Jan. 1, 1970: The first day of a new decade seems a fitting point of departure for my journey to find out about the workplace of the future. I have been fortunate to get my hands on an advance copy of a new book by Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, which will be published later this year. Toffler writes about the stress and disorientation when people are subjected to "too much change in too short a time." His book is more than a mere vision of the future; it speaks to the very nature of how people react to this "disease of change," and how they will be affected in the future. I must see if he's right.

Having modified my new IBM Selectric typewriter, an LED wristwatch, and a comfy office chair, I have managed to build a machine to transport me through the portals of time. My purpose: to see, first-hand, how Canadian workers have dealt with "future shock" in the years to come.

I am to depart tonight from behind my locked office door – an enclosed room in a corner of the main floor of a warehouse building leased by the Acme Apparel Co.

I set my destination dial for 2002. A single generation may not give me enough taste of the workplace change I'm looking for. But going 800,000 years ahead risks too much, or so I've been led to believe.

April 10, 2002: I have arrived safely after a journey that seemed to take just seconds. But my office seems to have disappeared – replaced by cloth partitions that separate desks that are side by side. Each desk appears to have a television on it, along with the keyboard from a typewriter, but no typewriter underneath. Just a thin wire attaching it to a big metal box kept under each desk. Will wait here tonight and insinuate myself into the Acme Apparel workforce tomorrow.

April 11, 2002: Work has changed in ways I can only begin to explore. For one thing, Acme Apparel went out of business in 1982 – apparently done in by a brutal recession and competition from Asian garment makers who could make the same shirts and pants for a third the price. (The warehouse building now belongs to a company that calls itself a "solutions provider.")

Employees (who are amused by my flared pants and sideburns) spent the day telling me that the whole world has apparently been busy dismantling tariffs, quotas, duties and other barriers that had protected their own industries for decades.

Canada, for instance, signed a Free Trade Agreement with the United States in 1988 and another one with Mexico and the U.S. in 1993. Much of the world now wants to open up its borders (more or less) to goods and services from other countries. Globalization has brought many opportunities. But it has clearly brought many worries, too.

Whole lines of work (like the textile industry) have been sent reeling in Canada. Traditional manufacturing jobs have disappeared in areas like steel-making and small appliances as it became impossible to compete with foreign markets. In steel's case, the accusations are that foreign countries have been illegally dumping cheap steel in Canada, making it impossible to compete. But illegal or not, thousands of Canadian steelworkers have already paid the price.

Giant American "big-box" retailers began arriving in Canada in the 1990s, taking advantage of the newly-opened corridors of commerce. Canadian chains and smaller independents sometimes found they had to shut their doors.

But many new industries developed in this new environment (notwithstanding the mass firings following the Internet bubble of the late 1990s.) Some industries just kept on growing. Quebec's biggest export these days, for instance, is airplanes.

Which brings me to the other thing that has made this kind of globalization possible – the unbelievably rapid spread of technology in the workplace. Starting around 1980 or so, businesses apparently began investing in technology in a big way. By 1990, it seemed just about anyone who had a desk had their own personal computer.

While it's true that some industries escaped free trade's touch (education, for instance), computer-based technology appears to have changed every industry, every business, every workplace, and virtually every worker.

Sometimes, computers replaced workers entirely. Many travel agents are looking for a new line of work as an amazing communication network called the Internet lets people book travel themselves. Computers (along with the Internet) also allow work to be done virtually anywhere. Companies could decentralize to the regions (or even to another country) without any loss of focus – and frequently do.

For instance, the biggest private employer in Cape Breton is not a fish plant, or a steel-maker, or a coal mine. It's a U.S.-based call-centre company called Electronic Data Services Corp. By the end of 2002, 1,500 people will work for EDS, answering technical questions from customers of Fortune 500 companies all over North America.

Canada's workplace has spent much of the last decade or so transforming itself into what's been called a "knowledge-based" economy. What we know is now more important that what we produce.

But this transformation is increasingly rapid. It's not uncommon to lose one's job overnight, with no inkling that the axe was about to fall. A 1996 survey found that 37 per cent of Canadians believed there was a good chance they would lose their jobs in the next two years. That's a nervous workforce.

But as old skills became obsolete, new ones were created. Ongoing training is now crucial to a company's survival and evolution, and the same goes for the workers. There's no wiggle room these days for the employee who can't (or won't) adapt to change. It's just too easy to outsource jobs.

All of this technological portability (and the growing trend to outsourcing) has made the workplace an increasingly diverse and ever-changing landscape. Part-time work, working from home (telework – which first began back in the 1970s) and self-employment are on the rise. In fact, self-employment accounted for all of the net job creation in the 1990s. But non-standard employment, as it's called, has often meant substandard benefits, like no extended health care coverage and no pension. So the transition is sometimes a difficult and reluctant one.

Starting in the mid-1990s, the federal and provincial governments also started to wrestle their ballooning deficits under control. The end of deficit financing did many things. But in the public sector, it meant tens of thousands of fewer jobs as governments cut back on spending.

Sometimes it was simple economics that hobbled a way of life. Commodity prices, for instance, fell 45 per cent since the early 1970s (after adjusting for inflation). That caused a significant drop in Canadians' standard of living. Back then, 60 per cent of our exports were primary products. Now it's about half that. Older factories became empty factories if it became cheaper to build new ones somewhere else.

And sometimes, the commodity just went away – with major effects on the local economy and its jobs. The Newfoundland fishery has had to adjust to the disappearance of what was once a staple catch – the cod.

The impact of the falling Canadian dollar on the Canadian worker turned out to be quite a job-shaper too. Back in 1970, the Canadian dollar was worth about 95 cents American. Now, it's worth just 63 cents. That's made it much easier to sell our goods in the U.S. and helped to boost exports. Where exports amounted to barely a quarter of the Canadian GDP in 1970, they rocketed to 43 per cent by the late 1990s. Simply put, a lower Canadian dollar encouraged Canadians to make goods that can be traded.

And while some argue that a weak dollar helped to cushion a productivity gap with the U.S., there's no doubt that it also boosted American tourism in Canada, and boosted American investment, too. Dozens of American movies and TV commercials are now being shot in cities all across Canada. And American energy companies seem to love buying Canadian.

In the past 30 years, there's also been a huge rise in the number of women in the workforce. That's partly an economically-driven trend (it now takes anywhere from 65 to 80 hours of paid work per week to finance the running of an average Canadian household, up from 45 hours in 1970.) But for those who want more flexible work arrangements (and that appeals to women more than men), the new economy provides opportunities that didn't exist a generation ago.

That's a lot of change for any generation of workers to absorb.

April 12, 2002: Last day in 2002. Back to 1970 tonight (as soon as I find a replacement battery for the LED watch).

The intervening years have certainly seen irreversible changes in the Canadian workplace. There has been dislocation, decline and discouragement to be sure. But I also find much excitement and a spirit of renewal as new jobs – whole new industries – spring up.

Figures show that the number of new jobs created in completely new industries in the past 20 years has exceeded the number of jobs that disappeared in that time.

But while the economy as a whole may come out ahead, it's quite a different calculation for the just-displaced worker, who may find the new jobs being created are in a completely different industry – with a whole new set of unfamiliar skills – in another province.

This new economy sometimes asks a lot from the old economy worker.

Future shock indeed.