Canadians Challenge the Corporate Agenda

Robert White has been national president of the Canadian Auto Workers Union since the unions' founding convention in September, 1985. Prior to the formation of the CAW-Canada, White was the UAW director for Canada and international vice-president of the UAW, a position he had held since 1978. He is also vice- president of the Canadian Labor Congress and serves as a vice- president of the federal New Democratic Party.

If [the social democratic movement] is going to be successful, it really has to be a broad-based movement. Multinational Monitor: How would you compare the Canadian Auto Workers' (CAW) role in politics to that of the United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the most politicized unions in the United States?
Robert White: The difference comes from the political structure in the countries. We have a parliamentary system of government. A number of years ago, the Canadian labor movement chose to go the more European model, not just supporting one of the two old- line parties, but being involved in the social democratic movement and the social democratic party in Canada, the New Democratic Party [NDP]. Most of our local unions are affiliated with that political party, trade unionists run for office [as NDP candidates] and a number of us hold executive positions [in the NDP]. It is really a broad-based social movement of environmentalists and some farmers out West and the labor movement. This is different than the structure of the United States; there the labor movement supports the Democratic Party, but it is not a social democratic movement like we have in Canada.
The Party has never been in power nationally, but it has been in power provincially in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and held the opposition in Ontario and elsewhere. The NDP has really done a lot on the question of social issues in Canada, much more than their size and elected office [would indicate]. And we are very active in the New Democratic Party today, and share most of their policies on a lot of important issues facing our country.
MM: Is there any formal relationship between the CAW and the NDP?
White: Local unions decide by a vote of their membership to affiliate with the New Democratic Party and then pay an affiliation fee. Most of our locals are affiliated, though some of them are not. And you find labor people active in the riding associations [similar to U.S. congressional districts]. Where we have a good labor base like Oshawa or Windsor, where our union is very strong, we usually end up with New Democratic Party representatives in Parliament.
MM: Do conflicts develop between the environmental strain within the Party and the labor movement?
White: Sure. You will have some conflicts between environmentalists and trade unionists, and we have some of those in Western Canada and Ontario today. But I think the most the social democratic movement can do is allow those discussions to take place within the party and try and find a common solution. If it is going to be successful, it really has to be a broad- based social movement.
MM: The NDP went into the last election leading in the polls and then slipped down. Why do you think the Party wasn't more successful?
White: Well, two reasons. [First], it is not unusual for the New Democratic Party to be riding the polls in good shape before an election. Last time, Ed Broadbent, who had been the leader of the party for a number of years, was really seen as the best leader across the country. He was carrying a lot of the popularity of the Party with him.
[Second], the Party, I think, mishandled the free trade debate and misread the country on the free trade debate. Some of the election planners gave the wrong advice to leadership; in spite of our doing a lot of good work on free trade for two years prior to the election, the Liberals stole the issue from us. People became convinced that if they wanted to stop the free trade deal, then they had to vote Liberal, that if they voted NDP, they would be wasting their vote.
MM: Do you think there was too much focus on Broadbent?
White: Well, I don't know. Politics being what they are today, you can't take personalities out of it. Nor should you. He was seen as a strong leader, he had the confidence of the Canadian people, and I think if we had handled the free trade thing differently in the election, we would have done much better. I think you have to use your strengths, and if you have a good leader, that is one of the strengths the party should use.
MM: The CAW took a strong position in the post-election internal Party debate. What were you advocating the direction of the Party should be?
White: I was really very critical of how the Party handled the election. Our members were furious; we had done a lot of work, along with the rest of the labor movement, on the free trade issue for two years, and then we saw it slip away from us. I just said we can't let this happen to us again.
Nobody was talking about breaking the relationship with the New Democratic Party. What we were talking about was getting more input and more communication between the labor movement and the Party on an ongoing basis. And then at election time [we want to] make sure that an election committee is set up to have input from people from all over the country and not just depend on two or three people to [determine] what direction the Party should take.
MM: What does the election of Audrey McLaughlin to lead the party signal about where the NDP is going?
