Fighting Deep Integration: What We Are Up Against!

In 1971, CSIS embarked on its first Canada Study Project, bringing together a panel of Canadians, Americans and others chaired by John Deutsch of Queen's University in Canada. The effort, funded by the William H. Donner Foundation, responded to a sharp rise in anti-Americanism and economic nationalism in Canada that was reflected in the cabinet of then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and was souring bilateral relations in a number of areas. The Canada Study Project drew participation from several rising stars, including the Spectator's Nigel Lawson and U.S. political columnist Robert Novak. In 1972, this project produced a monograph, The Canadian Condominium: Domestic Issues and External Policy edited by project director Thomas Hockin that explored the roots of this nationalist sentiment, and advocated a pragmatic approach to managing bilateral relations - while anticipating much of the friction that Canadian economic nationalism would cause until the early 1980s.

Conservative strategists (and Mel Hurtig obviously!) understand the importance of the Donner Foundation in promoting the right-wing agenda in Canada, as indicated in the following excerpt. This article, which appeared in the National Post in 2001, is certainly worth a re-read for its overview of neocon strategy in Canada, and in particular for its mention of the ubiquitous American Donner Foundation and the role it is playing in Canadian politics:

Three power centres are capable of generating the energy Canada needs to renew itself politically.

The first is the national network of think-tanks and media. The phenomenon has not been well studied but for some years Parliament, the universities and the national civil service have been increasingly upstaged as centres of political discussion by organizations such as the C.D. Howe and Fraser institutes, the Conference Board of Canada, the Institute for Research on Public Policy, the Business Council on National Issues, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, the Donner Foundation, the two national newspapers and the more thoughtful radio and TV shows. [...]

Second, the governing party has the capacity to renew itself. [...] These days the expectation is that the sterile log jam of the last years of Chrétien Liberalism will be broken in the next few years, not by the Alliance or the PCs, but by the next Liberal prime minister, Paul Martin or Someone Else. [...]

The third hope for change comes from the provinces. [...] Creative opposition to the Liberal hegemony in Ottawa currently centres in the Conservative governments of Alberta and Ontario, about to be joined by the misnamed "Liberals" of British Columbia and, after another election, the never-conformist nationalist government of Quebec. [...]
[More]

A list of recent grants by the Donner Foundation can be found here. It also gives out "Canadian" book awards and it will come as no surprise to learn that the "Donner Canadian Foundation Awards For Excellence In The Delivery Of Social Services" is administered by conservative think tank: the Fraser Institute! (Here is where the neocon machinations make me feel really nauseous: Special notice is to be paid to the buzz words "Canadian" and "Social services". Just think "social engineering"!)

The Donner Foundation is working both sides of the integration issue. From the American side, it has underwritten the "Canada Project" at neocon think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Here in our country, it looks like it has metastasized and invaded the Canadian landscape. Besides pouring money in the integrationist neocon think tanks, it is in our charitable institutions (*), our universities, ... how on earth do we fight this?

(*) For that most important link between neocons and philanthropy, see Alterman again here and here for Part II.