THE GRASSROOTS STATE [DRAFT]

Joy Schnittker, McMaster University

Forthcoming, The Canadian State edited by Heather Whiteside and Stephen McBride, Fernwood

Publishing.

[DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE WITHOUT AUTHORS PERMISSION]

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 The term ‘grassroots state’ appears as an oxymoron: how can something be bottom-up

and top-down simultaneously? It therefore embodies a scalar tension, illustrating power

struggles centered on local and state actors’ governance strategies and efforts to enhance their

role and influence over decision-making.

The term ‘grassroots’ is often used to describe the scale of everyday experience.

However, scale in itself is not the focus of grassroots struggle; rather it is the means through

which interests, autonomy, rights, voice, and territories are protected (Hoogesterger and Verzijl

2015). It therefore implies a struggle over scales of decision-making, whereby everyday actors

seek to define their own goals and how to achieve them.

Following Marxian state theory, the term ‘state’ is understood as a relation in which

political institutions seek to maintain or create the conditions for profitable capital accumulation

and social harmony (Poulantzas 1976; Panitch 1977). Rejecting pluralist notions of the neutral

state, the relative autonomy of the state argues that there is some independence from direct class

control and economic determinants. The state is therefore a sight of class struggles and political

compromises (Albo and Jenson 1989).

The grassroots and the state interact through relations of scale. As Erik Swyngedouw

(1997) suggests, scale is better seen as a strategy and a way to achieve a particular end. The

strategic deployment of scale by the state can be used in pursuit of its own (capitalist) agenda,

and by extension, can shape the conditions of possibility for political action. This can create

forms of scalar fixity, portraying scales as stable and fixed which become sources of power that

organize social practices according to established hierarchies (MacKinnon 2010; Hoogesterger

and Verzijl 2015). In this way, the state may respond to scalar politics (read: grassroots

resistance) through the strategic deployment of scale.

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 The ‘grassroots state’ therefore describes a dialectical tension over the locus of decision-

making. Conceptually, it borrows from the scalar politics literature and seeks to capture how pre-

existing scalar structures within the state can build on or interact with existing and historically

structured arrangements and configurations of domination/subordination and inclusion/exclusion

(Brenner 2001; MacKinnon 2010). This implies that the negotiation between the grassroots and

the state tends to be inherently unequal. The state structures engagement with the grassroots in

ways that favours some groups over others, evidenced by prolonged divisions between rural and

urban, uneven development nationally, and intra-regional competition. In other words, local

agency is not eliminated by the state’s scalar structures but is indeed mediated through it.

It is important to recognize that capitalist societies are not homogenous in their patterns

of development, forms of economic activity, experiences, or even modes of production, meaning

that ‘spaces’ for grassroots politics vary greatly (Magnusson 1985). The grassroots is not

inherently democratic by virtue of its local scale. It must be understood as a contested terrain,

one in which both negative (xenophobic, racist) or positive (democratic, accountable) outcomes

can be produced (Purcell 2006). The success of grassroots strategies may differ based on

geographies of institutional power and structural inequalities. Nevertheless, the grassroots may

offer a particular opportunity for challenging existing governance strategies, cultivating

alternative economic, social, and political relations, and radically expanding the scope of

democratic enfranchisement (see Lefebvre 1996; Featherstone et al 2012). But this is not

guaranteed.

This chapter seeks to formulate a deeper understanding of the relationship between the

grassroots and the state in Canada. As such, it seeks to historically analyze the ways in which the

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grassroots have been constituted vis-à-vis the state through scalar structures, and how this

impacts the capacity for the grassroots to successfully engage in local decision-making.

The Historical Origins of Governing the Grassroots:

As Heather Whiteside (Ch 1) and Adam Barker (Ch 2) argue in earlier chapters, it is

difficult to understand the Canadian state without considering its colonial roots. Eighteenth and

nineteenth century British North America (BNA) is foregrounded by Indigenous genocide and

dispossession, seeking to replace forms of Indigenous self-determination with imposed colonial

sovereignty. As a result, Britain developed an extreme form of statist and centralist constitution,

by which colonial governors and their councils formed distinct colonial oligarchies and exercised

unchecked power within the colonies, protected by provisions of the royal constitutions (Isin

1992). Known as the Family Compact or Château Clique (Shortt 1907), colonial administrators,

the merchant capitalists and the seigneurs, and the Church largely dominated the unelected

legislative council across BNA, allowing the colonial state to remunerate those allied to the

Crown with access to land through charters (see Ch 1) and treaties (Ch 2), as well as finance (see

Ch 9), and thus power.

