Back in 1986, Diane Francis’s hard-hitting Controlling Interest revealed the startling fact that one-third of Canada’s wealth was in the hands of just 32 families and five conglomerates. At the time, Bernie Ghert, president of Cadillac Fairview, prophesized, “In a number of years, there will be six groups running the country.” Was he right? Media coverage would have us believe that the last two decades have only increased the concentration of power. Diane Francis disagrees, and she’s here to deliver some good news: a positive transformation has taken place in Canada, with both free trade and tough competition legislation creating a new and better nation. This time the country is driven by players who are ready to offer innovative policies and visions for the 21st century. Combining extensive interviews with Canada’s economic leaders―from individuals to families to international conglomerates― with Francis’s hallmark incisive analysis, Who Owns Canada Now? will be the most important and talked-about business book of the year.
• Of the 32 families who were profiled in Controlling Interest, fewer than half remain major players.
• Of the five conglomerates profiled, only one remains intact.
• A powerful new multinational cast―including Calgary’s Clay Riddell and Murray Edwards, Gerry Schwartz, the Burnetts, the Hos, the Shaws, the Peladeaus and the Aspers―are today’s economic drivers.
• Canadians have been successful at building world-class businesses and investing globally.
• A look at 70 of the most successful Canadians, most of whom are billionaires, shows that many are self-made; 11 were still in school or in foreign countries when Francis wrote Controlling Interest in 1986.
• Financial reforms have shifted the balance away from an old boys’ network of risk-averse investors towards daring Canadian innovators.
Diane Francis is an expert on Canada, the United States, Canada-US relations, Silicon Valley, future technology, geopolitics, the Ukraine-Russia conflict, Putin, energy, business, and white collar crime. Always provocative, her direct and forceful writing has established her international reputation in covering the personalities, trends, and financial backstories that affect companies, individuals, governments and societies. Her popular twitter feed on tech and corruption has more than 240,000 followers around the world.
An award-winning columnist, bestselling author, investigative journalist, speaker, and television commentator, she is Editor-at-Large at Canada’s National Post and a columnist for American Interest, Atlantic Council’s Ukraine Alert, and Kyiv Post. Francis is Faculty at Singularity University in Mountain View, California, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, and sits on the boards of the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative in DC and the Canada-US Law Institute in Cleveland. She is a member of Abundance360, created by Silicon Valley influencer and space pioneer Peter Diamandis, who leads this exclusive group of 250 entrepreneurs.
In 1991, Francis became Editor of Canada’s Financial Post, the first woman editor of a national daily newspaper in Canada, a position she held until the paper was sold in 1998. She is the author of ten books, including Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country (2013, featured in a cover story in Foreign Policy), Who Owns Canada Now?: Old Money, New Money and the Future of Canadian Business (2008), and Immigration: The Economic Case (2002).
She was a director of two public companies, Aurizon Mines and Lake Shore Gold, until both were sold and is now involved with companies in software development and medical devices.
