Review of The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich Are Stealing Canada's Public Wealth by Linda McQuaig

A couple months ago I had the opportunity to read, via NetGalley, a book all about debunking climate change. I debated the ethics of taking that eARC when I knew beforehand I would give the book an excoriating review. In the end, I decided not to read it, simply because I don’t have the time or bandwidth to spend reading and breaking down such a book. But it also got me thinking about who the target audience is—surely not people like me. Surely, the author was targeting other climate deniers who want something they can point to as a reliable source, something they can nod along to that will reinforce their expectations. An echo chamber, if you will.

When I started The Sport and Prey of Capitalists, I was excited because so many capitalist critiques focus on the US, and this book is very specific to Canada. Linda McQuaig spends each chapter focusing on a specific example of public good in Canada that was then privatized or otherwise hollowed out by private capital, from railways to pharmaceutical manufacturing. And this book is informative! However, the more I read, the more I worried this book was like that climate change book—just for leftists. Was I sinking deeper into an echo chamber? See, I agree with pretty much everything McQuaig says in this book—I just don’t think it’s particularly well written or edited.

If you’re reading this simply as a history book, I think that’s fine, so long as you recognize its bias. McQuaig has references, cites her sources—but there is nothing journalistic about this book. As a history book, however, I found it really interesting. Most of us Canadians, I think, learn a very shallow version of our history. McQuaig dives deep into specific moments: the construction and privatization of the 407 toll highway in southern Ontario; the CNR vs CPR railway battles and inadvertent birth of CBC Radio; public hydro generation in Ontario; Connaught Labs (and insulin!); postal banking; and Alberta and the oil sands. Throughout these stories there are familiar characters, sometimes cast in a new light. All in all, McQuaig does a decent job of relaying the facts.

However, as a polemic, I think this book leaves a lot wanting. To be clear, I’m not complaining about the bias—as I said earlier, I agree with it! Nevertheless, there is always such a thing as … too much. McQuaig’s opinionated writing suffers in two ways: weak arguments and poor editing.

I’ll dispense with the latter issue first. If I were McQuaig’s line editor, I would be going through this manuscript and metaphorically striking out most of her adjectives and adverbs. Here’s just one example:

Then, bending over backwards still further, the St. Laurent government offered the U.S. oilmen an eighty-million-dollar loan to help them overcome their financing problems. It was an incredibly generous offer, since the government would be providing crucial upfront financing during the risky stage of the project. Even so, the oilmen responded by arrogantly insisting….

Nearly every paragraph is like this, just flooded with adverbs that make it really difficult to wade through McQuaig’s explanations because of her constant editorializing. Tone it down, please.

But that’s a style critique, and it’s possible you read the above passage and thought there’s nothing wrong with it. My other critique, of McQuaig’s arguments, is a little more nuanced and harder to shake.

Again, I agree with McQuaig’s thesis: privatization is not good, in general, and Canada should be building stronger public institutions. However informative I find each of these chapters, when McQuaig attempts to move from teaching us history to arguing a point, the sands shift beneath her. She employs too many counterfactual fallacies, such as this one:

If Connaught were still operating as a public entity, it might have branched out and stepped into this role, producing key generic drugs when needed.

Sure, it might have. It might also have lapsed into obsolescence from insufficient public funding. McQuaig always assumes that avoiding privatization necessarily results in a brighter alternative future for the examples in this book. I wish I could agree that’s the case, but I don’t see the evidence for that. You can’t simply say, “Here are all the ways privatizing this thing was bad. If we hadn’t privatized this thing, everything would have worked out fine!” That’s a sneaky non sequitur.

McQuaig’s arguments are also very reductive in how she portrays “Canadian culture” versus “American culture” and even "Norwegian culture.” I’m putting these in quotation marks because the idea that any of these nations, even Norway, have monocultures, is itself a very reductive one. It’s so tempting to be taken in by McQuaig’s assertion that Canada tended towards more public enterprises as a quirk of its geography and its polite, “may we please have independence, Great Britain, uwu?” attitude versus our more aggressive and expansionist neighbours to the north. Yet, as I think her own details herein illustrate, the white men in power in both nations were not substantially different! Her approach is markedly similar to John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country, albeit with much less acknowledgement of Indigenous peoples.

Indeed, McQuaig’s framing of private vs public enterprise is entirely Eurocentric. There is no substantive discussion in this book about Indigenous peoples, colonialism, reconciliation (and the smokescreen that is “economic reconciliation”), etc. Even in the chapters about the railway across Canada West and the Alberta oil sands, McQuaig somehow manages to avoid discussing genocide or violations of Treaty rights. It’s quite the glaring omission, and if it had happened in 2009 I would (sadly) just barely be able to believe her editor and publisher let it happen … as it is, for a book from 2019, I just shake my head. Settler authors really need to do better—the bar is on the floor!

And it’s such a shame, because I think any anticapitalist movement that ignores Indigenous voices and values is doomed to failure. Truly dismantling capitalism requires us to surrender our extractive relationship with the land in favour of a more reciprocal one, a stewardship role rather than a dominion. Indigenous peoples have done this for countless millennia and have stood ready, ever since Europeans showed up, to teach. McQuaig’s failure to consider Indigenous worldviews as she ponders the value of public enterprise is not just about a lack of inclusivity: it is a huge missed opportunity to make her vision stronger.

I really wanted The Sport and Prey of Capitalists to be better than it was. I really wanted to enjoy it more than I did. I didn’t mind it, and it is short enough that it didn’t overstay its welcome with me. I recommend it if you want some good vignettes of Canadian history, with all the caveats I noted above.