If you want pillars to hold something up, four will do the job better than three. In his leadership campaign, Stéphane Dion relied on just three: economic prosperity, environmental sustainability and social justice. The missing pillar is surely democracy. None of Dion’s goals can be pursued without it; prosperity, sustainability and justice require democratic planning.

Planning is not supposed to be mentioned alongside democratic government. But planning is being done all the time; that is what large corporations do everyday. The economic story is that by acting for themselves, companies act on our behalf, protecting the prosperity pillar. Conversely, when governments act to control corporations, they act against us, denying our access to wealth.

Even if this were true, and growing gaps in wealth and income distribution suggest that it is not, there is no way to produce sustainability without regulating corporations directly. The invisible hand does not make green decisions.

As for social justice, the big banks and their corporate clients routinely tell us what is acceptable in our society. How should we tax? The corporate cabal has a list of do’s and don’ts. What constitutes the public interest? Well, listen up, corporations know best, and governments just need to stay out of the way.

The new Liberal leader has asked Bob Rae, Scott Brison and Martha Hall Findlay to draw up a party platform for the next election. Do not expect it to call for limits on corporate power. But there is no way to produce a sustainable economy, prosperity for the majority, or social justice without engineering a democratic takeover of the corporate economy. The problem is that our democratic institutions produce outcomes that sustain the corporation, not the environment.

Canada is no more than a quasi-democracy at best. The majority does not rule, and this is not just because of the faulty electoral system, or the dominance of the Prime Minister over his party and Parliament.

The basic rule of politics in Canada is that property rights prevail over civil and political rights, such as the right to organize, to speak out, vote, demonstrate or otherwise exercise individual freedom. Who owns what matters more than citizenship rights, freedom of expression, or the right to elect an MP or MLA by voting, and participating in the democratic process.

Property does not refer to personal property, though defenders of property rights want people to think they are standing up for your right to own your own toothbrush. Private property rights means ownership rights conferred on employers of all kinds, by virtue of incorporation as private, public or partnership companies under the laws of the land, as established by Parliament and Legislatures.

These property rights holders include, obviously, the natural resources exploiters, and the manufacturing companies that comprise the non-sustainable part of the economy.

In order to bring about a sustainable economy, the rights of owners would have to be severely curtailed, in the public interest. Except the public interest has been defined to promote those rights, in the name of prosperity. The British Columbia Utilities Commission has just revealed a scandalous deal whereby Alcan Aluminum would sell power produced for $5 a megawatt hour to BC Hydro for $71 a megawatt hour. Alcan was given access to cheap energy to create jobs. Instead, with the support of the BC Liberal government, it was exercising its property rights to line its own pockets at public expense.

In order to redefine prosperity we need to assert economic and social rights and place them above the rights of owners of private property. Common economic security and social justice require a sustainable economy, one where clean air and water, and the reduction of greenhouse gases and toxic wastes take priority over the exercise of property rights.

There can be no social justice when ownership rights override political and civic rights. In a political regime dominated by property rights we get top CEOs earning the average Canadian salary in less than two days on the job, as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) reported January 2, and child poverty rates failing to drop, despite GDP growth, as campaign 2000 has just shown.

Putting a democracy pillar in place is the only way to curb the abuse of power by corporations, allowing Canadians to redefine prosperity, and build a sustainable society. Democratic rights can be used to further economic and social justice, but only if they are used to limit ownership rights as well.

Somebody should ask the new Liberal leader if he is prepared to make Canada a country where economic and social rights prevail over private property rights. Those who want to build a just, prosperous and sustainable Canada, have to use democratic methods to take economic decisions out of the hands of the corporate oligarchy.

Democracy entails openly discussing and debating who makes what, and who gets what, even if private property holders assert these are not matters to which public office holders need to pay attention.

Duncan Cameron

Duncan Cameron

Born in Victoria B.C. in 1944, Duncan now lives in Vancouver. Following graduation from the University of Alberta he joined the Department of Finance (Ottawa) in 1966 and was financial advisor to the...