The existence of centralized colonial authority does not negate efforts towards grassroots

autonomy in BNA. In Lower Canada, for instance, the parish represented more than a unit of

obligation, but a unit of local self-management. Government administration, particularly in the

countryside, was weak, inequitable, and capricious. Appointed, albeit unpaid and independent,

magistrates and the militia system were the few channels to which the government asserted

obedience. Yet, their location within parishes meant that local communities reserved for

themselves the right to decide which authorities were legitimate and how their powers could be

used locally. Appropriating colonial administration through local traditions such as maypole

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ceremonies ensured that officers would be true representatives of the local community (Greer

1993). The inability of local folk to access elite state power did not mean they were politically

passive or under the thumb of external authority, as much historiography contends. This

revealed a tension between centralized authority and potential local autonomy.

Indeed, British sovereignty was not absolute, as the democratic challenges of the 1830s

reveal. Democratic movements emerged across present-day Canada, from popular-democratic

militancy across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and the securing of representative government

in Newfoundland (Ryerson 1968) to the Escheats party’s mobilization of tenant farmers on

Prince Edward Island (Bitterman 2006) and the more widely known Rebellion of 1837-8 in

Upper and Lower Canada. In the case of the latter, BNA radicals emerged as a movement during

the 1820s, rallying against the colonial oligarchy. Their grievances centered around condemning

large-scale enterprises such as the British American Land Company and chartered banks such as

the Bank of Upper Canada. The Patriots of Lower Canada and Upper Canadian radicals criticized

these institutions as wielding significant power under government sanction, which posed a threat

to the autonomy and sovereignty of both the legislature and the electorate (Greer, 1993). In

Lower Canada particularly (and to a lesser extent, Upper Canada), reformers echoed the

sentiments of Tom Paine and embraced the revolutionary notion that legitimate sovereignty

stems from the consent of the governed while rejecting the legitimacy of claims based on

conquest and dynastic rights. While internally incoherent and heterogeneous i, reform parties

presented a democratic reading of the existing constitution, critiquing power and colonial

subordination while advocating for an elected Legislative Council (Greer 1999). By the 1830s,

extra-parliamentary pressure was viewed as indispensable, and the radical’s commitment to the

ideals of democracy and of republican citizenship drove them in the direction of mobilizing the

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people. Radical leaders and the press continued to inspire peasants to see the struggle (including

generational anxiety over land and unfair seigneurial rents in Lower Canada) in larger than local

terms, united under a common anti-imperial cause (Greer 1993).

By 1837, the legislative business in Lower Canada ground to a halt, and while it

remained superficially normal in Upper Canada, legitimacy of the Assembly dwindled. Political

gridlock eventually compelled the colonial administration to intervene, allowing the colonial

governor to bypass Assembly approval, and eventually outlawing ‘seditious assemblies’ and

dismissing ‘disloyal’ magistrates and militia officers. In response, large sections of the rural

District of Montreal set up their own revolutionized local regimes, drawing on the cultural

traditions and political experience of rural habitants. Their existence challenged the sovereignty

of the colony’s government, presenting a rival claim to legitimate authority (Greer 1993, 1999).

While the Rebellions eventually ended in British triumph, its challenge to existing order and

extraordinary measures taken by the British to preserve rule (ranging from military assaults,

martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus, and mass arrests) demonstrates its historical

significance (Greer 1995). Indeed, the rebellions of Upper and Lower Canada demonstrated that

retaining central authority without diffusion of that authority has disastrous consequences (Isin

1992). The crisis of sovereignty emerging from the political consciousness of the masses

required a fundamental reconstitution of the British colonial regime. As a result, the potential of

collective agency in conflict with centralized authority required new forms of state governance to

be introduced to contain the tension.

The rebellions can therefore be partially explained by ideological considerations: the

conflict grew around two irreconcilable visions of the ideal society and the legitimate state.

Under the republican rhetoric of liberty, they transformed a practical problem – the best

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mechanism for preserving harmony between the legislative and executive branches of

government – into a political problem concerning the legitimacy of the colonial constitution

(Ducharme and Feldstein 2014). As a response to the Rebellions, Lord Durham’s Report on the

Affairs of British North America (1839) recommended the legislative union of Upper and Lower

Canada (undermining an otherwise French-Canadian majority in Lower Canada and maintaining

their political inferiority in the new Union), the implementation of responsible government

(placing executive under legislative control), and the creation of a system of municipal

institutions (elected by taxpayers; Morissette 2019).

