Crown Corporation Research Articles

Canadian Crown corporations and social procurement: Trade commitments and institutional bricolage

AbstractGlobalization has introduced insecurities to individuals and businesses. Countries are pressed to respond to these insecurities with more inclusive visions of globalization. One policy response is social procurement—public purchasing geared to create social value. Canada is embracing this response but faces barriers of its own making. Through the institutional bricolage of procurement trade rules, Canada has constrained its capacity to use social procurement. This is acutely felt by Crown corporations, which are increasingly under the scope of trade treaties. This article details this phenomenon through textual analysis of Canadian procurement trade rules and state enterprise attempts at social procurement.

Legitimacy of crown corporations in Canada: the case of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board

Legitimacy of crown corporations in Canada: the case of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board

Soonias Leading Farm Credit Canada’s Indigenous Agricultural Efforts

Farm Credit Canada (FCC), the country’s largest agricultural term lender, has been around since 1959. But it’s only been the last few years that the Crown corporation, which reports to the Canadian Parliament through the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, has taken a much more serious approach to Indigenous agriculture. “How to support Indigenous agriculture wasn’t part of the mandate and wasn’t maybe looked at seriously until [the] early 2000s,” said Shawn Soonias, a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. “Leadership made some efforts to understand the opportunity and what the role might look like. It was [in] 2019 that the company was able to create that role that I occupy as director of Indigenous relations.”

On the Edge: Straddling (Anti)normativity in Queer Performance

In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed explains that precarity is akin to a vase on the mantelpiece. If it were pushed even slightly, it would fall off the edge. Existence on that edge, Ahmed explains, is what we allude to when we discuss precarious populations. Patriarchy, racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia are violent forces. They threaten to push us over the edge. Queer performance often begins in this in-between state on the mantelpiece, not quite fallen, not quite stable, negotiating, and straddling a balance between holding on to a fragile state and falling off the mantle entirely. In this article, I analyze the Queer Pride Inside Cabaret (June 2020), the first official partnership between Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the largest and longest running queer theatre in the world, and the CBC, a Canadian federal Crown corporation and national public broadcaster. In considering the mainstream producers and the radical queer artists showcased, I refuse a simplistic antinormative/normative binary in queer performance in Canada and make space for accessing resources from the mainstream, while rejecting inequitable systems of oppression. If queer theatre is intended to break down ingrained static and naturalized assumptions of everyday practices, how do we understand queer performance through contradictions and incoherence? Can we simultaneously fuck the system and accept our complicity within it? Complicating the unique and diverse ways artists opt-in and out of mainstream queer presence, this article looks at creative practices that challenge and promote continuing legacies and failures of queer performance in Canada.

Using machine learning to retrospectively predict self-reported gambling problems in Quebec.

Participating in online gambling is associated with an increased risk for experiencing gambling-related harms, driving calls for more effective, personalized harm prevention initiatives. Such initiatives depend on the development of models capable of detecting at-risk online gamblers. We aimed to determine whether machine learning algorithms can use site data to detect retrospectively at-risk online gamblers indicated by the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI). Exploratory comparison of six prominent supervised machine learning methods (decision trees, random forests, K-nearest neighbours, logistic regressions, artificial neural networks and support vector machines) to predict problem gambling risk levels reported on the PGSI. Lotoquebec.com (formerly espacejeux.com), an online gambling platform operated by Loto-Québec (a provincial Crown Corporation) in Quebec, Canada. N = 9145 adults (18+) who completed the survey measure and placed at least one bet using real money on the site. Participants completed the PGSI, a self-report questionnaire with validated cut-offs denoting a moderate-to-high-risk (PGSI 5+) or high-risk (PGSI 8+) for experiencing past-year gambling-related problems. Participants agreed to release additional data about the preceding 12 months from their user accounts. Predictor variables (144) were derived from users' transactions, apparent betting behaviours, listed demographics and use of responsible gambling tools on the platform. Our best classification models (random forests) for the PGSI 5+ and 8+ outcome variables accounted for 84.33% (95% CI = 82.24-86.41) and 82.52% (95% CI = 79.96-85.08) of the total area under their receiver operating characteristic curves, respectively. The most important factors in these models included the frequency and variability of participants' betting behaviour and repeat engagement on the site. Machine learning algorithms appear to be able to classify at-risk online gamblers using data generated from their use of online gambling platforms. They may enable personalized harm prevention initiatives, but are constrained by trade-offs between their sensitivity and precision.

