In his first address as Minister of National Defense, David McGuinty promised Canada’s arms industry that the federal government would work closely with them to radically transform Canada’s military capabilities. Speaking at the arms industry trade show CANSEC, McGuinty proclaimed in French, “Now is the time for government and military industry to work very closely together.”
McGuinty said that he is inspired by how quickly the federal government managed to increase Canada’s military capacities during World War 2 and that Canadians should draw on that spirit, today.
“Canadians have a legacy of mobilizing quickly when times get tough,” he said. ”During the Second World War we went from just 6 ships to the third largest Navy in the world. We can and we will capture the same innovative spirit.”
Surely McGuinty was thinking about how the federal government expropriated the Dufferin Shipbuilding Company, financially ruining its owner James Franceschi in the process. Or maybe he’s thinking about the many Quebec-based shipyards that the federal government expropriated to create the Crown corporation Quebec Shipyards. Either way, Canada responded to World War 2 by running what was essentially a planned economy – an economic model that couldn’t be further away from where we are today.
Canada has always had close relationships with its corporations but for most of the country’s existence, that relationship was balanced by democratic demands that people expected from their governments: fair and progressive taxation that then pays for high-quality services. During the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, this balance was tipped in favour of corporations through deregulation, privatization and free trade. Canada outsourced our manufacturing base and doubled down on the industries that we could do better than most other countries: resource extraction.
These forces combined to create today’s economic reality: where houses are used to gamble, pensions are grown through the rent of low-income people or retirement residence residents, where corporate profits hit a record high in 2022 and have stayed high, and where Canadian politicians still declare proudly that they will be working hand-in-glove with the private sector, like McGuinty elucidated.
These are the themes that I examine in my latest book, Corporate Control, Book Two in the Canada in Decline series. Where I looked at Canada’s social safety net in Book One, Book Two looks deeper at the role that corporations have played in undermining, undoing or eliminating the social safety net. From the pursuit of profits at any cost to applying profit-driven logic to the public sector, corporate control is pernicious because it’s ubiquitous. It’s been rendered invisible so that it can be difficult for people to see clearly the role that corporate control has in Canada.
When we can’t see this control, it’s easy to write it off as not being there. Housing crisis? Must just be that there are too many people. Record-breaking food bank visits? Must be that salaries just aren’t keeping up with inflation. And so on.
At a moment where Canadian politicians are promising to triple Canada’s military spending and where parks and streets in communities all across Canada are sheltering the homes of more and more people, it is absolutely critical that we understand these forces so that we can condemn them and force our politicians to reverse course.