Our Grand Ayatollah - by Murray Dobbin

Murray Dobbin has recently written a great article on TheTyee excerpted below:

"Our Grand Ayatollah
Tom d'Aquino rules Canada's fate. What does he want?

Does Canada, like Iran, have its very own Grand Ayatollah? Iran is technically a democracy with regular elections choosing a legislature and president. But it is well known that no major decisions get made without the express approval of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran, after all, is an Islamic republic and the final arbiter of the country's direction is the supreme Islamic ruler -- democracy or no democracy.

And if you examine the roots of the Security and Prosperity Partnership -- the secretive scheme to annex Canada to the U.S. -- you will find a similar pattern in which the really important decisions aren't decided in Parliament but behind closed doors. Those decisions are made not in collaboration with a religious figure but with the keeper of the Holy Grail of free market fundamentalism. That individual is Tom d'Aquino, the president and CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) formerly known as the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI).

If you think calling Mr. d'Aquino Canada's Ayatollah is mere hyperbole, consider the fact that not a single federal budget since the early 1980s has ever had its i's dotted or t's crossed without being vetted by the representative of the county's 150 most powerful corporate CEOs.........."

The balance of the article is linked here.