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Sunday, May 15, 2005
Early Business with Beijing
One of the benefits of doing a large cover story like the Western Standard's current "Puppets of Beijing" is that people start contacting you with information that supplements the overall picture. While it would have been nice to have the info before the thing went to press, nevertheless I appreciate the effort people take to point out this or that fact, correct me, or give me references to other sources, etc. In the long run all this is of tremendous help because it expands the base of credible sources in case the story must be revisited.
One such fact came to light recently is on point with the story. It shows an early business interest that now-embattled UN advisor Maurice Strong (also an advisor to Paul Martin) had in China back in the pre-Deng Xiaoping 'capitalist' reform days (that began roughly in 1978). It is from the book Rae Days: The Rise and Follies of the NDP by Thomas Walkom, 1994. The excerpt is from Chapter 13: "Mo of the Jungle: On and off the privatization bandwagon":
By the 1970s, Strong had been picked by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to head Petro-Canada, the new state-owned oil company which the NDP of David Lewis (Stephen's father) had demanded as their price for keeping the minority Liberals in power. In November 1976, as Mao Tse-tung's widow and the rest of the so-called Gang of Four were about to be arrested in Beijing, a company linked to Strong was flying antiquities, gold, furniture, and jewelry out of China.
That's all it says about it. If anyone has anymore info on this--the name of the company for instance--feel free to post it in Comments.
Here is the entire chapter for those who might wish to see the the paragraph in its context or who may want to do a little Sunday reading about Bob Rae's long ties to Strong.
Rae Days: Rise and Follies of the NDP
By Thomas Walkom
Copyright 1994, Key Porter Books Limited
Chapter 13: Mo of the Jungle: On and off the privatization bandwagon
Pages 245-257
September 1992 Another crisis seemed in the making for the NDP government-this time over Ontario Hydro. Since its creation in 1906 by the legendary Adam Beck, the provincially owned utility had been one of the pillars of strength in Ontario. Although nominally under government control, Hydro had operated almost as a law unto itself, a fiefdom. It was, after all, the largest public utility in North America and one of the largest companies in the world.
From Beck on, Hydro's powerful chieftains had tended to regard their political masters politely, but with a touch of world-weary disdain. Politicians, after all, were merely transitory. Governments might come and go. Hydro remained. It had its rituals, its own peculiar perks of office. Every Christmas, for instance, it had been the custom of the Hydro board of directors to gather solemnly for a small celebration. A glass of sherry perhaps, and a nibble of chocolate. The chocolates were Hydro's own, made especially for the utility, each embossed with the utility's corporate emblem.
By late 1992, however, Hydro was in serious straits. The recession had slashed the demand for power. At the same time, the massive Darlington nuclear station east of Toronto had finally come on line, increasing the utility's generating capacity. Darlington, begun by the former Conservative government in 1981, had been a disaster--fraught with delays and cost-overruns. When it finally came on-stream ten years later, its cost was $14 billion, more than twice the original estimate.
Hydro had borrowed heavily to pay for Darlington, Pickering, and the province's other nuclear plants. By 1992, it found itself with a massive $36-billion debt.
The utility's response had been to jack up rates. By 1992, rates were 30 per cent higher than they had been two years earlier when the NDP had come to power. Senior citizens were flooding Energy minister Brian Charlton's office with calls, saying they could no longer afford to pay their electricity bills. The province's manufacturers, led by the powerful Association of Major Power Consumers in Ontario--a lobby for the major resource companies--were in an uproar. Rising power costs meant they were losing any competitive edge they had ever possessed. That meant, they warned the government, more job losses.
To make matters worse, Hydro chairman Marc Eliesen--Rae's personal appointment--had just quit in a huff. He had announced in August 1992 that he was heading off to British Columbia. The government needed a replacement who could keep the confidence of business and sort out the mess at Hydro without alarming the vocal environmental lobby. But who? Rae turned to Stephen Lewis for advice. Rae and Lewis had never been fast friends and, within a few months, they would fall out over the premier's social contract. However, in the fall of 1992, they were still close enough that Rae could look to his predecessor for help.
Lewis did have a suggestion. As Canada's former ambassador to the United Nations, Lewis had worked with just the kind of person he thought Hydro needed--a fixer with impeccable business, government, and environmental credentials who had a reputation for getting things done. The two, the former ambassador and the globetrotting fixer, had become friends, occasionally dining at each other's homes. The fixer's name was Maurice Strong. When Lewis suggested Rae hire Strong to run Ontario Hydro, the premier thought it a capital idea.
