Privatization: Canada's Dirty War

Privatization almost always involves falsification of economic benefits, attacks upon low wage earners, degeneration of safety measures, decreased viability (financial and psychological) of government as it loses administrative power, and the undermining of public confidence. All of those negatives are advantageous to the people wanting to place government power in the hands of private corporations. Finally, at a time when more and more experts agree that the abuse of environment requires discipline and regulation, privatization takes discipline and regulation out of government hands and makes a mockery of them. That definition suggests privatization is a process of robbing the people in order to favour and enrich particular private interests, wealthy forces, or classes. Normal people’s response to the definition, given its implication, might well be to say, “but in Canada and the rest of the Western World, there has been a steady movement (with some breaks) to privatization at least since the end of the Second World War. The best minds, then, must have judged that privatization is in everyone’s interest”. Reasonable people might go on to say something else. “It’s true publicly owned enterprises are held for the people by “the Crown”, our name for the State (and in Canada usually called Crown Corporations). But when privatizations come about, the transfer of ownership from the people to private owners is made by the democratically elected representatives of the people, chosen to represent the interests of all of the population. Privatization, then, must mirror the will of the people.” Those very important observations have to be put into the context of Canada in the 20th and 21st centuries. They are mistaken observations, made in good faith. The observations are wrong in two ways. First, Canada (and the bulk of the western world) exists in a “market economy”. That is to say, it exists in an economic system owned and controlled by powerful private operators who use (and abuse) planetary wealth to serve their own enrichment and greed. To the extent that those private operators also satisfy the needs of the population, they only do so (a) to make profit, or (b) because they are forced to do so by governments. Proof of that situation is provided by the simple fact that pharmaceutical companies making billions of dollars in profit vastly overprice products and refuse medicines to desperately needy countries and people who cannot not pay the exorbitant prices demanded. Those pharmaceutical companies are happy to see unnecessary pain, suffering, disease, and death happen to millions of people in order to assure themselves obscene corporate profits. The only possibly more vile evidence of active corporate evil undertaken to assure obscene profits for private owners is the manufacture and trade of military weaponry – a gigantic, private enterprise feeding war, famine, destruction, murder, pain, suffering, and planetary waste. Together, those two “private enterprise activities” working in the “market economy” give all the evidence we need that, to corporations in our present free enterprise system, human suffering and death, as well as the destruction of the environment, are openly employed to further the production of private profit and private wealth. Those are dramatic examples of a continuous process of degrading and destroying human life and dignity by “private enterprise” in the “market economy”. A less dramatic example in the continuous process is provided in B.C. where the Campbell Liberal government is privatizing – in the service of private wealth – every Crown activity it can transform. Refusing to call, fairly, upon all economic activity in the province to support necessary humane services, for instance, the Campbell Liberal government is attempting to make humane services into private, profit-making enterprises. As a result the weak and desperate in B.C. live in the streets. The sick in even our major hospitals face increasing dangers of infection and “hospital illnesses” as a result of privatized health support services (cleaning, laundry, food preparation, and so on). Seniors lucky enough to be in seniors' homes have services radically cut and are served food fit for pigs. Employees in such places and in hospitals are over-worked and have wages slashed to near-subsistence levels. To create profit for private (often foreign) operators, the Campbell Liberal government is perfectly happy to throw the vulnerable into the street, to deny excellent care-givers decent wages, to endanger the already-ill, and to create structures in which the invisible, defenseless aged can be abused and exploited. A Vancouver Sun report (tucked into a small corner of the paper) has just revealed that a “long-term care facility” in Victoria has a starting wage of $9.25, “about half the hourly wage earned before those jobs were contracted out to Compass Group” the now private employer. (Sun Jan 8 05 B2) The Campbell Liberal government is happy to see British Columbians reduced to bare survival living so that (often foreign) private corporations can grow rich on human vulnerability and defenselessness. That evidence and the much more we can’t record here make plain that “the best minds” have not judged that privatization is in everyone’s interest. The people who have judged that our economy must be privatized are the most powerful people in the market economy: corporation owners; the wealthy, driven by greed; and the dominant economic policy-makers in Canada. They are few, but they are powerful. They control most of the press and media. They finance and support so-called “independent research organizations” like the Fraser and C.D. Howe institutes. (Most revealing – the Fraser Institute refuses to make public the list of its financial supporters.) They “endow” and support university economics departments and Management Studies programmes to the point that there is hardly a single professional economist in Canada who will stand up to the rapacious and humanly destructive private corporations and their incessantly propagandized theories of privatization. The second error reasonable Canadians make is to believe that our democratically elected representatives - chosen to represent the interests of all the population – mirror the will of the people, and, so, the privatizations in B.C., for instance, passed by the B.C. Campbell Liberal government are being undertaken because British Columbians want them undertaken. Canadians must learn that in the present state of the market economy, governments