3 There is a great and long tradition in sociological thought of reflecting on the power of ideas to constrain and enable action, from Marx, Weber, Gramsci and Mannheim, to Foucauldian analyses of discourse, to “reflexive” analyses of the concepts and terms invented by the discipline itself.1 One of the key puzzles these varied works confront is how some ideas come to exercise disproportionate power and influence over social (including political and economic) life.

4 This is the puzzle at the heart of the work of sociologists Margaret Somers and Fred Block. As they put it: “Ideas matter. But equally important is that all ideas are not created equal. Only some ideas can exercise the causal power to undermine, dislodge, and replace a previously dominant ideational regime.”2 Drawing on the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, they argue that the strength of such “epistemically privileged” ideas is that they are held by people and institutions that have the power to make them true – for example, policymakers, lobbyists, and trusted subject experts. Accepting this argument, it is reasonable to assume that “a theory that has ‘the means of making itself true’ has an obvious advantage over a theory that lacks its own epistemological bootstraps.”3

5 Somers develops these insights into an approach she calls the “historical sociology of concept formation,” which is itself guided by a set of sociological concepts (which can have their formations analyzed, too, but not here!). The first is the “conceptual network,” which is defined as “a structured relational matrix of theoretical principles and conceptual assumptions.” Conceptual networks, and the individual concepts that make them up, are “always in a larger site of neighborhood, institution, authority, language” so “one conducts the analysis of the words in their sites in order to understand how we think and why we seem obliged to think in certain ways” and to make “the internal logic” of conceptual networks “visible.”4 Methodologically, this means tracing the births and lives of concepts and their networks – the theoretical principles and assumptions they seem to cluster with – in various kinds of texts.

6 The researcher undertaking such an analysis, as I do below, bears in mind that some conceptual networks “become [so] widely taken for granted in the political culture” that they help “[set] the parameters for what counts as worthwhile argument in social and political debates.” These “epistemically privileged” conceptual networks can become what Somers calls “ideational regimes” that “embed” other ideas, events, institutions, and issues.5

7 There are many approaches one could take to analyze ideas and their effects over time, from historical institutionalism to Critical Discourse Analysis to Foucauldian genealogy.6 Some approaches search for and critique the deep-seated “interests” served by particular ideas – Marxist and Gramscian analyses of ideology are prime examples – while others, notably those engaged in historiography or intellectual history, trace ideas more neutrally through the actors and networks that exchange them.7 This article makes use of Somers’s tools – conceptual networks, ideational regimes, and the phenomenon of embedding – because they are very good at drawing attention to the constraining power of ideas and the role this power plays in or against social and political economic change, leaving the (important) biography, political economy, and network-tracing for another time.8

8 In what follows, I argue that ACOA’s form and professed function reflect specifically a “productivist ideational regime” in which economic growth and increased productivity are presumed to be good in and of themselves (without needing any further justification) and productivity is elevated as the only means of improving living standards (even if it cannot guarantee them). I view productivism as an ideational regime instead of an ideology or an effect of hegemony in order to remain agnostic, at the outset, about productivism’s links to “deep social interests” or the false consciousness of those who do not detect and resist it every day.9 Detecting and exposing political interests is a strength in the “liberal revisionist” and “neo-Marxian” (aka Maritime political economy) scholarship that has appeared in Acadiensis over the last 40-plus years, and some products of this school of thought are considered below.10 But the present article attempts to depart from these extant analyses of ideas to question how an idea’s power can operate apart from the actions and intentions of specific individuals.

9 This is the purpose of seeing dominant ideas through the lens of ideational regimes: it is not to say that ideational regimes never privilege some interests or deny others, that they are detached from domination and subordination, or that they do not mystify social relations. They can and do exhibit these qualities. But as an analytical framework, the concept of ideational regimes makes the issues of interests, consciousness, domination, subordination, and mystification empirical matters.

10 Before examining ACOA’s relationship to the productivist ideational regime, the agency’s emergence must be situated as one event in a longer history of governmental strategies and techniques deployed to deal with regional inequality as well as the ideas that have underpinned those actions. Productivism itself must also be more robustly defined. Conveniently, but not coincidentally, the histories of regional development and of productivist thinking are intertwined. Productivism’s emergence and consolidation as a dominant ideational regime are visible in the increased frequency of terms like “growth” and “productivity” and the increased governmental use of measures like GDP; productivist thinking is why we pay attention to employment growth and export growth and become concerned when the numbers are small or negative. Productivism has been a dominant ideational regime in Canada, and much of the world, since around the Second World War, when the advent of national productivity statistics made it possible to track and compare productivity and growth on an ongoing basis and to use those measures as justification for all manner of policy.11

11 But the productivist ideational regime has also embedded other ideas over time, and thus with the exception of its foundational tenet – that growth is good – its character has changed. Here, I consider productivism’s reciprocal relationship with two interrelated shifts in the way regional disparities were spoken and written about – two discursive shifts, in other words – which are described next. The first is a shift from needs and rights toward opportunities, and the second is a shift from redistribution toward development. That the two shifts have occurred does not mean that the old ways are gone, just that they have ceded some of their power to explain and justify actions to the new ways. The concept and measurement of productivity, I will show, was central to advancing both shifts and giving the new ways of thinking the power to “make themselves true.”12

