Travel this country enough and you’ll come to the conclusion that as Canadians we’re a kind, caring people with an enviable standard of living. This is true….but for the manufacturing sector, we’re also one of the most underperforming nations on the planet.
In terms of industry and technology, Canada just drips with irony. The classic example is of course the Avro Arrow, a legendary case of Canadian small-think that simultaneously dropped us out of the high-performance aerospace industry and gave NASA lots of talent to put a man on the moon.
We design a world-class nuclear reactor technology, then deliver the product consistently late and over budget, opening the door to serious competitors from the US and Europe who can deliver high performance reactors with cost/performance guarantees.
We build pipelines to carry crude oil across the border to be refined into value-added products instead of building an Alberta-based large-scale refining/petrochemical industry. We don’t even have a national pipeline system that runs across the country.
We have a dysfunctional national transportation system that makes it more expensive to fly from Toronto to Charlottetown, PEI than to Miami, Florida. Canada has no high-speed rail. In the economically vital Highway 401 spanning the “Golden Horseshoe” in Southern Ontario, freight and people can sit for hours in what has become an all-day traffic jam.
Despite a national telecommunications regulator, Canadians pay some of the highest cell phone/Internet data rates in the industrialized world, and get lousy service to boot. We negotiate an FTA with the US but maintain crazy inter-provincial trade and taxation regulations.
We congratulate ourselves on banks that avoided the CDO insanity that trashed the US financial industry, yet say nothing when manufacturing operations can’t get operating credit because lenders would rather fund foreign companies to buy out our indigenous firms.
Governments at all levels hand truckloads of cash inducements to major players to get and keep manufacturing jobs in Canada, then continue to saddle young and growing companies with a crushing weight of taxes and regulations. We have shortages of skilled labour, then cut education and training funding. It is, in a word, nuts.
The good news, however, is that it’s fixable. What it will take is a national industrial strategy along the lines of Japan and Korea, anchored with an affordable education system that actually trains young people for industry.
Scrap our apprenticeship programs and look at the German model. Tax non-value added speculative sectors of the economy at higher rates than manufacturing. Use the income tax system to make sure that scientists and engineers have relative incomes appropriate to their importance in society. Drastically simplify corporate accounting and tax rules so small shop owners can retake control of their finances from big dollar accountants and still have time to innovate.
I could go on, but you get the point. The only things that have real economic value are things you can hold in your hand….that’s manufacturing. We’re sleepwalking into second-rate status, the sink rate hidden by our vast natural resource base.
This isn’t an issue of political Left versus Right, or rich and poor, it’s about whether we want to be a manufacturing country twenty years from now. E-mail or call your MLA and MP. Make some noise. Watch the business press and vote sensibly, regardless of party affiliation. We can’t afford a string of Avro Arrows.
Jim Anderton is editor of Canadian metalworking magazine. Click here to send comments to Jim.