White: I think Audrey will bring to the New Democratic Party a different style of leadership. She is much more consensus- oriented, and it will take a while for her to establish her profile across the country, as it does for any political leader who hasn't been around that long.
I think what it says first is, to the women in the New Democratic Party who have done a lot of the work, that they are really accepted as equals and that we want to build bridges to the women's movement. I think she will work hard at bringing in a lot more minority groups, native peoples and others into the Party. I think it said something that the social democratic party was the first party to elect a woman as a national leader....
MM: Do you see the NDP taking power nationally any time in the near-term or medium-term future?
White: Not in the short-term future, I don't see that.
What you have now is a very anti-Mulroney feeling in the country. The Tories [the Conservatives] are running at 16 percent in the polls, which is the lowest any government has been in the polls since Gallup started keeping the records here. And there is a move in the Liberals to elect a new leader, John Chretien, who appears to have a lot of popularity across the country. So there is a lot of focus now on the Liberal Party. I think the next election could very well see quite a split across the country, with the New Democratic Party possibly holding the balance of power.
But if you ask if the NDP will be in the government federally, I don't see that happening in the short-term. Provincially, yes. If there was an election in British Columbia today, the NDP would get elected. If there was an election in Saskatchewan, they would get elected and they would be in the running in Manitoba and Ontario.
MM: What was the CAW's position on the Free Trade Agreement?
White: We were fundamentally opposed to it. Not just because of the auto industry--I was very opposed because of the whole issue of sovereignty and independence. This was nothing like what happened in the European Common Market, where you had countries of similar size sitting down and integrating economies and working out relationships. Here we had one of the giants of the world and we were entering into trade relations with them. [And] before we even started, a lot of [our national] decisions, by virtue of being controlled by multinational corporations, were made outside the country.
I think we gave up a great deal to get the deal with the United States, and I don't know what we got in return for that. We gave up important energy policy decisions for the future, the right to control our own energy resources. We gave up foreign investment review agencies. We have given up, in many cases, our ability to manage the economy in Canada for the benefit of the Canadian people. We are into a whole discussion now as to what is a subsidy, and that is going to put in serious jeopardy, I think, a number of our social programs.
And in return for that, we have got supposedly unlimited access to the United States market, which we didn't have before, and we don't have now. We have several decisions against us by the dispute settlement mechanism which has a majority of Americans on it.
If you had an election today, I think the free trade issue would be defeated in Canada. There have been a lot of plant closings, there is a lot of nervousness as to what is going on and we still have a number of disputes with the United States. When we were sold this agreement, we were told it would solve all of our disputes over lumber, fish and lobsters and in other industries, and, in fact, it hasn't. The government said it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Canada and now they are not even keeping a scorecard on that.
MM: Why did the Free Trade Agreement pass?
White: Mainly because of the split politically. Because the fact is that the majority of Canadians who voted did not vote for the Conservative government and the policy of free trade. The majority of Canadians voted for one of the other two parties, but because of the split politically, the Conservatives got a majority of the seats.
The corporations played a big role in the last election for the first time ever. They really played a very blatant role, telling their workers and others that "If we don't get this agreement, there aren't going to be jobs here in Canada, our plants will be in jeopardy." So they were going all over Canada blackmailing working people and telling them that their best interest would be to vote for the Free Trade Agreement. And in spite of all that, the majority of Canadians voted against the Conservative government.
MM: Were U.S. corporations part of the force behind the Free Trade Agreement as well?
White: Oh yes. The Business Council on National Issues - a lot of the top heavy hitters in that organization are U.S.-based corporations, Canadian presidents of U.S.based corporations.
MM: Do you think that the agreement could have been defeated if the NDP had run a better campaign?
White: Yes, I do. If the NDP had run a different campaign, I think we would have had a shot at defeating the Tories. If you had had the Liberals and the NDP in some sort of coalition, the Free Trade Agreement would not have passed.
MM: Do you think there is much prospect for the Free Trade Agreement being overturned or abrogated?
