I was listening to the CBC last week on the way home from work. Former New Brunswick Premier and Ambassador to the United States Frank McKenna was being interviewed on the issue of "innovation" and the "innovation economy".
It was interesting to listen to what he had to say, mostly because of a radio clip that the host played from 1993 in which Mr. McKenna said that we needed to shift from a resource based economy to a more integrated economy across the country.
Here we are, 20 years later, with a resource economy with Mr. McKenna essentially saying that our lack of innovation has led to a lower standard of living and quality of life. We have fallen behind the rest of the world. We still have an economy where we are hewers of wood, drawers of water, and I would add "pumpers of oil".
It is the latter which is perhaps the most topical.
There are a number of reasons why we, in British Columbia, should be opposed to the Northern Gateway Pipeline. The environmental issues alone suggest that this is not a project worth pursuing.
Add in the way that we are being fed dribs and drabs to try and buy our support - we are now being told the pipeline "will create 500 permanent jobs" and they will "all be in B.C." - and it is enough to offend anyone.
Then there are the local events that Enbridge is now sponsoring. Getting the Enbridge brand out there in the community is the way that their marketing gurus would frame it. But the real question is what happens to these events when Enbridge no longer needs to buy our goodwill?
No, the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline is not a good deal for northern British Columbia just as it stands now.
However, a fundamentally more important question is should we be exporting raw petroleum at all? Should we be simply a resource basket where other countries can come and buy what they need to make the products that they then sell back to us?
It is not just the oil industry but mining, forestry, agriculture and a host of other areas that we seem to be willing to provide the world with the raw materials and buy back the finished goods.
In the case of the Northern Gateway, the petroleum will go to fuelling the jobs that we are losing at home. By any measure, manufacturing in North America is on the decline. Jobs are being shifted to low wage-and-benefit economies.
Indeed, whole industries appear to be moving out of North America and migrating to Asia. And our response is to provide these economies with the raw materials to keep expanding. To grow their innovation economies at the expense of our own. Not a particularly smart strategy.
Don't get me wrong. I am not an isolationist. I am not suggesting that we should throw up a wall around the country and not allow anything in or out. That sort of isolationism has been tried and it has failed miserably every time.
There is no doubt that the way forward is through world trade. However, that doesn't mean that we need to trade raw materials. Logs, ores, oil and other commodities could be processed here and sold to other countries at an increased value. Surely it makes more sense to get every penny out of our resources that we can.
And, ironically, it would decrease the inherent environmental risks. Shipping lumber takes less energy than shipping logs. Shipping metal is easier than shipping ore. Shipping gasoline is less risky than shipping oil.
Shipping finish goods is much better for our domestic economy than shipping raw materials.
And it will drive innovation which, in turn, will increase the quality of life in this country.
Consider, for example, a domestic economy where wind turbines were built in B.C. to create wind farms. We could be a world leader in renewable energy with expertise that could then see us competing in the world market.
We could be leading but, instead, we are busy digging up raw materials that other countries are then using to make wind turbines that they sell back to us - at a profit.
The argument has been made that by selling oil to China, we will decrease their reliance on coal and that this will be better for the global environment. The flaw in that argument is that electrical power stations don't run on oil. They use coal or natural gas. It makes sense to export natural gas to China.
But diluted bitumen? No. Let us finally develop the domestic industries that will produce a refined product here instead of there. That should be our way forward instead of just selling our resources.
