occupations. In
this way, the tensions and antagonisms that can stem from a situation
where there are entrenched class inequalities, are ideologically de-
flected, and social inequalities are cast simply as occupational dis-
tinctions. What we are dealing with here is a purportedly open system
that offers some mobility within a given class, in this case occupa-
tional mobility within the middle class, which is widely and errone-
ously viewed as mobility between classes. Where the distinction
between class and occupation is not clearly made, people who are
occupationally mobile can entertain the fiction that theirs is a class-
less society or that they all live in the same (middle) class.
Let us now turn our attention to the working class, or proletariat.
The Working Class or Proletariat
Owing to the movement out of the middle class into wage labour and
the increasing concentration of property ownership in Canada and
other advanced capitalist countries, the working class is the fastest
growing and probably the most occupationally heterogeneous of
classes. In these countries, people are generally reluctant to declare
themselves members of the proletariat. Even the term "proletariat"
is avoided, given its Marxist implications of being radical, prone to
confrontation, and revolutionary. In its place the label "working
The Myth of the Classless Society 49
class" is most commonly used, but even here resistance to self-iden-
tification is common, largely because advanced capitalist societies
maintain a clear separation between manual and mental work and
esteem the latter more highly, and also because the terms working
class and lower class (with all their negative connotations) are often
used synonymously. Members of the working class reluctant to iden-
tify themselves as such are also by and large the most likely to claim
that they are middle class, or that Canada is a classless society.
This notwithstanding, the proletariat, or working class, is an em-
pirical reality, and it is the largest of all classes. In Canada, the 1991
census lists a total population of 27,296,859 (Statistics Canada Cat.
93-304 p. 13). Out of an economically active labour force of
14,474,945, the census lists 13,005,505, or 90% as having worked
for wages (Statistics Canada, Cat. 93-324 p. 110; Cat. 93-326 p.2).
But as we have discussed, working for a wage or a salary is only one
insufficient element in the definition of class. To use a definition
simply tied to ownership of productive property yields a mere two-
class view of society, failing to take into account occupational and
other distinctions within a given class. The working class in Canada
is quite differentiated, running the gamut from semi-professional and
technical workers at the top to agricultural or farm workers at the
bottom. Among semi-professionals are those who possess some cul-
tural capital, limited amounts of power, and a restricted measure of
control over others, even though they do not own property. At the
other end of the spectrum are farm workers, who in 1991 were the
worst paid workers in Canada (Statistics Canada Cat. 93-332).
Following the categories developed by Statistics Canada to de-
scribe the working class, we can speak of five broad occupational
groupings within it. First are the semi-professional and technical
workers who make decent wages and salaries and who, even if their
jobs do not necessarily require it, might also hold a college degree
or diploma. This group includes a wide variety of occupations such
as teachers, social workers, x-ray and dental technicians, computer
operators, engineering assistants, nurses, master mechanics, and li-
brarians. Also included are those in the leisure and entertainment
industry, such as scriptwriters, performers and musicians, artists, and
certain media people like news writers and reporters. In the minds
of the average Canadian, this semi-professional and technical sector
of the working class is often confused with the middle class, and this
contributes to the belief that we all live in one, big middle-class
society.
50 Richer and Poorer
People in these occupations are usually quite visible in the work-
ing-class community. They are white-collar employees who gener-
ally enjoy quite pleasant working conditions, earn a comfortable
living, can accumulate various material possessions, and, as we have
said, can often boast some post-secondary education. Because of this
they are given a certain community status and often delude them-
selves into thinking they are part of a mobile segment in a fluid
middle-class society. At the same time, other segments of the work-
ing class view them as models that are not only deserving of emula-
tion, but are also within their own reach. The ideological implications
of all this are very real, especially given the heavy traffic between
this upper rung of the working-class ladder and the lower rungs of
the middle-class ladder. Many of these people have parents in lower
sectors of the working class, so, given semi-professionals' relatively
higher wages and good working conditions, the upward move is a
sign of intergenerational upward mobility. Ironically, however, for
some, "semi-professional" means a drop in class status. Some of the
children, usually daughters, of middle-class parents enter this sector
after college.
The second grouping within the working class is made up of
white-collar and other workers in offices, stores, supermarkets, and
even on the street. This is the very diverse clerical and sales sector
of the working class. Among the clerical occupations are such office
personnel as secretaries and stenographers, typists, bookkeepers and
accounting clerks, cashiers and tellers, shipping and receiving clerks,
receptionists and information clerks, mail and postal workers, tele-
phone operators, and messengers. In the sales sector there are general
sales clerks, door-to-door salespersons, service station attendants,
insurance, real estate, and advertising sales personnel, and telemar-
keters. Traditionally, a high school diploma was sufficient for entry
to this sector, but as the economy has contracted over the past two
decades it is not uncommon to find college graduates doing these
jobs for very low pay (see Table 2.3).
A third category lumps a wide array of working-class occupations
and income groups under the rubric of "service workers." Statistics
Canada reported that two out of every three Canadian workers in
1991 were found in service producing industries. (Cat. 93-326 p.l).
Service workers are found in restaurants and fast food outlets, thea-
tres and cinemas, hotels, and protective services. Some common,
poorly paid occupations in this sector include chefs and cooks, ush-
ers, waiters and bartenders, cleaners, baggage handlers, and train
The Myth of the Classless Society 51
Table 2.3
Selected Occupations by Average 1990 Income and Number
Census category
Health &
Medicine
Managerial &
administrative
Clerical
Sales
Service
Farming/Fishing
Forestrv
Tob title
Physicians &
surgeons
Dentists
Veterinarians
Senior government
managers
Engineering &
architectural
managers
Construction
managers
Sales and
marketing managers
Bookkeepers
Cashiers & tellers
Data processing
Stock clerks
File clerks
Phone operators
Wholesale & retail
Door-to-door
Real estate
Insurance
Chefs & cooks
Bartenders
Food & beverage
servers
Livestock handlers
Crop hands
Nurserv attendants
Trapping
Fishing
Forestrv & logging
Income ($)
83,407
95,728
86,623
63,870
60,611
52,878
59,625
20,000
9,543
20.019
17,807
13,982
17,729
16,023
13,581
35,128
32,590
11,718
10,681
7,265
11,869
9,169
12,210
7,020
12,835
10,360
Number
85,635
54,700
13,025
157,065
16,430
32,035
4,925
410,685
358,695
141,000
115,110
40,520
31,050
739,285
15,370
83,170
65,345
229,925
41,590
308,995
34,205
47,095
99,430
1.045
6,470
18,070
Source: adapted from Statistics Canada (Cat. 93-332). 1991 Census.
52 Richer and Poorer
porters. Among the better paid are armed forces personnel, fire fight-
ers and police officers, prison guards, and certain security personnel.
The fourth category includes manual production workers, the tra-
ditional blue-collar workers or industrial proletariat employed at the
industrial sites, in the factories, mines, and warehouses of the capi-
talists. Counted among their numbers are craftworkers (machinists,
linemen, crane operators, die makers), transport operatives (railway
workers, truck drivers, forklift operators), machine operatives (as-
semblers, cutters, fitters, welders, punch press operators), labourers
(longshoremen, warehousers, stevedores), and construction workers.
As is well known, these jobs are physically very demanding, repeti-
tious, and unimaginative, and with increasing mechanization and
computerization of blue-collar operations, many are subject to "de-
skilling." Consequently, many workers in this category suffer high
levels of alienation and exploitation at the hands of supervisors and
foremen, who are themselves pressured from above by their supe-
riors. Although the average wages of these workers might compare
well with some other categories, long hours and overtime, frequent
job-related accidents, unpleasant conditions, abusive supervisors,
and general occupational insecurity are just some of the adversities
they have to contend with on a routine basis. These workers are very
productive relative to many other sectors, and on their backs much
of Canada's economic prosperity rests.
The fifth and final category of the working class is made up of the
most powerless and miserably paid workers, who engage in farming,
as well as the specialized activities of stock raising, dairy production,
logging, and even fishing. Specific occupational designations in this
sector include general farm workers, livestock and crop farm work-
ers, horticultural and animal husbandry occupations, harvesting la-
bourers, and nursery and greenhouse workers. As can be seen in
Table 2.3, wages of workers in this sector are the lowest in Canada
and in no way reflect or acknowledge the vital contributions that
these workers make to the daily survival of every Canadian.
Compared with the rich lifestyles of the high-flying Canadian
Establishment, members of the working class live an entirely differ-
ent reality. Even if we were to leave the Canadian Establishment out
of the picture (since technically speaking they tend not to have
"occupations"), the disparities are staggering. According to Statistics
Canada, the average income for the 10 highest-paid middle-class
occupations in 1990 was $73,313, five times more than the average
for the 10 lowest-paid occupations, which stood at $15,092 (Statistics
The Myth of the Classless Society 53
Canada, Cat. 93-332 p.2). The former category includes judges,
magistrates, physicians, surgeons, dentists, pilots, and university pro-
fessors, while the latter covers such occupations as textile fabrica-
tion, apparel and furnishing service, chefs and cooks, sewing
machine operators, farm workers, waiters, and cleaners. There are
many, many more cooks, cleaners, and farm workers than there are
judges, physicians, pilots, and so on.
Further, while the figure for the top 10 might appear to be low, it
must be borne in mind that we are dealing here with averages.
Newcomers to the professions, such as assistant professors and re-
cently graduated doctors or lawyers not in private practice, lower the
average considerably. But this is only a temporary condition in pro-
fessions where there are no ceilings on incomes. At the other ex-
treme, among the bottom 10, where entry-level incomes will also
distort the overall average, the range of incomes is not all that great,
and most occupations have ceilings. Add to this the fact that the
wealthy tend to be more healthy, to have longer life expectancy, to
enjoy better life chances, to be more physically secure, and to be
better able to protect themselves legally and otherwise, and entirely
new dimensions of social inequality begin to become apparent.
The worlds of these two classes may seem to be different. Never-
theless, they are part of the same Canada. Those in the menial,
dead-end, dirty, low-paying occupations simply represent the flip
side of wealth, privilege, and power in our supposedly classless
society. Yet this does not come close to completing the picture of
social inequality in the country. For there is yet another world out
there: the world of the poor.
The Poor
Poverty might merit pity but not provoke indignation. The
poor exist because of the rules of the game or the ill-fortune
of destiny. Until 20 or 30 years ago, poverty was the fruit of
injustice ... much has changed in a short time. Now poverty
is unconnected to injustice, and the very notion of injustice
has been effaced and nearly disappeared. The moral code at
the end of the century does not condemn injustice, only
failure. (Galeano, no date)
Consistent with the generally rosy image Canadians have of them-
selves and their society, we also tend to deny the existence of pov-
erty, or we explain it away as the result of individual laziness and
54 Richer and Poorer
Table 2.4
Quintile Shares of Total (100%) Income
in 1981, 1986, and 1991
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
Top
Families
1981
6.5
12.8
18.3
24.1
38.3
1986
6.4
12.4
17.9
24.0
39.3
1991
6.4
12.2
17.6
23.9
39.9
Unattached
individuals
1981
5.0
9.5
15.7
25.1
44.7
1986
5.2
10.4
15.3
24.4
44.7
1991
5.4
10.6
15.6
24.7
43.7
All
households
1981
4.6
10.9
17.6
25.2
41.7
1986
4.7
10.4
17.0
24.9
43.1
1991
4.7
10.3
16.6
24.7
43.8
Source: Ross et al, The Canadian Fact Book on Poverty (1994:89).
Note: "Total income" refers to all sources of income including government
transfers, before taxes. Over the years the distrubution has remained
remarkably stable indicating a freezing of the inequality patterns in the three
categories listed in the table.
personal choice. Writing for the right-wing Fraser Institute in 1992,
for example, Christopher Sarlo asserted that "poverty, as it has been
traditionally understood, has been virtually eliminated. It is simply
not a major problem in Canada" (Sarlo 1992:2). Sarlo's writing
typifies the economic and political ideology of the Fraser Institute,
the well-known right-wing think tank located in Vancouver, B.C. It
extols the virtues of free enterprise capitalism, casts the individual
as the sole architect of his or her own destiny, and denies that social
processes can be structured into the society. And in one regard this
makes sense, for as the noted French sociologist Andre Beteille says:
"poverty is a source of social opprobrium; to be poor in an affluent
society is to show a lack of worth" (1969:369).
Thus, declaring that "I am not at all offended by inequality[;] I
have no problem with large variations in income and wealth," Sarlo
prepared the ground for a conservative defence of the status quo.
Because poverty does not exist and inequality is not offensive to him,
what is left to conclude? His position fits well with the functionalist
treatment of inequality discussed in Chapter 1, in which inequalities
in income and wealth are deemed necessary and desirable, even
innate. Echoing these precise sentiments, Sarlo continued: "States of
The Myth of the Classless Society 55
well-being or 'ill-being' are essentially personal and depend on the
individual's preferences, expectations and self-image — charac-
teristics which are in turn determined by some mysterious mix of
biology and environment" (emphasis added). He went on to argue
that "poverty is an eminently subjective state" and to make a distinc-
tion between "voluntary and involuntary poverty." His clear impli-
cation is that in a free society such as Canada's, where good things
abound, anyone who is poor chooses this condition deliberately. But
because poverty is associated with great physical discomfort, hunger,
ill-health, social scorn, loss of self-respect and human dignity, why
would anyone want to be poor and pay these severe penalties?
Clearly Sarlo's treatment of poverty is very narrowly ideological.
Functionalists insist, however, that in order to motivate the less
equal to better themselves, to ensure that the important jobs are filled
by the most qualified persons, and to convince the "naturally" tal-
ented members of society that they will be well rewarded for their
efforts, social inequalities must be preserved. Any attempt by gov-
ernment (or others) to get rid of inequality is doomed to failure
because, despite massive government spending on a variety of edu-
cational, welfare, and other anti-poverty programs in the past, "The
distribution of income is as unequal as it ever was. It is almost as if
there were something inevitable or inherent about this distribution,"
as Sarlo puts it (emphasis added). And so Sarlo is confident that
"there is nothing intrinsically unjust about inequality in general and
the current quintile distributions of income in Canada in particular,"
even if the top 20% of Canadian households receive about nine times
the income of the bottom 20%, or more than the bottom three quin-
tiles combined.
Defining Poverty
Those concerned with the problem of poverty in Canada engage in
a great deal of debate over how it should be defined. Much of the
debate is carried on between those who prefer to deny or minimize
its existence and those who acknowledge it and want to eliminate it.
Currently, as part of the general denial of the problem at the govern-
ment level, there is no official measure of poverty in Canada, al-
though several organizations have addressed it in one way or another,
including: Statistics Canada; Canadian Council on Social Develop-
ment (CCSD); Senate Special Committee on Poverty; Metropolitan
Toronto Social Planning Council; Montreal Diet Dispensary [Guide-
lines]; Fraser Institute [Poverty Lines].
56 Richer and Poorer
Table 2.5
Lines of Income Inequality Developed by the CCSD
in 1994
Family size (no. of persons)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Income level ($)
13,770
22,950
27,540
32,130
36,720
41,310
45,900
Source: Ross et al., The Canadian Fact Book on Poverty (1994: 16).
All of the above organizations differ on what exact measures
should be employed in the definition of poverty, but, with the excep-
tion of the Fraser Institute, they all agree that poverty really exists
and that it poses a serious problem for the whole society. One im-
portant aspect of their disagreement involves differences between
absolute and relative concepts of poverty.
Absolute poverty is linked to the cost of a basic "basket" of
essential goods and services, which is assigned a fixed dollar amount.
In its strictest sense, it assumes the barest of circumstances and
envisages the poor eating at soup kitchens, getting some groceries
from food banks, living in community shelters or even on the street,
buying second-hand clothing, and having no leisure or recreation.
Given such a definition, an annual income of around $2,000 per
person would be enough to afford the poor a rock-bottom level of
physical existence, and statistically speaking, it would all but remove
poverty from the books in Canada. But as a solution to the problem,
whether theoretically or statistically, this definition of absolute pov-
erty is clearly unsatisfactory and unrealistic, as denial always is.
Using figures from Campaign 2000's Countdown 93 report and
data from a House of Commons sub-committee report, Towards
2000: Eliminating Child Poverty, the CCSD has come up with a daily
dollar figure of $14.60 per person, or $21,300 annually for a family
of four, as a bare-bones minimum for survival in 1994. This figure
was broken down as follows: for food they used Agriculture Can-
The Myth of the Classless Society 57
ada's "Thrifty Nutritious Food Plan" as a guide to come up with a
daily figure of $4.75, to which they added a daily shelter cost of $7.16
computed from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation data.
Finally, they factored in the Montreal Diet Dispensary's estimate of
$1.22 per day for clothing, and then concluded that "out of the
remaining $1.47 per person per day, families need to pay for personal
care items, household needs, furniture, telephone, transportation,
school supplies, health care and so on." Other costs associated with
things such as entertainment, insurance, and religious donations are
not included.
In place of any absolute definition of poverty, we prefer a relative
approach. Given the vast differences among nations or even among
regions of Canada, it is clear that poverty levels and tolerable stand-
ards vary greatly from place to place so any meaningful assessment
of poverty would have to take as its point of departure the social
conditions prevailing at a given time and in a given place. Poverty
is therefore relative, and cannot simply be tied to subsistence. Human
beings are social and must be judged by relevant social comparisons,
not by some statistical or absolute imperative that ignores concerns
for human decency and dignity. As economist John Kenneth Gal-
braith wrote about 40 years ago: "People are poverty-stricken when
their income, even if adequate for survival, falls markedly behind
that of the community. Then they cannot have what the larger com-
munity regards as the minimum necessary for decency; and they
cannot escape therefore the judgement of the larger community that
they are indecent" (1958:323-4). Even if the poor in Canada might
be considered comfortable by the standards of another country, the
fact remains that they live in Canada, and so must be seen relative
to other Canadians.
The CCSD adopts a relative measure of poverty that is both
sensible and straightfoward. Focusing on family size and income (see
Table 2.5), it uses information from Statistics Canada to establish
that the average size of the Canadian family is 3.15 persons and that
the average annual income for a family of that size in 1992 was
$53,676. It then puts the poverty line at half the average income for
the community in question (Canada as a whole or a given province)
and factors in adjusted increments for each additional family mem-
ber. According to CCSD calculations, the rate of household poverty
in Canada between 1973 and 1991 stood fairly steady at 20.6%. This
means that a little more than one in every five Canadian households
is poor. The CCSD adds, however, "when this figure is combined
58 Richer and Poorer
with Canada's population growth over the same period, it translates
into an increase of 741,000 poor households."
The foregoing notwithstanding, the fact that the government of
Canada seems to prefer the Fraser Institute's absolute approach to
poverty over the CCSD's relative one is a cause for concern. As the
CCSD's 1994 Canadian Fact Book on Poverty clearly demonstrates,
the 1992 income of poor households fell well below figures com-
monly recommended by relative measures. As one example, its
authors noted that the income of $8,274 for the average Canadian
poor family in 1992 falls $7,376 below the widely recognized low-
income line established by Statistics Canada for a lone-parent mother
(Ross et al. 1994:5).
What Being Poor Means
There are over two million poor households in Canada. Those hardest
hit by the curse of poverty are the young, the elderly, Aboriginals,
visible minorities, and women. What is worse, poverty is a vicious
circle from which few people ever escape on their own.
Poor people are generally at greater risk of random violence than
better-off Canadians. They also tend to be sick more often, receive
lower quality medical care, and take longer to recover than non-poor
Canadians. And so they miss school and work more often. Compared
with more comfortably placed members of society, they are less
likely to do well at school, less likely to have good jobs, and less
likely to feel optimistic about their long-term chances of success. At
the same time, they are more likely to experience the whole range of
domestic difficulties that stem from tough economic circumstances
— alcoholism and drug addiction, domestic violence, separation and
divorce, unwanted pregnancies, and so on — more likely to have
problems with the law, and more likely to face discrimination and
disrespect from employers, teachers, police officers, politicians, and
other authority figures.
Conclusion
Poverty in Canada exists in a social system where government bails
out and gives massive subsidies to big businesses, creates tax loop-
holes for the wealthy, grants tax holidays and other incentives to
foreign investors, yet it claims to cherish the ideals of equality and
freedom. The contradictions are unmistakable. Canada's poor — the
homeless "bag ladies," the mentally ill who roam the streets of our
largest cities, the Native people on reserves, poor people within the
The Myth of the Classless Society 59
prison population, struggling single mothers, the unemployed and the
underemployed — are eloquent testimony to an unequal social order
that is not quite capable of dealing with all the human by-products
of capitalism.
The need for social order within an unequal system requires that
there be social control. This is where the dominant ideologies of
liberalism, individualism, and free enterprise play a central part.
Because these ideologies have been promoted so effectively, most
Canadians believe that hard work, individual initiative, and a meas-
ure of good luck are key ingredients of success. Those who call the
shots in Canada, as in all capitalist societies, have to find ways of
instilling such ideological mind-sets among the least advantaged
while continuing to preserve economic and political competition,
which takes place largely among members of the privileged classes.
But some amount of social welfare must also be available for the
social reproduction of those who are "less equal," and on whose
labour power the system relies. Class inequality is the most funda-
mental (though not the only) form of inequality in capitalist society.
Race, Racial Inequality,
and Resistance
Much has been written on the economic consequences of racial and
ethnic stratification for those on the receiving end of discriminatory
practices in Canada: poor life chances, low-paying and menial jobs,
higher levels of unemployment, substandard housing, ill health,
higher rates of criminal conviction, and so on. Less well documented,
however, are some of the political consequences of such stratifica-
tion. How do the victims of prejudice and discrimination react on a
daily basis to the more or less constant attempts to devalue them?
What strategies do they use to cope with challenges to their political
and human rights? Without wishing to minimize the economic costs
of prejudice and discrimination, it is political questions such as these
that will constitute the main focus of this chapter.
The great social diversity that characterizes Canada today is en-
hanced by a rich and complex ethno-cultural mix. Canada is touted
as a country of immigrants, and it is only to be expected that the
contemporary Canadian social fabric would reflect the baggage of
its different peoples: when they arrived, their numerical strength, and
their subsequent contribution to the composition of Canadian society.
Canadian society and culture, however, have a unique reality that
cannot be reduced to the various indigenous, European, Asian, Afri-
can, and American elements that comprise it. Over time all of these
elements have become uniquely fused into a national culture. But
Canada is also a vast country with diverse regional identities, so one
must always be cautious when generalizing about "Canadian cul-
ture."
As a lived process, Canada's national culture embodies the his-
torical record of ethnic encounters, the cooperation, competition, and
conflict that marked those encounters, and the ongoing power strug-
gles that define contemporary politics, economics, and cultural pro-
duction. It is in this context that we seek to understand the
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 61
Table 3.1
Ethnic Composition of Canada's Population in 1991
Aboriginal
British only
French only
British and/or French and Other
British and French
Caribbean, Latin-, Central-, South
American
Black
Canadian
Asian/Arab /African
All European
5.6
28.1
22.8
14.2
4.0
2.2
2.7
9.2
19.6
49.7
Source: Canadian Social Trends, No. 3 (1993: 20).
ethno-racial forces at play in Canadian society. We describe the
Canadian economy and society as capitalist, based fundamentally on
class exploitation and the pursuit of profit; the sectors of the capitalist
class that dominate the state are able to use a variety of means to
further their interests.
Racialization
Among the more successful strategies employed to distract and di-
vide the working classes is the development of the ideology of
"race," which holds that the human population can be divided into
discrete biological races, each with a set of accompanying genetic,
intellectual, moral and behavioural predispositions. Some races are
thus socially constructed as superior and others as inferior. This is
the process of racialization, whereby the wider population comes to
view a given group stereotypically. Racialization applies particularly
to those who are negatively constructed by authorities such as the
police and the courts, and by those who control key institutions, such
as the educational system and the media. Racialization increases
class exploitation and erodes economic well-being. By providing the
social basis for categorizing a sector of the labour force as inferior,
62 Richer and Poorer
it provides the specific justification for lowering wages in that sector,
and encourages a lowering of wages across the board.
Throughout the recent history of colonialism and imperialism,
various classes, and sometimes whole populations, have been racial-
ized. One well-known example is the indigenous inhabitants of North
America, who survived almost total annihilation only to find them-
selves confined to reservations that make up only a fraction of their
ancestral lands. Indeed, the 1989 Annual Report of the Canadian
Human Rights Commissioner noted, "If there is any single issue on
which Canada cannot hold its head high in the international commu-
nity, any single area in which we can be accused of falling down on
our obligations, it is in the area of aboriginal relations" (quoted in
Elliott and Fleras 1992:160; 164).
From the outset of colonial rule, while their lands were being
stolen and their cultures plundered, the peoples of Canada's First
Nations were stigmatized as godless, scalp-hunting, savage, hostile,
"red men," not to be trusted. After some 400 years, such intense
racialization has produced a population with infant mortality rates
60% higher than the national average, death rates that are four times
the national average, and suicide rates among young people six times
the national average. Regionally, for example, while Natives com-
prise 12% of the Prairie population, they represent 40% of inmates
in Prairie prisons. The 1991 census shows Aboriginal males as rank-
ing twentieth in income out of twenty-one ethnic groups listed. Add
to this the fact that unemployment for Natives ranges between 35%
and 75%, and where they are employed, it tends to be in low-status
jobs categorized as "other": fishing, trapping, and logging. Finally,
on such dimensions as education, health, and housing, Natives are
consistently at the bottom of the social ladder, which spells disaster
for them as a group.
