THE PRIME MINISTER’S HANDYMAN COMPLEX
MacGyver was very resourceful: give him a wad of chewing gum and a few paper clips, and in a pinch he could improvise the Large Hadron Collider. Likewise, the professor on Gilligan’s Island: with a couple of coconut shells, turtle droppings and a shoe lace, he could cobble together a short-wave radio. Handymen are naturally resourceful — it’s what makes them handy. If there’s a job to be done, and they don’t have the proper materials to do it, they work with what they’ve got. They patch things up. They splice, modify and invent. And, of course, they lean heavily on duct tape.
Resourceful has a range of meanings. The most common one, however, is ingenious, inventive under pressure, possessing the imaginative power to overcome a lack of ( proper) resources. In a nutshell, you have to be resourceful when you don’t have resources. It’s not a choice in that circumstance — hence the proverb, “necessity is the mother of invention.”
Thus I was puzzled when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, building on his presence at the historic Paris Conclave a few weeks ago (which saved the world) and presenting at the Davos summit this week (which will merely improve our rescued world), offered this rhetorical crackerjack: “My predecessor wanted you to know Canada for its resources. I want you to know Canadians for our resourcefulness.” ( The Trudeau years are going to be great for the T- shirt and bumper-sticker scribes.)
The first difficulty with his statement is that it suggests there is a problem with having, you know, resources. If a country has an abundance of wheat, timber, coal, minerals, fish, oil, gas, farmland and livestock, and the work ethic to go along with making the most of them (this too is a great resource), then the usual response is “hallelujah” or “thank God.”
Further, if a country is so providentially supplied, I can see no reason for any prime minister to play down that fact at Davos, or any other elite ski resort, for that matter. Trudeau’s toasty epigram more than implied that it’s a little tacky to actually have resources, when we can see how clever and resourceful we can be without them. It calls up an idea of Canada as a nation of Robinson Crusoes abandoned on a barren strand, patching stuff together from whatever could be salvaged from an offshore wreck.
The second difficulty is a more serious one, for it implies that hav- ing great natural resources means we do not need to use our powers of ingenuity, inventiveness and creativity in the development of those resources. Just because we are not forced to be resourceful, does not mean we may not, or do not, exercise high resourcefulness in the harvesting and development of those resources. The possession of natural resources does not contradict or suspend, as Trudeau’s semantic manoeuvring would have it, the powers of re- sourcefulness in the people — engineers, farmers, loggers, miners, fishermen and oil workers — who exploit those resources.
Oil that’s located 200 miles offshore, and fathoms under the turbulent and chill North Atlantic waters, does not roll ashore on its own. The magnificent offshore oil platforms that summon it from under the seabed do not build themselves. Minerals do not just pop out of the ground on a wish, refine themselves and then walk to the nearest subsidized GM plant in southern Ontario. And — surprise, surprise — even windmills do not collect their own materials and build themselves. All require the resourcefulness of the people working in that particular industry.
Economist and Post columnist Stephen Gordon, stirred by the prime minister’s words, this week let loose a trio of tweets, with commendable panache, on essentially this very point. With twitterian terseness he texted: “It takes resourcefulness to extract resources"; “Extracting crude from the oil sands requires an insanely elevated level of engineering skills. It’s not like picking $$ from trees"; “Trudeau is buying into the Jed Clampett trope: resource extraction is something any dimwitted yob could do.”
The Clampett reference is particularly telling. There is in this government’s dismissal or underplaying of the value and intelligence that goes into resource development, a strain of disdain for the ordinary, the common, the tried and useful. And, to coin a phrase, a leaning in to the flashy and trendy. After all, why flee to the altitudes of the Swiss Alps and bend Bono’s ear with talk of oil prices and disappearing jobs, when you can spell out a future of Canada as the MacGyver of our brave new world, and boast of Canada being the “intellectual powerhouse” of the dawning millennium.
That latter claim, not incidentally, would better come from a prime minister other than our own.
THE PROFESSOR FROM GILLIGAN’S ISLAND MADE DO WITHOUT THE SUPPLIES HE NEEDED; TRUDEAU HAS THE RESOURCES, BUT WANTS US TO GET BY WITHOUT THEM.