Towards a New National Policy

The Watkins Report1 is, or so one may hope, the final contribution of the Honourable Walter L. Gordon to the propagation of his well-known views on the dangers to Canada of foreign, specifically American, direct investment in this country. Those views were originally a fairly obvious projection of the private interests of a Toronto accountant, management consultant, and genteel man of property in the old-fashioned sense, and as such readily vulnerable to criticism on economic and political grounds, though they nevertheless succeeded in capturing the cachet of genuine radicalism among the semi-literate fringe of Canadian public opinion ("fringe" is too diminutive a concept however to be fully descriptive). Fortunately for Mr. Gordon, and unfortunately for Canada, economic and political developments in the world position of the United States since the Report of the Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects of 1957 was published have done much to create a fire to provide the smoke which the Gordon Commission sniffed in the air with great alarm but was unable to track down to a credibly identifiable source in the behaviour of United States enterprises in Canada. On the one hand the rapidly mounting unpopularity of United States military policy in assumed defence of the free world against communism, epitomized in the war in Vietnam, and on the other hand the United States balance-ofpayments policy of attempting to maintain an overvalued currency by irritating and quite futile controls over United States private foreign investment, adopted largely to placate the European central bankers, have made extraterritoriality a major issue and provided the Gordonites with a legitimate (though very complex) political issue to replace the largely non-existent economic one with which their concern about American direct investment in Canada started. Add to this altered environment of experience, and even more of attitude, the natural propensity of any group of responsible academics assigned to the investigation of an alleged problem to report solemnly that a problem does indeed exist, though its nature may be different and more complex than originally thought, together with the temptation for a predominantly young group especially when working in a heady centennial year to think in apocalyptic terms, and it is not surprising to find that the Task Force has apotheosized a mutated Gordonism into a new national policy. This is not to say that the Gordon viewpoint has won a strong endorsement in detail from the Task Force, and still less to deny that the Report is a useful, sensible, and important document on the whole. Most noticeably, the Report is extremely sceptical of any suggestion of the desirability of "buying Canada back" or of restricting foreign invest-