These are the unmistakable effects of racialization and racism
practised over the years against Canada's First Nations. The key
point is that race is a social, not a biological construct. Race is a
construct that has been used by the dominant classes to promote their
interests throughout history from slavery and colonialism right up to
the present day. But just as the dominant classes can actively pursue
their interests, so too can the dominated classes. And though the latter
may lack the same access to power, they still can and do offer
different forms of resistance to their domination. This said, it is also
important to emphasize that those who might offer resistance do not
necessarily have a critical understanding of the sources of racism,
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 63
Table 3.2
Male Education, Occupation, and Income by Ethnic
Group in 1981 and 1991
Ethnic
groups
Years of
education
(mean)
White-
collar
jobs
(%)
Income
1981
(male
mean age
20-60)
Income
1991
(male
mean age
20-60)
Non-visible minority
Tewish
British
French
Dutch
German
Ukrainian
Italian
Portuguese
14.7
14.0
13.5
12.4
12.4
11.1
9.0
7.9
56.4
42.7
41.7
31.5
28.9
19.0
15.2
7.7
$19,054
$17,360
$15,776
$16,461
$16,887
$17,109
$15,588
$14,776
$37,146
$29,928
$27,222
$30,888
$31,506
$34,110
$29,550
$26,926
Visible minority
West
Asian and
Arab
South
Asian
Chinese
Southeast
Asian
Black and
Caribbean
14.2
14.2
14.9
13.4
13.3
43.2
36.4
34.3
29.0
22.9
$14,120
$14,442
$21,284
$25,718
$26,392
$24,080
$23,346
Note: The category of white-collar occupations includes managerial and
administrative, natural science, engineering, mathematics, social sciences,
teaching, medicine and health, and artistic, literary, and related occupations. As
is obvious, however, the above "income means" include all categories of
occupations.
Source: Driedger (1996:199;247).
64 Richer and Poorer
Table 3.3
Rate of Participation of Visible Minorities and Other
Canadians in the Economy in 1991
Visible
minorities
Chinese
South Asians
Blacks
West Asians
and Arabs
Filipinos
Latin
Americans
Southeast
Asians
Tapanese
Koreans
Pacific
Islanders
Other
Canadians
%
26
20
20
11
7
5
5
3
2
0.2
10
Managers
9
8
7
12
3
5
4
13
17
5
13
Professionals
15
13
13
15
12
8
10
19
10
9
13
nor have they necessarily developed an alternative vision of their
society. Thus, their resistance must not automatically be presumed
to be carefully tailored to address or eliminate the practice of racism.
In this chapter, therefore, we will take for granted that the devel-
opment of capitalism in Canada paralleled the development of what
is called "a country of immigrants." We also assume that the arrival
of different immigrant groups influenced, and was influenced by, the
dialectical tensions between capital and labour, and that in the proc-
ess, some groups were racialized by others. Viewed in this way, the
unequal rankings of ethnic groups in Canada by income and other
material measures (see Table 3.2) are fundamentally social in origin.
They are firmly tied to the wider class and economic structures of
our society.
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 65
Table 3.3 (contd.)
Manual
work
13
19
16
10
14
29
32
8
8
15
13
Service
workers
15
9
13
11
25
13
11
9
8
14
10
Labour force
participation
63
69
69
63
75
61
60
66
66
69
68
Unemploy-
ment rate (%)
10
16
15
16
8
19
17
6
8
7
10
Source: Canadian Social Trends, No. 37, Summer (1995:2-8).
Depending on historical circumstances, place of origin, culture,
and "typical" physical appearance, some immigrant groups are gen-
erally able by the second or third generations to transcend racializa-
tion and normalize their terms of participation in Canada's economy
and society, whether as capitalists, independent professionals, or
workers. These are, generally speaking, "white" immigrants from
Britain, western, eastern, and southern Europe, and from the United
States. Immigrant groups from such areas as Africa, India, Asia, and
the Caribbean, however, Canada's so-called visible minorities, have
found it more difficult to escape racial definition and stereotyping,
and they are less likely to be represented among the country's elite.
They are, however, highly visible in a wide variety of low-paying,
menial, and working-class occupations, where rates of exploitation
66 Richer and Poorer
and alienation are usually excessive, and where incidents of racism
are commonplace.
Visible Minorities
Following passage of the federal Employment Equity Act in 1986,
four groups were designated as "high priority" for receiving special
attention in hiring decisions: women, Aboriginals, persons with dis-
abilities, and members of visible minorities. Within the latter group,
overwhelmingly made up of immigrants, 10 specific sub-groups have
been differentiated for census and other governmental purposes:
blacks, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Latin Americans,
Other Pacific Islanders, South Asians, Southeast Asians and West
Asians, and Arabs. Canada's visible minorities are made up of a vast
array of different types of people. Japanese and Chinese, for exam-
ple, though seen as minorities are viewed and treated very differently
from blacks and Latin Americans. The former have widely differing
levels of education, self-employment, and general involvement in the
labour force than the latter groups. They also have widely varying
types of family structures and other such forms of community sup-
port that are so crucial to the success of any immigrant group in a
prejudiced society.
Nevertheless, taken as a whole, visible minorities in Canada have
more difficulty than others in securing employment. And as non-
European immigration has risen, so too have incidents of prejudice
and discrimination.
Recent human rights cases suggest that entrenched prejudices and
discriminatory practices hinder the promotion of visible minorities
to managerial positions in the federal civil service. Visible minorities
are clearly separated from the rest of Canadian society by income.
Even when a visible minority member is better educated than another
person, this does not mean that she or he will enjoy a comparably
higher income.
Visible minorities must devise coping mechanisms for dealing
with their daily engagements with the wider society. They must resist
society's racism and the constant attempts to consign them to racial
categories. But before discussing those forms of resistance, it will be
useful to briefly put the historical evolution of Canada's ethno-racial
and ethno-cultural fabric into context.
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 67
Table 3.4
Education and Occupational Attainment of Visible
Minorities and Other Canadians in 1991
Population
aged
25-44
Visible
minorities
Other
Canadians
University
education
(% )
25
17
Less than
high
school
(%)
33
39
Profes-
sionals
(%)
39
52
Managers
(%)
13
18
Source: Canadian Social Trends. No. 37 (1995:8).
Historical Context
The constitutional definition of Canada betrays an entrenched racism
against the original inhabitants of this vast land. When Canadians
speak of the country's "founding groups," for example, they refer
exclusively to the French and British who arrived as colonizers and
exploiters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those who
were colonized, exploited, and decimated, the first Canadians, are
not mentioned. Right up to the 1960s, when politicians wrestled with
the definition of the country's cultural identity, Canada's First Na-
tions were still excluded: the 1963 Report of the Royal Commission
on Bilingualism and Biculturalism made no concessions to Indian
languages or cultures. The two languages and cultures intended in
the title of that report were French and English, giving the clear
indication that other ethnic groups, who were either here before the
arrival of the French and British, or who came subsequently, were
of lesser importance.
Between the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when
Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain and others were establishing
the first French settlements in New France, they encountered a vari-
ety of Indian peoples and cultures. Among them were the Iroquois,
the Huron, and the Algonquin, who offered differing degrees of
cooperation with, and resistance to, the European intruders, and also
to one another. In time, when the French came to realize that they
would not find quick riches in the form of precious metals (as the
68 Richer and Poorer
Spaniards had done in Mexico and Peru), they swiftly turned their
attention to the furs the Indians transported to, and traded at, various
trading posts. By the middle of the seventeenth century, this fur trade
culminated in an alliance between the French, on the one hand, and
the Huron and Algonquin, on the other, who supplied furs from the
interior. The Iroquois, however, were sworn enemies of the Huron,
and they were bent on expelling the French from their land.
When the British moved north and arrived on the scene in the
mid-1700s, they encountered a well-developed French fur trading
system based in the St. Lawrence Valley and reaching all the way
north to Hudson Bay and south to the Gulf of Mexico. Mirroring the
wider European hostilities, conflict was as immediate as it was cer-
tain. The English befriended the Iroquois and under the royal mo-
nopoly charter of the Hudson's Bay Company, they proceeded to
penetrate the most lucrative sources of French fur in the northwest.
They finally defeated the French in 1759 on the Plains of Abraham,
and New France was surrendered to Great Britain.
In the ensuing period, as the British established their political and
cultural hegemony over the continent, class interests were unmistak-
ably wrapped up with British, French, and multiple Indian ethno-cul-
tural differences. Realizing the great difficulty involved in
completely assimilating Catholic Quebec, several British governors
ignored instructions to anglicize the province and opted instead to
cultivate the class loyalty of the seigneurs (large landowners), the
upper levels of the Catholic clergy, and a powerful lobby of lawyers.
Thus, the Quebec Act of 1774 was passed, permitting Catholics to
sit on provincial councils, allowing the use of French civil law for
commercial and domestic purposes, and legitimizing the seigneurial
landowning system.
Britain was at this time keen on thwarting the ambitions for
independence of its thirteen American colonies. To this end, the
English-speaking, Anglican British made many overtures to the
French-speaking, Roman Catholic settlers — les habitants — with a
view to containing the rebellious Americans. Indeed, one of the
precipitating factors in the outbreak of the American Revolution had
to do precisely with the Quebec Act, which enlarged Quebec to
include much of the Ohio Valley, thus imposing a check on the
westward expansion of the thirteen seaboard colonies. When the
1783 Treaty of Paris formally ended the American Revolution, one
of its central provisions was the severance of the Ohio country from
Quebec and its surrender to the new American republic.
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 69
For the next 30 years or so the French and English in Lower and
Upper Canada continued to struggle for their respective "rights" to
impose their linguistic and cultural identities over the territory under
their control. Although the English were clearly in the ascendancy,
the French never relinquished the idea of a Catholic, French-speaking
Quebec. In the meantime, the Americans, who were never comfort-
able with British dominance of their ill-defined northern neighbour,
hoped to capitalize on the historic French-English animosities and
continued to entertain thoughts of ousting the British entirely from
the continent. To this end, the leaders of the new American nation
encouraged the republican sentiments among the population of
Lower Canada. They attempted to play off these sentiments, popu-
larized by the American and French revolutions, against the monar-
chist leanings of the British Loyalists in Upper Canada. Matters came
to a head in the War of 1812. The war accomplished nothing in terms
of territory, but it heightened Canadian suspicions of American ex-
pansionism and strengthened loyalist sentiments among English
Canadians.
In the years following the War of 1812 both Lower and Upper
Canada experienced much internal political unrest. The French of
Lower Canada feared that moves to unify the country would smother
them culturally in the face of the numerically, economically, and
militarily superior British; meanwhile the English of Upper Canada
were discontented over taxes and customs revenues that seemed to
benefit Lower Canada disproportionately. As well, the populations
of both provinces embraced liberal and radical politics and opposed
the traditional privileges of their respective elite classes. Thus, when
economic depression struck in 1837, spontaneous rebellions broke
out in both colonies. They were quelled only when Britain sent Lord
Durham to investigate as high commissioner and governor general
of British North America. In his report, Durham noted that when he
arrived: "I expected to find a contest between a government and a
people: I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state: I
found a struggle not of principles but of races."
Based on the Durham Report, which was decidedly pro-British
and spoke of the "superior knowledge, energy, enterprise, and wealth
of the English race" the 1840 Act of Union was passed and legally
unified Upper and Lower Canada into a single entity.
Rivalry between French- and English-speaking Canadians has per-
sisted and threatens to divide the country. Along with these tradi-
tional divides, twentieth-century migrations to Canada have
70 Richer and Poorer
conditioned the development of an ethno-culturally diverse society
in which racism is alive and well, and where minorities resist that
racism in many different ways. We will consider some of the strate-
gies for resisting racism that different minority groups in contempo-
rary Canadian society have adopted. But, we want to stress the fact
that most social conflicts based on race, tribe, ethnicity, or nation are
most fruitfully understood as rooted in the class or politico-economic
pursuits of elites and those classes that oppose them.
Race, Racism, Ethnicity, and Resistance: Definitions
Race
The first step in defining race is to separate biological from social
definitions. In biological terms, race refers to the categorization of
people on the basis of certain hereditary characteristics, such as blood
type, genetic make-up, and physical appearance. Because a person
from one genetic group can interbreed with a person from another
genetic group, such categorizations, and combinations of them, offer
infinite possibilities.
Some sociobiologists argue that biological differences can explain
social differences or social inequalities (Herrnstein and Murray 1994;
Rushton 1995). But, such approaches confuse the biological concep-
tion of race with its social definition: races are socially imagined
categories, and are not biologically real. Above all else, race is
fundamentally a political concept. For example, under South Africa's
apartheid system, Japanese people were defined as honorary whites
for economic reasons, while those of Chinese descent were not.
Similarly, the "law of one drop" in the United States, whereby one
drop of "black blood" renders a person wholly black, has enabled all
kinds of convenient race switching. Where did the idea of skin colour
as a basis for differentiating among the races arise? Why not use
blood type, hair colour, or ear size?
According to Robert Miles, "If 'races' are not naturally occurring
populations, the reasons and conditions for the social processes
whereby the discourse of 'race' is employed in an attempt to label,
constitute and exclude social collectivities should be the focus of
attention rather than be assumed to be a natural and universal proc-
ess" (1989:73).
The politics of race begins where the biological and social con-
ceptions of race intersect. As long as there are those who want to
justify social practices by resorting to biological claims, disagree-
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 71
ment and conflict will be the norm. In other words, when jobs,
housing, education, credit, and other social amenities are distributed
along racial (biological) lines, people are unlikely to agree on who
gets what. Those who perceive the system of allocation to be unfair
will usually find ways of resisting or protesting.
Concern with race, then, is ideological and serves the structure of
class dominance wherever it is invoked. Those who insist that races
are real will usually have a political agenda according to which social
contrivances such as poverty, intelligence, powerlessness, or even
class privilege are cast as natural. Thus they seek entirely to remove
responsibility for these social contrivances from the realm of social
interaction. No one is to blame. Acceptance of the term "race" legiti-
mizes it, enabling such talk as "whites are naturally smarter than
blacks." This attempts to legitimize a socially produced situation by
giving it the veneer of a natural, biological, inflexible fact.
Few serious scientists continue to give the term "race" any credi-
bility. This does not mean, however, that there can be no common-
sense understandings and uses of it. As Miles noted, "The fact that
the idea of 'race' continues to be employed in commonsense testifies
to its continuing practical rather than scientific utility." This is where
the concern with racism becomes relevant. Because so many people
continue to act as if races were real, obvious physical characteristics
will still serve as key social markers that provide individuals and
groups with packaged meanings of themselves and others. These
meanings are the basis on which categorizations are made, along with
expectations of what individuals and groups are like, what they are
capable of, and even about their morality. Medievalists have noted
that, in the context of such thinking, colour difference came to sym-
bolize moral difference; over time, being black came to signify
inferiority and immorality just as being white implied salvation.
Except for the fact that stereotypes may be more subtle today, not a
great deal has changed since medieval times.
Racism
Racism occurs when racial categorizations take on negative mean-
ings, so that those meanings relegate people to subordinate positions.
Along with its ideological message, racism is the practice of includ-
ing individuals and groups in full participation in the social economy,
or excluding them, based on imputed racial similarities or differ-
ences. Although scholars might argue that race is more accurately
seen as a social construct than as a biological fact, the biological
72 Richer and Poorer
reading continues to inform the commonsense understanding, and it
has real consequences for those consigned to the supposedly inferior
races. And as a social construct, racism is a matter of power: the
ability of some to label others, and to have those labels stick.
Ethnicity
If races or racial groups are supposed to speak to the biological
aspects of human populations, ethnic groups speak to the sociocul-
tural composition of those populations. Ethnicity has both subjective
and objective features and may include one or more of the following:
(a) a common history with a set of shared values and customs,
language, style of dress, food, music, and other such cultural attrib-
utes; (b) a myth of common descent; (c) national or territorial claims
to sovereignty; (d) an assumed inherited racial marker such as skin
colour, hair texture, or facial features; and (e) some degree of eco-
nomic or occupational specialization. In sum, ethnicity, a broader
term than race, requires a comparative in-group/out-group dynamic.
Depending on the social environment in which they exist, ethnic
groups in multi-ethnic societies face differing degrees of pressure to
assimilate to the dominant culture. In those cases where they resem-
ble the dominant group culturally, that pressure is not likely to be
perceived or interpreted negatively; but, if the ethnic group in ques-
tion has little in common with the dominant culture, pressure to
assimilate is likely to be resisted. Because groups, ethnic or other-
wise, have a tendency towards self-preservation, when such pressure
appears to threaten the survival of the group the resistance is apt to
be even greater. The specific form of such resistance, though, will
depend on the resources available.
Resistance
Resistance can include any action, whether physical, verbal, or psy-
chological, individual or collective, that seeks to undo the negative
consequences of being categorized for racial reasons. Thus, unlike
approaches that seek to portray victims of racial oppression as pas-
sive recipients of the dominant ideology and practice, the approach
we take in this chapter seeks to understand how the concept "race"
can be used to resist or mollify the deleterious consequences of
racism. Resistance is a political act, intimately tied to the wider
cultural forces that frame it. We will examine the co-optation of the
label "race" by those most negatively affected by its imposition, and
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 73
we will seek to understand their inversion of its meaning with a view
to combatting its negative consequences.
Strategies of Resistance
There are three different strategies of resistance that are more refor-
mist or conservative than revolutionary, because none of them sees
the problem of racism as rooted in the economic practices of capi-
talism. As a consequence each presumes that racism can be elimi-
nated without any fundamental alteration of the social and economic
institutions of capitalist society. The first of these, which isn't usually
thought of as resistance, is multiculturalism. It is in essence a stra-
tegic retreat because, instead of trying to be accepted and integrated
into the majority group, those who take the path of multiculturalism
will reject the dominant group's culture in favour of a retreat into
their (supposedly) original culture and value system.
This strategy, known in the sociological literature as accommoda-
tion, involves the creation of imagined communities and posits a
primordial attachment to them. It seeks to develop separate or cul-
turally parallel institutions, such as small businesses, schools,
churches, and community centres. The multicultural strategy usually
entails the invention of traditions of a more pristine and noble past
that is thought to have existed before their conquest and subjugation
by one or another colonial power, when they were free and all were
equal. Recognizing the existence of racism in the society at large,
and their inability to do anything in the short run to change it,
supporters of multiculturalism face an ambivalent situation. In Can-
ada, for example, economic opportunities for immigrants are prob-
ably greater than in their native countries, and what they are in effect
saying is that (a) they like their culture of origin, (b) they want, as
much as possible, to retain it in their new land, and (c) they want
peaceful co-existence with the dominant culture just so long as it
does not intrude on their culture of origin.
That Canada is a land of great economic opportunity cannot be
denied. Indeed, as previously noted in five of the last six years a
United Nations survey {Human Development Report) ranked Canada
as the best country in the world in which to live, and Canada is no
doubt very attractive to prospective immigrants from all other coun-
tries, both developed and underdeveloped. Clearly there is much to
be admired here, but it would be a mistake to understand Canada's
enviable position internationally as resulting simply from the hard
work, dedication, and decency of its citizens. For in addition to these,
74 Richer and Poorer
a key reason why Canada is able to boast one of the highest standards
of living in the world is related to its status as an imperialist country
with powerful allies; together they are able to dominate the resources
of other countries. And it is immigrants from these latter countries,
particularly the poorest, who desire most to come to Canada.
Ideologically, at the level of law and government policy, official
multiculturalism, as embodied in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act,
implicitly acknowledges the racism of the wider system and seeks to
implement programs to rectify past wrongs. Drawing on public
funds, such programs are designed to help the group involved redis-
cover its "golden age," its identity, for example, as African Canadi-
ans or Japanese Canadians. It matters little if claimants are ignorant
of their original languages, cultures, histories, geography, and soci-
ety, or that most of them have far more in common with Western
values and cultures than with Japanese or African ones. When it
works, however, multiculturalism is a very effective form of resis-
tance to racism.
The process is greatly accelerated when multiculturalism becomes
commercialized. At that point the success of this strategy is to be
measured by the extent to which those outside the minority group
come to embrace the symbolic culture of that group. For example,
white women wearing Afro hairstyles in response to the "Black Is
Beautiful" campaign, or Bo Derek's now-famous corn row hairstyle
in the movie 10, Vanilla Ice, the white rap artist that made rap music
acceptable to white, middle-class youths, the Jamaicanization ("no
problem, man!") of North American and Western European youth
via the media of Bob Marley, reggae, Rasta, and "roots."
A second strategy of resisting racism is assimilation. The politics
of assimilation dictate that the minority ethnic group accept the
culture and values of the dominant group and try to "pass" into it.
Assimilation is no less ideological than multiculturalism, although it
may be characterized as the path of least resistance. It is resistance
nonetheless. In contemporary Canadian society assimilation is best
exemplified by those members of minority groups who reject mul-
ticultural policies, either because these policies result from the de-
mands of other organized minority groups, or because they believe
that authorities are paying "official lip service" to equality among
competing ethnic groups.
For ethnic groups that are visibly different from an entrenched,
racist majority, assimilation is a form of naivete, a denial of existing
racism. This denial is a psychological defence mechanism, and at the
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 75
personal and subjective levels, it is an attempt to soften (resist) the
harshness of racism. It is most clearly evident in Neil Bissoondath's
popular 1994 book, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism
in Canada, in which the author opts for the comfort of obvious
deception rather than accept the sting of cruel reality. The popularity
of such efforts as Bissoondath's is tied to the racist establishment's
eagerness to deny its racism and to point to such declarations by
people "of colour" as proof that society is non-racist. Two other
recent examples are Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character:
A New Vision of Race in America, and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal
Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus.
Unlike the calculated strategies of accommodation and assimila-
tion, which involve either a strategic retreat or active self-deception,
a third approach to understanding how race can be used to provide
resistance to racism concerns the most commonly thought-of strategy
of resistance: violent, physical engagement of the (racist) aggressor.
Such violence, however, is not always clearly planned or co-ordi-
nated, nor does it always have a clearly articulated vision of an
alternative social order. Indeed, it is often spontaneous, and can spark
other pockets of resistance, developing situations the authorities are
unable to completely contain or control. The Palestinian "Intifada"
of the early 1990s, though dismissed by some as merely "civil dis-
obedience," is a clear instance of this form of resistance.
There are also other ways race can be used to galvanize support
for resistance strategies. For example, instead of acquiescing in the
dominant stereotype that holds that black is inferior and ugly, leaders
of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1960s
promoted the notion that "Black Is Beautiful" and exhorted their
followers to "Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud." In the spirit of
Stokely Carmichael's now-famous slogan of "Black Power," two
generations of black Americans have inverted the traditional concep-
tions of race and colour and have militantly asserted their humanity
and their political entitlement to a piece of the American pie. In
Canada there are several examples of the use of violence by a tar-
geted community to answer the force and violence of the estab-
lishment: armed stand-offs between Natives and federal authorities
at Oka, Quebec, in 1991; similar stand-offs at Ipperwash, Ontario,
and Gustafsen Lake, British Columbia, in 1995; the 1967 burning of
computer facilities at Concordia (then Sir George Williams) Univer-
sity in Montreal; and Asian vigilante groups patrolling their commu-
nities in Toronto and Vancouver in the wake of racist attacks against
76 Richer and Poorer
them. In exploring the use of violence as a means of resisting racism,
we will refer to Franz Fanon's 1963 classic, The Wretched of the
Earth, which deals with the violent politics of decolonization. Mul-
ticulturalism, assimilation, and violence have two features in com-
mon: (1) all three address the question of resistance to racism, albeit
in different forms, and (2) none of them advances an understanding
of racism as a systemic feature of capitalist society or seeks theoreti-
cally to link racism with the dominant class and economic structures.
As a consequence, all three tend to be ideologically conservative and
reformist by assuming that they can defeat the forces of racism
without changing too drastically the system (capitalism) that nurtures
it.
Multiculturalism as Strategic Retreat
As one observer recently stated, "Canada invented multiculturalism
as a national policy in 1971." Thus most Canadians will be at least
superficially familiar with the term multiculturalism. The 1992 Ca-
nadian Ethnic Studies Bulletin reported that "77% of Canadians
believe multiculturalism will enrich Canada's culture while 73%
agree with the view that multiculturalism will ensure that people
from various cultural backgrounds will have a sense of belonging to
Canada, that it will provide greater equality of opportunity for all
groups."
Nevertheless, the Canadian Ethnic Studies Bulletin reported that
among Canadians "66% think that discrimination against non-whites
is a problem," and, on the whole, "Canadians feel less comfortable
with people whose origins are Indo-Pakistani, Sikh, West Indian
Blacks, Arabs, Moslems than they do with persons of other origins."
It is unusual for Canadians to see multiculturalism as a strategy
for resisting racism. The Canadian nation generally could be said to
be in denial about the existence of racism in Canada, preferring to
point fingers south of the border for examples of this scourge. Indeed,
on the question of tolerance for racial and ethno-cultural diversity,
nationally and internationally, Canadians tend to have a rosy under-
standing of themselves as enlightened, progressive, and non-racist.
The political embrace of multicultural policies, both federally and
provincially, is seen as evidence of such tolerance and understanding.
What is not clear, though, is whether the Canadian government and
people think of multiculturalism as a description of their actual
society, the society they wish to have, or the society they ought to
have.
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 77
Regardless of which of these is most accurate, the fact is that in
recent years, much more so than in the past, Canada has become a
racially and ethno-culturally diverse country. For a variety of reasons
having to do with identity and security (e.g., occupational, residen-
tial, racial, and ethno-cultural), traditional groups in our society feel
threatened and react defensively, using the various means at their
disposal (e.g., economic, political, legal, sociocultural) to resist what
they perceive as new "intrusions" — especially in cases of those
whose physical appearance and way of life differ markedly from
theirs. Facing political pressures and demands from the greater urban
and industrial centres such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and
Edmonton, where immigrants have tended to settle in large numbers,
and recognizing the vital economic contribution that immigrants
make to the entire society and economy, governments across the
country in the 1960s began to draft and implement multicultural
policies and programs.
Multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity have not been enthusiasti-
cally greeted by the privileged, who see them as a threat to their
traditional "right" to dominate. This is not difficult to understand in
a society where Anglo-European traditions and institutions domi-
nate; where reserves have been created to contain the Aboriginal
population; where, during the First World War some 8,000 Ukrainian
Canadians were labelled "enemy aliens" and interned without due
process in 24 camps across Canada, (Malarek 1987:11); and where
in 1914 Canadian authorities prevented the landing of a freighter with
400 South Asian would-be immigrants on board (Fleras and Elliott
1992:56). This is also a country where Italian and German citizens,
and over 22,000 Japanese Canadians, were placed in prison camps
during the Second World War, where official immigration policy
made a clear distinction between "preferred" and "non-preferred"
immigrants, and where, as late as 1947, Prime Minister Mackenzie
King was unequivocal, racist, and patronizing in ruling out Asians
and Orientals as acceptable immigrants:
It was clearly recognised with regard to immigration from India
to Canada, that the native of India is not a person suited to this
country ... possessing manners and customs so unlike those of
our own people, their inability to readily adapt themselves to
surroundings entirely different could not do other than entail an
amount of privation and suffering which render a discontinu-
ance of such immigration more desirable in the interests of the
78 Richer and Poorer
Indians themselves (Mackenzie King quoted in Hawkins
1991:18).
And,
The people of Canada do not wish to make a fundamental
alteration in the character of their population through mass
immigration. The government is therefore opposed to large
scale immigration from the Orient, which would certainly give
rise to social and economic problems ... (Mackenzie King
quoted in Hawkins 1972:93).
During the late 1920s Canada's immigration policy designated the
following as countries from which it "preferred" to receive new
immigrants: Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany,
Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and France. Eastern Europe was
designated as a "non-preferred" source; it included Austria, Hungary,
Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,
and Czechoslovakia. Southern European countries such as Italy and
Portugal were not even mentioned.
Later, in the 1950s a similar situation faced the overwhelmingly
black British West Indians who wished to come to Canada. The
accepted wisdom was that they would be unable to adapt to the harsh
winters, and so it would be in their best interests not to immigrate.
All the evidence of West Indian "negroes" who had adapted success-
fully to life in Canada prior to this time was ignored. Given this
background, then, the 1993-4 involvement of the now-disbanded
First Canadian Airborne Regiment in racially motivated murder and
torture in Somalia is not so surprising.
Unity in Diversity
Recognizing the ethnic diversity of Canada, various levels of gov-
ernment have opted for policies of multiculturalism, with a view to
minimizing the prospects of ethnic conflict. Those policies were
designed to address the potentially serious political fall-out for a
society, economy, and labour force historically fractured along racial
and ethnic lines. Public participation in such culturally diverse and
colourful spectacles as Caribana, Panorama, and Caravan create a
climate (if not an illusion) of political acceptance that, in the minds
of minority ethnic individuals, symbolizes a way of combatting the
cultural alienation, exclusion, and even rejection they face in wider
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 79
social interactions outside their communities. Such public celebra-
tions and festivals empower them, if only momentarily, and foster a
sense of pride in their cultural traditions that they are eager to impress
upon other Canadians.
Multiculturalism is not consumed by minority groups alone. In the
calculations of politicians, the celebration of multicultural and ethnic
diversity serves as an effective mechanism of social control. Sure, it
seeks to promote a sense of tolerance and understanding among all
Canadians, but, along with the superficial pomp and celebrations of
multicultural policies and programs come other effects: they distract
citizens from the entrenched class inequalities in the wider society;
they are great for business (e.g., tourism, commercial retailers, ho-
tels, restaurants, and the transportation industry); and they confirm
for most of us the idea that Canada is an open and accepting mosaic
of all peoples and cultures, regardless of colour, creed, or national
origin. Ethnic diversity is portrayed as highly compatible with na-
tional unity, and political speeches, which always make reference to
the rich fabric of Canadian society, can be counted on to depict that
fabric in terms of an intricate ethno-cultural tapestry.
As a means of resisting racism, then, multiculturalism has a triple
function for minority individuals and communities: (1) it enhances
their self-esteem and cultivates a favourable predisposition to the
wider society and its institutions; (2) it promotes greater under-
standing of difference in the minds of others, thus reducing tension
and the possibility of conflict; and (3) it holds out the promise of
equality to members of ethnic minorities, both new and old.
For most immigrants of colour and members of ethnic minority
groups, it is clear that Canada's central social, political, and eco-
nomic institutions are dominated by "white" people, particularly
those of Anglo-Saxon, western European, and Jewish descent (Reitz
1990; Nakhaie 1995; Driedger 1996; Forcese 1997). Power is seen
to reside in "white" hands, and this "fact" is not lost on the members
of ethnic minority groups. Thus, even when multiculturalism pays
only lip-service to sociocultural equality, the powerless are eager to
embrace it. For them, the "white" power structure is formidable and
any (even minor) concessions to equality it grants are to be taken
very seriously. As a modern, Western, liberal society caught up in
the age of political correctness, therefore, Canada publicly and offi-
cially holds out the promise of equality to all its citizens and those
who have traditionally been least equal take the promise to heart.
80 Richer and Poorer
A key difficulty with multiculturalism and its strategy of accom-
modation, though, is that it leaves intact the very structures and
institutions of domination that have traditionally been in place in this
country, while seeking to encourage the building of other parallel
structures and institutions that are unable to compete on an equal
footing with the traditional ones. It thus gives ideological legitimacy
to the latter by creating an atmosphere of equality, while simultane-
ously deflecting potential political criticism of the wider system.
Thus, immigrant and other minorities proudly proclaim their roots
and delight in the possibility of retaining them while simultaneously
professing loyalty to Canada.
Viewed in this light, multiculturalism offers the best of both
worlds to ethnic minorities whose physical and cultural attributes
differ significantly from the dominant norm, but who are encouraged
to identify with their original cultures just so long as such identifi-
cation does not interfere with core cultural values such as individu-
alism and liberalism, or with the laws of the land. When made into
law, multicultural policies are very effective tools for resisting ra-
cism. Politically, however, proponents of such policies are essen-
tially reformists who see the overall sociopolitical system,
particularly as it deals with ethnic and racial minorities, as basically
legitimate, though in need of some tinkering or adjusting.
Assimilation as Resistance
Another form of resisting racism is the notion of assimilation. It
stands to reason that newcomers to a society will desire as smooth a
process of adaptation and inclusion as possible. Where prejudice and
discrimination exist, newcomers can be expected to offer different
forms and degrees of resistance. They will seek to minimize their
difficulties by "melting" or blending into the dominant institutions
as quickly and thoroughly as possible. This implies a process of
becoming "invisible" to prejudiced members of the host society, and
where it works, assimilation is an effective form of resistance to
racism. The questions, then, are how, where, and for whom does it
work?
According to Robert E. Park's classic 1950 formulation, assimi-
lation involves several progressive and irreversible stages. It comes
about when new groups enter an established society and come into
contact with groups already there. That contact is likely to lead to
competition for scarce resources (e.g., jobs, housing, and education),
and can produce conflict, which in turn requires various forms of
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 81
accommodation, leading ultimately to assimilation. But the various
stages that lead to assimilation are not inevitable. For a variety of
reasons specific groups may remain at a given stage. Gordon identi-
fied seven such stages: (1) cultural or behaviourial assimilation; (2)
structural assimilation; (3) marital assimilation; (4) identificational
assimilation; (5) attitude receptional assimilation (absence of preju-
dice); (6) behaviour receptional assimilation (absence of discrimina-
tion) and (7) civic assimilation, which implies a total melting into
the host or dominant culture and society (1964:71).
Thus, first there is cultural assimilation (acculturation), which sees
the subordinate group gradually taking on the cultural traits (lan-
guage, religion, music, food, eating habits, politics, family structure
and so on) of the dominant group. As Martin Marger pointed out,
however, this is not simply a one-way affair, since "there is ordinarily
some exchange in the opposite direction as well" (1994:117). As can
be imagined, though, the proportion of change in the opposite direc-
tion is smaller, slower, and less perceptible.
Next comes structural assimilation, the increased participation of
members of the subordinate minority group in the secondary eco-
nomic and political institutions of the dominant group. This usually
involves mixing in various public and private settings, such as rec-
reational sites, public transportation, retail shopping, political gath-
erings, and places of work.
In time, acculturation and structural assimilation will lead to a
third stage: admission into primary group relations (friendship and
intimacy), which can and does result in intermarriage or biological
assimilation (amalgamation). In successive generations, as cultural
differences evaporate and a new ethno-racial norm emerges, old
patterns and practices of racism will become anachronistic.
Accompanying these three macro-structural processes of assimi-
lation, there is a fourth, micro-interactive process known as psycho-
logical assimilation, experienced principally by first-generation
immigrants and newcomers to a society. Acknowledging their pow-
erlessness to combat the entrenched forces of prejudice and discrimi-
nation in the new society, such individuals resort to a psychological
form of resistance premised on self-deception. As Marger (1994:120)
has noted, with psychological assimilation, "Members of an ethnic
group undergo a change in self-identity. To the extent that individu-
als feel themselves part of the larger society rather than an ethnic
group, they are psychologically assimilated. As psychological as-
82 Richer and Poorer
similation proceeds, people tend to identify themselves decreasingly
in ethnic terms."
Selling Illusions
Psychological assimilation focuses on the individual and can take
different forms depending on those being assimilated and the norm
they are seeking. Assimilation to a racist or xenophobic society will
be far more difficult and problematic for those who are visibly
different. In Canada, for example, where a "white," Anglo-Saxon
appearance and Judeo-Christian beliefs and practices are dominant,
immigrants who closely approximate this norm, even if they are not
English speaking, will understandably have less difficulty assimilat-
ing by the second or third generation, for assimilation is both a
matter of degree and a process of "melting" or disappearing into the
dominant social institutions and cultural systems.
As subsequent generations acquire the language and accent of the
dominant society, then, German, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and
Greek immigrants are free to choose to leave their ethnic roots
behind.
On the other hand, when colour and related physical features are
associated with culture and national origin, for example, among East
Indians, Orientals, and Africans, the challenge of assimilation is
much greater. They are not as free to choose to use assimilation as
a means for resisting racism. And so, more than 125 years after the
abolition of slavery in the United States, the ideological notion of
American society as a "melting pot" is not regarded seriously by
either scholars or lay observers. Indeed, recent public opinion polls
show that blacks and whites in the United States are more divided
today than they were 30 years ago. Black people have lived in
Canada and the United States for hundreds of years longer than many
other immigrant groups that have long since melted into the fabric
of these societies and lost their "hyphenated" identities.
Illusion, then, is a key aspect of psychological assimilation for
visible minorities. Regardless of how much an individual may be-
lieve that he or she is an unidentifiable part of the larger society, that
he or she is not "an ethnic," the final decision to admit lies with wider
social forces and structures. Thus, even though members of ethnic
minority groups may desire passionately to be accepted by the host
society and may even think of themselves as assimilated in the eyes
of the prejudiced majority, they might be viewed quite differently. It
is this majority view that proves most consequential in the end.
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 83
A clear example of this can be seen in a Canadian context by an
examination of Neil Bissoondath's Selling Illusions: The Cult of
Multiculturalism in Canada. The author, an Indo-Trinidadian who
came to Canada at the age of 18 in 1973, goes to great lengths to
deny his ethnic heritage, acknowledges he is ashamed of it, despises
it, and desires nothing more than to be accepted as "a Canadian."
The discussion of Bissoondath here is not intended as an ad hominem
attack. Instead, he represents "a type" and a mode of conservative
thinking that is commonly encountered in the society at large, thus
making it necessary to develop a critical understanding of its political
origins and assumptions.
Trinidad, Bissoondath writes, is "a place where truth was form-
less, where one was taught to dismiss nothing and to distrust every-
thing." Home for Bissoondath is Canada: "When I feel myself in
need of comfort, security, familiarity, it is this country [Canada] —
its air, its sounds, its smells, the textures of its light — that I long
for. It is here, everywhere, that I find the comforts of home."
The major obstacle to his full acceptance, however, is multicultu-
ralism, which, together with its advocacy of quota systems and equity
policies in occupational, educational, and like matters, Bissoondath
finds finds personally embarrassing: "I can think of few things more
demeaning to me than to be offered an advantage because of my skin
colour ... no matter what I have struggled to achieve ... I am still,
even with the best of intentions, being viewed racially — and that is
offensive to me."
Clearly, Bissoondath's problem is that he confuses equity and
fairness with unfairness. Because he "made it," all others should be
able to do the same; and those who do not have only themselves to
blame! What he refuses to acknowledge, however, is the fact that
quota systems and equity programs are not meant to reward incom-
petence, but rather to control the dominant society's tendency to
exclude members of visible minorities regardless of their abilities.
Bissoondath's solution to the problem is to abolish multicultural-
ism in favour of the self-deception of being considered assimilated.
Thus, "Don't call me ethnic!" was the apt headline that appeared in
the October 1994 issue of Saturday Night, which featured prepubli-
cation excerpts of his book. Though generally ignored by intellectu-
als, Selling Illusions has been popularly received in non-academic
circles by politicians, media commentators, and other lay observers
who wish to deny that Canada is a racist society and are grateful
whenever a "person of colour" (Bissoondath's self-description) joins
84 Richer and Poorer
the chorus of voices denouncing those who would so label Canada.
For example, Marlene Nourbese Philip poignantly noted, "the domi-
nant culture has uncritically acclaimed Bissoondath, along with his
shoddy work, as their brown spokesperson" (1995:7).
To understand Bissoondath's response to multiculturalism, it is
useful to see him as one who is seeking psychological assimilation.
This is evidenced by his emphasis on the individual, non-structural
aspects of the assimilative process. His frustration, however, comes
from the fact that psychological assimilation is a two-way process,
whereby (1) one identifies with the new society and (2) the latter is
accepting. As a "person of colour" in a racist society, though, Bis-
soondath may just be fooling himself into thinking that the wider
society sees beyond his ethno-racial features and their imputed mean-
ings, and accepts him for who he is. For visibility is crucial here and
those with physical markers such as skin colour are not likely to lose
"ethnic status" in the minds of the majority.
Bissoondath's passionate desire to become accepted by the
"white" mainstream is premised upon a denial of the racism in the
society at large, and it underlines the way assimilation can be used
to soften or resist the harsh consequences of racism. Thus, Bissoon-
dath seeks to dismiss racism in Canada as a thing of the past: "Nasty
things happened years ago in Canada. But that is a Canada that no
longer exists. The world is no longer what it was." Exactly what the
Canada of today is, however, and how it came about, he never
specifies. What he does specify, though, is the fact that the new
Canada must somehow resist the celebration of ethnic diversity that
is multiculturalism: "To attend an ethnic festival, then, is to expose
yourself not to culture but to theatre, not to history but to fantasy:
enjoyable, no doubt, but of questionable significance."
In conclusion, then, Bissoondath was right to talk about "selling
illusions," but he needs to acknowledge that in his economic market-
place he is both seller and buyer of illusions. In the last paragraph of
his book Bissoondath revealed his unrealistic yearning for "a nation
of cultural hybrids, where every individual is unique, every individ-
ual distinct. And every individual is Canadian, undiluted and undi-
vided." If this is not illusory, then one wonders what is.
Certainly assimilation can effectively counter or resist racism in
later generations for some, but for others this strategy is not a prac-
tical option. This does not mean, however, that there are not other
Bissoondaths who, unable to deal with rejection, seek to distort and
deny all evidence that points in its direction. It is a peaceful, conser-
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 85
vative solution, but it remains only at the level of the individual, and
of individual delusion. Politically speaking, then, if the strategy of
multicultural accommodation is said to be ideologically reformist,
assimilation must be said to be ideologically conservative. Indeed,
Bissoondath says it best, when he notes, "Revolutionary change is
illusory ... True and lasting change, then, cannot be imposed; it must
come slowly, growing with experience, from within."
Resistance through Violence: The Colonial Context
Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of
Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the
corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of
the globe. — Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Mobilization against injustice, actual or perceived, can assume
many forms that are confrontational to varying degrees. These can
range all the way from symbolic gestures proclaiming that "Black Is
Beautiful" through peaceful protests or demonstrations, civil disobe-
dience, public legal challenges, covert terrorism, all the way to armed
engagement of the oppressor. The actual form that mobilization
against injustice takes will depend on the specific situation — the
resources available to the oppressed and the means at the disposal of
the oppressor to retaliate. Here, we discuss that form most commonly
thought of as resistance, whether to racism or any other institutional
form of oppression: direct confrontation leading to the use of vio-
lence. It must be clarified at the outset, however, that not all confron-
tations and violence involving two or more racial groups is
automatically to be blamed on racism. For it is true that when caught,
lawbreakers have been known to invoke ethnic or racial identity and
affiliation to claim victim status.
Nowhere is the injustice leading to violence more evident than in
a colonial system on the eve of collapse. But when colonialism is in
full force, the forms of resistance to its racism are more subtle. In
the case of New World slavery, slaves engaged in what Gordon
Lewis, a Caribbean historian at the University of Puerto Rico, has
termed "covert protest," a whole range of behaviours short of escape
and rebellion: "Everything from feigned ignorance, malingering,
sabotage, slowed-down work habits, suicide, and poisoning of mas-
ters, on to the endless invention of attitudes that reflected a general
war of psychological tensions and stresses between both sides in the
master-slave relationship" (Lewis 1983:175). Realizing the futility
86 Richer and Poorer
of attacking the system head-on, most slaves devised coping mecha-
nisms in order to survive on a daily basis.
As historian D. Hiro wrote: "They lied; they played dumb; they
deliberately, yet defiantly, slowed their movements and thus reduced
their work output. They perfected circumlocution as a fine art... they
developed repression of their feelings and 'playing it cool' as defense
mechanisms against the system ... The slave also learned to release
his frustration and misery into humour and laughter — often at
himself, sometimes at his fellow slaves. For him laughter became a
safety valve (1991:22)."
We know that colonialism did not come to an end with the aboli-
tion of slavery, nor did the racism and violence it inspired. As
perhaps the most complete form of institutional racism, colonial
domination produced a sense of rage in the colonial subject that
exploded during the process of decolonization, when the colonial
masters were about to exit the colony. This was poignantly captured
in Franz Fanon's 1963 book, The Wretched of the Earth and Albert
Memmi's 1965 The Colonizer and the Colonized, which deal with
the case of Algeria and the struggles of the Algerian people to free
themselves from French colonial tutelage. But as Jean-Paul Sartre
noted in his Introduction to Memmi's book, rather than viewing
colonialism as a "situation" it is better understood as a "system";
thus, useful generalizations can be made from the Algerian case that
can cast light onto other cases in which the process of decolonization
has had to come to terms with racism and violence. It is well known,
as Fanon wrote, that "the well-being and the progress of Europe have
been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs,
Indians, and the yellow races," among others. Therefore, whether an
African slave, an Indian indentured servant, a Chinese "coolie," or a
captured native of the colony, the colonial subject was seen as "the
Other," and was invested with all the negative attributes that repre-
sented the opposite of the colonizer: sexual immorality, savagery,
godlessness, and evil. As Fanon wrote, "the native is declared insen-
sitive to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also
the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values
and in this sense he is the absolute evil."
For Fanon, decolonization is of necessity a violent process. Its
point of departure is the violence committed against the colonial
subject by the colonizer. In the early phase of the struggle for free-
dom, as the rage builds, the colonized is unable to lash out against
the oppressor, and so he directs his anger at his fellows. "This is the
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 87
period," Fanon writes, "when the niggers beat each other up, and the
police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced
with the astonishing waves of crime." As the struggle builds, how-
ever, the colonized native "finds out that the settler's skin is not of
any more value than a native's skin; ... this discovery shakes the
world in a very necessary manner." This is when the violent resis-
tance of the colonized begins to strike fear into the heart of the
colonizer, for the former come to realize that their freedom is impos-
sible so long as colonialism and racism remain intact. Thus, Sartre
minced no words when he summed up the native's options in his
Preface to The Wretched of the Earth: "In the first days of the revolt
you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one
stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same
time: there remain a dead man and a free man (1963:22)."
Violence as a Cleansing Force
To Fanon, colonialism and violence are synonymous. No process
premised on invasion, plunder, and theft, that virtually exterminated
the indigenous inhabitants, can legitimately expect that the victims
will acquiesce forever. Resistance was as certain as the lash of the
master's whip. In the process of colonial expansion, when savage
nobles met noble savages, the latter were immediately made to know
their place. But as the internal contradictions of colonial capitalism
mounted, as the resentment of the colonized grew and the forces of
decolonization began to take shape, no one could realistically expect
the process to be non-violent.
For colonialism is fascism, and fascism is violence. As Memmi
tells us, "There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived
through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism ... It is violence
in its natural state ... and will only yield when confronted with
greater violence." Thus, as the violence of colonialization confronts
the counter-violence of decolonization, few are left unscarred. In the
minds of the former colonized the resistance symbolized by their
counter-violence is frenzied and energizing. Fanon wrote: "At the
level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native
from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it
makes him fearless and restores his self-respect (1963:94)."
In today's advanced industrial countries, the violence of street
gangs, of the ghettos, of the drug culture, of men against women, and
the violence visited on the homeless, on the illiterate, on the poor
and on the hungry, can be seen as a variation on the theme traced by
88 Richer and Poorer
Fanon. For it is a violence turned inward: black on black, poor on
poor, the desperate against the desperate. It is a blind violence.
Youths on drugs, unschooled and unemployed, are casualties of a
system that has created "internal colonies" in the centres of the
largest cities of the West. Such phenomena as the Los Angeles riots
and the Native stand-off at Oka are aspects of the violence that
accompanies the process of decolonization everywhere. What is
noteworthy, however, is the fact that their violence, like that de-
scribed by Fanon, is often spontaneous, undirected, personal, and
contained. It is not informed by a wider vision of social transforma-
tion, or the transcendence of capitalism.
Neocolonialism and Violence: A Canadian
Example
Canada has long been witness to struggles for ethno-cultural auton-
omy among French Canadians, particularly those of Quebec, who,
even within their own country, claim to be colonized by English
Canada, and who are determined to break free. This theme of "inter-
nal colonialism" and the violence it occasions was poignantly cap-
tured in Pierre Vallieres' 1971 White Niggers of America, in which
the average French Canadian was compared to the average, disen-
franchised black person in the United States. In the early 1970s,
Canada was plunged into a state of emergency: a violence erupted
on the streets of Montreal, bombs exploded in public places, Quebec
Labour Minister Pierre Laporte was murdered, and British diplomat
James Cross was kidnapped and held for several days. The Front de
Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) took responsibility for the violence and
issued a manifesto outlining its philosophy, major goals, and de-
mands.
The FLQ Manifesto
The Front de Liberation du Quebec is not the Messiah nor
a modern-day Robin Hood. It is a group of Quebec workers
who are committed to do everything they can for the people
of Quebec to take their destiny into their own hands.
The Front de Liberation du Quebec wants the total inde-
pendence of the Quebeckers brought together in a free soci-
ety, purged forever of its band of voracious sharks, the big
bosses who dish out patronage and their servants, who have
made Quebec into their private preserve of "cheap labour"
and of unscrupulous exploitation ... what is called democ-
racy in Quebec is and always has been nothing but the
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 89
victory of the election riggers ... Consequently we wash our
hands of the British parliamentary system; the Front de
Liberation du Quebec will never let itself be distracted by
the electoral crumbs that the Anglo-Saxon capitalists toss
into the Quebec barnyard every four years. Many Quebeck-
ers have realized the truth and are ready to take action ...
We have had our fill of taxes which Ottawa's man in Quebec
wants to hand out to the English-speaking bosses to give
them "incentive" to speak French, to negotiate in French.
Repeat after me: "Cheap labour is main d'oeuvre a bon
marched
Working people in the factories, in mines and in the for-
ests; working people in the service industries, teachers, stu-
dents and unemployed: Take what belongs to you, your
labour, your determination and your freedom. And you, the
workers at General Electric, you make the factories run; you
alone are capable of producing, without you, General Elec-
tric is nothing!
Working people of Quebec, begin today to take back what
belongs to you; take yourselves what is yours. You alone
know your factories, your machines, your hotels, your uni-
versities, your unions, do not wait for a miracle organization.
Make your revolution yourselves in your neighbourhoods,
in your workplaces ... You alone are capable of building a
free society.
We are Quebec workers and we will go to the end ... we
want, with all the people, to replace this slave society with
a free society, functioning of itself and for itself, a society
open to the world.
Our struggle can only be victorious. Not for long can one
hold in misery and scorn, a people once awakened.
Long live Free Quebec!
Long live our comrades the political prisoners! Long live
the Quebec Revolution!
Long live the Front de Liberation du Quebec!
What is interesting about the FLQ Manifesto is that while it called
for an end to Anglo-Saxon capitalism, it did not call for the abolition
of capitalism per se; nor did it mention anything about socialism. It
is as though the authors were thinking in ethno-linguistic terms,
supposing that somehow French-speaking capitalists would be
90 Richer and Poorer
kinder to French-speaking workers than English-speaking capitalists
were. The underlying reformism is unmistakable here, and it goes to
the heart of our earlier observation that resistance is not always
critically informed or possessed of a clear alternative vision of the
society.
