The Truth About Canada (24 page)

So where does that leave us? For Lawrence Martin, “You alter the character of a nation by changing how it sees itself. You change how it sees itself by changing the media.”
¹²

In Lloyd Axworthy’s review of Linda McQuaig’s 2007 book
Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the U.S. Empire
, he writes how our “Yankee cheerleaders” are given by our media “disproportionate platform time — just check out the panel lineups on our nightly news shows. To quote McQuaig, ‘It is the views of the elite.… Their views are given an extraordinary amount of media time and space, which gives them considerable influence in shaping the debate and making palatable a neo-conservative political agenda.’ ”
¹³
How ironic that they should be advancing at full throttle here in Canada when their neo-con heroes in the United States are in such decline and disarray.

A few words about newspapers in Canada and global warming. In a superb article in the
Georgia Straight
, Mitchell Anderson wrote about how some Canadian newspapers “have been supplying the public with a steady diet of misinformation and skewed science on the critical issue of global warming.”
¹⁴
Like earlier articles by deniers of any danger from tobacco, climate-change deniers, claiming that science does not support the idea that global warming is caused by humans, make a long list of claims quite unsupported by scientific evidence and in direct contradiction to international scientific studies by thousands of widely respected experts including the detailed reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change involving more than 2,000 climate researchers from 100 countries.

Anderson pointed out that one such climate change denier, “who has not published a peer-reviewed scientific publication on climatology in more than a decade, has published no less than 39 opinion pieces and 32 letters to the editor in 24 Canadian newspapers.” Given that expert after
expert has described the material as mischief, unbalanced, baseless, and misleading, Anderson asks, “What’s going on? Do newspaper editors not possess a phone?”

Anderson refers to Michael Campbell, a
Vancouver Sun
business columnist who happens to be B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s brother, who “regularly holds forth on climate change. Last year he scolded the scientific community: ‘I see little evidence that proponents of man-made global warming know how damaging the shoddy science behind some of their claims had been to their cause.’ ”

As indicated earlier, like the big tobacco companies, Exxon Mobil Corporation set out to plant doubt in the public’s minds. The skeptics they employed, wrote Anderson, “didn’t have to bother defending their position in the scientific community because the public was the target audience. They restricted their pugilism to the popular press rather than peer-reviewed scientific journals.”

The American Petroleum Institute called for

a campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry’s views on climate science and to train them in public relations so they can convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify.

If there is a significant difference between the PR efforts of the tobacco industry and the fossil-fuel industry, it is size. The oil, gas, and coal sectors make Big Tobacco seem positively puny by comparison.

Has this campaign against climate science been successful? You bet. It may well go down as the most audacious, successful and cynical campaign in public-relations history.

The result? The public is being misinformed on climate science by poor journalists that continue to tell both sides of the story even when there is no other side. The resultant political inaction might kill the planet.

Consider these numbers. A McAllister Opinion Research
poll from the fall of last year showed that fully 50 percent of Canadians still believed that “most scientists disagreed with each other about whether global warming was happening.” In the U.S., the numbers are even worse. An ABC News poll last year showed that 64 percent of Americans believed the majority of scientists are still arguing about whether or not global warming was even happening.

To be fair, a great many Canadian journalists have been doing an excellent job of warning of the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. That some Canadian newspaper editors choose not to pick up the phone and check with the scores of respected Canadian experts before they publish the opinions of very questionable sources is regrettable.

At this writing, there are some suggestions that Ottawa is considering new restrictions on media concentration, mergers, and cross-media ownership. But as is to be expected, the media owners are howling that any such actions would be “absolutely irresponsible.”
¹⁵

Professor Marc Raboy specializes in media policy at McGill University. In his opinion, “The horse left the barn a long time ago but we keep seeing more extreme cases of media consolidation.”
¹⁶

It’s never too late, but what needs to be done quickly will require strong political leadership that seems to be nonexistent in our country today. Meanwhile, the Stephen Harper government, in unprecedented ways, has to the best of its ability cut off the flow of information to the media and hence to the public. Most ministers are not allowed to talk freely to the media, so there has been less public comment from the Cabinet than at any time in the history of our country. The public flow of information and requests under the Access to Information Act have been slowed in a manner never seen before. And worse, much of the news media seems increasingly intimidated by the all-powerful Prime Minister’s Office and are prepared to accept that they must be on a pre-approved list before they are even allowed to ask questions.

PART SIX

24

FOREIGN INVESTMENT, FOREIGN OWNERSHIP, FOREIGN CONTROL

“Canadians are behaving like naive Boy Scouts by failing to emulate other countries that unabashedly protect their vital economic sectors from foreign ownership.”

“This is economic suicide.”

I
n the late 1960s and throughout the first half of the 1970s, Canadians became increasingly concerned about the already high and rapidly increasing level of foreign ownership in Canada, which had reached over one-third of all non-financial industry corporate assets and over 37.4 percent of all revenues.

This concern led to the formation of the Committee for an Independent Canada (CIC), the Watkins Report and the Gray Report, and a steady stream of public opinion polls which reflected growing Canadian unease regarding the issue. After being presented with a 176,000-name petition by the CIC, Pierre Trudeau and his government brought in the Foreign Investment Review Act in 1975. In a decade, foreign control dropped all the way down to 21.4 percent. This was still very high compared to other industrialized countries, but at least it was decreasing instead of continuing to increase at an alarming rate.

