BILL MORNEAU IN THE DRAGONS’ DEN.
WILLIAM WATSON
The passage of last week’s fiscal update that really brought me up short was where the federal government says it’s going to hire more pitching coaches. Pitching coaches?, I thought. Ottawa?, I thought. It’s true the Blue Jays weren’t great last year and sub-par pitching played a big role but, I don’t know, they seem to have pretty self-confident management, they’re worth close to US$1.5 billion, and they’re owned by Rogers, a mega-corp. You think they’d be able to figure out all on their own, without help from Bill Morneau or Justin Trudeau, whether they need a new pitching coach.
But then I went back and read more carefully and discovered what the feds were actually talking about wasn’t “pitching coaches” but “pitch coaches.” As Gilda Radner used to say on Saturday Night Live: “Never mind!”
Except, on third thought, maybe we should mind. What’s a “pitch coach”? A pitch coach, the update says, helps business firms “hone their messaging,” and if there’s anything the current federal government does know inside out, it’s messaging.
The pitch coaches the update talks about are part of the Canadian Technology Accelerator (CTA) Program. That’s described in a sidebar to a section of the update called “Enhancing Trade Services for Canadian Exporters,” which announces the government’s proposal to spend $184 million over the next five years to “support the growth and diversification of Canada’s exports.”
CTA diversification must be different from the destination diversification that’s talked about elsewhere in the update, i.e., diversification away from the United States of Trump and toward supposedly more progressive trading areas like Europe, China and India. So far CTA has been active only in Boston, Philadelphia, New York City and Silicon Valley, where it has “introduced close to 500 Canadian technology and life sciences firms” to these markets, helping them raise more than $570 million in private capital, generating $190 million in revenue and creating more than 1700 jobs in Canada.”
Pitch coaching is just part of the effort. Firms also get mentoring from a network of executives, entrepreneurs and investors. They get introductions to industry leaders. They get “member privileges to world-class industry associations.” And they get in-market “landing-pads.” That sounds extremely high-tech but in fact seems to be a desk or cubicle in an innovation centre.
As Ronald Reagan used to say, the nine most frightening words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” But you don’t have to believe government always screws things up to wonder just how effective this sort of hands-on business assistance is likely to be. The update does include a couple of glowing testimonials from program beneficiaries, but this government is always saying how it wants policy to be “evidence-based,” which is quite different from aspiration- or even testimonial-based policy.
Take pitch coaching. If the feds didn’t provide pitch coaching, would Canadian businesses be condemned for eternity to awkward, ineffective pitching? Do would-be Canadian entrepreneurs not watch Dragons’ Den or, if they want to breach the U.S. market, Shark Tank? What are those very popular TV shows about if not the importance of a well-honed pitch, not to mention a product real people might actually buy, of course.
And what are we to make — what would the auditor general make — of the cited job-creation and made-deal numbers? Accounting for this sort of thing suffers from reverse-Midas effects. Everything Midas touched really did turn to gold (in the myth, at least). In influence-accounting, by contrast, any government representative who so much as exchanged business cards with anyone who eventually generated some gold turns him or her self into Midas, that is, claims credit for it. What we want, and cannot in this universe get, are numbers about how many deals worth how much money would not have taken place but for the influence of the government agency claiming credit. Instead what we get are numbers on how many deals worth how much money these Midas-in-their-own-minds helpers had any association at all with.
Then there’s the question of what’s gold and what’s not. Do business revenues ($190 million in the case of the technology and life sciences companies the CTA takes credit for) represent a net gain to Canadians in general? It’s not all gravy. Businesses have costs, too. Likewise, would the 1,700 people holding the jobs the CTAs take credit for all be unemployed otherwise?
I can understand why Canadian businesses might well enjoy receiving free pitch coaching and even benefit from the pitch hints they get. Why not take free advice when it’s available? What’s harder to understand is that anyone would assume that free federal pitch coaching necessarily produces net benefits for Canadian society, let alone is indispensable to Canadian business success.
IF THE FEDS DIDN’T PROVIDE ‘PITCH COACHING,’ WOULD BUSINESSES BE CONDEMNED TO INEFFECTIVE PITCHING?