12 The analysis in this article begins with a brief history of regional inequality, and a consideration of two related policy techniques to deal with it: first, equalization payments, and second, the broader set of programs aimed at “regional development.” Extant historical accounts of Confederation, and the formation of Atlantic Canada over the century that followed, tend to agree that living conditions in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and (later) Newfoundland were consistently worse than the rest of Canada.13 After the “orthodox” staples thesis’s brief reign, new schools of “liberal revisionist” and “neo-Marxian” thought emerged to argue that it was primarily political arrangements and policies and not natural endowments of resources or work ethic that put the Maritimes at a disadvantage.14 Rather ironically, many of the harmful policies identified by these historians, including some of the terms of Confederation laid out in the British North America Act (BNAA), were originally introduced as means of addressing regional inequalities.15

13 Such disparities, while somewhat reduced since Confederation, have stubbornly resisted all manner of attempts to eliminate them. Twenty-five years after Confederation, the BNAA’s system of redistribution and subsidies had failed to bring the Maritime provinces close to the national average incomes, economic output, and employment.16 Then, from the First World War through the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even beyond the Second World War, the overall situation in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island worsened. Historians looking back on this period, dissatisfied with the social naturalism of Harold Innis and his contemporaries, asserted that the terms of Confederation, and the tariffs, subsidies, and transportation rates that developed over the subsequent few decades, rewarded the already-wealthy and already-powerful, further consolidating capital and political power in the “centre” of the country.17 No matter the explanation, no historian could deny that the Maritimes’ economies were struggling and that its people were suffering during the first half of the 20th century.

14 The magnitude of the inequality was revealed by the Rowell-Sirois Commission, struck in 1937 to investigate relations – mainly fiscal – between the dominion and its provinces. Its final report, issued in 1940, urged the federal government to acknowledge that the low tax base in some provinces “constrained [them] from providing the necessary level of services,” and to use its authority to transfer some money from richer provinces, via federal taxes, to the poorer provinces “to ensure that all Canadian citizens [had] a semblance of equality in health, education and other services provided by provincial governments.”18 Importantly for this article, the commission’s recommendations were not productivist. That is to say, they were not explicitly concerned with the economic growth or productivity of the receiving provinces. There is no expectation conveyed in the commission’s recommendations that well-being or equality depended on economic growth, nor did the commissioners seem to assume that the provinces’ economies or the national economy should or could grow continuously.

15 The Rowell-Sirois Commission’s report kicked off several decades in which the redistribution of wealth among the provinces on the basis of need, while not entirely uncontroversial, was a normal part of Canadian governance. In 1957, the St. Laurent government introduced the country’s first formal “equalization payments” program. The Rowell-Sirois Commission’s sole concern had been that the provinces be able to afford the social services and programs for which they were responsible, and the equalization scheme introduced in the Federal-Provincial Tax Sharing Arrangements bill spoke to the same concern. Aside from a few assurances that they did not amount to Soviet-style “centralization” in government, these ideas needed very little help to gain approval in the House of Commons. The recommendations and proposed legislative changes only needed to point to the need for “reasonably comparable public services” in order to underscore their importance.

16 Introducing the bill to the House of Commons, then-Finance Minister Walter E. Harris surmised that the task before the government was the “reconciliation . . . of the differing factors of economics, geography, race, custom and religion” across the Canadian provinces.19 This understanding of provincial wealth as inherent, even immutable, was voiced as well by Harris’s predecessor, Douglas Abbott, who once opined “No federal-provincial fiscal arrangement can alter the facts of geography or change the location of rich natural resources, but federal-provincial arrangements should be designed to moderate, rather than aggravate, these regional inequalities of wealth and resources.”20

17 But by the 1980s, although the right of the provinces to “sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation” had been enshrined in the 1982 constitution, the system was subject to attack from governments at all levels and from Canadian people, even those in the receiving provinces. Mirroring similar arguments against welfare to individuals, some argued against regional equalization on moral grounds by claiming that it was not fair for wealthier provinces to subsidize those that failed to thrive while others argued that regional transfers actually worsened inequality in the long run – a “parasitic thesis” representing the regional version of what Somers and Block call “the perversity thesis.”21 Even some Maritime and Atlantic politicians came to believe that equalization payments were a shameful handout that damaged the entrepreneurial spirit in their provinces: they were “the help that hurts.”22

18 The sentiment that the provinces need the additional fiscal transfers to compensate for uneven natural or historical endowments of wealth and industry has survived, and in 2005, when the public was apparently last surveyed for its opinions, equalization payments had the support of the wide majority of Canadian people; Ontario was the only province where more than 50 per cent of residents believed their province is unfairly burdened by the system.23 Yet the rights or needs-based articulation of equalization payments has been routinely countered by the idea that equalization creates parasitic and damaging interprovincial relationships, perpetuating inequality and holding all of the provinces back from their full economic potential. As one Conservative MP put it in the 1980s, equalization was appealing only to people who “don’t like success.”24

