Where have the economic nationalists gone?
Last week, The New York Times discovered a crisis in Canada, wrote the Toronto Star Oct. 29. Reporting on the formal closing of deals by foreign companies to buy two leading Canadian firms Inco Ltd. and ATI Technologies Inc. the paper headlined its story, “Canada wonders why it’s the Bought and not the Buyer.” Actually, Canada wonders no such thing, said the Star. And that’s the crisis, for those who still believe in such a thing as economic nationalism. In the past two years, more than a dozen of Canada’s largest corporations, with total assets of more than $57 billion, have been swallowed by foreign predators. And the response has been…well, there really hasn’t been a response. At the height of economic nationalism in Canada in the 1970s, there was nothing like the “hollowing out” of Corporate Canada that we’ve witnessed lately. Bernie Wolf, an economics professor at Yorks Schulich School of Business, regards openness to foreign takeovers as fair play. “If we want Canadian companie
