This is a well-written, well-structured and largely convincing argument against the “staples” approach to Canadian political economy (CPE). Kellogg challenges the staples characterization of Canada as an underdeveloped, peripheral economy controlled by American capital and overdependent on the sale of natural resources. Instead, Kellogg argues that Canada is a “principal economy” with the other G7 nations. As such, Canada enjoys political and economic autonomy and exercises considerable influence abroad, including through foreign direct investment, despite its small population. Normatively and politically, Kellogg rejects the left-nationalism associated with the staples tradition in CPE, for focusing on the “wrong enemy” (228), non-resident economic control. Instead, he warns of the dangers of all nationalisms, whether left or right.

Overall, this book is important, worthwhile and (mostly) rigorous. Nonetheless, Kellogg makes a striking omission regarding the politics of Mel Watkins, a key figure in the staples tradition. This creates a seriously misleading description of (some) left-nationalist theory and politics, as actually practised. This unaccountable omission mars the otherwise fine (and fair) critique of a staples tradition that Kellogg argues has outlived its once-useful role in Canadian theory and politics.

The crux of the staples argument and associated left-nationalisms turns on this statement, not a query but an affirmation: “A lot of foreigners owned our economy, if they owned our economy, could they not in fact control our political system” (60). As developed in Canada in the 1970s, by Daniel Drache, Kari Levitt and Watkins, among others, staples theorists were alarmed by Canada's supposed overreliance on natural resource extraction and preoccupation with American economic, hence political control of the Canadian economy. Consequently, staples theorists supported left-nationalist political struggles to reassert economic sovereignty through a strengthened Canadian capitalist class, one subject to the democratic, political control of the state and the Canadian people.

Plausible, if unproven, in the 1960s and 1970s, Kellogg maintains that staples theory is empirically untenable as a description of Canada from the 1990s to the present. First, Canada's manufacturing goods accounted for less than 10 per cent of exports in the 1960s, but 50 per cent of experts by the 1990s. This directly contradicts the staples prediction of increasing dependence on staples exports (121, but see all of chapter 5) alongside the mass importation of manufactured goods from the (American) “metropole.” Second, “foreigners,” a term that Kellogg refuses to use given its xenophobic insinuations, do not own the Canadian economy. In 2012, Canadians controlled 82 per cent of assets and revenue (77). Moreover, Canadian capitalists invest abroad, mostly in the global North, as much as foreign direct investment comes into Canada (97, but see all of chapter 4). Third, Canada exercises an important political influence, not least through the country's “entrenched role” in “the powerful club called the G7” (83), made up of the world's most productive economies. Membership in this club is inconsistent with staples' portrayal of Canada as economically and therefore politically weak. In sum, an impartial examination of empirical evidence suggests that Canada is a fully integrated member of the world capitalist system's “core” (140).

This contrasts sharply with staples theorists' descriptions of Canada as part of the world capitalist system's “semi-periphery.” To make his point, Kellogg contrasts Canada with the genuine semi-periphery nation of Mexico, on measures ranging from hourly wages to child labour to percentage of the labour forced employed in agriculture (chapter 2). Qualifying Canada as a “rich” neo-colony, compared to the “poor” neo-colony of Mexico, Kellogg suggests, cannot remedy a basic categorization error. If the empirical analysis is wrong, so is the political solution, Canadian left-nationalism. Kellogg raises the spectre of German nationalism (166) as a reminder of why progressive-left intellectuals ought to be wary of pro-Canada “jingoism” (215), a patriotic fervour masking both Canada's neo-imperial ventures in the global South and colonialism over Indigenous peoples at “home.” As Kellogg observes, “A political stance that understands the stars and stripes, but not the maple leaf, as a flag of conquest, can seriously disarm social movements” (218). Left-nationalisms play dangerously into the hands of fascist populisms rather than progressive struggles.

With respect to the dangers of left-nationalism, Kellogg's describes a “staples” tradition consistently blind to Canada's colonialization of Indigenous peoples, writing that “a focus on a mythic suppression of Canadian sovereignty obscures the real sovereignty that is being suppressed: that of Indigenous communities” (222). While plausible, this is not true.

In particular, Watkins was a consistent, vocal and relentless supporter of Indigenous nationalisms.Footnote ¹ His support of Dene nationalisms is not a minor detail but a consistent theme, unambiguously announced in the title of his edited book, Dene Nation: The Colony Within (1977). Watkins wrote: “To their great credit, the Dene are struggling mightily (against the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline). In the process, they are greatly strengthening their identity as a people and their rights as a nation. They are telling the rest of the world, and southern Canadians in particular, what colonialism has done to them, and how they intend to decolonize themselves” (Hugh Grant and David Wolfe, Staples and Beyond: Selected Writings of Mel Watkins, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006: 51).

In the same book, Watkins insists that nationalism is that “most universal of human rights, the right to be a self-determining people” (52), one he sought equally for Canadians, Indigenous peoples and the Québecois. Watkins saw no contradiction but consistency in his principled Canadian nationalism and his active support of Dene (and Québeçois) nationalisms.

Those not familiar with the political history of the Canadian left-nationalist tradition will be misled by Kellogg's (incomprehensible) oversight of Watkins' politics. Those who are will wonder why Kellogg did not describe this tradition as actually politically practised. I find myself hoping for a second, corrected edition, in which Watkins' intellectual and political commitments to Dene self-determination struggles are not erased. This mischaracterization-by-omission was disappointing (and unnecessary) in a book that will otherwise provoke necessary and important debates, at once theoretical and political.