Political economist Harold Innis regarded the development of British Columbia as a story of “struggle against mountains, rocks and forest.”Footnote 1A “region apart” from the rest of Canada, British Columbia is situated west of the Rocky Mountains against the Pacific Ocean.Footnote 2 As settlers disrupted, displaced, and deprived the land’s indigenous population, they constructed an “imagined geography” of wilderness rich in resources and primed for profit.Footnote 3 The province’s natural endowments—chiefly fur-bearing animals, fish, minerals, and especially forests—were bountiful. Pliant, development-oriented governments facilitated private wealth accumulation through infrastructure projects, land grants, utility franchises, and logging licenses. In 1966, premier W. A. C. Bennett appeared on the cover of Time, with the magazine describing British Columbia as “one of the world’s last frontiers … subduing nature with the tools of modern technology,” and Bennett embodying the province’s “pioneering” spirit.Footnote 4 But, by the 1970s, this pattern of political and economic development was beginning to unravel, and the contours of the new regime that would replace it would be heavily contested.
If British Columbia’s development was a story of struggle to exploit the wealth of its natural environment, it was also a story of struggle as to how that wealth would be distributed. In the 1970s, against a backdrop of shifting economic conditions and bitter industrial conflict, the election of the left-wing NDP in 1972 was a pivotal moment within this history, and one which prompted a sharp response from the province’s ownership class. In response, a group of businessmen from one of the province’s largest corporations—lumber conglomerate MacMillan Bloedel—sought a new means of influencing the province’s course. In the course of their search, J. V. Clyne, T. P. Boyle, Csaba Hajdu, and Michael Walker (all but Walker were former or current employees at MacMillan Bloedel) contacted the Institute of Economic Affairs in London and its founder, Antony Fisher. Under Fisher’s tutelage, the team at MacMillan Bloedel established the Fraser Institute—Canada’s first neoliberal think tank and the first transplant of the IEA model outside the United Kingdom.
Fisher elevated a knee-jerk reactionary scheme of parochial lumber executives into a constituent element of the emergent neoliberal thought collective. As the first attempt to franchise the IEA model, the Fraser Institute played a crucial role in the network’s development, facilitating the establishment of numerous similarly oriented think tanks around the world. If the Fraser Institute’s history was transnationally significant, it also remained rooted in British Columbia; named after the nearby Fraser river, the think tank was a product of the province’s particular forest-based economy.Footnote 5 The Fraser Institute would ultimately help shepherd pioneering experiments in privatization and guide Canada’s first program of neoliberal retrenchment. The drafters of the privatization campaign sought in particular to reshape how British Columbians related to their environment. As articulated by premier Bill Bennett, the denationalization of the British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation (BCRIC, or “brick”) was intended to give ordinary British Columbians a “piece of the rock”— an individual, direct stake in the exploitation of British Columbia’s environment.Footnote 6 The purpose of this article is to situate the Fraser Institute within the history of the neoliberal thought collective and to elaborate its significance for organized neoliberalism within British Columbia, Canada, and beyond.
The importance of the Fraser Institute for the organizational development of neoliberalism in Canada should not be understated—though there were important Canadian neoliberals before the Fraser Institute’s founding, Canada was mostly detached from the formal structures of the neoliberal thought collective.Footnote 7 As Fraser director Michael Walker recollects, in the mid-1970s he “didn’t even know of the existence of the Mont Pèlerin Society” and believed that Canada “had no conservative movement.”Footnote 8 When Fisher recommended T. Patrick Boyle, one of the Fraser Institute’s founders, for MPS membership, his verdict was that “the MPS [was] sadly lacking in Canadian members.”Footnote 9 As late as 1970, the MPS had only one Canadian in its ranks.Footnote 10 The significance of the Fraser Institute goes beyond its contribution to the development of neoliberalism as an organized movement within Canada itself. Sociologist Marie-Laure Djelic argues that the IEA inaugurated the neoliberal think tank as “a new organizational form” with unique and definable features.Footnote 11 However, accounts of the progression from the IEA’s founding in Britain to the creation of the Atlas have largely skipped over earlier, ad hoc initiatives to create IEA-type institutions abroad. The Fraser Institute constituted a crucial waypoint in the elaboration and growth of the organizational form pioneered by the IEA. The Fraser Institute’s adaptation of the model mattered in three ways. First, it contributed to the definition and refinement of the abstract “IEA model” apart from the original institution itself. The experience Fisher and others acquired in assisting the development of the Fraser Institute taught them what worked and what did not in adapting the model abroad. Second, the Fraser Institute contributed to proliferation by providing a further example of what the IEA model could do: when new think tanks were getting off the ground, the Fraser Institute’s success was used to sell the concept to potential donors. Third, the Fraser Institute itself took a leading role in encouraging further proliferation. It was a precursor to the development of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and participated in that organization’s development, in 1983 hosting the first Atlas workshop dedicated to sharing best practices in launching new, IEA-type organizations. The globalization of the neoliberal think tank form did not begin with Atlas: Atlas itself was possible in large part because of the precedent set by the Fraser Institute.