White: I don't think so. There is, however, a very uneasy feeling in our country today because the Free Trade Agreement [has led to] a high interest rate policy, unemployment and plant closings and because of the constitutional problems we are having. So I wouldn't want to predict that somebody running across the country campaigning on abrogating the Free Trade Agreement couldn't get elected. It could very well be the mood of the country in another couple years.
But I would think [abrogating the Free Trade Agreement] would be very hard to do now that it is in place and people have made investment decisions based on it.
MM: Given the Auto Pact, which regulated auto trade between Canada and the United States, did the Agreement have much direct impact on Canadian auto workers?
White: The Auto Pact, which was signed in 1965 between Canada and the United States, recognized some very important principles. It recognized, first of all, that Canada does not have a domestically-based auto industry. It is all from outside our borders. And therefore if some industry is going to sell cars and trucks in this market, it should make some commitments here. It said to the Americans, "If you want to rationalize your plants between Canada and the United States and you want to take advantage of the Canadian market, you have to make a commitment to Canada." They didn't have to make commitments to the United States, because they were all based there. And the Auto Pact required that if they sold a car in Canada, they had to build one here, and if they sold a truck in Canada, they had to build one here. And they had to reach a 60 percent level of content. If they failed to meet those requirements, they would have to pay a penalty on everything they brought in from the United States.
What the Free Trade Agreement does is substantively change that. There is no longer a Canadian content rule at all. It is now 50 percent North American content. The penalty for not meeting the assembly-to-sales ratio is not on what you bring in from the United States, but what you bring in from offshore. The penalties are much less, probably 10 percent of what they were under the old system. So [the negotiators] really gave up a lot of important levers for us to argue both with the corporations coming in from Japan and elsewhere about meeting a Canadian content level and also about how we maintain a share of auto production as we move into a continuing shakeout in the auto industry in the 1990s.
I sit on a blue ribbon Canada-U.S. panel in which we are talking about whether or not we should increase the North American content level from 50 percent to 60 percent. I don't have any argument about doing that as long as we figure out how Canada can get its share of that.
MM: What have been the effects of the Free Trade Agreement?
White: We have had more plant closings, not just auto, but across the industrial base of Canada, in the last year than we had in the depths of recession in the late seventies and early eighties. It is happening every day. You can't draw a straight line for every plant closing to paragraph such and such of the Free Trade Agreement, [but the Free Trade Agreement is responsible].
[We believe] the Free Trade Agreement was part and parcel of a corporate agenda designed to restructure [Canada] along the lines of what I call the survival-of-the-fittest society. It says to corporations, do whatever you have to do to be competitive. If that means closing a plant in Canada and moving it to a maquiladora along the Mexican border, that is fine. It has now become acceptable conduct to close plants and go to the United States and "rationalize" production because you are supposed to do that under the Free Trade Agreement. The sort of social consensus that we had in Canada that recognized private enterprise and public enterprise as an important social safety net is really coming apart because the corporations and the government are trying to operate the country as if it was a corporation and move to the corporate bottom line.
There is a lot of concern about loss of jobs here, about corporate mergers which are not creating jobs but are concentrating power and [costing] jobs. There are a lot of pressures on our social programs � some steps have been taken toward doing away with our universal social programs such as pensions � and there are pressures on unemployment insurance and things of that kind.
MM: How has the Free Trade Agreement affected union power?
White: In terms of trade union collective bargaining power, we live in the economy, and whatever is going on, the economy has an impact on us. There is no question in our mind that one of the reasons the corporations wanted the Free Trade Agreement was to level the collective bargaining field with the United States. They didn't like the attitude of the Canadian labor movement on a lot of bargaining issues. And so they were hoping if they had a freer environment, that the pressure of the threat to move would force the labor movement to hold [still] or else [move] backward at the bargaining table.
MM: Has that in fact been what's going on in your estimation?