Conclusion
Our central theoretical point of departure for this chapter concerns
debate over the role of race versus class, and which is more salient
in terms of political consciousness and opposition in capitalist soci-
ety. On one hand are those, like Robert Miles, who refuse even to
give legitimacy to the concept "race" by treating it as a real or
meaningful category. He criticized those who "have, perversely,
prolonged the life of an idea that should be explicitly and consistently
confined to the dustbin of analytically useless terms" (Miles
1989:72). Miles, therefore, favours a stricter class approach to ana-
lyzing social inequality under capitalism, and agrees with Canadian
sociologist Peter Li who argues that "the fundamental source of
inequality under capitalism is, in the Marxian view, social class." Li
also maintains that other forms of inequality are basically derived
from class, and in this context he notes that "This is the way race
and ethnicity should be understood under the capitalist system" (Li
1988:48). On the other hand, there are those, like the controversial
and outspoken sociologist at the University of London, Paul Gilroy,
who feel that race must be retained as an analytic category not
because it corresponds to any biological or epistemological abso-
lutes, but because it draws attention to the power that collective
identities acquire by means of their roots in tradition. In other words,
even if primordial membership in a race is a purely imaginary phe-
nomenon, even if race consciousness is false consciousness, and even
if races are social constructs and not biological realities, so long as
people in power continue to treat them as real, they will have real
consequences for all involved. One cannot presume that the public
is sociologically informed on all such matters.
It seems, then, that the most fruitful approach to the intellectual
stand-off is to recall the words of Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James,
who is committed to the class position, but who cautions us that in
dealing with capitalism and imperialism: "The race question is sub-
sidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism
in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as
Race, Racial Inequality, and Resistance 91
merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it funda-
mental" (quoted in Gilroy 1987:15).
Class is fundamental to the Marxist understanding of resistance
against social inequality under capitalism; but unlike orthodox Marx-
ists, who hold that race consciousness is merely secondary, a matter
of "false consciousness," neo-Marxists correctly leave the door open
to the possibility that the class struggle can be advanced by embrac-
ing the race struggle (or even the gender struggle) at strategic mo-
ments. For as Gilroy reminded us, "Racism does not, of course, move
tidily and unchanged through time and history. It assumes new forms
and articulates new antagonisms in different situations." This is a call
for empirical research to inform theoretical insight, because different
forms of oppression demand different strategies of resistance. But
under capitalism, especially when oppression is perceived as being
based on race and racism, contextualizing race within the class strug-
gle offers a broader, and hence possibly more viable, base for resis-
tance. There are, however, no automatic guarantees of successful
resistance, for we are dealing here with a question of process. Thus,
resistance, whether spontaneous or planned, is a two-way street: each
oppositional act of resistance can expect to provoke counter-resis-
tance.
Clearly, then, the strategy is not to surrender to the forces of
racism in Canada or elsewhere, but to prepare better for the chal-
lenges of resistance. This implies more study of, and research into,
the various available strategies that can be used to meet the condi-
tions at hand, and the efficacy of each. We must not be deluded into
thinking that a mere tinkering with surface manifestations of racism
and racial inequalities will rid society of such a deep-rooted social
problem.
4
Gender Inequalities in
Canada
Few issues currently generate as much interest, debate, or acrimony
as does inequality between women and men. Given the attention this
topic has received, one would think that we would have moved
further towards consensus about how society might be structured in
a more equitable fashion. Yet, the persistence of gender inequities
makes the problem appear in certain ways intractable, and at times
Canadians as a whole seem confused when "gender" is at issue. It is
within this context of antagonism and frustration that we will briefly
analyze gender relations in Canada with a view to helping men and
women recognize some of their common interests and develop the
political will to resolve this important issue. But, in order to act upon
their common interests, men and women must understand who actu-
ally benefits from the gender inequalities and tensions that charac-
terize contemporary social relations.
Many Canadians born in the latter half of the twentieth century
were, or are, optimistic about the potential for women to share
equally in the wealth and power of Canadian society. However, for
many this optimism waned in the 1980s, as it became apparent that
the ideals of the 1960s were not being fully realized. In fact, the
contrast between the ideals of the 1960s and the realities of the 1990s
suggests that there is a stall in progress towards equality in Canada,
and in other countries attempting the same changes. This is evident
not only in persisting forms of workplace segregation and wage
disparity, but in a lack of consensus over what should be done to
correct them. Moreover, there is now even a lack of consensus among
academic feminists regarding what form "gender equality" should
take in society.
In our view, the stall itself — as well as the lack of consensus
about what to do about it — are in part attributable to the fact that
certain workplace inequalities are necessary conditions for the sur-
Gender Inequalities in Canada 93
viva] of advanced industrial capitalism. Historically, women have
constituted one of several groups of cheap labour targeted by capi-
talists. In a sense, gender inequality is good for contemporary capi-
talism because it allows profit margins to be sustained. Indeed, the
very notion that men and women are "opposite" sexes is "good" for
capitalism.
Explaining Gender Inequality: A Materialist
Approach
Much has been written on gender inequality in Canada and else-
where, documenting inequities in the workplace, in education, and
in the wider society. This literature adopts a number of perspectives,
including biological and "idealist" explanations of persisting in-
equalities. Our approach to understanding the persistence of gender
inequalities follows the position laid out in the previous three chap-
ters. That is, we adopt a materialist position towards gender inequali-
ties that looks to the class structure of the society — the distribution
of wealth and privilege — to see what objective conditions obtain
for different people as they earn their daily livelihoods. We see
biological and idealist approaches to the issue as limited in their
ability to explain how the structure of inequality originated and why
it is resistant to change.
Because our approach is focused on material conditions, we will
not address all of the contributions to the literature on gender in-
equalities in Canada. In particular, we do not incorporate approaches
that fail to treat inequality as an inevitable condition of capitalist
society, from which certain groups predictably benefit. A materialist
analysis of gender inequalities takes as its point of departure the
physical organization of work performed by women both in the home
and in the labour force. This is in turn related to the way employers'
interests are articulated with the economic needs of the family. What
work is actually performed by women and who, ultimately, gains
from it? Ideas and ideologies about gender roles and relations emerge
out of the objective and practical conditions (both physical and so-
cial) under which people struggle to produce and reproduce their
existence. The important point, therefore, is that material conditions
and struggles give rise to beliefs and ideologies (and not vice versa),
as human beings fight to define themselves and their worlds.
One objective condition of industrial capitalism is the constant
demand for reserve armies of unpaid or cheap labour, which make
possible continued high rates of exploitation. The larger these armies,
94 Richer and Poorer
the more wages can be suppressed, and the more profit can be
extracted. Competition dictates that a capitalist enterprise which fails
to secure the average rate of profit will not survive very long. There-
fore, owners of enterprises most at risk are also most likely to try to
maintain conditions that maximize their profit, especially conditions
that ensure that certain workers are employed as cheaply as possible.
For historical reasons, women have constituted both unpaid and
cheap labour throughout the era of industrial capitalism. They have
provided unpaid labour in the home to reproduce and maintain labour
power, at virtually no expense to capitalists. During the early indus-
trial period, women were pressured to spend their married lives
bearing and raising children, all the while emotionally supporting
their husbands — producing, reproducing, and maintaining the la-
bour force. Single women also provided cheap labour in low-paying
factory jobs, often enduring horrid working conditions and abuses.
Following the periodic ups and downs of the capitalist economy in
the more recent industrial period, even married women have been
called upon to enter and exit the workforce under similar conditions.
Bearing all this in mind, let us now look at the history of gender
inequality in Canada and see how it can inform our understanding of
the current situation. But in order to prepare readers for the materi-
alist analysis that follows, we begin with a discussion of two key
concepts: (1) the gendered division of labour and (2) the separation
between the public and private spheres of labour.
The Fundamental Division of Labour
All societies organize themselves in ways that assign different tasks
to various members, often on the basis of visible attributes like sex
and age. This assignment of tasks contributes to survival or even
affluence. Sometimes the assignment is hierarchical, reflecting an
unequal sharing of the fruits of collective labour. In some societies,
tasks are performed side by side in the same area or sphere; in other
societies, tasks are performed in separate spheres.
A division of labour by gender appears to be fundamental to all
societies. Because physical-sexual attributes are the most immedi-
ately apparent attributes, it is assumed that they are the most obvious
bases for assigning people different roles. Accordingly, the biologi-
cal capacity for childbearing has been seen as a feature that might
push groups to assign women to one set of tasks and men to another.
And, because only women bear children, some theorists believe that
men were viewed in some societies as more expendable. Accord-
Gender Inequalities in Canada 95
ingly, men were more likely to be warriors and hunters, the high
risk-takers for the community. Another common explanation holds
that pregnancy, breastfeeding, and care for the very young tied
women more closely than men to the home. Variations and excep-
tions to these generalizations are found in different cultures and at
different times, but factors such as these may have contributed to the
division of labour with which modern Canadians are attempting to
deal.
Some societies are doing a better job dealing with this legacy than
others, but so far none has managed to eradicate the gendered divi-
sion of labour. One way to understand why this is so and how it might
be changed is to examine societies where women have traditionally
enjoyed higher status, as well as those where the status of women
has improved.
Sociohistorical analysis suggests that an important condition
needs to be present for any "group" to enjoy high status in any
society, whether it be a small tribal group or a large society: their
roles in the division of labour need to be recognized as making a
direct contribution to the material welfare of their community. Re-
gardless of how fair this may seem from the lens of the 1990s, if
women as a group are not recognized as contributing directly to the
material wealth of the community, history suggests that their status
will not be high. This principle applies not just to women, but also
to other groups, like the young. This sociohistorical principle can
serve as a benchmark in tracing how the status of women has changed
over the centuries in Canada.
The Private and Public Spheres
In the preindustrial era, most labour was performed in the household.
For the average (non-capitalist) colonist, most of the necessities of
life were grown, made, or extracted in or around the homestead. In
the overall economy, the household was primarily a unit of produc-
tion, while "consumption" was limited to the essentials of day-to-day
sustenance and shelter. In this setting, women, men and children
worked side by side. However, during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, industrial capitalism radically transformed the
household economy. According to Rifkin (1995), "consumption" is
a part of the consumer society as a result of efforts by manufacturers
to encourage people to buy their products. One meaning of this word
is "to waste."
96 Richer and Poorer
Driven by the requirements of the new industrial order, two
spheres of labour emerged: the "private sphere" and the "public
sphere." Patricia Lengerman and Ruth Wallace, two American soci-
ologists, define these spheres as follows: "Public sphere refers to the
complex, bureaucratically organized institutions of modern life: the
economy, the state, formal education, organized religion, the profes-
sions and unions, the mass media of communication and entertain-
ment ... Private sphere refers to the less formal, emotionally more
open networks of social relationships that coexist with the public
sphere: marriage, family, kin, neighbourhood, community, friend-
ship" (1985:107).
Lengerman and Wallace also observed that societal power lies in
the public sphere, while the private sphere exercises less formal
power and is heavily affected by the public one. Moreover, they
argued that the "hallmark of the conventional gender arrangements
is that women have restricted access to the public sphere, while men
have restricted participation in the private sphere." Much of the
women's movement in Western societies has sought to give women
equal access to the public sphere and to encourage men to take a
more active role in the private one. It has been very difficult to coax
many men into the private sphere. In Sweden, for example, where
the "Swedish experiment" has been attempting for some 30 years to
accomplish this as one of its goals, little success has been achieved.
Only a small percentage of Swedish men have embraced the private
sphere to the extent that the majority of women do the public sphere.
For details, see Jacobsson and Alfredsson (1993), and The Swedish
Institute (1992).
Given a history of segregation of men and women into separate
spheres, it is understandable that people in industrial-capitalist socie-
ties have tended to base their identities on the roles available to them.
To understand the persistence of gender inequalities, therefore, we
need first to understand how identities are shaped around certain
roles. We believe that male and female identities have been manipu-
lated in ways that serve the interests of capital, and that sustain
gender inequality. However, in the twentieth century, especially in
its past two decades, roles have changed dramatically. Women have
become increasingly active in the public sphere, while at the same
time there has been a widespread reassessment and reworking of
gender arrangements in the private sphere. Over this period, life
chances and experiences have changed for both men and women,
reflecting a reconvergence of the spheres separated by industrial
Gender Inequalities in Canada 97
capitalism. This applies especially to those making the effort to move
from one sphere to the other. Notably, though, in every Western
country so far studied, more women are doing so than men. Never-
theless, belief in the "rightness" of traditional segregated arrange-
ments appears to persist: what "is" or "has been" is translated into
what "ought to be" — (see Lengerman and Wallace 1985:45-6, 57,
n5). This type of thinking among the lay public puts pressure on men
and women to stay in separate spheres as if it is their rightful place
(reinforcing the "ideology of gender"; Cote and Allahar 1994), but
as Lengerman and Wallace show, it does not follow logically that to
speak of these spheres sociologically is to attempt to relegate men
and women to their traditional ones.
The Gendered Division of Labour: The Material
Basis
From the perspective of the 1990s, it is easy to look at the past as
one of a pervasive patriarchal oppression of women. While it is true
that Canadian society has a history of patriarchy, it is instructive to
separate the material basis of the division of labour from its ideo-
logical basis.
As noted in Chapter 3, before Europeans began exploring and
settling what is now Canada, Natives had occupied these lands for
thousands of years. By most accounts, the gendered division of
labour was reasonably equitable, with few stable distinctions be-
tween private and public spheres or labour. Because Native women
played a key part in contributing to the material well-being of their
communities, they enjoyed a status comparable to Native men. In
many Native tribes, women also participated in political affairs.
By modern standards, the earliest European settlers in Canada
faced severe conditions: poor housing, poor diet, infectious diseases,
and poor hygiene, not to mention long, cold winters during which
food grown in short summers was carefully rationed. Natives often
helped settlers adjust to these stark conditions, ensuring their sur-
vival. Most of the earliest pioneers were "dirt farmers" who made
what they could out of often rocky and barren land. Many saw friends
and family die on the voyage across the Atlantic or suffer untimely
deaths from injuries or infections. Contending with meagre material
conditions, early European settlers were typically concerned with the
means of survival. It is easy to underplay the relevance of this in the
1990s, when much of the population now take their means of survival
for granted. Instead of being concerned with these "lower order"
98 Richer and Poorer
needs, much of the population is now more concerned with "higher
order" needs associated with a sense of community, and their own
self-esteem and self-actualization. For according to Abraham Mas-
low (1954), humans experience a hierarchy of needs, from lower
order survival needs to higher order self-esteem and self-actualiza-
tion needs. When a lower order need is not being fulfilled, people
focus on it and are not concerned with higher order ones. However,
when lower order needs are met, people expect more, including
experiencing self-esteem and self-actualization from their jobs. If
Maslow is correct about this, we can understand better the "other
directedness" of many people, who focus on others because they
derive their sense of self-esteem from others. Some work-related
stresses associated with "office politics" seem to be associated with
the playing out of people's attempts to meet their higher order needs
in competition with others.
A recent Statistics Canada analysis provides considerable insight
into the life chances and life experiences of the average Caucasian
woman and man over the past three centuries. According to their
analysis, a pioneer born in 1700 had a life expectancy of between 30
and 35 years. Over the next four generations this improved, but only
to the point where by 1831 men had a life expectancy of 40 years
and women of 42. It took another four generations before life expec-
tancies resembled those which we now take for granted. Among
those born in the 1990s, females can expect to live about 81 years
and males some 75 years.
The 1993 Statistics Canada study also noted that very high infant
mortality rates had severe implications for the childbearing role of
women. Even in the 1800s only about two-thirds of women survived
to childbearing age. Those who survived to age 50 bore, on average,
10 children by the time they were 40. By the time they completed
their childbearing, most of their expected life had been played out.
Many women did not see their children grow into adulthood. This
picture is dramatically different from the one faced by contemporary
women. Women born in the early 1950s have only one or two
children, and have devoted only about two years of their lives to
pregnancy and early infant care. If we subtract these two years from
their longer life expectancies and ignore mandatory retirement, con-
temporary women actually have more of their lives available than
men for participation in the public sphere of society, particularly paid
work.
Gender Inequalities in Canada 99
In the earliest pioneer days, there was very little paid labour, of
course, because most men and women worked the land for food and
made their own goods. Production took place in the home and the
family was the basic unit of production. In fact, "home" and "work"
were difficult to distinguish. Even those who worked for a wage often
did so in a family establishment, living with the family employing
them.
The family remained the basic unit of production in Canada for
more than two centuries. During this time markets grew, but many
men and women still made some products in the home to sell in the
market (they sold what was surplus to their own needs). Historians
note that in this setting, men and women were more or less equal
partners. This domestic production meant that women were valuable
economic partners in the struggle for survival, and this was generally
acknowledged.
Paid labour grew slowly, and it was largely males who performed
it. The paid labour force of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
comprised mainly young males, who worked on average only about
two decades, before they died. But more germane to the impending
decline in the status of women was a rapid disappearance of the
household economy of production along with a rapid rise in industrial
capitalist production.
By the early 1900s domestic production had disappeared in much
of Canada. Few households could produce what they needed for
survival, and work increasingly took place outside the home. Facto-
ries, offices, and stores replaced home-based production, increas-
ingly segregating workers. Consequently, industrial capitalism
created a division of the earlier labour process into two discrete
spheres: the private, domestic sphere in which labour power itself
(children) was produced and maintained by women; and the public,
industrial sphere, where goods and services were produced mainly
by men for the commodity markets.
In the first part of the twentieth century these processes acceler-
ated, helped by increased mechanization and automation, and by
compulsory education. With the mechanization of agriculture, which
displaced workers, more men were drawn into factories and offices;
women were assigned to operate new domestic technologies in the
home; and as children were required to attend school to later and
later ages, the menial labour they had once performed in the home
was taken up by adult women. In short, the new role of "housewife"
put the burden of maintaining the domestic unit (now a unit of
100 Richer and Poorer
consumption rather than production) almost entirely on women. Ac-
cordingly, their status fell dramatically, as they were left out of the
production process, which was recognized as contributing directly to
the collective wealth.
A century ago, about 15% of the paid labour force in Canada was
made up of women, who were largely young and unmarried. Those
who worked in the public sphere received low wages and had limited
opportunity for advancement, so life in the private sphere was more
appealing. In fact, what has been called the "cult of true womanhood"
and the "cult of domesticity" bombarded women with the message
that their "true" place was in the home having and raising children,
tending to their husbands' needs, and not competing with men for
jobs. And married women were not to engage in paid labour. The
ideal woman was pure, pious, and submissive. Because of these
influences, at the turn of the last century only about 3% of married
women in Canada worked for wages outside the home. The concept
of the ideal woman was buttressed by the media of the time (mainly
magazines and pamphlets), and by the educational system, which
channelled women into the study of home economics, even through
advanced study. It would be several decades before women would
make any meaningful gains in the public sphere.
Compared with their forebears, contemporary men face quite dif-
ferent circumstances. The average male can expect to spend over 40
years in the paid-labour force, and very few will be engaged in
agricultural labour or any work that provides for self-sufficiency. In
other words, the contemporary male sells his labour power to survive
and has little choice about it. The history of the labour movement
tells us that many men resented the exploitation that went along with
the appropriation of their labour power. Many were forced off the
homestead that was their heritage, and trades workers and craft
workers found their economic functions lost or diminished by mass
production. With their skills made obsolete, many men were forced
to take on undignified manual labour or factory work at exploitive
wages, often working under dangerous conditions. Men felt pressure
to provide all the money necessary to support their families, so they
needed to find employment that would provide a sufficient "living
wage." To add insult to injury, many could not do this adequately,
and as a result they were often made to feel ashamed.
Gender comparisons of life expectancy suggest that, in spite of
material gains, industrialization has been costly for men's physical
well-being. For those born in 1831 there was a two-year difference
Gender Inequalities in Canada 101
in the life expectancies of Canadian women and men. However, by
1951 this difference had increased to eight years. Despite any advan-
tages in status that paid labour may have given men over women
during this period, therefore, industrialization appears to have been
"harder" on them than on women.
Given this historical-demographic context, we can now under-
stand somewhat better the painful transition to industrial capitalism
that women — and men — have experienced. Most men working in
the paid labour force of the late twentieth century have little knowl-
edge or awareness of earlier times, when labour was less alienating,
that is, when they had control over how they spent their time and
what they produced. This alienation of the industrial capitalist work-
place is simply taken by most as a normal state of affairs. Being a
successful wage-earner came to be a defining feature of the identity
of twentieth-century men. At the same time, women were condi-
tioned to be "good homemakers" and to believe that involvement in
paid labour would mean they were neglecting their family duties and
taking work away from men who had families to support. These
conditions have combined to help create a sense of competitiveness
among many men today in terms of sharing paid labour with women
who have been attempting to take their rightful place in the public
sphere.
The Gendered Division of Labour: Ideological
Justification
Material conditions give rise to beliefs that people use to create
meaning in their lives. Generally, when inequality is involved in the
origin and maintenance of these material conditions, these beliefs
justify those conditions and disguise their true nature. And, such
beliefs often congeal to form a full-blown ideology, a body of
thought difficult to contest, because ideologies tend to be emotionally
linked to the identities of those affected by material conditions.
In the past, religion provided part of the ideological justification
for the gendered division of labour. In Western societies, this has
included a hierarchy rooted in the form of patriarchy in which the
father was the head of the family. (Thus there was also a hierarchy
among males, with the father having power over his sons.) Today,
religion still provides an acceptable justification for many people,
but this is on the decline, given the increasingly secular ethos of the
society. Now, rather than having an explicit religious justification,
for many people ideologies have scientific and political justifica-
/ 02 Richer and Poorer
tions. In these forms, the ideologies are often more implicit, that is,
they have become an integral part of the culture which many people
simply take for granted as "normal." Thus, the contemporary form
of patriarchy influencing many Canadians does not rely on a "su-
preme father" image, but on a more subtle belief system that legiti-
mates male dominance in areas like job segregation and differential
wages.
Contemporary patriarchy has been challenged by recent laws for-
bidding various forms of discrimination. Yet, it persists, in part
because it is difficult for individual women and men to change the
way they have been taught to think. Indeed, implicit ideologies can
put tremendous pressure on individuals because of their intangibility.
It can be difficult for individuals to articulate just why they think and
behave in a given manner. To make matters worse, digging deeper
into motivations can be a threatening and anxiety-producing exer-
cise. But we can easily see contemporary patriarchy in the behaviours
of some employers, whether male or female (who believe that men
deserve a living wage but women do not, that there is "women's
work" and "men's work," or that men make better managers), as well
as in the "gendering" of commodities marketed by modern advertis-
ing and commercial firms.
The challenge for the twenty-first century, then, will be to deal
with a cultural legacy in which people have seen it as "normal" for
women to be relegated to the private sphere of the family and men
to the public sphere of work and politics. This legacy of role segre-
gation has been, and continues to be, internalized by many men —
and by many women. We have referred to this as the "ideology of
gender." It permeates contemporary culture, from educational curric-
ula to the messages of the mass media.
Even in the "enlightened" time of the late twentieth century, we
find that many young Canadian men and women have been brought
up to believe cultural myths based on the "proper" roles of men and
women. As they internalize these myths into their own value systems
they reproduce remnants of patriarchy and (may) eventually pass
them on to their children. During their teens many young people
undergo a phase of "gender intensification" as they form central
aspects of their adult identities. Few people of any age seem to take
the time to reflect on the fact that gendered roles may have emerged
out of the material conditions of survival, or as a response to the
needs of industrial capitalism. Today, however, there is no justifica-
tion for gender segregation into private and public spheres, either in
Gender Inequalities in Canada 103
the survival of the species or in any historical necessity associated
with industrial capitalism.
Perhaps the ability of the ideology of gender to resist change can
be explained, in part, by the fact that it is so entrenched in modern
industrial society. In fact, it took great effort to manufacture this
ideology, beginning back in the 1800s with the concept of the ideal
woman and intensified during the 1920s as advertisers perfected their
techniques of influence.
The ideology of gender is the result of a concerted effort on the
part of particular interests, mainly capitalist, to "manufacture con-
sent" and manipulate public consciousness on certain issues. It has
been very profitable for business interests to ensure that males and
females remain in somewhat segregated spheres. For example, males
and females to various extents view each other as "opposites" who
need attracting, so a whole set of products are sold to people under
the pretext that they will attract the "opposite sex." Many men and
women may not be consciously attempting to attract the other sex,
but are simply trying to "display" their gender in ways they have
been taught by advertisers and the media. These products amount to
billions of dollars in sales every year.
Thus, we have a society in which expensive display and courting
rituals are repeated daily and are nurtured and maintained through
the messages of advertising, movies, magazines, novels, and televi-
sion programs. Simply stated, during this century people have been
made to believe that this is the "normal" way for men and women to
deal with their attraction to each other. This is part and parcel of the
ideology of gender, with which capitalists manipulate vestiges of
patriarchy for their own purposes. But in doing so, they maintain a
barrier between women and men, thereby sustaining the ideological
confusion between sexual differences and gender inequalities.
Gender in the Late Twentieth Century
During the early history of industrial capitalism, the life courses of
men and women "diverged." More recently, their life courses have
"converged." With the advent of widespread wage labour and the
mass production of commodity goods, the domestic unit changed
from being one of production to one of consumption, with women
left in the home as unpaid labour to tend to children and their
husbands. The average woman and man increasingly occupied sepa-
rate spheres. This material condition was justified by, among other
things, an ideology that has-been called the "cult of true woman-
104 Richer and Poorer
hood," in which married women were expected to provide a "haven"
for their husbands and children from the cruel world of industrial
capitalism.
