Planet Canada by John Stackhouse

Author:John Stackhouse [Stackhouse, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

10

The Opposable Minds of Globalization

HOW TO REWIRE CAPITALISM AND SAVE IT, TOO

If you had to name a place and time for peak globalization, London 2012 wouldn’t be a bad choice. The Summer Olympics had embraced the tenor of our times, with its hip opening ceremony and group hug for global diversity. London was among the undisputed business capitals of the world, the financial crisis notwithstanding. The city remained an essential crossroads of diplomacy, too, a place where the world could gather to try to resolve its troubles, be they the Arab Spring or Benghazi debacle or Russia’s meddling in democracy. In almost any field, London was the place to be, a global capital that was comfortable in its cosmopolitan skin. So comfortable that at the height of the 2012 celebrations, the city took little notice of what the rest of the country was thinking. It wanted a different deal. Four years later, when the Brexit vote startled the world, no place would be more rattled than London, which voted massively to stay with the European Union while so many others rushed for the exit. The discontent among Britons wasn’t just about the EU. It emanated from a sense that the global elite, and all those expats who considered London home, were the new carpetbaggers, a new caste of transnational citizens who had gamed globalization to their favour. The view was gaining currency elsewhere, too. To listen to the political debate in Birmingham—England or Alabama—you might think that two centuries of expat progress, going back to the Scots who left London for Halifax, had come to a crashing halt. Moya Greene saw it differently.

As the Olympics got underway, the Canadian had already been CEO of Britain’s Royal Mail for two years and was preparing the five-hundred-year-old organization for the most controversial privatization since Margaret Thatcher’s time. Greene was the first non-Briton and first female to run the Royal Mail. When she arrived in 2010, the state-owned enterprise was, in the words of its own chairman, “balance sheet insolvent,”1 which quickly threw Greene into the crosshairs of a public debate, raging since the financial crisis, about the purpose of business. Decades of labour unrest had weakened the Mail and rendered it seemingly helpless to fight the rise of Amazon and society’s general shift to digital communications. And now the government wanted to sell it off, threatening the old-style service that many Britons depended on and the lifestyle its employees had come to assume. Greene didn’t mind the challenge. As a civil servant in Ottawa in the 1980s and ’90s, she had been put in charge of the privatization of CN Rail and the deregulation of airlines. Then, after several years on Bay Street, she joined Bombardier to help it expand in Europe, and in 2005 took over as CEO of Canada Post to help it cope with disruption. If nothing else, challenges were her forte. But as the Canadian executive took on her biggest one yet, to get the £10-billion-a-year Mail ready

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