Controlling Interest: Who Owns Canada?

James G. Snell is a history professor at the University of Guelph,
author of In the Shadow of the Law: Divorce in Canada, 1900-1939, and
co-author of The Supreme Court of Canada: History of the Institution.

Controlling Interest is a disturbing and informative analysis of the Canadian economy. Diane Francis, a business reporter for the Toronto Star, sets out to provoke her readers into a thoughtful response to the extent of corporate concentration and power in this country.

The informational heart of the book is a short synopsis of each of 32 families to whom Francis points as the authors and beneficiaries of this economic power. Each family survey consists of a mixture of history, gossip, and financial data in varying amounts. The overall thrust is hard-hitting. For the most part Canada’s economic elite contributes little to the socio-economic well-being of this country. Benefitting from an inordinately generous tax environment that has allowed many of the families to pass on the wealth and power to succeeding generations, the business elite has taken advantage of lax govemment policy and a permissive environment to accumulate vast assets and corporate resources while putting very few of their personal assets at risk.

According to Francis, the losers are Canadian consumers, small business people, the tax coffers, and the business culture in Canada. Rather than producing and encouraging a dynamic, creative entrepreneurial environment, there has been created an almost parasitic group of financiers. Most of these men and their families show a strong tendency to plough little or none of their gains back into the society or economy that has placed them in such advantageous positions.

Controlling Interest concludes with a series of solutions to the problems described. But the tone of the book is such that the reader cannot help wondering whether it is too late to reverse or even to alter significantly the pattems that have been in place for so long in Canada.