A historic piece of iron sits in the corner of my dad’s shop.
It was the original lathe at Clear Lake sawmills where my dad was a machinist for 25 years. Between that old “engine lathe” and the cast of characters who ran the Clear Lake machine and fabrication shop, it helped Clear Lake make a name for itself.
One of their claims to fame was being the first mill to get an operational hole-driller set up on the chain, a wily way around the softwood lumber tariffs. By drilling a hole in every stud for electrical wiring, the 2x4 became “value added” and was no longer subject to the softwood lumber limits. Truckload after truckload of pre-drilled studs left Clear Lake to circumnavigate the tariffs.
Not everybody thought it was so great.
Years later, at a graduate seminar I attended at SFU, one of the negotiators of the Softwood Lumber Agreement singled out those damned pre-drilled studs for pissing off the Americans and deep-sixing the agreement’s renewal back in 2001.
“Then some hillbillies up in Prince George came up with pre-drilled studs,” I remember him saying. Maybe he didn’t use the word "hillbilly," but it was something along those lines.
I couldn’t help but open my trap and brag about how that was my dad and his buddies who came up with the hole drilling contraption.
But sitting in the background of that story was that old lathe.
Built during the Second World War by the R. McDougall Company in Galt, Ontario, its production was in many ways the last gasp of Canadian manufacturing prowess.
From the late 19th century until the post-war era, Canada had tariffs and policies in place to ensure we had manufacturing capacity. And not just the ability to produce things, but the ability to produce the tools necessary for production — the machine tools.
Between the industrial hubs scattered throughout Ontario and Quebec, and even Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver, Canadian industry manufactured locomotives, heavy equipment, tractors, ships, and most importantly, the machines to make them.
The national policy that gave birth to what is now my dad’s lathe were borne out of what we are now experiencing: fear of the United States.
In the 19th century there was a lot of concern with American imperialism, there were violent border skirmishes even, and one of the hedges against American expansionism was ensuring Canada had domestic machine-tool capacity.
That industry, pushed along with demand from a massive railway network, laid the groundwork for the rapid expansion of Canadian manufacturing during the Second World War. Canada rose from a global backwater to the fourth-largest industrial producer amongst the allies, and probably seventh worldwide after Germany and Japan.
Borne out of that explosion of activity, rumour has it the old lathe took on a post-war life manufacturing desktop globes, back when we still made stuff like that in Canada. Later, it ended up at Clear Lake Sawmills.
Now, even that industrial legacy is fading behind us. Clear Lake and the many other small mills that drove Prince George’s prosperity have been torn down and shipped out. The R. McDougall Company, it goes without saying, has long since gone out of business.
Now I notice that Ireland has overtaken Canada in its manufacturing capacity.
Despite Pierre Pollievre trying to pin this on the Liberals, Canadian manufacturing has been in steady decline since we abandoned our nationalist economic policies at the end of the second world war. This accelerated under the Progressive Conservatives and Brian Mulroney’s Free Trade deal, a deal which, to their credit, the Liberals campaigned against in the 1988 election.
Now both parties are indistinguishable: both promise free trade, endless sums of money for port infrastructure, open borders to cheap offshore goods, and an unflinching commitment to turning Canada into a dumping ground for Chinese and other offshore manufacturers. They are equally in cahoots in their quest to turn Canada into an extraction zone of cheap minimally processed goods for the global manufacturing powers to exploit, whether that is raw logs, oil and gas, coal, or minerals.
The worst out of all these dead-end economic strategies has been oil and gas. Despite mixed signals in the last couple years, the massive growth of this sector- we are now the fourth-largest oil exporter in the world- has effectively turned Canada into a petro-state with a petro-dollar that has helped further undermine our manufacturing sector.
I don’t expect our oil and gas lobbyist/politicians or our oil and gas invested financial sector to say anything about this when they complain about the loss of manufacturing, but I’d encourage readers to learn about “Dutch Disease.”
Despite Mark Carney’s denials, that’s what Canada’s got. The growth of oil and gas lines up pretty closely with the quickening decline of manufacturing, and a lot of this has to do with the petro-dollar pricing out our value-added exporters.
Taking the path of least economic resistance has been our newfound national policy: buy cheap offshore products and sell off our resources for pennies on the dollar; do nothing to support domestic self-sufficiency and manufacturing and do everything for the entitled oil and gas elites.
But that old lathe in the corner of the shop tells me that’s not how we built this country.
We built it through manufacturing and self-sufficiency. We built it using our brains and our instinct for self-preservation and our desire to add value. We built things we could be proud of, not this flimsy sell-out economy we now have that exposes us to the whims of global uncertainty, the product of generations of clueless elites and selfish neoliberalism.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