If Maurice Strong were American, someone would have made a movie about him. His background was almost too romantic. Born to a working-class family in Oak Lake, Manitoba, during the Depression of the 1930s, he quit school at age fourteen and literally ran away to sea, working freighters in the Pacific and into Hudson's Bay until, at the age of seventeen, he discovered the world of business. By age thirty, Strong had his own company; by thirty-five, he was running one of Canada's largest conglomerates; by forty-three, The New Yorker magazine was lauding him as the man upon whom "the survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend."
What defined Strong's style was the elaborate network of friends, partners, and acquaintances he created--a network that wound through the business, political, and intelligence communities of three continents. In particular, Strong's life was interwoven with New York banking, U.S. oil interests, Canadian big business, and the Liberal party. As journalist Elaine Dewar points out in an intriguing Saturday Night magazine feature piece on Strong, the same names kept appearing in his life: the Texas Company, the Rockefellers, the Loebs, the Bronfmans, Power Corp., and the Paul Martins--both senior and junior. In Ottawa, one of the influential Liberal mandarins Strong kept up with was Saul Rae, Bob's father.
Physically, Strong was unprepossessing, a slightly paunchy, balding sixty-three-year-old with a squeaky voice and a toothbrush moustache. His public manner was modest but reassuring-like that of a small-town prairie bank manager. Indeed, Strong was reminiscent of George Smiley, the self-effacing master spy of John le Carré's novels, described by his creator as being both eminently forgettable and slightly out-of-date.
Like Smiley, Strong had the knack of always turning up at the right moment. When the Cold War started, the RCMP used the mineral exploration office in which Strong worked to spy on suspected Communists in the Canada--U.S.S.R. Friendship Association next door (the Friendship Association's wartime treasurer would later become one of Strong's business partners). "I wasn't a spy," Strong told journalist Dewar later. "I was too young."
A few years later, as anti-colonial movements heated up in Africa and the Middle East, Strong was there too, working for U.S. oil interests embroiled in the region's politics. By the early 1960s, Strong was running Power Corp. an influential Montreal-based conglomerate with close ties to the ruling Liberal party. One of the bright young men he hired was Paul Martin Jr., the future federal Finance minister.
In 1968, at the behest of the Liberals, Strong created the Canadian International Development Agency--a federal government-aid organization designed, in part, to persuade the new, poor countries of francophone Africa not to support Quebec independence. A year later, he was asked to head the United Nation's first international conference on the environment in Stockholm.
By the 1970s, Strong had been picked by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to head Petro-Canada, the new state-owned oil company which the NDP of David Lewis (Stephen's father) had demanded as their price for keeping the minority Liberals in power. In November 1976, as Mao Tse-tung's widow and the rest of the so-called Gang of Four were about to be arrested in Beijing, a company linked to Strong was flying antiquities, gold, furniture, and jewelry out of China.
By the early 1980s, Strong was back in Ottawa heading up the Liberal government's newest idea for state-sponsored industrial growth, the Canada Development Investment Corp. By the mid-1980s, he was working for the United Nations in concert with Stephen Lewis, sorting out the complex politics of Africa and the Middle East so as to get aid to starving Ethiopians. Meanwhile, he was involving himself in an American real estate firm known as AZL Resources Inc., which itself was connected to Saudi Arabian arms dealer and Middle East political wheeler-dealer Adnan Kashoggi.
Strong and his second wife, Hanne, were also in the forefront of the New Age movement. Their money helped survivalists build a new version [sic] of Noah's Ark, in preparation for the second deluge. Strong's AZL sold land in Colorado's San Luis Valley to fellow New Age enthusiasts such as Shirley MacLaine. Many of these New Agers later turned against Maurice and Hanne when another Strong-related company proposed to pump out the water that sustained this valley and pipe it to Denver.
By 1992, the environment was the issue. The head of the gala U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that year--a summit which garnered acres of media publicity but accomplished little else--was Maurice Strong.
To Rae, Strong represented the dedicated and skilful public servants of Pearsonian Liberalism--of Saul Rae's time. Indeed, as a child, young Bobby Rae had been virtually dandled on Maurice Strong's knee. As the premier pointed out proudly, Strong had often been a visitor at Saul Rae's during that period.
Rae was adamant that Strong was to be hired. This caused some trouble for Energy minister Brian Charlton, who had already engaged a head-hunting firm at a cost of $100,000 to find a new Hydro head. But the sham was allowed to come to a conclusion. On October 29, 1992, Rae announced Strong was his choice as chairman of Ontario Hydro.