more and more are becoming the direct servants of wealth and the private corporations. The Gordon Campbell Liberal determination to impoverish the defenseless on behalf of corporate power is part of a growing merger of so-called democratic government and private corporate greed. The result is direct action to destroy democratic government. Here again we have to look at the historical record. It reveals an ugly truth. To begin, I have written in these columns of the savage, unrelenting attack on the NDP government of B.C. in which Glen Clark – never proved to have done even a shady deal, let alone a criminal one – was hounded from the premiership, defamed, and destroyed politically to make a place for the Gordon Campbell reactionary Liberal government. The forces uniting to destroy Glen Clark and the B.C. NDP at the time involved the Gordon Campbell forces, the RCMP, the press and media – especially the Canwest monopoly press in B.C., and the B.C. courts. The degree to which any of those forces was deliberately involved in fraud will only be fully revealed by a major public inquiry. Until that time, a rotten stench rises from the whole shameful sequence of events and yet surrounds the Gordon Campbell government. At the close of Clark’s highly dubious trial in which he was cleared of any suspicion of wrong-doing, Canwest’s Vancouver Sun political columnist Vaughn Palmer left the insinuation that perhaps Clark might not be innocent. And since then, unashamed, Palmer – writing of former B.C. premier Bill Vander Zalm’s reappearance on some public questions – has remarked that the next thing we can expect to see (suggesting it would be outlandish) is the restoration of Glen Clark in the public’s eyes. Palmer’s insult is beyond comprehension unless one accepts that he works actively for the reactionary forces which have seized power in B.C. I will not write of the "reactionary forces that won the last election in B.C.". Having seized power, the Gordon Campbell governing clique pays as little attention to the elected MLAs in the Victoria legislature as it does to other British Columbians. The terms of sale of B.C. Rail – which Gordon Campbell promised publicly not to sell – have not only been kept from the B.C. population but also from its representatives in the B.C. legislature – and even the Liberal MLAs! We learn, as time passes, that the sale of B.C. Rail is immersed in chicanery and fraud charges – and STILL we aren’t told all the terms of the sale. B.C. Rail is not being sold from ownership by the people of B.C. because it is a profitless operation without potential for the future, but – on the contrary - because it is both profitable and with a huge potential for the future. The sale is a naked steal from the people of B.C. on behalf of the privately wealthy. Changes to the B.C. private forest legislation on behalf of corporate wealth were made by Order in Council (by, that is, the inner Campbell clique) without the B.C. population or its representatives in the B.C. legislature being informed. The legislation written to chop B.C. Ferries (owned by the people of B.C.) into pieces to be gobbled up by private corporate owners was a backroom “magic act”. I am sure not one in ten B.C. MLAs could pass a test identifying the major financial and other manipulations undertaken to wrest B.C. Ferries from the hands of the B.C. people. They live in ignorance – as the Gordon Campbell clique wishes them to. What is more, to insure research into the condition of B.C. Ferries will be stymied, the Campbell Liberal government legislation stealing B.C. Ferries from the B.C. people removes Ferry activities from examination through the Access to Information processes, removes them from inquiry and investigation by the provincial ombudsman, and removes all labour matters from examination by the B.C. Labour Relations Board. So much for democracy and the representatives of the people making decisions for the population. A very sad comment on the situation in B.C. is that the uniting of governments with private corporations to make “corporative” policy has happened before in fairly recent history – by the Fascist government in Italy and the Nazi government in Germany in the first half of the last century. The one fact that experts agree on now about Fascism and Nazism is that the political forces of Mussolini and Hitler did not dominate private corporations. In fact, the opposite occurred. Private corporations financed the rise of both Mussolini and Hitler in order to gain unimpeded power. The regimes of the two men worked hand-in-glove with private corporations in the desecration of human life and dignity. That suggests privatization is more than simply another way of running the economy in a democratic country. The more there are privatizations, the more democratic power is sapped from the people and the more government becomes a tool of corporate forces which are happy – as I have suggested – to see human pain, suffering, disease, humiliation, and death in the pursuit of profit for private interests, wealthy forces and classes. Long term results are clear. But the endlessness of Canada’s dirty war is not clear to all. A few brief examples. At the end of the Second World War, Canada had built the third or fourth largest merchant marine fleet in the world – publicly built and owned to conduct the needs of the war. Its potential was unlimited after the war in a world with expanding needs for reconstruction and trade. The Canadian merchant marine fleet was destroyed in a 15-year criminal assault on the Canadian Seamen's Union by a recognized thug brought from the United States by the Liberal government of the day. Under the guise of ridding organized labour of Communists, the union was destroyed and the ships sold for a song. Less blatantly but with equal determination, another wartime company made for wartime purposes that was successful and innovative in the early production of plastics and related products was dumped – not because it was a failure, but because it was not. The brilliantly conceived and constructed film-making operation – another product of wartime needs – the National Film Board, which has an envied international reputation, could not be sold because of public interest. But instead of growing to the internationally competitive film-making operation that it should have become, it has been purposefully strangled to permit U.S. private corporation movie makers to dominate the Canadian market. For some years in British Columbia a government telephone service was operated to provide service to distant and