Social Capital Partner’s Director of Policy, Dan Skilleter, on The Agenda with Steve Paikin

As our new government pursues growth and a nation-building agenda, we should remember this lesson from history: too often, we build and invest, only to sell off our assets and resources to the highest foreign bidder, leaving us economically vulnerable. In this moment of extreme peril, SCP CEO Matthew Mendelsohn asks how we should “build, baby, build” in a way that doesn’t merely accelerate the trends towards consolidation of wealth and deeper economic dependence. Canada has everything we need to emerge stronger from this period of geopolitical disruption if we put economic sovereignty and broad access to wealth-building at the heart of our agenda.

Canadian businesses are immensely profitable, but businesses simply haven't been reinvesting in them. As Tom Goldsmith writes in Orbit Policy's Deep Dives, the financialization of Canada’s economy and the high levels of rent extraction that accompany it are barriers to innovation. We are impoverishing ourselves over the long term to support short-term financial gains. If we care about innovation and productivity, then we need to focus far more critical attention on corporate Canada.

If we allow for private equity ownership of law firms, it isn’t unreasonable to expect a similar result as we are seeing in other professions—lower quality of service and work for clients and lower job satisfaction for lawyers. In an op-ed for Bloomberg Law, SCP Fellow Rachel Wasserman of Wasserman Business Law outlines why law firms should decentralize, not consolidate, to provide good service and keep lower overhead.