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COMMUNITY CENTRED ENTERPRISE
Herschel Hardin Leadership Campaign
Policy Circular 8 • May 25, 1995 |
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Crown and co operative enterprise are more relevant than ever for Canada. I call these forms of enterprise "socially rooted enterprise" or "community centred enterprise," because they have an organic relationship to the regions in which they have developed. They draw on the energy of people living together in a society and gain an added impulse from their common ownership and their collective economic striving.
Now there is another contributing factor. With NAFTA, footloose private capital and enterprise move by bean counter's calculation from one location to another. That means jobs lost. If planning, financial decision making, research and development, design, engineering, and other such functions are involved, it means real enterprise and future new work are lost as well. Community centred enterprise provides a common sense counterbalance to this pattern. No country can afford to be without a rooted entrepreneurial base of it own.
Enterprise in the end is a social process, animated by the spirit of people at large, and fed by infrastructure, a good education system, steady application, and people with knowledge talking to each other. A lot has been written recently of the so called "cluster effect," where innovative activity in a sector builds up in a region to the point where it reaches a critical mass not just a critical mass of capital but also of experience and of people communicating. The fashionable talk about the cluster effect is just another way of saying that rootedness of enterprise in a region is important. Community centred enterprise lends itself to this dynamic.
Canada, moreover, has few large, technologically innovative companies of its own, leading internationally in their respective sectors. Foreign ownership continues to be exceptionally high. All the more reason to rebuild the crown enterprise stream and to help co operative enterprise move into new fields.
The impulse behind crown enterprise in Canada has always had this entrepreneurial logic to it. Common share ownership was part of this logic, not only for itself, but because it symbolically connected the enterprise to the community. We should have aggressively attacked the privatization movement in the 1980s. Our doing so would have involved the country in a real debate about the nature of enterprise and the value of the crown stream, as well as showing how superficial and flawed privatization doctrine was.
Instead we fretted about our critics assailing us for such unfashionable ideas and how we might be politically tarnished. We drew back, in no little part because we had stopped thinking about enterprise and were no longer confident in the territory. Privatization advocates, however including the business press had a limited understanding of the complex social roots of enterprise. They saw enterprise as the work of greedy individualism. This was notwithstanding that the most successful demonstration in the decade, Japanese manufacturing, was the opposite. NAFTA, with its abstract doctrine of the free flow of capital, reflects the same superficial dogma.
The Privatization Putsch charts those privatization developments and debunks the doctrine. It explores the role of the brokerage and investment bureaucracy in promoting privatization because it puts more of the economy in their sector and adds to their status. (These are the same cadres who are gearing up now, in Canada, for their lucrative slice in the proposed privatization of Canadian National Railways and the rest of Petro-Canada.)
The most important section of the book, however, is a chapter on the nature of community centred enterprise itself how enterprise can be animated by a sense of community. In some countries, like Japan or Germany, this might happen in the "private" sector formally speaking, because the impulse of collective striving and achievement pervades all of society. For the most part in Canada, however, only crown and co operative enterprise captures this quality.
Crown and co operative participants also have a role in the competitive marketplace: they make the market work better. Their different ownerships and cultures are more likely to act as a check on private sector oligopoly. They can enhance competition. Because of their different cultures, they also add creativity. The role of the credit union movement in revolutionizing retail banking is an example.
The public monopoly model has its own business logic as well, not only for utilities but also for other applications like car insurance, air transport, and eastern Canada's rail systems. We all know the medical insurance story.
I look, in short, to rebuilding the crown enterprise stream into a dynamic, creative force once again. The door can also be opened for credit unions to use their organizational and financial strength in an enterprise role. The co operative and crown sectors can work together. Partial share participation can be used to maintain control of technologically forward companies in Canadian hands and to promote and protect the cluster effect. A crown company can be used co operatively as a technological partner.
New areas are opening up. A publicly owned presence in the exploding world of electronic communication, whereby the citizenry as a whole can have broad access, is a possible objective. Creating new work in the "post market era" (see Policy Circular 5, "Taking Charge of Economics") is another possible new role. Community economic development has an open field and should be strengthened.
The imminent privatization of the CNR and Petro-Canada hurts, but should not deter us. There are new entrepreneurial horizons awaiting us. Anybody can sell off a company, particularly at a bargain price. Creating new enterprise and new kinds of work is the real challenge. We should be proud to accept that challenge. Let the Liberals and Reform be known as the sell-off parties, and ourselves as the party of enterprise and application. It’s an imagery to build on.
Community centred enterprise is a key economic vehicle.
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