As Elaine Dewar has pointed out, Strong's signature throughout his business life had been the "mingling of public and private in the cause of public policy." The new chairman brought that characteristic approach to Hydro. Within weeks of being appointed, he was musing publicly about privatizing parts of the giant utility. Charlton was not amused; the day Strong's remarks were published, Charlton denied that privatization was under consideration by the government. The seed had been planted.
More than any other single institution, Ontario Hydro embodied the contradictory Red Tory political culture of Ontario--a socialized industry created by a Conservative government. Since its formation in 1906, at the behest of manufacturers anxious to break the power of the private electricity companies, the utility had received the whole-hearted support of the province's business class. They found its mandate--to provide power at cost--a glorious slogan.
By the time Strong took over, Hydro was the largest publicly owned utility in North America. While opposition politicians (and even government ministers) had always grumbled at Hydro's regal ways, no one in a position of authority had ever seriously contemplated dismantling it. Hydro was the province's flagship.
The Tories had long used it as a kind of industrial development corporation. Hydro had kept the entire Ontario-based Canadian nuclear industry alive. Hydro nuclear and heavy-water plants kept workers employed in regions of the province that would have otherwise withered. Inflated Hydro contracts subsidized the uranium mines of Elliot Lake, keeping both owners and workers happy.
The Liberals, during David Peterson's short reign, had been advised to use Hydro as an industrial-development engine to encourage high technology firms. At first, the NDP government was no different.
Rae appointed Marc Eliesen, one of his most influential bureaucrats, to the position of Hydro chair in 1991 in order to bring the utility under firm political control. The Hydro board of directors was stacked with environmentalists and New Democrats to act as a counterweight to old Tory and Liberal appointments. Eliesen, former research director for the federal NDP and former chair of the board of directors of Manitoba Hydro under Howard Pawley, was ordered to bring the utility to heel.
To that end, Hydro under Eliesen helped to bail out both Elliot Lake and the northern pulp town of Kapuskasing. Hydro involved itself in the government's Native agenda by scaling back hydro-electric projects in the North. It supported the government's environmental agenda through a vigorous campaign to encourage energy conservation. It became more amenable to buying power from small-scale private generators, the latest darlings of the environmental movement.
The relationship between Eliesen and Rae soon soured. Among senior bureaucrats, Eliesen was seen as greedy. Among political aides, he gained the reputation of being imperious. At one point, for instance, he telephoned Energy minister Brian Charlton to berate him for the way he had answered a Hydro question in the legislature. "Marc was not an easy person to deal with," Charlton would acknowledge later. "But I didn't have as many problems as, I think, my predecessor did or as, I think, the premier did."
For his part, according to friends, Eliesen was increasingly angered by what he saw as the government's refusal to stand by him. In the legislature, Eliesen's $400,000 salary became an issue as opposition politicians accused Rae of rewarding political cronies. The fact that Eliesen, a New Democrat, had been brought into the Ontario civil service by the Liberals seemed not to matter. Nor did the fact that Eliesen's predecessor had been paid an even higher salary, $540,000. Indeed, when Rae was asked about Eliesen's salary, he noted pointedly that it was more than he made as premier. Eventually, Eliesen offered to have his salary cut to $260,000. To the Hydro chairman's annoyance, Rae accepted.
There were disputes on other levels too. Eliesen argued that the government had become overly obsessed with its deficit. Rae, on the other hand, increasingly worried about Hydro's finances, was said to be demanding staff cuts at the utility. The Hydro chairman later told friends that Rae had called for "blood on the floor."
Money seemed to be front and centre--money and pride. The opposition barrage continued as Liberal MPPS attacked Eliesen's pension arrangements and perks. After one such foray against Hydro's bonusing practices, in which Eliesen felt the government had left him dangling, the chairman quietly made other plans. In August 1992, he announced he was quitting to become head of B.C. Hydro.
Eliesen's successor, Maurice Strong, was equally, if not more, imperious. In taking the Hydro job, he was required to put himself at arm's length from business affairs that might create a conflict-of-interest. But Strong was a man of many interests. According to Charlton, he had taken the Hydro job on the condition that he be permitted to continue jetting around the world to minister to those he continued to hold. The Hydro chair's peripatetic habits, Charlton said, were never a problem for him as Energy minister.