19 Outside the House of Commons, Canadian economists and political scientists added empirical weight to the parasitic thesis. In a symposium paper and a later article in the journal Canadian Public Policy, Thomas Courchene argued along similar lines that equalization transfers created dependency and “erode[d] individual initiative” in receiving provinces while urging their “rationalization.” His theory, and that of many other economists then and now, hinges on the idea that equalization transfers lead to an “inefficient household location” or “inefficient labour mobility.” In other words, people keep choosing to live in places with poor economic prospects because equalization transfers (and employment insurance) make such choices possible.25 The popularity of the parasitic thesis waxes and wanes, but it persists and continues to be invoked in policy disputes such as in a recent squabble between the Alberta and federal government over the Trans-Mountain pipeline.26

20 In the Constitution Act of 1982 the parasitic rendering of equalization gained some official ground, as the concept of equalization became firmly attached to economic growth, development, and productivity and entrenched in productivist logic. While the act continued to commit provinces to “providing essential public services of reasonable quality to all Canadians,” it foregrounded the objectives of “promoting equal opportunities” and “furthering the economic development to reduce disparity in opportunities” – as if a minimum standard of public services was not valuable enough without some prospect of it increasing provincial incomes.27 As Will Langford notes in this journal, the shift in emphasis from rights and needs to opportunity reflected, in part, the rising influence of modernization theory with its vision of “the world as a binary place comprised of developed and underdeveloped nations” and, increasingly, developed and underdeveloped regions “within countries.”28 These two concepts – opportunities and development – and their conceptual networks helped transform not only how equalization payments were couched in the constitution, but also changed regional development more broadly from a system articulated in terms of needs, rights, and redistribution to an “alphabet soup” of departments, agencies, and programs launched at Atlantic Canada to develop it, economically, and give it the power to “pull itself up by its own bootstraps.”29

21 Granted, the emphasis on development-as-response-to-opportunity did not come out of nowhere in 1980 to replace the older notion of redistribution-asresponse-to-rights/needs. As early as 1960, with the creation of the Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Act (ARDA), the federal government had begun to articulate the goal of regional equality in terms of “economic growth” and “development” insofar as the former needed to “be dispersed widely enough across Canada to bring employment and earning opportunities in the hitherto slow-growth regions as close to those in the rest of the country as proves to be possible without an unacceptable reduction in the rate of national growth.”30 While the preamble to the ARDA bill, finally assented in 1961, made mention of poverty and living standards, “the Legislation in itself was not designed to cope with this problem.” As James McCrocrie wrote, in a report to the Canadian Council on Rural Development in 1969:

22 A “parade” of acronyms followed ARDA in the realm of regional development, from the Atlantic Development Board (ADB) to the Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE) to the Department of Regional Industrial Expansion (DRIE) to ACOA as well as nearly a dozen in between – all of them built on the premise that only economic growth, and especially growth in productivity and employment (thought to go hand-in-hand), could bring about long-term improvements in living conditions.32 This foundational idea took time and an accumulation of evidence to solidify, and it was not until the late 1970s that it cohered around the concept of productivity specifically while requiring that productivity be monitored, measured, and evaluated as part of the development programs’ regular activities.

23 One possible impetus for narrowing the focus to productivity specifically was a 1977 report from the Economic Council of Canada (ECC) entitled Living Together: A Study of Regional Disparities; the ECC, it is worth noting, had emerged out of the rubble of the short-lived National Productivity Council just a few years earlier.33 In this report the ECC looked back on the history of regional development measures and concluded that most policies had done little to lessen interprovincial inequalities, save for some of the subsidies to firms. Looking to the future, it conceded that the principle of “equity demands that something should be done for the people living in [poor] areas” but ultimately prescribed the “common-sense” solution that “no long-term commitments should be made unless the area concerned is a complete province, because endless subsidization lies down that road.” Capturing a sentiment that continues to guide some regional development activity to this day, but would arguably never be articulated in such harsh terms, the commission wrote:

Living Together mobilized an array of statistics to argue that the most effective way to close the gap in regional incomes and living standards was to boost the economic productivity of the weakest provinces. The way to do that, they wrote, was by manipulating “the determinants of productivity”: “paying closer and more direct attention to educational disparities, by seeking out and closing technological gaps, and by nurturing a more economically efficient urban structure.” They offered over a dozen specific recommendations; the “first group” focused on “reducing regional differences in productivity levels” – “because productivity differences are the prime explanation of earned income differences” – and the second focused on reducing unemployment. All of the actions, they claimed, were “best taken by provincial ministers” but also that this left “some scope for action by private businessmen in the provinces.” In sum, they optimistically concluded: “Pulling oneself up by one’s own provincial bootstraps is more feasible than has hitherto been thought.” Each province even came equipped with its own pair of bootstraps: productivity was one, and aggregate demand was the other.35