During his visit to Vancouver in 1984, Milton Friedman defined the role of think tanks as “primarily not producers, but distributors and retailers of ideas.”Footnote 12 Some scholars have suggested, at least heuristically, a polarity between processes of elite intellectual exchange and neoliberal popular engagement.Footnote 13 In fact, the modular neoliberal think tank filled this vital role within the structure of the neoliberal thought collective, mediating and translating the intellectual productions of the wider network for popularization and application in specific contexts at specific moments. Planted firmly in the terrain between high and low politics, the modular think tank is a crucial node within the structure of organized neoliberalism. Philip Mirowski has reminded us that “the neoliberal thought collective didn’t exist merely to persist as a debating society … its aim was political domination.”Footnote 14 Given the Fraser Institute’s centrality in the consolidation of the modular think tank form, and the significance of that form as an organizational node dedicated to the concrete realization of the NTC’s political preferences, the unexplored story of Fraser’s foundation and growth is a matter of fundamental interest for the intellectual history of the neoliberal thought collective.Footnote 15
“Chile of the North”
It might be somewhat unexpected that this development took place in British Columbia, quite far from the Canada’s economic and political core. Antony Fisher, looking back on his time with the Fraser Institute, recalled being told that Vancouver was “the last place” one would want to set up a new think tank.Footnote 16 Neoliberalism is often associated with financial power, deindustrialization and centers in the global North.Footnote 17 The British Columbian experience suggests a different trajectory. A peripheral resource economy, British Columbia stood as a “separate and distinct industrial complex” within Canada.Footnote 18 The province’s wealth derived from the exploitation of its environment, especially its forests, and the particular characteristics of its economy produced a pronounced class consciousness.Footnote 19 The British Columbian economy, based as it was on primary resources, was subject to boom-and-bust cycles which exacerbated existing conflict within the province’s company towns.Footnote 20 As Benjamin Isitt has argued, the circumstances of work and life in British Columbia’s mines, railroad camps and logging camps “reinforced a Marxian critique of capitalism and spawned militant industrial unions.”Footnote 21 Founded in 1932, the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was the flagbearer of the socialist tradition within the province, although more radical currents thrived on the margins.Footnote 22 Responding to the left’s strength, the overarching imperative of keeping the CCF and later the NDP out of power became the organizing feature of the province’s bourgeois parties from the 1940s onward. By the 1950s, the anti-socialist vote coalesced around the Social Credit Party and its leader, W. A. C. Bennett. Bennett, an Okanagan general-store owner, would ultimately form a government in 1952; he and his party would remain in power for the next twenty years.Footnote 23
While it would be too much to say that the founding of the Fraser Institute was caused by British Columbia’s uniquely polarized political culture, by its history of pronounced class conflict, or by changing economic conditions within the province, these factors shaped the decision making and worldview of its business leaders and made them receptive to the erstwhile fringe ideas of the MPS. After decades of party-political maneuverings to keep the left out of power, the first great shock to the province’s ownership class was the election of the New Democratic Party in 1972.Footnote 24 This victory was itself symptomatic of the unraveling of the postwar economic order.Footnote 25 In 1970, the British Columbian forest industry employed about thirty per cent of the province’s full-time employees, with 9 per cent of the workforce employed directly in the industry and two further jobs indirectly associated with each role in the sector.Footnote 26 The postwar order had always been more a “tug-of-war” than a compromise, a “pitched conflict between workers and employers over the rules of collective bargaining, the distribution of resource wealth, and the scope of worker entitlements provided by the welfare state.”Footnote 27 No other region in North America was as highly unionized, with approximately half of the province’s workers belonging to unions during the first decade of W. A. C. Bennett’s premiership.Footnote 28 During the early 1970s, this back-and-forth struggle became more pronounced amid pressures of automation, inflation, and unemployment, together with persistently hazardous working conditions.Footnote 29 In 1972, one unionized worker in every three went on strike.Footnote 30
With the election of the NDP, the province was on completely new political ground, and the business press reacted with considerable alarm. According to the financial magazine Barron’s, new premier Dave Barrett threatened to turn the province into a “Chile of the North.”Footnote 31 The government undertook a series of limited nationalizations, bringing into public ownership properties from pulp-and-paper conglomerate Crown Zellerbach as well as the lumber company Columbia Cellulose.Footnote 32 With the founding of the BC Petroleum Corporation and the establishment of the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, the NDP created a government monopoly over the sale of oil and natural gas as well as auto insurance.Footnote 33 The Barrett government further raised resource royalties, targeting minerals, coal, and timber.Footnote 34 In an effort to move beyond a reliance on resource exports, Barrett worked to either persuade or pressure foreign companies to develop secondary industry in the province.Footnote 35 Labor protections were strengthened, and the province introduced a Human Rights Code.Footnote 36 The government improved conditions for tenants and housing was defined as a basic right.Footnote 37 The minimum wage was gradually raised and extended to women for the first time.Footnote 38 Seniors were granted a guaranteed minimum income.Footnote 39 The NDP also formulated a number of policies to increase environmental protection.Footnote 40 Further reforms were promised in health care, social services, and education.Footnote 41 On the whole, it was no exaggeration when the Toronto Star credited Barrett with crafting “the most bountiful welfare apparatus in Canada.”Footnote 42 These policies were flatly intolerable for the province’s corporate elite, accustomed as they were to a provincial government that met their interest.Footnote 43
Launching Fraser
