Action for a change

>> Canada's D.C.-trained citizen activists take Nader-ite tactics to Ottawa

by JOHN EDMONDS

Ralph Nader's Toronto stopover on August 30 was billed as a bid by the Green Party presidential candidate to get some votes from the roughly 500,000 expatriate Americans resident in Canada who are eligible.

But the veteran critic of the American political and corporate elite has shown an interest "north of the border" pre-dating his foray into presidential politics. Nader has relatives in Canada, and co-wrote Canada Firsts, a 1993 bestseller extolling Canadian inventions and achievements. He has long hailed Canada's Medicare system as "the best in the world" and made numerous speeches here warning that American big business is eager to apply suction to the lucrative Canadian health-care market, should it become privatized.

But his main impact on Canadian political life has probably been through his training of Canadian activists such as Duff Conacher, who co-wrote Canada Firsts with Nader, and wrote the 1999 follow-up, More Canada Firsts. Conacher is coordinator of the Ottawa-based NGO called Democracy Watch, which has had significant success since its debut in 1993, becoming a name on Parliament Hill and the pundit of choice for major media outlets on issues ranging from bank mergers to the regulation of corporate lobbyists.

It's a success Conacher says he owes largely to his work with Nader.

After doing volunteer work in El Salvador in the mid-1980s, Conacher got a grant from Nader to work in Ontario and Quebec organizing Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs)--Nader-designed student-activist groups funded by student fees--and was instrumental in setting up Quebec-PIRG, which now has chapters at McGill, Concordia and UQAM. Then, after earning a law degree, he went down to D.C. to work for the big man himself.

"Nader has been working two shifts a day, seven days a week for 30 years. He is extremely knowledgeable about how American government works. His archives are amazing--almost every issue you could think of has material from some previous Nader campaign," says Conacher.

The 66-year-old Nader, a Harvard-trained lawyer, earned fame for his 1965 exposé of the auto industry Unsafe at any Speed and went on to sue more corporations--often successfully--than probably any other human being alive. But Conacher says his greatest strength is as a "Johnny Appleseed." "He helps get people started and then lets them go create their own projects," Conacher says. "Even when I first went down, I always planned to apply what I learned to Canada."

Bashing the banks
So how has Democracy Watch's Nader-inspired activism worked in Canada so far? Over the last six years, the group has launched campaigns on a wide variety of issues, often promoting the concept of organized citizen influence over corporations through novel institutions such as Citizen Utility Boards. But the group's biggest response from the press and the public has come from bashing the big banks.

When the Royal Bank and the Bank of Montreal announced merger plans in 1998, Democracy Watch was already positioned on the issue, due to a project called the Canadian Community Reinvestment Coalition (CCRC).

"In 1996, we formed a coalition of NGOs from across the country to try and bring attention to banking issues like service fees, transparency in bank lending and bank account access to low-income Canadians," says Conacher, who is the CCRC's chair.

"In the U.S., they have a federal law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that obliges banks to keep statistics on who they lend to in terms of gender, income, address and other criteria. If a bank shows a discriminatory pattern in its lending, they are sanctioned. Government figures show that, in the 10 years the CRA has been in place, the act has caused $1-trillion (U.S.) to be invested in disadvantaged communities that would otherwise not have happened," Conacher says. "We're lobbying for similar policies in Canada and believe this would cause at least $15-billion to be reinvested in communities, which could go to mortgages for low-cost housing. There are many places in Canada where people now deposit their money in banks but have trouble getting loans from them. This siphons money out of the communities."

Conacher claims the CCRC played a critical role in Finance Minister Paul Martin's December 1998 decision to forbid--for now--big-bank mergers. "We were the ones who provided him with the ideas and arguments necessary to justify his position to the public," says Conacher. But while the group submitted research papers to parliamentary committees and gained wide and non-critical media coverage of their anti-bank polemics, they weren't the only ones. Many leading economists and bank executives also publicly condemned the merger plans.

Conacher says the group's lobbying also helped secure provisions in financial-sector legislation passed this summer, which included the creation of a financial services ombudsman and a legal right to a low-cost account--ideas the CCRC had long promoted. The banks say they're happy with the changes, but Conacher is doubtful.

"It's hard to be sure exactly what they think of us, but I've heard they loathe us," says Conacher.

The Canadian Bankers Association declined the Mirror's request for an interview.

Follow the money
But bank bashing is an easy sport. A tougher public awareness challenge for Democracy Watch might be their campaign to "clean up" corporate influence on Canadian politics.

"He who pays the piper calls the tune," is the frequent refrain of Aaron Freeman, a Democracy Watch board member and author of Cashing In: Money and Influence in Canadian Politics to be published this fall by McClelland & Stewart.

Freeman is another former Quebec-PIRG activist who spent time in D.C. For two years he worked on corporate-influence campaigns for the Nader group Public Citizen and as the associate editor for the Multinational Monitor. Then, like Conacher, he got a law degree and set up shop as an Ottawa gadfly, working on Democracy Watch campaigns and writing a column for the parliamentary journal The Hill Times.

An excerpt from his book in the April 10 McLean's likens Big Tobacco to an organized-crime syndicate and calls the "Tobacco Dream Team" the best-organized lobby group on the Hill. It also lists a dozen senior political players with current or past connections to the tobacco industry, including Paul Martin, Treasury Board president Lucienne Robillard and former Mulroney chief-of-staff Norman Spector.

Hitting a public nerve about Canada's campaign finance system is a harder sell. "We haven't had any big scandals like the U.S. over campaign financing, but the Canadian system is just as rotten, only on a smaller scale," says Freeman. "In fact in some ways it's worse. In the U.S., virtually every dollar donated to a political campaign is tracked and reported. The Canadian system is full of loopholes--'black holes'--where 'stealth money' can be given to political parties without being reported. There could be as much as $10-million donated in a federal election whose donors are unreported to the public. And people don't donate money to political parties without expecting something in return."

Freeman also criticizes recent changes to the Canada Elections Act--Bill C-2. "The Canada Elections Act includes more loopholes than law." But he adds that Quebec--among a handful of provinces--has relatively progressive campaign-finance laws: "The only people who can donate to a political campaign in Quebec are the people who can vote, and not organizations like corporations or unions."

Don't discount Democracy
In the short run, Freeman and Conacher probably have no more a chance of harnessing Canada's elite than Ralph Nader does of becoming the next U.S. president. But it's hard to deny that they've managed to credibly insert themselves into Canadian political debate in the space of a few short years.

"We've become credible for a few reasons," Conacher says. "We don't comment on something until we've done research on it. In all our campaigns we've published position papers before we started to make public comments. Another reason is that we don't have links to unions and political parties. And we try to work through coalitions, because then we can't be discounted as simply representing our own point of view."

Conacher also says the American-style political activism that influenced the group is more focused and aggressive than that practised by a lot of Canadian NGOs. "Maybe it's a cultural difference. Or maybe it's because things in the U.S. are much worse in some ways than in Canada."

Democracy Watch has no formal links to any Naderite or other American groups, and all of what the group does is strictly "made in Canada." But with political and economic changes regularly emanating northwards from the U.S. capital, it doesn't hurt to have an insight into what's going on in D.C.

And if you want to learn about how to make an activist statement in national politics, you could have a worse teacher than Ralph Nader. Says Conacher: "We learnt a few things from Ralph." :