Rogers v. Rogers is a play about oligarchs and oligopolies. In its sold out world premier run at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto (and soon coming to Winnipeg), the show has brought audiences inside the Rogers Communications board room and somehow made the Competition Bureau of Canada interesting. A biting satire that provides a fictionalized retelling of the boardroom politics surrounding Edward Rogers’ haphazard takeover of his father’s company amidst the company’s takeover of Shaw. In a virtuosic performance, Tom Rooney stars in the one-act, one-man play as several members of the Rogers Family and the Rogers board, as well as competition commissioner Matthew Boswell, who tries to stop the Shaw takeover. While the imbecilic antics of the Rogers clan provides much of the fodder for laughs throughout the show, the play also manages to level a devastating critique of Canadian capitalism.
Monopoly capitalism on-stage
Canada’s telecommunications market is notoriously uncompetitive, with three companies – Bell, Rogers, and Telus – dominating the landscape. The lack of competition leads to sky-high prices and awful service quality. Whom among us has not been ready to punch a wall after spending several hours on the phone getting nowhere with Rogers? The play deftly explains how the lack of choice in the telecom industry mirrors lack of choice in other industries – from groceries to banking – thus leaving Canadians worse off all around.
There is a word for this type of market domination: oligopoly. When people don’t have a real alternative to the small number of companies that dominate an industry, those companies have no incentive to lower prices or provide better services. Oligopolies, like monopolies, are likely to form in industries that have high barriers to entry, preventing new companies from offering a better alternative. Like cartels, oligopolies corner a sector and determine the terms on which the public can access the goods or services in question. This leads to enshittification and to $4 tomatoes.
Rogers v. Rogers importantly frames the issue as one of freedom. While we usually look to the government when considering how free we are, Rooney’s interpretation of the competition commissioner notes that we, in fact, interact with corporations far more than we interact with government. And as private equity firms scoop up small businesses and affordable rental units we begin to live and die at the whims of a force beyond our control: capital. The play thus taps into a frustration that is deeply felt and that socialists must agitate.
The path forward
Of course, freedom does not merely mean having a dozen telecom companies instead of three. As socialists, we know that freedom means a transformation of society away from the logic of capital, instead towards services—like telecom and grocery stores—that are owned and operated by workers. It would democratise decisions currently made by the bumbling Rogers board room pilloried in the play, allowing us to make collective decisions about supply chains and environmental impact in a truly democratic fashion. Only under socialism can utilities like telecom serve the masses of people who use it, instead of being a ‘money-hose’ (as the play puts it) for the Rogers family.
Rogers v. Rogers comes at a time when Avi Lewis is running for leadership of the federal NDP on a platform that includes public telecom and grocery stores. Avi’s plan doesn’t go nearly far enough in the type of worker-led democratic control that would be truly transformational, but perhaps it’s a sign that something better is on the horizon. Hopefully, the play’s smashing success shows that these issues are resonant and that the nationalization of oligopolists, like Rogers and Loblaws, could become attainable.
Though Rogers v. Rogers does not lay out such a grand vision for what freedom actually looks like, it does—with great humour—show precisely what’s wrong with contemporary Canadian capitalism and hapless nepo-baby oligarchs, like Edward Rogers, who run it. What the play lacks in vision, it makes up for in indignant optimism and the belief that another Canada is possible.
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