Changes over the past several decades suggest, however, that a
life-course convergence is occurring for younger Canadian men and
women. This can be seen in a movement towards greater sharing and
overlap of the private and public spheres. In fact, with each succes-
sive post-Second World War age group, the life courses of young
women and men are becoming more and more alike. This conver-
gence is quite apparent in education, in work and career opportuni-
ties, and in family life. It means there are increased possibilities for
identity formation. That is, both women and men have time to ex-
plore and develop interests, and greater freedom to base commit-
ments on personal choices and personal fulfilment: they have more
freedom to choose sexual partners and explore their sexuality, as well
as to develop lifestyles suited to their talents and inner needs. But, it
is clear that the legacy of the past separation of the public and private
spheres persists for many women and men. It is to the current state
of the sharing and segregation of the spheres that we now turn.
The Public Sphere
In the 1994 third edition of their book The Double Ghetto: Canadian
Women and Their Segregated Work, Pat Armstrong and Hugh Arm-
strong made a compelling case that women have not progressed in
the public sphere of paid labour as far as many believe, particularly
since midcentury (their point of reference is 1941). They argued that
although women's participation in the labour force has tripled since
then, so that now the participation rate of younger women approxi-
mates that of men, their participation does not reflect an equal share
of community material resources. In their view, the segregation of
women's and men's work continues, and despite the momentous
changes in the sexual composition of the labour force, women are
still greatly overrepresented in the least attractive jobs in "industries
and occupations characterized by low pay, low recognized skill re-
quirements, low productivity, and low prospects for advancement."
Earlier in this century, women's participation in the labour force
was largely dictated by "market demand." When they were needed,
for example, during the Second World War, they were readily re-
cruited by employers. But this recruitment was in a buyers' market
in which many women functioned as a reserve of cheap labour, to
be called upon only as capitalist production demanded. As Arm-
Gender Inequalities in Canada 105
strong and Armstrong noted, a "large supply of women at home
without paid work helps ensure that extra workers will be available
when needed." In this buyers' market, women filled gaps in the
labour supply and were offered low wages and benefits, often on a
part-time or part-year basis. With their ideological anchoring in the
private sphere of family responsibility and their belief that it was
inappropriate to compete with "breadwinning" men, most women
apparently did not feel that they were in a position to bargain over
wages and working conditions.
Employers capitalized on this ideological anchoring by paying
only enough to constitute a "second income" for the family. And
women did not have an organized support system, as did men with
their unions, which attempted to help men maintain a living wage to
support their families. Even as recently as 1994 women made up
about 70% of part-time workers (about 25% of women with jobs,
compared with 10% of men with jobs), while more than 30% of these
workers preferred full-time work but could only obtain it part-time,
an increase of 12% from 1989. Even women employed full-time all
year work fewer hours than do men in the same situation.
Armstrong and Armstrong also held that the willingness of women
as a whole to provide this supplementary form of labour has de-
creased sharply, as has their willingness to be the primary agents in
the private sphere. They argued that only a minority of women now
leave the labour force after the birth of their first child, and when
they do they stay out for only a short period. And, because of today's
low birthrate — women commonly have only one or two children
— most women now hold paid jobs for most of their adult lives. They
concluded that women's "labour force participation patterns have
become more and more like those of men." Table 4.1 shows the effect
of raising children on labour force participation.
In spite of these changes, women's increased participation in the
public sphere still seems to be dictated by the needs of the advanced
capitalist workplace for a reserve army of cheap labour. Many em-
ployers have taken advantage of the legacy of patriarchy, which
includes notions of "women's work" and ideological ties to the
private sphere. Hence, we find that many of the jobs performed by
women are extensions of work performed in the home: seeing to the
basics of daily functioning (clerical work), ensuring that the basic
needs of others are met (service work), cleaning, preparing and
serving food, making and mending clothing, teaching and caring for
the young, disabled, and elderly. In addition, employers have capi-
/ 06 Richer and Poorer
Table 4.1
Labour Force Participation Rates of Women by Age and
Presence of Children in 1981 and 1991 (percentages)
All women
With no
children at
home
With
children
At least one
child under
age 6
Aged 6 and
over only
Age
15-24
1981
61
64
44
44
63
1991
65
66
52
52
72
25-34
1981
66
89
54
49
66
1991
79
91
70
67
77
group
35-44
1981
64
79
61
47
64
1991
80
85
78
69
80
45-54
1981
56
61
53
37
55
1991
72
71
72
61
73
Source: Logan and Belliveau (1995).
talized on the poorer bargaining position of older women, who have
had less education and less paid-work experience.
We can also trace the rise in women's paid employment to the rise
of the service sector. In the early 1950s about 67% of those employed
in service industries were women, but by the 1990s this had increased
to 80%. These service jobs tend to be low skill and labour intensive,
and as such, low paid. But, to make matters worse, employers have
replaced labour with machines whenever profitable, so many women
have found themselves taking low-paying jobs in a growth area only
to be displaced by a machine (often, in recent times, by a computer).
Their status as a reserve army of labour continues, despite the fact
that most women no longer have the same ideological anchoring to
the private sphere, and they now have more education and job expe-
rience.
Table 4.2 helps us understand the situation women (and men) face
in the workplace of the 1990s. It provides a breakdown of occupa-
tions by sex for the years 1982 and 1994, allowing us to examine
Gender Inequalities in Canada 107
Table 4.2
Distribution of Occupations for 1982 and 1994:
Percentages of Women and Men Employed in Each
Occupation and Women as a Percentage of Employees in
Each Occupation
Managerial/
Administrative
Natural
sciences/
engineering
Social
sciences/
religion
Teaching
Doctors/
dentists
Nursing/
therapy/
health related
Artistic/
literary/
recreational
Clerical
Sales
Service
Primary
Manufacturing
Construction
Transportation
Material
handling/crafts
Total
1982
Women
6.0
1.3
2.0
6.1
0.3
8.8
1.4
34.2
10.1
18.1
2.8
6.4
0.2
1.5
1.8
100.0
Men
10.2
5.3
1.8
3.0
0.8
1.1
1.6
6.4
10.8
10.7
8.0
19.8
9.3
6.0
5.2
100.0
Women
/Men
29.3
14.9
42.7
58.9
18.3
84.7
38.6
78.8
39.7
54.2
19.6
18.4
1.4
5.9
19.3
41.2
1994
Women
12.7
1.7
3.3
6.9
0.5
9.1
2.2
26.8
10.1
17.1
2.1
4.8
0.3
0.8
1.6
100.0
Men
13.8
5.9
2.1
3.3
0.9
1.2
2.1
5.4
9.9
11.0
6.4
17.3
9.3
6.2
5.0
100.0
Women
/Men
43.1
19.2
56.8
63.4
32.1
86.1
46.4
80.2
45.7
56.2
21.3
18.5
2.4
9.2
21.0
45.2
Source: Statistics Canada, Women in Canada, 3rd ed. (1995).
/ 08 Richer and Poorer
recent trends. Most striking here is the concentration of women into
five occupations that mirror work done by women in the private
sphere (clerical, sales, service, teaching, and nursing related): 77.1%
of employed women were in these five occupational groups in 1982
and 70.0% in 1994, compared with 33.0% and 30.8% of men, respec-
tively. Thus, in terms of life chances and life choices, contemporary
women still face greater restrictions than do men, pointing to a
limitation of the life-course convergence that we have been discuss-
ing. In other words, the "homogenization" of women noted a quarter
century ago is still a factor in the lives of many women of the 1990s.
But, there is some room for optimism when we look at changes
between 1982 and 1994 in terms of growth in non-traditional occu-
pations such as management/administration, natural science/engi-
neering, and medicine/dentistry. However, it is unclear how much of
this "growth" actually represents job redefinition (e.g., when a cleri-
cal worker is assigned "management" duties at the same pay).
Hughes (1995) traces the growth of women in the experienced
labour force with census data, noting that between 1986 and 1991
men's participation in the labour force remained stable at about 77%,
while women's increased from 55.4% to 60.7% (increases took place
for all age groups). By 1991 women in the labour force had almost
as many higher educational credentials as men. However, their in-
creasing participation in the labour force and their increasing accredi-
tation in male-dominated fields did not necessarily translate into
employment in non-traditional occupations. In 1971, 86% of women
were in traditionally female occupations, but by 1991 this had only
dropped to 78%, with women concentrated in about one-quarter of
all occupations (132 out of 484). The few occupations that experi-
enced a significant growth in female participation between 1986 and
1991 were optometry, services and financial management, osteopa-
thy and chiropractics. Women who moved into male-dominated oc-
cupations worked more hours than other female workers, but fewer
hours than their male counterparts. They also tended to be younger,
were less likely to have a university degree, and were paid less than
men.
When we focus on wages, a complex picture emerges. Table 4.3
shows that the "gender gap" in wages has been a more or less
constant factor over this century. Although "real wages" have quad-
rupled (Rashid 1994) for both men and women, women have consis-
tently made between only 50% and 60% of what men have. Between
1940 and 1970 wages increased between 30% and 40% per decade,
Gender Inequalities in Canada 109
Table 4.3
Real Average Annual Wages for Canadian Women and
Men, 1920-1990, and Percentage Difference
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
Women
4,100
5,000
4,700
7,400
10,000
13,700
15,700
17,900
Men
7,500
8,300
9,600
12,800
18,500
26,200
29,900
29,800
Women/Men
(%)
55
60
49
58
54
52
53
60
Source: Rashid (1994) Based on adjusted 1990 dollars for all workers
(full-time, part-time, full-year, and part-year).
an increase that slowed in the 1970s and stalled in the 1980s. During
the 1980s men's "real average annual wage" decreased slightly,
while women's rose 14%, (more or less duplicating the rise in
women's wages in the 1970s). This increase in women's earning
power is most likely a result of their improved education and work
experience.
Table 4.4 provides a breakdown of women's earnings by age and
education for 1993. It is apparent that both factors influence women's
earning potential: younger women and those with more education
tend to have the greatest earning power. Among the youngest women
in the workforce, university-educated women earn a full 84% of what
men in the same category make. From these figures it appears that
progress has recently been made towards wage parity. But some
would argue that previous estimates were based on the erroneous
assumption that annual wage estimates took full account of the
number of hours worked. Recent surveys indicate that employed men
work full-time, on average, three to four hours more each week than
do women employed full-time. An examination of the annual salaries
of university graduates from the class of 1990 shows that female
graduates are paid slightly better than their male counterparts with
110 Richer and Poorer
Table 4.4
Percentage of Earnings of Women Working Full-Time
Compared with Men, by Education and Age, in 1993
Level of
education
All women
Some secondary
Graduated high
school
Some
post-secondary
Post-secondary
diploma
University degree
Age group
25-34
76
63
74
65
75
84
35-44
72
62
68
67
76
77
45-54
67
60
67
51
73
72
Source: Best (1995).
an equal level of experience, job tenure, education, and hours of
work. With community college graduates from the same year, a 3.5%
gap was found in favour of males. When considering the general
labour force in terms of earnings ratios based on hourly salary, in
1992 the female-male ratio was 0.79, which is significantly different
than the ratio based on annual salaries (Coish and Hale 1994).
In interpreting the significance of these findings, several things
must be kept in mind. First, the reason why women work fewer hours
per week needs to be further examined. It is likely that unequal
demands from private sphere duties are largely responsible for their
lower availability for work. These findings suggest that, while sys-
temic discrimination in the workplace against younger, more highly
educated women is not a new problem, many women still appear to
be subject to ideological pressures to remain anchored in the private
sphere. And, the wage parity with males is partly the result of the
declines in the salaries of men, including university-educated men.
In fact, by 1993, university-educated men had about the same real
earnings as men with high school diplomas in the late 1970s (Cromp-
ton 1996), while university-educated women gained over this period.
Gender Inequalities in Canada 111
Table 4.5
Women as a Percentage of Full-Time
University Enrolment by Level and Year
Program/
Year
1972-73
1981-82
1992-93
Under-
graduate
43
50
53
Master's
27
41
46
Doctorate
19
31
35
Source: Normand (1995).
In commenting on some of these findings, Globe and Mail columnist
Margaret Wente wrote in 1995:
It's not hard to guess why there's a difference in hours
worked: Women have child-rearing and other obligations
that compete heavily for their time. Some women's advo-
cates cite this as proof of discrimination, as if all women
would choose to work longer hours if only they didn't have
to spend so much time cleaning house and looking after the
gosh-darn kids. Economists prefer to cite "labour-supply
decisions within the family context," which means that fami-
lies tend to do the rational thing depending on their individ-
ual circumstances.
This is the crux of the problem we have been discussing. Women
and men face material limitations in forming and maintaining fami-
lies, and they utilize the resources available to them as best they can.
They also base their decisions on what they have been taught to
believe is right, which, for many, has been informed by the ideology
of gender. Clearly, we are in a period where the greater involvement
of women than men in the private sphere is a persistent phenomenon.
While change is taking place, it is apparently very slow and it will
likely take more time before equal involvement in these spheres
becomes a reality.
Finally, women's participation in the higher educational system
in Canada has shown dramatic increases in the past two decades.
Between 1975 and 1990 there was a 79% increase in the number of
full-time female university students, compared with a 15% increase
112 Richer and Poorer
for males. Table 4.5 shows enrolment increases from 1972 to 1993.
By the early 1990s .w^rnen made up more than half of university
undergraduates, almost half of master's students, and a third of doc-
toral students. The lower rate of participation at the graduate levels
is not well understood, but it probably reflects, in part, the same
problems of integration of women into traditionally male-dominated
fields, especially those that make great demands on one's time, such
that private sphere commitments suffer. And, it is likely that many
women are still channelled away from non-traditional fields though
the processes of adolescence that affect their sense of identity and
shape their career aspirations. But one long-term repercussion of the
gender intensification process that may affect higher education and
the adult workplace is the wedge driven between males and females
as they are taught to define themselves "against" each other (i.e., in
terms of masculinity versus femininity), making it difficult for them
to cooperate as co-workers and colleagues.
Nonetheless, these changes in educational attainment suggest that
impressive gains in social status have been made by women. It is
noteworthy that it was the Canadian government, not corporations,
that sponsored this investment in women's "human capital" (market-
able skills), yet corporations benefit from trained labour paid for by
taxpayers. Unfortunately, these gains for women come at a time
when the corporate world is reorganizing itself and demanding even
higher credentials for access to most corporate jobs. Thus, even
though women now bring greater human capital with them to the
labour force, the ante has been raised for everyone, so the returns
may be less in the long run.
The Private Sphere
The history of industrial capitalism can be traced in the division of
"men's work" and "women's work" into separate spheres. It is ap-
parent that these spheres are reconverging in certain ways.
One index of activity in the private sphere is the amount of "un-
paid work" done. Statistics Canada has been monitoring this for some
time and has provided useful information regarding unpaid work
done by men and women. A recent summary of this research revealed
the following:
In 1992, adult Canadians spent 25 billion hours on unpaid
work. This represented 1,164 hours per adult, down from
1,223 hours in 1961. Women, on average, spent 78% more
Gender Inequalities in Canada 113
time in 1992 on unpaid work than men did (1,482 hours per
year, compared with 831 hours). They also spent 11% less
time on unpaid work in 1992 than in 1961, though their
participation in the labour force had nearly doubled over the
same period. In contrast, men spent 6% more time on unpaid
work. Nonetheless, women still did two-thirds of the unpaid
work in 1992. If paid and unpaid work were combined,
women spent the same amount of time working as men did.
(Jackson 1996:26-27, emphasis added)
We can see from this that some progress has been made, although
women have moved from one sphere to the other more than men.
We can also see that, contrary to some views that present male-fe-
male relations as master-slave arrangements, when all labour is taken
into account, men and women do the same amount. Thus, equal
contributions are being made by men and women to the welfare of
the community. The problem lies in sharing the labour in an equitable
fashion — with women doing more paid labour and men doing more
of the unpaid labour. Of course, properly rewarding unpaid labour
by providing an income for it is a long-term goal that many support,
but in the short term, we are not likely to see it, given the fiscal
retrenchment taking place in Canada. According to Jackson (1996),
unpaid labour represents about one-third of the Gross Domestic
Product, or about $235 billion for 1992.
There is also evidence of greater sharing in the types of unpaid
labour being done by men and women. Between the early 1960s and
the 1990s men spent more time on meal preparation and clothing
care, while women spent more time on transportation, volunteer
work, and other out-of-home activities. It thus appears that the daily
lives of many men and women have changed, and that more coop-
eration is taking place. However, women are still more likely to alter
their employment patterns to accommodate responsibilities from the
private sphere, especially when young children are involved.
One final indication of the extent of crossing over from one sphere
to the other can be seen in the growth of dual-earner families. In a
1995 article in the journal Perspectives on Labour and Income, Susan
Crompton and Lucy Geran described their increase as follows: "One
of the most radical changes in Canadian society in the past 30 years
has been the growth of dual-earner husband-wife families. Between
1967 and 1993, the proportion of such families almost doubled from
33% to 60%. In less than a generation, the traditional family with a
114 Richer and Poorer
breadwinning husband and a stay-at-home wife has been transformed
into a new norm in which both spouses work outside the home"
(1995:26).
One consequence of this greater involvement of married women
in the workforce is that in an increasing number of families the wife
earns more than the husband. In 1967 only 11% of wives earned more
than their husbands. By 1993 this had more than doubled, to 25%
(Crompton and Geran 1995). Moreover, the percentage of single-
earner families in which the wife is the earner rose from 2% in 1967
to 20% in 1993. These trends accelerated in the early 1990s, as the
fortunes of men in the workplace continued to deteriorate and those
of women continued to improve. Again, dichotomous conceptions
about the lives of contemporary men and women do not withstand
the scrutiny of close inspection, supporting the notion of life-course
convergence. Using gender to predict a life's course is becoming less
accurate, as men and women face more equal odds of various for-
tunes and misfortunes.
Why Gender Inequality Is "Good" for Capitalism
We can now consider why progress towards equality has not been
more satisfactory. Given that the material basis for a division of
labour is no longer a factor and that the legitimacy of separating men
and women into different spheres has been challenged, why do
women not enjoy an equal share of the material resources of Cana-
dian society, particularly in terms of equal pay and equal access to
all jobs?
In public debate over this issue, especially in the media, the finger
is often pointed at "men." The problem is often posed as simply one
of men in general being sexist and unreasonable in their relations
with women, or as "white males" being the source of the problems
women face in seeking equality. While it is not difficult to find
examples of such problems, such a generalization amounts to little
more than stereotype, and it portrays women as passive, innocent and
hapless victims of patriarchy. As discussed in the context of raciali-
zation in Chapter 3, stereotypes constitute errors of categorization in
which members of a group are treated as if they were all the same.
Stereotypes constitute the simplest and most primitive way of view-
ing the world, and they are usually wrong. And, stereotypes polarize
men and women (or, e.g., blacks and whites). Polarization is often
harmful to social reform movements because it divides those who
have common interests and allows their opponents to prevail. If we
Gender Inequalities in Canada 115
are to achieve gender equality, both men and women must become
involved as willing partners.
A materialist view helps to expose the self-defeating nature of
anti-male (or anti-female) views. When social class is explicitly
brought into the analysis, it becomes clear that not all men have better
working conditions, higher pay, or more power than all women.
There is no sexually defined master-slave relationship in Canadian
society, contrary to some claims. In fact, the situation is far from
absolute. On average, men do enjoy more of certain benefits than
women, but it is also true that many of these benefits, such as wages,
are decreasing for men and increasing for women. As we have seen
among most recent university graduates, women are earning slightly
more for their efforts than their male counterparts.
When we break down economic and social benefits by class, we
see that stereotypical claims about gender inequalities are specious.
For example, if we compare the average upper-class woman with the
average working-class man, there is little merit to the notion that the
poor man has anything over the rich woman. But even a less extreme
comparison yields the same conclusion, as when middle-class pro-
fessional women are compared with working-class men. In both
cases, the women in question probably have far greater earning
power, savings and self-esteem, personal worth, and more social
power than the men. The women may in fact be the bosses of those
men and therefore have legitimate authority over those men's lives
and well-being. In such circumstances, it is hardly appropriate to say
that affluent women are more oppressed by the system than are poor
or working-class men.
With respect to the issue at hand — why gender inequalities are
so persistent — our position is that these inequalities are, in part,
perpetuated by anti-male stereotypes and by the more traditional
stereotypes about women. As long as these prevail, men and women
will be locked in struggles with each other in their day-to-day lives,
blaming each other for their sense of injustice. The more individual
men and women point their fingers at one another as the cause of
their respective problems, the more the real sources of their problems
go unnoticed. Thus, many contemporary women and men seem to
have been duped by an old political ploy. This ploy — divide and
conquer — has been used throughout history by those attempting to
protect their interests. Simply stated, those with power first establish
a perception of scarcity in an attempt to create divisions among those
without power. It succeeds when those without power fight among
116 Richer and Poorer
themselves over the resources. The more the powerless fight each
other, the less they will notice that the powerful enjoy a dispropor-
tionate share of community resources. Once this form of control is
established, those in power simply have to provide enough "scraps"
to keep the rest distracted by fighting with one another.
But why would capitalists be interested in perpetuating a "gender
war" among individual women and men? Surely, it cannot matter
that much to them, unless they derive personal gratification from it.
Well, most probably do not. But if they are to maintain their superior
position and lifestyle, they need a capitalist economy that is maxi-
mally effective. And, the basic principle of capital accumulation is
the extraction of profit from the labour of others; the lower the wages,
the greater the profit. Thus, inequality is an essential condition of
capitalism — wages have to be kept as low as possible to maximize
profit. And just like racism, sexism is a proven method for doing just
that.
Of course, few people would choose to work for low wages if they
had the opportunity to receive higher ones, especially for doing the
same job. Accordingly, capitalists have found it convenient to recruit
cheap labour based on existing prejudices and stereotypes. In this
case, the typical example taken from late-modern society is the
legacy of patriarchy and the ideology of gender. Capitalists, both
male and female, have played upon people's stereotypes about a
"differentness" between men and women. In playing on these ideas,
and convincing people of them (with varying degrees of success),
capitalists have succeeded in maintaining wage disparities and job
segregation — getting women to work for lower wages in low-skilled
jobs. (Interestingly, to the extent that the struggle against this exploi-
tation has been successful, capitalists have turned to another segment
of the population — young people — for cheap labour, as we will
see in the next chapter.)
Throughout the history of industrial capitalism, the capitalist
class's superior position has been subsidized by women's free labour
in the household. Without this free labour, that is, if capitalists had
to pay their fair share of the costs of bearing and raising the children
who become their workers, their accumulation of profits would have
been much less over this whole period. Little wonder, then, that the
media and institutions controlled or influenced by the capitalist class
have sustained stereotypes about women and men and nurtured the
ideology of gender.
Gender Inequalities in Canada 117
In addition to having reserve armies of cheap or free labour,
capitalists have also found markets for their goods and services in a
"genderized" society. Thus, capitalists have a vested interest in main-
taining a basic division between men and women in terms of their
very "essence." The more men and women are convinced that they
are different "species," the more they can be sold special products
and services. (Note in this context the popularity of John Gray's
(1992) best-selling pop-psychology book, Men Are from Mars,
Women Are from Venus.) Marketers know very well that "gendering"
products works, because much of the population has a well-devel-
oped set of gender stereotypes about themselves and others. Much
of this marketing plays on heterosexual attraction, with women and
men sold billions of dollars in products and services that ostensibly
give them the inside track in attracting desirable mates. And so men
and women are not only alienated from their sexuality as it might
otherwise manifest itself, but women are set in competition with each
other in trying to look most "attractive" according to arbitrary and
unrealistic standards set by marketers. These influences now begin
in childhood, become intensified in adolescence, and continue into
adulthood. While individual women and men might resist and escape
these influences, they are nonetheless potent cultural forces not easily
undone. Consequently, many individual lives are deeply affected,
including those of young women who invest more in their appearance
than in their inner selves and personal potential, with predictable
consequences in later life (for instance, being unprepared for non-
traditional jobs, or for being widowed or divorced).
The commodification of women's and men's sexuality extends to
the literal selling of women's and men's bodies through pornography
and various forms of exotic dancing bordering on prostitution. These
multi-billion-dollar industries draw women in particular from vari-
ous walks of life, encouraging them to rationalize their involvement
as a natural extension of the sexual displays they have been taught
to view as "normal." Many women become involved in these indus-
tries to "make ends meet," generally because of limited job opportu-
nities and low pay elsewhere. Some need to put themselves through
college or university, while some single mothers become involved in
these activities to give their children more material benefits.
Conclusion
Our examination of the history of the gendered division of labour in
terms of its material basis suggests that pioneering European men
J18 Richer and Poorer
and women worked together, sharing the same paramount goal —
survival. In the earliest days of pioneer settlement, there were no
"middle class" careers to compete for; indeed, there was little in the
way of paid labour, and there were also few products to be purchased.
Most of what was consumed was made by the family in the home or
grown in the surrounding fields. By most accounts, women enjoyed
a much higher status in this preindustrial setting than they did during
the industrial era, when men were drawn into the paid-labour force
and women were relegated to home and unpaid labour. Paid labour
carried with it higher status, and money bought privilege. Men's
status increased, particularly for those who became part of the so-
called middle and upper middle classes, while women's status de-
creased because their labour was no longer seen as an essential and
valid contribution to the economy. Moreover, the change in the status
of children and teenagers further affected the status of women. As
children were increasingly viewed as "innocents" to be protected and
educated, they were expected to contribute less and less to household
maintenance, so the menial labour they once performed was largely
taken up by their mothers.
When the central goal is survival, there is not much need for
elaborate ideologies to justify one's role in the division of labour.