outlying areas. It undertook that task because B.C. Telephone Co. (now Telus) didn’t want the expense. As the B.C. Government Telephone service brought areas into profitable telephony, the areas were delivered to the B.C. Telephone Company whose controlling shares were owned by General Telephones of America. The B.C. government created and serviced and prepared for profitability telephone service for a foreign-owned company operating in B.C. In 1987 B.C. Hydro and what became B.C. Gas and then the present Terasen were interlinked Crown operations with immense potential to serve British Columbians, to provide for growing industrial potential, to develop markets beyond B.C., to maintain a good level of wage rates in the province, and to be significant and stable contributors to provincial revenues – affording solid building of economic and social infrastructures and guarantees of continuing funding for health care and other social securities. The potential for genuine good was simply immense. In 1988 the natural gas portion was sold off by the Vander Zalm government for $741 million to private holders who began milking the cash cow immediately and have never stopped. The natural gas portion of B.C. Hydro had helped balance the huge costs of dam-building and other B.C. Hydro growth. With the sale went that invaluable interaction, and soon railway properties of irreplaceable value were also sold off. Since coming to power the Gordon Campbell Liberal government is doing what it can - and is still hard at work – to undermine B.C. Hydro. It has brought in the notorious Accenture administrative processing operation famous for its connection to the massive Enron (fraudulent) operation. However “clean” Accenture may be, it is known for its wage-slashing and its attack on a secure and respected workforce. The Campbell Liberal government clique welcomed Accenture into the B.C. Hydro operations, hardly an action even the worst of its MLAs would have desired. But the Campbell Liberal government has done more – hardly observed by the people of British Columbia. Because it is a servant of private corporations and private wealth, the Campbell Liberal government is doing what it can to prevent B.C. Hydro from being effective, forcing it into policies that serve private corporations, and pushing it towards privatization. The Campbell Liberal plan is to weaken energy regulation, to sell energy outside B.C. regardless of B.C. needs, and, finally, to privatize B.C. Hydro. (See Dale Marshall and Jodi-Lyn Newnham, Running on Empty, CCPA, Aug. 2004.) All that is completely in accord with the destruction of the electricity, gas, and oil continuum which was a godsend to British Columbians and which has been increasingly broken up for one reason only – to enrich private owners at the expense of the B.C. population. The terrible truth is that in a market economy owned and controlled by private wealth, everything in the economy is lied about – through corporate statements, press and media, and government “information”. Private enterprise, for instance, is not more efficient than publicly owned enterprise. Private enterprise does not deliver products more cheaply. It does not treat employees better. It does not ensure security and harmony for the community. It does not give better service to the community. It does not better protect the environment. The only thing it does really well is to hide the degree to which it is misusing resources and misleading the public about its activities. The terrible tragedy of the situation I describe is the extent to which government and corporate forces work together to destroy publicly owned enterprises in order to convince the population that such enterprises are not workable. The prime example at the moment is Canada’s Medicare system. Governments like the Gordon Campbell government and the Ralph Klein Alberta government don’t want Medicare to work. Canadians wonder and wonder why the Canadian Medicare system can’t be fixed. It can be. But Paul Martin, Gordon Campbell, Ralph Klein, and many others with power in the system don’t want it fixed. They want it privatized, made a wealth-producing activity for private corporations. Ralph Klein recently appointed an active anti-Medicare person as one of his chief advisors. Gordon Campbell appointed - as B.C. representative to the new National Health Council – his brother-in-law who is on public record as opposing Canada’s Medicare system. As to Paul Martin – “Under his watch as Finance Minister, for-profit health care took root in many provinces. Neither Martin nor the federal government as a whole took a stand on this issue, even though the encroachment of for-profit care threatens the viability of Medicare….” (Cindy Wiggins, “Martin fails…”, CPPA Monitor, April 2004, p. 30.) Paul Martin, moreover, engineered the election to Parliament and appointed to the federal cabinet the former president of Canfor. David Emerson was on the 1987 committee that shaped the sell-out of the natural gas portion of B.C. Hydro. When the Gordon Campbell Liberal government seized power in 2001, David Emerson joined the Board set up to destroy B.C. Ferries and to find, as an aid to its destruction, a U.S. head who had no experience in ferry operation but – coming from a bankrupt, dubious U.S. corporation – had much experience in dismantling and selling off corporate assets. Finally, Paul Martin also engineered the election to Parliament and to the federal cabinet of Ujjal Dosanjh (as Minister of Health), the former NDP B.C. premier who was Attorney General when Glen Clark was forced out of office as a result of the criminal investigation I believe was fraudulent. Dosanjh then replaced Glen Clark as premier, is believed by many to have thrown the next election on behalf of Gordon Campbell, and very soon after began working for the Liberal Party in B.C. Every indication that a reasonable person might bring to the examination of the Canadian Medicare system is that many members of the Canadian federal cabinet and many powerful people in the provinces are committed to the domination of private corporations in a market economy and are, therefore, committed to the destruction of the Canadian Medicare system. The dirty war in Canada is being fought over every activity that might bring profit to private corporations. More and more – as the politics of the country now stand – governments are placing themselves in the service of private corporations. The dirty war can only get dirtier and dirtier, until the privatizers are run out of governments and the larger Canadian community.