From COMER, August 2013:
“The corporate agenda had to be given academic credibility. This became the primary role of the Fraser and C.D. Howe Institutes, whose officers and minions quickly became adept at giving economic trends and statistics the requisite right-wing spin.”
A coup d’etat, especially a non-violent one, can’t succeed without a shrewd, careful, long-term strategy. The takeover of Canada by its big business executives could not have been achieved if they had not planned it so meticulously. Even a shade less forethought, less daring, less patience, less attention to detail could have aborted their mission long before it was accomplished.
Before examining the various stages and elements of their grand design, let’s concede that Canada’s top CEOs had a lot of help from the new computer technologies and the globalization of business and finance that started to be developed in the 1970s and ’80s. To some extent, these developments alone would have increased corporate power considerably. But to seize absolute power, an elaborate takeover scheme was still required.
Conceived in the early 1970s by corporate leaders chafing under political, regulatory, and jurisdictional constraints, the plot aimed to bring Canada under corporate rule within the next two decades. This had to be done quietly, stealthily, incrementally, to avert the mobilization of effective opposition. It had to be given the appearance of a natural evolutionary process, driven by impersonal and inexorable global forces.
The first and most important step, then, was to mould and influence public opinion. The CEOs knew from their brilliant product marketing campaigns that people’s preferences could be shaped by slick advertising. They knew that people’s thinking about economic and social issues could be similarly manipulated by the same techniques. Repeated and heard often enough, the biggest falsehoods can be twisted into unquestioned beliefs.
Here, then, in rough chronological order, are the steps and stages that comprised the cunning corporate blueprint.
1. Get organized. To coordinate the various elements of their plan, the CEOs of the 150 largest corporations set up and generously funded the Business Council on National Issues. The BCNI – which has since morphed into the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) – was to be the “quarterback” in planning and executing their long-term offensive.
2. Set up or co-opt conservative think-tanks. The corporate agenda had to be given academic credibility. This became the primary role of the Fraser and C.D. Howe Institutes, whose officers and minions quickly became adept at giving economic trends and statistics the requisite right-wing spin.
3. Cultivate and support articulate spokespeople. Tom d’Aquino, the first and long-serving CEO of BCNI, adroitly filled this role, as did the voluble Michael Walker of the Fraser institute. They were supported by such high-profile media “neo-cons” as Jeffrey Simpson, David Frum, Terence Corcoran, Barbara Amiel, and Andrew Coyne, and academics like John Crispo, Michael Bliss, and William Watson.
4. Create and control the terminology. The terms coined by the neo-cons (and later the neo-liberals) – e.g., “big government,” “the nanny state,” “disastrous “tax-and-spend” policies, “welfare cheats,” “the debt/deficit crisis,” “special interest groups,” “stride-mad unions,” “downsizing,” etc. – soon came to dominate public discourse, forcing those on the left to debate key issues in the language of the right.
5. Control the media. This was easy. Most newspapers, magazines, TV and radio networks, after all, were owned by BCNI members. Three newspaper moguls at the time – Ken Thomson, Conrad Black, and Paul Desmarais – owned or controlled 72 of the country’s 110 dailies. The same concentration of corporate power prevailed in the broadcast media (except the CBC), and in the most popular magazines. Little wonder that news and views that supported the corporate agenda flowed easily through the media, while the voices of dissent got scant space or time. They were mainly confined to the Toronto Star among the largest newspapers, and to low-circulation journals like the Canadian Forum, and later in the mid-1990s the CCPA Monitor.
6. Control or coerce all major political parties. This was not difficult, either. The Liberal and the various versions of the Conservative parties, being mostly run by and for the corporations anyway, proved willing – even eager – to help advance the corporate coup d’etat. Business leaders such as Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Michael Wilson took sabbaticals from their executive suites to assume political leadership on behalf of the BCNI. The NDP, when it formed a provincial government, could usually be confined to modestly progressive policies, sometimes by the threat of a massive business exodus or an engineered financial crisis. The truly great legislative breakthroughs pioneered by the Saskatchewan CCF government under Premier Tommy Douglas in the 1950s and ’60s – Medicare being the loftiest – came nowhere near being emulated by successive NDP governments anywhere in the country. The CEOs could be confident that their agenda would continue to be implemented, no matter which party was favoured by the voters.