Executives at lumber conglomerate MacMillan Bloedel were especially alarmed and aggrieved by the NDP’s policies. In response to the election of the NDP, MacMillan Bloedel halted all new investment in the province.Footnote 44 This was only the first move. As Fisher observed to Hayek, “to get an institute going, the most important initial factor is a businessman who can act as a catalyst.”Footnote 45 In the case of the Fraser Institute, that leadership came from within MacMillan Bloedel. During the Great Depression, timber baron H. R. MacMillan had led a direct intervention in the province’s governance, organizing a delegation of the province’s leading businessmen to demand spending cuts.Footnote 46 Martin Robin, author of a two-volume political history of British Columbia, characterized BC as a “company province,” dominated by a handful of large firms which intervened freely in its politics.Footnote 47 As part of a general trend of concentration within the forestry sector, MacMillan Bloedel was formed in 1951 by the merger of H. R. MacMillan Export Company with Bloedel, Stewart and Welch. It was the largest firm within the BC forest industry, responsible for approximately one-eighth of all economic activity in the province.Footnote 48 From its mid-century brutalist headquarters in Vancouver’s financial district, the company aspired to multinational success.Footnote 49 By the early 1970s it had attained its zenith, establishing subsidiaries in the “United States, Great Britain, Spain, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, France, and Holland.”Footnote 50 With a polarized, class-conscious culture and an ownership class accustomed to dictating the terms of its political course, the establishment of the Fraser Institute was the latest chapter in a longer history. Decades after H. R. MacMillan’s direct interventions, tactics had changed: the succeeding generation of businessmen at MacMillan Bloedel came to believe that “intellectual husbandry” would produce better results than “direct political involvement.”Footnote 51
One businessman in particular was responsible for launching this project of intellectual husbandry: John Valentine Clyne.Footnote 52 A profile of Clyne in the Vancouver Sun portrays him as a “pillar of the Canadian establishment.”Footnote 53 His office, lined with portraits of British judges, carried “an aura of empire and tradition.”Footnote 54 The same was true of Clyne himself, who would go about his day wearing suits emblazoned with the provincial flower, Pacific dogwood, and royal-blue ties bearing the Canadian coat of arms.Footnote 55 Earlier in his life, Clyne had travelled to London from Vancouver to complete his legal education and attend classes at the London School of Economics. He was present during the 1926 General Strike, donning an armband, bearing a truncheon, and joining a bourgeois antistrike militia. He kept the truncheon for the rest of his life.Footnote 56 “An elder statesman of British Columbia business,” over the course of his career Clyne would rotate back and forth between elite roles at the province’s leading institutions, both public and private.Footnote 57 He served as a justice of the British Columbian Supreme Court before resigning to become chairman and CEO of MacMillan Bloedel in 1958.Footnote 58 Clyne retired from his position as chief executive in 1972 but retained an unpaid role as company chairman.Footnote 59 After fully retiring from MacMillan Bloedel, Clyne became chancellor of the province’s leading university.Footnote 60 Capping off a life of social engagement, in his final years Clyne established a “non-partisan” organization dedicated to the goal of ensuring that Canada “remains” a “white country.”Footnote 61
In 1972, Clyne’s more immediate priorities led him elsewhere. The election of the province’s first-ever left-wing government had produced, in his words, “an entirely new situation.”Footnote 62 Irritated at the NDP’s criticisms of MacMillan Bloedel, he vented his frustrations to the Globe and Mail, arguing that businessmen needed to push back: “unless businessmen act to create wider public understanding of how the business enterprise functions to the benefit of society as a whole, we cannot expect the public to recognize and reject unjust criticism that reflects the integrity of corporations.”Footnote 63 If business leaders failed to properly educate the public, “we may help to prove the assertion contained in the Communist Manifesto that capitalism creates its own gravediggers.”Footnote 64 He assigned the task of determining a path forward to his deputy, T. Patrick Boyle. Boyle, later a board member of the Atlas Network, was at the time a vice president of financial planning at MacMillan Bloedel responsible for “detect[ing] economic trends worldwide.”Footnote 65 Faced with the NDP’s program and finding no “effective arguments for a sound economy as opposed to big-scale government intervention,” Boyle thought “action was called for.”Footnote 66
If it was Clyne’s instruction that got the ball rolling for the creation of the Fraser Institute, Boyle was responsible for “actually set[ting] it up” and recruiting its staff.Footnote 67 Through Csaba Hajdu, an in-house economist at MacMillan Bloedel, the team within the company reached out to Michael Walker, a friend of Hajdu’s from his studies at the University of Western Ontario.Footnote 68 Walker would ultimately become the organization’s public face and its most important figure for decades. Born in Newfoundland to working-class parents, Walker moved to Nova Scotia to study economics at St Francis Xavier University.Footnote 69 Admiring the subject for its “practicality,” he continued his studies by pursuing a doctorate in econometrics at the University of Western Ontario, where he shared an office with Hajdu.Footnote 70 He obtained work at the Bank of Canada and later became a consultant for the federal Department of Finance.Footnote 71 Claiming to have “never seriously pondered political theory” at this stage in his intellectual development, Walker was sympathetic to the idea that “with a mathematical model of the economy, government could fine tune all the social problems out.”Footnote 72 As he recounted in 2005, “I went to the bank thinking I could fiddle dials, change tax rates, figure out the optimum way to eliminate higher unemployment and get higher growth … I was very idealistic, and I really didn’t know anything about the philosophical implications.”Footnote 73 Walker claimed that his experiences in Ottawa made him doubt the possibility of “mathematically controlling … ‘the economy.’”Footnote 74 He came to suspect that “I was actually part of the problem in the sense that the way in which econometric models (and to some extent economic models of all kinds) caused us to think about the world’s difficulties led us to command-and-control type solutions.”Footnote 75 He further claimed disillusionment at the arrogance of Ottawa’s civil service mandarins.Footnote 76 Apart from his direct experiences, the first text which pushed him down the path of ideological reconstruction was “the emotive expression” of Ayn Rand, which he felt “confirmed [his] suspicions.”Footnote 77 Model-building for the federal government was a futile task: “people aren’t mechanisms, they’re organisms. You can’t mold behavior or predict it in a mathematical way.”Footnote 78
After receiving Hajdu’s call in fall 1973, by spring of the following year the twenty-eight-year-old Walker agreed to move to Vancouver and join the team.Footnote 79 Walker, Boyle, and Hajdu shared a consensus that “the root of the policy errors which were underway was the system of ideas used to inform the public.”Footnote 80 They also concluded “that this was not simply a British Columbia problem, or a Canadian problem, but rather one of increasingly international experience.”Footnote 81 By September 1974, together with new recruits John Raybould and Sally Pipes, the small group began looking into the “intellectual resources” of similar efforts abroad.Footnote 82 In 1974, as part of this search, Boyle telephoned Fisher.Footnote 83
