Geoff Russ: Natural resources have always been a pillar of Canada’s prosperity. There’s no sense in changing that now

From the era of the fur trade to today’s oil markets, Canada’s economy has been defined by exporting staples, a special term for natural resources. Those staples were fur in the 17th century, timber in the 19th century, and has been oil and gas since the 1970s.

The recent completion of the Trans Mountain pipeline (which as economist Jack Mintz recently noted in a Hub podcast ought to have been six years earlier) should be understood as part of Canada’s staple legacy. It’s also an opportunity to revisit two of the greatest historians that Canada has ever produced.

Harold Innis and Donald Creighton were historians of Canada’s political economy who wrote great volumes that revealed how natural resources were essential to nation-building in Canada. Today their work is mostly ignored by university departments and can even be difficult to find in used bookstores.

Innis wrote books like The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy, while Creighton authored The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850. What those titles lack in excitement was made up for by their depth, research, and in Creighton’s case, the quality of his prose.