Quebec Inc and the Temptation of State Capitalism

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH? This book, about Quebec' s giant pension fund management agency (the Caisse de dépôt et placement) and the raft of provincial and municipal Quebec corporations -- at times ill-begotten, often ill-fated -- set off a thunderous controversy and public debate when it was recently published in French. A well-founded documentation of the sometime use of the power of such institutions for political purposes outside of the mandates and missions for which they were conceived, Pierre Arbour's criticism of Quebec's experience over the past quarter century is of equal relevance to all parts of Canada. For if upon completion of this book the informed reader is stunned by the financial catastrophes which arose in the wake of affairs such as Asbestos, Brascade, Quebecair, Sidbec-Dosco, or the Montreal paramunicipal corporations, he will also remember the disasters of BRIC in B.C., Novatel in Alberta, UTDC in Ontario and SYSCO in Nova Scotia. The temptation to intervene through