24 Why did the ECC’s report make productivity so central to explaining and resolving regional economic disparities? What impact might it have had on regional economic governance? And how should we understand it – as nascent neoliberalism or as something else? Viewing the report as part of a burgeoning productivist ideational regime, it is evident that one simple condition for the regime’s emergence, so visible in Living Together and invoked in Courchene’s influential work, was the availability of labour force and productivity statistics. The collection of such data only began in earnest with the System of National Accounts (SNA) launched in the 1940s, which was refined and intensified through the 1960s due, in a large degree, to a 1961 recommendation of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics’s [DBS’s] Interdepartmental Committee on Productivity Statistics. In part out of a perceived need for detailed statistics of productivity and efficiency during the Second World War, by the 1960s the DBS was convinced that “knowledge about productivity [was] of prime importance” not only for the war, but also for the future of Canadian industries in general.36

25 The availability and authority of productivity statistics helped shift the understanding of regional disparities and how to deal with them away from concepts such as the historical distribution of various resources toward concepts that expressed how efficiently or productively provinces used their endowments. Instead of seeking to redress injustices of the past or mitigate power imbalances in interprovincial and intergovernmental relationships, the government (“ministers”) and wealthy parties (“businessmen”) who wished to hang on to their wealth could focus on helping weaker provinces work harder and do more with less.37 These ideas, importantly, are not neoliberal on their own. They went hand-in-hand with continued government intervention with redistributive aims, equalization transfers included. The ideas are productivist, but they do not inherently imply that government responses ought to conform to neoliberal principles of minimalism, individualism, and laissez-faire. This point will be returned to later.

26 For now, suffice it to say that a firmly entrenched productivism and a budding neoliberalism dominated the ideational context in which ACOA was born in 1987 – the same year the Department of Regional Industrial Expansion (DRIE) was disbanded. Unlike DRIE, which prioritized the establishment and development of specific industrial operations ahead of the broader development of entire regions (validated by the then-popular “growth poles” concept), ACOA (and parallel agencies established in other regions around the same time) was meant to have a more holistic approach by directing funding and other kinds of support to businesses across the region. In part, this new approach stemmed from an emerging consensus, informed by new economic and policy research, that most economic growth came from small and mid-sized businesses. Policy makers concluded that the “smokestack chasing” of DRIE and earlier bodies had failed, and would continue to fail, to incite economic growth and expand employment in depressed areas.38

27 Accordingly, ACOA was created in 1987 with a mandate to improve opportunities and a title that ensured this focus would not easily be abandoned. It was there to help small- and medium-sized businesses establish themselves through seed funding and general assistance with coordination, and to be an advocate for the region with the federal government. Media coverage of the agency’s founding, combined with the records of parliamentary debates, speaks volumes about the anxieties of the time and the ideational regime within which ACOA had to make sense and find legitimacy with the population. Many warned that allocating federal money in this way would create an unhealthy dependency on the part of receiving provinces – a rather curious worry, considering that similar bodies were established in Ontario, Quebec, and the Prairies around the same time. Even among Atlantic Canadians, their media, and their MPs, there was a deep, related worry that ACOA would hand out money, left, right, and centre and become a drain on federal tax revenue. Moreover, there were predictions that the agency would become one more ballooning bureaucracy being strangled by its own red tape. It is in these mounting anxieties and burgeoning narratives that we can see the growing persuasion of neoliberal thinking, and a distinctly neoliberal variant of productivism taking shape.

28 The Mulroney government sought to pre-empt the public’s worries immediately. In the official announcement of ACOA’s establishment, it assured Canadians that the agency would not receive any new funding but would “work towards a more effective use of the generous funds already set aside for the development of the Atlantic Region.” It would spearhead “the development of businesses rather than the uncontrolled growth of the public sector” by “eliminat[ing] obstacles that stand in the way of private-sector growth” and “strengthen[ing] our competitiveness by lightening the burden of red tape and regulation.”39

29 Still, by early 1988, the regional newspapers would surmise that ACOA looked “like a cumbersome bureaucracy – 189 employees already and counting towards 380.” As the Halifax Chronicle-Herald concluded: “All that can be said definitively about ACOA today is that its wheels grind slowly.”40 Later that year, debate broke out in the House of Commons over a proposed amendment to the Government Organization Act delimiting ACOA’s mandate and institutional structure. Jack Harris, a New Democrat (NDP) MP from Newfoundland, proposed that the description of ACOA’s role should include, among its objectives, “reduc[ing] the economic disparity between Atlantic Canada and other regions of Canada.” Addressing the House, he said:

Ultimately, Harris’s motion was defeated. Most MPs, including many from the Atlantic Provinces, disagreed with putting regional inequality so front-and-centre. They were quite satisfied with the original wording, which merely committed ACOA to “support and promote opportunity for economic development of Atlantic Canada, with particular emphasis on small and medium-sized enterprises.”42 Denis Cochrane, an MP from Moncton, New Brunswick, expressed the views of this majority as follows:

Moreover, he said, “we do not want to entitle a certain region or a certain province to a given amount of money under this program. Rather, we want all Atlantic Canadians to have the opportunity to chase after every economic opportunity that presents itself.” Conservative MPs added to Cochrane’s points, the most bombastic among them being Minister of International Trade John Crosbie, whose remarks, though increasingly hyperbolic, are only a slight exaggeration of the assumptions underlying the rejection of Harris’s amendment. He began by reinforcing the primacy of “opportunities” in the new agency’s mandate: “If the people are more alert, more on the ball, more active and have more initiative in Nova Scotia, PEI, New Brunswick or Newfoundland than in the other places,” he proposed, “then they deserve to have a response to their initiatives.” In his view, ACOA was meant “to give entrepreneurs, risk-takers and those who have initiative a chance to move ahead.” He closed with this dramatic dismissal of the NDP motion:

