What's in a Name?

It has recently come to light that the management of Canadian National Railway has sent a memo to all of its employees forbidding the use of the word "Canadian" in any of their dealings with the public. The company claims that the reason for this position is simply a desire to establish "CN" as the public name of the corporation. However, when an organization changes its name it is usually indicative of an attempt to change the nature of that organization, and Canadian National Railway is no exception.

When Canadian National Railway was privatized in the early 1990s it quickly ceased to be a Canadian-owned corporation, with a majority of its shares being bought by Americans. CNR immediately began to position itself as a "North American" railway, as opposed to a Canadian railway, and initiated a series of take-overs of smaller railways in the United States. For several years, CN's former CEO, Paul Tellier, has been one of the main proponents of the complete integration of Canada into the U.S. and the elimination of the border between the two countries.

Under Tellier's leadership, CNR also began a process of Americanizing its management, with the end result that virtually the entire middle and upper management of the corporation are now American nationals. There are numerous reports that these managers treat Canadian employees with utter disdain and use openly racist terminology to describe Canadian workers.

The experience of Canadian National Railway is not unique in this regard. In recent years numerous other Canadian corporations, including most of the big banks, have been systematically trying to shed their identification with Canada. This is a reflection of the fact that the most powerful corporations in Canada, both those which are nominally Canadian-owned and those which are outright subsidiaries of American companies, no longer see a use for the Canadian nation. Whereas in the past the existence of the Canadian nation permitted these corporations to capture a guaranteed market, they now view the continuing existence of Canada as being detrimental to their profits. The attempts of these corporations to hide their identification with the Canadian nation are part of a larger effort to extinguish Canada as a separate nation and to facilitate its absorption by the United States.

The abandonment of the Canadian nation by the most powerful section of the Canadian capitalist class has created a political situation in Canada in which the struggle for sovereignty and independence is not only inherently anti-imperialist, but also inherently anti-capitalist. No revolutionary struggle in Canada can hope to be effective if it fails to recognize this basic feature of the reality of Canada.