Tom D’Aquino wants more

Tom Fuller, AFL Staff

Most Canadians first became aware of Thomas D’Aquino during the debate over the Canada/US Free Trade Agreement. As spokesman for the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), he was the point man for the business lobby on Free Trade, deregulation, public sector cutbacks, and the whole corporate agenda foisted on Canadians by the Mulroney and Chretien governments.

For its part, the BCNI was the secretive but assertive organization of Canadian CEO’s that pushed these right-wing policies during the 1980s, using its money, its political clout, and its influence in the media.

Times have changed, and the BCNI (still headed by D’Aquino) has "rebranded" itself as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE). The political agenda, however, remains the same. In mid-January D’Aquino made a presentation to the annual meeting of the CCCE entitled "The Dynamics of a New Canada-United States Partnership in North America." Excerpts from this presentation were reprinted in the National Post – which is always eager to promote the corporate agenda for Canada.

In this presentation D’Aquino argues that the two countries have to "reinvent the border," turning it from an international boundary to a "shared checkpoint within the Canada-United States economic space." This would, of course, require a much closer "harmonization" with the US economy. For example, we would have to accept US standards – including safety standards – in areas such as food and drug testing.

Some Canadian nationalists will deplore the loss of Canadian sovereignty implicit in D’Aquino’s proposal. They will see it as yet another example of the anti-Canadian/pro-US bias shown by so much of the Canadian political right.

In a sense, however, this reaction misses the point. Business leaders like Tom D’Aquino and corporate elites like the CCCE aren’t fundamentally pro-American. Unlike many of their allies in the Reform/Alliance Party, they don’t assume American institutions and values are automatically superior to those in Canada. They simply believe that forcing the Canadian government to adopt many of the pro-business policies of the US would be in their interest.

There is nothing new in any of this: big business in Canada is used to getting its way. They got the Canada/US Free Trade Agreement, then they got NAFTA. They got the Bank of Canada to wrestle inflation to the ground with high interest rates, then, when those interest rates created a huge federal government debt, they got government downsizing to deal with the debt load. They got deregulation, privatization, and the hollowing out of Medicare.

Now they want more. That’s hardly surprising: people like Tom D’Aquino always want more.