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From: clarke@utcs.UUCP (Jim Clarke)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: Nationalization/Crown Corps.
Message-ID: <729@utcs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 3-Jul-85 13:49:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcs.729
Posted: Wed Jul  3 13:49:12 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 3-Jul-85 14:14:05 EDT
References: <1121@ubc-cs.UUCP> <1110@mnetor.UUCP> <720@utcs.UUCP> <1114@mnetor.UUCP> <183@watmum.UUCP> <1131@mnetor.UUCP>
Reply-To: clarke@utcs.UUCP (Jim Clarke)
Distribution: can
Organization: University of Toronto - General Purpose UNIX
Lines: 35
Summary: 

In article <1131@mnetor.UUCP> fred@mnetor.UUCP (Fred Williams) writes:
>	Would I rather see the money going out of the country? Well,
>I think the money should go to whoever can produce a quality
>product for less money. That is the basis of free enterprise.
>Rewards go for results.
Umm, well maybe that's something wrong with free enterprise.  It seems to
produce profits nicely, but it doesn't care much about anything else.

My (poorly informed) impression about crown corporations is that they fall
into more than one group:

-- The very public giants like CN and Air Canada, which make money or lose it
   very much in the news.  They might be less efficient than their private
   equivalents, but are we sure?  Lots of airlines lose money lately,
   ESPECIALLY in the free market to the south, and CP has had some pretty
   big government subsidies too, hasn't it?  Maybe the big difference between
   Air Canada and, say, Massey-Ferguson (or White or Volkswagen or Chrysler,
   to name a few "private" firms that have benefited from "socialist"
   interference here and in the U.S. lately -- or does anyone remember those
   private Canadian railroads that went into CN when they failed?) is that
   the ups and downs are better smoothed by the government for crown
   corporations than for private ones.  Also, we the taxpayers do have a
   little more to show for our money if we own the company that gets it.

-- The group that never expected to make money and were (I presume) crown
   corporations rather than divisions of government for managerial reasons.
   Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd springs to mind, because my father worked for
   them for 20 years or so.  He and his friends sure didn't act like civil
   servants, because they weren't.  They also didn't act like private
   employees -- they worked harder.   But maybe AECL was a special case.

-- The group that do nicely, thank you, without a lot of notice.  Remember
   Polysar?  As I recall, we had to sell it to private investors, because
   our friends to the south found it offensive to have to deal with a
   government-owned company.  The money felt different, somehow.