It has been 30 years since Canadian National was privatized, and Wall Street continues to profit at Canada’s expense

Immediately following privatization, CN began prioritizing its new shareholders—within less than a year, CN initiated its first dividend payout in 1996, delivering $99 million to shareholders. Since then, dividend growth has been explosive, with increases of between 10 and 30 per cent year-over-year every year from 1997 to 2019, with the exception of a seven per cent increase in 2010.

  • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
    18·
    8 days ago

    Let’s make a test for this:

    • is it an industry you’d be forced to save if it went bankrupt?
    • is it a natural monopoly, or a field that consistently concentrates to at most 1-3 companies?
    • is it so important that a labour strike or shortage causes significant external impact to the economy as a whole?
    • is it a foundational infrastructure with no viable alternative replacements?

    If you answered yes to these questions, then you should nationalize it.

    The free market can’t or won’t ever provide a better service, and there’s no viable replacement. There’s no value in it being private, in fact, it’s negative value as the corporate margin acts as a tax anyways. If you took all the corporate profit and dividends and reinvested, you would be further ahead than privately owned.