Corporate Rules: The Real World of Business Regulation in Canada

This book offers documentation for the first time of how corporations have captured Canadian government agencies set up to protect the public.

Twenty-one authors, experts in their fields, describe how federal agencies do their job to regulate industries -- oil, nuclear, pharmaceuticals, construction, international mining, finance and more. In virtually every case, they find that the agency has set aside the public interest to favour corporate interests.

They also find that government legislation, policies limiting regulations, ongoing working relationships with “stakeholders” that often take place in secret, lobbying, financing of regulatory agencies by regulated industries, and job movement between industry and government all combine to produce these captive regulatory agencies.

The result is that government continuously and often disastrously fails to protect the public interest. The results are a degraded environment, increased inequality in society, loss of trust in government, and avoidable deaths.

Editor Bruce Campbell concludes the book with a set of proposals that would restore the primacy of the public interest in the work of government agencies.