Reconciling with capitalism: Selling Crown land to settle with First Nations

AbstractThis article examines the connection between privatization and reconciliation in Canada, witnessed through the disposal of federal and provincial land in Vancouver. The Jericho Lands were sold to the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil‐Waututh Development Corporation (MST) in joint partnership with the federal Crown corporation Canada Lands Company (CLC). This deal was partially funded through Crown‐provided accommodation payments seeking to address unceded territory claims through commercial transactions. The remainder of the MST land purchase featured a vendor take‐back mortgage (where a seller lends money to the buyer) that tethers MST repayment to revenue earned through land speculation, thus merging Indigenous reconciliation with capitalist imperatives. With scant scholarly literature on the subject, the article makes extensive use of relevant primary sources like Hansard transcripts, government reports, press statements, and planning documents. It finds land development conflicts familiar to privatization generally, namely problems of secrecy, affordability, and commercialization.

Economic Doctrine Is in Flux: What are the Implications for Canada’s Regional and Multilateral Trade Engagement?

The current opportunities for Canada’s reengagement with the United States present themselves at a moment of profound changes in economic thinking in the United States and beyond. There are many factors behind the renewed interest in industrial policy, including the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, the geopolitical competition with China, the return of shortages and inflationary pressures, the concerns about anti-competitive behaviour of platform firms, and the distributional dynamics of the data-driven economy. These have broad implications for trade policy and for the strategic approach for small, open economies like Canada. In an innovation-intensive world of superstar firms and geostrategic competition, the focus for Canada should be on innovation and firms. The measure of success: Canada’s count of unicorns would be rising steeply, as would be Canada’s R&D share of GDP, and private and public venture capital support for Canadian technology-intensive companies would be breaking records. Canada’s economic history is punctuated by the establishment of Crown Corporations to fill gaps. The maturation of the industrial era economy may have given the impression that this was history. Today, it’s not a question of necessarily resorting to Crown Corporations, but Canada should not hesitate to go that route if necessary.

Selling off the Crown Jewels: Socialization of Costs and Privatization of Profits in the Canadian Isotopes Industry

This article explores the privatization process of a nuclear Crown corporation, the Radiochemical Company (rcc), under Brian Mulroney’s two Progressive Conservative governments. The rcc specialized in processing and commercializing radioactive isotopes for the medical market, an industry in which it was a major global player. Between 1984 and 1991, several stakeholders, including the rcc’s parent company Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources, the Ministry of Finance, and the Canada Development and Investment Corporation, tried to define and shape the terms of the privatization. As a result, the process did not follow a straightforward path since it triggered conflicting political and strategic interests. Through the rcc’s case, this article provides a comprehensive account of the institutional mechanisms that were at play during the application of the Conservatives’ divestiture policy. Contrary to what the government’s rhetoric suggested, privatizing the rcc did not put an end to public spending in the medical isotopes business. The opposite actually happened as the rcc’s sale resulted in socializing the costs and privatizing the profits of this lucrative branch of the Canadian nuclear industry.

