Kari Levitt and the Long Detour of Canadian Political Economy

When Kari Levitt first published Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada – it quickly became a defining text in the nationalist movement that was to dominate the English Canadian left from the late 1960s until the demise of the Waffle in 1973. Mel Watkins, in his foreword to the 2002 re-issue – makes it clear that he hopes it can become as important for the current generation of the Canadian left, asserting that "the continuing resonance and relevance of this book, thirty years on and counting, is remarkable. Call it a Canadian classic." This paper will argue that Watkins is right to identify Levitt’s book as a seminal work in the Canadian political economy tradition, but that it did not lead to clarity, but confusion. It played no small role in contributing to a long detour of Canadian political economy, which has had political economists for almost 40 years trying to square the circle – explain the actions of a G8/Quad member country as being! in the same category as the world’s neo-colonies and dependencies. Levitt’s book should be read by today’s new left – but not as a work to be emulated, but to be critiqued and transcended. The paper will first work through empirical evidence documenting the failure of Levitt’s key predictions as to the trajectory of the Canadian and American economies, and then offer some thoughts on flaws in her theoretical framework which are at the root of these failures.