Hence, most pioneering Canadian men and women probably believed
the roles they were allocated were legitimate, as they often worked
together in the same sphere. Today, however, there is no justification
for the segregation into separate spheres that occurred during the
early industrial period, yet, because of the persistence of the ideology
of gender, many people continue to believe there is. The persistence
of this belief is perhaps one reason why men and women are so
divided — they see little higher order basis for cooperation. Instead,
many see each other as competitors for a different kind of survival
— well-paid jobs that provide personal comforts as well as self-es-
teem and self-actualization.
Thus, we find men and women of the 1990s as somewhat opposed
groups in competition with each other over the scarce resources of
the workplace. Women's move into the workplace would perhaps
have been smoother if not for the recessions of the 1980s and early
1990s, and for corporate restructuring. With downsizing, outsour-
cing, and contracting out, more and more men and women are scram-
bling to maintain an income. The fact that they are facing each other
in line-ups for these jobs has not helped create an atmosphere of
cooperation and common interest. It is not the individual men in these
Gender Inequalities in Canada 119
job line-ups who are responsible for the recessions and the corporate
restructuring, yet the politics of resentment between men and women
is often played out at this interpersonal level. Both men and women
have a common interest in escaping their precarious situations, in
finding jobs that pay well and have reasonable security, pleasant
working conditions, and employers who value them. However, the
more individual men and women blame each other for not having
their own interests met in these ways, the more corporate interests
can continue their practice of reaping profits at the expense of those
who have nothing to bargain with but their labour.
Within this context, we can better understand the current "adjust-
ment problems" in Western societies regarding the integration of
women into the paid-labour force. This public sphere has been domi-
nated by men and has been structured to suit their interests. Women
attempting to move into this sphere have encountered prejudices and
practices that make them feel unwelcome and even physically threat-
ened. Efforts to deal with these problems have also met resistance,
as one can see on nightly newscasts that feature stories about em-
ployment equity, sexual harassment, and workplace restructuring to
accommodate daycare and parental leave.
When the circumstances individual women and men currently face
are viewed in the context of capitalism, two things become apparent.
The first is the inevitability of continued inequality under capitalism:
until capitalists find other groups to exploit (and they have now
turned to youth, as we see in the next chapter) women (and racialized
ethnic minorities) will continue to be targeted by class or economic
and ideological forces. The second is that the gains that have been
made towards equality have not threatened the entrenched interests
of capital. As much as the various waves of feminism have brought
attention to women's issues, change has only occurred in those areas
that do not directly affect the accumulation of capital among the
bourgeoisie (e.g., equity in higher education). Indeed, unless the
material conditions are conducive to it, little real change seems to
take place, which helps explain why some countries have improved
levels of gender equality without a feminist movement.
An important lesson emerges from this analysis: single-issue ap-
proaches to social justice (like "women's issues") are likely to
achieve limited success if they are divorced from materialist, class
issues. Indeed, since all women are not the same and are not likely
to have the same interests, any talk of "women's interests" pure and
simple is bound to create difficulty: because women have multiple
120 Richer and Poorer
identities, then, there is no logical reason why gender or social
position based on attributes of gender should be uniformly assumed
to override class, ethnic, or other identities that may divide women.
Rather, the idea is to identify "gender interests," both practical and
strategic.
Strategic gender interests are feminist interests and speak to the
theoretical and philosophical concepts behind such things as sexual
subordination and inequality, abortion rights, and the right to be free
from physical violence and sexual assault. Practical gender interests
are more concrete and issue specific. Given the place that women
traditionally occupy in the gendered division of labour, these may
include mobilization around the need for daycare, for school bus
service, or for the efficient delivery of water and electricity to rural
homes. And the organization of women around practical gender
issues must be linked to organization around strategic gender inter-
ests (Allahar 1995b:66-67) and be articulated with issues of class,
race, ethnicity, and national identity that challenge the subordination
of women (Acosta-Belen and Bose 1990:314).
Care must be taken, however, to ensure that gender issues, whether
strategic or practical, are not manipulated by opportunistic gender
entrepreneurs who have other agendas, and who might seek to em-
ploy the "divide and conquer" strategy that pits women against men
as a smoke screen. This is not to say, though, that the single issues
are not themselves worthy of attention. But without a sense of the
"big picture" they can cause divisions among the very people who
ought to work together towards common interests or who might be
genuinely united around concerns for social justice. Thus, rather than
addressing issues such as the inherent demand of capitalism for
unequal income distribution, progressive women often fight with
progressive men over scarce resources. And, progressive or not,
many women are led to believe that their salvation lies simply in
wage parity with men, even though most men's salaries have de-
creased in the past two decades, rather than over more general issues
of social justice, which can only be effectively pursued by a unified
movement of both women and men.
The Disenfranchisement of
Youth
In contrast to the widespread concern over racial and gender inequali-
ties during the 1980s and 1990s, attention to intergenerational in-
equalities has been relatively muted. Even among those most affected
— young people themselves — there seems to be a lack of wide-
spread, genuine interest in understanding what lies behind growing
inequities among the different age groups. We encountered this in
1994 when we released Generation on Hold. We even encountered
a curious form of denial among some of our sociology colleagues,
who are supposed to be attuned to social issues. Certainly there is
disaffection among some young people and concern among some
adults, but it seems often to be poorly informed and diffusely di-
rected. The problem seems to be that many people still prefer indi-
vidualistic over structural explanations of inequalities.
Within this context of relative indifference and misdirected expla-
nations, we offer a review and analysis of intergenerational relations
that we hope will help young people recognize some of their common
interests. In doing so, we hope to help them better understand their
life chances and relations with other age groups. In contrast to most
treatments of age inequality, our focus is on the young rather than
the elderly. It is not that the elderly are without their problems, but
in Canada the fortunes of the elderly have increased over the past 20
years proportionately to the declining fortunes of the young. More-
over, estimates of the standard of living of the elderly are often based
on income, which lead to underestimates, given the accumulated
equity of many older individuals.
What we offer here is a refinement and update of what we wrote
in Generation on Hold, since the circumstances many young people
face have not improved. In fact, the most recent studies (from the
mid-1990s) suggest that certain conditions have continued to dete-
riorate.
122 Richer and Poorer
There is another difference between our discussion of gender
inequality in the last chapter and our discussion of intergenerational
inequality here. The history of gender inequality reveals a story of
lost status for women with the advent of industrialization, and of
progress made as industrialization has moved into its more advanced
stages. There was an optimistic tone of something "lost, then found."
The history of age inequality, however, suggests a somewhat differ-
ent story. Youth in Canadian society "found" more equality with
industrialization because of the value placed on their labour. (This
particularly applied to young men and young unmarried women.)
But, especially in the past two decades, this has eroded. So, there is
here more of a pessimistic tone of something "found and lost."
The issue of gender may be raised in terms of whether the expe-
riences of young women are markedly different from those of young
men. Should we really have separate chapters dealing with each sex?
From our research, however, it is clear that young men and young
women increasingly share more with their age-mates than they do
with older same-sex persons. For example, we traced in the last
chapter a convergence in educational experiences and earning power
among young men and women. In the late twentieth century, the
commonality of youth binds them together, probably more so than in
any period in the past. The movement towards gender-role equality
seems to be largely responsible for this, as we find young men and
women increasingly working, studying, and playing together far
more than in the past. Thus, the differences among the inequality
issues we examine below are now one of degree rather than kind.
This said, it is apparent that young men and women are still affected
differently by segregation in the workplace, and their socialization
experiences also differ when it comes to matters like femininity and
masculinity.
Class enters our analysis in our observations of the ways in which
young people have been economically disenfranchised. Many young
people are downwardly mobile within their class of origin. And, for
many of them, aspirations to membership in the new middle class
have been thwarted. Certainly, upward mobility out of the working
class now seems increasingly rare, and is unlikely in the future,
except for a few exceptional cases. There is little doubt that poverty
is increasing among young people, and the future does not look bright
for those now growing up. It is likely that a sizeable number of young
people will not be able to work their way out of poverty, now or in
the future.
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 123
Division of Labour by Age
In addition to the class-, ethnic-, and gender-based divisions of la-
bour, societies also divide tasks on an age basis — and with even
more variation. Generally, pre-or non-industrial societies assign chil-
dren the simpler, more menial tasks (and these tasks are often divided
again according to gender). As an individual ages, the tasks often
become more complex, often less menial, and the rewards normally
increase; but so too do the responsibilities.
In the previous chapter we argued that those who are recognized
as making a direct contribution to the welfare of the community tend
to have relatively higher status. When we examine the history of age
relations in Canada, we find marked changes: in recent years the
young are losing ground in terms of being welcomed into the work-
place and attaining the independence of adulthood.
These losses have both material and ideological bases, but before
reviewing these it is useful to examine the commonsense idea of
"starting at the bottom." Societies generally give children the most
basic and menial tasks, but as they grow, the tasks often become more
complex and carry greater responsibility. "Starting at the bottom"
implies that there is somewhere upwards to move to. In industrial
societies this has meant that one can work up the "ladder of success."
As we see, this basic assumption has been challenged in many mod-
ern workplaces, as many young people now start at the bottom —
and stay there. Young women, recent immigrants, and members of
certain races have been accustomed to this for some time, but now
it increasingly applies to young men of European descent, too. Given
that the labour force was once dominated by young men, this consti-
tutes a major cultural change over the past century.
Age Stratification in Canada
What has happened in Canadian history to produce this deterioration
in the life chances of the young and the increasing disparities be-
tween youth and adult opportunities? To answer this question we will
examine underlying changes in material and ideological conditions.
First, we will examine how changes in material conditions have
affected three institutions associated with the transition to adulthood
— the workplace, education, and the family; then we will speculate
about the ideological conditions that have emerged to complement
these changes.
124 Richer and Poorer
Changing Material Conditions
Two sets of material conditions associated with the rise of industrial
capitalism appear to have had dramatic influences on youth-adult
relations over the past century, to the detriment of young people: (1)
changing demographic patterns and (2) changing means of produc-
tion.
Changing Demographic Patterns and the Competition Ratio
In the last chapter we described changes in the life experiences of
the average Canadian woman and man over the past three centuries.
Particularly striking is the increase in life expectancy, from about 30
to 35 years in the early 1700s to about 75 to 80 today. In the earliest
colonial days, there was very little paid labour, as the vast majority
of work involved subsistence agriculture and the household produc-
tion of basic goods. Accordingly, most men and women worked the
land and produced most of their own essentials. Even at the turn of
the twentieth century, about 65% of the population lived in rural
areas, and some 40% of the population was still engaged in agricul-
tural labour. At that time about 45% of the labour force was still
employed in the primary sector, about 27% was in the secondary
sector, and only 28% was in the tertiary sector. By 1990, however,
the percentage employed in the primary sector had dropped to only
6%, while the secondary sector remained relatively stable at 23%,
and a full 71% were now employed in the tertiary sector (McDonald
and Chen 1993). The wage labour force of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries was made up mainly of young males, who worked
on average only about two decades before they died.
In the twentieth century an increasing proportion of the population
has lived well beyond what we now call young adulthood. This
"aging population" has influenced intergenerational competition for
scarce resources, particularly workplace resources. The competition
between younger and older age groups can be be referred to as the
"competition ratio," because it can be expressed statistically. As
Table 5.1 shows, in both 1861 and 1881, those in the range of 15 to
29 years of age outnumbered those in the wider range of 30 to 64
years. Expressed as a ratio, there was slightly more than one potential
young worker for every older worker. When we look at changes in
this ratio over the following century, we find it dropping steadily
(with the exception of the 1981 figures). By 1991 there was a com-
petition ratio of about one to two. In other words, there are now twice
as many older people as younger people who are potential competi-
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 125
Table 5.1
The Competition Ratio:
The Changing Proportion of Adult Age Groups
Between 1861 and 1991
1861
1881
1901
1921
1941
1961
1981
1991
Age groups
15-29
Male/Female
(000)
368/358
667/674
754/731
1,102/1,098
1,543/1,515
1,945/1,911
3,441/3,396
3,126/3,080
30-64
Male/Female
(000)
333/292
612/558
899/830
1,649/1,450
2,347/2,135
3,433/3,365
4,806/4,859
6,081/6,147
Ratio of age
groups
15-29
30-64
Male/Female
1.11/1.23
1.10/1.21
.84/.88
.67/.76
.66/.71
.57/57
.72/.70
.51 /.50
Median
age of the
popu-
lation
17.8
20.1
22.7
23.9
27.0
26.5
29.6
33.5
Sources: Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics, Census Dept. (1863) — estimates
are for Upper Canada and Lower Canada; Department of Agriculture (1884);
The Census Office (1906); Department of Trade & Commerce (1925);
Dominion Bureau of Statistics (1946); Dominion Bureau of Statistics (1962);
Statistics Canada (1982); Statistics Canada (1992). Ratios calculated by the
authors. Median ages for 1881 to 1991 are from McVey and Kalbach (1995).
The median age for 1861 was calculated by the authors from Leacy (1983).
Note that Easterlin (1978:422) found similar ratios for the American male
population, as follows: 1920 = .667, 1940 = .630, 1960 = .502, 1980 = .721,
and 1990 = .546 (the latter two are his projections from the late 1970s).
tors in the workplace. It should also be noted that in the 1800s many
older people would not have been as physically able as the young to
work in the primary or secondary sectors that provided most of the
paid labour. Now, owing to computers, technological advances, and
improvements in health care, older workers are more physically
suited to the modern workplace dominated by the lighter tertiary
sector. And so the competition now may be even greater than the
proportions alone suggest.
126 Richer and Poorer
A consequence of these patterns is that the economic appeal of
young people as workers has almost certainly decreased dramatically
over time. Today, a much larger proportion of older people are
available and willing to engage in paid labour than ever before. The
impact of this development in the 1990s has become increasingly
obvious, as many older workers affected by corporate restructuring
have been forced to take jobs normally performed by younger work-
ers. This is, in part, due to the fact that in the past corporations were
usually structured as pyramids. However, changing demographic
patterns have meant that as larger numbers of young people have
tried to move up this corporate structure in the late twentieth century,
many have found themselves blocked. As David Foot noted in his
1996 book, Boom, Bust and Echo: How to Profit From the Coming
Demographic Shift: "We have been trying to promote a rectangle
[large numbers of young people] up a triangle, and it can't be done.
This system only works when there are more younger than older
employees, which was exactly the case over most of the twentieth
century as the modern corporation took shape."
With many of the lower and middle level jobs taken by older
workers, an increasing number of young people seeking a foothold
in the labour market cannot find the job they want. Many are forced
into the lowest subordinate positions, which are part-time, low pay-
ing, and provide little opportunity for advancement — "McJobs."
Others are unsuccessful and become "discouraged workers" who
stop looking for work altogether and therefore do not show up in the
official statistics. When the number of discouraged workers is added
to the number of officially unemployed, the resulting unemployment
rate is about 50% higher than the official one.
These developments seem to have had a dramatic impact on the
life experiences of young males. As noted, in the 1800s this group
dominated the workplace. They now have to compete with twice as
many males over 30, and also with a growing proportion of females
looking for work. Thus, in 1991 the competition ratio for young
males was nearer to one-to-five than the one-to-one of a century ago.
To the extent that some young men predicate their identity on the
role of "good provider," we can see a potential source of conflict,
and perhaps resentment, for them.
The life experiences of young women have also changed dramati-
cally but for somewhat different reasons. They increasingly partici-
pate in the public sphere in parallel with young men. In fact, young
Canadian women and men now share certain life experiences to an
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 127
unprecedented extent (cf. D. Anderson 1991). Their rate of partici-
pation in the educational system is an obvious example, but so too
is their rate of participation in the workforce. This means that, along
with problems unique to them, young women also face most of the
same problems young males do when trying to enter the public
sphere. Accordingly, as age inequalities have grown and gender
inequalities have lessened, young women have had an increasing
amount in common with younger men rather than with older women.
Clearly, then, these demographic shifts have contributed to
changes in the lives of average Canadians, both female and male.
The transition to adulthood has altered as the period of pre-adult
dependency has increased. This process began when adolescence (the
teen years) became a prolongation of childhood dependency; more
recently, the period of young adulthood (the twenties) has taken on
characteristics of adolescent dependency. In fact, the Canadian
Youth Foundation called in 1995 for the Canadian government to
officially recognize that the period of youth be extended to age 29,
because the "definition of youth used by the government ... is not
an accurate reflection of the ages young people are leaving school
and beginning careers." This call was an effort to direct employment-
policy initiatives beyond the 15 to 24 age group. The foundation's
reasoning was that unemployed people between 25 and 29 are dif-
ferent from younger unemployed people only in that they have been
unemployed longer.
Technological Displacement
The decreasing economic value of young workers and the competi-
tion they face in the workforce have been exacerbated by changes in
the technologies used in producing goods and services. Throughout
this century, techniques of mass production have been refined by
owners and managers of capital intent on increasing profit. The
increase in profit has been made possible largely by replacing work-
ers with machines: in the secondary sector, robots continue to replace
factory workers; in the service sector, computers continue to replace
lower and middle managers, clerical workers, and various other
workers. These trends have tended to carve the middle out of the
labour force, leaving the highest and lowest paid workers in greatest
demand. Foot (1996:68-9) summarized the problem in Boom, Bust
and Echo:
128 Richer and Poorer
As recently as the early 1980s, it was cheaper to add
workers than to add machines. But by the 1990s, the cost of
labour in Canada was twice the cost of machines ... So
today's companies are adding machines instead of labour.
The result is improved productivity but increased unemploy-
ment. The conventional wisdom in the 1980s was that tech-
nology would eventually create as many jobs as it took.
Although the jury is still out on this question, the optimistic
view is increasingly being called into question. Technology
continues, at a relentless pace, to destroy far more jobs than
it creates.
Whatever the future might hold, it appears that change in age
group ratios and technological displacement have now dovetailed to
devalue the bargaining power of young workers. In spite of being the
most educated generation in Canadian history, many young workers
find themselves unable to get even a foothold in the workforce, let
alone to pursue the types of careers their educators and parents told
them constitute the basis of happiness and success. As David Foot
noted, the "unskilled entry-level jobs leading to middle-class security
no longer exist. That is why the labour force participation rate for
people between 15 and 24 fell to a 19-year low in 1995."
Institutional Changes over the Twentieth Century
To help us understand the impact of these changing material condi-
tions, it is useful to trace what has happened to those in their teens
and twenties over the past century. Of course, there are variations
among individuals, by age, gender, race, and class, and two world
wars and a depression affected these patterns. However, a compari-
son of the beginning and the end of the century gives us a useful
historical perspective.
We begin with a thumbnail sketch: Around 1900, only a small
number of teens attended secondary schools. Almost half were in-
volved in agricultural labour, while the rest were employed in paid
labour, often making a living wage, or close to it. Many lived with
their families and were able to make considerable financial contri-
butions to the family.
As we approach the year 2000, the vast majority of teens attend
secondary schools, and over 60% of secondary school graduates go
directly to post-secondary institutions. However, less than one-third
of those aged 18 to 24 are employed and sufficiently well paid to
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 129
afford them independence from their parents. Those who stay at
home rarely contribute much financially and usually make only mi-
nor contributions to household labour (although young females do
more housework than young males). Their parents often subsidize
them with free or cheap room and board, or allowances, and mothers
often provide "domestic" services for them.
Three institutions — the workplace, the education system, and the
family — have affected the experiences and life chances of young
people in the twentieth century. We will now give attention to each
of them in their order of importance as factors in bringing about the
current situation.
The Workplace
Those groups recognized as making a direct productive contribution
to the welfare of the community tend to have higher status in any
society. This principle is based on observations of non-capitalist
societies. In capitalist societies, it does not hold for the parasitic
capitalists, movie and sports heroes, and others who are able to take
advantage of the system to reap extraordinary benefits without pro-
ducing anything of tangible value.
When we look at key indicators of direct productive contribution
— wages, employment levels, types of jobs held — we see that, as
a group, young people have lost much of their ability to make such
contributions relative to other age groups. Indeed, the above-men-
tioned changes in material conditions have dramatically affected the
share of resources young people are allotted from the collective
resource pool.
DECLINING WAGES
When we examine changes in wages over the past 25 years we find
a steady and significant redistribution of wealth by age. In the 1960s
males aged 16 to 24 earned incomes that were about on par with
those over 24, depending on the job. Picot and Myles (1996:17) show
how the various age groups in Canada began at more or less the same
wage level in 1969, but have since steadily differentiated. By 1993
the 17 through 24 age group was only making about 5% more than
it did in 1969, while the oldest age groups were making about 30%
more. Adjusting for inflation, those in the 17 through 24 age group
declined about 19% in real annual earnings, while those aged 25
through 34 fell 10%.
These trends are illustrated in Table 5.2, where we can see the
age-based redistribution of income in Canada from 1981 to 1991.
130 Richer and Poorer
Table 5.2
Change in Average Income, 1981-1991,
Adjusting for Inflation, by Age (%)
Age cohort
Families
Unattached
individuals
<25
-20.7
-21.7
25-34
-4.9
-13.2
35-44
0
-8.4
45-54
6.1
3.8
55-64
4.3
4.8
>65
14.9
12.4
All
ages
3.5
-0.8
Source: adapted from Ross and Shillington (1994).
These figures suggest that, contrary to the image the media often
provide, what is taking place seems to be more than a simple com-
petition for resources between the so-called baby boomers and baby
busters. Rather, redistribution of income is more continuous along
age lines. Over the decade, economic benefits accrued to those over
45, but in 1991 the early baby boomers were just reaching age 45.
Thus, contrary to public perception, the early baby boomers (aged
35^4) actually suffered losses in the 1980s. Later baby boomers
(aged 25-34) suffered even more. However, neither group was hit as
hard as the so-called baby bust aged 25 and younger. It is telling that
those who made gains during this period were the very ones making
the bulk of the decisions about such things as wages and benefits
(i.e., those 45 and over — the pre-baby boomers). A 1993 Statistics
Canada report made this observation: "In the face of downward wage
pressures from globalization, older workers are better able to immu-
nize themselves from growing wage competition as a result of sen-
iority rules, firm-specific training and other 'institutional' barriers
that favour job incumbents over new labour market entrants."
Most current studies from the mid-1990s show that these trends
have continued. The downward trend in wages and employment
prospects continues for young men, regardless of whether they have
high school or university educations. In contrast, wages and employ-
ment prospects continue to fall only for young women with high
school educations, especially those aged 24 and under. Crompton
(1996) found that men and women aged between 25 and 29 with high
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 131
school diplomas saw their wages decline between 1979 and 1993 (as
much as 17% for men). Moreover, by 1993, university-educated men
in this age group earned about the same in real terms as did men of
the same age with high school diplomas in the late 1970s. Univer-
sity-educated women made gains over the same period, and by 1990
were actualy making more "than their male counterparts [with
equivalent] experience, job tenure, education and hours of work"
(Wannell and Caron 1994:ii). Note, however, that the wage gap
closed in part because of declining earnings among males.
According to a 1994 Statistics Canada analysis, there is little
evidence that this is a temporary stage in a cycle of increase and
decline. Wages for both young men and women have dropped
"within all educational levels ... within all major industrial groups
... and all occupational categories." Accordingly, the drop in earn-
ings cannot be simply attributed to the increase in subordinate service
work taken up by young workers or to business cycles.
This redistribution of income was not merely the result of certain
isolated individuals feathering their own nests, or those of their age
mates. Indeed, many of the policy adjustments undertaken by the
Canadian state have made government a key mediator between the
interests of capital and young workers. One such policy is the setting
of minimum wage levels. In the mid-1970s, the minimum wage
would put a person about 40% above the official poverty line; now
it puts a person 30% below that line. Notably, two-thirds of minimum
wage earners are under 24 years of age. Here, government policies
have clearly contributed to age-based discrimination. Few people
seem to be aware of the role the state has played in mediating the
interests of capital in this regard, and many of those who are aware
seem to see nothing wrong with it.
DECLINING WORKFORCE PARTICIPATION
Not only are the youngest being hardest hit in their earning power,
but their opportunities for any jobs at all have diminished. Between
1989 and 1994, while other age groups maintained their participation
rates in the workforce, the participation rate of the young dropped
dramatically from 71 % to 62%. This decline accounted for an overall
drop in the unemployment rate at the time — to 9.7%. Of the G7
countries, in 1993, Canada had the third highest youth unemployment
rate (about 17%), lower than only France (about 25%) and Italy
(about 30%).
What actually happened was that many would-be workers went
"missing" from official statistics; otherwise the unemployment rate
132 Richer and Poorer
would have been 13%. Between 1989 and 1994 some 300,000 young
Canadians simply gave up trying to find work; as a result, they were
no longer counted as unemployed. Granted, many of these discour-
aged workers went back to school, but, as we see below, this often
involves a fruitless scramble for credentials in a job market charac-
terized by extensive underemployment of graduates with higher edu-
cation. Interestingly, Statistics Canada's 1994 analysis argued that
the drop in workforce participation might have been greater if it were
not for the lower wages young people now make. In other words,
their extremely low wages seem to have enhanced their employabil-
ity in some sectors (Betcherman and Morissette 1994).
Recently women over 25 have made the most gains in employ-
ment — presumably in response to employment equity initiatives.
Although they constituted 38% of the workforce, they found 52% of
the jobs since 1990, while men over 25 found jobs in proportion to
their representation in the population.
JOB GHETTOIZATION
Young workers not only are paid less and participate in the workforce
less, they are also becoming less well represented in all job categories
except consumer services. Indeed, it is in the subordinate service
occupations that their (cheap) labour is most in demand.
