Today, however, a new version of corporatism has sneaked its way into the counsels of government, and particularly Canadian government, where it tries to combat or at least modify the traditional principles of representative democracy. This is a liberal/left version of corporatism, which is founded on the idea that a citizen in a democracy derives rights not just from his status as an equal in a society of equals, but also from his status as a member of particular groups or communities. Society is conceived of as an organization of communities rather than of individuals, and furthermore as an organization which dispenses unequal benefits to these communities. It is therefore concluded that the goal of social reform is to eliminate any differences between groups in the benefits they receive from society.
For example, we have for many years been debating the best ways to provide equity for women, members of visible minorities, francophones, and so on. The idea is always that equity will have been achieved when women receive the same benefits as men, members of visible minorities receive the same benefits as members of majorities and of non-visible minorities, francophones receive the same benefits as anglophones, and so on. The commonest examples of this type of thinking are pay equity laws, and the purest example of this type of thinking in Canada was the employment equity law of the Rae government in Ontario in the early 1990s.
The Rae government divided society into five groups: women, members of racial minorities, people with disabilities, aboriginal people, and everyone else (that is, white men). The act mandated that every employer's work force was to "reflect the representation of aboriginal people, people with disabilities, members of racial minorities and women in the community" in every job category. If fewer than half the physicians at a hospital were women, for example, the hospital was to develop an employment equity plan to recruit more women physicians.
But is equal representation the same thing as equity? The school system is considered by many to provide fewer benefits to members of certain groups, and this opinion is probably true. Nevertheless, the most successful groups in the educational system have usually been oppressed groups – Jews, Chinese, Irish, Italians, and so on. Are we to conclude that these groups were actually privileged groups masquerading as disadvantaged ones?
Well, some people do. In the United States, standardized tests of academic achievement and aptitude are now often said to be biased in favour of students of Chinese origin. The idea that the Midwest ministers' sons who created the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) were out to further the interests of Chinese students seems more than a bit comical, although the proponents of the new corporatism seem to have no problem in asserting that the SAT is the result of a pro-Chinese conspiracy instead of simply saying that Chinese students tend to receive higher scores on the SAT.
Alternatively, you could say that the effects of oppression are not general, and that a group may still be oppressed even though in some ways it appears privileged, but that is contrary to one of the fundamental principles of corporatist thinking – the idea of community.
The groups into which the new corporatists divide society are commonly described as communities. In fact, the new corporatism must assume that the groups into which new corporatists divide society are communities of interest. The new corporatism assumes that all members of a group have the same interests, so Chinese students must have the same interests as all other students from visible minorities. However, the broadly defined groups of the new corporatism rarely share interests to any great extent.
Furthermore, when they do, they usually do because the members of the group share interests which are common to all groups. Within any group the interests of individual members will differ and will even often be in opposition to each other. Within groups as broadly defined as those of the new corporatism, heterogeneity of interest is inevitable.
Let's consider aboriginal people. The relationships of the three main Canadian aboriginal groups – First Nations, Métis, and Inuit – to government are different. Their needs cannot even be dealt with in the same way. First Nations deal with the government either through the Indian Act or, if they are not on the Indian Register, not at all. The western Métis have treaties with the government which they consider the government to have breached. The Métis in the North and East have no treaties. Some Inuit have treaties, while others don't. Among First Nations, the interests of band councils are different from the interests of other band members, a fact which the Canadian government has exploited effectively for many years.
In other words, aboriginal people consist of several groups whose interests are quite different. If you want to improve, for example, the schooling received by aboriginal people, you will have to address different problems in each group. While this observation does not invalidate the idea of aboriginal people as a community, it does suggest that considering them to be a community is of no help in addressing their problems.
The new corporatism is an attempt to get us to abandon the idea that democratic rights are individual rights. It wants us to think of discrimination as a denial of rights to a group, when we have usually thought of it as a denial of rights to an individual. A further danger of this idea is that the groups in which rights are thought to inhere exist only as abstractions.
Under the traditional conception of democracy, individual citizens could form communities of interest called political parties. Under the new corporatism, individuals are arbitrarily assigned to "communities" based on arbitrary characteristics such as skin colour, type of genital organs, inheritance, or physical capacity. Instead of being represented by elected public officials they are represented by members of community groups, representatives they have most likely not chosen and with whom they may have few interests in common. These representatives will usually be activists, and the new corporatism is the result of the corruption of the ideal of activism.
Political activism started out as an attempt to get individuals to obtain and exercise democratic rights, but it has degenerated into an elitist exercise in which government negotiates with pressure groups. I am not arguing against pressure groups – without them we would not have seen the enormous progress in civil rights which has been taking place for over a hundred years. What I am arguing against is the idea that society is nothing more than competition and negotiation between pressure groups, and the replacement of the ideals of equality, dignity, and freedom with the ideal of getting one's piece of the pie.
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