Diane: You are correct. Adopting this or that economic model or theory will not necessarily cause a country to lose its culture, you can’t loose something you can’t control, something that is part of who you are. As that great Canadian philosopher Ralston Saul might have put it “culture is not something you control or protect, it is something that grows and changes over time. The best you can do is provide an environment for that culture to blossom while still preserving your society’s traditions and values”. That being said, economics and culture are still inexorably linked. If your economic model doesn’t support your culture then you culture will eventually change to accommodate your economic model. By accepting the U.S. economic model – that free trade and the sale of the country’s resources and manufacturing sector made inevitable – you eventually, inexorably adopt a good portion of the culture of the country that now controls your economy.

Johnny: What was for you, how would you have defined Canadian culture?

Diane: In my opinion, what defined Canadian culture before it was almost completely smothered by the economic dominance of its neighbour to the south, was not only its European roots, its two, then three, then four, then five official languages, but something more fundamental; something that was part of the make up of the first inhabitants of the land and became an integral part of how Canadians defined themselves and that was compassion.

Johnny: Compassion???

Diane: Compassion for those in trouble; compassion for those that were less fortunate than you; compassion for those who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on hard times; compassion for the sick and the destitute; even compassion for strangers in trouble, from the compassion shown by the first inhabitants of the land for Cartier and his small band of explorers dying from scurvy during the winter of 1534 to the compassion of twentieth century Canadians for the boat people of Vietnam. It was not a hypocritical concern or the crocodile tears shed by the so-called compassionate Conservatives or Republicans. Canadians backed up their concern for their fellow citizens, even strangers, with money and national programs, government run health care being the most obvious; its generous immigration and refugee policies being another.

Johnny: And the new economy did what to the … to what you claim, was the compassionate nature of Canadians?

Diane: The new economy with its fire-sale prices for the country’s resources; its preoccupation with cutting taxes for the rich and corporations meant that the economy could no longer support the programs that made Canadians feel good about themselves; that made them proud to be Canadian, proud to be compassionate Canadians. It shattered the belief that theirs was a civilization that had grown beyond the narrow self-interest and primitive preoccupations of its southern neighbour. Culture was redefined to blend into an economic model that supported the archaic capitalist culture of the United States. I think politicians and profiteers of the period called it “harmonizing” the two economies. Homogenizing might have been a more descriptive term. In this type of economy, showing compassion, sharing your resources to help others just wasn’t done, unless of course there was a profit to be made and that was not Canadian or didn’t use to be Canadian.

Johnny: It does makes sense that the new economic model required the Canadian economy to adjust to the Americans. The neutering of FIRA, the FTA and then NAFTA and then the other agreements entered into by Canada to gain access to the U.S. market, including the sale of the artic islands, all agreements which the U.S. ignored when it was not in their interest …

Diane: Sorry to interrupt, but the sale of the artic islands to the U.S. was because Canada needed the cash after the New United Nations declared the mining of the Athabaska tar sands a threat to the survival of humanity and mining of the tar sands was brought to a halt. There was so many agreements, disagreements on trade between the two countries that it is easy to get confused.

Johnny: Yeah. In any event, Canada, according to your theory, had become a branch economy and in such an economy it’s obvious that the head office will call the shots.

Diane: It also goes without saying that the American economic model allowed, in fact, encouraged making a buck from all sectors of society from policing, health care and so on, and encouraged its branch plants to lobby and pressure their host county to adopt head office’s way of doing thing.

Johnny: But surely, you don’t equate culture with who pays the bills?

Diane: Yes and no. If at one point in time your culture morphs, changes from a culture where everyone pays his/her fair share and the less fortunate are taken of, into a culture where the less fortunate are left to fend for themselves or, if they are part of the working class, pay to subsidise the lifestyle and the health care of the rich, then – YES – it does matter who pays the bills. The poor and powerless can not force the rich and powerful to pay their fair share, nor can they stop them from indulging in parasitical behaviour such as profiting from other people misfortunes, only their government can. I agree with you, however, for one of the world’s oldest democracies to so quickly morph into a plutocracy, a political system governed by the wealthy, it took more than a change of economic circumstances. Even after FTA and NAFTA, even after the Conservatives made greed a virtue, Canadians would not easily have accepted that the rich deserved to be richer, the powerful more powerful.

Johnny: What was this, this something, you claim accelerated the transition from a democracy to a plutocracy?

Diane: As explained previously, compassion was the trait history tells us Canadians most identified with, and the compassion of Canadians is what Mulroney counted on to provide the object of his affection with perhaps the greatest gift of all – definitely the most expensive – and in the process completed the destruction of the quality that made Canadians, “Canadians”; destroyed a quality that for more than three-hundred years was an integral part of what Canadians thought was an essential ingredient of Canadian culture.

Johnny: That’s a lot of Canadians for one sentence to bear?

Diane: Don’t be funny. This is serious.

Johnny: Sorry.

Dianne: Let “me” ask you a couple of questions. What is the expenditure that a corporation makes that has the highest impact on profits?

Johnny:Wages?

Diane:How do corporations keep wages low so as to maximise profit for their owners?

Johnny: Keep the job market competitive. Get rid of employee unions. Don’t have a minimum wage or have a low minimum wage, that sort of thing.

Diane: All good answers. Now in a developed country like Canada, a frontal assault on a system that provided Canadians with decent wages – mostly through collective agreements,  a competitive but not a dog-eat-dog competition for jobs, a clean and relatively safe workplace – this would not have been allowed. To get the Canadian middle and working class to cut its own throat, to support policies that were not in its interest, Mulroney appealed to the compassion of the Canadian people.

Johnny: Huh!

Diane: He even had the support of the New Democratic Party, the self-proclaimed friend of the working men and women, the working poor in, pardon the expression, in screwing these same working men and women.

Johnny: You loss me at Mulroney appealing to the compassion of the Canadian people to get them to cut their own throats.

Diane: Perhaps a little background history is required here.