Book Review: Staying Connected: How MacDougall Family Traditions
Built a Business over 160 Years
Introduction
This is a book review of the book “Staying Connected: How MacDougall Family Traditions Built a Business over 160 Years” which is written by James Ferrabee and Michael St B. Harrison and published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2009. Its analysis will mainly expound on the theme “Entrepreneurship Labor Government Management Finance Industrial Capitalism”. The authors have dealt with capitalism development in America and Asia, how industrial growth in Canada developed in 1900 and improvement of it economy, the roles which are played by entrepreneurs and government in development of economy and Canadian labour movement history and its structure. It shall as well evaluate on business environment in Canada and how Canada is performing in international globalization and economy.
Canadian business sector is capitalist and has developed over the years. Such capitalistic economy emerged through management, professionals who were managing the economy and stakeholder’s economy in the development of the business sector. The extra national forces
Canadian Staples Economy and Industrial Growth to 1900 and since 1900
Originally, the staples thesis set out an export led model of economic growth and attempted to how regional natural resource endowments led to the autonomous demands for and dependence upon exports, their spreading effects (linkages) to the rest of the economy, and to technological changes. The Staples approach was developed primarily by Canadian economists and historians whose works are rooted firmly in the historical examination of the development of the Canadian economy. They describe the effects of this development on Canadian social and political life. The school derives its name from the emphasis on staples industries, which, following Gordon Bertram, are defined as those industries ‘based on agriculture and extractive resources, not requiring elaborate processing and finding a large portion of their market in international trade’ (1967, p. 75). Staples theorists view Canadian political economy as having been shaped by the export of successive staples over the course of Canadian history from the earliest colonial times to the modern era.
The staples approach has its origins in research into Canadian social, political, and economic history carried out in Canadian universities, roughly between 1920 and 1940, by members of what were then known as departments of political economy. The two most prominent scholars following this approach were Harold Innis and W.A. Mackintosh. But numerous other scholars during the same era arrived at similar conclusions regarding the significance of the resource industries and their impact on Canadian settlement (Fay, 1934). These included, most notably, Arthur Lower, a Queen’s University historian; S.A. Saunders, a Dalhousie University historian; and Donald G. Creighton, a University of Toronto historian, as well as others scattered across the country. Lower (1938) explored the origins and impact of the lumber industry on Canadian development, while Creighton (1937) adopted several staples tenets in developing his ‘Laurentian thesis’ of Canadian history (Berger, 1976). Saunders examined the development of the Maritime provinces using a staples framework
Capitalism, which would become the dominant philosophy for Canadian economic development, evolved from the economic activity of the colonial business elite. One of the most important manifestations of this ideology was the creation of an indigenous financial system. One of Canada’s first banks, the Canada Banking Company was founded in Montreal in 1792. This was followed by others including the Bank of Montreal, in 1817, the Bank of New Brunswick in 1820 and the Bank of Upper Canada in 1821. By 1886, 38 banks had been chartered. The pace of this financial activity was marked by the newly formed Government of Canada with the passing of the Bank Act in 1871. Insurance companies, including, Sun Life, 1865, Mutual Life, 1870, Confederation Life, 1871 and London Life, 1874, were also founded during these years. Markets for the exchange of investments came to Canada as well, with the establishment of the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1832, the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1861 and the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange in 1904. The repeal of the Corn Laws by the Parliament of Britain in 1846, terminated colonial trading preferences and marked the symbolic end of mercantilism in Canada while ushering in the new era of capitalism.
Climatic and topographical difficulties prevented Canada from undergoing a similar process of development, and the resulting dependence on staples exports, according to Innis, doomed Canada’s chances of developing a domestic industrial base. Reliance on staples exports necessitated increasingly large investments in building a transportation infrastructure. The heavy debt-servicing charges that such investments involved diverted funds away from other areas of the economy, including manufacturing.
