Dominion of Capital: The Politics of Big Business and the Crisis of the Canadian Bourgeoisie, 1914–1947 by Don Nerbas (review)

Don Nerbas has produced a lively work capable of appealing to undergraduates and the general public, and he has done this by structuring his discussion around the lives of five individuals: New Brunswick entrepreneur Howard P. Robinson; politician-turned-businessman Charles Dunning; cpr President Sir Edward Beatty; automaker Sam McLaughlin; and the legendary entrepreneur-turned-central planner C.D. Howe. The book consists of chapter-length biographies, as well as an introduction and a conclusion. Although this approach raises the question of representativeness, it allows the author to present a more richly textured account.

Nerbas shows that Canadian big business was indeed in a crisis during this period. Prior to the First World War, the hegemony of private enterprise in Canadian society had gone largely unchallenged, notwithstanding the emergence of social-democratic movements in various parts of the country and the odd nationalized railway. There was no income tax, a minimal welfare state, and very limited rights to collective bargaining. In some ways, Canada was a businessman’s paradise. After 1914, Canadian politics became more social democratic, thanks to the rise of left-wing parties and the adoption of collectivist policies by both main parties. These collectivist policies included the nationalization of two transcontinentals by the Borden government and the introduction of old age pensions by Mackenzie King in the late 1920s. The challenge was increasingly to see whether the mixed economy could be managed in the interests of business.

Nerbas suggests that many Canadian businessmen also came to express skepticism about democracy, largely because they feared that the post-1920 political regime of near universal suffrage was leading the country toward social democracy – a threat to profits and the economic status quo. In the 1930s, many businessmen supported the creation of a national government that would include the Liberals and the Conservatives. The thinking was that a less competitive political marketplace would result in the implementation of “sensible” (i.e., conservative) economic policies. These proposals for a national government were obviously inspired by the coalition government formed in Britain in 1931. Nerbas demonstrates that this mildly anti-democratic attitude was widespread within the Canadian business elite. One of the businessmen quoted by Nerbas appears to have even seen some value in Franco’s right-wing dictatorship, but one gets the impression that Robinson was taking skepticism about universal suffrage to an idiosyncratic extreme, one few Canadian businessmen would have supported.

The publication of this book is an encouraging sign that business history, or at least the political history of business, is renascent in Canada. The exciting new centre for Canadian business history at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management played a role in the publication of this book. Moreover, this study, based on extensive archival research, fills an important lacuna in Canadian historiography. There are numerous works on how big business in the United States fought back against the New Deal and then funded a conservative counter-revolution in the late twentieth century. There are similar works on how businessmen in the United Kingdom responded to the rise of the welfare state and later subsidized the diffusion of neoliberal ideas. Sadly, we have few equivalent works on Canada. One hopes this book will stimulate additional research in this area.

There are some oversights and unanswered questions. Nerbas does not assess whether the growing skepticism about democracy he has documented encouraged business leaders to re-evaluate Canada’s un-elected upper houses – the Senate at the federal level and the legislative council of Quebec. Did some Canadian business people come to regard the Senate as an important brake on the excesses of democracy? Did big business use the Senate to water down important pieces of legislation that emerged out of the House of Commons? How many company directors were in the Senate at any...