Cory Doctorow is an award-winning author, activist, and journalist. Born in Toronto, he now lives in Los Angeles. Doctorow’s personal blog is pluralistic.net. There he reviewed “The Big Fix” by Columbia’s Denise Hearn and McMaster’s Vass Bednar.

Says Cory Doctorow:

The Canadian national identity involves a lot of sneering at the US, but when it comes to oligarchy, Canada makes America look positively amateurish.

Canada’s monopolists may be big fish in a small pond, but holy moly are they big, compared to the size of that pond. In their new book, The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians, Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar lay bare the price-gouging, policy-corrupting ripoff machines that run the Great White North.

From telecoms to groceries to pharmacies to the resource sector, Canada is a playground for a handful of supremely powerful men from dynastic families, who have bought their way to dominance, consuming small businesses by the hundreds and periodically merging with one another.

Hearn and Bednar tell this story and explain all the ways that Canadian firms use their market power to reduce quality, raise prices, abuse workers and starve suppliers, even as they capture the government and the regulators who are supposed to be overseeing them…

Read Doctorow’s full review HERE:

More and more of the Canadian economy is dominated by a handful of huge companies that control what we buy, how we work, and which other businesses can or can’t thrive. 

Beyond the obvious examples of airlines, telcos, grocery chains, and banks, The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians shows how corporate concentration is growing across many industries, leading to higher prices for consumers, lower worker’s wages, more inequality, fewer startups, less innovation, and lower growth and productivity.