Ruling Canada: Corporate Cohesion and Democracy, Jamie
Brownlee, Halifax: Fernwood Books, 2005, pp. 168.
For a discipline explicitly engaged in the study of power,
particularly as exercised in liberal democracies, it is striking how
little Canadian political science has actually done to examine the
concentration of private economic power, the political organization of the
business classes and the extension of that power into the political realm.
Indeed, Canadian political science has been principally preoccupied with
power insofar as it pertains to the constitutional distribution of power
and the relative access to political power of the multinational and
multicultural constituent groups comprising Canada. The enormous
concentration of economic power—the top 25 firms accounting for over
40 per cent of business assets and the monopolies with over $100 million
in revenue accounting for 80 percent of business assets (p. 31)—has
largely been occluded from serious scrutiny. The mythologies of a
pluralist Canadian democracy are better preserved in the absence of
conceptual and empirical debate about the economic foundations of
political power.