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

This important book charts a major transformative shift in big business and state relations in Canada between the beginning of the First World War and the end of the Second. Don Nerbas’s Dominion of Capital tells the story of the waning days of the “National Policy period” (4) of business-state relations, which were marked by a small, noninterventionist state, powerful business influence over political and economic policy making, close ties to the British Empire and British capital, and Canadian nation building through railways, high tariffs, and the settlement of the Canadian West.

It was a happy time for early Canadian industrialists like New Brunswick’s Howard P. Robinson, Saskatchewan’s Charles A. Dunning, and Ontario’s Sir Edward Beatty, all of whom, not incidentally, are among the principal characters in this book and imagined that the nation’s interests matched their own.

But the happy time was not to last. Over the course of the next three decades, the ground on which Canada’s economic and political elite stood shifted in profound ways, as the nation adopted an increasingly continental orientation, relied increasingly on American capital, and embraced a growing bureaucratic and interventionist state. In short, the Canada that emerged out of the Second World War was one that the nation’s early elites neither understood nor controlled, at least in the way they had during the National Policy period.

For the most part, according to Nerbas, the early business leaders who had cut their teeth during the National Policy period remained largely unaware of the enormity of the shift. And it is on this point (among others) that Nerbas offers up a revision of earlier scholarly efforts that describe this transformation. Nerbas asserts that early business leaders were far less prescient about the character and implications of the transformation than previous writers have suggested; that far from leading the way toward a markedly different business-state relationship, early business leaders were left bewildered, frustrated, and certainly with less power and influence over economic and political policy making than they had had before.

Nerbas organizes Dominion of Capital into two parts. The first part details the rise and fall of big business and the state of the National Policy period through the careers of the three aforementioned industrialists: newspaper man and capitalist Robinson; farmer, grain-handling elevator cooperative manager, and provincial and federal politician Dunning; and railway magnate Beatty. The second part follows the careers of automobile manufacturer Sam McLaughlin and the “minister of everything,” C. D. Howe. The division into two parts makes sense; after all, this is a story of the rise and fall of one set of assumptions about the nature of business-state relations, on one hand, and the emergence of quite another set of assumptions on the nature of business-state relations on the other. And it is also a story about the rise of one mode of transport (railways) and the fast rise of another, competitive mode of transport (automobiles). In this latter sense, the close examination of auto manufacturer McLaughlin is revealing (especially, perhaps, as a story juxtaposed against railway magnate Beatty).

Still, I am not at all certain that intimate portraits of representative individuals is the most effective way to tell this story. For one thing, the author’s choices seem arbitrary. Would, for instance, featuring Moncton, New Brunswick–born banker Sir Frederick Williams-Taylor, or influential business tycoon, newspaperman, and Halifax, Nova Scotia–born politician Max Aitkin (Lord Beaverbrook) on the same level as the principals of this book have told a different story? As the Bank of Montreal’s general manager beginning in 1913, Williams-Taylor would have been one of the central figures at, according to Nerbas’s story, a transitional time. And Beaverbrook learned all about the world of high finance through his...