The Truth About Canada by Mel Hurtig

Author:Mel Hurtig [Hurtig, Mel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Political Science
ISBN: 9781551992693
Publisher: Douglas Gibson Books
Published: 2011-12-28T07:09:02+00:00

25

FOREIGN TAKEOVERS

“It’s a disaster for Canada. Anything and everything is for sale. We’ll run out of companies to invest in.”1

In early 2006, business columnist Andrew Willis of the Globe and Mail wrote:

Virtually every company in this country without a controlling shareholder seems to be on the auction block these days.

The unanswered question is just how the people of Canada, and their elected officials in Ottawa, feel about selling off the biggest businesses in the land.

Expect takeovers to continue at a red-hot pace.

And, of course, Willis was right. It’s been hard to open a daily newspaper without a story about yet another foreign takeover. As to how Canadians feel, the evidence is mixed. As mentioned earlier, in all public opinion polls, for many years, Canadians overwhelmingly have said we already have too much foreign ownership and foreign control and don’t need more. Yet there has been relatively little in the way of a public outcry as more and more corporate icons fall.2

How does Ottawa feel? Don’t expect much change. The chances of the Harper government doing anything of real importance about growing foreign ownership and control are at best remote. When asked about it in June 2007, the prime minister said he had “no intention of intervening.” Perhaps Lynton (Red) Wilson and his policy review panel appointed in the summer of 2007 to study the problem will have enough influence with Harper to prove me wrong. Perhaps. Certainly there’s a chance that strong public opinion might make a difference. Yet if the Liberals regain power in Ottawa, based on their record in office during the Chrétien and Martin years there’s little evidence that they will be much better.

According to Stéphane Dion, “Canada is not for sale [sound familiar?]. I believe domestic ownership does matter.… I promise to … protect our economic sovereignty.”3 Very nice. But it would have been nice to have heard from Dion during all the Chrétien and Martin years when so many companies were vanishing from Canadian control. Dion later reassured the business community that he was “no protectionist.”

As David Olive wrote in 2006 in the Toronto Star,

In the past two years, more than a dozen of Canada’s largest corporations with total assets of more than $57 billion have been swallowed by foreign predators. And the response has been … well, there really hasn’t been a response.

There have been no calls in Parliament, any legislature, the media, or the halls of academe for a royal commission on the consequences for our economic sovereignty from this unprecedented yard sale of Canadian industrial assets.

So, we have

the outsourcing of decision-making to Switzerland and California, the sapping of the Toronto Stock Exchange as listings disappear: the decline in business for ancillary providers such as legal, accounting and underwriting firms and the implications for philanthropy as CEOş focus on the communities in which they live … [leaving] too many absentee owners of glorified shipping depots.

Meanwhile, “Our G-7 partners France, Germany and Italy regularly thwart attempted outside takeovers deemed to be of strategic national importance.

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