White: I don't think so, not yet. I think you're going to find a labor movement in a fairly feisty mood here. There will be accommodations in certain cases, but we are going to insist that workers are entitled to share the improvements in our society. We will have to take on corporate power where we can at the bargaining table.
MM: You mentioned the effects that the Free Trade Agreement is having on social welfare programs. Could you explain that dynamic?
White: Take, for example, unemployment insurance. You now see where the government has cut back on its contribution to unemployment insurance; it is now being funded by employers and employees. The government is making it more difficult for workers to get unemployment insurance in several sectors of the country.
We have got claw backs on the pension programs � after you get to a certain level of income, they'll claw back a certain amount of your pension based on your earnings.
There are a lot of pressures on our health care system in Canada today as well, caused by cutbacks in funding between the federal and provincial governments. We have had a really strong emphasis on being your brother's keeper. Because of what is happening, a lack of tolerance is developing and pressure is growing to say, "Why should we provide health care for everybody? Why shouldn't some people who have more money get a little bit better standard of health care?"
Those kinds of things all tie in with the corporate agenda, and free trade is the cornerstone of that.
MM: The proponents of the Agreement said that free trade would force Canadian manufacturers to be more competitive. While some would lose out, it was held, there would be winners who would increase jobs, and these would outweigh the costs of the losers. Has that come to pass at all?
White: Haven't seen it. The facts are that you didn't have a Canadian manufacturing sector in most cases that was nonproductive or old and dilapidated. The auto industry is a good example: you had a lot of new investment, a lot of new technology. [The same was true in] the telecommunications industry, the steel industry, the aerospace industry. All I can tell you in terms of job creation is that the government has failed to bring out a scorecard at all, and they were supposed to have a scorecard a year after free trade was signed. We haven't got it yet and the government is saying that it is too difficult to do, which would indicate to me that the numbers are not looking very good for them.

A lot of [our national] decisions, by virtue of being controlled by multinatinal corporations, were made outside the country.

We have given up, in many cases, our ability to manage the economy in Canada for the benefit of the Canadian people.

We have had more plant closings in the last year than we had in the depths of recession in the late seventies and early eighties.

The corporations and the government are trying to operate the country as if it was a corporation and move to the corporate bottom line.

There is no question in our mind that one of the reasons the corporations wanted the Free Trade Agreement was to level the collective bargaining field with the United States.

Table of Contents

If [the social democratic movement] is going to be successful, it really has to be a broad-based movement.	Multinational Monitor: How would you compare the Canadian Auto Workers' (CAW) role in politics to that of the United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the most politicized unions in the United States? Robert White: The difference comes from the political structure in the countries. We have a parliamentary system of government. A number of years ago, the Canadian labor movement chose to go the more European model, not just supporting one of the two old- line parties, but being involved in the social democratic movement and the social democratic party in Canada, the New Democratic Party [NDP]. Most of our local unions are affiliated with that political party, trade unionists run for office [as NDP candidates] and a number of us hold executive positions [in the NDP]. It is really a broad-based social movement of environmentalists and some farmers out West and the labor movement. This is different than the structure of the United States; there the labor movement supports the Democratic Party, but it is not a social democratic movement like we have in Canada. The Party has never been in power nationally, but it has been in power provincially in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and held the opposition in Ontario and elsewhere. The NDP has really done a lot on the question of social issues in Canada, much more than their size and elected office [would indicate]. And we are very active in the New Democratic Party today, and share most of their policies on a lot of important issues facing our country. MM: Is there any formal relationship between the CAW and the NDP? White: Local unions decide by a vote of their membership to affiliate with the New Democratic Party and then pay an affiliation fee. Most of our locals are affiliated, though some of them are not. And you find labor people active in the riding associations [similar to U.S. congressional districts]. Where we have a good labor base like Oshawa or Windsor, where our union is very strong, we usually end up with New Democratic Party representatives in Parliament. MM: Do conflicts develop between the environmental strain within the Party and the labor movement? White: Sure. You will have some conflicts between environmentalists and trade unionists, and we have some of those in Western Canada and Ontario today. But I think the most the social democratic movement can do is allow those discussions to take place within the party and try and find a common solution. If it is going to be successful, it really has to be a broad- based social movement. MM: The NDP went into the last election leading in the polls and then slipped down. Why do you think the Party wasn't more successful? White: Well, two reasons. [First], it is not unusual for the New Democratic Party to be riding the polls in good shape before an election. Last time, Ed Broadbent, who had been the leader of the party for a number of years, was really seen as the best leader across the country. He was carrying a lot of the popularity of the Party with him. [Second], the Party, I think, mishandled the free trade debate and misread the country on the free trade debate. Some of the election planners gave the wrong advice to leadership; in spite of our doing a lot of good work on free trade for two years prior to the election, the Liberals stole the issue from us. People became convinced that if they wanted to stop the free trade deal, then they had to vote Liberal, that if they voted NDP, they would be wasting their vote. MM: Do you think there was too much focus on Broadbent? White: Well, I don't know. Politics being what they are today, you can't take personalities out of it. Nor should you. He was seen as a strong leader, he had the confidence of the Canadian people, and I think if we had handled the free trade thing differently in the election, we would have done much better. I think you have to use your strengths, and if you have a good leader, that is one of the strengths the party should use. MM: The CAW took a strong position in the post-election internal Party debate. What were you advocating the direction of the Party should be? White: I was really very critical of how the Party handled the election. Our members were furious; we had done a lot of work, along with the rest of the labor movement, on the free trade issue for two years, and then we saw it slip away from us. I just said we can't let this happen to us again. Nobody was talking about breaking the relationship with the New Democratic Party. What we were talking about was getting more input and more communication between the labor movement and the Party on an ongoing basis. And then at election time [we want to] make sure that an election committee is set up to have input from people from all over the country and not just depend on two or three people to [determine] what direction the Party should take. MM: What does the election of Audrey McLaughlin to lead the party signal about where the NDP is going? White: I think Audrey will bring to the New Democratic Party a different style of leadership. She is much more consensus- oriented, and it will take a while for her to establish her profile across the country, as it does for any political leader who hasn't been around that long. I think what it says first is, to the women in the New Democratic Party who have done a lot of the work, that they are really accepted as equals and that we want to build bridges to the women's movement. I think she will work hard at bringing in a lot more minority groups, native peoples and others into the Party. I think it said something that the social democratic party was the first party to elect a woman as a national leader.... MM: Do you see the NDP taking power nationally any time in the near-term or medium-term future? White: Not in the short-term future, I don't see that. What you have now is a very anti-Mulroney feeling in the country. The Tories [the Conservatives] are running at 16 percent in the polls, which is the lowest any government has been in the polls since Gallup started keeping the records here. And there is a move in the Liberals to elect a new leader, John Chretien, who appears to have a lot of popularity across the country. So there is a lot of focus now on the Liberal Party. I think the next election could very well see quite a split across the country, with the New Democratic Party possibly holding the balance of power. But if you ask if the NDP will be in the government federally, I don't see that happening in the short-term. Provincially, yes. If there was an election in British Columbia today, the NDP would get elected. If there was an election in Saskatchewan, they would get elected and they would be in the running in Manitoba and Ontario. MM: What was the CAW's position on the Free Trade Agreement? White: We were fundamentally opposed to it. Not just because of the auto industry--I was very opposed because of the whole issue of sovereignty and independence. This was nothing like what happened in the European Common Market, where you had countries of similar size sitting down and integrating economies and working out relationships. Here we had one of the giants of the world and we were entering into trade relations with them. [And] before we even started, a lot of [our national] decisions, by virtue of being controlled by multinational corporations, were made outside the country. I think we gave up a great deal to get the deal with the United States, and I don't know what we got in return for that. We gave up important energy policy decisions for the future, the right to control our own energy resources. We gave up foreign investment review