Corporate America And Canadian Politics, The Mulroney Years

McDonald then lays down layer after layer of detailed behind-the-scenes information which shows both Mulroney's eagerness to curry favour with the U.S. and corporate America's interest in using Mulroney as the standard-bearer of Reaganomics in this country. She exposes the deep ties between Mulroney and influential Americans who not only helped him get elected, but helped him sell the policies they advocated to Canadians.

And McDonald doesn't shrink from including other key players who are still familiar faces--such as Tom d'Aquino, head today of the CCCE. The CCCE was formerly the BCNI, an organization which McDonald points out "blatantly patterned itself on the U.S. business roundtable, the lobby of 196 top Fortune 500 corporations whose enormous influence with congressman and the Reagan White House was uncontested". During Mulroney's reign the reports of the BCNI were often translated word for word into actual legislation.

McDonald also reminds those of us reading now, before Cellucci, there was Paul Robinson, "proconsul for Reagan's imperial Presidency", who like Cellucci never bothered with diplomatic niceties when describing the U.S. view of Canada. Robinson had a willing ally in d'Aquino, and d'Aquino helped craft the selling of NAFTA, an agreement which Canadians and even the BCNI's own Canadian members didn't actually want.

According to McDonald:

"As soon as they met, Tom d'Aquino and Paul Robinson recognized in each other a shared vision. At BCNI's offices and its regular lavish dinners for its blue-chip members, Robinson became a frequent speaker who found a receptive audience for his rambunctious patriotism. But he quickly realized that neither he nor the Reagan administration could be seen as the instigators of any continental trade initiative. "I always knew it had to come from Canadians," he explains. "For one thing, Canadians always told me that. If it got out that it was an American idea, I knew it would be dead."

Something to remember when you're told that deep integration is really the idea of Canadians and Canadian think tanks, not the Bush administration--like for example the very Canadian think tank and the very Canadian that already sold us NAFTA on Reagan's behalf.

McDonald also demonstrates that NAFTA itself was far more than a trade agreement, but rather the beginning of Canada-U.S. harmonization on many fronts and the instrument of the erosion of Canadian democracy and our very nationhood. In other words, Mulroney was the first architect of Canada's slow destruction through globalization.

As McDonald concludes, retired conservative billionaire James Goldsmith himself "pointed out that unrestrained trade might be a boon for corporations, but it was proving notoriously noxious for people"...

..."In Western nations, GNP might be steadily rising, Goldsmith argued, but so was despair and social unrest. 'We seem to have forgotten the purpose of the economy,' he raged. 'Prosperity with stability.' Unless the brakes were put on globalization, he predicted it would 'impoverish and destabilize the industrialized world while at the same time cruelly ravaging the Third World.'

But as Goldsmith pointed out, what else could be expected from the captains of transnational industry who owed no allegiance to any land? Their fealty was to their shareholders' dividend cheques, not the commonweal. For nearly a century, Canadians, like Americans and Europeans, had looked to their government to protect them against that relentless corporate testosterone. But suddenly governments were abandoning the dreams of their communities for a multinational vocabulary and value system--a mindset that, paradoxically, seemed aimed at putting them out of business. At a time when a strong national vision had never been more sorely needed, the very concept of governance had fallen into disrepute. Even the notion of nationhood itself was under siege, and the latest academic fashion trumpeted Canada's virtues as the first "post-national" nation--in effect, no nation at all.

Increasingly, Canadians were being prodded into questioning the meaning of the country--an exercise in existentialism that was unthinkable south of the border. No chest-thumping American patriot would ever be caught pondering whether the United States was merely an outdated commercial convenience. But in Toronto, the business editor of a leading magazine could blithely announce that her constituency considered Canada an irrelevance. Had the nation been reduced to a sentimental accident of geography? A patchwork of fractious regional tribes? Or had it always been something more--a collective will, even a collective dream, no matter how ill-defined? In the summer of 1995, as the fate of the nation had never seemed more uncertain, that, in the end, may have been Brian Mulroney's most damaging legacy: he had left Canadians with a diminished sense of themselves. They might be slowing becoming more Americanized, more uppity and individualistic, quicker to the barricades or the end of a Maritime fishing pier, fists waving at an interloping European trawler. But in the face of the global tides, they found themselves impotent to defend those institutions to which they declared themselves most attached from the rampages of their own leaders."

That's what makes Yankee Doodle Dandy such an important book; it takes us to the beginning of the rise of neoconservatism in Canada, and the very people and polices that began enshrining the rights of corporations over the rights of their own citizens. It chronicles the birth of deep integration. So I highly recommend it to readers here.

And by the way, when you're done, pick up a copy of Straight Through the Heart: How the Liberals Abandoned the Just Society (HarperCollins) by Maude Barlow and Bruce Campbell, to see how the Liberals accelerated the process of transferring power from citizens to giant corporations begun under Mulroney.