Forming the Foundations of the Canadian State

As authors such as Ian McKay (2009) argue, from the 1840s onwards the liberal-state-as-

project emerged in British North America. The framework – constituting the formal equality of

adult male individuals before the law, the liberty of some individuals to certain carefully

delimited rights and freedoms, and their freedom to acquire and defend private property – tended

to shape the state and civil society according to the principles of liberal order. Colonial reform in

British North America would be a means of reconciling liberal values with ‘imperium’, bringing

together elements of self-government with imperial control of foreign relations, trade, and

disposal of public lands. For political economists such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield, placing a

sufficient price on land (read: enclosure) would compel settlers to become a labouring class and

work on someone else’s land for wages, thus creating profit and rent for the owners. Social

conflict could be deferred as those whose labour is rendered a commodity are given the prospect

that they could become landowners (Piterberg and Veracini 2015). This would be further

sustained by strong private property rights, converting land from a form of subsistence to a

commodity, and would work to socialize and educate the working class to seek to generate

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surpluses and render them subservient to the priorities of capital (Ince 2018). Wakefield’s

society was not so much aristocratic as bourgeois. He believed it was necessary for the political

structure to be supported by economic development.

Municipal authorities stood at the centre of this process of transformation in Canada,

representing the fundamental link between the state and the grassroots. According to British

officials such as Lord Durham and Lord Sydenham, by instituting a framework for managing

day-to-day issues (from construction and maintenance of streets, establishment, and upkeep of

police forces, water distribution, schools etc.), municipalities would therefore protect the

political system against the adverse effects of administrative centralization, by instilling in

citizens a sense of attachment to the political entities associated with their freedom and franchise

(Morissette 2019). By embedding property relations in the state, socioeconomic relations and

differences in social groups (class, sex, race) are transformed into legal relations of supposedly

individual, equal, or identical citizens (Duncan and Goodwin 1982). Echoing Wakefield, Durham

viewed land resources under proper management as fostering rapid and efficient economic

development in the colonies. Thus, to preserve the public property for the most effectual

attainment of a greater public purpose, the state needed to reconsider questions of land

management and property rights in the colonies (Lucas 1912: 203-9). The proposed solution to

rebellion was a new form of government that encourages citizens in the acquisition of property,

as it is chiefly the individual’s hopes of acquiring property to improve their prospects that ground

their bond to a nation and obedience to the law.

As incorporated entities, municipalities were to run like a company. Rate-paying

residents and property owners were its shareholders, its key constituents petitioning to improve

infrastructure and regulate the space through bylaws. Municipalities represented ordered, settled,

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and increasingly industrialized formations instituted through a bureaucratized colonial order

(Edmonds 2010). As the power to raise money within municipalities came from property taxes

(Stokes 2018), it was essential for municipalities to (a) ensure the protection of property rights,

and (b) maximize the attractiveness of land in each municipality to draw people and businesses

in. Municipal corporations were responsible for the roads and streets, clean water, draining the

land, disposing of sewage and waste, creating new systems of public transport, cleaning and

lighting the streets, installing parks and pavements, making room for railways, and providing

gas, electricity, and telecommunications (Magnusson 1986; Ducharme and Feldstein 2014). Most

of these features were new, and by extension, essential to the creation and development of an

industrial economy.

Most industrial policy instruments that municipalities were able to deploy pertain to land:

municipalities can purchase or expropriate land suitable for industrial uses to assist businesses

with site assembly needs and enhance the attractiveness of industrial land through the provision

of physical infrastructure and services (sewers, water mains, roads, railways) to provide access to

transportation networks; and encourage investment by providing regulatory accommodations

such as easing of zoning regulations. To compensate for locational disadvantages, municipalities

would play a more direct role in industrial development through economic inducements to

industry (such as railways), including the guarantee of bond issue, property tax exemption, and

direct grants of cash, land, and even water (Cobban 2013). In this way, as Reg Whitaker (1977)

has previously argued, the state offered an instrumentality for facilitating capital accumulation in

private hands, carrying out the construction of a vitally necessary infrastructure, providing the

coercive framework of public order and enforcement of contract, and reinforcing the legitimacy

of unlimited appropriation in a small number of private hands.

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 Many scholars portray the development of local government and ‘responsible

government’ by Sydenham and Baldwin as the culmination of the long struggle for ‘home rule’ at

the local level (Shortt 1907), about power passing to the citizenry and thus the arrival of

democracy in Canada (Saul 2010). However, the changes made post-rebellion were not intended

to produce greater democracy. Indeed, as Pilon (2017) highlights, the real objective was to alter

the way that patronage was distributed and allow greater representation for the emerging wealthy

merchant and industrial class, not the masses. Indicative of McKay’s (2009) Canada-as-project

framework, post-rebellion reforms such as responsible government and elected representatives in

municipal bodies sought to extend voting and legal rights primarily to property owners (see also

Isin 1992; Schrauwers 2021). As Brenna Bhandar (2018) argues, being an owner and having the

capacity to appropriate have long been considered prerequisites for attaining the status of the

proper subject of modern law, a fully individuated citizen-subject. This required the

marginalisation (French-Canadian society) or outright elimination (Aboriginal-kin ordered

societies) of pre-existing formations and imposing on it an order of liberty, equality, and property

predicated on possessive individualism (McKay 2009). The development of municipal

institutions does represent an achievement in class conflict over access to political power.

