Labour and Capital in Canada and the Caribbean: The Dependency Paradigm Revisited

Canada's political and economic relationship with the Caribbean is of interest, not simply as a case study of the general phenomenon of First World/Third World relationships, but also for the way in which it highlights aspects of the development debate which have bedevilled theorists for decades. Here, through a consideration of this debate in the context of Canada's economic relationship to the Caribbean, we intend to highlight two such aspects. First, we will argue that such a study partially confirms key aspects of the dependency paradigm, in particular its insistence on a structually delineated hierarchy of nations in the world system. Second, by demonstrating Canada's place near the top of this hierarchy, and the Caribbean's regional position near the bottom, it will be argued that a crucial error has been made in the political economy tradition which attempted to apply dependency theory to Canada. This error follows from a postulate commonly held among Canadian political economists that Canada is itself a "dependency", holding a position on the periphery rather than at the core of the world system.