Having contacted Fisher in late 1974, the group at MacMillan Bloedel began to study the structure of the IEA, with Boyle flying to London and visiting its offices.Footnote 84 In November of 1974, flush with $200,000 in initial funding from MacMillan Bloedel and fifteen other companies, the newly christened Fraser Institute moved into offices at 626 Bute Street.Footnote 85 By December, the group had produced a statement of aims which reflected the heavy influence of the IEA. After his visits to London earlier in the year, Boyle wrote to IEA director Ralph Harris. Alluding to the now published statement of aims, Boyle expressed his wish that Harris would be “flattered rather than annoyed by some resemblance to the way in which the IEA has presented its face to the public.”Footnote 86
The symmetry between the Fraser Institute’s declaration of aims and the vision of its British counterpart was striking. According to Walker, the Fraser Institute directly “cribbed” its declaration of aims from the IEA.Footnote 87 Fraser’s first statement set out that the purpose of the institute was “to re-direct attention to the use of competitive markets as the best mechanism for responding to change and providing for the well-being of Canadians.”Footnote 88 The institute’s declared objective was “to inject into the policy discovery process a base of well-supported information about the functions the competitive market system can best be relied on to perform.”Footnote 89 The institute would engage in a “comprehensive publications program,” putting out “non-technical” but “authoritative” research intended for “informed readers in every walk of life.”Footnote 90 Publications would be overseen by a Board of Editorial Advisors and the institute would seek to develop a media profile. Organizationally, the Fraser Institute would have a board of trustees, elected by its membership annually. The board of trustees, in turn, was responsible for appointing a director, a board of editorial advisers, and an executive advisory board, as well as hiring senior staff.Footnote 91 The fixed amount of seed money from MacMillan Bloedel, noted above, was scheduled to decline each subsequent year, “based on the understanding that others would commit increasing support as the institute developed.”Footnote 92
For the British Columbian and Canadian context, these were novel aims. At the time of the Fraser Institute’s founding, the closest existing analogue within Canada was the C. D. Howe Institute. Founded in 1958, the C. D. Howe Institute advocated for the concerns of the business community but was not regarded as sharply partisan: it was “known for pragmatism as opposed to ideological fervor.”Footnote 93 The C. D. Howe Institute lacked the overarching, dogmatic commitment to the market that animated the IEA and Fraser. As one Canadian businessman complained in a letter to the IEA, the C. D. Howe Institute “does not examine, as your Institute does, matters of principle and policy in a fundamental and searching way.”Footnote 94
The C. D. Howe Institute’s position on wage and price controls around the time of the Fraser Institute’s founding is indicative of the gap between the institutions and their respective orientations. From the vantage point of 2004, grocery executive and Fraser chairman R. J. Addington claimed that, in the 1970s, “other research institutes in Canada, including our current ally in most policy areas, the C. D. Howe Institute, supported controls.”Footnote 95 Some businessmen, pragmatic but naive, supported wage and price controls “as a solution to the problems they were having with an increasingly powerful trade union movement.”Footnote 96 The C. D. Howe Institute’s position was adopted by the federal Conservative leader Robert Stanfield, who ran in 1974 on a platform which favored the imposition of such measures.Footnote 97 For Addington, this policy was an unacceptable concession. It was a product of the “perceived ineptitude of the competitive market economy in making these decisions [on prices], and the presumed role of greed in the inflationary process.”Footnote 98 The Fraser Institute provided a more consistent defense of market mechanisms than that offered by other Canadian research organizations. Elevating and mystifying the market, Fraser claimed that it was “unique among other organizations” because “it argues consistently that the market is indestructible: the market cannot be suppressed by political power; the market cannot be avoided by businessmen; the market cannot be ignored by politicians … the market is a fact and each and every one of us is part of it.”Footnote 99
In referencing the disagreement with other Canadian think tanks like C. D. Howe, Addington might have also acknowledged the highly revelatory internal dispute on the subject that took place within Fraser itself. In one account, Fraser “immediately almost self-destructed” over the issue.Footnote 100 Reflecting a position widely held among other business leaders, Clyne also favored wage and price controls as a means of keeping down labor costs.Footnote 101 When he learned of Walker and Boyle’s intention to stake out an opposing position, he was reportedly “furious” and “threatened to pull the plug” on the new organization.Footnote 102 In the end, Walker was able to persuade Clyne to back down and allow publication of a study criticizing wage and price controls.Footnote 103 What the episode indicates is just how significant the model provided by the IEA was to the new organization. Clyne did not initially set out to create an organization dedicated to the overarching goal of promoting neoliberal market dogma. He bore no special commitment to the market and did not fetishize the price mechanism. Apparently, neither did Walker. Previously uninterested in political theory, Walker reportedly only began to immerse himself in Hayek’s oeuvre in late 1974.Footnote 104 The IEA had offered a template, and over time Boyle and Walker both became true believers. The team which launched the Fraser Institute had an objective, but the sharply ideological orientation—the self-consciously neoliberal orientation—that the organization came to possess was not built in from the beginning and was largely arrived at through the influence of the IEA and its personnel. In other words, the founding of the Fraser Institute reminds us again that neoliberalism was not just the straightforward assertion of unmediated class interests: neoliberalism was and is an ideological movement for the protection and perfection of markets.Footnote 105 While the launching of the Fraser Institute can be seen as a chapter within the broader story of British Columbian class conflict, and it certainly had its origins in bourgeois reaction to a left-wing surge, it was also much more than that. Over time, through the influence of the IEA’s sophisticated tool kit and personnel, the rude, unrefined reaction of BC’s capitalist class became neoliberal.
