We have always been a trading nation. In the 1980s, we engaged in an economic system centred on accelerated growth in trade with the expectation of a sharp growth in more sophisticated economic activity. Over twenty years there has been growth, but the relative and therefore fundamental effect has been to undermine sophisticated activity, except in a few exceptional areas—think of corporations such as Research In Motion (RIM) or Softimage—and to return us to dependence on those old raw materials. There are many possible ways to interpret what is happening. One of the most obvious is that the more we integrate as a smaller player into the large and complex U.S. economy, the more we are assigned a specific role not by market theory but by the U.S. market. Given the shape and needs of the U.S. economy and the highly integrated role of regional political influences, it isn’t surprising that our assigned role should be that of source of raw materials for U.S. industry and U.S. consumers. That’s what peripheral and colonial societies are for. The history of every empire is perfectly clear about this pattern of organization. And given that the U.S. economy will want to do with those commodities exactly what it wants, when it wants, at the price it wants, it is not surprising that control—that is to say, ownership—over those sectors is now a priority for U.S. corporations or their competitors elsewhere. The sign of the deeply colonial nature of our business and economic leadership is their passivity and even pleasure at being despoiled. At least important people are paying attention to their bodies, that is, to their corporations. In a colonial situation, a mind is an encumbrance.

Finally, today’s unassembled parts move back and forth across the continent and the oceans in search of assemblage. This is usually presented as rationalization, a modern sign of continental and international integration. It could equally be argued that this is an antiquated outcropping of nineteenth-century theory, wasteful, involving expensive fuels for unnecessary transportation, polluting and contributing to global warming. It may be, in the era of expensive commodities, marked by one particularly expensive commodity—oil—that the appropriate market structure is one that concentrates natural resources and more sophisticated downstream production in a severely limited geographic area. Perhaps it would be worth at least talking about this and doing some calculations that integrate all of the costs and effects of different systems. If we do inclusive economic cost calculations, it may turn out that long-distance-assembly options are too expensive. The long-distance transporting of low-value goods may also be too expensive. For example, the difference between Chinese production costs and ours is in good part that their economic analysis includes even fewer real economic factors than ours. Their analysis includes few social costs, few work condition costs, even fewer environmental impact costs. There is little enough discussion of alternate approaches elsewhere in the world. In the Canadian elite, there is no discussion. To discuss is to think. To think of alternate economic possibilities is to question the conventional codes of expression and so to raise the frightening spectre of reality.

This fear of debate then throws control over public ideas into very few hands and rarely amplifies the most interesting voices. If you look at the public discussion of Canadian business over the last two decades, you will find that a remarkably large space has been occupied by Conrad Black’s opinions, adventures and, more recently, travails. Yet he has never been a capitalist. That is, he has never assumed the capitalist’s role as owner for the purposes of wealth creation. He has only created one thing—one newspaper—and even that he couldn’t hold on to for more than three years. Apart from that, his career has been largely about stripping corporations. Destroying them. As the most visible voice for Canadian capitalism, he has had a negative effect on how most Canadians imagine the marketplace. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who has had a more negative effect on how Canadians think of the market. As one of the most active exploiters of libel chill, he has spread the impression that business leaders don’t want freedom of speech. As someone who over decades denounced his own country for being inferior to the United States and Britain, he promoted the old Family Compact colonial idea of how business relates to Canada. In the end, he made the ultimate colonial gesture by throwing away his citizenship in order to join an arcane, powerless British institution. And when real capitalists or business leaders, such as the five I mentioned earlier in this chapter, have raised their voices to express varying opinions on our economy, who shouts them down and denigrates them? In part it is the columnists who owe the launching of their careers to Lord Black.

Meanwhile, The New York Times and its writers have no trouble looking at Canada and seeing a crisis. “Canada’s vast mineral resources once made it the world’s leading mining nation. Many international banks based their mining experts in Toronto and students from around the world came to study mining at its universities. Major miners, like Inco ... were respected for their innovation and operational efficiency.” The Times describes how it all went wrong in steel, mining, forestry and breweries, and then the loss of real head offices, the loss of potential investments in the stock market, underwriting, accounting, legal work, the loss of charity donors. “Canada became the hunted not the hunter.”