is 25 per cent more expensive in Canada than the U.S., at least partly because of our dairy monopoly. And on it goes.
Canadian politicians, by contrast and regardless of the side of their aisle, all get along swimmingly with our own big guys. We lack a powerful, mainstream anti-monopoly movement, perhaps because our largest corporations come cloaked in nationalist garb.
The arrival of the railroad, itself a monopoly, introduced some competition – along with a powerful desire to contain and suppress that competition. “The earliest investigations” into 19th-century Canadian business practices “reveal full-blown cartels already in existence,” according to Mr. Reynolds.
Despite the existence of laws designed to curb anti-competitive business practices, Mr. Wilson found a long historical record of “passivity and ineffectiveness” in their enforcement – owing to what he called the “‘business’ point of view” that helped sway Parliament. Mr.
All explanations for Canada’s love of monopolies ultimately lead to our myths of the past. Where the British and American cultural imagination often construed nature as a site of regeneration or renewal – think of Thoreau’s Walden Pond or the spiritually ennobling nature of English Romantic poetry – the Canadian wilderness is a site of “deep terror,” Prof. Frye argued. Our wilderness was not a source of pleasure or spiritual rejuvenation, it was a source of trauma and death.
The “garrison mentality” is one name for the deeply entrenched cultural mythology that compels our unthinking submission to what we are told is our communal interest.