Betcherman and Morissette tell us that between 1981 and 1989,
the proportion of service sector jobs held by young workers aged 16
to 24 rose from 69.7% to 75.8%, while in the goods sector it dropped
from 30.3% to 24.2%. The two most common service sector jobs
held in 1989 were retail trade (22.7%) and accommodation and food
(13.7%). Statistics Canada (ibid) noted from these trends a "substan-
tial absolute decline of youth employment in the goods sector and in
public administration, health, social services, and education" and
concluded that for "earlier generations of young people, these indus-
tries typically offered good entry-level opportunities." When broken
down by gender, over 84% of employed females between the ages
of 15 and 19 worked in the service sector, compared with about 60%
of their male counterparts.
A clear picture emerges here: the jobs available to the young are
increasingly unskilled, poorly paid, subordinate dead-end jobs, with
little chance for advancement. At the same time, these are also the
most common jobs available. Two-thirds of the new jobs created in
the Canadian labour force are in sales and service, suggesting a
long-term trend that many young people will be confronted with
throughout their working lives.
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 133
Higher Education and the Credentials Paradox
In the workplace of the 1990s a person without higher education
faces severely limited economic prospects. The unemployment rate
of young people without post-secondary credentials is about three
times higher than for those with them (Canadian Youth Foundation
1995). And those without a post-secondary degree are less employ-
able in most sectors of the economy. Moreover, a university educa-
tion is a good investment in salary level and future earning power.
According to Statistics Canada, nearly two-thirds of new jobs be-
tween 1991 and 2000 are going to require at least 13 years of edu-
cation or training, and 45% of them will require more than 16 years.
Male university graduates earn about 60% more than those with
high school or less. In the United States, the overall salary difference
is 77% between university and high school graduates. In Canada,
female university graduates earn about twice as much as do women
with high school or less, up significantly from a differential of 71%
in 1984. The lifetime payback for a university education can be
sizeable. Spread over 40 years, it could amount to an average of
$600,000 in 1990 dollars (Fournier, Butlin and Giles 1994; Associa-
tion of Universities and Colleges in Canada 1996).
However, many highly educated workers, especially those with
non-technical degrees, perform tasks that have little to do with their
formal education. But without the credentials, employability and
earning power are seriously jeopardized. To understand this paradox,
we need to have a sense of the history of the educational system.
The primary and secondary educational systems in Canada
emerged, in part, to provide daily structure to young people displaced
by the increasing technologization of agriculture and manufacturing.
Primary school enrolment in the nineteenth century was low and
sporadic. Many parents were not supportive of compulsory educa-
tion, and it was difficult to get children to attend school regularly.
Even by 1901, although efforts to implement compulsory education
had been under way for two decades in many provinces, the average
daily attendance in primary schools was only 62%, and the typical
student received only about six years of schooling (Phillips 1957).
It was not until several decades into this century that enrolments
increased to the point where the educational system began to take its
current form as the major institution governing the lives of young
Canadians. In Ontario, for example, although the population doubled
between 1900 and 1950, enrolments in secondary schools increased
sixfold. From Table 5.3 we can see that in the 1920s about 25% of
134 Richer and Poorer
Table 5.3
Percentage of Young Men and Women Attending
School, 1921-1991
1921
1931
1941
1951
1961
1971
1981
1991
Ages
15-19
Men
23
32
34
41
62
74
66
79
Women
27
35
37
40
56
56
66
80
Ages
20-24
Men
3
4
5
7
12
12
21
32
Women
2
2
3
3
5
5
16
33
Source: adapted from Normand (1995).
those aged 15 to 19 attended school, but by 1991 80% did. Of those
aged 20 to 24, only about 3% attended in 1921, but by 1991 about
one-third did. In fact, this latter age group increased their participa-
tion almost threefold in the 1980s.
Currently, Canada has one of the highest participation rates and
most expensive publicly funded educational systems in the world.
Nobert and McDowell (1994) reported that current expenditures on
post-secondary education are 21 times higher than they were at the
beginning of the 1950s, totalling about 15 billion dollars in 1991-2.
Of the OECD countries, Canada puts the greatest share of its public
expenditures into post-secondary education (4.6%). Canada has the
second highest post-secondary participation rate in the world, second
to the United States (both countries have about twice the participa-
tion rate of other developed countries). Taking the entire population,
17% of Canadians have studied at university (compared with 24% in
the United States).
On the face of it, this looks like an enviable achievement that less
developed countries should emulate. Nevertheless, there is more to
this picture than simple enrolment figures.
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 135
Let us not be misunderstood here. It is admirable that Canada has
tried to educate its citizens to such an extent. Given the choice, most
societies would surely prefer formally educated citizens to under-
educated ones. There are clear benefits to having an educated popu-
lation, and it is a laudable democratic ideal to try to reach as many
people as possible. However, an unintended consequence of Can-
ada'smass-education system places many graduates in a labour mar-
ket that does not need the skills it has taught them.
The roots of the problem can be found in the 1960s, when the
higher education system was expanded dramatically and many new
community colleges and universities were built. This expansion led
to a ninefold increase in post-secondary enrolment between 1950 and
1990. The assumption was that the skills transmitted through higher
education — human capital — would meet the needs of an advanced
industrial economy and generate economic wealth for both the indi-
vidual graduate and for the society as a whole. This human capital
assumption has been borne out to some extent, but is not a full
explanation of educational outcomes.
But by the mid-1970s, graduate underemployment was visibly
becoming a widespread problem. Stories about graduates with PhDs
driving taxis abounded in the media. This came about because the
public sector had reached its capacity to absorb university graduates
while the number of people with higher degrees continued to grow.
Without ongoing expansion in the public sector, graduates increas-
ingly turned to the private sector. Although there were "good jobs"
to be found in business and professional services, many found only
"bad jobs" in consumer services. As the supply of graduates grew, a
buyers' market in favour of employers developed in most sectors.
Employers could take those with the highest credentials, even for
lower skill jobs, so many of those with higher degrees found them-
selves taking jobs that did not require any or all of their skills.
Consequently, those without higher degrees faced increasingly stiff
competition for (any) jobs.
By the late 1980s almost one-half of community college graduates
and over 40% of those with BAs found themselves underemployed,
doing jobs that did not require an advanced credential (Nobert,
McDowell and Goulet 1992). This applied especially to non-techni-
cal, liberal arts degrees. Faced with this, many chose to seek further
credentials to get ahead of the pack (and would then have been
counted as among the "discouraged workers" mentioned above). In
the late 1980s many people were in a scramble for credentials, trying
136 Richer and Poorer
to gain some advantage to enhance career possibilities, and as many
as 50% of community college and university graduates were re-en-
rolling in subsequent educational programs. With an oversupply of
higher degrees, workplace demand for many of them decreased, so
higher educational graduates had less to bargain with because their
credentials had lost market value.
The market value of many credentials has continued to fall from
the 1970s as more and more people obtained higher degrees. This
process accelerated in the 1980s when higher educational enrolments
in Canada increased by some 40%. It was not until 1992 that the rate
of growth began to decline, and not until 1995 that there was actually
a decline — of 1% — in university enrolments (Association of
Universities and Colleges in Canada 1996).
Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the educational
system has become perhaps the most important institution regu-
lating what has become a prolonged period of adolescence and
youth. Its role has become even more apparent over the past 20
years, as increasing numbers of graduates have encountered di-
minished job opportunities and returned to school, only to find
themselves caught up in the scramble for credentials. Conse-
quently, the stakes are now higher for everyone, making many
years of expensive education necessary if one hopes to have an
interesting career and a decent salary.
The Family and Safety Net Parents
In Canada about two-thirds of unmarried people in their early twen-
ties, and one-third of those in their late twenties, live with their
parents. American data reveal the same trend. In fact, this has become
a trend in most developed countries (cf. Jones 1994). In Italy, ac-
cording to D'Emilio (1995), some 50% of males aged 25 to 34 live
with one or both parents, apparently taking advantage of free domes-
tic services and parental permissiveness regarding sexual privacy.
Concern for this was expressed recently in an ad in which stay-at-
home males were referred to as mammoni (mama's boys). The ads
read "Ancora a casa da mamma?" ("Still living at home with
mama?") with a picture of an adult male dressed like a baby. Italy
has the highest youth unemployment rate among the G7 countries,
as well as the highest ratio of youth unemployment to total unem-
ployment — three to one.
The trend, which continued upward through the late 1970s and
early 1980s, seems to have stabilized in the 1990s. This increased
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 137
dependency of young Canadians on their parents is of concern, but
the stabilization may mean that the trend has plateaued. It is possible
that a saturation point has been reached: perhaps contemporary fami-
lies simply cannot absorb any more young adults. Some families may
not be able to maintain their adult children because of their own
economic problems, while other families cannot for emotional rea-
sons. Interpersonal conflicts can be a problem, especially if both
biological parents are no longer residing in the same home.
This pattern is reminiscent of arrangements early in the century
when proportionately as many, or more, young people lived in their
parents' home. But they did so for a variety of reasons, including
mutual survival and support, which were especially important before
the advent of social assistance programs. Such arrangements seem to
have been more to the collective benefit of the family as a whole, to
which the young person made different kinds of valuable contribu-
tions. These arrangements were not necessarily a sign of lower status
in the wider society for the young person involved, but rather one of
kin obligation, especially for young women. In contrast, living with
parents now seems to be more often a "safety net" for young people,
marginal in the workplace and unable to afford independent living.
When we take a longer view, even broader trends emerge. Current
living arrangements appear quite different from those that prevailed
in mid-nineteenth-century Canada. For example, in Hamilton, On-
tario, in 1851, only about 20% of males and females in their early
twenties lived in their parents' homes. Instead, boarding was a com-
mon living arrangement. In the early twentieth century most young
working-class people, both male and female, went to work in their
early teens and contributed about half of their income to their par-
ents' household. Some young men could actually make more than
their fathers, or when several children were working, their joint
income could be greater than the father's income. This period spent
living with working offspring was sometimes the most prosperous
time in the parents' lives, and the offspring's status in the family
benefited as a result. Working offspring who made such contribu-
tions were often exempted from household chores and enjoyed con-
siderable independence.
It appears that over the history of the colonial-industrial period
there have been different reasons for co-residence at different times.
But not until now, it seems, has it been a result of the inability of the
young to support themselves. It appears that in the late twentieth
century, the general social status of the young is lower than it was
138 Richer and Poorer
in the mid-twentieth century, and is perhaps even lower than in the
mid-nineteenth century. If these speculations are true, we have wit-
nessed a general slide in the overall status of the young.
The Overall Impact of Institutional Changes
A broad picture emerges from the above institutional analysis of
youth in the workplace, as seekers of educational credentials, and as
increasingly dependent on "safety net parents," and of the prolonga-
tion of youth as a period of life. In comparative terms, young people
have gone from (a) beings assets of their parents to being liabilities;
(b) being socially valued as workers to being socially assigned as
students; and (c) being producers in a society that recognized their
contributions to being consumers in a society that gives them insuf-
ficient means to satisfy their material appetites.
These trends have combined to introduce several contradictions
into the lives of young people and their parents. For example, many
parents with adult children living at home are in a sense subsidizing
the industries that pay their offspring so little, as well as those that
sell their offspring expensive consumer items. According to Pallad-
ino (1996), in the United States, teenagers currently constitute "a
red-hot consumer market worth $89 billion," not counting the $200
billion their parents spend on them. This is a tenfold increase over
the past 40 years.
At the same time, many young people living with their parents can
only find minimum-wage jobs that do not allow for independent
living. Caught in this situation, young people often spend their mea-
gre earnings on immediate gratification instead of saving for eventual
independence. One American study of working secondary school
students noted that "when asked about their motivations for employ-
ment, they emphasize the monetary rewards," and most of this dis-
cretionary income "supports a high level of self-indulgent
consumption." This consumption is most often of clothing (among
70% of those studied), and secondarily of items like "records, tapes,
sports equipment, stereos, TVs, bikes," and only 7% admitted giving
money to their families" (Fine, Mortimer, and Roberts 1990).
Though rare, some have also been known to put away some money
for future educational endeavours.
This generally frivolous use of their money increases their finan-
cial dependence on their parents, delaying even longer their departure
from the parental home. As a result, their youth is prolonged further,
and full adulthood is postponed even more.
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 139
The Emergence of the Ideology of Youth
It is quite curious that more people have not expressed greater con-
cern about how things have worked out for young people in Canadian
society. One might have expected more public outcry, marked by
frequent demonstrations or some sort of political mobilization. There
has been disaffection, but there are few signs that there will be any
concerted effort to remedy the situation. When a muted response is
found to conditions such as those described above, it is often due to
ideological manipulations of public perceptions about the nature of
the problem.
It appears that if the changing material conditions noted above are
acknowledged at all, they are thought of as historical inevitabilities.
But the changes that have taken place in the workplace, the education
system, and the structure of family were not inevitable. Clearly, the
direction of change and who benefited from the changes was influ-
enced by those who had the most say in these things: those in the
oldest age groups controlling business and government. Yet, if we
were to review media discussions of these issues, we would most
likely see the problem framed as a baby boomer-baby buster conflict,
with baby boomers portrayed as the "greedy bad guys." As we saw,
however, it is the pre-baby boomers who have benefited most from
changes over the past 20 years, while baby boomers have actually
suffered losses (see Table 5.2). But, even this media-produced dis-
traction from the issues is only part of the story. To get a sense of
how public perception about young people might have been manipu-
lated with the net effect of diminishing their status, it is necessary to
take a longer historical view.
Part of the diminishing status of young people can be traced to
negative stereotypes. Those negative stereotypes gained legitimacy
in the late nineteenth century, when the renowned psychologist G.
Stanley Hall formulated the "storm and stress" model of adolescence.
This marked the "discovery" of "adolescence" as a social problem
by social scientists. Before this time, "young people" were not as
clearly distinguished from "older people" as they are now, partly
because fewer people grew old. Being younger was simply more
normal. As we saw in Table 5.1, a century or more ago those between
ages 15 and 29 made up about half of the adult population, and the
median age was 20 or less. In fact, it was not until the late 1930s that
the term "teenager" was even coined.
140 Richer and Poorer
Hall's work created the widespread belief that adolescence is a
period distinct from both childhood and adulthood, characterized by
hormonally stimulated turmoil. Hall and others argued that it does
not matter what experiences and opportunities are available to the
young, for all must pass through this period of storm and stress. But
adolescence is a cultural institution, not a biological phenomenon,
and the storm-and-stress model has been discounted by recent re-
search. However, the net effect was that the labels stuck, and with
them this segment of the population was singled out for special
treatment.
We will not dwell on all the implications of the storm-and-stress
model except to say that it has prevailed during the twentieth century
in several of the social sciences and has indelibly stamped public
consciousness. The psychopathology attributed to adolescence came
to be used as a justification for the juvenile justice system in North
America and the suspension of rights of adolescents imposed by that
system. These conditions have been accompanied by widespread
discrimination towards the young, not only in the workplace, but in
their day-to-day lives, when they are denied access to restaurants,
stores, and other public places.
Thus, what has happened over this century is that, in an attempt
to understand and protect "young people," social science appears to
have prejudiced public consciousness and public policy against them.
What has developed is an exaggerated tendency to see the young
person as "afflicted" with the "condition" of adolescence, even to the
extent that some psychiatrists tend to see adolescence itself as a
"disorder" with various sets of symptoms.
These attitudes may have contributed to the marginalization of
young people and their exclusion from adult society, affecting how
changing material conditions played out in the workplace, the edu-
cational system, and the family. As shown above, young people have
increasingly been kept in holding patterns before being allowed entry
into adulthood and full productive participation in the community.
Thus, the twentieth-century "ideology of youth," which views ado-
lescence more as a biological phenomenon than a cultural institution,
may have helped justify the disenfranchisetnent of this age group,
particularly teenagers.
Unlike women and racial minorities, it is still considered legiti-
mate to speak of the young adult as somehow biologically unsuitable
for full participation in society (Males 1996). However, we believe
that it is more than a coincidence that the ideology of youth, which
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 141
emerged in the twentieth century, nicely complements the fact that,
when youth labour is needed at all, it is mainly used in subordinate
service positions. It would be much better, and more just, to acknow-
ledge that technological displacement and changing competition ra-
tios are responsible, than to continue to find fault with young adults.
So, instead of having this segment of the population competing with
older workers for the more valued and rewarding jobs, we find that
it is now accepted as "normal" for many people under 25 (and even
30) years of age to have their transition to adulthood and inde-
pendence delayed because of beliefs about some "defect" when a
century or two ago they would have spent more of their lives in
productive activities.
Talking Directly to Youth
After the publication of Generation on Hold in 1994, the most com-
mon question journalists asked us was what solutions we could
recommend to young people themselves, and to society as a whole,
to remedy age-based inequalities experienced by young people. In
that book, we offered some; here we offer several more.
For young people themselves, a number of personal adjustments
can be made:
• Be informed about who benefits and who loses as a result of
certain economic changes — this is an antidote for self-blame.
Combat apathy, and become involved in the political affairs of
your community.
• Resist indoctrination pressures that draw people into the mind-
less consumer role. (This ranges from peer pressure, through
advertising strategies, to political propaganda.)
• Work to develop a meaningful philosophy of life not solely
predicated on consumerism, materialism, or hedonism; balance
the "pleasure principle" and the "reality principle" (i.e., have
fun, but realize there are real issues that affect your long-term
happiness and well-being).
• Think about what constitutes "success" for you, rather than
what other people think. (There are non-status-seeking forms
of success, like being good at caring for others, and contributing
to the general social betterment of the community.)
142 Richer and Poorer
• Discover your own "special competency," namely, what you
are really good at and feel good doing. (But don't worry if what
you are good at is not part of middle-class definitions of suc-
cess.)
• Take advantage of the prolonged period of youth imposed on
you to develop your "real" self instead of the self others want
you to be for them (i.e., be true to yourself, and don't try to
please others just for its own sake).
• If you are locked out of adult independence, make the best of
it in a way that enriches your life; and consider the real possi-
bility that your adulthood will not be based on the middle-class
model of the mid-twentieth century. (In fact, you may be ahead
of the times because it is a real possibility that everyone will
have to adopt sustainable lifestyles for a sustainable planet for
ecological reasons.)
At the collective level, we recommend that young people them-
selves create a youth movement modelled after the "grey power"
movement, the environmental movement, or the women's move-
ment. Activities might include the following:
• Political lobbying (e.g., through student federations).
• Pushing for the formation of well-funded youth councils (as in
the Scandinavian countries) run by young people to monitor
problems, conduct research, and make policy recommenda-
tions. (Canada has one such organization as far as we know —
the Canadian Youth Foundation.)
• Joining or forming a political party which speaks to youth
interests. (This party could mobilize the 18- to 29-year-old
vote, which amounts to almost 30% of eligible voters — com-
pare with the Bloc Quebecois, which is a single-interest party
ostensibly representing 30% of Canadian voters, yet for a time
it was the official opposition in Canada's Parliament.)
• Boycotting products, media, and other institutions or organiza-
tions that manipulate young people and attempt to turn them
into mindless, passive consumers.
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 143
At the level of political economy, the state needs to reverse its
recent neglect of youth issues and focus on the following:
• Adopt active versus passive employment practices. (The Cana-
dian Youth Foundation [1995] puts the hidden costs of youth
inequality at $4.5 billion a year in unemployment benefits and
social assistance, e.g., Sweden of the 1980s provides a model
for active policies.)
• Build the social capital of communities — the so-called third
sector — by providing social wages (e.g., for work with non-
profit, volunteer, and community organizations) and shadow
wages (i.e., through tax deductions for voluntary work in the
community at large).
• Create jobs for young people by encouraging job sharing and
shorter work weeks with economic incentives (i.e., state subsi-
dies topping up lower wages, which in turn save on unemploy-
ment benefits and social assistance).
• Tax the profits made by transnationals, so money is invested in
the communities from which it is taken.
If all of these things were done, we believe many of the problems
of young people would be mitigated. Through these efforts, the shape
of capitalism can be fundamentally altered and redirected so that it
does not run counter to the goals of social justice and does not
amount to mere reformism. However, this task requires both individ-
ual initiative and political will. It remains to be seen whether Cana-
dians, who are known for their passive acceptance of authority, can
rise to the occasion.
Intergenerational Justice
In the foregoing we have been articulating a concern for intergenera-
tional justice, namely, the responsibilities generations have for each
other's welfare and the sharing of collective resources. But there is
a serious generation gap, not in the simple sense of parents and their
children not understanding each other, but in terms of hostilities
among different age groups based on perceived self-interest. Indeed,
"us-them" antagonisms seem to be growing, and age-based blame
and recrimination are now widespread. Thus, we have a new area of
144 Richer and Poorer
intergroup relations emerging where many people — not just teens
— are "tribalizing" with their age-mates. This tribalization gives
people a sense of "rightness" in terms of their privilege or oppression
as against the privilege or oppression of people from other age
groups.
Such intergenerational tensions are familiar, and are media fa-
vourites. Two particularly high-profile tensions are (a) the elderly
who fear and loathe teens, and (b) baby busters who dismiss baby
boomers as greedy and self-indulgent. In his 1996 study of intergen-
erational justice in the United States, Generations and the Challenge
of Justice, D.E. Lee identified the following tensions:
• "The tendency to find fault with other generations is common
to all generations";
• "Many members of all generations falsely assume that their
experiences either have been or can be duplicated by members
of other generations";
• "Many members of younger generations have high anger levels
related to the taxes they pay to finance benefits for older gen-
erations";
• "Members of older generations who came of age when good
jobs with decent wages were readily available have little un-
derstanding of the job anxiety and economic insecurity experi-
enced by many who are younger."
However widespread these tensions are, it is clear that in the
interests of justice they must be set aside so we can get down to the
business of creating a more equitable society where age is not a basis
for discrimination. This may sound idealistic in a society with a
recent history of "tribal self-interest," but justice must be based on
ideals. Given their economic underpinnings, D.E. Lee believed these
generation gaps are more serious than any we have seen in the past.
In his view, they are not issues that can be put off, for if they are,
there may be dire consequences: "We will be strained to the breaking
point if we cannot articulate a shared sense of justice based on
inclusiveness and the affirmation of the dignity and significance of
those of all ages. We will be torn apart if we are not responsive to
the concerns and well-being of young and old alike. The years to
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 145
come will be disastrous if we plunge headlong into the chasm of a
war between the generations."
Thus, we have various age groups fighting with each other over
their share of the pie to the point that serious animosities seem to be
emerging. Yet, in blaming each other, people miss the real cause of
their financial troubles, namely, an economic system in which 20%
of the population controls 70% of the wealth. And, as we know, for
reasons of social control and political order, it is very useful for that
20% of the population to have the other 80% distracted and fighting
over their 30% share of the wealth.
Conclusion
Some critics might read the above and argue that there have been
periods when it was tough to be young in many societies. For exam-
ple, during the Great Depression, poverty and despair were wide-
spread and forced many young people to move about the country
looking for work. During the two world wars, thousands of young
Canadians lost their lives. Young people have faced war and famine
throughout history, and the physical consequences were far greater
than what most young people are facing today. Critics might also add
that the affluence of Canadian society makes comparisons relative:
Is it not much better to be non-affluent in contemporary Canada than
in the Canada of 200 years ago, or in a developing country? The
answer to this last question is probably yes. But that must not distract
us from trying to discover how things got this way, and why things
did not work out more equally over this century.
The future certainly holds promise for some; indeed, change can
bring great benefits as old interest groups lose their power and
conventions change. However, a key issue for the future is whether
the inequalities identified here constitute part of a cycle or part of a
long-term trend. Unfortunately, a consensus is emerging that work-
place changes are part of long-term structural changes. In fact, two
long-term trends appear to have set in, one in the workplace and one
in the educational system.
If the current trend of technological displacement continues un-
abated in the workplace, it is likely that we will see a continuing
reduction in the size of what people think of as the "middle class" in
the next century, along with a continuing polarization of income.
This polarization could reshape the class structure of advanced so-
cieties, returning to a more blatant two-class system, with little re-
sembling the "middle class" of the twentieth century. Up to 80% of
146 Richer and Poorer
workers will be needed for low-wage jobs, particularly in subordinate
service work. Accordingly, only about 20% of workers will be
needed to bring their considerable expertise to design and maintain
the technology and to manage complex technical systems. More and
more young people in each generation will find themselves members
of a working class that engulfs 80% of the population in work that
is clearly undesirable in terms of wages, benefits, security, and work-
ing conditions. There will be large numbers of working poor, and
many unemployed, underemployed, and unemployable people. Be-
cause the young are often the hardest hit by such changes, we may
see a realignment of occupational and class structures based partly
on age, with the poorest segment being drawn largely from the youth
population. Moreover, once in the poorest segment of this new work-
ing class, people will likely remain there throughout their lives. If
this happens, most people will face the prospect that they will not do
as well financially or occupationally as their parents; the "middle
class" lifestyle of the second half of the twentieth century will be a
thing of the past.
Economic globalization is currently exacerbating this problem as
capital continues to leave Canada in search of cheap labour and
lucrative markets elsewhere. This has meant fewer tax revenues from
that capital, which could otherwise have been reinvested in the com-
munities from which the profit was extracted. In turn, it has been
even more difficult for governments to reduce the deficits produced
by the inflation of the past 20 years, leading them to set aside many
of the obligations they had assumed in the twentieth century, includ-
ing assistance to the disadvantaged and support for two mainstays of
so-called middle-class employment — health care and education.
And so we see a complex set of circumstances that contribute to the
downward spiral of the "middle class."