The dependence on staples export also increasingly exposed the Canadian economy to the vagaries of international commodity markets, which tend to witness violent fluctuations as new capacity comes onstream in different countries, lowering world prices until world demand catches up with global supplies and prices rise accordingly. The ‘cumulative’ impact of all this, according to Innis, was that the Canadian economy became caught in what Mel Watkins (1963) would later call a ‘staples trap.’ This form of economic life
History of Canadian Labour Movement
Early unions, on the wharves of Halifax, Saint John and Quebec during the War of 1812, existed to profit from labour scarcity. Others, such as the Montreal shoemakers or the Toronto printers of the 1830’s, reflected the concern of skilled workers to protect their craft and status from being undermined. A persistent common factor was the creation of a benevolent fraternity against the disasters of unemployment, illness and a pauper’s funeral.
Yet, as many early labour historians indicate, the benefits of organization were reserved for the lucky and few.Before 1859, all the unions seem to have been purely local, except for the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), a British union that established its first Canadian branch in Montreal in 1853, a second in Hamilton in 1857, and two more (Toronto and Brantford) in 1858. But from 1859 on, Canadian unionism became steadily more
and more “international”; that is, more and more of its members belonged to unions with their headquarters and the bulk of their membership in another country. But there were also differences among some of these small Canadian unions. At no time were all Canadian trade unionists concerned with “bread-and-butter” or “business” unionism to the exclusion of an active interes n progressive social policies which would benefit the community as a whole, or of support for a political party which would give priority to such policies. Small as they were in the early days, Canadian unions were in the forefront of the battle for social benefits such as old age pensions and unemployment insurance. Between 1901 and 1913 workers were involved in 14 large strikes across Canada in which violence in some occurred. In 11 of those strikes, the militia or regular military forces were used. The law placed a higher priority on property rights and right of an employer to carry on operations without interference than it did on the rights of workers to organize for collective bargaining and to protect their jobs.
The history of the Canadian labour movement is a history of fragmentation. Anti-union employers, judicial interpretations, geographic realities, uneven regional development, union structures, ideological divisions, and the bi-national character of Canada all posed great obstacles for the development of an independent and cohesive union movement in Canada. In order to understand how the labour movement came to develop in Canada, one must first look at events which unfolded in the United States.
Although a number of small and scattered trade unions existed in pre-industrial Canada, they certainly did not constitute a labour movement. A movement could only emerge after workers had recognized their shared class interests and decided, as a class, to pursue common political and economic causes beyond the narrow confines of their workplaces. Thus, in Canada the emergence of a labour movement coincided with the arrival of the Knights of Labor in 1875. Founded in Philadelphia in 1869, the Knights of Labor, like other trade unions, worked to improve the wages and working conditions of their members, but the Knights also promoted politics and education as tools to transform society in the interests of the working class. The Knights were very successful at recruiting new members in Ontario and Quebec including both skilled and non-skilled workers and women as well. Bryan Palmer and Greg Kealey estimate that the Knights organized roughly 21,800 workers in Canada.[1] However, the impressive growth of the Knights of Labour was only matched by its equally precipitous decline. An economic downturn in the late 1880s combined with an internal political crisis over the direction of the organization led to its eventual demise in both Canada and the United States.[2] The Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, which the Knights helped to organize in 1886, would end up replacing the Knights as the dominant trade union central in Canada.
When it was first created, the TLC’s purpose was to unite both independent national unions and international unions affiliated to the American Federation of Labor and Knights of Labour. The main function of the Congress was to bring together these various unions on a yearly basis to discuss issues of common concern and, in turn, lobby governments to enact legislation to improve the lives of working people. The TLC was fiercely non-partisan and adopted a policy of neutrality in election campaigns. The TLC’s decision to eschew electoral politics was offset by the fact that the scarcity of skilled trades people gave both the AFL and TLC impressive economic strength during this period. Both organizations could effectively use their economic clout to achieve a measure of economic justice in the workplace without pressing for greater social and political transformations.

the analysis should reflect the following themes: Entrepreneurship Labor Government Management Finance Industrial Capitalism AND the following the topics when possible: -The Rise of Market Society in Europe and the British Industrial Revolutions -The Development of American Capitalism – -The Canadian Staples Economy and Industrial Growth to 1900 -The Modern Canadian Economy since 1900 -The Role of the Entrepreneur -The History of the Canadian Labour Movement -The Role of Government -Management Structures in Canadian Business History -The Development of the Canadian Financial Sector -Canadian Business and the Environment -Canadian Business in the International Economy and Globalization