The influence of the IEA was both decisive and direct. Antony Fisher, the founder of the IEA, was invited to join the Fraser Institute as a trustee in January 1975.Footnote 106 By March, Fisher had been hired as the organization’s acting director. Fisher agreed to work for Fraser part-time, approximately “one week in four,” with the goal of helping the upstart institute to “to find suitable economic advisers,” to help raise money, and to “help over policy.”Footnote 107 One of Fisher’s major contributions early on was to help the Fraser Institute develop a public image as a “credible, academically based research group.”Footnote 108 Following the same strategy as the IEA, he sought to assemble a group of academics who could grant the new institution an aura of authority. To that end, drawing from his contacts, Fisher produced “an instant list of academic advisers as evidence of its impartiality.”Footnote 109 These included Hayek, Harry Johnson, Armen Alchian, and James Buchanan, all of whom “agreed on the phone to allow [Fisher] to use their names as an advisory council.”Footnote 110 For Fisher, earning the instant, over-the-phone approval of the prospective advisory council members was a product of the relationships he had built over the decades at the Mont Pèlerin Society.Footnote 111 Looking back, Walker acknowledged the significance of the Mont Pèlerin Society in granting the institute “access to an international network of researchers” which the institute otherwise “would not have had.”Footnote 112 Immodestly, Fisher himself claimed that “the friendships and associations I have made through the Mont Pèlerin Society have [made] the Fraser Institute possible.”Footnote 113
Fisher and his MPS connections thus helped to equip the nascent Fraser Institute with ‘credible’ economic advisers, to draw it into an international network, and to gain sympathetic press commentary. He also assisted the Canadians in earning support for the institute from other individuals and corporations beyond MacMillan Bloedel. Acquiring a base of small subscriptions was a priority.Footnote 114 Fisher’s fundraising involved addressing local businessmen in Vancouver and across the country and discussing the IEA, the model it practiced, and how the Fraser Institute would imitate its counterpart. For Addington, Fisher’s speech at the Vancouver Club in 1975 was decisive in drawing him in: “I became your disciple and after listening to your great plans, formed a picture in my mind’s eye of you sitting atop the world pulling strings in all directions.”Footnote 115 Fisher’s ability to arouse visions of quasi-celestial control among British Columbian businessmen paid dividends; by May 1976, leading donors of the institute included Algoma Steel, the Power Corporation, the Bank of Montreal, and Canadian Pacific.Footnote 116
Expansion and growth
The provisional success of the Fraser initiative suggested to Fisher the possibility of further proliferation for the IEA form. The first post-Fraser development began in early 1975 on the initiative of future CIA director William J. Casey. In 1975, Casey, then chairman of the Export–Import Bank, phoned Fisher in Vancouver, seeking his assistance with a new institute in New York. The two arranged to meet at that year’s Mont Pèlerin Society gathering in Hillsdale, Michigan.Footnote 117 Casey requested assistance with his personal project, the Institute for Economic and Legal Analysis (IELA).Footnote 118 Casey was eager to have Fisher’s help. He recognized that Fisher had “blazed a trail” developing the IEA and transferring that model to Canada.Footnote 119 Fisher was confident that his efforts in Vancouver would ease future expansion. As he told Casey, “watching reactions to the IEA on an international basis … I am more certain than ever that certain rules have to be adhered to.”Footnote 120 Having acquired “quite a wealth of experience of the type of job that I can do from what is happening with the Fraser Institute,” Fisher was sure that “the pattern that has been developed has been and is being highly successful.”Footnote 121 After some teething issues, the IELA, which never really got off the ground, was folded in 1977 into a new initiative—the International Center for Economic Policy Studies (ICEPS, later renamed and existing today as the Manhattan Institute)—in which Fisher took on a more involved role.Footnote 122 Casey’s new institute closely resembled the IEA and Fraser. Whereas the IELA had been established as a “private foundation,” ICEPS was established like the IEA and Fraser as a publicly supported not-for-profit, a tax-exempt “educational foundation.”Footnote 123 Fisher became director of the organization, filling the same position as he did with Fraser, and set about fund-raising for the new organization with his existing contacts.Footnote 124 The fact that the new organization was explicitly modeled after the IEA and Fraser was used as a selling point for potential donors. Fisher explained, “without the track record of the IEA and the [Fraser Institute] there was absolutely nothing that he knew of that would sell ICEPS” to prospective supporters in New York and beyond.Footnote 125 Until ICEPS had developed its own publications and had a record of its own, the work of the other organizations would give the project credibility. Fisher’s work with the IEA and Fraser suggested techniques for fund-raising: “experience in London and Canada seems to indicate that however enthusiastic a supporter may be, it takes a long time to turn that enthusiasm into money. The more he understands about what you are doing when you ask him for money the quicker the likely response.”Footnote 126 It was necessary to turn the concept of the neoliberal think tank into a concrete product.
