Corporate Control by Nora Loreto

Reviewed by Lisa Timpf

In Corporate Control, Nora Loreto discusses free trade, the rise and fall of Canada’s Crown corporations, corporate influence over politics in Canada, and other topics. Loreto makes the argument that Canada’s landscape has dramatically shifted since the 1980s, moving from democratic control to market control.

While Loreto concedes that free trade has been good for big corporations, she notes that it hasn’t benefited the average Canadian. Though profits for big companies have gone up, says Loreto, “real wages have barely increased,” and the majority of Canadians have also been “nailed with rising costs in other aspects of their lives,” leading to the current affordability crisis.

Loreto notes that the 1995 federal budget fundamentally altered Canada by privatizing Crown corporations, cutting public services, and loosening regulations for corporations. The long-term effects of this are not pretty, and to make things worse, these moves are difficult to roll back. The result is that “whether through deregulation, privatization, or free trade, Canadians have very little control of their own economy through their democratic institutions.” Instead, corporations, driven by a profit imperative, hold significant power.

The chapter I found most interesting was one titled “The Rise and Fall of Crowns,” which explores the history and purpose of Canada’s Crown corporations. Loreto notes that Crown corporations, which had been part of Canada’s makeup since its start as a country, numbered in the dozens at one time, and included transportation, telecommunications, mining, and petroleum companies, among others.

These Crown corporations “allowed the government to have a hand in the economy through a corporate entity.” But in the 1990s, “nearly every Crown corporation that produced something or provided a direct service to Canadians was sold off to the private sector,” in part because “public ownership posed a barrier to true free market participation.”

This was a significant loss, Loreto argues. Crown corporations had given Canadians “a measure of democratic control, oversight, or proximity to corporate leadership” because they were freed from “the pursuit of profits at all costs.”

Corporate Control discusses the financialization of health, housing, and education, and the negative impact of having social services sold off or manipulated by market forces. The rise in student debt, the increase in violence in schools, and the stressors caused by housing insecurity are all disturbing trends, but not everyone sees it that way: overcrowded emergency rooms, in an ironic turn of events, become “a business opportunity,” and in some cases for-profit corporations “are financializing systemic problems caused by austerity and underfunding.” The philosophy of doing more with less, popularized in the private sector and in manufacturing, isn’t a good thing, Loreto argues, when it is applied to the social safety net.

Loreto lays a lot of the blame on neoliberal reforms made over the past forty years. “The cost of living is increasing, productivity is declining, and Canadians are struggling. All the while profits have been allowed to soar,” Loreto notes. The reforms that started forty years ago have served to “remove the guardrails from Canada’s economy and allow corporations to make as much money as they can off us.”

How do we balance human needs against the profit imperative? What kind of society do we want to live in? How do we push back against the negative impacts of globalization? Corporate Control doesn’t so much as answer these questions as encourage readers to recognize there are issues, while providing an opinion on how we got here. But Loreto hasn’t given up hope, stating, “the good news is that we can still believe in democracy.”

Corporate Control is the second book in the “Canada in Decline” series. The Social Safety net, published in August 2024, was the first. Yet to come is a third volume, which will “examine democracy in Canada” as well as offering “possible ways forward for Canadians to fight for their democracy before it’s too late.”

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About the Author

Nora Loreto is an activist, author, and journalist. She is the editor at the Canadian Association of Labour Media and co-hosts the popular political podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics. She lives in Québec City.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dundurn Press (May 6 2025)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 264 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1459753135

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1459753136