Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Post War Canada by Tina Loo

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Reviewed by: Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Post War Canada by Tina Loo Martha Walls Tina Loo, Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Post War Canada (UBC Press: Vancouver 2019) Tina Loo's Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Post War Canada explores state efforts to alleviate poverty and expand its power in Canada during the 1950s-1970s. Loo's book considers how this dual agenda was sought via a series of five relocation initiatives in Canada: Newfoundland's fishing outports, Inuit communities in the central arctic, parishioners of Quebec's Lower St. Lawrence and Gaspé regions, Africville in Halifax, and Vancouver's East side community of Strathcona. Federal, provincial, and municipal governments undertook relocation programs that were not ends in and of themselves but rather they were part of broader programmes of government intervention, economic growth, and community development. These served to harness poor people themselves in identifying and remedying social and economic problems and in shoring up the authority of the state. Loo's analysis operates on two levels. She considers specific attributes of each relocation—how such factors as place (rural vs urban), geography, local culture, and era shaped each initiative—but also how these initiatives operated in shared national and international contexts that saw the emergence of new concepts of democracy, government responsibility, and individual rights. Loo argues that collectively these relocation initiatives served to increase the reach and disciplinary power of the state while they also reflected a genuine optimism and commitment on the part of the state to ensuring that Canadians universally experience "the good life" – material equality and opportunity and a voice in their democracy. Moved by the State adds to existing literature which has emphasized the lasting hardships created by relocation, as it seeks to understand the motives and policies of the architects of relocation schemes. With this approach, Loo challenges the concept of "the state" as monolithic and unknowable to consider instead how state programs were guided by well-intentioned people who were genuinely committed to improving the lives of the poorest Canadians. Loo's focus on these state actors offers a gateway to a more nuanced understanding of the complex (human) nature of "the state." While Loo accepts that the people behind state relocation initiatives were animated by good intentions, Moved by the State is no hagiography. Loo makes clear that these individuals, while empathetic, operated "where the boundary between benevolence and oppression were easily crossed." (7) Although they viewed poor communities as being hamstrung by circumstances beyond their control (such as failing resources and geographic isolation), from their neoliberal vantage points they also believed that poor communities suffered of their own innate failings. Thus, state officials viewed Arctic [End Page 191] Inuit as people psychologically damaged by colonialism, Newfoundlanders as being impeded by their inherent timidity, and people of the Gaspé region as victims of their parochialism. This emphasis on poor peoples' shortcomings ensured that tutelage was a central goal of relocation efforts and that the state committed to training relocated people to think and behave in (allegedly) new, modern, and progressive ways. This perspective, Loo explains, did not prevent state actors from recognizing the existence of larger structural issues, such as racism, but their overweening focus on fixing people disinclined them to seek remedies to wider structural problems. Although Loo is critical of state actors, one wonders at times if she is critical enough. Loo argues that Africville's relocation was largely shaped by an antiracist, anti-segregationist, critique of Africville's historic marginalization. It was also the only relocated community to not include a community development initiative. Instead, grassroots organization was left to the community. Loo attributes this to the existence of the Halifax Human Rights Advisory Committee, an organization regarded by state actors as the voice of Afrciville. However, Loo also observes that in the decades following Africville's relocation, the emergent Black Power movement in Nova Scotia was contested by the state. This begs the question of whether racism—the state's fear of Black agency—might also have inspired the exclusion of community...