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August 31, 2010
What does Feist think about potash?
In other countries, where a sense of economic sovereignty still gets people going, this would not be a completely ironic kind of question. We know, for example, that Björk cares passionately about resisting the foreign takeover of one of Iceland’s geothermal power companies. The outspoken singer-songwriter has called for a public referendum on the issue so that Icelanders can express their desire to control their country’s natural resources.
The iconic Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan is under threat of takeover by the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton Ltd., but so far our own indie darlings have remained silent on the risks this poses to our national sense of self. What’s more telling about the state of nationalism today is that we don’t expect them to take a stand – the Trudeau-era belief in Canada’s economic independence seems almost embarrassingly antiquated in the wired world where Broken Social Scene says Canada much louder than potash ever can.
Who will speak for Canada? Not Inco or Alcan, Stelco or Potash Corp. We let the foreigners take our natural-resource companies without much hesitation because (1) we’re convinced it’s good for business (shareholder value – yummmm!); (2), that globalization means there’s no such thing as a foreigner any more (it’s a Vancouver company that aims to take over Björk’s beloved geothermal plants); (3) there’s not much we can do about it (a.k.a. The Canadian Argument); and (4) actually, we don’t really care.
A few people do care about the ownership of Potash Corp., mostly those executives and shareholders who stand to make scads of money when the company (now tied as much to Chicago as to Saskatoon) sells for an even higher price than BHP is offering. But otherwise potash doesn’t register on the national-pride radar, however much sentimentalists want to connect it with Tommy Douglas’s golden age.
How can a slightly dubious fertilizer component whose value stems in large part from China’s megalomania hope to compete with Sidney Crosby’s Olympic overtime goal, our gallant troops and accessible health care? Moralizing commentators tut-tut us for our reluctance to draw the sovereigntist line in the sand, to make potash our Thermopylae in the last stand against the dollar-wielding barbarian foe. But nostalgia for the swinging, swaggering Canada of the Trudeau days, when the nation itself was an indie darling, isn’t quite enough to compel us into battle. We need a reason to believe, and corporate Canada has seen to it that when it comes to their enlightened ownership of natural resources, we’re agnostics at best.
The buying and selling of Potash Corp. isn’t a test case for our sense of Canadianness mostly because Canadianness has moved on. In the Trudeau era of the seventies, there was indeed a weird harmonic convergence between economic sovereignty and patriotic pride. Flying Air Canada, cheering Paul Henderson’s goal against the Soviets and reading Margaret Atwood’s Survival were all part of the same potent vision quest. But now, notes University of Toronto political scientist Neil Nevitte, “there’s been a decoupling. National pride is no longer the same thing as nationalism.”
Potash Corp. was a key element of that decoupling – it went private in 1989 as part of the mass migration away from the idea of public ownership. In any current debate over economic sovereignty, it’s hard not to see a generational split between wistful elders who grew up with a belief in the positive values of public-sector institutions and their post-Thatcherite offspring who won’t ever be convinced that governments could successfully mine potash, fly you comfortably to Heathrow and run a kinder, gentler chain of gas stations.
Continue reading John Allemang’s article online at globeandmail.com.