Corporate Rules: The Real World of Business Regulation in Canada

Building on his groundbreaking and profoundly disturbing work on how regulatory capture in the transportation sector put corporate interests above the public good, Bruce Campbell has brought together top experts to give us a comprehensive look behind the veil at how, and in whose interest, Canada’s governments regulate. This should be essential if unsettling reading for all those involved in the regulatory process, and for citizens interested in making government better.

Anyone wanting to understand how it is that corporations manage to control our world so completely should read this important and powerful book. In an insightful collection of essays, Corporate Rules tells the story of how feeble government regulators are unable and unwilling to force corporations to behave in the public interest. No wonder today’s capitalism is so unsatisfying for all but the truly rich.

Bruce Campbell bravely confronts the problem and implications of regulatory capture, challenging Canadians to realign our regulators with the public interest and resist being clouded by corporate influence. This is a must-read for anyone that cares about how we can strengthen our governance institutions and guard against avoidable disasters.

An eye-opening and meticulously researched study of the fallout from a 40-year neoliberal project to strip the Canadian state of its power to rein in corporate greed. Read it and imagine how government might again plan, ban, and regulate in the interests of people and the planet.

For years, Bruce Campbell has been presciently warning of regulatory capture in Canada — the sad truth of federal and provincial governments and senior public “servants” whose cozy and sycophantic relationships with the very corporations they are supposed to regulate undermine our safety. In this collection, the reality of this democratic distortion is laid bare, across numerous sectors — energy, pharmaceuticals, construction, transportation and finance. Not only has our immediate safety been compromised, but as the chapters on the petroleum industry document, this dynamic has allowed the oil companies to systematically block progress on the defining emergency of our time. For all those who wrestle with the sick feeling that the foxes are minding the hen house, well, you aren’t wrong. Here you will find historic validation that those government agencies tasked with protecting our health, safety and environment too often see their true role to be advancing the interests of the very corporations they are supposed to monitor and regulate. But this collection doesn’t just expose these truths; it also offers solutions to make our public institutions more “capture resistant,” to rebalance the relationship between the public and corporations, and hopefully, in so doing, to chart a path to democratic restoration.