However, through the strategic deployment of scale, the ‘local’ scale is used as a means to

subordinate BNA subjects to colonial and capitalist demands while retaining some semblance of

popular control.

Post-rebellion reforms were therefore used as a strategy to restore British power, pacify

subaltern democratic movements (Greer 1993), and preserve property and traditional authority

from mass democracy (McKay 2009). Thus, the industrial capitalism emerging in the mid

nineteenth century led to the crystallization of a new – more legitimate - ruling cast, replacing

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colonial oligarchies with industrial bourgeoisie. Financial power inherited the privileged

position of the Family Compact, with significant degrees of intermarriage between the older

aristocratic and commercial class and the new industrial class. These would be the real “fathers”

of Confederation (Ryerson 1973: Ch 13). This period primed the relationship between the

grassroots and the state in Canada. Decidedly anti-democratic and highly centralized, popular

ratification of Confederation was diligently avoided in favour of the new elites, who, together

formed the national interest (Whitaker, 1977). The British North America Act (1867) embedded

the political convention of centralized authority, and by extension, bestowed the local scale a

legally and practically weak level of decision making and no constitutional standing. In the

wake of mass rebellion, municipalities were formulated as ‘creatures of the province’.

The Fingerprints of the Past on 20th Century Canadian Experience

By locating the facilitation of industrial capitalism at the local scale, it substantially

changed the nature of social relations at the grassroots. The instruments awarded to

municipalities sought to harness the potential of industrial capital for growth purposes. Industrial

bonusing or promotionalism gave birth to a broader political culture which contributed to the

idea that certain capitalist activities could be viewed as ‘public goods’. The competitive

parochialism of community efforts to fund railways and industries was transformed into broad-

based political processes within a well-defined institutional framework (Nicol 2005). In essence,

industrial capitalism was fused to the practice of local government itself.

As an unintended consequence of the politics of scale, municipalities have been forced to

compete to attract industries through subsidies, labour costs, tax rates, and access to raw

materials (Nicol 2005). The unequal distribution of municipal finance as well as public

infrastructure therefore benefited some regions over others, creating inter-regional competition

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and uneven development nationally. The growth of capitalist enterprise because of this

boosterism has led to the concentration of capital, and thus power over both labour and the

municipality (Magnusson 1985). Industry’s important role as local economic beacons (especially

in single-industry communities) reinforced their institutional strength and patronage within the

community.

Far from being fixed, this understanding of the local scale was not uncontested.

Considerable grassroots resistance emerged from labour and agrarian radicals across Canada,

contesting their material circumstances under growing industrial capitalism and the liberal state.

For example, in more urban areas, the concentration of capitalist production and refusal to

recognize unions and bargain with workers drove retaliation in the form of worker strikes,

including the infamous Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. Crushed by the state’s monopoly on

violence, the strike ended in defeat, but its momentum carried on through a struggle for workers’

rights across Canada (Lester 2019). Labour unrest continued across sectors and geographies of

Canada in the interwar period, from the coalfields in Nova Scotia to unemployed workers in

Vancouver.

Across more rural regions, farmer discontent emerged in diametrical opposition to the

dominant culture of monopoly in economics (of railroads, grain companies, financial institutions,

and middlemen) and partyism in politics. The replacement of autonomous units of civic

association with medium-sized municipalities in the prairies in 1905 facilitated the development

of an agrarian radical political culture. The school of citizenship ii imagined a new agrarian

political culture, organized through locals of the Grain Growers Associations. Over 900 local

branches expanded throughout the West by 1910 and formed multiple centers of farmers’

dissident culture (McConkey 1990). While losing much of its radical edge, agrarian movements

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in the 1920s and 30s eventually produced parties such as Social Credit in Alberta and the

Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Saskatchewan, producing regional identities

that disrupted the traditional Liberal/Tory parties.

While indeed fragmented in terms of identities and goals, labour and agrarian unrest

threatened capitalist development in Canada significantly. State-sponsored violence to subdue

these tensions therefore demonstrates its capitalist intentions. Beyond threatening capitalist

development, much of this unrest also threatened the state’s strategic deployment of scale. In

some ways, grassroots political activism challenged the notion that localities are customarily

subordinate to both national and capitalist imperatives. Indeed, many of these grassroots

movements sought to challenge the locus of decision-making, seeking to relocate decision

making in the hands of those impacted. Regardless of their fragmented nature, the development

of regional or class-based identities threatened the imagined homogeneity and hierarchy of the

state.

