Public Enterprise as an Expression of Sovereignty: Reconsidering the Origin of Canadian National Railways* ANTHONY PERL University of Calgary Canada's Railway Nationalization: Economic Necessity or Political Initiative? Among the great Canadian railway myths that have achieved an un- deserved status of conventional wisdom, one in particular deserves crit- ical reappraisal by political scientists. We take it for granted that Can- ada's government inaugurated modern public enterprise in the form of a nationwide crown corporation due to economic necessity, because there was simply no alternative that could have refinanced insolvent firms like the Canadian Northern (CNoR), Grand Trunk Railway (GT) and Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP). This myth was given credence by an earlier generation of transportation historians, who made claims such as "The people of Canada had not launched into this great expansion of public ownership by design, but from the pressure of existing facts ... [and] on the whole [public enterprise] was undertaken with no enthusi- asm, and from necessity rather than from choice." 1 The Canadian Na- tional Railway's official history echoed the claim of economic inevita- bility, stating that Sir Robert Borden's government had been "ragged and badgered into public ownership by circumstances beyond their * This article was written during a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support (Grant #756-93-0194). Ian Drummond, Roger Gibbins, Ronald Manzer, Louis Pauly, Garth Stevenson, Carolyn Tuohy and the anonymous reviewers of the JOURNAL each offered valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. 1 George P. Glazebrook, A History of Transportation in Canada, Vol. 2 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964), 176-77. Anthony Perl, Department of Political Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4 Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, XXVII: 1 (March/mars 1994). Printed in Canada / Imprint au Canada