agencies. We have given up, in many cases, our ability to manage the economy in Canada for the benefit of the Canadian people. We are into a whole discussion now as to what is a subsidy, and that is going to put in serious jeopardy, I think, a number of our social programs. And in return for that, we have got supposedly unlimited access to the United States market, which we didn't have before, and we don't have now. We have several decisions against us by the dispute settlement mechanism which has a majority of Americans on it. If you had an election today, I think the free trade issue would be defeated in Canada. There have been a lot of plant closings, there is a lot of nervousness as to what is going on and we still have a number of disputes with the United States. When we were sold this agreement, we were told it would solve all of our disputes over lumber, fish and lobsters and in other industries, and, in fact, it hasn't. The government said it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Canada and now they are not even keeping a scorecard on that. MM: Why did the Free Trade Agreement pass? White: Mainly because of the split politically. Because the fact is that the majority of Canadians who voted did not vote for the Conservative government and the policy of free trade. The majority of Canadians voted for one of the other two parties, but because of the split politically, the Conservatives got a majority of the seats. The corporations played a big role in the last election for the first time ever. They really played a very blatant role, telling their workers and others that "If we don't get this agreement, there aren't going to be jobs here in Canada, our plants will be in jeopardy." So they were going all over Canada blackmailing working people and telling them that their best interest would be to vote for the Free Trade Agreement. And in spite of all that, the majority of Canadians voted against the Conservative government. MM: Were U.S. corporations part of the force behind the Free Trade Agreement as well? White: Oh yes. The Business Council on National Issues - a lot of the top heavy hitters in that organization are U.S.-based corporations, Canadian presidents of U.S.based corporations. MM: Do you think that the agreement could have been defeated if the NDP had run a better campaign? White: Yes, I do. If the NDP had run a different campaign, I think we would have had a shot at defeating the Tories. If you had had the Liberals and the NDP in some sort of coalition, the Free Trade Agreement would not have passed. MM: Do you think there is much prospect for the Free Trade Agreement being overturned or abrogated? White: I don't think so. There is, however, a very uneasy feeling in our country today because the Free Trade Agreement [has led to] a high interest rate policy, unemployment and plant closings and because of the constitutional problems we are having. So I wouldn't want to predict that somebody running across the country campaigning on abrogating the Free Trade Agreement couldn't get elected. It could very well be the mood of the country in another couple years. But I would think [abrogating the Free Trade Agreement] would be very hard to do now that it is in place and people have made investment decisions based on it. MM: Given the Auto Pact, which regulated auto trade between Canada and the United States, did the Agreement have much direct impact on Canadian auto workers? White: The Auto Pact, which was signed in 1965 between Canada and the United States, recognized some very important principles. It recognized, first of all, that Canada does not have a domestically-based auto industry. It is all from outside our borders. And therefore if some industry is going to sell cars and trucks in this market, it should make some commitments here. It said to the Americans, "If you want to rationalize your plants between Canada and the United States and you want to take advantage of the Canadian market, you have to make a commitment to Canada." They didn't have to make commitments to the United States, because they were all based there. And the Auto Pact required that if they sold a car in Canada, they had to build one here, and if they sold a truck in Canada, they had to build one here. And they had to reach a 60 percent level of content. If they failed to meet those requirements, they would have to pay a penalty on everything they brought in from the United States. What the Free Trade Agreement does is substantively change that. There is no longer a Canadian content rule at all. It is now 50 percent North American content. The penalty for not meeting the assembly-to-sales ratio is not on what you bring in from the United States, but what you bring in from offshore. The penalties are much less, probably 10 percent of what they were under the old system. So [the negotiators] really gave up a lot of important levers for us to argue both with the corporations coming in from Japan and elsewhere about meeting a Canadian content level and also about how we maintain a share of auto production as we move into a continuing shakeout in the auto industry in the 1990s. I sit on a blue ribbon Canada-U.S. panel in which we are talking about whether or not we should increase the North American content level from 50 percent to 60 percent. I don't have any argument about doing that as long as we figure out how Canada can get its share of that. MM: What have been the effects of the Free Trade Agreement? White: We have had more plant closings, not just auto, but across the industrial base of Canada, in the last year than we had in the depths of recession in the late seventies and early eighties. It is happening every day. You can't draw a straight line for every plant closing to paragraph such and such of the Free Trade Agreement, [but the Free Trade Agreement is responsible]. [We believe] the Free Trade Agreement was part and parcel of a corporate agenda designed to restructure [Canada] along the lines of what I call the survival-of-the-fittest society. It says to corporations, do whatever you have to do to be competitive. If that means closing a plant in Canada and moving it to a maquiladora along the Mexican border, that is fine. It has now become acceptable conduct to close plants and go to the United States and "rationalize" production because you are supposed to do that under the Free Trade Agreement. The sort of social consensus that we had in Canada that recognized private enterprise and public enterprise as an important social safety net is really coming apart because the corporations and the government are trying to operate the country as if it was a corporation and move to the corporate bottom line. There is a lot of concern about loss of jobs here, about corporate mergers which are not creating jobs but are concentrating power and [costing] jobs. There are a lot of pressures on our social programs � some steps have been taken toward doing away with our universal social programs such as pensions � and there are pressures on unemployment insurance and things of that kind. MM: How has the Free Trade Agreement affected union power? White: In terms of trade union collective bargaining power, we live in the economy, and whatever is going on, the economy has an impact on us. There is no question in our mind that one of the reasons the corporations wanted the Free Trade Agreement was to level the collective bargaining field with the United States. They didn't like the attitude of the Canadian labor movement on a lot of bargaining issues. And so they were hoping if they had a freer environment, that the pressure of the threat to move would force the labor movement to hold [still] or else [move] backward at the bargaining table. MM: Has that in fact been what's going on in your estimation? White: I don't think so, not yet. I think you're going to find a labor movement in a fairly feisty mood here. There will be accommodations in certain cases, but we are going to insist that workers are entitled to share the improvements in our society. We will have to take on corporate power where we can at the bargaining table. MM: You mentioned the effects that the Free Trade Agreement is having on social welfare programs. Could you explain that dynamic? White: Take, for example, unemployment insurance. You now see where the government has cut back on its contribution to unemployment insurance; it is now being funded by employers and employees. The government is making it more difficult for workers to get unemployment insurance in several sectors of the country. We have got claw backs on the pension programs � after you get to a certain level of income, they'll claw back a certain amount of your pension based on your earnings. There are a lot of pressures on our health care system in Canada today as well, caused by cutbacks in funding between the federal and provincial governments. We have had a really strong emphasis on being your brother's keeper. Because of what is happening, a lack of tolerance is developing and pressure is growing to say, "Why should we provide health care for everybody? Why shouldn't some people who have more money get a little bit better standard of health care?" Those kinds of things all tie in with the corporate agenda, and free trade is the cornerstone of that. MM: The proponents of the Agreement said that free trade would force Canadian manufacturers to be more competitive. While some would lose out, it was held, there would be winners who would increase jobs, and these would outweigh the costs of the losers. Has that come to pass at all? White: Haven't seen it. The facts are that you didn't have a Canadian manufacturing sector in most cases that was nonproductive or old and dilapidated. The auto industry is a good example: you had a lot of new investment, a lot of new technology. [The same was true in] the telecommunications industry, the steel industry, the aerospace industry. All I can tell you in terms of job creation is that the government has failed to bring out a scorecard at all, and they were supposed to have a scorecard a year after free trade was signed. We haven't got it yet and the government is saying that it is too difficult to do, which would indicate to me that the numbers are not looking very good for them.
A lot of [our national] decisions, by virtue of being controlled by multinatinal corporations, were made outside the country.
We have given up, in many cases, our ability to manage the economy in Canada for the benefit of the Canadian people.
We have had more plant closings in the last year than we had in the depths of recession in the late seventies and early eighties.
The corporations and the government are trying to operate the country as if it was a corporation and move to the corporate bottom line.
There is no question in our mind that one of the reasons the corporations wanted the Free Trade Agreement was to level the collective bargaining field with the United States.