Traditionally viewed as a political ‘compromise’, the Canadian state introduced reforms

to win the consent of the subordinate classes to the capitalist system (Mahon 1977). Pay-offs to

regions and classes through welfare programs were the “…price which capitalism was willing to

pay for the social and political peace which would allow accumulation to continue” (Whitaker

1977: 57). The reassertion of scale as a political strategy followed. At the municipal level,

administrative reforms were announced in the 1930s, introducing professionalization and

bureaucratization to reduce the size of municipal councils and transfer certain authority and

functions to boards of control/commissioners and independent or semi-autonomous agencies to

protect them from the whims of municipal politics. The modernization of administrative

structures did not alter the basic orientation of municipalities, but instead, the functions of

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fostering and regulating economic development were bureaucratized, routinized, and to a

considerable extent depoliticized (Magnusson 1983). Ostensibly, amid the expansion of suffrage

and growing grassroots activism, class relations could be transcended by bureaucratic relations

of the state form and remove important social transactions from the domain of electoral politics

(Duncan and Goodwin 1982). This divorces the ability of local state institutions from becoming

part of the local class conscious and popular movements.

The creation of the welfare state in Canada further altered the development of

municipalities. Given that it was difficult or constitutionally impossible for the federal

government to use municipalities as administrative agencies, the new welfare system developed

outside of the municipal framework (Magnusson 1983). Without dismissing the importance of

this achievement, the strategic scale of the welfare state reasserted traditional scalar

understandings of the locus of decision-making. Welfare decisions were largely removed from

communities and were to be awarded and redistributed by higher levels of government. This

endorsed an understanding of dependence on the centralized state while reinforcing the

traditional hierarchy of space. Following the rise of grassroots activism that underlined the

fluidity of space (and the interdependence of scales), the state reterritorialized both socially and

spatially to respond. The centralization of the welfare state effectively excluded concepts of

welfare and local development from public debate, ensuring that welfare was to be used to

facilitate, rather than challenge, capital accumulation. Canadian welfare therefore sought to

confront inequalities through redistribution rather than reshaping the economic processes that

cause the inequalities in the first place. This strategy coincides with Miliband’s (1969)

assessment that subcentral government is both an ‘instrument of central control and an obstacle

to it’ (49).

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 Welfare was therefore used to create a ‘Social Canadian’, distinct from the earlier subject

of the British Empire. Indeed, federal narratives of the Social Canadian did not merely ignore the

marginalisation of First Nations and the intensification of Quebec nationalism, but it was viewed

as a strategy to remedy these and other challenges to national unity (Brodie 2002). Latent

regional concerns became a target for the federal government, bringing regional economic

development concerns to centre stage. Major responsibility for promoting regional development

therefore resided with the federal government. National programs were implemented on a cost-

sharing basis with provinces (including fiscal transfers from urban to rural areas), designed to

address problems of rural poverty and regional disparity (Lapping and Fuller 1985). Agriculture

policy in the 1950s and 1960s was oriented at increasing the productivity and efficiency of

agriculture, encouraging mechanization and the growth in the size of farms, developing water

and soil resources, and setting up projects designed to benefit people engaged in natural-resource

industries other than agriculture (Savoie 2003). Commercializing agriculture has led to a decline

in jobs in the farming sector and the concentration of resources among fewer individuals and

firms, rather than targeting rural poverty.

The Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE) was established in 1969

combining multiple initiatives and consolidating decision making in Ottawa. DREE altered

existing programmes by shifting the emphasis from supporting weak industries in poor regions to

supporting stronger sectors with more growth potential. This significantly expanded eligibility to

the industrial incentive program from 18 per cent to 50 per cent of the Canadian population. As a

result, prosperity was to trickle down from urban or industrial growth centres to rural regions

(Fairbairn 1998). Rural development policy was therefore awarded to new entities without an

avowed rural constituency or mandate. Federal policy thus treated many rural areas as residual

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places, not only furthering unequal development but maintaining an urban bias (Lapping and

Fuller 1985). The postwar compromise therefore included a spatial project of attempting to

incorporate local development into national systems of integration and delivery. The crude

dichotomization of urban/modern and rural/backward had serious implications on grassroots

resistance as the opportunity for inter-municipal competition is enhanced, reinforcing exclusive

identities of the haves and have nots. This serves to rearticulate the understanding that scale is

hierarchal (with the urban now above the rural), casting aside how scales are interrelated and

imbued with unequal power relations.

