Economist Abraham Rotstein reads article in the Canadian Forum, the magazine of nationalist ideas that he edited.John McNeill/The Globe and Mail
A public intellectual who engaged with the great issues of his era; a brilliant educator who inspired generations of students at the University of Toronto and received their highest ratings; a cultivated man who loved music and theatre; a kind, elegant, witty person who refused to despair even when the causes he espoused failed – Abraham Rotstein was no conventional economist. He rejected the orthodoxy of unfettered markets for goods and capital, arguing that interference in the free market is justified in the name of national independence.
In the exuberant 1960s, he was one of eight economists appointed by Walter Gordon, a member of Lester Pearson's Liberal government, to a task force on Canadian industry. The resulting Watkins Report of 1968, which recommended strict controls on foreign ownership of Canadian resources and businesses, led to the establishment of the Canada Development Corp. and the Foreign Investment Review Agency.
"He became the leader of nationalism on the left. The left was pretty suspicious of nationalism at that time; before then it had been espoused only by Conservatives, like Diefenbaker," explains political scientist Peter Russell, who had edited Nationalism in Canada (1966), with a concluding chapter by Prof. Rotstein. Previously, "for the left, nationalism was linked to militarism."
In his book of essays The Precarious Homestead, Prof. Rotstein noted that Canadians always lived with a sense of precariousness reinforced by proximity to the U.S.: "The nominal equality of two sovereign states was contradicted by their vastly unequal economic, political and military power."
In 1970, along with Mr. Gordon and Maclean's editor Peter C. Newman, Prof. Rotstein founded the Committee for an Independent Canada to safeguard our precarious cultural and economic autonomy. The CIC drew many high-profile individuals including Montreal journalist and politician Claude Ryan and publishers Mel Hurtig and Jack McClelland, and saw some of its proposals, such as tougher Canadian content rules for radio and television rules, put into effect.
Before disbanding in 1981, the CIC had 10,000 members and 41 chapters, published a newsletter and produced two books, Independence: The Canadian Challenge (1972) and Getting It Back (1974) edited by Prof. Rotstein with Gary Lax.
"The foreign investment struggle looked to be won, but all of that disappeared under the Mulroney government in the late 1980s," said his friend and colleague Mel Watkins. Yet nationalism continues to be reflected in a more confident generation of students; it has become commonplace.
Prof. Rotstein died following a heart attack on April 27, at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital. He had a history of cardiac problems, according to his daughter, Eve.
Abraham Rotstein was born in the Plateau area of Montreal on April 10, 1929, to Fay (née Mosenson) and Hyman Rotstein, the first of two sons. His parents had arrived from Poland only a year earlier. Both worked in the millinery trade but they found it difficult to make ends meet, according to his brother, Morris Rotstein. The boys went to Baron Byng High School, later made famous by novelist Mordecai Richler, who was two years ahead of Abe.
Their home was Yiddish-speaking, meaning the parents spoke in Yiddish while the two boys – in the manner of many children of immigrants – answered in English. Abe went to McGill University, where he graduated in economics at the top of his class. At 20, he went to Chicago to continue his studies but he left after a year, dispirited by the dry, mathematical approach of Milton Friedman, who dominated the economics department.
He moved to New York and enrolled at Columbia University, where he selected a course given by a Hungarian émigré he'd not heard of because it would give him six credits of the 21 he required for his master's; the other courses were worth only three. The teacher, Karl Polanyi, hired by Columbia as a visiting lecturer on the strength of his book The Great Transformation – his first university position, though he was then past 60 – showed him an approach to economics that linked it to history, culture, even anthropology.
At an academic dinner in Montreal in November, Prof. Rotstein gave a talk about his life-changing encounter with Mr. Polanyi, who belatedly recommended that his Canadian student read The Great Transformation, a book he'd not previously mentioned: "Unbelievable. I started to read it after the course was over, and that was when I had an intellectual earthquake. I was stunned by the depth and clarity of his account of the coming of the Industrial Revolution, a revolution that was in lockstep with the world of laissez-faire."
With his Columbia master's degree in hand, the young Abe Rotstein was hired as an economist at Canadair (now Bombardier) but kept in touch with his mentor.
