Policy Without a Country
The huge corporate influence on governments around the world in the last 30 years has created significant opportunities and massive dislocations and problems at the same time. Canada’s experience has been no different. The world created through globalization has consistently been feted as transformative and wealth-creating, and that’s all true. The shadow side of that, however, has been the growth of poverty and unemployment in the West and the reality that the fabulous wealth that has been created primarily advantage those already possessing and abundance of resources and not so much the average families attempting to survive the transition. Wealth generation only works effectively when it is shared with everyone.
The change in corporatism’s influence on successive Canadian governments was introduced in the 1980s and has continued undaunted since, with no interruption or correction, even after the financial crisis of 2007.
In the 1984 election campaign, Brian Mulroney ridiculed free trade as if it were unthinkable. He wasn’t being transparent. In reality, he had been studying the subject since 1981. Plans were already underway to integrate North American economies. Similar patterns were emerging in Europe. The problem was that the majority of Canadians rejected it – polls showed it and any government attempting to introduce the subject was roundly defeated. The financial barons on both sides of the 49thparallel went to work in a great plan of artifice.
Within two months of coming to power, a secret government memorandum urged that ways be found to make free trade more "sellable" to Canadians so that it would become the main election issue for the next election in 1988. At the famous Shamrock Summit in Canada, with Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, officials were furiously at work putting the pieces in place for the corporate transformation that was about to come. Derek Burney, one of the summit’s organizers, boasted later: "We made it as vague as we possibly could so the Canadian people wouldn't comprehend the significance of the event." We know the rest of the story and of how the following Liberal government built on this architecture.
This post isn’t about whether the financial transformation that ensued from such events around the world are right or wrong. It’s how such policies were designed in the shadows that is the focus here. One really must wonder about the very validity of citizenship itself when we read words such as these. The key components of the scenario are clear enough: A small group of people desire a more abundant and prosperous world for themselves but a naturally constrictive political process stands in their way. The solution is to largely bypass that process itself by pursuing the agenda in clandestine fashion, keeping those that the process is designed to serve - the citizenry - from fully realizing what they are doing. It might very well be a form of negotiation that has proved successful in the extreme, but attempting to dovetail such a practice with the concept of an open and involved citizenry is an insurmountable task.
And, so, secrecy and incomplete information became the order of the day. As American ambassador Clayton Yeutter's rather foreboding words put it after he watched over the signing of the original Free Trade Agreement: “The Canadians don't understand what they have signed. In 20 years, they will be sucked into the U.S. economy.” Does this sound like an economic concept deriving from a holistic or respectful view of citizenship itself? Hardly. And yet it is now the predominant economic theme running throughout most of Canada's financial lifeblood.
At the same time, an insightful woman journalist, Frances Russell of the Winnipeg Free Press, was telling us another story. She pointed out that the struggle to save Canada wasn’t between Quebec and the rest of Canada, or even between the East and the West. “The battle for Canada's soul," she wrote, "is between its elites and its citizens.” She reminded Canadians that not a day goes by without us being reminded that we hate government, that we are obviously over-governed and that we want to see the country decentralized – the same stream of messages that the corporate community had been peddling to Canadians in the years prior to the Free Trade Agreement. Yet she quoted polls that showed only a minority wanted to see radical change to the structures that had served Canadians so well over the decades. She then opened the rather festering sore of corporate manipulation and clearly laid out how the corporate community was waging a full-scale assault on the minds of Canadians, attempting to confuse them as to government's usefulness.
Again, we know what happened – the corporate message succeeded and in remarkable time the Canadian economy, along with the world’s, was transformed. The inequities that have resulted didn't occur as a result of oversight but were in fact predetermined by certain minds who sought to maximize profits for some while forcing average citizens to increasingly pay for and maintain government services.
One of the great ironies of democracy is that we have no one to really blame for our present challenges but ourselves. It was a trade-off and we consented to it. What we got was cheaper financing, lower interest rates, larger houses, more economical travel, computers, bling and cheap goods from around the world. What we lost was our capacity to save, the root strength of our government programs, service that is machine-driven and not human-driven, the inability to create gender wage parity, isolation from other citizens and our country as a place of solidarity.
But we lost even more – the big stuff. Climate change is our most serious problem and its being driven by the corporate culture and manic consumerism. We lost our ability to solve poverty. Somewhere we misplaced that citizenship isn’t about me but we. And we lost government as the great arbiter, not of generating wealth, but disbursing it equitably. What we got was a corporate policy without an effective democracy to manage it. We are now living with the consequences. Something we'll explore in the next post.