Crosbie did not need to be so shrill. His vision of ACOA – as a reward system for those who “dare to try” rather than a delivery system for “welfare” – was already the accepted vision for the new agency, and it would remain so.45 This foundational and lasting commitment to opportunities and individual enterprise is important. It signals a movement beyond (but building on) the productivist emphasis on growth as a foundation for better living standards and towards a decidedly neoliberal insistence that governments should only create the conditions or opportunities for growth – and should not interfere directly in living standards, incomes, or any other aspect of a population’s well-being. Granted, interventions of all kinds have endured, but they are typically cast in a new language of opportunities, productivity, and development. The story of how the productivity concept and its statistical measurement became central to this narrowing mandate discourse adds an additional layer to the history of ideas underpinning ACOA’s role and actions.

30 Donald Savoie, a Canadian scholar of public administration and frequent advisor to federal and provincial governments, wrote the 1987 report that effectively led to ACOA’s creation. At the request of Prime Minister Mulroney, Savoie “had discussions” with business people, academics, political leaders, policy makers, and ordinary Canadians about how Atlantic Canada could grow its economy and improve standards of living for its population. He claimed to have found, through this methodology, “a deeply felt desire to break away from dependency on government,” and wide recognition “that the dependency syndrome offers little prospect for improving economic opportunities, particularly for the new generation.”46

31 He was careful to distinguish his focus in the report – regional economic development – from the equalization question of “regional equity in public services and income,” arguing that the two had “become confused and it is important to separate them in our thinking and to keep them apart.” According to Savoie, equalization payments had largely taken care of the service equity issue. With that matter settled, attention had to turn to “creating, developing and strengthening the private sector.” Atlantic Canada would have to eschew the “smokestack chasing” of earlier initiatives and focus on “developing new endogenous companies, enhancing existing business, developing new products, and expanding into new national and international markets.”47

32 All of Savoie’s specific recommendations about mandate revolve around this commitment to business development. Savoie’s sights, and the agency’s in turn, were set on establishing businesses – small businesses, to be precise. Informed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Birch’s 1979 essay, “The Job Generation Process,”48 Savoie and most governments of his day were convinced that small- and medium-sized enterprises (or SMEs), not big corporations, were the biggest job creators. Accordingly, economic development efforts turned toward the problem of getting small businesses up and running, encouraging people to be entrepreneurs, and lifting some of the bureaucratic and financial burden on those who dared to start a small business. Although Savoie urged that ACOA should take a “long-term view,” and made some recommendations about the need for “innovation” and “human resources development,” there was very little in his vision for ACOA that dealt with the sustainability or even the performance of businesses. It was enough to simply get more of them going,49 to get Atlantic Canadians to seize on the available opportunities for business. None of Savoie’s recommendations concerned increased productivity.

33 The act establishing ACOA created an agency that mirrored Savoie’s vision; its object was “to support and promote opportunity for economic development of Atlantic Canada.” It was to focus on “small and medium-sized” businesses, developing “entrepreneurial talent,” and enhancing “economic prosperity” in the region. The original act, like the version in force as of 2015, does not include the word productivity, although it does make two references to “productive employment” in its delineation of ministerial responsibilities.50 Even in the parliamentary records from 1986-1990, although there are many mentions of productivity and many exchanges about ACOA, there is only one discussion that suggests that it is ACOA’s responsibility to improve productivity in the region.51 In October 1989, an MP reporting to the House of Commons quoted Prime Minister Brian Mulroney as saying the following about the agency:

34 Yet, in its first one-year report to Parliament, covering 1989-1990, the agency did not mention productivity at all. A section on “Catching the Wave of Global Trade” presaged a shift toward trade and “competitiveness” that would fully take hold nearly 20 years later, but the emphasis was overwhelmingly on helping to “get the Atlantic Region’s new pioneers into business.” The minister’s introductory letter reiterated ACOA’s commitment to small businesses and entrepreneurs, especially new start-ups, which it helped in “developing management and marketing skills.” This commitment to business start-up was all-encompassing: “Everything that ACOA has done and will continue to do,” according to Mulroney, was about “renew[ing] the ‘Atlantic Entrepreneurial spirit’.”53

35 In 1991, perhaps spurred by the new decade, perhaps by the “severe recession” that had set in around 1990, the agency (and outsiders looking in) began to reflect on its achievements to date.54 Long-serving Senator Alasdair B. Graham, originally from Cape Breton, asked for a list of ACOA’s major accomplishments in June 1991. Graham, whose collection at Library and Archives Canada is also the primary holding of ACOA’s records, saved the document he received in response. In it, there is nothing at all about productivity, either in the list of agency objectives or the accounting of its achievements. There are only job numbers and qualitative reports about increased support for entrepreneurs, procurement of federal contracts, and “strengthening the environment for business growth.”55

