Frank Stronach

Fixing capitalism by mandating profit sharing

April 11, 2023

One of my favourite books published over the last few years is “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few,” by Robert Reich, a public policy professor at UC Berkeley and secretary of labour in the Clinton administration. Reich’s main argument is that capitalism is damaged and that the rich are getting richer while the poor and middle class are getting poorer, creating the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity in nearly a century. He’s right that capitalism is a system that enriches only a few. I also agree with Reich’s call for a revival of corporate profit sharing, which was much more widespread in the 20th century, when some of America’s biggest and most well-known companies had profit-sharing programs.

Government bureaucracy is the cholesterol clogging up the economy

July 11, 2023

Back in the early 1980s, when commercial computers first came onto the market, they were sold with a big promise: they could do the work of an entire floor of employees in a typical office building and could dramatically decrease the amount of paperwork and paper filing for businesses and organizations. But it never happened. If anything, the piles of paperwork, government forms and compliance reports that needed to be filled out increased enormously — and with it, so too did the size of our bureaucracy. As a result, today you see hundreds and hundreds more office buildings staffed with more people who devote a large chunk of each workday to regulation compliance requests. The facts bear this out: government

Give young Canadians – and Canada – a break. Teach them trades

August 1, 2023

When most Canadians think of quality products made with a high level of technical skill and engineering, they usually think of Europe. And for good reason: European countries such as Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Italy are all exporters of world-class products. These products include BMW and Siemens from Germany, Ferrari and Ducati from Italy, Cartier and Michelin from France, Kuehne + Nagel and Schindler from Switzerland, and Electrolux and Husqvarna from Sweden. These brands — as well as other quality products from Europe — are synonymous around the world with state-of-the-art engineering, technical precision and know-how, and reliability. It’s why the European Union has one of the strongest and most productive economies in the world and why European living

The core issues facing Canada in 2023

January 3, 2023

For many of us, the start of a new year focuses our minds on goals and plans for the future. It’s a time for a fresh start, a time when we get around to tackling projects that we keep putting off even though we know they’re important for our financial or personal wellbeing. That same mindset should be adopted by our government as well. With the worst of the pandemic firmly behind us, now is the time to finally start solving some of the key problems that have hobbled our economy and held back our potential as a country. But where do we begin? We’re confronted by a number of seemingly insurmountable problems: Skyrocketing debt. Falling living standards. A country

Big business does best when workers get their share

October 10, 2023

I’ve been arguing in this column for a while now that large Canadian companies should have to share their annual profits with employees — and that it should be a cornerstone component of a new national economic charter of rights. Some businesspeople have said to me the last thing they want is the government telling them that they have to give up some of the company’s hard-earned profits. I can understand why they feel that way. When I was the CEO of Magna International, we introduced a profit sharing program with my managers, employees and investors that gave each stakeholder group a pre-determined percentage of our annual profits. After introducing the program, profits skyrocketed. My only regrets are that I

Unleash small business by exempting them from corporate taxes

May 2, 2023

Small businesses are often described as the backbone of our economy — and that’s because they are. They develop new products and technologies that drive economic growth and create new jobs. But if small businesses are so important, why aren’t we doing more to support their success and foster even greater growth? Small businesses bore the brunt of the economic fallout during the pandemic. The on-again, off-again lockdowns dried up revenue, drove away customers and made employee retention very difficult. I often wonder how many of the small businesses that went under during the pandemic could have become another Magna International? Legendary entrepreneur Richard Branson famously said that all big businesses start small. When I started Magna, I opened up