>Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though, it is just an organization for providing government services and isn't any different than a typical department of education or post or government rails etc.
An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry? I also suggest you read the second link in the grandparent: Nova Chemicals, Yara Belle Plaine, PotashCorp, all the resource extraction corps in Saskatchewan...
Also, that's strictly wrong -- Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all, so long as the government chose to endow them to do so. Furthermore, some Crown corporations must deal with real physical externalities arising as a consequence of their operations, like Petro-Canada, which (before it was sold off for a song to already-rich people) extracted real physical oil in Alberta, and dealt with the real physical externalities in a much MUCH *MUCH* more accountable way.
> An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry?
No, they aren't manufacturing anything. Managing natural resources is a reasonable thing for a government to do.
> Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all
But they aren't which is the point. Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would, so using them as an example doesn't work.
> Furthermore, some Crown corporations must deal with real physical externalities arising as a consequence of their operations, like Petro-Canada
There is no reason this couldn't just be done for private corporations via regulations. Politicians have that power today, why aren't they using it? And why do you think they would use it if ownership was different?
Apologies, I had updated my comment to list a few of the dozen-and-a-half industrial Crown corporations that Canadian governments have sold off to already-wealthy people. I'll continue: Victory Aircraft, Orion Bus Industries, Canadian Vickers, Canadair...
It's a historical fact that the government did operate industrial Crown corporations, and they operated them "better", as viewed from the embarrassingly non-fiduciary perspectives of the workers and the environment, which is the point.
>There is no reason this couldn't just be done for private corporations via regulations. Politicians have that power today, why aren't they using it? And why do you think they would use it if ownership was different?
There's several organizations between the legislature in which some regulation is made, and the actual group to be regulated, whereas a Crown corporation's mandate to report directly to the government, not to mention the absent necessity to cover bad things up until the quarterly earnings report drops, makes them more honest. The other kicker, of course, is that private corporations can just bribe I mean lobby the government for permission to do bad things. There's not really an incentive for Crown corporations to do that.
A Crown corp is not there to make ever-increasing amounts of money, they're there to provide a service. No amount of deployed regulation on a for-profit, privately-owned corporation can change its tendency to optimize for the former.
Victory aircraft was a WW2 wartime aircraft manufacturer, not sure how that is relevant for anything. Wartime economics is very different from peacetime economics.
Orion Bus Industries is and was always a private company. It was owner by a government entity for an extremely short period.
Canadian Vickers is a private company.
Canadair was a private company, then nationalized for a decade. Crown didn't do a good job leading this company so they sold it a decade later. This just solidifies my point, they can't run industries efficiently.
> There's not really an incentive for Crown corporations to do that. They're not there to make ever-increasing amounts of money, they're there to provide a service.
Right, they can work in service sectors where you provide a service to people. They can't do good work in an industry sector where the job is to produce goods. Government agencies are great at managing simple sectors, but they couldn't take over the entire private sector. If they could then they would already have done that in many areas of the world and those would thrive. But anyone who tried quickly reversed it as it didn't work out.
"Evidence"? You said there aren't any industrial Crown corporations. In fact, you said that
>>>Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though
and
>>Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would, so using them as an example doesn't work.
But I listed a whole bunch of former industrial Crown corporations. Just because you don't like the idea that your baseless assertions were proven wrong by the facts doesn't detract from their facticity.
Canadian Vickers isn't a private company, they don't exist. When they did exist, they were heavily subsidized by the government and then nationalised into Canadair, which then privatized after the war and got thrown around as a subsidiary of various aerospace corps until '76 when the government bought it from General Dynamics. Then it actually did quite well until the Challenger business jet, then the Mulroney government -- one of those right-wing, fast-buck governments I mentioned earlier -- sold it in '86. And that's a great example, because that's just a straight-up loss. If a private company makes a crazily-bad investment, it's going to go under and get bought for pennies on the dollar by another private company. A Crown corporation, theoretically, can take less "sensible" business risks without that fear, because of government support. Unless the government decides it's not worth it and sells it for pennies on the dollar by another private company.
>Crown didn't do a good job leading this company so they sold it a decade later. This just solidifies my point, they can't run industries efficiently.
The "Crown" doesn't "lead" a Crown corporation. They don't make business decisions for them, they just provide a mandate (in this case, "design aircraft in Canada"), a financial backstop, and, yes, allow much more efficient internal meddling than normal regulatory schemes if need be.
To be honest, I don't think you really know what you're talking about. Your assertions are mostly false, and the suggestion that my argument is leading up to the idea that "government agencies" could "take over the entire private sector" is absolutely bonkers. Again, I suggest you go read up on what, exactly, a Crown corporation is and does. You're clearly under a number of incredible misapprehensions.
An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry? I also suggest you read the second link in the grandparent: Nova Chemicals, Yara Belle Plaine, PotashCorp, all the resource extraction corps in Saskatchewan...
Also, that's strictly wrong -- Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all, so long as the government chose to endow them to do so. Furthermore, some Crown corporations must deal with real physical externalities arising as a consequence of their operations, like Petro-Canada, which (before it was sold off for a song to already-rich people) extracted real physical oil in Alberta, and dealt with the real physical externalities in a much MUCH *MUCH* more accountable way.