However, neither Charlton nor Bud Wildman (who replaced Charlton as Energy minister in early 1993) was ever quite sure what Strong was doing. Energy ministry staff were convinced that Strong was operating on his own, rather than the government's, agenda. No one was sure what this agenda was. The Hydro chair travelled the world at will. Not even the premier was sure where to find him.
One anecdote is telling. In May 1994, Wildman was annoyed and embarrassed to find that, without notifying the government, Strong had begun negotiations to purchase a 12,500 hectare rain forest in Costa Rica. Opposition MPPS pointed out that Strong had investments in Costa Rica and questioned why a crown corporation that was $36 billion in debt needed a rain forest. The newspapers had a field day with, as one Toronto Star headline writer called him, "Mo of the Jungle."
Strong, however, was unrepentant. Jungle acquisition was an idea worth looking into, he insisted, one in line with the most modern principles of sustainable development. After all, trees in Central America could absorb the carbon dioxide that Hydro and other world polluters produced. Critics, he said, were focusing "primarily on the petty, the peripheral, and the parochial." Ministers such as Frances Lankin who were dubious about the jungle scheme were speaking “impulsively.'' Soon, some of Strong's powerful friends in business and politics were telephoning opposition MPPS such as Liberal Sean Conway, advising them to lay off. The story quickly died.
In terms of the NDP government, Strong did possess something Eliesen never enjoyed--Rae's unqualified support. When Strong announced he would lay off 4,500 Hydro workers, the premier praised him for being "courageous.'' While Rae had never been comfortable with the idea of Eliesen making $400,000 a year, he saw nothing wrong with Strong's $425,000 a year salary. Indeed, when reporters questioned the sum, the premier seemed personally offended that anyone could question the worth of such a man.
When, soon after being appointed, Strong started talking about privatizing Hydro, Rae didn't think it necessarily such a bad idea. At one level, this might have seemed odd. For, in opposition, Rae had presented himself as a fierce opponent of privatization. Speaking to a 1986 conference in Washington, the NDP leader had slammed then premier David Peterson for selling off one of the province's more minor Crown corporations. Privatization, Rae said, was "a symptom of a diseased economic order . . . a casino economy'' in which governments sell off "the family silver . . . while the company itself is often left to decay or shut down in a process euphemistically called rationalization." Privatization, he went on, was a fundamental element of what he called neo-liberalism.
"Proponents of neo-liberalism are attracted to right-wing economic ideas but disapprove of its [the right's] social ideas," Rae told his audience. "How many times have you heard the common refrain 'I'm a conservative on economic issues but progressive on social issues.' This idea, that you can separate economic and social life is bizarre in itself, but again it would be naive for anyone to underestimate the potential popularity and danger of this approach . . .
"We will lose if we give all the economic arguments to the right by climbing on the privatization band-wagon."
Before entering NDP politics, however, Rae had been far more ambivalent about public ownership. In his Oxford thesis, for instance, Rae criticized those who saw all state intervention as socialist. "This is mistaken." he wrote, because it blurs important distinctions about why the state has decided to interfere, what kind of policy it is imposing, and in whose general interest this intervention is being carried out." Public ownership, he went on, "is often simply a means for the propertied classes to use the state as an ally in the exploitation of wealth."
In short, with public enterprise, as with almost everything else, there were two Bob Raes. One Bob Rae took a case-by-case approach to the issue: How would public ownership work in a specific situation? Whom would it benefit? Whom would it hurt? The other, the New Democratic Bob Rae, took a more global approach, seeing public ownership as a concept worth preserving, one of the few remaining manifestations of a set of social values and ideas that were under constant attack from the right.
In opposition, it was the New Democratic Bob Rae who dominated. In government, the more basic Bob Rae had re-emerged. When Maurice Strong began to make practical arguments about why it might be a good idea to sell off parts of the province's oldest Crown enterprise, the more basic Bob Rae listened intently.
Even before Strong's appointment, the NDP government had already made its first tentative moves towards privatizing public enterprise. In this case, it was highways. The government wanted to build new highways. But it didn't want to spend any of its own money. Other Ontario governments had flirted with the idea of toll roads but had pulled back for fear of public opposition. The NDP government, however, decided to go one step farther: it would privatize new highways.
As explained by Transportation ministry officials, the plan would work this way: Queen's Park would find a private-sector consortium (a "partner," in NDP government lingo) willing to put up the capital needed to build a highway. In return for building and operating the highway, the consortium would be allowed to charge tolls. The arrangement would last for a period of thirty years. By that time, it was assumed, the road would require rebuilding, and the government could start all over again.
