Off the mark, the 1990s made an upbeat start. Heading toward a brand-new millennium, it was fitting to say good riddance to the extremes of the 1980s, already tagged on their departure as a grasping time of staggering highs and depressing downers.

Although a recession loomed several months into 1990, there were good reasons for optimism at the start of the year. One was the rapid recovery of the stock markets, a daily index of economic health, from the crash of Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987. The TSE got itself together again by the summer of 1989. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall that November, a signal of the Cold War's end and communism's imminent collapse throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.

It was therefore time to bring closure to past problems, to move on, to go forward, as the boardroom clichés of the new decade expressed positive attitudes. The 1990s were bound to bring better things to the world of business. And the optimists did mean world of business. The post-communist planet was now opening up as one welcoming free-market place, including an easier-going China.
       
"Globalization" thus became the buzzword for going forward into a world without Cold War barriers. It also held the promise of shaking free of other nationalist impediments to commerce — such as export subsidies, then at issue among the 123 member governments of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, about to morph into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.





Leave aside the quibble that global business had been around for a goodly number of centuries, at least since the Marco Polos and John Cabots introduced intercontinental commerce to Europe.

After all, the vision of an earth without boundaries for business fit aptly with the updating of the information highway by means of computer chips, satellite signals and the Internet. It reinforced Marshall McLuhan's 25-year-old mystical idea of the global village:






And globalization did go on in the 1990s, if not in the entirely fulsome ways envisaged at the outset of the decade. Individual examples include some that went rewardingly right, such as Toronto architect-hotelier Isadore Sharp's Four Seasons resorts and hotels, reaching out from the South Pacific to Canary Wharf. Or Bombardier Inc.'s further overseas extension of its aircraft and landcraft enterprises. Another went outrageously wrong, when Calgary's David Walsh and his Bre-X Minerals Ltd. reached out to develop a reputed gold mine on the Indonesian island of Borneo. Falsification of drill tests turned out in 1997 to be what investigators later rated as the mining hoax of all time, costing investors billions.

The globalization of Canadian business generally has a few strong points on some federal government charts. Canadian direct investment abroad, known in Ottawa as CDIA, grew in the 1990s at a faster rate than foreign direct investment in Canada (FDI). By 1996, for the first time in history, the accumulated total value of direct foreign investment by Canadians slightly exceeded counterpart foreign investment in Canada. But the bulk of the money still went across the border (more than half) or the Atlantic (almost one-quarter).

As for trade, most of a 1990s boom was cross-border business as usual — hardly surprising under the influence of the 1989 US-Canada Free Trade Agreement, and NAFTA five years later.

Other factors fueled an unglobalizing mood — currency-exchange shocks in Europe, Mexico and Japan, an end-of-decade Asian slump. The WTO became a demo-designated "enemy of the people" by decade's end at the so-called Battle of Seattle:






In Canada, the decade's initial promise turned sour with a 1990-1991 recession, and a long, dispiriting slog toward recovery. Gordon Thiessen, at the close of his time as Bank of Canada governor from 1994 to 2001, recalled how "defaults, restructurings and downsizings became the order of the day."