Making do with less: crown corporations in an age of restraint.

• Author: Normand Grimard

The French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote that "man is in no sense there for the State. The State is there for man." Paul Valery said, "If the State is powerful, it crushes us. If it is not powerful, we are lost." Today Governments on both right and left are cutting public services because they cannot find the money to fund them. Reducing the deficit entails eliminating spending. Every legislature in the country now boasts of extensive expertise in the consequences of liquidating its Crown corporations. Parliamentarians, many with great reluctance, have had the responsibility of adjusting the size of government to the needs of the current decade, while all around unemployment, bankruptcies, job losses and seizures by creditors go hand-in-hand with plummeting real estate values and a steadily weakening dollar.

In 1973, Ernest Schumacher published his best-selling Small Is Beautiful, singing the praises of small business enterprises. Today economic considerations are forcing governments to embrace smallness, in ways that ten years ago would have seemed far-fetched but are now realities, or at any rate seen as entirely reasonable possibilities.

Air Canada, Petro-Canada and the national railways have managed to preserve their logos. But their ownership has changed. At the provincial level, privatization is under consideration for Ontario Hydro and to a certain extent Hydro-Quebec. In February 1996 the Globe and Mail informed Canadians that even socialist Saskatchewan might be getting rid of five of its Crown corporations: Saskatchewan Telecommunications, Saskatchewan Power Corp., SaskEnergy Inc., Saskatchewan Government Insurance and Saskatchewan Transportation Co.

It seems like only yesterday that confidently wealthy governments, were considering the nationalization of this or that service in the name of necessity or national pride!

The great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, who died last December, wrote The Cunning Man in 1994. Its narrator describes the arrival of a train in Sioux Lookout, a little hamlet in Ontario, in the 1930s:

The southern world reached us by the daily appearance of the transcontinental train of the Canadian National Railway, which dropped mail and parcels when there were any. Most of the mail was for my father's mine.

The same situation could have been found in a myriad of Quebec villages with their identical steeples.

It was as though the building of the transCanadian railway by Sir John A. Macdonald in the nineteenth century had paved the way for the expansion of the state as entrepreneur. In a country with so vast a territory, those prestigious names were reassuring, especially when attached to services that could not make a profit. To the people, they represented the...