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Managing Democracy, Defending Capitalism: Gilbert E. Jackson, the Canadian Committee on Industrial Reconstruction, and the Changing Form of Elite Politics in Canada

This article examines the interwoven history of University of Toronto economics professor-turned-business consultant Gilbert Jackson (1890–1959) and the Canadian Committee on Industrial Reconstruction (CCIR), an organization established by a small group of leading Canadian business executives in 1943. Unknown to the general public of the period, the CCIR financed Jackson to prepare studies and deliver speeches at a time when many corporate leaders believed that the spectre of socialism posed an imminent threat. This secretive political mobilization was intended to shape the formation of “expert opinion” as a means to exercising political influence. A deliberate campaign to manage democracy from above, it altered the political tactics of the business elite by ascribing a greater role and more autonomy to the expert-intellectual. Jackson’s intellectual output and role in the CCIR shared much in common with the contemporaneous activities of early neoliberals in Europe and the United States and presaged the proliferation of advocacy think tanks during the second half of the twentieth century, part of “a new technology of persuasion” that was reshaping the form of elite politics in Canada much earlier than is posited in existing scholarship.