In February 1993, the government announced it would enter into agreements with companies to finance and build an expressway north of Toronto. As a way to get around the political problem of large deficits, the scheme seemed ingenious. New highways would be built, but none of the billions of dollars borrowed to build them would appear, officially at least, on the government's books. As a piece of economic policy, however, the scheme had serious problems.
First, the government would, in practical terms, always be liable for the money borrowed. Any loan default by the private-sector partners could put some of the province's major transportation routes at risk. No government would be able to allow that. Keeping the capital costs of new roads officially off the government's books might fool the general public, but it wouldn't fool the people who count in so far as deficits are concerned--the creditors and bond-rating agencies. They would soon come to recognize that monies borrowed by private contractors to build Ontario highways were, to all intents and purposes, contingent liabilities of the province.
Second, no matter who officially borrowed the money to build the new highways, the same people would ultimately pay-the users. These users (including consumers who bought products transported along the new highways) would have to pay more than if the highways were publicly operated. Tolls paid to a public authority have to cover the cost of building and maintaining a road. Tolls paid to a private consortium must cover not just these costs but the operator's profit, a not-inconsiderable sum.
Through its private-highway scheme, the NDP government had threatened higher costs for drivers and consumers-without actually addressing the fiscal problem of debts and deficits it had set out to solve.
By April 1994, the government had realized the obvious downsides involved in privatizing highways and quietly backed off. But the flurry of interest in privatization that the highway scheme represented had already taken hold. It was first blood. If the NDP could privatize highways, why not something else? Why not Hydro?
Those who favoured privatizing Hydro never contemplated selling off the entire utility. As Energy minister Bud Wildman later commented, no one would have wanted it. For Hydro was saddled with expensive but under-utilized nuclear generating plants that were responsible for the bulk of its $36-billion debt. Rather, privatization enthusiasts favoured splitting Hydro into three parts. The nuclear plants, plus the bulk of the Hydro debt, would be kept by the government. The transmission grid, the wires and transformers, would remain a public monopoly. But the non-nuclear generating plants would be sold. The publicly owned transmission grid would then buy power from anyone willing to supply it.
By early 1993, with Strong still musing about privatizing parts of Hydro, Energy minister Brian Charlton had become less categorical in his denials. "We're looking at everything and anything," Charlton told The Toronto Star. "If you don't consider every option, you are subject to criticism."
Inside government, the crisis in Hydro had become a major issue. At the centre was fear of what would come to be called the "debt spiral." It went something like this: as Hydro raised rates to cover its debt, industries and consumers would cut back energy consumption even more. Indeed, some industries and cities were already warning that they would produce their own power, using natural gas, rather than buy electricity from Hydro. If demand fell, Hydro would be even more hard-pressed to pay its debt and have to raise rates even more--and the spiral would continue.
Two camps had formed around the debt-spiral issue. Michael Decter, then deputy Health minister, would later refer to them as the "bail-it-out camp'' and the "cut-it-loose camp." The former-including deputy cabinet secretary Michael Mendelson, Treasury Board secretary Jay Kaufman, and deputy minister of Energy George Davies, wanted to keep Hydro as a government monopoly and have the province take over the bulk of the utility's $36-billion debt. Since the province already guaranteed Hydro's borrowing, they argued, what would be the difference? Socializing Hydro's debt and cutting off the limited competition from independent power generators, this camp said, would give the public enterprise a chance.
On the other side were Decter and deputy minister of Finance Eleanor Clitheroe (she would later move to a senior position at Hydro). The cut-it-loose camp argued that Hydro's monopoly should be abolished, more competition permitted, and shares in the utility sold--perhaps to municipal utilities, perhaps elsewhere.
The fiscal conservatives in this camp were also joined by some environmental conservatives outside government, particularly those associated with an anti-nuclear group called Energy Probe. For environmentalists had long argued that small-scale generating plants--the so-called non-utility generators (NUGs)--were far less disruptive than the traditional nuclear behemoths of Hydro. If Hydro were broken up and its monopoly on generation truly broken, Energy Probe argued, private NUGS could have a real chance.
The debt-wall scare that swept the NDP cabinet in early 1993 put an end to any notion of the province helping out Hydro. Decter warned the premier that bailing out Hydro would mean "in the extreme way I put things in these kinds of debates, that that was the end of medicare. The way I put it to the premier was: If there's only room in the lifeboat for either medicare or Hydro, I know which one I'm for. . . . There's certainly no particular logic to the government continuing to own a Hydro utility in an increasingly competitive energy world."
