Prime Minister Goldman Sachs’ corporate takeover is moving apace. Hopefully his bid to impose a corporate candidate in a Montreal by-election will be defeated.
On Sunday, signs for Liberal candidate Guy Cormier (and some with a picture of Carney) went up in my riding of Laurier–Sainte-Marie. On December 7 there’s a byelection for a seat left vacant after Steven Guilbeault resigned over Carney’s climate destruction. Carney wants Cormier to replace the former environment minister.
Until last year Cormier was CEO of Desjardins Group. The former finance professor at HEC Montréal led the large federation of credit unions for nearly a decade. During that time Cormier was a member of the Canadian Business Council(formerly Canadian Council of Chief Executives) with Galen Weston, Power Corporation’s Paul Desmarais Jr., GardaWorld’s Stephan Crétier and 150 other top CEOs. In June, Cormier joined the board of the massive construction firm Pomerleau and he’s a member of the QG100 Network, which is “a gathering of CEOs and senior executives from exceptional Quebec companies who exchange ideas, inspire each other and grow together, both locally and internationally.”
Despite Guilbeault announcing his resignation five months ago, the Laurier–Sainte-Marie Liberal party association doesn’t appear to have held an election or met to select Cormier. According to La Presse, Carney was directly involved in his candidacy. On Saturday that outlet reported, “according to a Liberal source, Mr. Cormier agreed to make the leap into politics after having a conversation with Prime Minister Mark Carney.”
Carney has turned to the corporate world for a slew of positions in his government such as former Goldman Sachs Canada CEO, Tim Hodgson, as energy minister, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec CEO Michael Sabia as Clerk of the Privy Council, Trans Mountain chair, Dawn Farrell, as CEO of the Major Projects Office and BlackRock executive Mark Wiseman as ambassador to the US. He has also reintroduced former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s practice of regularly holding informal meetings with Bay Street CEOs when in Toronto and in mid-September took his capitalist ethos to a brazen level. The PM brought together 250 of the world’s most powerful capitalists for a summit where they were presented with a “pitch book” of 167 Canadian projects to buy into.
At the CEO summit Carney announced the government would be seeking to effectively privatize Canada’s four largest airports and introduced a “Productivity Mega Deduction” slashing the effective tax rate on new business investment from 13% to 6.4%.
Carney has instigated a series of other measures that lower the tax burden on large enterprises and the wealthy. Immediately upon taking office Carney cancelled a scheduled increase to the capital gains inclusion rate and scrapped a small Digital Services Tax, which saves the world’s largest internet giants a billion dollars annually. The PM even joked that they called it the “Productivity Mega Deduction” since they’d already adopted a “Productivity Super Deduction” last year, letting businesses immediately deduct 100% of the cost of eligible new machinery, equipment, and technology in their first year of operation.
As he cuts taxes on capital, the former Goldman Sachs banker is seeking to weaken unions. The outrageous Bill C-39 not only boosts the government’s ability to end a legal strike but also weakens environmental regulations and undercuts First Nations rights. It builds on numerous other pieces of legislation that empower corporations to the detriment of the environment and indigenous rights.
Selecting a prominent CEO to represent a working-class Montreal neighbourhood, which includes the Gay Village and Chinatown, is the latest step in Carney’s corporatist onslaught.
Leftists in Montreal should consider getting involved in the byelection. Defeating Carney’s corporate candidate would send a message of opposition to the PM’s ecocidal, wealth concentrating, agenda.
While I strongly disagree with Nima Machouf on Iran, I’ll be voting for her. The NDP candidate has defended Palestinians and was at Saturday’s rally to oppose the Carney government weakening regulations on cancer causing pesticides. She’s also the only candidate with a realistic shot of defeating Carney’s corporate candidate.
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