It is hard to believe that it is 20 years since the final Pierre Elliot Trudeau administration, in its twilight in 1982, authorized the royal commission that legitimized free trade with the United States. The Macdonald Royal Commission (or, to use the full formal title that no one ever remembers — the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada) reported to the first Brian Mulroney administration in 1985 that Canada should take a “leap of faith” into a continental partnership with the United States in defiance of over 100 years of Canadian economic development policy and history.

The Commission got off to a shaky start with the premature announcement of its birth, courtesy of an embarrassing leak to the press. That the government was going to embark on one of those generation-defining programmatic commissions of inquiry that looks into everything and anything under the sun caught even the Trudeau cabinet off-guard.

Moreover, the appointment of former Liberal cabinet minister Donald S. Macdonald as chair was widely seen as a consolation prize for his frustrated leadership ambitions, nipped in the bud by Trudeau’s surprising decision to “un-retire.” And controversy swirled around the fact that Macdonald was being paid the outrageous sum of $800 per day to head the Commission. His ungracious response was to point out that he was earning twice that in his Bay Street law practice.

The appointment of Macdonald certainly did not portend free trade. After all, he had a reputation as a protégé of Walter Gordon, the arch-nationalist minister in Lester Pearson’s government. Macdonald had himself charted nationalist and interventionist courses as minister during the Trudeau government’s most nationalist phase. Indeed, free trade was barely a blip on the radar screen in the early 1980s.

After hearing the views of hundreds of Canadians in the largest public consultation exercise to that point in time, and after commissioning the largest single body of social science research from over 300 academics, the Macdonald Commission produced its weighty three-volume report. But most importantly it produced a signature recommendation — free trade — that caught the country off guard.

Twenty years later, it is noteworthy that no one has drawn a link between the public submissions to that long-ago royal commission and the anti-globalization protests that erupt at the meetings of the various supra-national institutions that have been created to make the world safe for capital. But in the period from 1982-1985, over 1,100 Canadian groups and citizens made deputations to the Macdonald Commission. Among those non-business groups that commented on economic development strategies for Canada, close to 100 per cent either opposed free trade or suggested alternative strategies. More surprisingly, perhaps, close to 50 per cent of business organizations took the same perspective.

When we combine these findings with the fact that 60 per cent of Canadians who voted in the great free trade election of 1988 voted against the only party advocating free trade, we should not be surprised that the chickens are coming home to roost in the streets of Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa etc. The folly of not heeding the views of the majority 20 years ago have undoubtedly contributed to the climate of today, including the mass mobilization of citizens’ groups in opposition to free trade.

As for the impressive body of 72 volumes of research produced by the Commission, there are lessons to be drawn there as well. It has long been documented in academe that the influence of the mainstream economists on government policy-making is out of all proportion to their numbers. Moreover, that influence is rooted in a striking ideological homogeneity. It is said the range of ideological thought of mainstream economics is reminiscent of Dorothy Parker’s description of a play she reviewed as having run the whole gamut of human emotion from A to B.

Within the Macdonald Commission, a combination of old-boy academic and intellectual networks produced a research program in which the advice of mainstream economics was heavily privileged. At the first meeting of academics to shape the research agenda of the Commission held at Hart House at the University of Toronto, it became apparent that nationalist researchers need not apply. The orthodoxy of the discipline was not to be compromised.

Indeed so embarrassingly one-sided was the advice flowing to the Commission, that two “reluctant nationalist” political scientists eventually had to be conscripted to draft some counter-arguments to the free trade juggernaut, though not so forcefully as to knock it off course. These were incorporated into the Commission’s report as a sort of “manufactured dissent.”

Twenty years later, the conventional economic view continues to be that we need not fear national disintegration through the pull of our continental partner. Even though every province in Canada save Prince Edward Island now trades more with the United States than with each other, we are assured that east-west trade, when corrected for differences of population and distance, still accounts for a greater proportion of our GDP than north-south trade.

So trade within a system constrained by barriers is more valuable to us than one which is purportedly barrier free. Ironically, in defending against charges of national disintegration due to continental integration, the economists have missed the point that east-west trade is defying the nostrums of free trade. Notwithstanding the anemic Agreement on Internal Trade, which compels provinces only to “voluntarily” comply in any case, we are confronted with a legion of interprovincial barriers to trade whose number is only exceeded by the imaginative force that goes into their creation and application.

Alas, the “leap of faith” having long since been taken, we find ourselves in a continental world that has taken on a whole new complexion since September 11 and the re-election of Bush the younger. Security issues have apparently trumped economic relations; in any event the softwood lumber dispute and the “Mad Cow” issue glaringly reveal the hollowness of NAFTA for Canadians.

But it has been a generation since the Macdonald Commission did its work. Is it possible that as we contemplate the new forces of continental integration and national disintegration, we should consider another inquiry into the state of the economic union — one that might actually listen to the people, for a change?