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Thank you Saddam Hussein
by David West
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein may turn out to be a great stroke of luck for the Bank of Canada. The reason is that, while international currency traders scarcely noticed the failure of the Meech Lake Accord [in June 1990], they're anything but sanguine regarding international tensions in the Persian Gulf. With the Canadian dollar held aloft by higher oil prices, it no longer requires the same updraft it has been receiving from high interest rates. This means that Bank of Canada Governor John Crow now has leeway to narrow the interest rate differentials with the US, even as the Federal Reserve Bank allows the US rates to drift moderately downward.
Interestingly, the strength of the dollar leans more on the international perception of Canada as a petro-economy than it does on reality. The characterization may have been correct in 1973, but is much less appropriate now. In 1972, crude petroleum exports accounted for about 5% of total exports, with this share rising to 11% by 1974--the year of the first oil price shock. Since 1983, however, these have only been 3% of total nominal exports....
—Vol. 63, No. 10, October 1990
Brace yourself for life in the slow lane
By George Vasic
We start 1994 by asking the same old question: is this the year the Canadian recovery will finally kick in? The good news is that economic growth did move up a notch in 1993 to 2.5%, compared with 0.7% in 1992. The bad news is that while you can expect to see at least as much growth in 1994, chances are it won't be a lot more....
—Vol. 67, No. 1, January 1994
The new meddlers
By Peter Foster
Many Canadian businesspeople have turned into creatures with one eye on the market and the other on the next batch of government incentives....
The shining seas are linked by a chain of historical incompetence, from the Glace Bay heavy water plant, through Bricklin, Sydney Steel Corp. (Sysco), Cape Breton Development Corp. (Devco), Canadair Ltd., Mirabel Airport, Consolidated Computer Inc., de Havilland Inc., Ontario Hydro, Ontario's investment in Suncor Inc., Manitoba's investment in Churchill Forest Industries, Petro-Canada, the Lloydminster heavy oil upgrader, Novatel Communications Ltd. [of Alberta] and on and on....
Many of the new meddlers claim they have learned the lessons of the past — that direct intervention... doesn't work. What is now needed, they claim, are not blueprints but frameworks:...the circumstances under which free enterprise can flourish. The fundamental interventionist argument remains, however, that business just can't flourish by itself...what we have at work here is a combination of unshakeable ideology and desperate democracy.
—Vol. 66, No. 1, January 1993
The man, the myth, the corporation
Norman Bethune makes a postmortem conversion to capitalism
Anxious to cash in on China's economic miracle? Unsure where to start? On a recent visit to Canada, a delegation of 23 Chinese executives and academics had some startling advice: exploit your shared nationality with Norman Bethune, who is known and beloved by all in China....
Alas, just as we were set to spread the word, we learned that it may be too late. A 10-month-old Beijing firm, with a branch office in Weston, Ont., is already well on its way to cornering the Bethune market....The Bethune International Group['s] (TBIG)...current projects, which it says are worth more than $2 billion, include the Bethune Expressway, the Bethune Montreal Garden and the Bethune International Business Centre in Beijing; the Bethune Ronebeng Small Zone, an office complex in Chengdu, and the Bethune High-Tech Tower in Harbin...[also] the Bethune Mutual Investment Fund of China....
[I]t's hard not to marvel how the name of a Canadian doctor who went to China to help amputate "the tentacles of the octopus of monopolistic capitalism" has been co-opted.
—Vol. 68, No. 4, April 1995
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