7. Achieve maximum global corporate mobility. This was done mainly by having their subservient government vassals negotiate first the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and then the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), later followed by other worldwide trade pacts under the aegis of the corporate-controlled World Trade Organization (WTO). Promoted as measures to expand trade and lower import costs, their chief purpose was to enable the corporations to move anywhere in the world to exploit the cheapest labour, lowest taxes, and weakest environmental protection laws. They could also much more easily “shed” Canadian workers, relocate their plants abroad, and still send and sell their goods back home duty-free. The simultaneous development of high-tech communications technologies also gave them world-spanning financial mobility.
8. Escape from Legal and regulatory restrictions. Rules and regulations that compel the corporations to abide by certain minimal standards – on corporate taxes, wages, health and safety, service to the public, toxic emission levels, consumer protection, etc. – were incompatible with the goal of total corporate power and freedom. They had to be eliminated, or at least reduced to token levels. So, one by one, all the major industries have been deregulated, or regulations still on the books studiously left unenforced. The corporations were entrusted with the responsibility of “regulating” themselves, as if “good corporate citizenship” had not become the most ironic of oxymorons.
9. Dismantle the public sector. By creating and then demonizing the “debt/deficit crisis,” the CEOs and their tame politicians and PR experts gave themselves a convenient all-purpose excuse to slash government spending on social programs. In the span of a couple of decades, they rampaged through the public sector, privatizing services, slashing or shrinking those they couldn’t privatize, laying off thousands of public employees, and subjecting health care, education, and social assistance to the “death of a thousand cuts.” Private sector rule means public sector subjugation.
10. Disarm and debilitate the opposition. The right-wing propagandists have done a good job of discrediting and even ridiculing any person or organization daring to oppose or even disagree with the corporate takeover. They are dismissed as cranks or troublemakers, as special interest groups, as welfare state parasites, as Luddites foolishly trying to keep the economy from growing. To make sure they don’t seriously threaten corporate rule, unemployment is kept high and social security payments low. And if the dissidents’ NGOs are dependent on government funding such as financial support is cut or completely withdrawn.
11. Curb the rights and effectiveness of organized labour. One of the few corporate objectives that hadn’t been accomplished up to the 1990s was the enfeeblement of the labour movement. But since then, unions in the private sector have had their bargaining strength sapped immensely by the rising power and mobility of corporate employers. Thousands of manufacturing plants were shut down and many thousands of union members’ jobs eliminated when production was shifted offshore. Unemployment rates were kept high and unemployment insurance rates low. In the public sector, increasingly anti-labour.
12. Exalt and protect the size and value of wealth. The ultimate objective of the corporate agenda, the one that subsumes all others, is to protect the rich and make them richer. The normal workings of unfettered free enterprise have that effect, in any case, but other measures include the steady reduction of taxes on the wealthy and corporations, elevating them to the highest positions of power and influence, lavishing them with social status and privilege, and of course providing them with police protection from their resentful working-class victims.
13. Preserve the illusion of democracy. This is quite a feat, considering how absolute corporate rule has become in this country, and indeed in most other developed countries around the world. But so far the CEOs have managed to pull it off. They do it mainly by preserving the outward trappings of a democratic state. We still have several political parties, still have “free” elections, still have legislatures in session for at least a few months in the year. Protesters are still free to demonstrate, free to lobby their MPs and MLAs, free to present briefs to parliamentary committees. They can even, occasionally, get their alternative views reported in the medial.
For most Canadians – even most of the dissidents – the exercise of these traditional democratic “freedoms” is sufficient to maintain the illusion of a true democracy. Unfortunately, they are no more substantive than a politician’s promise, no more real than a TV soap opera. They work because most of us accept the illusion as reality.