Witnessing Oka Apesvchi / Protecting the Water

Witnessing Oka Apesvchi / Protecting the Water1 Bethany Hughes (bio) Oceti Sakowin Land In 2016, water protectors joined together near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota to protest the installation of an oil pipeline on tribal homelands. The Sioux, known in their own language as Oceti Sakowin, led what became an international protest movement combining Native American rights and environmental activism. #NoDAPL and "Water Is Life" became hashtags and rallying cries for Indigenous-led protests against resource extraction, environmental racism, and disregard for Indigenous sovereignty. A historic gathering of tribes, nations, and peoples, the water protectors at Standing Rock awakened the United States to ongoing maltreatment and injustice within Native American communities and on Native American lands. Successful in bringing together a multitude of supporters but ultimately unable to stop the laying of underground pipe carrying crude oil from the Bakkan/Three Forks area to its destination in Illinois, these protectors created a movement. Art, performance, music, and story shaped the movement and the ways in which larger non-Native and non-activist communities encountered the #NoDAPL cause. Folksinger Raye Zaragoza (multiracial, Pima) contributed to the protest movement through her song, "In the River." Reminiscent of folk protest songs from the twentieth century, Zaragoza forwards an Indigenous understanding of kinship relations among people and water. She calls on her listeners to recognize their relations in the water itself, singing "[i]n the river are our sisters and our brothers." She calls out the violent suppression of water protectors and pleads for humanity to not "poison our future away." Video: https://youtu.be/I4eosRdP5gQ (courtesy of Raye Zaragoza) [End Page E-1] Three months after the release of her protest song, Zaragoza again performed "In the River" while at the water protector camps near Standing Rock. The Facebook live stream of her acoustic performance in –20°F weather calls again to listeners to locate the stakes of protecting water and the specific location under threat. Filmed with the camp as backdrop, the distance between the live-stream viewer and her live performance reminds viewers of their own distance from Standing Rock, even as it challenges them to take up the cause of their relative, the water. We are separated from Zaragoza by distance and time. However, we are all still in relation to the water that sustains us and requires our care. The multiple flags blowing in the wind behind her live performance remind viewers of the multinational and multi-tribal nature of this fight. At least 280 separate Indigenous tribes supported the water protectors, displaying their flags at the camps as markers of solidarity and scale. The protection of water is not simply a Standing Rock Sioux issue, but a human issue, and it requires us, as Zaragoza's live stream invites us to remember, to come together and care for both our present and future. Video: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1374329889304383 (courtesy of Raye Zaragoza) Inuit and Innu Land Only a month after Zaragoza posted her music video on YouTube, farther north and east another Indigenous nation protested the poisoning of their water relative. Inuit and Innu governments in Labrador, Canada, objected to Nalcor Energy, a Crown (government-owned) corporation, building a hydroelectric dam in their territory. Nalcor did not plan to clear the land to be flooded of vegetation and other organic materials. As the organic material decayed in the flooded land, it would create methylmercury, a central-nervous-system toxin, which would negatively impact the water quality of communities downstream of the dam. Methylmercury is a neurotoxin that impairs enzymes, cell-membrane functions, motor functions, vision, and has fatal effects on the brain development of fetuses.2 It accrues as it moves up the food chain, causing larger animals like humans increased exposure and damage. As the Indigenous governments worked with scientists from Harvard to create an environmental-impact study that adequately addressed the downstream impact of the dam's creation, protestors actively shut down the dam's construction site. Thirteen-year-old Allyson Gear joined these protestors at a blockade in October 2016 and performed a drum dance. Captured on video and later in a prize-winning photograph by Ossie Michelin, the...

