exports
![James Laxer](http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/thumbnail/category_pictures/picture-62_0.jpg "James Laxer is regularly asked to comment on current national and global issues by the Canadian media and frequently writes columns in major newspapers and periodicals.
In 1969, he was one of the founders of the Waffle Group, Canada’s largest New Left political movement. In 1971, at the age of 29, he ran second for the national leadership of the New Democratic Party. In the mid 1970s, James Laxer was a leading crusader against the power of multi national petroleum companies. His books, speeches and television appearances helped lead to the creation of a nationally owned oil company, Petro Canada, established to counter the power of companies like Exxon in Canada.
In 1981, Laxer was appointed research director of the federal New Democratic Party. At the end of his two year term, he wrote a controversial, book length critique of the party’s economic policies, charging that they were seriously dated. The report was front page news in Canada and was debated for months in the national media.
In 1984, the National Film Board of Canada hired Laxer to be host narrator, for a series of documentaries on the changing global economy and Canada’s place in it. In preparing the series, Laxer travelled extensively in Japan, Europe and the United States. The series, entitled Reckoning, was denied broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because it was seen as too controversial.
Instead it was broadcast by a hook up of all the English language educational networks in the country. The series was also broadcast in the United States, as well, by a large number of PBS stations. The Reckoning series has won awards in both the United States and Canada. One of its films won the blue ribbon, first prize, at the prestigious American Film and Video Festival, for best political documentary. The same film won the Atlantic
Film Festival and national Gemini Awards in Canada for best writing in an information series, awards which went to Laxer and the film’s director as co-authors.
In 1986-87, Laxer spent a year in Europe writing Decline of the Superpowers. From 1978 to 1981, he hosted a public affairs television program on TV Ontario. He regularly went to Europe to conduct interviews with leading European political and intellectual figures. In 1993 his book False God: How the Globalization Myth Has Impoverished Canada, was published by Lester Publishing. In Search of a New Left: Canadian Politics
After the Neo-Conservative Assault was published by Viking in 1996. The Undeclared War: Class Conflict in the Age of Cyber Capitalism, was published by Viking in 1998, and by Penguin Canada in 1999, in a paperback edition. Dalton Camp wrote that the Undeclared War "is an informed and cogent book on the great and growing dilemma of our time: how to preserve a free society in the face of increasing disparity and the creation of a new class society---‘a dominant class and a dominated class.’ This is stuff we need to know." Laxer’s book, Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America was on national best seller lists for seven weeks in the autumn of 2000. In his review of the book for the Globe and Mail, David Shribman, Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the Boston Globe, commented: "This is a book by a Canadian that can change the United States." Stalking the Elephant is to be published by The New Press in New York in September 2001. In 2003, his book, The Border: Canada, the U.S. and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel, was published by Doubleday Canada. In 2004, Douglas and McIntyre published his book Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism. This memoir of James Laxer’s childhood was the winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for best biography/memoir in 2005.
James Laxer is a Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto")
Harper's Christmas Special: The myth of how fortress North America will boost Canadian exports to the U.S.
| December 27, 2010Canada and the new protectionism
When the world plunged into recession in 2008, G20 leaders ostentatiously pledged not to repeat the errors of the 1930s. To hasten economic recovery, they would avoid protectionism and keep trade flowing. Canada's government has been among the loudest voices in this free trade chorus.
This is a gross misreading of actual history. World trade collapsed in the 1930s because of collapsing consumer demand, not protectionism; competitive tariffs were a response to that implosion, not its cause. For the same reason, world trade plunged 12 per cent last year, despite the G20 promises.
History lessons: Resource management means reclaiming our environmental and fiscal futures
| May 23, 2012Boosting Canadian trade vs. free-trade deals
As soon as it won its coveted majority, the Harper government put the pedal to the metal on the trade front, with a stampede of new free-trade deals. The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade currently lists 18 different deals in play, ranging from puny (Panama and Jordan) to gargantuan (Europe, Japan and India).
Anyone who stands in the way of this juggernaut clearly must oppose trade in general. At least that's how the Conservatives portray the issue, attempting to brand its New Democratic opponents as economically illiterate dinosaurs.
Mulcair and energy McCarthyism
The high-and-mighty vitriol which greeted Tom Mulcair's comments last week about the downside of oil-powered currency appreciation is lamentable (repeating the over-the-top reaction to Dalton McGuinty's similar comments a few weeks ago). Mulcair made two modest and empirically substantiated statements: the loonie is sky-high as a result of the oil boom in Alberta's bitumen sands (I doubt you'd find a single currency trader on Bay Street who would disagree with that), and that overvaluation is causing negative side-effects on other industries and regions in Canada.
Who wants 'closer' economic ties with China?
The Prime Minister's trip to China last week sparked a flurry of media coverage regarding prospects for "closer" economic ties between Canada and China. Some even speculated that another free trade agreement is in the works (as soon as the Harper government inks its planned deals, of course, with the EU, India, Korea, and the TPP!).
The pandas are cute, sure. But what are the dimensions of the current economic links between these two economies? Does that relationship benefit average Canadians? And do we want something even "closer"?
Here are a few factoids to throw into that particular discussion:
- Canada imported almost $50 billion in merchandise from China in 2011, almost all manufactured goods.