The Truth About Canada: Some Important, Some Astonishing, and Some Truly Appalling Things All Canadians Should Know About Our Country

385 Pages·2009·1.7 MB·English

by  Mel Hurtig

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Betrayal of Canada
A New and Better Canada
At Twilight in the Country
Pay the Rent or Feed the Kids
The Vanishing Country
Rushing to Armageddon

Copyright © 2008 by Mel Hurtig
Cloth edition published 2008
Emblem edition published 2009
Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hurtig, Mel
The truth about Canada : some important, some astonishing, some truly appalling things all Canadians
should know about our country / Mel Hurtig.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-269-3
1. Canada — Politics and government — 2006-. 2. Canada — Economic conditions — 1991-. 3.
Canada — Social conditions — 1991-. 4. Health status indicators — Canada. 5. Canada — History — 21st
century. I. Title.
640. 87 2009 971.07’3 2008-904242-5
FC H C
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development
Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the
Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program
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v3.1
The Truth About Canada is dedicated
to the wonderful people at Unicef,
the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Ultimately, this book is about social justice, the quality of life, and about democracy. The following
quote is from Unicef’s 2007 Innocenti Report Card 7, originating at the Innocenti Research Centre in
Florence, Italy. It sums up some of the key chapters that follow.
The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children — their health and
safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved,
valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
PART ONE
1. Health Care in Canada and Our Tragic, Inexcusable Shortage of Doctors
2. Poverty in Canada
PART TWO
3. Aboriginal Peoples in Canada
4. Canadian Social Policy
5. Employment and Unemployment in Canada
6. Ottawa’s UI/EI Cash Cow
7. Welfare in Canada
8. Immigration and Emigration
PART THREE
9. Wages in Canada
10. The Distribution of Income in Canada
11. The Distribution of Wealth in Canada
12. Big-Business Bellyaching and Actual Corporate Profits in Canada
PART FOUR
13. Big-Business Investment in Canada
14. Research and Development
15. Productivity in Canada
16. Manufacturing in Canada
17. Cars, Trucks, and Auto Parts
18. Corporate Taxes in Canada
19. Personal Taxes
20. How Competitive Is Canada?
PART FIVE
21. Education in Canada
22. Culture in Canada
23. The Media in Canada
PART SIX
24. Foreign Investment, Foreign Ownership, Foreign Control
25. Foreign Takeovers
26. Canadian Investment Abroad
27. The Free Trade Agreement
28. NAFTA
29. Trade in Goods and Services
30. Globalization
PART SEVEN
31. Foreign Aid
32. Defence, the Military, the Arms Trade, Peacekeeping, and the Arctic
PART EIGHT
33. Government in Canada
34. Decentralization
35. Energy Policy in Canada
36. Water
37. Gross Domestic Product
38. Standard of Living and the Quality of Life
PART NINE
39. Reforming Our Dysfunctional Electoral System
40. Women in Canada
Conclusion
Glossary
APPENDICES
Appendix One: Health Care
• Category Breakdown of Total HealthCare Expenditures in Canada
• Provincial and Territorial HealthCare Spending
• Public and Private HealthCare Costs
• Health Care in the United States
• Some Sample American Surgical Costs in U.S. Dollars
Appendix Two: Poverty
• Measuring Poverty
• Some Notes About Poverty in the United States
Notes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With special thanks to my publisher, Douglas Gibson, and to Philip Cross, Jillian
Skeet, Geoffrey Stevens, Julie Maloney, Willem Hubben, David Green, Martha
Friendly, Jared Bernstein, Carla Curran, Pierre Lalonde, Larry Gordon, Andrew
Sharpe, Kim Kierans, Rob Macintosh, Carol Goar, Dennis Raphael, Mary
Griffiths, Peter C. Newman, David Hughes, Mark Jaccard, Geoff Ballinger, Jim
Stanford, Michael Veall, Duncan Cameron, Richard Chaykowski, Paul Axelrod,
Richard Stursberg, Ian Morrison, Lawrence Martin, Peter Desbarats, Stewart
Taylor, David Sabourin, Les Shinder, Thomas Walkom, Michael Byers, Eric
Reguly, Steve Staples, John Ibbitson, Gordon Laxer, Barry Mersereau, Wendy
Holm, Bill Potter, Neil Brooks, Bill Tielman, Janine Brodie, Aaron Paton, David
Morley, Peter Julian, Cathy Oikawa, Nigel Fisher, Jeffrey Simpson, James
Travers, Erin Weir, Doug Pepper, Roy MacSkimming, Roger Jullion, Allan
Tomas, Kelly Patterson, Andrew Jackson, Owen Adams, Alain Rineau, Don
Drummond, Rob Rainer, Paul Cappon, Michael McBane, John Ralston Saul,
Mel Clark, Walter Dorn, David Crane, Nicholas Heap, Michael Goldberg, Jeff
Merrett, and John Godard.
Also, special thanks are due to the wonderful people at Statistics Canada and
at the OECD who have been so very helpful in steering me to the numbers and
the sources I needed in writing this book.
PREFACE
This book is about how Canada has changed, and changed very much for the
