From the beginning, resource activities defined Canada’s global role. As Glen Norcliffe’s original and perceptive paper observes, John Cabot’s discovery of Newfoundland began a relentless, albeit uneven pattern of resource exploitation of Canada designed to serve the metropolitan markets of the world. This early European maritime contact supported small, vulnerable, and dispersed settlements on Canada’s eastern shores. As Innis (1930) documented, the eastwest extension of these maritime contacts, through the sinewy tentacles of the fur trade via rivers, lakes, and portage geographically defined the future Canada, and its relation to the rest of the world. The purpose of our paper is to fill out Cabot’s story, and more generally the issues of staples, environment and globalization, that are the focus of the first of Norcliffe’s sketches. In doing so, we do not intend to derogate the significance of his other four vignettes. To different degrees, they also enter our account, especially the continentalism associated with C.D. Howe. We emphasize staples for four reasons. They fundamentally and indelibly stamp Canada from its very beginning as a particular kind of European geographical invention, shaped by its historical relationship to Europe, and later by extension to the rest of the world. They are, if not the basis of the Canadian ur-narrative, at least the equivalent to golden threads that stitch together the different stories about this country (and here we depart from Norcliffe’s seeming belief that no one story is more important than another). They are the beginning point for one of the most distinctive theoretical contributions made to the social sciences by a Canadian, Harold Innis’s staples theory, which has provided a homegrown account of this country and its relationship to the rest of the world. Finally, they are the focus of our own substantive research interest, and in particular, the British Columbia forest industry, which we shall draw upon in this paper to provide illustrations. The paper is divided into two main parts. The first outlines the general relationship between staples and industrialization in Canada by drawing upon Innis’s work and that of later commentators. Two different models of resource development are discussed, entrepreneurial and plantation. An entrepreneurial model predicated upon small producers dominates early exploitation of resources in Canada. This emphasis changes from the 1920s, when increasingly larger firms (equivalent to the plantation system) become more prominent, until by the late 1940s, they dominate. Concomitantly, there are also shifts in Canada’s major international markets that then redefine the country’s global position. There is a move away from European links, particularly with Britain, towards continentalism, that is, a northsouth integration with the United States. While there are public policy initiatives that favour this move, and that Norcliffe discusses with respect to C. D. Howe, continentalism is also pushed forward by the increasing corporatization and US foreign ownership of Canada’s resource production under an economic regime known as Fordism. The paper’s second section takes the story of Canadian staples into the late 20th century where continentalism, and its associated resource Fordism, is re-jigged in the face of sys-