After Brian Mulroney abolished the Foreign Investment Review Agency in 1986 and replaced it with the rubber-stamp Investment Canada, foreign control and the foreign share of assets and revenues began to increase once again. By 2000, the foreign control of non-financial industries was back at about the same level as it had been in the mid-1960s. The latest official Statistics Canada figures show that in 2005 the foreign share of corporation revenues was back up to 30 percent, the highest level in 30 years, and the foreign share of profits was up to 30.5
percent. Foreign companies were taking well over half of all manufacturing revenues and oil and gas revenues.

Now, in 2008, we are on our way to passing the levels that caused such great concern in the 1970s, and are rapidly proceeding to new record levels, although official Statistics Canada figures won’t be available until 2009 or 2010.

In this respect, it’s interesting to note that in compiling its figures, Statistics Canada does not consider companies such as Air Canada, the Canadian National Railway Co. (which held its AGM in the United States in 2006 for the first time in history), Petro-Canada, or Canada’s largest oil and gas producer, EnCana, in its foreign ownership calculations, even though all four (and dozens of other important “Canadian” corporations) are already majority foreign-owned, mostly by Americans. Many other countries consider that as little as 10 percent foreign ownership can, and often will, represent effective foreign control.

For those right-wing continentalists and their comprador colleagues who make their perpetual pleas for more foreign direct investment (the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Conference Board of Canada, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the C.D. Howe and Fraser Institutes, not to mention many of our leading newspapers), we should have nothing but contempt. As we shall shortly see, what they are asking for is plain and simple: more foreign ownership and thus more foreign control of our resources, our industry, our high-tech companies, and many other businesses. How so?

Let’s look at the startling figures for foreign and direct investment since Brian Mulroney declared Canada “open for business” and dumped the Foreign Investment Review Agency. From June 30, 1985, to the end of 2007, 10,807 Canadian companies were taken over by non-resident-controlled corporations. The total dollar amount of all foreign direct investment monitored by Investment Canada was an enormous $834.86-billion. Of this amount, an astonishing 97.7 percent was for takeovers. Only a truly pathetic 2.3 percent was for the hoped-for new business investment.
¹

Note these numbers well and then consider these words from a
Globe and Mail
editorial (June 21, 2007) endorsing even more foreign direct
investment: “Foreign direct investment is typically welcomed when it involves new capital investment, such as creating a manufacturing plant from scratch in Canada bringing industry and jobs to the country.”

So, then, three big cheers for that tiny 2.3 percent of all foreign direct investment in Canada that was for new business investment during the last 22 years.

Since Investment Canada began keeping track in 1985, some 62 percent of these foreign direct investments has been attributed to American firms. Far behind in second place is the United Kingdom at 9 percent. So when we talk about foreign ownership and control in Canada, it’s predominantly American. And contrary to all the nonsense in our newspapers about Canadian direct investment in the United States exceeding U.S. direct investment in Canada, at the end of 2006 American direct investment here was $50.1-billion higher, and, more importantly, it represented a very much greater percentage of total assets and GDP.

As might be expected, a large percentage of Canadian direct investment abroad was by our good old patriotic Canadian banks, 42 percent to be exact. You know, the very guys who fund the likes of the continentalist C.D. Howe and Fraser Institutes, the Conference Board of Canada, and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

For some very good reasons, most Americans think they have the right to buy up as much ownership and control of Canada as they wish. For some truly bizarre reasons, many of our leading politicians, business leaders, and journalists see no problem with that. In fact, many of our political leaders and a large number of our most prominent editorial writers and columnists encourage more U.S. direct investment every time the topic comes up, seemingly ignorant of the fact that what they are asking for is even more foreign ownership and foreign control of our country.

What is remarkable is that the corporate con artists from the Business Council on National Issues who claimed that the FTA and NAFTA would encourage foreign companies to invest in Canada, because, with our supposed guaranteed access to the United States, Canada could provide a launching platform to the U.S. market, are essentially the same
crew who, as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), are now constantly whining that Canada’s share of foreign direct investment has been falling.

Is Canada running short of foreign direct investment? Hardly. In October 2006, an analysis by BMO Capital Markets said, “Inward investment is currently running well above long-run trends as a share of GDP. Indeed, strong foreign investment flows have played a role in driving the Canadian dollar above its fair value.”

Not enough foreign investment? What utter nonsense. In 2006, foreign direct investment in Canada amounted to a huge $78.3-billion, the second highest amount in our history. In the first six months of 2007, foreign direct investment in Canada was the second highest amount ever for the first six months of a year.
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In comparison to the Canadian figure of $78.3-billion for 2006, foreign direct investment in all of the huge country of China was only about $83-billion, and in the giant U.S. economy it amounted to only $109-billion. Adjusted for the relative size of these economies, the 2006 takeover figure for Canada is six times greater than in the United States. In 2006, Canada attracted $2.12-billion per million population, France $1.32-billion, the United States only $0.59-billion.
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And new OECD figures show that in 2007 Canada had the fifth-largest foreign direct investment inflow of any country, regardless of size.

Contrast this with the silly claims of the Conference Board of Canada and their head, Anne Golden, who told CBC Radio, “We’re losing out on our share of foreign direct investment,”
⁴
and the
Financial Post
, “On the ability to attract foreign investment, Canada gets a D grade. While emerging economies such as China and India are becoming increasingly attractive foreign investment destinations, Canada is losing ground.”
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