Regulating Natural Monopolies in Canada: An Introduction to 'Regulatory Failure and Renewal: The Evolution of the Natural Monopoly Contract', by John R. Baldwin

In the first decades of the twenty-first century – more than 150 years after the earliest franchise contracts were negotiated between Canadian governments and privately owned utility companies, and 30 years after the Economic Council of Canada published John R. Baldwin’s Regulatory Failure and Renewal: The Evolution of the Natural Monopoly Contract in 1989 – the federal government still holds a controlling interest in more than 40 crown corporations. The provinces and territories in Canada own at least 150 more firms. These public enterprises typically operate in industries prone to the formation of what economists call “natural monopolies”, including pipelines, power generation, municipal water systems, transportation, broadcasting and telecommunications. A wide range of policy instruments can be used to regulate natural monopolies, and these instruments lead to different redistributive patterns, and different levels and forms of inefficiency. In general, the social, political and economic environments in Canada have been institutionally secure, mature and sophisticated. However, the division of power that defines the federal system of governance in Canada has opened the door for idiosyncratic provincial (and therefore municipal) policy making, which has lead to the adoption of a wide range of regionally distinct regulatory responses to the formation of natural monopolies. In this introduction to Baldwin's classic work, the history of Canada's efforts to regulate natural monopolies is surveyed, and the lessons learned from a theoretical framework founded on a transactions cost approach are articulated. Questions about privatization and public ownership still swirl around Canada’s pipelines, telecommunication networks and transport systems. In pursuit of answers to these questions, this introduction explains how Baldwin’s work helps us to make sense of policy heterogeneity by describing how transactions costs have shifted across time and space, how courts have constrained government opportunism and defined property rights, how local industrial, economic and technological environments have interacted with political pressures, and how private and public stakeholders have strategically engaged with the policy making process in pursuit of influence and control.

“Suddenly, it was a real thing”: The Feminist Fight for Equal Opportunities in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1971-1981

Following the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1970, feminist activists spent the next decade fighting for gender equity in federal workplaces, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They argued that equal opportunity in hiring and promotions would lead to more equitable and accurate representations of Canadian women on the air. After several encounters with these determined activists inside and outside of the Crown corporation, the CBC became an equal opportunity employer and adopted an affirmative action policy, while maintaining its own limited, corporate goals.

Roots, Region, and Resistance: Facing Industrial Ruin in Sydney, Cape Breton, during Canada’s Centennial Year

Le 13 octobre 1967 – le « Vendredi noir » – les propriétaires de la Dominion Steel and Coal Company (DOSCO) annoncèrent la fermeture imminente de l’aciérie de la compagnie à Sydney. Néanmoins, après une grande manifestation de la population locale, appelée la « Parade of Concern », le gouvernement provincial, grâce à une aide considérable du gouvernement fédéral, acheta l’usine de la DOSCO et la transforma en société d’État. Cette réponse centrée sur l’État à la désindustrialisation démontre l’importance économique, politique et culturelle que revêt le « lieu » dans les efforts pour éviter l’effondrement de l’industrie lourde, une réponse qui était complètement absente du contexte américain et qui n’était apportée qu’avec parcimonie dans le contexte canadien.

Commentary on Graydon et al. (2019): Realistic simulations and nudging gambling policy.

Commentary on Graydon et al. (2019): Realistic simulations and nudging gambling policy.

Public Health Ontario's Environmental Burden of Disease Project

Previous estimates of the portion of disease attributable to exposure to environmental hazards range from 3% to 23%. Public Health Ontario (PHO), a Crown corporation that provides scientific and te...

From an uncomfortable conversation to a productive strategic dialogue

From an uncomfortable conversation to a productive strategic dialogue

Building radio publics in post-war Canada

This article examines architecture designed and built by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada (CBC) from 1940–1953. Following the Second World War, the construction of buildings across the country confirmed and solidified the Crown Corporation’s position as a national service, reinforcing social democratic values held by cultural elites. These buildings became important material components of radio publics as they amplified the public broadcaster’s presence. Focussing on transmission stations and studios, the article shows how the building of radio infrastructure strategically promoted a sense of national community on the one hand yet tapped into regionalism on the other. The article illuminates the overlooked material presence of radio and adds to recent scholarly interest in studying media houses by arguing that the architecture of radio was instrumental in the composition of modern, mediated publics in the mid-twentieth century.

