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

Abstract

LOO, Tina − Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Postwar Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019. Pp. 284. Historians of the Canadian state often characterize the study of statecraft as “contrapuntal melodies of freedom and coercion, centre and periphery, liberty and illiberity” (E. A. Heaman, A Short History of the State in Canada, p. 224). Building on this idea of the contrapuntal state, Tina Loo’s analysis of forced relocations in 1960s Canada reveals how the state’s goals for development attempted to extend participation, empowerment, and democracy to impoverished regions thereby granting them a piece of the “good life.” However, Loo illustrates these ideas did not always function in harmony; rather, they often ended in dissonance between local actors and state actors. Using unique methodological and narrative approaches, Loo analyzes organizational strategies and technologies of coercion used to enact state-sponsored relocation. By so doing, Loo successfully identifies elusive agenda and ideological strata of state initiatives, exposing the state as an assemblage of contradictory bureaucratic and political figures. Loo examines five distinct geographic contexts of forced relocation to illustrate a coherent strategy enacted by the Canadian state. For Loo, the displacement of Inuit in central Arctic, the Fisheries Household Resettlement Program in Newfoundland, the closing of parishes in the Lower St. Lawrence and Gaspé regions of Quebec, the “urban redevelopment” of Africville in Nova Scotia, and the fragmentation of Vancouver’s East Side were all part of a “larger, more encompassing project of improvement rather than as ends in themselves” (p. 8). Through this methodological lens, Loo signifies relocation as the perfect framing device to elucidate the state’s paradoxical proposition—to better the lives of Canadian citizens, they must first evict them from their homes. Indeed, this points to another interesting perspective explained by Loo; namely, that forced relocation was only one part of a two-pronged program to enhance the quality of life for all Canadians. The second stage of state strategy consisted of what Loo refers to as “community development.” This emphasis implicitly suggests that both government agents and academic experts believed that a “culture of poverty” prevented the poor from organizing beyond their kinship networks, and, even more troubling, hindered their “integration … in the major institutions of larger society” (p. 17). In effect, the poor contributed little to civic society and did not possess a civic culture. Drawing on the Foucauldian concepts of discipline and governmentality, Loo argues that the Canadian government acted to politicize citizens during the process of forced relocation, encouraging them to become an integral and participatory part of the process. Indeed, “rather than being animated by outside investment or connections to markets [community development] proceeded on the assumption that changing the lives of the poor had to begin from the inside out—that is, it had to be grounded in the human resources in each of its settlements” (p. 50). In essence, Loo shows how the state utilized both relocation and community development to empower citizens to “run their own affairs”; at the same time, the state was “cultivating particular subjectivities and shaping relationships among people and between people” to allow for the state to extend its auspices and rule from a distance (p. 90). Awareness of this two-pronged approach is powerful. Homing in on the paradoxical nature of many state initiatives, Loo reveals how the outcome the state envisioned is often altered by the role of experts and, equally so, by local autonomy. For example, the Fisheries Household Resettlement Program in Newfoundland began with the grand task of trying to centralize the coastal population of Newfoundland. Relocations began in 1965, but they began with a major obstacle—there was not a clear sense as to where to move Newfoundlanders. In an attempt to undercut protest, utilize local knowledge, and empower citizens, the Canadian state offered relocation on a voluntary basis. As a result, Newfoundlanders exploited this system by taking the federal reimbursement for relocating and sending in an application to “move down the road” (p. 72). In the end, the people participated in the state’s program of development and improvement, but they were doing so on their own terms. In essence...