I stumbled upon a presentation released by the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) yesterday. The presentation outlined strategies for companies to integrate ethical and environmental concerns raised by consumers. In many ways, this is nothing new. The distance between this rather tepid advice and the actual needs of facing our economy and our planet brought to mind another gulf that will likely be need to be bridged first: that between public ownership and public aims.
The BDC is a Crown corporation that provides financial services. In short, it is a public bank, an institution of socialized finance. It is a good example of how the reality of socialized finance differs from its potential – of the limits of public ownership that exists without a broader context of democratic pressures for public aims.