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> Also, Canada -spread thinly across the vast distance of the 49th
> parallel - historically had need of a strong state to lay down its
> unifying infrastructure and provide other services, such as insurance
> for health care, which fell to the much more powerful bourgeoisie in
> the US.
It would be hard to argue that the cdn bourgeoisie was weak. More importantly however health care is a provincial responsibility and provincial elites including the doctors wanted nothing to do with universal health care. When socialists were elected in Sask they were faced with massive opposition from the capitalist class and the petite bourgeoisie. Had it not been for those god damned determined socialists in Saskatchewan health care would have never hit the national agenda. And when they (CCF) did bring it in they were faced with a massive doctors strike and they had to bring doctors in from all over the empire to break the doctors strike. Eventually the feds got into the game when (a) they saw how popular it was (b) and how popular it was making the socialists (CCF/NDP). So the key here is not the relative strength or weakness of the bourgeoisie but the dialectic of region, class, electoral politics and timing.
> Louis Hartz and others also thought the Tory culture of noblesse
> oblige inherited from Britain, which was typically counterposed by the
> empire loyalists to the "vulgar" capitalism to the south, helped to
> create a more propititious climate for social democracy in Canada, but
> I think this factor is exaggerated. I think the later arrival of
> socialist immigrants from Britain and Eastern Europe had more to do
> with it.
>
Yes, agreed. Although this would preserve Heart's fragment mechanism.
Consider that the US had more socialist immigrants from all of Europe
than Canada did.
> Otherwise, the Canadian labour movement resembled that of the US, sans
> the corrosive effect of racism and imperialism.
This is over simplified. The cdn labour movement was perhaps equally racist. Given the demographic composition of the cdn population it had more muted effects for labour.
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tfast