Meanwhile, at the utility, Strong carried on with his characteristic management style. His usual method in other ventures had been to rearrange the business into an array of interlocking companies and then bring trusted associates on board to run them. Strong himself would then continue his peripatetic existence--jetting back and forth to his headquarters in Geneva, his ranch in Colorado, and to other interests around the world, returning from time to time to make major decisions.
At the height of the 1993 social-contract talks, for instance, the government's chief negotiator, Michael Decter, needed urgently to talk to the Hydro chairman. Strong was nowhere to be found; he was, Decter was told, incommunicado somewhere in Europe. In frustration, Decter finally turned to Rae. Did the premier have any advice on how to get hold of his Hydro chairman? Rae's wry response was not that helpful. "My advice, Mike," he told Decter, "is to go to the nearest hub airport and wait. He'll probably be through."
In March 1993, Strong announced he was laying off 4,500 employees. Within a year, Strong would have laid off 2,000 more workers. By April, Hydro had reorganized itself into three distinct operating units. Analysts inside and outside the utility saw the move as a prelude to privatization.
By the fall of 1993, Rae himself seemed to be hinting at privatization. In a speech to a conference on technology, he lauded Strong as a modern-day Adam Beck, the man who had brought public power to Ontario in 1906. Public ownership may have been appropriate for Hydro then, Rae said, but in changed times, Hydro must change--and Strong was the man to make such change happen. In a newspaper interview, Rae signalled that his government would not be bound by NDP public-ownership policies in its dealings with Hydro. Instead, the premier said, he would approach Hydro reform in a "non-ideological way."
However, according to Michael Decter, the premier seemed reluctant to privatize any part of Hydro before the next provincial election. Politically, Rae knew he would run into serious trouble-from the public sector unions and from his own party. "I don't think Bob came to any conclusion," recalled Wildman later.
Elsewhere in cabinet, opposition to privatizing Hydro was hardening. Both Energy minister Bud Wildman and Finance minister Floyd Laughren were opposed to the idea. In Wildman's Energy ministry, officials and aides began to plot ways to derail Maurice Strong.
At the same time, the pressures for immediate privatization were lessening. Strong's Draconian staff-cutting measures had worked. They had alleviated the cost pressure on Hydro. A 20 per cent hike in the price of natural gas had soured the appetite of municipalities and large firms to produce their own, gas-fired, electrical power. So the danger from that side had retreated too.
In early 1994, Wildman informed Hydro there was no appetite in cabinet for privatizing Hydro. That no point was there a serious consideration to privatize it," he would say later. In February, Rae himself made his strongest public statement to date on the issue. "I do not think that a wholesale or fire sale of assets of this magnificent public institution is in the public interest," the premier told a conference of business people. "I don't think it makes sense." Just what the premier meant by "fire sale," however, he refused to say.
Later, Charlton would argue that privatization--in the sense of selling major Hydro assets to private operators--had never been seriously contemplated. He acknowledged that the government was thinking of permitting more "partnerships" with private industry in the generation of electricity. "We were not interested in privatizing the basic capacity. We had no problem in considering a more flexible approach. . . . We had to find some of that flexibility through partnerships."
To others in government though, it had been a near miss. Strong himself, according to aides, had come eventually to realize the near political impossibility of an NDP government privatizing Hydro during its last year of office. Nonetheless, the stage had been set. Privatization of Ontario Hydro had been put on the political agenda. The once unthinkable had been thought. An NDP government had come close to buying the idea. Indeed, as one government figure opposed to privatizing Hydro put it: “Who knows? We still might do it."
More important though, Strong had laid the foundation. Whichever party won the next election would inherit a utility in which the groundwork for privatization had already been done.
Posted by Kevin Steel on May 15, 2005 in Canadian Politics | Permalink
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Comments
Don't forget about Operation Sidewinder. Fragments of the report can still be found by the truly diligent archeologists among us.
Posted by: Shaken | 2005-05-15 1:34:21 PM
Are John Rae and Bob Rae related?
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-05-15 2:06:31 PM
"In November 1976, as Mao Tse-tung's widow and the rest of the so-called Gang of Four were about to be arrested in Beijing"
This is factually incorrect. Jiang Qing was arrested in October of 1976.
Posted by: donald | 2005-05-15 6:01:48 PM
Here's another good one:
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/datelinedc/s_334103.html
Posted by: Aaron | 2005-05-15 8:38:27 PM
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