A year ago the Federal Conservative Government asked a panel of five corporate big shots to review Canada’s competition and investment policies. Not surprisingly, when the “Competition Review Policy Panel” issued their report last week, they recommended making Canada a better place for corporations and corporate big shots. For the rest of us? – not so much.
In fact, the Panel basically restated the program that has been put forward by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (formerly the Business Council on National Issues) for the last three decades. Followed slavishly by successive Liberal and Conservative governments, the program has increased the earnings of high-income Canadians (and CEOs in particular), reduced the income of the poorest Canadians, and left most of the rest of running hard just to stand still.
As the most recent census figures showed, between 1980 and 2005 the median earnings of the top 20% of income earners rose by over 16%, the median income of the lowest 20% fell by over 20%, and the median income of the middle 20% was flat. Over 25 years, all of Canada’s economic growth went to profits and the earnings of the wealthiest.
Over the same period of time, the earnings of the top 1% of Canadians (including those lucky CEOs) went up over 60%. So you can understand why the Panel wants more of the same.
Of course, growing inequality, the loss of good manufacturing jobs, the decline in public services – none of these are worth mentioning. They are probably not visible from the Panel’s lofty perch. After some ritual blather about globalization, productivity and competition, they move on to recite the corporate catechism to a receptive federal government.
The Panel calls for a further dismantling of Canada’s virtually non-existent controls on foreign investment. Canada has long been one of the world’s most open and foreign-dominated economies. The Panel calls for a weakening of the few remaining foreign ownership controls that provide a small measure of national influence in key sectors like telecommunications, financial services, and air transport. Particularly bizarre is their attack on Investment Canada’s pathetically-weak and ineffective foreign investment review.
For all of its verbiage about the importance of competitive markets, the Panel proposes weakening the Competition Act and the Competition Bureau to make it even easier for corporations to cut deals and fix prices. It’s workers that have to compete, not corporations.
The Panel goes well beyond its original mandate of competition and investment policy to put forward the full corporate economic agenda.
- lower taxes, particularly on corporations and capital
- support for “talent” (ignoring the fact that their proposed tax cuts will continue the cuts in funding for public education – they like training and education as long as someone else pays)
- pushing municipalities into more wasteful (and profitable for corporations) public-private partnerships to fund facilities
- pushing inter-provincial free trade deals (like the B.C./Alberta TILMA deal) to weaken provincial governments and strengthen corporations
- deeper integration with the U.S. (ongoing in the Security and Prosperity Partnership) to weaken national governments and strengthen corporations
- promoting trade and investment deals with other countries to weaken our governments and strengthen corporations
- deregulate, to weaken governments and strengthen corporations (can we detect a trend here?), except in areas like patent protection, where regulations protect corporate rights.
How about good jobs, growing incomes for most families, better public education and health care? No sign of these as goals for the CEOs.
None of this program is new. Corporate CEOs have been directing our governments to deregulate, reduce government services, cut taxes and sign corporate-friendly “trade” deals for a long time.
It is still, however, galling to have my tax dollars pay for this corporate communications effort. And they even want to set up a permanent Canadian Competitiveness Council to push the message. We can’t stop them from promoting their program, but I think that the CEOs can afford to pay for it themselves.
