Ottawa Sun
Published: Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Hope for the future

In last week’s throne speech and budget the Harper government laid out its three-pronged agenda of continued infrastructure funding, spending restraint and a commitment to build the jobs and industries of the future.

While several analysts picked up that the throne speech and budget were financial transitions from short-term Keynesian prime-the-pump spending to medium-term deficit reduction, the more salient, political and next election relevant transition is this focus on implementing policies that help enable the transformation of our economy to adapt and thrive over the next decade to 20 years.

While not an original idea — the Obama administration Council of Economic Advisers was tasked with this challenge last spring — it is welcome and frankly, overdue. Thankfully the Tories dumped the rehashed and somewhat repulsive innovation agenda that was championed by the Chretien-Martin governments and a complicit bureaucracy for over a decade.

While well-intentioned, innovation was the ubiquitous term to underpin every other news release out of Industry Canada and other departments and agencies with their hands in our national economic pie. Even more disconcerting was the mindset that government had a direct role in innovation; for the record, it does not.

Innovation is driven by continual consumer aspiration and demand. Prescient and nimble enterprises — small or large, domestic or foreign — either meet this demand or stagnate and eventually die. And government’s role is best confined to supportive policies and programs that facilitate an environment of pre-competitive R&D into new ideas, protection of intellectual property, competitive tax policy, measured and science-based health and environmental regulations, supporting the education system and protecting a sphere where open discussion can occur between all stakeholders in the marketplace.

The challenge for the federal government will be to move beyond its traditional focus on our agriculture and resource sectors — well-covered in the budget — and do more within the confines of the constraints outlined above in the fields of life sciences, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, telecommunications, robotics, and nanotechnology.

In this realm, there is an opening for the Ignatieff Liberals to exploit should the Conservative government fail to move comprehensively with sectoral policies for these industries.

This could be a fascinating and engaging policy debate if the opposition parties (and the government) have the maturity to stay focused on the big picture as opposed to their collective record of drowning in the trivial fluff and bluster that too often dominates question period, parliamentary committees and then is sadly rebroadcast across all media.

Finally, as part of this debate, political and industry leaders must be honest with the Canadians who have lost their jobs in our sunset sectors like auto, shipbuilding and 20th-century manufacturing; those jobs aren’t coming back.

The last 50 years of Canadian industrial policy is littered with failed regional development and jobs schemes like propping up polluting coal mines, training fishers for hair salon jobs or throwing wads of taxpayer cash at dubious museums and fountains for a few votes in the next election.

This history only serves to reinforce why a plan and focus on emergent industries and lifelong learning should be our dominant national interest. It offers real hope for the future.