I think the main root of Canada's present economic woes lies in having relied on the "resource economy" - i.e. selling off the country's natural resources - to provide easy access to an artificially high standard of living, instead of accepting a lower but adequate level of affluence while building the ability to be as self sufficient as practical. If you depend on trade for your livelihood, and especially on resource selling, you give up the option of having your own independent policies and of developing internal economic infrastructure that will sustain you in the long run, especially in turbulent international times.

   

This has been talked about all my life. For a while is seemed to recede but came roaring back with high oil prices. We've always had a branch plant mind set, selling out our resources to foreign big business for a quick buck now. I understand getting something like IKEA off the ground here would be harder than Europe, but we still should have tried, instead of just selling cut lumber, if we're lucky, logs if we're not. We ship our oil to the states to be refined, then buy it back at high cost. And so forth. Of course with our small population, we could not have just used our resources internally, but we should have used the income from those exported resources to build up more of an internal industry, as you say. Look at how well Norway has done with their oil. But that would have required a more socialist mindset, and with the elephant south of us that would never have gone over. And, we're children. We want our candy now instead of thinking about the long term.

   

We WERE a branch plant economy and it served us well until the 80s-1990s. That meant Canadian branches of companies like Simpsons-Sears, the automakers under the old auto pact, etc. The pain was, in return for that we all paid much higher prices.
My grandfather, my father and yours all complained about that too, none of which had the capital to even invest in enough shares to influence corporate decision making.
Investors follow the best return, that meant closing those branch offices, losing tens of thousands of jobs here. You can buy a generator now for $400 instead of $2000
But now, neither of my kids will ever have the option of warehouse work or assembly line jobs for union wages like my father and I did. Neither one (both in their 30s) makes what I did when they were fucking born. We fucked up real good. We trusted them.
Let's trust them some more. Maybe under TPP the Malaysians will get so rich they'll buy Baycrest washers, Frontenac cars and shop at Woodwards.

   

Interesting what you say there. I wonder whether people on average, once they become shareholders, influence companies toward the long term good of the country and its people, or more often for the shorter term affluence of the corporation and therefore themselves.

   

The latter, since the majority of shares will be held by large investors, including people's pension plans. People will certainly want the pension plan to maximize income since they won't be directly involved with the holdings of the plan. Since so much of our economy is owned by foreign companies, that would go double, since most shareholders won't give a shit about Canada.

71% of the oil sands are owned by foreign companies. How is it that Saudi Arabia, which was a little backwater before American oil came in, is able to control it's own production while we gave our control away?