Tony Sutton
The people need to take back control Recent Canadian governments thought it would make sense to place the economy in the hands of the private marketplace. Bad decision
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t’s painful to recount the times in recent decades that we’ve been fed the neoliberal mantra that privatising public services is more cost effective than allowing them to remain in the hands of ‘spendthrift’ governments. To see the unreality of those claims of corporate fiscal superiority, we need look no further than Britain, where various governments have, over the past few decades, sold essential public utilities cheaply to companies that promised greater efficiency and lower prices. Unfortunately, as the Brit consumers soon discovered, the private sector is much better at raising prices, slashing services, pigging on profits, and squealing for government support when, inevitably, things go wrong. The situation on the other side of the Atlantic is worse, US leaders having convinced their guileless citizens that they live in a classless society in which unions are the devil’s creation, socialism is for commie bastards, taxation is evil, and a half-decent public health service is just a liberal wet dream. Canada is different, we are
The sport & prey of Capitalists How the Rich Are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth Linda McQuaig Dundurn – www.dundurn.com Can $25.99
told. Ours is a kinder, gentler, and generally more sensible society. People are polite. Healthcare is a right, not a luxury. And, perhaps most important of all, Canada has long resisted the economy-gobbling excesses of US-style military funding.
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ell, yes. But, as Linda McQuaig points out in her latest book, The Sport & Prey of Capitalists: How Capitalists Are Stealing Canada’s
22 ColdType | Mid-August 2020 | www.coldtype.net
Wealth, a succession of political betrayals have taken Canada on a long ride down the neoliberal highway, leaving the country “increasingly dominated by the forces of private greed that rule the marketplace”. Sport & Prey begins with a cautionary tale that warns against reckless distribution of public cash, in which McQuaig tells how Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government paid $4.5-billion of taxpayer cash in 2018 to take over the long-troubled Trans Mountain oil pipeline. Kinder Morgan, its Texas-based owner, started the pipeline in more optimistic times, as a means of transporting heavy crude oil from Alberta’s tar sands to West Coast ports en route to Asia. However, their plans were thwarted by protests from indigenous groups and others, including the government of British Columbia. The decision to buy the pipeline was, Trudeau insisted, “in the public interest”, although critics pointed out that its completion would have compromised our ability “to survive on the planet”. How, McQuaig, asks, could “something serve our interest as a nation