worse, under the governments of Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin,
and Stephen Harper. It is also about how, as a result of the profound changes that
have occurred, we are no longer the country we think we are, and no longer the
people we think we are.
In chapter after chapter, you will discover just how very different we’ve
become from our long-time self-image and from what has been our international
image. You’ll see how far we’ve departed from the principles and the ideas that
helped Canada become one of the most admired countries in the world and the
country the overwhelming majority of Canadians have so cherished for so long.
An important feature of The Truth About Canada is the fascinating
international comparisons it contains that show how we stack up against other
countries around the world, but principally against the other OECD developed
countries. It’s no exaggeration to say that you will find a great many of these
comparisons disappointing, shocking, and even appalling.
Another main theme in the pages that follow is the dismal failure of our
powerful corporate leaders to use their gigantic, record-breaking profits and
reduced taxes to adequately invest in our country and to conduct reasonable
levels of research and development that would help make Canada more
innovative, more productive, and more competitive so we can raise our overall
standard of living. You will find many of the facts that follow relating to big
business in Canada both disturbing and dismaying.
A further theme is the unparalleled sellout of our country in a manner no other
developed country would ever dream of allowing. While this has been taking
place at an accelerating rate, the purposeful dissemination in the print media of
false information about rapidly growing foreign ownership and control of
Canada goes a long way towards explaining why our myopic politicians have
failed to take action on this and other related problems that are very quickly
robbing us of our ability to plan and manage our own future.
The chapter on the Free Trade Agreement is subtitled “The Most Colossal Con
Job in Canadian History.” When you read it, I hope you will ask yourself why
you have never read any of this information in our newspapers or magazines, or
have never seen anything remotely similar on television. God knows, you’ve
been inundated with an abundance of right-wing, continentalist propaganda to
the contrary. The chapter on the media in Canada should help explain why this
important information has never before been available to you.
When you read the economic chapters in this book, on foreign ownership,
trade, investment, productivity, competitiveness, and taxation, I hope you will be
aware of the fact that exactly the same people who have left us in these
weakened positions have for some time been very secretly planning more of the
same in private, high-level meetings designed to integrate Canada further into
the United States.
Big business, in the form of the Business Council on National Issues and its
well-financed successor, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (the very
same people who helped put Canada, as you will see, into two terrible so-called
“trade” agreements), are now covertly planning “deep integration” with the
United States, a process that will rob us of our ability to maintain our
independence, protect our sovereignty, and preserve the important values so
many of us cherish.
I hope you will be angry after reading The Truth About Canada, very angry.
Angry at greedy, hypocritical, intentionally misleading corporate executives, and
angry at the remarkably inept politicians who have allowed a small and wealthy
plutocracy to sell out our country and our destiny for their own selfish motives.
The Truth About Canada is the result of many long days, months, and years of
research. It certainly will be regarded as my most controversial book, and will
bring immediate cries of protest from the usual Neanderthals at the Fraser
Institute, the C.D. Howe Institute, the CCCE, the increasingly continentalist
Conference Board of Canada, and, of course, the house organ of all of them, the
National Post.
One editor asked me if I was not apprehensive about the strong criticism such
a tough book will inevitably bring. The answer is simple. You cannot ever expect
to accomplish anything important without bringing criticism from the entrenched
forces this book describes, criticizes, and blames for what has gone wrong in our
country.
I have been very fortunate in having some of the best minds in the country
available to me for consultation as I wrote The Truth About Canada. You will
find their names on the acknowledgements page. Many of the most important
pages of original research in this book are the result of their help, for which I am
very grateful.
Whether it’s our pathetically low number of doctors, our high comparative
levels of both adult and child poverty, our truly awful record of educational
funding, our shameful levels of foreign aid and peacekeeping, our abysmal voter