Me, Myself & Inc.

by Anthony Marco

One of the greatest hypocrisies in modern law is the way corporations are treated as individuals. Courts have granted corporations the legal rights of “personhood” when it comes to contracts, property, and liability. Yet when it comes to accountability about crimes that destroy lives, communities, and ecosystems, corporations enjoy a protection that no actual human being could ever hope for.

If an individual robs a bank, they are swiftly arrested, prosecuted, and locked away. But if a corporation launders money through offshore tax havens, manipulates its books to avoid billions in taxes, or pushes financial schemes that devastate livelihoods, the worst it faces is a fine or a penalty that, more often than not, is simply written off as the cost of doing business.

If you or I dumped toxic waste into a river, poisoning families downstream, we would be in handcuffs before we could rinse the chemicals off our hands. Yet when major corporations commit environmental atrocities, the executives face no jail time and the companies negotiate settlements that barely scratch their profits.

The Canadian context alone establishes this double standard. SNC-Lavalin, an engineering giant, was implicated in massive international bribery and corruption scandals. If an ordinary person were caught bribing a government official, they would be hauled before the courts and face the real prospect of jail. Yet SNC-Lavalin lobbied its way into a deferred prosecution agreement, a sweetheart deal that allowed it to avoid the harshest penalties while continuing to bid on lucrative government contracts. The company walked away bruised but not broken, while individuals in similar circumstances would have had their lives upended.

Imperial Oil’s catastrophic Kearl tailings pond leaks in Alberta released millions of litres of toxic waste into the environment. Downstream, many First Nations and Métis communities in the Fort Chipewyan area, were left with poisoned water and shattered trust. If a farmer or small business owner had contaminated drinking water in this way, they would be facing criminal negligence charges. Yet Imperial faces nothing more than regulatory probes and promises of remediation that will take decades, if they ever materialize. Meanwhile, executives collect bonuses for “strong performance.”

The bread price-fixing scandal is another glaring example of corporate misconduct, collusion and fraud. Several of Canada’s largest bread producers and retailers were found to have colluded to artificially inflate prices, cheating consumers across the country. These companies simply paid fines (often a fraction of their profits) and carried on with business as usual. This kind of behaviour harms everyday Canadians, especially those for whom the price of basic food staples is a real concern, and yet the corporations responsible face little more than a slap on the wrist.

We see the same pattern with arms manufacturers. Canadian companies have exported billions in weapons to countries with appalling human rights records, most notoriously the sale of armoured vehicles and weapons into conflict zones. If an individual knowingly supplied weapons to a regime that used them to massacre civilians, they would be branded a criminal and charged under international law. Yet when a corporation does the same thing under the banner of “business,” it is protected by trade agreements and government contracts. Ottawa even defends these deals in court and cloaks them in the language of “jobs” and “economic growth.” The result is that corporations profit while civilians abroad pay the ultimate price in blood.

Even in the realm of tax avoidance, the hypocrisy is glaring. The Panama Papers and Paradise Papers revealed how Canadian corporations and wealthy elites quietly funneled billions offshore. When an ordinary Canadian fails to file their taxes properly, the Canada Revenue Agency comes down hard with penalties, garnishments, and threats of prosecution. But the multinationals who hide money in shell companies are more likely to receive a negotiated settlement than a prison sentence.

And here’s another angle, admittedly a bit tangential but revealing: if corporations are supposedly individuals under the law, why don’t they pay the same tax rates as actual individuals? The average Canadian worker can face a marginal tax rate of over 40 percent. Corporations, on the other hand, often pay an effective rate much lower than the statutory 15 percent federal rate, thanks to deductions, loopholes, and offshore havens. A so-called “individual” who hoards billions in profits yet pays less in taxes than a nurse or a construction worker is not an equal citizen. It’s a parasite protected by policy. If we are going to accept this legal fiction that corporations are people, then fairness demands they carry the same tax burden as the rest of us. But of course, they never will, because the fiction was designed to privilege them, not to treat them as equals.

Workplace safety tells the same story. After the 2009 Vale Inco strike in Sudbury, attention briefly shone on how resource corporations slash costs by cutting corners on safety and staffing. Tragic accidents in mining and construction have claimed workers’ lives, yet prosecutions under Canada’s “Westray Law” (meant to hold executives criminally accountable for workplace deaths) are vanishingly rare. If an individual homeowner ignored basic safety and a worker died on their property, charges would follow. But for corporations, the law is often nothing more than an inconvenience.

This is the kind of fiction that only the wealthy and powerful could invent. Corporations are “people” when they want the protection of limited liability, when they want the freedom to lobby government officials behind closed doors, and when they want to escape responsibility by pointing to shareholders or “the market” as the decision-makers. But when it comes to moral responsibility, they retreat into their corporate shell, arguing that no one person can be blamed for systemic harm. Imagine if you tried that defence in court: “Your Honour, it wasn’t me who committed the crime… it was my job, my position, my role within a larger structure.” No judge would buy it. Yet for corporations, this is the legal norm.

If we really believed corporations were people, then they would face criminal consequences when they commit crimes. Executives would face jail time, boards of directors would lose their liberty as well as their reputations, and companies found guilty of gross negligence or mass fraud would be dismantled the way a criminal organization is dismantled. Instead, the “personhood” of corporations is a one-way street. They are people when they want protection, but ghosts when justice comes knocking.

And this is no accident. It is not a flaw in the system but the system functioning exactly as it was designed. Capitalism elevates profit above people, so of course it extends legal rights to corporations while stripping responsibility away from those who profit most. The corporate “individual” is the perfect capitalist invention: it exists to accumulate wealth, avoid punishment, and protect those who exploit workers and communities from accountability. To expect corporations to behave like citizens is to misunderstand their role. They are not fellow travellers in a democratic society, they are engines of profit, and their survival depends on pushing past ethical limits.

That is why the hypocrisy of corporate personhood will never be resolved inside capitalism. It is not a bug to be fixed but a feature of the system itself. If we want laws that treat all people equally, that punish harm and reward contribution, we cannot rely on capitalism’s corporate fiction. We must be prepared to confront the system that created it. Only then will justice stop bending itself to the will of entities that claim to be people while acting like predators.

Reprinted from The Rad Comrade.