Private Power, Public Purpose: Adventures in Business, Politics and the Arts

By Thomas d’Aquino

Penguin Random House, February 2023

Reviewed by John Stackhouse

February 20, 2023

Entering the 1980s, Canada was convulsing politically and economically. The provinces and Ottawa were at intense odds over the nature of the country, while business and government were at odds over the nature of the economy. For Thomas d’Aquino, the new solitudes presented an opportunity.

A corporate lawyer, business consultant and former staffer to Pierre Trudeau, d’Aquino had worked in the private and public sectors, in Canada and abroad. He knew the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions were on the rise, Wall Street was in vogue, and the “Me” generation — baby boomers with MBAs and mortgages — was agitating for change. Canadian business, d’Aquino thought, could help lead Canada into an uncertain new world of political, generational and technological transformation.

In Europe, d’Aquino had seen the practice of business advocacy on public policy, and knew how rare it was in Canada, where the distance between Ottawa and Bay Street seemed as vast as the country itself. Frustrated by the country’s challenges to embrace a rapidly changing world, he set out to raise the voice of business in public policy by taking the reins of a sleepy lobby group called the Business Council on National Issues. No longer would the business of business be just business. Under d’Aquino, a revamped Business Council would take on every and any national issue that impacted Canadian prosperity, even if it didn’t always serve the immediate interests of its members.

Over the next three decades, through Liberal and Conservative regimes, d’Aquino ensured there was a corporate contribution — sometimes feisty, sometimes amicable — to every national conversation. He also used the BCNI to help three generations of CEOs better understand the complexities of government, and of the political economy. Some of those who dealt with him, in business and government, could find him presumptuous, as he turned the Business Council into a kind of fiefdom that gave him more prominence, prestige and, at times, power, than a lobby group might otherwise seek or merit. But as he lays out in his memoir, Private Power, Public Purpose, d’Aquino was on a mission from Day One to elevate the interests of business and focus the ambitions of government, for the betterment of Canada.

Now 82, Tom d’Aquino’s journey to the pinnacle of private power and public prominence speaks to a post-war Canada that may seem foreign today. The son of Italian immigrants, he grew up in modest comfort in Nelson, in the B.C. Interior, making his way to the University of British Columbia and a career in law. The sudden death of his father, when he was 18 and just starting UBC, shocked d’Aquino’s early adult life and seemed to make him restless for both change and adventure. He finished law school, and with his wife Susan Peterson, who later became one of Canada’s top Finance bureaucrats, set out into the world. Rather than joining the counter-culture of the 1960s, the future power couple were establishment-bound, moving to Europe and then back to Susan’s hometown of Montreal, where Tom landed a corporate job and was swept up by Trudeaumania.

D’Aquino projects himself as a kind of philosopher-kingmaker, trying to live up to his namesake, the Dominican friar, philosopher and jurist, Saint Thomas Aquinas, writing “the historical weight and significance of my name has never been lost on me.” He didn’t seek to be a company man or a political hack, landing instead on the peripheries of power. The insider’s outsider — and increasingly, the outsider’s insider.

After the 1968 election brought Trudeau to power, d’Aquino gave up corporate life to become a political aide, eventually to the prime minister. He stayed for Trudeau’s first term, which he calls the “golden age” of Canadian public policy, and then switched careers again to work in London as an international consultant, before settling back in Ottawa and hanging out his own shingle. Perplexed and frustrated by the parochialism of Canadian leaders, he convinced the country’s top CEOs to let him take the Business Council on National Issues in a new direction, with as much weight on national issues as on business counsel.

D’Aquino’s first big foray was with the Macdonald Commission on the economy in 1983, which created a kind of Ottawa Consensus on economic liberalism. Once the report was public in 1985, he used the Council’s growing voice and powerful membership to advocate for free trade, tax reform and a smaller government role in the economy. He also dared to challenge the Mulroney government on pension de-indexing, arguing that even in the face of a fiscal crisis — created by the Trudeau years — budgets shouldn’t be balanced on the backs of pensioners. The Business Council soon became a critical ally for Mulroney’s Conservatives as the country divided itself anew over free trade, particularly as d’Aquino applied his able debating skills to take on the popular voices of trade unions, culture groups and anti-FTA voices like Maude Barlow.

D’Aquino deepened his influence when the Conservatives were chased to the political wilderness in 1993, by making himself relevant to the Chrétien Liberals, with research and advocacy campaigns that ensured they didn’t revert to a Trudeau-style economic agenda. Equally, as Quebec separatism and Western alienation threatened to tear the country apart, he ensured the country’s leading business voices spoke up for Canada. In the same spirit, after 9/11, he helped put the weight of business behind the Armed Forces as they prepared for a new period of American-led combat. And after the Enron scandal brought a new critical eye to corporate governance in the early 2000s, he was able to rally Canadian business leaders around new commitments to boardroom accountability — saving them from further government intervention.

In many ways, d’Aquino was right for the times, arriving in the early years of a new media age that shaped public policy in a 24/7 news cycle of cable TV. He was also fortunate to enter the public arena before the internet and social media became a bare-knuckle sport that no longer favours the country club camaraderie he enjoyed.

D’Aquino writes in a lively and personal style, taking the reader with him on fly fishing trips with world leaders, dinners with prime ministers and private jets with global CEOs. He offers less reflection on the limits of public purpose or introspection on the foibles of private power, including the shortcomings of his mission, notably the hollowing out of corporate Canada and frustratingly small levels of private sector research and development.

The BCNI eventually became the Council of CEOs (a culturally off, if factually correct name) and today’s Business Council of Canada. It continues to be a leading voice for the private sector, and often a wise counsel to governments. But it’s also had to adjust to a rapidly changing society and economy, be it on climate change or diversity.

Despite d’Aquino’s efforts, big business continues to face challenges of public trust, including grocery pricing, airline performance and telecom reliability. In an atmosphere of perpetual finger-pointing, it’s become too easy for politicians — left, right and centre — to blame the challenges of our times on business. Some of that scarring formed during the financial crisis, which coincided with the end of d’Aquino’s time at the Business Council, and deepened in the ensuing recession. Remarkably, some of that skepticism changed during the pandemic, when Canadian businesses took on unprecedented responsibilities and largely succeeded. But in the new abnormal, business is again a punching bag, forcing leaders to think anew about the solitudes of private pursuit and public responsibility.

The book’s professed mission is to explore “power and purpose,” and its final chapters on leadership offer a range of thoughtful insights on what it takes to run a large company, including ambition, humility and tenacity. It offers less on how leadership needs to change — and is changing — in a world rocked by political, social and technological divisions. D’Aquino got a glimpse of that future in his final months at the helm, when Stephen Harper and his ministers began telling business leaders that Ottawa was about to change, and the Rideau Club would no longer be a nexus of power.

More than a decade later, the debate rages over the public and private role of perceived gatekeepers. The distance between Ottawa and Bay Street may be shorter, thanks to the Business Council and others. But the distance between both places and Main Street may be greater, posing a new challenge for a new generation seeking to balance private power and public purpose.

John Stackhouse, Senior Vice President in the Office of the CEO of RBC, is also a Senior Fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute and at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Globe and Mail, and author of several books, including Planet Canada: How Our Expats Are Shaping the Future (Penguin Random House, 2021).