Open for Business is out of print but is available from many libraries and for purchase from Amazon and other sites. I will soon put the full text on this website and in the public domain.

Mel Watkins, a pre-eminent staples theorist, wrote the following about Open for
Business:

"The premise of Open for Business is “that Canada was significantly
industrialized, or at least well launched on that path, prior to the emergence of significant
foreign ownership. Why, then, was so much foreign ownership thought necessary?
Comparative study shows, that the reason was less the complicity of the Canadian
business class (the staple argument of political economists) than the fragmented character of the agrarian class; relative to the domestic social formation, Canadian capital was not too weak, but too strong. Full-blown indigenous (sic) industrialization requires more than a strong business class; it also requires a strong push from below, from popular democratic forces, insisting on such things as a better banking system and restrictions on foreign ownership, to which capital and the capitalist state have creatively to respond.

That mostly means farmers historically, but in Canada (a.k.a. British North America)
their populist discontent was all too easily labelled pro-American and disloyal, and
anyway they never quite got their act together nationally in considerable part because of
English-French tensions”.

In effect, Laxer argues that Canadian political economy, left-leaning though it is, has
been too elitist oriented, to the neglect of proper allowance for popular democratic forces. Laxer insists that Canada’s failure to cut the umbilical cord with Britain militated against the development of an independent armaments industry with linkages into engineering and machine production. This is potent stuff, about how colonial-mindedness becomes, intentionally or otherwise, pervasive, and the superior alternative, of independent industrialization, suppressed. The problem was not too much economic nationalism, as orthodox scholarship alleges, but too little."

Watkins’ book review in the Canadian Historical Review 1990.