In other words, the scaling of welfare at the federal level worked to appeal to national

identity to hold diverse and unequal polities together and maintain allegiance and social control

(Castells 1997). However, efforts to preserve social cohesion did not tackle the inherent

inequalities themselves. By virtue of the historical power of capitalists in Canada, welfare

redistribution did not occur alongside meaningful regional development or participation. Rather

than enhance social solidarity, favouring urban over rural areas or the Canadian identity over

Indigenous or Francophone identities serves to fracture horizontal relationships across the local

scale. As such, important actors are effectively left out of key decision-making opportunities by

design.

State rescaling emerged once again by the 1980s alongside, and in response to, the

strengthening of an organized alliance of monopoly capital and its growing influence in

policymaking circles in the federal government (Schnittker 2023). In the new neoliberal era,

efforts to cut government waste and provide tax relief congealed into a greater attitude toward a

less interventionist government and laissez-faire market liberalism. The rise of neoliberalism in

Canada contained a new redesigning of the political geography of the capitalist state. The

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privileging of the national scale as a site of regulation, economic management, and political

struggle under Keynesian-welfarism was replaced with a neoliberal preoccupation with

privatized localism and global deregulation (Peck 2002). The neoliberal state rescaling project

involved the federal government devolving key responsibilities (such as welfare) to provinces,

who in turn began downloading service provisions and responsibilities to municipal

governments. However, without the corresponding authority or fiscal capacity, municipalities

have marketized or privatized these services. Under the auspices of enhancing community

control and management over key services, service provisioning has been opened to multiple

actors presumed to be local in some way or another (communities, public service professionals,

social enterprises, individuals, and so on). The community becomes the crutch of the neoliberal

programmes of welfare state retrenchment.

The shift from universality to entitlements-based welfare has sought to enhance the self-

regulatory capacities of individuals to liberate individuals from dependence on the state

(McKeen and Porter 2003). The devolution of responsibility has not only resulted in a

downscaled welfare system, but the logic of the system was transformed (Peck 2002). Welfare

was rationalised as individual employability, which simultaneously required deregulation of the

market to make space for an enlarged private sector to capture transnational capital mobility. To

increase jobs and investments, provincial governments have encouraged municipalities to

become more innovative and entrepreneurial by pursuing ‘risk taking’ activities to support

growth and development. As such, local economic development seeks to cultivate locational

competitive advantages for attracting investment, forming financial niches, encouraging tourism,

and building export platforms (Albo and Fanelli 2019). Citizens, corporations, and municipalities

must therefore align their priorities with the demands, or expectations, of an entrepreneurial and

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competitive domain as a necessary condition for the benefit of communities (Hallstrom 2018).

Cities compete for economic regeneration through property developers and overseas capital

(read: gentrification; Walks 2009), while rural communities sell themselves as recreational

venues for city dwellers, sites of massive industrial and/or agriculture developments, or dumping

grounds for the by-products of cities, industry, and mega-projects like hazardous waste disposal

(Epp and Whitson 2009).

While fiscal austerity dominates the redistributive areas of policy, the state continues to

empower its policing branches to ensure property and security for investors and upper classes in

the economy. The financial constraints placed on local scales from the fiscal paternalism

embedded in Canadian federalism and constitutionalism therefore depict this scale as constantly

constrained financially and in terms of local decision-making capacity (Albo and Fanelli 2019;

Hallstrom 2018)iii. Portrayed this way, state rescaling under neoliberalism renders localities as

residual and relatively powerless places, defined and confined by global capitalism (Gibson-

Graham 2002). The state, largely siding with capital, has relocated the burdens of capitalist

development on local communities. As Kern and McLean (2017) argue, under these conditions

grassroots politics and resistance are often written off as already co-opted or too local to count

against the juggernaut of neoliberalism.

It is important to restate that efforts of state rescaling are not evenly applied. Indeed, one

of the most interesting yet most difficult aspects of understanding the grassroots state is its

variegated nature. This presents both opportunities and challenges for grassroots movements.

The final section of this chapter will therefore examine how state rescaling has contributed to

variegated forms of grassroots activism, and why some are privileged over others by the

Canadian state.

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The Politics of Scale and Grassroots Activism in the 21st Century

As we have seen throughout this chapter, the politics of scale has been used as a strategy

by the colonial and national state throughout Canada’s history. As Jonas (2006) highlights,

scales are not fixed geographical structures, pre-assigned arenas of action, or static identities;

they are dynamic and always constituted in and through strategic actions and struggles (404).

