Abstract
This paper draws upon the critical political economy tradition in Canada to examine the renegotiation of NAFTA and the class interests at work in the final agreement. It draws on a range of ethnographic and media sources in its argumentation. The paper provides a comprehensive review of Canadian Political Economy before it turns to the negotiation and the actions of Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland. It is argued that Freeland was adept at appearance management and manipulating media presentations of herself to make the negotiation seem more laboured then it was. In the end, the agreement protected Canada's crown jewel, the commercial banking sector, the source of wealth for Canada's Power Elite. This all happened without much discussion of its uniqueness or its important to wealth and power in Canada. Given this, what then are we to do to resist? The final section builds a case for imaging abject futures as a mode of resistance to what might be termed Canada's Power Elite.
Highlights
On Making Faustian DealsIf Toronto is a Faustian city, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland is Faust
I mean this bit of instructive reasoning not as a moral qualm with Freeland herself, but as a window into the social forces and class geographies which are expressed in her negotiation of global trade deals at the beginning of the 21st century, an era of ever-increasing inequality and global instability, that shape the frontiers of capital and inequality in spaces like Toronto
For Berman, the figure of Faust has much to teach moderns about themselves—about the way social forces shape them outside of themselves, and about how their dreams, aspirations, and desires come to shape the world around them (2010). It is this paradox—that actors are both affected by and affect the social world—that sits at the heart of global trade deals in the 21st century
Summary
If Toronto is a Faustian city, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland is Faust. Berman finds three sequential archetypes—the dreamer, the lover, and the developer He writes, “[Faust] starts in an intellectual’s lonely room, in an abstracted and isolated realm of thought; it ends in the midst of a far-reaching realm of production and exchange, ruled by giant corporate bodies and complex organizations, which Faust’s thought is helping to create, and which are enabling him to create more (1982, 39).”. For Berman, the figure of Faust has much to teach moderns about themselves—about the way social forces shape them outside of themselves, and about how their dreams, aspirations, and desires come to shape the world around them (2010) It is this paradox—that actors are both affected by and affect the social world—that sits at the heart of global trade deals in the 21st century. The final section considers Freeland the developer, having her mental energies engineer an abject future rather than the ideal Liberal outcome she desires
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