The U.S. takeover of Canada, and mice

Biblio File conversations about James Coyne, Walter Gordon and Mel Hurtig

Americans already own most of Canada. The turning point came more than sixty years ago. The Hudson’s Bay Company? Roots? Canada Goose? All American. So, why not just formalize things like Donald Trump says?

Postal service sure would improve - it’d be cheaper to mail stuff, plus us travellers wouldn’t have to live with such a shitty exchange rate…

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It’s common knowledge that Canada’s very rich (i.e. the half percent of Canadians who own 30% of the country) don’t give a shit about their own country, never have. They may occasionally worry about Americans buying properties too close to their lakeside mansions; mostly they’re concerned about paying no inheritance taxes, increasing money they’ve invested outside the country, and, oh yes, maximizing profits from the domestic consumer-bilking monopolies they have money in. Most of their cash is offshore and they’ve sold their start-ups to U.S. investors. They have a history of running rum and selling development rights to the land they own ( taking the easy money: let foreigners do the work and reap the hard profits) instead of nation-building.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited this topic, but given Donald’s recent remarks, you might find it useful to look at a few previous posts and listen to some podcasts hosted here:

This interview to start with, where Andrew Coyne talks about his father James,

a true patriot, as opposed to a hypocritical, self-serving patriot, like many wealthy economic nationalists were:

Speaking of whom, here’s a conversation with Stephen Azzi about Walter Gordon, the Liberal finance minister in the early 1960s who, in his federal budget of 1963 tried unsuccessfully to take a stand against the American takeover of Canada (he was bullied into dank submission by the local business mafia). The last meaningful, if failed, stand for Canadian independence IMHO.

Gordon’s family-owned accounting firm made millions off American subsidiaries operating in Canada, including The Ford Company of “Canada.” Pioneers, they were, at helping companies avoid paying taxes in the countries they operated in by shifting revenues to low or no tax jurisdictions and returning profits to their rightful U.S. based owners. Millions more were made by selling lots of Canadian-owned companies to American interests.

I use “Canada” because American companies here (most notably Imperial Oil) exhibited the same kind of fake, self-serving patriotism that Canada’s elite used in order to fill their pockets. Tangible examples of this fakery were what I went looking for when I drove across Canada and back a few years ago.

Read The Great Cross-Canada Used Bookstore American Takeover Tour posts here, here and here.

But I’m being too hard on Gordon. I think he was a great Canadian who, like Jimmy Carter, had great integrity.

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Finally, because I got pretty red about all the American propaganda that flooded into Canada during the late fifties and early sixties, I decided to calm down by reading Mel Hurtig’s autobiography (and all of his other books).

Mel was another great Canadian nationalist. He died in 2016. Fortunately I was able to catch up with his daughter Leslie and a colleague of Mel’s, Jan Walter, during a visit to the Kingston Writer’s Festival one year. Listen here:

Everyone laughs at Canadian economic nationalist cats these days.

Pierre Polievre and Justin Trudeau are the mice, or should I say powder monkeys, that roared.