Workplace incivility, psychological distress, and the protective effect of co-worker support

PurposePrevious in-depth focus groups found that postal workers employed by a crown corporation in Canada identified a lack of respect in the workplace. A lack of respect or discourteous behavior might be better understood as a phenomenon of workplace incivility. The purpose of this paper is to report a larger cross-sectional survey to determine: the magnitude of workplace incivility among Canadian postal workers; any association between incivility and indicators of worker well-being; and, the potential buffering benefits of social support from co-workers.Design/methodology/approachQuestionnaire packages were mailed to nearly 2,000 employees of Canada Post Corporation, asking for anonymous responses to questions about their job, demographics, satisfaction and commitment, treatment in the workplace, and well-being.FindingsMore than 82 percent of 950 respondents reported at least some workplace incivility. After controlling for demographic and work factors, incivility explained significant variation in worker burnout, anxiety, depression, and hostility (i.e. adjusted R2 values ranged from 5 to 46). In addition, the association between incivility and worker anxiety, depression, and hostility was reduced when workers reported greater social support from co-workers.Research limitations/implicationsIncivility is more than just a minor or infrequent source of psychological distress for people working in service. However, a positive outcome is that co-worker support helps reduce the adverse effects of rude and discourteous behavior.Originality/valueTo our knowledge, this was the first large-scale survey exploring workplace incivility in the public postal service. The data from a large sample of postal workers across Canada suggest that the treatment of employees is an ongoing problem at this organization. This research is relevant for understanding workplace interactions and health in the service sector in Canada, though the authors expect it is germane also to other occupations worldwide.

POLICY ADRIFT: CANADIAN CROWN CORPORATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

ABSTRACTCanada has had a strong tradition of using state‐owned enterprises for economic development. ‘Crown corporations’, as State‐owned enterprises are known in Canada, were created with a built‐in autonomy for their commercial activities on the condition that they also fulfil policy objectives. Of late, however, policy objectives have been articulated more through regulations and governance models and are issued far more from central agencies such as the Treasury Board Secretariat than from the ‘home department’ of the agency. This article explores the evolution of the use of Crowns from the glory days of their formation to the privatization era of the 1980s and 1990s to the modern day. It examines how governance and control mechanisms have replaced policy directives. The picture given of the Canadian experience could be relevant for the coming years when these enterprises become more international and thus challenge the present arrangement.

