Met Hurtig talks about important, astonishing, and truly amazing things Canadians should know about their country.

Imagine if Canada was a character on the reality TV show Intervention, in which families attempt to salvage the lives of their self-destructive members. From the evidence uncovered by Mel Hurtig, our country would be an easily-manipulated dolt with poor impulse control, memory problems and a bad habit of pawning off valuable possessions. In Canadian Intervention, Hurtig would play the combined role of therapist and Marine gunnery sergeant, trying to convince Canada that it’s not in its best interests to hang out with smooth-talking pundits from right-wing think tanks, tax-dodging CEOs, weapons makers or self-described “journalists” who can’t be bothered to check their sources.

It’s a thankless task, but Hurtig obviously loves his country, and has spent years trying to steer it in a different direction. Once owner of one of the largest book retail operations in Canada, he founded Hurtig Publishers in 1972 and later launched The Canadian Encyclopedia. Founder and past-president of the Council of Canadians, Hurtig was elected leader of the National Party of Canada in 1992 and led it in the federal election a year later. Now in his seventies, the energetic and animated Hurtig is promoting his seventh book, The Truth about Canada: Some Important, Some Astonishing and Some Truly Appalling Things All Canadians Should Know About Our Country. We sat down together at a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver to discuss our nation’s latest woes.

Common Ground: Many Canadians suspect there’s a discrepancy between what the mainstream media reports on Canadian social and economic issues and the actual truth. But it’s as if the numbers in your book are from a parallel dimension. On almost every major issue, from foreign investment to poverty in Canada, it seems the Canadian media has been either ignorant or misleading about the facts.

Mel Hurtig: That’s why I wrote this book. About six years ago I got so pissed off reading Stats Canada Daily. It’s the first thing I read when I go to the Net. So I would read really interesting stuff and the next morning it either wasn’t there or it was so badly distorted from what the actual report was. I got madder, madder and madder. And then I signed a book contract. Over three years of research I found much more than I ever dreamed of. Horrible distortions by the media to fit their ideology. You get a right-wing publisher like a Conrad Black or Izzy Asper hiring a right-wing publisher, and then the right-wing publisher hires a right-wing editor, and then the right-wing editor hires a right-wing columnist, and you end up getting the kind of junk that appears in The National Post. I think The Globe and Mail is a pretty good paper, but their ideological view is so different than the way most Canadians think. And the other thing I found, the more I looked at this book, is that when the Fraser Institute or the CD Howe Institute or the Conference Board of Canada issues a report, the media tends to publishes it word for word on their front page or the front page of the business section. And very few journalists in this country bother to take the time to check.

CG: Which they would do for any other source.

MH: Exactly. The Canadian Council of Chief executives issues a document, and it’s published word for word as Gospel, whereas when the “left-wing” Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives publishes something, it very rarely gets published in the media. They never check the stuff from the big “think tanks.” And [National Post contributor] Diane Francis comes out with a statement that Canadians buy up more companies in the United States than Americans buy up here in this country, which is absolute nonsense! All the press gallery has to do is pick up the phone and call a hundred yards away to Statistics Canada or Industry Canada and get the exact figures. I quote in the book where prominent Canadian executives such as the CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada make statements about Canadians buying up the States, which are simply not true. These guys say, “Americans only bought up 1,046 Canadian companies.” The true answer is that they bought up over 6,000 Canadian companies and I give example after example. On my desk at home I have, to use the operative word, bullshit, from the CEOs of Canadian businesses. That’s why I wrote this book, why I spent three years putting it together. The key thing about this book is that it’s all sourced. We know exactly where the numbers come from. And instead of getting BS like, “well, our standard of living would drop if it wasn’t for American capital,” I show that most of the takeovers in this country are accomplished by our own money by our own Canadian banks.

CG: I’m surprised that no one has thought to do a book like this until now, let alone report it in the papers. These figures aren’t squirreled away in some secret archive somewhere.

MH: There are some wonderful journalists at The Globe and Mail, some really good business reporters. Why don’t they pick up the annual report from Statistics Canada? Or why don’t they look at the annual publications from the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development], as I did? One of the strengths of this book it compares Canada to the 29 other OECD countries. It’s astonishing that out of 30 OECD countries, we are twenty-second in terms of poverty, we’re twenty-fifth in social spending, we’re twenty-first in low paid jobs. Only twenty countries have fewer low paid jobs. We’re twenty-second in unemployment insurance benefits. We’re eighteenth in investment in new machinery in equipment. We’re twenty-fifth in research and development. How the hell can we be competitive, how can we be productive, if we don’t invest money in new machinery and equipment? And these guys all they do is complain about their tax load. We’re twenty-first in our tax load. The tax load in this country is now way down below the American corporate tax loads. Is that the picture you get from The National Post? Is that the picture you get from The Globe and Mail? No way. What you get from these guys is we’ve got to have lower taxes in this country. As corporate taxes have gone down, so has our ranking at the World Economic Forum in competitiveness.