36 That same year, Savoie, who had remained central to the agency throughout its first four years, wrote another report that reviewed ACOA’s efforts to that date and made recommendations for the way forward. It appears that although it took some time, it was this 1991 report, entitled ACOA: Transition to Maturity, which thrust productivity into the agency’s official communications and its strategic plans and priorities – the latter of which were increasingly expected of government agencies through the 1990s and 2000s as a matter of greater accountability. Savoie remarked that although “solid progress has been made,” the “global economy” made ACOA’s tasks more complex as did “deindustrialization” and the concentration of “new technologies” in “high-growth areas.” Unfortunately, Atlantic Canada displayed a lack of innovation and the “lowest levels of technological intensity,” and it also had the lowest levels of economic output and growth. In Savoie’s view, which echoes that of the ECC in Living Together, if the region was “to be competitive” it had to meet the following “key challenges”: “the continuing decline in productivity in the region’s manufacturing and service industries,” “the quality of the labour force,” “the application of technological innovation,” and, echoing the politicians and pundits of decades past, the region’s dependency on the federal government.56

37 To help the region overcome these deficiencies, Savoie recommended that ACOA focus its energies on two key “themes.” The first was entrepreneurship, because “if the region is to prosper” it had to be Atlantic Canadians who would “provide the energy, the skills, and the imagination to conceive and organize economic activity.” But the second “overall theme” is slightly more important to the story building here: Savoie wrote that “ACOA should focus its efforts on making Atlantic Canada more competitive”:

The direct link between competitiveness and productivity made above would resurface many times in ACOA’s future communications and initiatives: being competitive is a matter of being as productive as or more productive than other regions and countries. The attractiveness of this proposition is that it seems easily quantifiable, even if beneath the surface many problems of comparability lurk. Savoie had a few ideas about how ACOA could help the provinces pursue a common goal of increased productivity: it could prioritize “promoting innovation and technology transfer, human resources development, increasing cooperation with the private sector and the universities, strengthening the region’s research and development capacity and even its infrastructure – notably transportation.” In sum, he suggested, productivity should be one of the main “themes [that] should form the basis of ACOA’s vision of how it would like to lead Atlantic Canada for the next several years.”58

38 Judging by ACOA’s report to Parliament in 1992, these recommendations were not swiftly adopted. According to John Crosbie, then the minister responsible, the agency’s primary objective was still helping small businesses and entrepreneurs in “developing and marketing innovative ideas.” Although the agency had undertaken “an intensive corporate planning exercise” and would have had access to Savoie’s report and recommendations for this purpose, the “seven strategic priorities” on which it settled did not include increasing “the region’s productivity levels” as Savoie suggested.59 When ACOA reported to Parliament in 1993 on its activities over the previous five years, the agency still devoted only scant attention to productivity. It re-committed itself to a definition of equity as “meaning equality of opportunity,” and again stated its mission was “to foster, in a strategic partnership with the people of Atlantic Canada, the long-term economic development of the region through the renewal of the Atlantic entrepreneurial spirit.” This time, however, it began to place more emphasis on the influence and role of the federal government. And it was in pointing to national economic priorities that the agency first made productivity an explicit piece of its objectives. Its “strategic priorities,” it explained, were “shaped by national priorities and by annual consultations with Atlantic Canadians.” As such, they had been “refined through the years to reflect the Agency’s mandate and the national concerns of increased productivity and competitiveness in the global marketplace.”60

39 At the end of the next five-year period, in 1998, productivity was still peripheral to the agency’s understanding of its mandate, but Minister John Manley’s introductory letter points to an increased emphasis on competitiveness – or ensuring “that the resources which facilitate and accelerate competitiveness are available to everyone, everywhere” and “respond[ing] to the myth that Atlantic Canada is not a competitive location for investments.” Productivity makes an appearance in this report only in the context of one (new) strategic priority: “Business Management Practices.” The agency was convinced that “enhancing management skills in SMEs leads to an increase in survival, growth and productivity.” They took extant evidence that “Atlantic Canada ranked poorly against benchmarks for management efficiency” as an explanation for why “the region’s SME survival rate is lower than the national average.”61 This focus reflects the long legacy of the human relations and management schools – the academic and business schools of thought, tracing back to Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo, that hinged productivity on proper management – but it also represents a delayed uptake of an idea that was already gaining traction 16 years earlier in Canada in the ECC’s Living Together.

40 By ACOA’s 2003 report, productivity was running through almost every strategic priority area and in the very first paragraph of Minister Allan Rock’s introduction:

Minister of State Gerry Byrne, who also provided an introductory letter, proclaimed: “Increasingly, in Atlantic Canada, the drivers of the region’s productivity and competitiveness are its ideas, talent and ingenuity” and went on to state “Atlantic Canada’s ability to compete in world markets now, more than ever, depends directly on its capacity to innovate productively.”62

41 Both ministers wove this newly explicit emphasis on productivity into the agency’s historical mission to foster entrepreneurship. Calling up the old association of productivity with prosperity, they praised ACOA for its commitment to new “trends,” such as “the growth of new, knowledge-rich industries,” and connected its activities in this realm to the federal government’s “Jobs and Growth Agenda” – an apparently unofficial agenda built around “improving Canada’s economic performance through greater productivity, increased international competitiveness, and enhanced trade and foreign direct investment.”63 Such pronouncements are typical of ACOA’s 21st-century vocabulary: productivity rarely appears in the agency’s communications without competitiveness, but it is almost never connected to living standards and the well-being of people in Atlantic Canada. Thus, the productivist ideational regime endures, but in a neoliberal form where growth is good, but not because it helps governments make life better for their citizens; it is good for individuals (and best left to develop “naturally” via market mechanisms) because without it, things would be so much worse.