The strategic deployment of scale has been used to delineate power relations, and influence how

wider processes of political, economic, and social restructuring are played out in particular

contexts. The political production of scale can have repercussions on grassroots activism,

creating scaled identities, placing scalar constraints on agency, and creating sites of struggle.

While this is not predetermined, inherited scalar structures may work to limit some expressions

of grassroots activism more than others.

Canadian news stories continue to highlight the rise of the far-right across the country

(Perry 2023), and the growing urban-rural divide (Stirrett 2024). Far-right actors often employ

their own form of scalar politics to harness and manipulate the discursive and material

dimensions of scale in pursuit of their agenda. For example, amid the growth of climate change

politics, oil companies have garnered increasing grassroots support among those who live and

work in oil-producing communities. There is a discursive war between jobs and the

environment, with local sites of extraction increasingly becoming arenas of struggle (Eaton and

Enoch 2021). Engagement campaigns have emerged that encourage workers to defend their

industry against environmental critics and climate change policies and to amplify their message

through social media. Extractive populism has therefore emerged as an effort to position

extractivism as under attack from elites, as an economic and political project that demands

popular mobilization to defend, and as a democratic expression of the public will to fight for an

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industry that serves the common good (Gunster et al 2021). Turning ‘Just Transition’ discourse

on its head, extractive populism laments that grassroots efforts must challenge climate change

policies to save quality jobs, exports, and government revenues from disappearing (Fairness

Alberta 2024). This discourse echoes the boosterism of the late nineteenth to early twentieth

century.

While commonly referred to as ‘astroturfing’ (Barnard 2023) – a practice of hiding the

sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear as though it originates from, and is

supported by, grassroots participants - extractive populism may be understood as a repercussion

of the politics of scale. Historically, the Canadian state has prioritized capital accumulation at the

local scale through subsidization, tax benefits, and other advantages to secure industrial benefits

to their communities. Additionally, national and provincial level mega-projects have further

facilitated the concentration of capital and wealth in key export promoting areas – such as oil and

gas. State rescaling has functioned to embed industries in communities, especially rural/remote

communities, tying the economic and social development of these regions to the fate of these key

industries. With the removal of universal welfare benefits, jobs become key to the social

reproduction of these communities. The failure of the state to properly engage in economic

diversification and social reproduction has therefore created generational ties to work in the oil

and gas industry. Furthermore, many local businesses are further entwined with the survival of

these industries, demonstrating their socially embedded nature (see House 2024). Amid growing

economic turbulence, oil and gas industries can capitalize on the ‘threat’ to the white working

class, manipulating the already-existing repercussions of the politics of scale to their benefit. As

Gunster et al (2021) highlight, fossil fuel companies thus have a major stake in preventing people

20
who live in extractive communities from questioning the ecological, economic, and moral

viability of the industries on which their livelihoods depend.

As such, fossil fuel companies have used their positions as beneficiaries of scalar politics

to construct climate policies as threatening the community’s ‘way of life’ and pinning ‘the

people’ against urban and bureaucratic elites. Simultaneously, they can assert their agendas

through the strategic (re)deployment of the local scale as a powerful spatial imaginary, drawing

on long-standing traditions of self-sufficiency and the historically produced urban-rural divide.

This movement has also been able to capitalize on Canada’s white nationalist history, portraying

‘the people’ largely as the ‘white working class’, despite its multiracial and heterogeneous

nature. They have engaged in what Silver (2003) refers to as ‘boundary drawing strategies’ to

protect their narrow sectionalist interests despite weakening the power of the broader working

class.

Scales are both fixed and fluid, meaning they are contingent on the struggles among

particular actors in particular places. Significant Indigenous and environmental grassroots

protests have emerged across Canada against pipeline developments. The Coastal GasLink

(CGL) pipeline, for instance, partially traverses territory belonging to the Wet’suwet’en First

Nation community. Claiming to have been granted Aboriginal title in the 1997 trial, Delgamuukw

v. British Columbia, the hereditary chiefs argue that the CGL pipeline is an unjustified land rights

violation. As a result, Indigenous land defenders have protested injustices by undermining the

pipeline’s construction and establishing roadblocks to prevent project development officials from

reaching their sites (Gaglione 2023). Anti-pipeline protesters have leveraged their connections to

local place to articulate a regional storyline in which representatives of various regional identities

(i.e. British Columbians, First Nations, environmentalists) exercise their democratic agency by

21
opposing the injustice of pro-pipeline elites from outside the region (Neubauer and Gunster

2019). In contrast to extractivist populism, anti-pipeline movements describe a more outward-

looking strategy that seeks to create positive affinities between places and social groups

negotiating global processes. These struggles are not merely defensive, but expansive in their

geographical reach seeking to create productive new relations between places and social groups

(Featherstone et al 2012). Anti-pipeline protests form place-based organizing around ecological

sustainability (and the unequal impact of the extractive industries), indigenous sovereignty, local

democracy, and social justice.