I was going to call my book “A Perfect X.” Here’s what happened to individual taxes – they’ve gone up from lower left to upper right, while corporate taxes have gone in the opposite direction. So it is people like us who are paying more taxes on average by far than most other OECD countries. I think we’re the fourth highest in terms of personal taxation amount in the 30 OECD countries. And it’s that way because corporations are not paying their proper share of taxes.

One of my main complaints in this book is what are these guys doing with their all-time record profits. To digress for a minute - I don’t think this is in the book - I recently showed that the banks in 2006 made a profit of 89 billion dollars. And guess what the rate of effective taxation was?

CG: What percent?

MH: Fifteen percent. Compare that to the taxes you pay and its ridiculous. So what these big corporations have been doing is not investing in new equipment, not investing in new R and D [research and development]. Instead they’ve been shipping the money out of the country.

CG: It’s astonishing that we are fifty-fourth in the world in terms of doctors per 100,000 patients. Even more astonishing is that Cuba, under a blockade, has twice as many doctors per 100,000 patients.

MH: More than twice as many. Cuba has 591 doctors per 100,000, Canada has 214. But why is that? Because a bunch of our bureaucrats decided we’re going to start curtailing registration in medical schools. All kinds of really bright young men and women who want to become doctors have to leave the country to become doctors.

I think one of the most astonishing figures in my book has to do with the fact everyone knows the world is becoming a more competitive place. So what do you do if that’s the case in a country like Canada and you want to maintain your standard of living? You’ve got to invest in things. But one of the things is you’ve got to make sure you have is a really good educational system. So where do we stand in terms of spending on education as a percentage of GDP in comparison to other countries? Ninety-first, for Gods sake! Ninety-first!

CG: I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn the UN has criticized Canada on human rights and poverty on two separate occasions, most recently in 2006.

MH: In 2007 Canada had the ninth largest gross domestic product in the world. And were 25th in social spending, twenty-third in poverty etc. etc. And what does that tell you? We’ve got a goddamn lousy distribution of income in this country. The rich are getting richer. The disparity between the poor and the rich is now at a 30 year high, and it’s getting higher every year.

CG: In your book you talk about the high levels of foreign ownership and write that our federal trade minister travelled to Beijing to convince the Chinese to buy up whatever the US and Europe don’t already own. That’s especially ironic considering China is far more defensive about foreign investment than we are, as is the US. What part of economic nationalism don’t we understand?

MH: No other developed country in the world would dream of allowing the degree of foreign ownership and foreign control that we have. There are 36 different sectors of the Canadian economy that are majority foreign owned and controlled. How many of them are there in the United States?

CG: Zero?

MH: Zero. Did you think the Americans would ever allow their chemical industry, their rubber industry, their computer industry, their petroleum industry, etc. to be majority foreign owned? I mean what a laugh!

CG: Do you remember the outcry when China attempted to take over the California-based oil firm, Unocal?

MH: Remember the outcry when the Japanese took over Rockefeller Centre? The foreign ownership in the United States is minimal compared to Canada. Not one person in Ottawa – not in the department of finance, not in the Bank of Canada, not in Statistics Canada, not in the Privy Council – not one person knows how much of the buy-up of our country has been accomplished by our good loyal patriotic Canadian banks financing the takeovers of our Canadian companies.

CG: What I found most disturbing in your book is the anecdote toward the end of your book, when you released documents leaked to you on the secret meeting in Banff in mid-September of 2006. It appears there’s a covert agenda to remake Canada in the image of the US, and our press has been pretty much complicit in the process, if only through silence.

MH: That’s what these guys want. They’re having secret meetings across Canada, across the United States. They’ve even been condemned by a number of Americans in the House of Representatives and they’re moving toward integration in whole bunch of different ways, in a system that will be irreversible if we let them go ahead with it.

We’re talking about the future of our country here; we’re talking about something incredibly important. I managed to get my hands on some documents about these secret meetings. I released them to almost all the media in the country and they ignored it. In those meeting were people like former American Secretaries of State, people like Peter Lougheed, the former Premier of Alberta, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, etc. etc. and big business from Canada and the United States. And the media treated this as a nonexistent story. And that is bizarre. It’s unconscionable that the media wouldn’t report this information when it was handed to them.