Environmental Politics, Political Economy, and Social Democracy in Canada

Abstract

In Greening the New Canadian Political Economy, Glen Williams observes that Canadian political economists have been virtually silent on environmental issues [1992, 16]. Indeed, most of the political science literature dealing with such issues takes the form of liberal, bureaucratic-elite, or economic structuralist analyses of environmental policy making [Dwivedi 1974, 1986; Brown 1992; Skogstad and Kopas 1992; Boardman 1992; Coleman and Skogstad 1990]. To the extent that Canadian socialists wrote about environmental issues in the 1970s and 1980s, their approaches paralleled other debates between Marxism and the social movements. Those who were close to the labour movement took up the question of conflict between workers and environmentalists, in particular, the corporate practice of job blackmail in response to pressures for environmental regulation.