Because of the technical skills it imparts, what remains of the
higher educational system after government retrenchment will likely
be increasingly important in determining who has access to the
relatively small number of lucrative high-tech jobs. But, social class
advantage will likely come into play, as parents already positioned
in the lucrative sector give special guidance to their children and
provide "social capital" for them. Thus, we may see a situation where
education is an uncontested means of reproduction of social classes,
as it was before governments attempted to correct class-based injus-
tices.
The Disenfranchisement of Youth 147
Demographic change may mitigate these long-term trends. We
may witness another phase in a cycle where the fortunes of the young
improve. This demographic change hinges on the movement of baby
boomers out of the labour force. Most of them will retire between
2010 and 2030, with retirements peaking around 2020. As seniors,
the baby boomers will constitute a formidable market for goods and
services, so the labour force will benefit by providing them. It is
possible that this shift will begin earlier, with a significant proportion
of baby boomers taking early retirement beginning in 2001 when the
first of them reach their mid-fifties.
The down-side of these demographic changes is that most of the
jobs produced in this cycle will likely be in low-level service posi-
tions. However, there may also be a greater demand for higher level
financial, information, and health care services that could offset this
trend. Regardless, because of improved health care and the conse-
quent increased human longevity, it is unlikely that the competition
ratio will ever favour the young worker again.
Earlier predictions that the smaller baby bust generation would
be in greater demand in the labour market were not borne out, mainly
because of technological displacement (cf. Morissette, Myles, and
Picot 1993; Myles, Picot, and Wannell 1988). As well, when the baby
boom generation passes through, the population "pyramid" will more
closely resemble a vase than a pyramid, especially if fertility remains
low. This is likely to lead to a situation where the few young people
will have to support a large number of retirees. Indeed, by 2036 the
median population age will be somewhere between 41 and 50 de-
pending on fertility patterns (McKie 1993).
What lies beyond these demographic trends is difficult to say. Just
how much more technological displacement will take place, and how
much educational credentials will continue to inflate, is also difficult
to say. Certainly, there will be peaks and plateaus to these trends.
For example, we may have reached a plateau in the chase after
credentials, with the recent levelling in university attendance. But,
the danger with trends like technological displacement is that one
company's employee is another company's consumer: when a com-
pany lays off one of its employees, it is also laying off a purchaser
of goods and services. In spite of the ability of capitalism to survive
such crises in the past, it is only a matter of time before companies
collapse because of overproduction; if this becomes widespread, the
entire economy can collapse. If that happens, the cleavages and
fractures that underlie Canadian society may well come to the surface
148 Richer and Poorer
and conflict among different age groups could become more overt.
Certainly, if a majority of young people continue to find themselves
locked into lifelong poverty, this conflict could lead to violence
motivated by vengeance and a desire for social justice. Recognizing
the class basis for intergenerational inequalities is the first step to
bringing about a more just society.
6
The Faces of Inequality
Under Capitalism
In George Orwell's classic work of fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four,
he painted a picture of alienation, oppression, and hopelessness
among the citizens of "Oceania" that many in the West associated
with the hapless people of the Soviet Union, and that many today
might associate with the youth of Canada and elsewhere. Because of
the pervasive and effective system of social control in Oceania, and
because the better educated, middle-class citizens were so brain-
washed by the ideology of "Big Brother" (the inner circle of political
leaders), there was little likelihood that an opposition would develop,
or that meaningful change would ever come from the "Party" or from
the better-off segments of society. But unwilling to accept the dismal
fate dictated by the Party, Winston, the protagonist in the book, felt
that the only salvation for Oceania lay with the exploited and op-
pressed workers: the proletarian masses or so-called proles. Thus, he
wrote in his diary, "If there is hope it lies in the proles." Indeed,
Orwell goes on to emphasize that hope "must lie in the proles."
By extension, given the pervasiveness of the dominant ideologies
of liberalism, individualism, consumerism, and materialism in con-
temporary Canadian society, if there is to be hope for the future, we
might just paraphrase Orwell and say that it must lie with the young.
They are the ones who must find a way to transcend the ideology of
corporate capitalism. Not only does the future belong to youth in the
cliched sense, but it is among them that we can see a narrowing of
the divisions along race and gender lines we have been discussing.
Those divisions that have marked the country's history to date, and
have generally distracted Canadians from developing a class aware-
ness of their society, are increasingly coming to be seen as socially
conditioned, and not as naturally ordained.
Broadly speaking, as inter-ethnic marriages or sexual liaisons
become more common, as children of those unions increase in
150 Richer and Poorer
number and visibility throughout society, as gender differences that
separated previous generations become eroded by legislation and
modern social consciousness, as capital and consumer markets con-
tinue to homogenize the population through such phenomena as
deskilling and mass advertising, the terms of social and political
engagement will vastly change. Hence, the hope in the long run (and
we stress the word "hope") is that young women and men who share
similar lifestyles, who have roughly equivalent levels of education,
income, and cultural capital, and who are growing progressively
impatient with the ideologies of racism and sexism will emerge as
the best placed to address the problems of continuing social inequal-
ity in Canada. Their challenge will be to overcome the persistence
of ageism, while directing their combined energies to the fundamen-
tal class divisions of capitalism that are likely to survive race, gender,
and youth inequality. We must emphasize, however, that the accu-
mulation of race, gender, age, and class inequalities does not have a
mere additive effect. Rather, as the black feminist writer Patricia
Hill-Collins notes, the effect is better understood as multiplicative,
since no type of simple reductionism can ever hope to capture the
qualitative nature of the oppressions involved. So, how does one
manufacture consensus or combine energies among young people
when ethnic, gender, and class entrepreneurs are so keen on dividing
them? Is this mere unbridled idealism?
The Vertical Mosaic
Canadian society was characterized by John Porter in 1965 as a
mosaic — a vertical mosaic in which various ethnic groups have fit
together in a class-based hierarchy of wealth, privilege, and power.
More recently, Queen's University sociologist Roberta Hamilton has
called it a "gendered vertical mosaic," in which men (husbands and
fathers) enjoy myriad social privileges at the expense of women.
However one wishes to characterize Canadian society metaphori-
cally, it is clear from what we have discussed that in recent years its
class structure has changed in some respects. Changes have resulted
from immigration, demographics, technological displacement, af-
firmative action, globalization, and other forces.
Some of these changes have brought about an ethnic diversifica-
tion of the Canadian bourgeoisie, which is no longer dominated by
Anglos. In fact, the global face of capital is certainly not distin-
guished by race, and this is having an increasing impact in Canada,
as the forces of globalization reshape its economy. As for the work-
The Faces of Inequality Under Capitalism 151
ing class, its face is not strictly defined by race, sex, or age, except
as these designations are conducive to targeting various groups as
sources of cheap labour. Because capital has no race, sex, religion,
or national allegiance, we have also seen how, as the conditions for
capital accumulation change, different groups are targeted for exploi-
tation: indigenous peoples, blacks, women, poor whites, and so on.
To this list we might add the recent focus on the young, who are
being rapidly disenfranchised socially, occupationally, and economi-
cally.
In Chapter 1 we argued that inequality is a defining feature of
capitalism. Because the economic structure of society is premised
upon a fundamental inequality in the ownership of productive prop-
erty, one cannot meaningfully speak of capitalism and equality
synonymously. The non-owners of property must work for wages in
order to survive, and in the process they create vast wealth for those
who employ them. In Chapter 2 we showed how, over the years, the
increasing proportion of non-owners (the proletarianization of for-
mer independent producers) has been accompanied by a shrinking
number of owners (the concentration of capital in fewer hands).
Canada's maturity as a leading industrial capitalist country has thus
mirrored changes that have taken place in other similarly placed
countries, particularly as these changes relate to wider patterns of
inequality in the society.
The ethno-racial composition of the Canadian class structure, for
example, is shifting as some non-Anglos, especially those of Japa-
nese, Korean, and Chinese descent, improve their positions (Forcese
1996:87-90). These changes are also echoed in the make-up of the
Canadian middle class, which was at one time overwhelmingly Brit-
ish and French in origin, but now includes many Jews and people of
German, Dutch, and Ukrainian descent (Driedger 1996:198-199;
246-248). Further, women are making gains at home, at school, and
in the workplace, especially younger women, while men's past ad-
vantages are declining. But just as matters appear generally to be
improving for the next generation of Canadians, we have noted a
contradictory reversal along the age dimension. Whereas throughout
Canadian history every generation was able to do better than the
previous one, this is no longer the case. Older Canadians have bene-
fited from shifts in wealth over this century — more secure jobs and
pensions, better health care, and cheaper housing. This contrasts with
the fortunes of younger Canadians, particularly young men, who
152 Richer and Poorer
have lost out as a result of those economic crises occasioned by the
excesses of older generations.
Among social commentators, nevertheless, there is still a great
deal of controversy regarding some of the above-mentioned changes.
Turning to race and gender, for instance, there are those who see
positive changes in the positions of these previously disadvantaged
groups. However, those changes are seen by some as minimal for we
still hear complaints from these very sectors of persisting racial and
gender discrimination associated with educational and employment
equity practices. It appears that the Canadian workplace is the scene
of conflict as individuals and groups struggle for some advantage in
the competitive capitalist economy. Just what do we make of such
contradictory claims? And, how are they likely to be resolved?
Beyond Identity Politics: The Importance of Class
The current situation in Canada can be understood in terms of the
divide-and-conquer strategy that creates and maintains intergroup
hostilities as a means of diverting attention away from the real
sources of inequalities. The more individual men and women, black
and white, young and old, compete with each other over jobs and
wages, the less attention the capitalists and corporate elites receive.
Thus, in Chapter 4 we documented how this competition has led to
a decline in the earning power and employability of men as a group,
not to an overall improvement in the lives of Canadians, and we went
on to charge that young women's recent near-parity with men is due
more to this decline than to a rise in the fortunes of young women.
Similarly, the more individuals from various ethnic groups compete
with, and perhaps resent, one another, the more the real sources of
their social and economic disadvantage escape scrutiny.
One way to illustrate this is to examine figures that correlate the
population with the ownership of wealth in Canada (see Table 2.4,
Chapter 2). There are various estimates of how this wealth is divided
among Canadians, but a clear pattern of income and wealth concen-
tration is evident. In Controlling Interest: Who Controls Canada?,
Diane Francis noted that just twelve families and five conglomerates
control one-third of all corporate assets in the country. Statistics
Canada reported that the income of the top quintile of the population
is over nine times the amount of the bottom quintile (Cat. No. 13-207
1992:147). University of Western Ontario economist James Davies
shows that the top 20% of the population owns or controls about 70%
of the wealth (1993:108). What this means is that the other 80% of
The Faces of Inequality Under Capitalism 153
Canadians must share the remaining 30% of the wealth. Little won-
der, then, that there is so much competition, strife, and resentment,
especially among those who aspire to the affluence and lifestyles of
the new middle class. Instead of fighting among one another, a
simplistic argument would hold that the 80% segment of the popu-
lation needs to develop a political consciousness and direct its atten-
tion to the practices and lifestyles of the wealthy and comfortable
20% segment. We are referring here to the inordinate attention that
segment receives from governments in the form of tax breaks, bail-
outs, government-sponsored investment insurance, and trade protec-
tion legislation. If it were possible for the neglected 80% to unite
their vote, the simplistic argument continues, they could conceivably
form their own political party and easily elect a federal government
to see to their interests.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen. Why? Because that 80%
of the population does not form a homogeneous whole with common
economic and political interests. They continue to be divided along
lines of race, gender, regional identity, and so on. The manufacture
of consent has been so successful over this century that a large
percentage of the voting public has been convinced that corporate
interests are also their own interests. This manufacture of consent
dates back to the 1920s, when universal suffrage was put in place
and when those in power realized that they needed to influence voters
by shaping public opinion to suit corporate interests. They worked
at this for decades, and by all accounts they have succeeded. This is
how we can explain the general lack of political will to oppose the
corporate agenda and the amoral practices that daily violate both the
human community and the environment, and the simultaneous ac-
ceptance of the neo-conservative agenda of deficit fighting.
The distribution of wealth in Canada cannot be divorced from the
fact that international capital has been siphoning wealth out of the
country, a process made even easier by the North American Free
Trade Agreement and sustained by the type of thinking that accepts
the "inevitability" of globalization. The distribution of wealth has
also been affected by the technological displacement that has funda-
mentally altered many workplaces and job structures, and affected
families of all social classes. From the perspective of retail sales, for
example, every laid-off worker is potentially a laid-off consumer,
and when that worker is the main breadwinner of a family, the effect
is multiplied.
154 Richer and Poorer
Following the discussion in Chapter 5, it appears that the job
picture in Canada is becoming increasingly polarized between a tiny
segment of highly skilled and highly paid technical experts, and a
large variety of workers in routine or mechanical jobs in the service
and related industries. We may in fact be heading towards the situ-
ation where only 20% of jobs provide a remuneration currently
associated with middle-class affluence, while the remaining 80% will
tend to be low-skill, low-pay, terminal or contract positions. Thus, a
rather disturbing scenario is likely to unfold: a continuing proletari-
anization and impoverishment of the majority of Canadians based on
age. That is, each successive future group of Canadians is likely to
be poorer than the last. This may continue until we reach the type of
highly volatile situation that makes for social and political instability.
Blending the Generations in the Late Twentieth
Century
The impoverishment of youth has affected not just the youngest age
groups — those in their teens and twenties — but every age group
born since the Second World War. In fact, there is much misunder-
standing and confusion about what has happened to each age group
over this time period. Just as race and gender rivalries have bedev-
illed the society, so too age groups dispute who has benefited and
who has suffered most from developments since the war. The irony
is that these misunderstandings and conflicts, like those related to
race and gender, have also directed attention away from the sources
of the difficulties that these younger generations have experienced.
Accordingly, by way of concluding the book, it is worth devoting
some space to this issue, especially since we are convinced that it is
to youth we must look if the new millennium is to hold any promise
of seriously addressing the problem of Canada's social inequalities.
Much has been said and written in the media about the various
age groups born since the Second World War: so-called baby boom-
ers have been accused of being greedy and self-absorbed, and so-
called generation Xers have been called whiners and slackers. Such
characterizations often amount to little more than stereotypes, nega-
tive labelling, and overgeneralizations. They also tend to personalize
age groups, as if it is somehow people's "fault" that they were born
in a certain year that coincides with one of the labels. Thus, we find
another example of victim blaming, where the larger picture is ig-
nored in favour of individualistic, psychological explanations.
The Faces of Inequality Under Capitalism 155
Table 6.1
The Post-Second World War Cohorts
Year Born:
Labels:
Ages in
1997:
Parents'
Birth
Cohort:
I
1945-54
Early
Boomers
43-52
1915-24
II
1955-64
Late
Boomers
33-^2
1925-34
III
1965-74
Busters
23-32
1935-44
IV
1975-84
McBoomers
13-22
1945-54
Source: Allahar and Cote.
As sociologists, we are not interested in stereotypes associated
with personality characteristics, as if the year one was born can
predict how lazy or greedy one is. We prefer to leave that sort of
stuff to astrologers. Instead, we deal with these issues at the aggre-
gate level, using concepts that help us understand long-term and
widespread societal trends. Hence, we adopt here a "cohort analysis"
to help us examine what age-groups have in common and how they
differ at the aggregate level. For our purposes, a cohort is any group
of people born within a given period of time.
Although useful, we should add some qualifications about the
applicability of cohort analysis and its limitations. First, in a cohort
analysis not all individuals will be described by a pattern; rather, the
experiences of the average member will be taken as the marker for
the entire cohort. Assuming that the experiences examined have a
"normal distribution" around this average, we can have some confi-
dence that the majority of people in a cohort will be "properly"
characterized. Second, this type of analysis is further limited because
of the arbitrary dividing lines defining cohorts. Often these lines are
based on a combination of significant events or the beginning or
midpoint of a decade. Third, individuals born close to the dividing
lines may share the experiences of both cohorts, so exceptions may
need to be made for them. And fourth, even when differences are
identified at the aggregate level, they are differences of degree, not
kind. In the cohorts we examine, certain commonalities are reflected
in shared significant experiences (like underemployment), but they
756 Richer and Poorer
differ by degree. Too often cohorts are set apart from each other by
the media and general public as if they are different species bent on
annihilating one another. Such characterizations simply fuel misdi-
rected intercohort tensions.
Table 6.1 provides a categorization of the post-Second World War
cohorts. We have taken the liberty of using easily recognized labels.
We can see that a cycle has been completed in generational terms.
That is, the first cohort has reproduced itself with the fourth — the
early boomers are the parents of the McBoomers. Moreover, the early
boomers are increasingly the guardians of the society the McBoom-
ers are entering, and will enter, for another half decade. Hence, as
both parents and teachers, the early boomers have reason to be
concerned about the plight of the McBoomers. We take this as a good
sign from the point of view of intergenerational understanding.
The post-Second World War cohorts have shared certain signifi-
cant coming-of-age experiences. Viewed from the perspective of
their day-to-day lives, these experiences include a convergence of
gender roles (the experience of "being" male or "being" female is
becoming more similar as more roles are shared); liberal gender
relations (males and females as peers and casual lovers versus earlier
forms of segregation and sexual puritanism); greater permissiveness
accorded them by their parents and society (especially regarding
sexual behaviour, drug use, and the use of leisure time); the rise of
mass culture and the truly mass media (especially rock music and
the television industries); mass segregation in age-graded schools;
and expanded opportunities for higher education.
These intercohort experiences have varied by social class and
racial or ethnic group. We submit, however, that there are enough
similarities to warrant the proposition that the forces shaping cohorts
are also affecting the structure of inequality in Canada, thereby
creating greater similarities within each successive cohort, regardless
of race, class, or gender. While the process is by no means complete,
it can be seen in second-generation immigrant families whose cul-
tures differ markedly from Canada's dominant norm. Take, for ex-
ample, teenaged children who appear to have more in common with
their fellow Canadian-born peers than with their parents, and who
demand the same freedoms as those peers, like staying out late in
mixed-sex groups, drinking alcohol, choosing their own dates, and
so on. This process seems to result mainly from the tremendous
capacity of capital to use technologies to reach and influence the
masses. These technologies have been improved at an astounding
The Faces of Inequality Under Capitalism 157
pace, permitting the forces of capitalism to be strengthened, most
recently on a global basis. Consequently, we live in a "mass-capital-
ist" society, a world in which increasingly advanced technologies
intrude on virtually all aspects of people's day-to-day lives and affect
almost every aspect of consumption and production.
Cohort analyses can be employed to illustrate these homogenizing
influences in a number of domains. For example, as noted in Chapter
5, the term "teenager" was first coined in the 1930s, but because of
the Second World War, the first cohorts to be widely known as
"teenagers" by advertisers and merchandisers were the postwar co-
horts. We traced the effects of this, noting the paradoxical rise of
youth consumerism in spite of a loss of productive earning power.
The consequences of this include a prolonged period of youth and
dependence on parents.
The homogenizing influences to which we refer can be illustrated
by the higher education and work experiences of each cohort as
follows.
EARLY BOOMERS
A significant segment of this cohort entered university between 1963
and 1972, during the first enrolment expansion. They were the first
to face the prospect of a mass prolongation of youth as "student,"
although most went only as far as completing high school. They rode
the crest of the wave of expanding middle-class opportunities. (But
note that these opportunities were enjoyed more so by the cohort
before them, those born between 1935 and 1944.) There were good
economic opportunities for university graduates, yet many have ex-
perienced a decline in earning power since the early 1980s. Although
some became well positioned in the expanded middle class, as this
has shrunk large numbers have either been squeezed out or live with
job insecurity, heavy debt loads, and would face great difficulty in
retraining.
LATE BOOMERS
Members of this cohort enrolled in universities in increasing numbers
between 1973 and 1982, but they saw the beginning of the underem-
ployment trend. They made the transition to the workplace as the
once-expanding middle class began to contract, and there was grow-
ing concern that economic opportunities were diminished for some
graduates. Thus, underemployment has been a persistant problem,
and significant numbers must now accustom themselves to regular
job or career changes as institutional downsizing has truncated many
careers. For members of this cohort, available work is increasingly
158 Richer and Poorer
contract and unskilled, or is in competition with younger cohorts, and
the accompanying economic shortfalls and insecurities make it dif-
ficult for many to buy a home or save for retirement.
BUSTERS
They entered university during the 1984-1993 period and were part
of the second enrolment expansion, as a majority went on to higher
education. They increasingly found themselves caught up in a scram-
ble for increasingly devalued credentials, with growing numbers
pursuing postgraduate degrees to gain some relative advantage. They
(and others) felt a mounting disillusionment with higher education
and, owing to declining job opportunities, some have experienced an
increased prolongation of youth as "adults on hold," finding them-
selves still living with their parents in their late twenties. Many
encountered increased competition for jobs with older cohorts and,
having amassed student loans in the range of $20 to $30 thousand,
felt a growing pessimism regarding even short-term economic op-
portunities.
MCBOOMERS
They began enroling in universities in 1993 (and will continue to do
so until the year 2003). They are among the largest cohort that has
gone directly from high school to postsecondary institutions and, as
such, are the inheritors of the paradox of inflated credentials (Chapter
5), even while their educational funding is under financial attack by
various levels of government. The bulk of this cohort find themselves
locked into youth, out of "adulthood," and still living with their
parents. The "perfunctory student" becomes a model for many —
any degree will do. They witness the collapse of middle-class oppor-
tunities for their parents and the other two cohorts as governments
retreat to fight deficits and corporations downsize in spite of record
profits. The "good" jobs that might have been theirs are taken by
older cohorts who are themselves under pressure, and because only
"McJobs" are available for most, the short- and long-term economic
prospects appear dismal for many.
Thus, we have four cohorts with varying degrees of shared edu-
cational and work experiences that have reason to find common
cause for complaint independent of race and gender issues, although
these are still very real for many and complicate the matter in no
small way. Certainly, the 1980s and 1990s have been hard on mem-
bers of all four cohorts, but to varying degrees. Yet we find certain
tensions and resentments among them, especially between the two
boomer cohorts, on the one hand, and the two later ones, on the other.
The Faces of Inequality Under Capitalism 159
The questions are, then, how can members of these cohorts develop
the political awareness that is necessary if they are to arrive at a
structural understanding of their situation? Do they, in fact, have a
common predicament that can override their potential age, ethnic,
and gender differences and unite them on a class basis?
Conclusion: Learning to Love Corporate Capitalism?
Just as some may dismiss as a "fact of life" the predicament in which
many young people find themselves, others may dismiss as a "fact
of life" the conditions of capitalism that have created the other
inequalities we have identified. These critics might argue that capi-
talism is here to stay, and in spite of its faults, is the best available
system, given the human propensity to self-interest and greed. They
might also defend this position by arguing that those people, young
or otherwise, with the most talent, and who work the hardest, will in
the end realize their dreams. Young people, however, will have to
wait longer than their parents and will have to settle for less.
The implicit ideological message here is that capitalism is the only
game in town, and the sooner one learns to play it, the better off he
or she will be. The media and other "guardians" of the social order
are always keen to remind us how the baby boomers who experi-
mented with alternatives to materialism and consumerism in the
1960s saw the light by the 1970s and gave up their experiments as
unworkable. Indeed, many from that cohort who shunned material-
ism for spiritualism and communalism came back to materialism and
individualism, and some have even become very materially success-
ful. Capitalism is a social system that encourages one to be "selfish":
to explore one's self indefinitely, to be concerned or even obsessed
with feeding one's self-esteem, to feel a right to seek one's self-ac-
tualization, and to continually gratify one's sensual self. And, for
many, it is not difficult to learn to love such a system that permits
one to be so self-indulgent.
As we have argued throughout this book, however, the success
stories and the material comforts are largely illusory and spread
unevenly among all segments and classes in society. Further, there
is no guarantee that capitalism will continue to provide such narcis-
sistic benefits indefinitely. It is becoming increasingly clear that the
planet can no longer sustain current levels of consumption and the
accompanying waste. But when these are no longer possible, it is
certain that capital will move on to other profitable investments. In
so doing, it will search out other groups to exploit, and thereby
160 Richer and Poorer
perpetuate, exacerbate, or create new inequalities in Canadian soci-
ety. This is how one might understand the willing embrace of
NAFTA by the political elite — an embrace which exploits cheap
Mexican labour while exporting Canadian jobs abroad. This is part
of the essential nature of capitalism. Hence, inequalities will remain
part of Canada's social landscape as long as the economic logic of
capitalism continues to be coupled with the political ideologies of
liberalism and individualism, and as long as these dictate the policies
of the various levels of government and structure the productive
labour activities, consumption patterns, and political options of Ca-
nadians.
But, even beyond this, there is a clear challenge to both the
economic and political leaders, on the one hand, and the Canadian
people, on the other. We noted in Chapter 2 that, five times in the
past six years, Canada has been named by the United Nations as the
best country in the world in which to live. This is because of the very
high average standard of living of the population and the overall
quality of life of its citizens. These in turn are related to the fact that
Canada's economy is strong and competitive: its products are in
demand both locally and around the world, for while of equivalent
quality, Canadian goods and services are better priced than those of
other countries.
Competitive pricing, however, is related to competitive labour
costs. Those who are able to pay lower prices for labour and still
produce a product of high quality will capture the market and triumph
over competitors. And as we know, racial and gender inequalities
that ensure, for example, that blacks and women can be paid less than
others, serve directly to cheapen the price of labour. Thus, the social
inequalities we have analyzed in this book are not merely incidental
to capitalism, but are rather structurally and intimately tied to Can-
ada's high standard of living. And herein lies the challenge: will
Canadians be prepared to work for the elimination of social inequal-
ity based on race, gender, age, and class if it will cost them their
number one world ranking?
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