Why are we selling off the impressive public enterprises we often battled as a nation to create?
In the early 1900s, thousands of Canadians battled wealthy interests, winning control of Niagara Falls and creating a public power company. Another popular movement succeeded in creating Canada’s public broadcasting system to counter American dominance of the airwaves. And a Canadian doctor established a publicly owned laboratory that saved countless lives by producing affordable medications, contributing to medical breakthroughs and helping to eradicate smallpox throughout the world.
But in recent decades, we have allowed our inspiring public enterprises to be privatized and our vital public programs downsized, leaving us increasingly dominated by the forces of private greed that rule the marketplace.
In The Sport and Prey of Capitalists, Linda McQuaig challenges the dogma of privatization, which has defined our political era. She argues that now more than ever, as we grapple with climate change and income inequality, we need to expand, not shrink, our public sphere.
SOUNDING THE ALARM ABOUT PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC PROJECTS
"This book documents the long history of the Canadian government's role in creating a whole array of public institutions, like the CBC, the Post Office, and many more that we take for granted. In the first chapter, McQuaig sounds the alarm about the new ""Canadian Infrastructure Bank"" -- part of a new trend that is designed to privatize investment in projects, which Canadian taxpayers will have to repay at much higher interest rates than if governments undertook the projects."
