Deep Lobbying

There is just so much swirling around the SNC-Lavalin affair that people can’t seem to get enough of it. Who’s at fault?  Is it a mortal blow for the government?  Was the law broken?  It goes on and on.

But one of the key things emerging from their entire scenario has been a glimpse into the backroom deals governments cut with major corporations. Nothing illegal with that, naturally, buy from this affair emerges a new sense of alarm that the corporate sector operates by one set of rules in consultation with the government, while the remainder – civil society, smaller businesses, NGOs, researchers, etc. – have to take a more arduous route. What citizens are learning about SNC-Lavalin is causing them to doubt.  And to be clear, this arrangement has been standard practice for all governments for decades.  It became an issue for this government, and Canadians in general, because Jody Wilson-Raybould simply said no

It might be helpful in the next few posts to hearken back three decades ago when the cozy relationships between government and the large corporate players was opened and nourished. It wasn’t always this way.  There was a time when citizens were on more of an equal footing with these larger players, but that was then and this is now. What is instructive in all of this is not that it happened but how it was done – surreptitiously and frequently with willing intent to deceive voters.

In only a century and a half, Canadians had shaped out of the North American wilderness one of the most durable societies on the face of the earth. Ranking among the seven most prosperous nations in the world, Canada is rich, not only in the abundance of its resources and the magnificence of its land, but also in its diversity and character of its people. Yet surprisingly little of this came about by accident. The reality is that Canadians, generation after generation, made conscious choices at every stage of the nation's development - a nation literally "willed" into being.

From its inception, Canadian leaders understood that if everything in the nation's development was left up to "market forces," it never would survive as an independent entity, and this for two reasons - the sheer size of its landmass (along with its widely dispersed population) and its close proximity to the economic giant south of the border.  Keeping these influences in mind, the nation's leaders recognized that if the country was to etch out a future for itself, it would only be by a collective act of the will - individuals working with a tolerant government acting on their behalf.

Since Confederation, Canada opted for a strong national government because its citizens recognized that there were some things they all had to do through their government, through public ownership and public intervention, because market forces alone couldn't bring about such a community.

Ultimately, Canadians chose to balance the free enterprise system with a social contract that provided for a strong social system, adequate health care, a prominent role in world peacekeeping initiatives, and an increasing concern for the environment.  It came to be called a "mixed economy - a suitable title.  What resulted from such a strategic balance eventually became the envy of the world.  But, and this is vital to what comes next, the nation continually had to choose such a lifestyle because of the sheer magnetic force of an economy and population ten times its size just a few miles south of the border.

That economic pattern went through radical change, beginning in 1984, only two months following Brian Mulroney’s first sweeping electoral victory, when his government introduced an economic blueprint for the future, titled, A New Direction for Canada: An Agenda for Economic Renewal.  It soon became apparent that the country's economic future would be based soundly on “free market” initiatives and corporate global dominance – an influence that lies at the root of the SNC-Lavalin pattern of behaviour.

How was it accomplished?  That is the subject of the next post, but it’s important to recall what the American ambassador to Canada, Paul Robinson, reflected on later: 

"We knew stealth and subterfuge would be required if the Canadian people were to go for it. For that reason, we decided that the request for free trade talks must seem to come from north of the border. Ithad to come from Canadians. If it got out that it was an American idea, I knew it would be dead."

What happened next was revolutionary and has now become standard economic policy, adhered to with an almost blind religious fervour. Yet that process could only work with subterfuge and it opened the door for a deep kind of lobbying by corporate interests of successive Canadian governments that suddenly had light shone on it these past few weeks as a result of the SNC-Lavalin affair.  What began as a heavily bankrolled deception in 1984 and succeeded has now become a driving force behind our politics and we need to understand it if we are to understand the Lavalin story.