Alex Wood, senior director, Policy and Markets for Sustainable Prosperity, wrote an insightful article for the National Post recently.
It caught my eye because it was tagged with the line: "It is not too much of a caricature to say that we sell the Americans and Chinese the raw materials they need to create technology to sell back to us."
No. That is definitely not a gross overstatement of the case. Indeed, if you add a few more countries to the mix - such as Japan and Korea - it is a very accurate portrayal of the Canadian economy.
We don't innovate. We buy.
Mr. Wood's starting point was a consideration of two speeches. The first was Prime Minister Harper's address in Davos. The second was President Obama's State of the Union speech to Congress.
In Mr. Harper's speech, he declared that for Canada (read: the Conservatives) it will be a "national priority to ensure we have the capacity to export our energy products beyond the United States and specifically to Asia."
In Mr. Harper's world, energy is a commodity that should be traded and exported. It is a thing. And Mr. Harper would like to sell our energy to the world because that will somehow bring prosperity at home, although Robyn Allan's recent report would dispute that.
Mr. Obama, on the other hand, spoke of oil development and decreasing foreign dependency but he also mentioned that having only two per cent of the world's oil reserves wasn't good enough. Not that he had in mind capturing more.
No, Mr. Obama went on to say: "The country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy. A strategy that's cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs."
And there you have it. North of the border, our prime minister is content with business as usual. More oil flowing through more pipelines to more of the world. We should be content to sit on our largess as a resource-rich nation and ride that wave into the future.
South of the border, their president has seen that the wave is running out and that the American relationship with energy needs to change. Indeed, a little later in the speech, Mr. Obama says: "I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same
commitments here."
Time to lead not time to follow. Time to innovate and not simply buy from abroad. Time to develop a workforce of engineers and scientists meeting the nation's energy demands for now and into the future.
Oh, to have a leader with a clear vision of where we would like to be instead of one that simply wants to stay where we are. But that is not the Canadian way. Innovate? We used to. Heck, we are the country that gave the world both insulin therapy and the zipper. But now?
As Mr. Wood said, we ship our raw material around the world so that others can innovate and then sell us the results. And in doing so, we sell ourselves short in so many ways.
More to the point, we sell the next generation short. Increasingly, resource extraction is becoming the job of machines. Machines made in other countries, no less.
The number of workers required per tonne of ore extracted or 1,000 board feet of wood cut has steadily declined over the past 50 years. Resource extraction is critically important to our economy but it is not a growth industry for jobs. Drilling still requires a number of workers but it is hard, dirty work of short duration. Ditto for laying down pipelines. But once construction is over, so are most of the jobs.
We need to be thinking about jobs for the next generation. We are missing the boat here. We need to be encouraging our kids to have a bigger vision than simply working in a mine or cutting down trees.
There is nothing wrong with being a miner or a forester but as the number of workers involved in those industries decreases, what are the rest of the next generation supposed to do? Work at Starbucks, McDonald's, or Burger King?
No. Now is the time for a bold strategy and a commitment to research and development in alternative energy systems that will see Canada lead and not follow. We can not cede our future to others. That is the vision that Mr. Harper should have been articulating at Davos.
Yes, we will sell to Asia but not just raw commodities. We should be selling refined products. Otherwise, when the resource baskets run dry, we will be left holding nothing.
To steal a quote: "We can not predict the future, but we can invent it." Time we started thinking about doing that.
