David Crane
David Crane is an award-winning journalist with special interests in the economics of globalization, innovation, sustainable development and social equity.
David Crane is an award-winning journalist with special interests in the economics of globalization, innovation, sustainable development and social equity.
Mark Carney plans to invite the world’s largest investors to a summit in Toronto in September to ‘advance Canada’s nation-building projects.’ But we need to be more than a branch-plant economy.
The problem, as Savvas Chamberlain, founder of one of Canada’s most successful tech companies, sees it, is that Canada is not creating the innovation-led, high-productivity economy needed to boost living standards.
We need to move our economic ties to China beyond traditional exports to the knowledge-based industries of the future. Understanding the latest five-year plan is a good place to start.
But the bigger question is: if the auto industry is not a growth driver for Canada, what will replace it? The answer is not oil and gas. This is where we need much greater thinking and acting.
The war against Iran will almost certainly accelerate the transition from a fossil-fuel economy to an electricity economy, reinforced by continuing concerns over future geopolitical threats and by the potential for future technological advance, as well as by the growing threat to global well-being from climate change.
With pressures from outside threats to our Arctic sovereignty from Russia, China, and the United States, as well as worries about the disappearance of polar bears and other impacts from climate change, we can now see that we must become an Arctic nation.
Prime Minister Mark Carney could at least give Canadians a better sense of what lies ahead, what we have to do, and who will do it. This would combine leadership and accountability, both desirable and necessary.
This is only the beginning of a long and challenging journey for a new Canada. Success will take much more work.
Increases in federal R&D spending and new initiatives through the Bureau of Research, Engineering and Advanced Leadership in Innovation and Science—BOREALIS—are important. The strategy also promises $4-billion in new venture funding through the Business Development Bank of Canada.
The new strategy is based on a recognition that past processes on defence procurement have been a failure—this time has to be different. Government itself has to become a better and smarter customer.
We are living through one of those periods in human history where change and the tensions from change can overwhelm. Coping with change—with creative destruction—can be hugely rewarding. But getting policy right is the challenge.
Mark Carney is not abandoning CUSMA. But Donald Trump’s ego demands ‘wins,’ and Carney has promised to sign a deal only if it is ‘good for Canada.’ So Canada must be prepared to walk away if Trump’s demands would make us the 51st state in all but name. The immediate result would be costly, with a recession, affecting everything from the job market to the Canadian dollar. Much will depend on how well we are proceeding with Carney’s efforts for ‘strategic autonomy’ and the options generated. But it can be managed.
Every dollar U.S. Big Tech can extract from Canada makes America richer and U.S. Big Tech more powerful—while making Canada more dependent on U.S. Big Tech giants and more vulnerable to their laws. And the more powerful U.S. Big Tech becomes here, the less the potential to build up Canadian firms and generate wealth and good jobs for Canada.
So while Mark Carney’s efforts to develop new markets and new partnerships around the world matter, without a corresponding effort to boost Canadian innovation and support our ambitious entrepreneurs in building and growing new companies, the new market opportunities won’t lead to new exports and investments.
Canada is, by far, the U.S. auto industry’s largest export market and the cross-border value chains have worked well for all three countries. So CUSMA may continue. But how far are we prepared to go at the expense of other sectors and regions in Canada?
Our test is to prove him wrong, and not sacrifice the future for the present.