42 If the ECC recommended a productivity-focused regional development scheme in 1977, and if the related shifts from needs, rights, and redistribution toward opportunities and development are visible in ACOA’s earliest mandates, what took so long for the productivity concept to find its place in the agency’s self-identity? The answer may shed some light on what it is, exactly, that the measurement and meaning of productivity “do” for economic discourse.

43 Interestingly, while productivist assumptions about economic growth were steadfast, the more specific productivity concept had actually receded in Canadian government discourse in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, before ACOA’s establishment. Living Together was, then, somewhat anachronistic. The ECC’s predecessor, the National Productivity Council (NPC), established in 1960 and collapsed in 1963, was tasked with figuring out how to improve national productivity on the assumption that greater productivity was the key to greater prosperity for all. But in the course of its many meetings, seminars, and commissioned reports, it had unearthed and failed to deflect some damaging and common perceptions of productivity – especially on the part of organized labour and academia but also on the part of some businesses and ordinary working people. Many in the NPC’s nationwide productivity conferences associated productivity with “speedup,” lower wages, and technological unemployment. This reaction was so widespread that the NPC’s members eventually came to the conclusion that their job was to combat negative perceptions of productivity and convince working people that productivity improvements were in their better interest – to get people “productivity-minded” as they put it.64 In the end, the NPC was dissolved and the Economic Council of Canada emerged to fulfill some of its mandate. But the ECC dropped the word “productivity” from its own mandate – a change that was not lost on those attending the seminars that continued under the new council.65

44 Their plan may well have worked. Looking at some of the speeches and other communications from the federal government over the 1998-2003 period, it is clear that, even beyond ACOA, productivity enjoyed a significant resurgence in Canadian governmentality in the late 1990s and that this was often in relation to economic competitiveness. Minister of Industry John Manley, for example, gave a speech in 1999 entitled “Putting People First: Productivity, Growth and Living Standards.” The understanding of productivity advanced therein reveals something very important for making sense of the way ACOA adopted productivity into its collection of priorities. Manley told his audience a familiar productivist tale: that “productivity – the measure of the efficiency with which people, capital, resources and ideas are combined – is the most important determinant of our standard of living.” But, like the NPC, Manley could not avoid the question of who would gain and who would lose from productivity improvements. He admitted this was a relevant thing to ask, but he pleaded for Canadians’ patience and trust.

To underscore the necessity of productivity improvements despite these risks to wages, work time, and work effort, Manley appealed to his audience’s insecurity and enmity. The country was now “in [a] fight for a share of the global economy”; its international “friends” were also its “competitors” in everything from tax regimes to intellectual property rights. Competing – and winning – would depend on establishing the best “conditions” for businesses to set up and make money.66 Again, the message, refined with talking points many attribute to neoliberal thinking, was that high productivity cannot guarantee jobs and income gains, but low productivity most certainly drives investors away, pushes existing businesses out, and leaves Canadians with no jobs and lower wages. Productivity had been transformed in political discourse, with the aid of the notion of competitiveness, from the guarantor of prosperity to its abductor – never reliably delivering prosperity but certainly taking it away.

45 Productivity’s growing association with competitiveness, and the absorption of this association into productivist arguments for economic growth, points to a developing governmental vision of the national economy that was – and still is – dangerous. ACOA’s evolving understanding of how productivity growth happens, and how it affects ordinary people’s lives, offers one example of the impact that productivism has had on public policy and governance.

46 In the first decade of the 21st century, ACOA continued to put productivity at the forefront of its agenda. In its five-year report covering 2003-2008, Minister Peter MacKay again emphasized the synergy between ACOA’s “work to develop a more innovative, productive and competitive regional economy” and the federal “government’s goal of a prosperous and united Canada.”67 But beyond this, his remarks, and the material that follows in the main report, hint at the importance of several increasingly prominent concepts structuring productivity’s role in regional economic development discourse.