As ICEPS took on definite form, Fisher expressed the benefits of further proliferation, arguing that it would strengthen the authority of the already established institutes. Publications from ICEPS would “reinforce evidence favoring the free market and a free society, such as that published by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and the Fraser Institute (FRI).”Footnote 127 This was because “a chorus of these voices not only compounds the vitality of the statement but adds credibility to each solo. The novelty of our message, plus its urgency, makes the proliferation of these institutes essential if we are going to achieve our objectives and cover the many subjects which have to be dealt with in relatively short time”.Footnote 128 Concurrent with his work on ICEPS and the Fraser Institute, Fisher had several invitations to set up think tanks outside North America, from wealthy admirers in Australia, Brazil, and Europe.Footnote 129 In short, “now that the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia, is beginning to emulate the IEA in every way,” Fisher found he was fielding requests “to help set up institutes on every continent.”Footnote 130
As early as 1976, Fisher had speculated about the possibility of creating an organization which could amplify his personal efforts to launch new institutes.Footnote 131 Such an organization could at “no great cost [help] the fledgling organizations get off the ground in the right way.”Footnote 132 Writing in 1979, Fisher claimed that his goal was to “to establish another 25 IEA-type institutes in some 24 countries, ultimately producing 250–350 books per annum in some 17 languages.”Footnote 133 In launching the initiative that would become Atlas, Fisher sought out Hayek’s endorsement, and Hayek obliged by providing a letter that could be freely shared for fund-raising purposes. Writing to Fisher, Hayek singled out the Fraser Institute as an example of the IEA model’s promise and adaptability:
I entirely agree with you that the time has come when it has become desirable and almost a duty to extend the network of institutes of the kind of the London Institute of Economic Affairs … And at least some of the institutes that you have more recently created, especially the Canadian one, prove that this was not mere special luck in finding unusually able people to run it, but that when repeated, the experiment promises equal success.Footnote 134
As with the fund-raising efforts on behalf of ICEPS, seeking money for Atlas, the Fraser Institute’s example was put forward as proof of the IEA concept’s modularity.
When Atlas itself was formally established in 1981, the Fraser Institute’s personnel made direct contributions. T. Patrick Boyle, then serving as the Fraser Institute’s vice chairman, was one of the first figures approached to join Atlas’s board.Footnote 135 Fraser’s donors were also vital to the new organization. One contribution from a Fraser donor funded almost the entire first year of Atlas’s operations.Footnote 136 The exact identity of this donor has not previously been established, but archival material indicates that the donation was almost certainly from Canadian American petroleum entrepreneur Harold Siebens. A letter from Fisher to Fraser chairman R. J. Addington references this donation from Siebens and also notes his wish “to remain anonymous.”Footnote 137 Siebens’s donation was provided in both Canadian and American dollars, amounting to US$125,000 plus an additional CA$110,000.Footnote 138 The American dollars were designated for Atlas and the Canadian dollars were set aside for Fraser.Footnote 139 Harold Siebens had previously been a (smaller-scale) donor to the Fraser Institute, and his son, William, was on its board of directors.Footnote 140 Fraser remained bound up with Atlas’s development, hosting the inaugural Atlas seminar in 1983.
“A piece of the rock”
Established by lumber executives in response to local conditions, the Fraser Institute made vital contributions to the institutional infrastructure of the neoliberal thought collective. It also made its presence felt at home in British Columbia, where it helped to unravel the NDP’s reforms and reshape the province’s political economy. The privatization of the BCRIC was derived from a Fraser proposal, and the Fraser Institute would ensure that the lessons of the precedent-setting program were disseminated, recognized, and imitated abroad. Beyond the goal of reshaping the province’s political economy, the BCRIC privatization also had the objective of fostering a new neoliberal subjectivity, recasting how British Columbians related to their environment.
Barrett’s NDP failed to win reelection in 1975, and the Social Credit party led by W. A. C. Bennett’s son and successor, Bill Bennett, returned to power. Seeking to undo the NDP’s nationalizations, Bill Bennett established a committee with the code name “Project West” to explore possible paths forward. One suggestion came from a Fraser publication, Friedman on Galbraith, a transcript of talks delivered by Friedman at an IEA gathering in London in 1976.Footnote 141 Friedman suggested that rather than auctioning off nationalized assets, they could be given away to citizens free of charge.Footnote 142 Nationalized assets belonged to the people; organizing the assets in a new corporation and distributing shares in that new corporation to citizens would return to the people something they already owned.Footnote 143
The Fraser Institute’s publication was the direct inspiration for the government’s policy. In Michael Walker’s account, the “transmitter of the idea” was businessman Austin Taylor, chairman of brokerage house McLeod Young Weir and a Bennett confidant.Footnote 144 “An avid reader of Fraser Institute publications,” Taylor was selected by Bennett to head the government’s privatization committee.Footnote 145 On the committee’s advice, Bennett announced the reorganization of select assets nationalized under the previous government into a single company—the British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation (BCRIC).Footnote 146 With a deadline of 15 June 1979, residents could apply to receive five free shares in this new entity, with an option to purchase up to five thousand additional shares for six dollars apiece.Footnote 147 For the Globe and Mail, it was evident that “Mr. Friedman’s idea was followed almost to the letter.”Footnote 148
The idea of distributing shares appealed to Bennett for several reasons. For one, it was possible to brand the privatization a project of provincial pride.Footnote 149 Bennett’s privatization harnessed a long-standing tradition of British Columbian resentment against outside capital and central Canadian interests.Footnote 150 BCRIC president David Helliwell explicitly claimed that the goal of the project was “to show that a new company based in British Columbia can be successful, against the laments of those who cry otherwise.”Footnote 151 Socred campaign materials further declared a desire to create a capitalism “not owned by powerful interests or by government, but by many thousands of individual British Columbians.”Footnote 152 Freidman’s conception of privatization thus cohered with the mode of populist politics typical of British Columbia generally and the Socred party in particular. Walker, for his part, warned of “xenophobia” in the BCRIC privatization, and was considerably less committed to Bennett’s regionalist spin.Footnote 153
