Faculty Research Fellow
Dimitry Anastakis (Ph.D, York University, 2001) is the L.R. Wilson/R.J. Currie Chair in Canadian Business History in the Department of History and at the Rotman School of Management. A scholar of postwar Canadian business and the economy, Professor Anastakis has published extensively on the history of the Canadian automotive industry, including two award-winning books on the subject. His current research projects include finishing a book about the Bricklin SV-1, a car produced in Canada in the 1970s, and is embarking on a major research project on postwar Canadian neoliberalism and free trade. Professor Anastakis is Chair of the Canadian Business History Association (CBHA/ACHA), oversees the Business History Reading Group at the University of Toronto, and is general editor of the Themes in Business and Society series from the University of Toronto Press. Professor Anastakis is a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, a Senior Fellow at Massey College, and a Senior Fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History.
Fellowship Project—Neoliberalism and its Discontents: A Canadian History, 1945-2020
Neoliberalism has been Canada’s dominant ideological, policy-framework and political, economic, and social reality for the last half-century. Neoliberalism’s defining elements— free trade, individualism, market fundamentalism, privatization, deregulation, and a weakening of the state –have profoundly reshaped Canadian discourse, governance, and society since the 1970s, and marked a departure from the Keynesian interventionist and social welfare approaches that dominated Canadian policy and culture from 1945 until the 1970s. This project seeks to historicize Canadian neoliberalism’s emergence, its ascendance, and the resistance that this ideology and its policies have engendered from its beginnings in the postwar period to the present, and within a transnational context. In so doing, the project aims to explain a fundamental transformation of Canadian life. Neoliberalism and its Discontents is much more than the intellectual history of an ideology and its spread; it is the story of how business, politics, work, governance, welfare, and discourse itself was transformed in postwar Canada from a Keynesian mode to a neoliberal model, much of it through the rhetoric and realities surrounding the debate and enactment of free trade. Above all, it seeks to understand how ordinary Canadians across the generations understood and engaged with abstract ideas of neoliberalism and free trade, and how these ideas came to shape, in very real ways, their lives, jobs, communities, nation, and the broader world in which they live.