As Canadian fury grows against Donald Trump with each new outrage, Mark Carney has found a sweet-spot.
As long as Carney keeps his elbows up, signalling his defiance of the menacing U.S. president, Canadians have mostly given the prime minister a free hand in running the country.
And Carney has used this considerable leeway to quietly consolidate corporate power in Canada — with dangerous consequences that are receiving insufficient media attention.
Corporations have long had a dominant hand in shaping Canadian economic policies.
But Carney, with connections deep inside Canada’s corporate establishment, is making government even more acquiescent to business demands.
This rightward drift is most noticeable in Carney’s redirection of public funds from social programs towards military contracts, and his welcoming approach to Big Oil.
But it’s also evident in an extraordinary measure that Carney seems to be trying to sneak into law. The measure — hidden deep inside the mammoth omnibus Bill C-15 currently before Parliament — would give cabinet ministers sweeping powers to allow corporations to escape government regulations.
The measure would enable ministers to exempt an individual or corporation from any law (except criminal law), in order to promote the nebulous goal of “innovation, competitiveness or economic growth.”
Such exemptions would have to be “in the public interest.” If that sounds like a sufficient safeguard, you might be interested in some swamp land or steaks that Donald Trump is selling.
For decades, under both Liberal and Conservative governments, Ottawa has concluded it’s “in the public interest” for corporations to increasingly regulate themselves, that the proper role for government is, as business demands, to “get out of the way.”
It was this deregulatory mania that led to the horrific 2013 disaster in which a speeding, driverless train, pulling 72 oil tank-cars, derailed in the town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, incinerating 47 people in flames that soared to 1,650C, according to Bruce Campbell, author of ”The Lac-Megantic Rail Disaster.”
Campbell meticulously documented how the tragedy stemmed from dozens of decisions, made by Canadian political leaders, that reduced Ottawa’s oversight of rail safety — in order to make railways more profitable.
Campbell notes that no public inquiry was held into the Lac Megantic tragedy, and no lessons appear to have been learned from it.
Indeed, two years after the disaster, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government passed the Red Tape Reduction Act, to reduce the regulatory “burden” that had “affected the cost of doing business.”
Now Carney is planning to take us further down this perilous deregulation path. He’s proposing to strengthen Harper’s anti-regulation Red Tape law by adding the new measure allowing cabinet ministers to grant regulatory exemptions to individuals and corporations.
The public would be mostly in the dark about these special regulatory favours; cabinet ministers would be able to keep details secret, based on considerations like “the protection of confidential or personal information.”
Like Harper, Carney maintains Canada has “too much regulation.” Overall, he’s closer to Harper than to his Liberal predecessor Justin Trudeau when it comes to yielding to the entreaties of business leaders, many of whom Carney knows personally.
Due to his key roles in central banking and global asset management, Carney is connected to 59 people who’ve become heads of Canada’s largest corporations, according to researchers working with the World Elite Database, an international consortium of scholars studying national power structures.
Lobbying disclosures show that, during his first nine months in office, Carney met with corporate lobbyists twice as many times as did Trudeau, and Carney met with the Business Council of Canada, representing Canada’s major CEOs, three times as often as Trudeau.
Reducing the “regulatory burden” has long been a key goal of corporate leaders. And, in Carney, they now have someone who appreciates how much their profitability can be improved by getting government out of the way.
It’s just that sometimes — like in Lac-Megantic — it’s better for government to be in the way.
This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.
