We held a conference the other day in Toronto that got me thinking about the limits of policy making. It was put together by Northern Ontario Business’ sister company, ITWorldCanada. The meeting brought together the top CIOs (chief information officers) in Canada. The purpose was to help them get to know one another, share best practices, and begin to consider how to have more influence in their corporations and, more broadly, with policy making at the provincial and federal levels.
One of our speakers was John Manley, who spent a considerable
amount of time as deputy prime minister in the Jean
Chrétien government, and at various times was our finance
minister, foreign minister and minister of Industry Canada.
His first love and, I think, most effective contribution was at
Industry Canada where he took the question of “innovation
and Canadian competitiveness” very seriously and made
some initial progress.
In 1993 he became Industry minister and in 1994 produced a
document called Building a More Innovative economy.
He can take credit for ensuring that Canada was the first
jurisdiction in the world to have all of our schools and libraries
connected to the Internet. He spoke tirelessly about the need for
increased productivity and was a part of an administration that
increased federal government support for research and development
substantially. It is still a passion of his.
The sad reality, however, is that Canada, even after all this
effort, is slipping badly on the productivity front. The former
minister listed sufficient metrics to prove the point 10 times
over. I’ll give you a snippet.
In 2003 and 2004 growth per output in the business sector in
Canada was essentially zero.
In the United States, the growth has been 3.5 percent a year
since 2000. We are 25 percentage points behind the United States,
and we are ranked 17th among the top 30 industrial nations.
A prime indicator on productivity is our investment in
information and communications technologies (ICTs). In Canada we
invest less than half of what they do in the United States on a
per-worker basis.
This is a failure that cannot be put at the foot of government.
It is a failure of the business culture in Canada, one that has
been protected by a low Canadian dollar for a generation. By now
(if you are still with me) you are thinking “I know all
of this!!”
The other thing you are thinking is that this is one of the most
boring columns I’ve written in a while. You are right on
both counts. Productivity is not sexy. It is not a problem like
global warming where we can point to hurricanes and floods and say
I told you so with a film at 11. It is not like George’s
War or Canada’s peacemaking (as opposed to peacekeeping)
missions, which include death and conflict.
I don’t think talking about macro productivity is very
useful. To begin with it is disconnected from life, and secondly it
doesn’t differentiate between stupid productivity and
smart productivity. To be relevant, this discussion has to be tied
to communities of interest and productivity needs to be tied to
common sense.
Stupid productivity is getting the unit cost of a log so low you
can send it to the Japanese and they will send it back as
furniture. Smart productivity is understanding the true value of
maximizing a resource with innovative and productive value and
components. This comes from a conscious business culture.
Stupid productivity is getting the unit cost of a high-polluting
car so low we can all afford to help choke ourselves to death.
Smart productivity is building a green car first and efficiently.
Stupid productivity is scraping the bottom of the ocean floor
with huge trawlers that cut the cost of fish and destroy the
ability of nature to recreate. This kind of productivity kills you.
All roads lead to education. We need science and engineering to be productive and liberal arts to help us consider the impact of what we do.
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This column is reprinted from Northern Ontario Business. Michael Atkins is president of Laurentian Media, publisher of Northern Life. He can be reached at [email protected].