Moreover, forms of progressive localism demonstrate the interrelationship between

scales, collapsing hierarchal understandings of the local versus the global. Despite the so-called

global nature of the pipeline, it nevertheless must negotiate through the local. Place as a political

project in this respect works to destabilize the hegemony of capitalist globalization and reassert

the capacity of the grassroots to challenge the locus of decision-making and demand local

autonomy. Challenging the historical politics of scale, progressive grassroots activism revalues

the local as a site of politics rather than a victim of the national or global scales.

The remnants of the state’s politics of scale nonetheless impact how progressive localism

unfolds nationally. Without dismissing the successes of these movements, anti-pipeline

movements present a fundamental threat to the Canadian states’ capital accumulation by

asserting alternative forms of sovereignty and non-liberal rights over land. The Canadian state

has gone so far as to characterize Indigenous rail blockades as terrorist threats to national

security (Forester 2022). In stark contrast to extractivist populism (which promotes racial

discrimination, xenophobia, and nativism), grassroots activism from marginalised groups face

considerably more violence and repression from the state. With anti-pipeline protests viewed as a

22
direct threat to capitalist development and private property rights, the Canadian state has

responded by criminalizing land defense and mobilizing police action against Indigenous

protesters (Gaglione 2023). The Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa in 2022 further

demonstrated the privilege awarded to white settler Canadians, manifested as the lack of police

action for weeks despite evidence of threatening behaviours, assaults, and hate crimes (Stelkia

2022). The threat posed by more progressive forms of grassroots activism to the liberal state

therefore highlights the embeddedness of structural racism in Canada’s politics of scale and

liberal democracy. As such, the inequalities fostered through the politics of scale continue to

mark some outsiders and threats to the nation.

Conclusion

The grassroots state in Canada encapsulates a historical battle over the locus of decision-

making, operating as a political strategy of scale that seeks to subjugate the grassroots to the

capitalist interests of the state and the elite. The politics of scale emerged as early as the 1830s

(likely much earlier), seeking to establish municipal institutions to quell lower class revolt.

Municipalities became important to securing and facilitating private property rights, and driving

industrial capitalism forward, while maintaining some semblance of popular control. The

contradictions of (monopoly) capitalism eventually drove working class and agrarian radicals to

contest the locus of decision-making, leading to a top-down approach to welfare and

redistribution. Unfortunately, rectifying regional disparities was largely ignored under the

welfare state, leading to the growth of the urban-rural divide. The introduction of neoliberalism

in the 1980s further entrenched scalar politics by locating decision making on increasingly global

scales, while downloading responsibilities onto municipalities and individuals. The politics of

23
scale has worked to shape both right-wing and progressive forms of localism while privileging

the former over the latter.

While progressive grassroots activism establishes the local as a site of realistic challenge

and possibility, much of the literature continues to portray it as confined, constrained, and

fragmentary. The local continues to be viewed as spaces of dependence, requiring larger scales

of coordinated action to be successful against the steamroller of neoliberal capitalism

(Swyngedouw 1997). This hierarchal construction of scale has been formulated across centuries

of state development. The weakening of the municipal scale over the last two centuries should

be highlighted as a strategic political project seeking to diminish the power of local actors and

eliminate prospects of local autonomy. As such, scales represent a political project that must be

continually reproduced. Challenging the common understanding of the local as a subordinate

scale may offer opportunities to see the local as a more accessible level to change everyday life,

and therefore a strategic front for creating transformative politics of scale.

[6660 words]

[6810 with endnotes]

24
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i
The rebellions included a rift between more moderate (professionals and businessmen) and radical (largely workers
and farmers, including immigrants from Ireland and Scotland) supporters (Ryerson, 1968). As Greer (1999, 1993)
highlights, the rebellions also included divergent positions on who should be included democratically (propertied,
poor, women, minorities?), the role or abolition of seigneurial tenures, as well as debates over colonial autonomy.
These tensions would have likely caused internal clashes if the rebellions lasted longer than they did.
ii
According to E. A. Partridge, required a substantive experience of active participation that would nurture the
confidence and competence necessary for quality citizenship upon which democracy depends (Partridge, 1908).

32
 The federal and provincial focus on capital investment in physical infrastructure and financial incentives assists
iii

this process through high-profile mega-projects (National Energy Programme, BC Resource Investment
Corporation, the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan), prioritizing resource exports over productive investments in
diversified economic development (Fairbairn, 1998).

33