Ruling Canada: Corporate Cohesion and Democracy

Extract

Ruling Canada: Corporate Cohesion and Democracy, Jamie Brownlee, Halifax: Fernwood Books, 2005, pp. 168.

For a discipline explicitly engaged in the study of power, particularly as exercised in liberal democracies, it is striking how little Canadian political science has actually done to examine the concentration of private economic power, the political organization of the business classes and the extension of that power into the political realm. Indeed, Canadian political science has been principally preoccupied with power insofar as it pertains to the constitutional distribution of power and the relative access to political power of the multinational and multicultural constituent groups comprising Canada. The enormous concentration of economic power—the top 25 firms accounting for over 40 per cent of business assets and the monopolies with over $100 million in revenue accounting for 80 percent of business assets (p. 31)—has largely been occluded from serious scrutiny. The mythologies of a pluralist Canadian democracy are better preserved in the absence of conceptual and empirical debate about the economic foundations of political power.