Mr. Polanyi's wife, Ilona Duczynska, had been denied a U.S. residency permit while he taught at Columbia because she had been a revolutionary socialist in Hungary (she supported the short-lived 1919 revolution of Bela Kun). She created a home for them in the hamlet of Rosebank, an hour outside Toronto, where Karl Polanyi stayed during holidays and settled after his retirement. Here his former student began to visit him from Montreal.
Around the Polanyis' dining room table, Prof. Rotstein told his Montreal audience, "Karl started to talk: He talked about the Cold War, international politics … Robert Owen (the 19th century reformer) and a topic he called 'the reality of society.' It was a one-way conversation and I was taken with how important these comments were. I feared that they would disappear into thin air so I grabbed a pad and began to write. And I wrote and wrote, trying to get it all down."
The notes he made during 28 weekend visits from Montreal over a three-year period, typed up by his secretary at Canadair, are deposited now at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University, created by Kari Levitt, Karl and Ilona's economist daughter.
Abe Rotstein carried these ideas with him to the University of Toronto, having left the business world to take his PhD in political economy.
"At the beginning," Prof. Watkins recalled after Prof. Rotstein's death, "I was a faculty member and [Abe] was a graduate student, but I can say without exaggeration that he was my teacher. He had a remarkable breadth of interest, from economic history to political science to anthropology to philosophy to theology to linguistics, to the history of technology."
"He was a teacher of my father's ideas for the rest of his life," said Kari Levitt in a phone conversation from Montreal. "We were part of the same group, with similar concerns."
In the early 1960s, he met Diane Whitman at a Toronto theatre. She was a hematologist who had come from the U.S. to do research at Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital. They married in 1965. Diane played the piano well, which was useful in the formation later of what Eve calls "the Rotstein family band."
"My father played fiddle, slightly out of tune, the harmonica, the flute" recalls his son, Daniel, who plays drums. The marriage ended after 26 years.
Upon receiving his doctorate, he was offered a teaching position by the university. Prof. Rotstein edited the Canadian Forum, then an influential publication about trends and ideas, attended the seminars of Marshall McLuhan, and was active in the teach-in movement of the 1960s against the Vietnam War.
"We had American draft resisters staying in our house for about three years," Eve recalls. "They were our babysitters."
When the department split in two (economics and political science) in 1981, he was the only one appointed to teach in both. His students loved him and sought his counsel. His son, Daniel, remembers a stream of visitors who sought his advice on everything from real estate to politics to personal issues. "He was a guru."
He was also an unstoppable punster. Prof. Watkins recalled such gems as, "Every dogma has its day" and "Buddy, can you spare a paradigm?" When the two Canadian professors were invited to lecture at Moscow University, Prof. Rotstein arrived a few days early and went to the airport to meet his colleague, who was flying in from Helsinki. Later he liked to say: "Watkins appeared, out of Finn Air."
Long after his contemporaries retired, Prof. Rotstein remained at the university. He spent his last 25 years working patiently to make journalists better educated, by running the William Southam Journalism Fellowship program at Massey College, where he was a senior fellow. By throwing his academic prestige behind these awards he made them, according to the college's former master John Fraser, the Canadian equivalent of the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.
As well, Prof. Rotstein participated in selecting winners for the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy and the Donner/CJFE Journalist-at-Risk Fellowship, for refugee writers from the world's trouble spots.
Aaron Berhane, a journalist who fled Eritrea, credits "Prof. Abe" with helping to relaunch his life in Canada: "He was always there to provide me advice and assistance whenever I needed," he wrote in a tribute. "As a newcomer, new to Canada's educational system, I would have been lost without his guidance. As a result of his advice I audited courses that could allow me to understand how the political, economic and social system of Canada works."
In his late 60s, by which time social mores had become more relaxed, Prof. Rotstein came out as gay and joined a circle of older gay men – teachers, business executives, lawyers, accountants, people in the arts – who called themselves the Fraternity. The night before his death, he took ill during a performance he was attending at Toronto's Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, which showcases gay-themed plays.
He leaves his daughter, Eve; son, Daniel; grandchildren, Maya, Charlotte and Lev; brother, Morris; and former wife, Diane Rotstein.
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