Approximately two million British Columbians claimed free shares in the new corporation, and a further 80 million shares were purchased at six dollars each.Footnote 154 Analysts had predicted that the sale would bring in closer to $90 million, but when the final tally was complete, revenue from the privatization amounted to a whopping $487.5 million.Footnote 155 This was more than double the previous record for a Canadian IPO and surpassed the third-largest in the United States.Footnote 156 Apart from AT&T, BCRIC had more shareholders than any other company in North America.Footnote 157 The volume of interest was unexpected: the previous Canadian record holder for a stock issue was telecommunications giant Bell Canada: an experienced utility company, seasoned, dividend-paying, marketing its shares Canada-wide, with stock available to both individual and institutional investors.Footnote 158 BCRIC, by contrast, was an inexperienced resource company, without dividends, sold exclusively to British Columbians, with stock available only to individual (i.e. not institutional) investors.Footnote 159
The BCRIC privatization was buoyed by Bennett’s restless promotion. Bennett’s speeches encouraged British Columbians “to buy as many [shares] as they can,”Footnote 160 and suggested that shares, available for sale at six dollars, were worth closer to ten.Footnote 161 The government distributed personally addressed letters encouraging and providing instructions for the purchase of shares to 1.5 million households across the province.Footnote 162 Caught up in the hype and—given the backing from the government, confident of strong returns—many British Columbians borrowed considerable amounts to purchase shares.Footnote 163 Banks, eager both to sell loans and to cash in on the commission they earned for selling each BCRIC share, marketed the stocks aggressively.Footnote 164 It was clear that some were in over their heads. In the opinion of one local banker, “a lot of unsophisticated people walked into their banks and asked for loans to buy BCRIC shares. Many went heavily into debt without giving thought to a balanced portfolio.”Footnote 165
Privatization was about more than just getting assets out of the government’s hands. In recasting a whole web of relationships, privatization on this model had the potential to change how British Columbians related to their environment. As Bennett told the legislature, for these reasons, whatever the cost of privatization, “ownership is priceless.”Footnote 166 Though Bennett wouldn’t have used the term himself, one of the objectives of the privatization was to promote a new subjectivity: through BCRIC, in the words of contemporary journalist Stan Persky, “every citizen would be made a capitalist.”Footnote 167 Fresh off the province’s first experience with “socialist” governance, the BCRIC privatization was designed as “an educational lesson for all British Columbians.”Footnote 168 The goal was to give ordinary British Columbians a “piece of the rock,” to give them an individual, direct stake in the exploitation of British Columbia’s environment and to conceive of themselves as personally profiting from the development of its natural endowments.Footnote 169 Citizen shareholders would be encouraged to think of themselves as individual owners of the province’s natural-resource wealth. To encourage that self-conception, and with the goal of allowing British Columbians “to see and feel their ownership,” Bennett printed and distributed share certificates.Footnote 170 The printed share certificates included a large illustration of a family standing in front of the provincial landscape: behind them trees and mountains, extending into the distance.Footnote 171
Prior to BCRIC, only 60,000 out of the province’s population of 2.4 million “had ever bought corporate shares,” and the government sought to ensure that they fully appreciated their new position as investors “in the future of the province.”Footnote 172 According to Project West participant Ted Ohashi,
there was much spontaneous education taking place, because those who had never before owned a financial asset suddenly owned one. The educational process was something to behold … It was a natural subject for newspaper, radio, and television treatment, as well as bank and investment firm advertising: this is what your shares are, this is what they mean, this is how you can buy or sell them.Footnote 173
The company printed full-page “reports to shareholders” in local newspapers.Footnote 174 Bennett hoped that provincial schools would educate students in the virtues and responsibilities of ownership.Footnote 175 BCRIC president David Helliwell made visits to BC secondary schools, where he staged mock “shareholder meetings.”Footnote 176 One “shareholder meeting” took place on Saltspring Island, a rural locale with a population of five thousand. With attendance voluntary, high-schoolers were invited to learn about BCRIC and what it meant for them. The schoolroom was “packed with students … standing, squatting, primed and ready to question the stranger in the pin-striped suit.”Footnote 177 One student’s question to the BCRIC president reflected the dominant mood: “are you going to make us a bunch of money real quick?”Footnote 178
Some were quite taken with the experiment. A few small businesses in the province began to accept BCRIC’s bearer shares as a form of payment. The owner of one sporting-goods store, for example, told the Wall Street Journal that he sold $150 worth of hockey equipment in exchange for twenty BCRIC shares.Footnote 179 Another drug store owner acquired two thousand shares from his customers.Footnote 180 A First Nations association accumulated five thousand shares with the intention of raising political issues at shareholders’ meetings.Footnote 181 Seeking to finance the renovation of its children’s ward, a North Vancouver hospital solicited the donation of shares from the public.Footnote 182 A man named Vincent Cochrane persuaded homeless residents of Vancouver’s skid row to grant him power of attorney to apply for shares on their behalf, which he planned to collect himself.Footnote 183 The project of turning citizens into capitalists was proceeding apace. Everyone was simply “caught in the BCRIC fever,” and expectations for the company were high.Footnote 184
