Two-Thirds of All Assets in Canada’s Economy Are Now Owned By Under 1% of All Companies

Multinational corporations currently own 67% of all assets in Canada’s economy

Less than 1% of companies operating in Canada control over two-thirds of its assets,  new figures from Statistics Canada show.

On Monday, StatsCan released a study looking at aggregated data from the financial statements of all Canadian enterprises.

In 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, only 0.8% of companies operating in Canada were multinational enterprises (meaning they have facilities or other assets in a country other than the home country).

Half were majority domestically-owned and half were majority foreign-owned.

Statistics Canada

Nevertheless, the report noted, this 0.8% of companies held 67% of all assets in the Canadian economy, in both the “financial and non-financial sectors.”

The biggest share of the Canadian-owned half of non-financial MNEs were in manufacturing (39.3%) and extraction (33.4%).

StatsCan notes MNEs dominated these sectors, along with finance, utilities and others, due to their capital-intensity and greater-returns to scale.

Statistics Canada

That is reflected by a big discrepancy in raw dollars — in extraction, the median value of assets held by MNEs was $14.4 million, versus $0.16 million for non-MNEs while in the utilities industry, the median value of assets held by MNEs was $17.34 million, versus $0.29 million.

As PressProgress reported previously, many experts and business groups have noted that most of the key sectors of Canada’s economy are oligopolies, dominated by a very small group of very large and powerful companies. SOURCE

 

‘Near Monopoly’: Canada’s Economy is ‘Dominated’ By a Small Handful of Corporations, Experts Warn

Why Justin Trudeau’s SNC-Lavalin scandal is a sign of Canada’s deeper problem with power concentrated in the hands of corporations

There are 117 Canadian companies who currently appear on the World Bank’s list of 250 firms blacklisted from participating in projects around the world under the organization’s fraud and corruption policy.

Most are affiliates of SNC-Lavalin, the company at the centre of a growing scandal involving Justin Trudeau’s PMO and former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, after Trudeau’s PMO reportedly pressured Wilson-Raybould to abandon corruption and fraud charges against SNC-Lavalin.

Thanks to companies like SNC-Lavalin, the Financial Post suggested Canada is fast gaining a reputation for being “home to the most corrupt companies in the world.”

“Six companies dominate the Canadian banking industry. Four companies dominate the internet-service-provider market. Three companies dominate English-language television broadcasting, the supermarket industry, and wireless telecommunications. A duopoly dominates the airline industry. And so on. Oligopoly players are fat and happy.”

But according to experts, the  troubles facing SNC-Lavalin and Trudeau’s PMO are actually symptoms of an economy that has become dominated by a small handful of very powerful and very influential corporations. MORE