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.
Will we simply hope that our raw materials will sustain our prosperity? Or do we need to become aggressively proactive in building a new knowledge-based economy? The latter will take much greater effort than has been deployed so far.
In particular, we need to invest in innovation and build a new generation of large Canadian firms that have scale and scope for global success, with high-paying jobs for workers and wealth generation to sustain and improve public services.
Boosting skilled trades is critical to many of the Carney government’s plans to reinvent our economy. Carney has said that, by 2033, Canada will need more than 1.4 million new trades workers ‘to build homes, expand transit and develop energy infrastructure across the country.’
The federal government is becoming a shareholder in many Canadian firms as it seeks the capital it needs to build planned projects or launch new technologies.
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.