The 1979 BC election “once more [developed] into a free enterprise–socialism clash,” with Bennett framing the BCRIC privatization as representative of “a question of great philosophical difference” between himself and the NDP opposition.Footnote 185 The Socred government was reelected, but BCRIC began to stumble within a year.Footnote 186 Allegations of insider trading, financial mismanagement, and self-enrichment soon swamped the Bennett-appointed board.Footnote 187 By 1981, BCRIC shares were trading at $3.45. By 1987 they were around two dollars.Footnote 188 For British Columbians who had bought into the government’s boosterism and borrowed to purchase shares (when interest rates were around 10–12 percent), the crash had devastating consequences.Footnote 189 Former promoters conceded that some of the education provided to the public about “what it means to be a shareholder” was “just plain wrong.”Footnote 190 By 1992, the meetings had become sparsely attended “rituals of despair” visited only by “miracle-seekers.”Footnote 191 That year, of the original 136,000 who had purchased a hundred or more shares, 92,000 remained.Footnote 192 Those who held on were almost completely wiped out. In 1995, remaining shares were consolidated at a 125:1 ratio, and in 1997 the residual assets of BCRIC were acquired by billionaire Jim Pattison.Footnote 193 In 2023, a ninety-four-year old Pattison was awarded the Fraser Institute’s Founder’s Award, its “highest honour.”Footnote 194
The BCRIC privatization set a global precedent. In 1980, with the intention of sharing the lessons learned, the Fraser Institute published a book on the experience, Privatization: Theory & Practice. Distributing Shares in Private and Public Enterprises. Footnote 195 In the preface, the editors expressed a need “to explain the title, since ‘privatization’ is not yet an accepted word usage … no firm definition has emerged and no other books on the subject (by that name) have yet been written.”Footnote 196 The British Columbian experiment was on the cutting edge and provided a precedent for would-be privatizers in the UK. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher had been elected with a commitment to “denationalization,” but the specific path forward was unclear.Footnote 197 The BCRIC initiative suggested one possibility. Briefing Thatcher in advance of a 1980 meeting with Milton Friedman, Nigel Lawson referred to Friedman’s preference for the “‘British Columbia’ solution” to the issue of British denationalization, “in which profitable and loss-making [assets] are grouped in a holding company, and stock in that company is distributed to the population.”Footnote 198 Michael Walker delighted in “the delicious irony of the fact that the idea for privatization which was enunciated by Milton Friedman in London in 1976 should have found its way to Vancouver, British Columbia, and be implemented in a most marvelous way; the lessons of which were then applied back in Great Britain several years later.”Footnote 199 Walker applauded the Thatcher government for their achievements, but suggested that they would have been difficult to contemplate without the British Columbian model: “it is important to ponder whether they would have had such confidence had the BCRIC experiment in all of its multi-faceted splendour not occurred.”Footnote 200 Altogether, for Walker, the BCRIC experience communicated “a very important fact about how ideas are transmitted throughout the world.”Footnote 201 BCRIC would also provide a model for privatizations in postcommunist Europe in the early 1990s. In the Czech case, Vaclav Klaus “repeatedly” referenced the British Columbian precedent for selling off state assets through the distribution of shares in his addresses to the Czech Parliament.Footnote 202
Conclusion
In 1999, MacMillan Bloedel was purchased by American competitor Weyerhaeuser. Its Vancouver headquarters were closed, with some management and research positions moving south of the border.Footnote 203 There was an obvious irony in the fact that the company which brought neoliberalism to British Columbia was promptly left behind as the economy moved away from a primary dependence on natural resources towards a new reliance on speculative real-estate investment. The significance of natural resources as a share of GDP in British Columbia has steadily decreased, falling from 17.2 percent in 1999 to 11.1 percent in 2019. Over the same period, real estate and residential construction as a percentage of GDP has tripled.Footnote 204 The BCRIC experiment was one part of this process, aggregating the nationalized residue of an alternative conception of the province’s political economy and transforming it into a hysterical financial asset. In the process, BCRIC helped create a new subjectivity that was not based on the old class antagonisms, but on turning everyone into a capitalist and reshaping the way they related to the province’s natural environment. It is possible that the Fraser Institute’s success is at least partly attributable to the fact that BC itself was peripheral within Canada. The relative isolation and distinct economic patterns which separated it from the Canadian core made it a terrain of precedential experimentation.Footnote 205 In this way, the periphery took on a vanguard role, doing things that were not yet possible in the center. Following the BC precedent, reform came gradually for the rest of Canada.Footnote 206
Like the establishment of the Fraser Institute itself, the BCRIC experiment was one manifestation of unresolved conflicts over the orientation and structure of the province’s resource economy. The Fraser Institute was the fruit of an initiative launched by executives at the British Columbian lumber conglomerate MacMillan Bloedel, seeking to redress what they perceived to be a crisis in the province’s economic and political life. Led by J. V. Clyne, Patrick Boyle, Csaba Hajdu, and Michael Walker, the team within MacMillan Bloedel adopted wholesale a strategic outlook developed by the British Institute of Economic Affairs, borrowing from its publications, benefiting from its contacts, and employing its personnel. Antony Fisher took on a role as the organization’s acting director, helping the institute find suitable economic advisers, helping it raise money, and helping it define its underlying philosophy. The IEA in general and Antony Fisher in particular shaped the Fraser Institute’s development, elevating it from a local initiative at a lumber company into a constituent element of a growing transnational network. The success of the Vancouver initiative, in turn, suggested the possibility of further proliferation. The Fraser Institute made a threefold contribution to the global proliferation of the neoliberal think tank form, helping to define the key characteristics of the model apart from the particular institution of the IEA, providing a positive example of the transferability of the model, and actively taking a leading role in facilitating further expansion. If, as Dieter Plehwe argues, the two definitional structures of the neoliberal thought collective are the Mont Pèlerin Society and the Atlas Network, it bears noting that the first time these two overlapping organizations came together was joint conferences hosted in Vancouver in 1983 under the auspices of the Fraser Institute.Footnote 207 Hitherto overlooked, the Fraser Institute made undeniable contributions to the growth and development of organized neoliberalism, both in British Columbia and beyond.
Open access
