More likely, the decision to take a pass on Wireless Spring emanated from the fact that business, like life, abhors a vacuum. Verizon had more predictable places in which to forage for profit. In Canada, policy often looks sketchy and ad hoc, hardly a confidence builder even if it may favour your interests at a given moment. Indeed, the failure of this attempted consumer revolution from above is replete with lessons for those who care about growth, innovation and jobs, and the limited but essential role government and policy still play.
Youth unemployment has Canadian parents believing their children will be worse off than them. The CBC recently conducted an interview with a fictional unpaid intern who has worked his way up his company over 35 years, at each step being told the experience will be good for him. The satire hit home. Manufacturing is sickly. Auto investment is going south, literally. We lost one global technology champion with Nortel and appear in the process of losing another with BlackBerry. We have turned to the hurry-up offence in a late-game bid to secure oil markets in the United States and develop outlets to other countries. And irony of ironies, the premier of Alberta, not the prime minister of Canada, has been the prime mover behind a national energy strategy.
With exceptions such as the drive to rebalance the budget, ours is a government that dabbles in economic policy, often with little consistency, coherence or conviction. Telecom is just a recent manifestation. Policy has been predicated on a simple — and simplistic — proposition: introduce a fourth player in the market and prices will plummet. The government has been at it since greasing the wheels for Mobilicity and Wind in 2008. In the case of Wind, it went so far as to ignore the law of the land on foreign ownership but not so far as to change the law, which would have opened the protected sector to U.S. competitors.
This internally contradictory approach ultimately produced two weaklings — and little discernible consumer benefit. This time out, the government was prepared to give a preferred place at the table to a U.S. giant, still without changing ownership rules. Verizon opted out, knocking yet another hole in the fourth player policy.
Once they beat down the deficit, the Liberals focused their economic policy on supporting the building blocks of the knowledge economy through creation of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canada Research Chairs, etc. The Harper government has turned instead to energy and trade as its priorities. The former has been a well-documented jumble, culminating in a Keystone XL pipeline file that could have been managed by the Keystone cops themselves.
On trade, a four-year quest to reach a deal with a weakened European Union teeters with little notice, an effort so uninspired as to prompt one of its patrons, former Quebec premier Jean Charest, to wonder whether the government “is putting enough resources into this.” While completing deals with the likes of Colombia, Panama and Jordan, the proportion of Canadian exports covered by FTAs has actually fallen in recent years. That’s because we blow hot and cold on critical Asia. We stumbled out of the gate with Korea; talks with Japan and India are preliminary and challenged; we came late to the Trans-Pacific Partnership; and the government remains hesitant to fully grasp China’s outstretched hand. Just as perplexing, little effort is made, in a need-to-know political culture, to nurture public and business support the way Brian Mulroney did with the original FTA.
Peter Harder, a former deputy minister of industry and foreign affairs and current president of the Canada-China Business Council, has observed that with our European partners devastated after the Second World War, Canadian leaders realized the future lay in North America. Government policy promoted all kinds of hard and soft infrastructure: the St. Lawrence Seaway, pipelines, electrical grids, an auto pact, interconnected highways, bilateral talk shops.
Now with Asia on the rise, who is the modern C.D. Howe shaping the policy, preparing the politics, making the case? Where’s the requisite consistency, coherence and conviction?
No comments:
Post a Comment