Fiery Joe: The Maverick Who Lit Up the West by Kathleen Carlisle

Reviewed by: Fiery Joe: The Maverick Who Lit Up the West by Kathleen Carlisle George Hoffman Kathleen Carlisle, Fiery Joe: The Maverick Who Lit Up the West (Regina: University of Regina Press 2017) Joe Phelps arrived in Saskatchewan from Ontario in 1908, when he was nine years old. The Phelps family homesteaded near Wilkie, west of Saskatoon. George Phelps, his father, like thousands of settlers from Ontario and elsewhere, came to the West filled with determination and confident of success in this land of [End Page 279] opportunity. Reality, however, soon set in. Those pioneers who survived on the land, and many did not, faced a hostile natural environment and sold the wheat they produced into a complex international market dominated by what one farm leader referred to as commercial pirates. It was not a life for the faint hearted. Joe Phelps, the subject of this biography, was a part of the next generation of Saskatchewan farmers which faced this situation and attempted, with some success, to construct a social and economic system that would alleviate problems and provide a degree of security for farm families. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Phelps dedicated his life to this task. It led him in the 1920s to the Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association, the Farmers' Union of Canada, the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, and the United Farmers of Canada (ufc). In the 1930s, he was involved in the creation of the Farmer-Labour Party and the Saskatchewan Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (ccf). By then Phelps clearly was a part of the left wing of the broader farm movement and had become what Seymour Martin Lipset in his study of the ccf would call an agrarian socialist. Phelps was elected a ccf member of the provincial legislature in 1938 and was re-elected in 1944 as a part of the sweep that brought Tommy Douglas and the ccf to power. He served as Minister of Natural Resources in the Douglas government from 1944 to 1948 and was at the centre of several controversial measures involving ventures in public ownership and resource development in northern Saskatchewan, gaining the reputation of a fiery left-wing maverick. At least partly as a consequence, he was defeated in the 1948 provincial election. Phelps then turned back to the farm movement and built the Saskatchewan Farmers' Union (sfu) into a formidable force in the 1950s. In the years that followed, he played a leading role in the creation of the Western Development Museums in the province. To the end of his life, he remained devoted to collecting and preserving the farm machinery which had been so essential to the agricultural era in the West of which he had been a part. Kathleen Carlisle's book is an interesting and well-written account of Joe Phelps' remarkable career. It is largely based on Phelps' papers, government records, interviews, and other unpublished material. The research in regard to Phelps' contentious years as Minister of Natural Resources is particularly impressive. The book adds to our knowledge of the Saskatchewan farm movement, the Saskatchewan ccf, and the early years of the Douglas government. What is especially clear is that Phelps' ideas and the policies he advocated were rooted in Saskatchewan's rural economy. Thus he saw the Wheat Pool, the ufc and sfu, socialism, the ccf, Crown Corporations, and the possibility of a publicly-owned oil industry as ways of providing farmers with a measure of security or of making what was still an overwhelmingly rural province less dependent on the vagaries of a wheat economy. As the title of the book suggests, Carlisle places considerable emphasis on Phelps' colourful personality in her story. One cannot understand or appreciate Joe Phelps without doing so. Various words can be used to describe him, which help explain both his successes and failures: hard working, dedicated, relentless, fearless, impatient, impulsive and difficult. Two of my favorite anecdotes from the book, which tell much about Joe Phelps, are the following. While president of the Saskatchewan Farmers' Union in the 1950s, Phelps wrote and presented a number of briefs to the board of the Canadian Grain Commission. They were lengthy, detailed, and filled with criticism, as he...

Canadian Business Risk Management: Private Firms, Crown Corporations, and Public Institutions

AbstractThis paper considers the current and possible institutions (programs, policies, participants, etc.) that govern public Business Risk Management (BRM) in Canada. This is an important policy topic for two reasons: BRM spending accounts for the vast majority of public monies funneled to Canadian agricultural producers and the upcoming Canadian Agricultural Partnership includes a mandated BRM review and thus presents an opportunity to change these institutions in meaningful ways. We pay particular attention to the rhetoric surrounding greater involvement of private insurance, the lack of rhetoric regarding the use of crown corporations, and issues of subsidization. We conclude with policy recommendations favoring commodity‐specific revenue versus whole‐farm net margin insurance, a possible reduction in subsidy levels, and a call to reconsider the role of crown corporations. We also make programming recommendations regarding the discontinued use of private reinsurance, a reduction in the level of program reserves, and greater transparency.Ce document examine les institutions actuelles et potentielles (programmes, politiques, participants, etc.) qui gouvernent la gestion des risques d'entreprises (GRE) au Canada. Deux raisons rendent important ce sujet politique : les dépenses liées á la GRE totalisent la grande majorité des fonds publics accordés aux producteurs agricoles, et le futur cadre politique agricole offre l'occasion de modifier ces institutions de manière significative. Nous portons une attention particulière á la rhétorique entourant l'implication plus soutenue des assurances privées, á l'absence de rhétorique au sujet de l'utilisation de sociétés d'État, et aux enjeux de subvention. Nous concluons avec des recommandations politiques favorisant les assurances de revenus provenant spécifiquement de produits agricoles versus celles de la marge nette de l'exploitation globale, une potentielle réduction des niveaux de subvention, et un appel á tenir compte du rôle des sociétés d'État. Nous proposons aussi des recommandations de programmation concernant l'arrêt de l'utilisation des réassurances privées, une réduction du niveau des programmes de réserve, et une transparence accrue.