47 At the forefront is the growth in “international competition from low-cost producers” and the importance of being competitive. The agency accepted “that globalization and the rise of the knowledge-based economy were pushing Atlantic Canada toward what economist Michael Porter and others called the new ‘paradigm of competitiveness’.”68 In this (not-so-new) new paradigm, “prosperity . . . would be based on productivity, rather than on labour or natural resources.” ACOA channelled these predictions into its business programs after 2003 “to focus less on support for the acquisition of capital assets and more on the assets associated with productivity – innovation, marketing, international trade and human resources development”; it is unclear how capital came to be understood as anything other than a factor of production and therefore productivity, but it is likely a conclusion unquestioningly taken from the “competitiveness paradigm” literature.69

48 Part of the impetus for change, according to the report, was that unemployment in Atlantic Canada had dropped to historic lows, outdating ACOA’s founding mandate of creating jobs and boosting employment. The agency ostensibly needed to shift its focus “from helping business to create employment to stimulating growth in productivity, competitiveness and earned income.” Accordingly, it reported that it was now focused on “fostering research and development, technology adoption, business skills development, and trade and investment.” It had also begun to try to reorient its activities toward the “factors that contribute to lower levels of productivity in Atlantic Canada (relative to the national economy)” – which at that time included “firms’ ability to innovate,” “R&D spending,” “business skills,” “international trade,” and technology adoption.70 Not coincidentally, it was in this 2008 report that ACOA first included charts measuring productivity alongside those depicting GDP, employment, income, and exports. It had also developed programs to help small businesses increase their productivity through the acquisition of labour-saving technology and the application of better human relations and management practices.

49 Thus, it appears that the agency circled its wagons to target low productivity and its causes over a decade after Savoie, its architect, urged it to do so, and over 30 years since the ECC chose productivity as the primary vehicle for reducing regional economic disparities. ACOA put productivity explicitly at the centre of several initiatives and strategic priorities and even in its stated mission. It did not try to cover up the shift or pass it off as a continuation of the same project in new terminology. As its spokespeople made clear in the 2008 report, “Although high-quality jobs will continue to be important to the economic security of individuals and families going forward, the focus of ACOA’s work will need to shift. . . . Thus, the agency will give increasing emphasis to growth in productivity, competitiveness, and earned incomes.”71

50 Fittingly, in 2015, the ACOA website lists “three strategic areas of activity,” which are obvious outgrowths of the change of direction from 2003-2008. Productivity is there in the first strategic area – “Enterprise Development” – which targets “improved growth and competitiveness of Atlantic enterprises with emphasis on those of small and medium size; and fostering the development of infrastructure leading to increased productivity, earned incomes and job creation.”72

51 Others looking at the same period of time and many of the agencies and policies covered here have found, rightfully, a story of the rise of neoliberalism. The argument against equalization building over the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s has been understood as a consequence of neoliberal thinking – or market fundamentalism – in Canada and across the world.73 Neoliberal governmentality and market fundamentalism prioritize entrepreneurialism, competition, freedom (especially for business), and laissez-faire economic policy (or, at least, the appearance thereof). They tout the market’s ultimate power to provide the necessities and perks of life to all who are willing to work for them. There is little room in neoliberal thought for the notion that provinces (or people) might be structurally disadvantaged and therefore deserving of structural support. Instead, the reigning view of social, political, and economic relations is that, so long as government does not meddle in economic affairs, provinces (and people), acting freely, competitively, and entrepreneurially, can prosper and, through their competition and prosperity, induce presumably boundless economic growth.74

52 Neoliberalism, thus described, provides a very good explanation for ACOA’s emergence and transformation, and it also helps explain what has happened to the discourses around regional disparity and development since the mid-20th century. But the Canadian experience with regional inequalities and the interventions (or non-interventions) designed to deal with those inequalities highlight two important things about neoliberalism that have yet to be examined in any great detail. The first, not explored in any detail here, is the discourse of opportunities. ACOA would be an insightful starting point, a “paradigmatic case” of the economic opportunities discourse emerging in the 1980s, and, because it has survived well into the second decade of the 21st century, offers insight into how that discourse has evolved through several major fluctuations in the Canadian and global economy.75

53 But pertinent to this article is a second point: the fact that much of what is pulled under the umbrella of neoliberalism is actually productivism, and the latter predates and enables the rise of neoliberal economic thought. In ACOA, we see an intersection of the two. The imperative of economic growth runs throughout the agency’s current mission and mandate, and, on the website – the organization’s public face – growth is noticeably unaccompanied by its one-time partner concepts of prosperity, well-being, quality of life, and national unity. There is nothing about regional equity either. It advances a perfect example of what Serge Latouche calls “growth for growth’s sake.”76 It has become, then, a productivist government agency.

54 But wherever it pairs growth for growth’s sake with laissez-faire ideas, enterprise, and individualism, it binds onto neoliberal discourse and becomes not just productivist but neoliberal as well. It has managed to shed old associations with such social goods as living standards and prosperity (or, at least, social understandings thereof) and even jobs, and strengthened its attachment to specific individual benefits, most prominently “earned incomes.” Unlike older, NPC-era versions of productivism that hinged social welfare on productivity growth, ACOA’s version de-emphasizes even social welfare and makes productivity either a good in itself or, at most, a condition for potential individual gain. If there are non-neoliberal variants of productivism, attacking neoliberalism – the strategy of many dissatisfied with the present state of inequalities and governmental responses thereto – may only be half the battle. What the history of thinking about regional inequality reveals about neoliberalism and productivism is important: it is possible to be productivist but not neoliberal, but it is probably impossible to be neoliberal without being productivist.77 If the Canadian people at some point decide to reject neoliberalism, they may still find themselves operating in a regime that elevates economic productivity and growth above other goals.