Can Canada pull up its socks?

Published in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, July 4, the Trail Daily Times, July 9, the Nanaimo News Bulletin and Flin Flon Reminder, July 11, the Windsor Star, July 24, the Yorkton News Review, July 17, the Red Deer Advocate, August 20, the Sylvan Lake News, August 25, and the Flin Flon Reminder, August 29, 2008

By Dr. Roslyn Kunin
Senior Fellow
Director - BC Office
Canada West Foundation

Dr. Roslyn Kunin There is a story about a Canadian and an American crabbing in the Pacific Ocean just at the international border opposite Peach Arch Park. They each collect a pail of crabs. The American carefully covers his pail and starts to walk away when he notices that the Canadian has not put a lid on his pail. “Better cover that”, he calls “or all the crabs will climb out and crawl away.” “Oh, no,” the Canadian replied. “These are Canadian crabs. If anyone gets too high, the others will pull him down.”

I was reminded of this story after reading the recent Conference Board of Canada report How Canada Performs 2008: A Report Card on Canada.

The Conference Board rates Canada on the economy, innovation, environment, education and skills, health, and society. No grade is better than B and Canada does not even have to be in the top half of the 17 countries rated to get this B grade. The environment rates a C and innovation gets a pathetic D.

That D in innovation is bad enough on its own and even worse when we consider that the lack of innovation is seriously hurting our economy. Innovation is what gives business its competitive edge by providing new products and services and by increasing our productivity. Productivity (output per worker) not only helps our economy thrive; it is also what generates our incomes and our standard of living. No company can afford to pay a worker an income greater than what that worker produces. If they tried to do so, they would go out of business.

And Canada’s productivity has been lagging the United States and other countries for decades. For several years we hid from this bad news behind a lower Canadian dollar. Currently, high resource prices shield us. Over the longer term, will we become more innovative, more competitive and more productive or will we take a nice, complacent, Canadian way out and settle down to “enjoy” a slow, continuous erosion of our absolute and relative standard of living.

Several steps are needed to reach a positive and productive outcome. We are already well on the path to achieving the first step which is to educate our workers. Canada is not doing badly in providing post-secondary education to its population. Certainly we could use more people in fields related to mathematics, science and technology. Certainly we can do better keeping up the skills of adult workers. Use it or lose it most definitely applies to training of all kinds. Even literacy skills, if they are not exercised, start declining after a few years away from the classroom.

The second step is to inculcate an entrepreneurial spirit into the Canadian workforce, especially among younger people . We need people who can ask and answer the question; What good or service can I provide that people are willing and able to pay for? We need people who are willing to invest the time and the effort that a successful business demands. We need those who are not afraid of failure. We need the attitude of Thomas Edison. After his first few hundred attempts had failed to produce a working incandescent bulb, he was told that he had wasted his time. “No, I haven’t,” was his response. “I now know a thousand ways of how not to make a light bulb.”

We have many Canadians who were or are now in business programs. Unfortunately, too many of the programs and the students aim at jobs doing on-going work in existing large organizations. Canada has relatively few of these large companies and most innovation comes from smaller, newer firms.

Nevertheless, there are still many creative, new firms in Canada—at least for a while. In a phenomenon bemoaned by the Business Development Bank of Canada which encourages many such firms, we see too many new companies reach the brink of global success and then yield to foreign take-over and/or leave the country because we do not have enough of the kind of entrepreneurial, executive talent to take our leading edge firms onto the world stage.

The third and probably most important step for Canada to become a rising star in the world economy is to cultivate a culture of success. The good Canadian value of fairness has often resulted in our undervaluing success. For example, some people connected to high schools in Vancouver expressed reluctance to introduce mentoring programs to encourage students to enter the trades and technology. Why? Because such mentoring would not be available to all the students.

Canada needs more success and more heroes to impersonate it. We need to set ambitious goals and not fear the failures that may get in the way. Take the great Canadian hero, Terry Fox. He set an amazing goal and even though he did not get as far as he had hoped, no one would describe what he has accomplished as anything other than a wonderful success. We can apply the Terry Fox spirit to our economy, our businesses and our country. Then just watch us soar.

The Canada West Foundation’s Going for Gold Project is exploring policy options for making Canada more competitive in the international economy.

Keywords: Roslyn Kunin, Canada West Foundation, competition, heroes, creativity, innovation, Conference Board of Canada

News Beats: Business, Political