‘Supercluster’ sales pitch is hard to swallow

The announcement last week of the federal government’s five newly anointed “superclusters” was strange, even by Ottawa’s myopic standards. The whole thing felt like the launch of a cutting-edge tech product, with Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains playing the role of the visionary CEO. Bains paid homage to the tech titans of our age, suggesting that a supercluster is nothing less than a “made-in-Canada Silicon Valley.”

To hear it from the tweeting cheerleaders who naturally gravitate toward these types of things (that is, the government giving away money), the supercluster announcement was perhaps the most revolutionary thing to happen in — forever. Understandably, those most excited about Bains’s announcement were those who directly benefit from Ottawa’s money trough: the universities, private companies and pseudo-government agencies that are meant to form the skeleton of these superclusters. “We won,” was a common refrain. “Thank you for investing in Canada,” was another.

Unfortunately for the taxpayers who will foot the $950-million bill for this project, one important fact seems to have gone entirely unnoticed by those who see the superclusters initiative as the answer to everything. The truth about #InnovationSuperclusters is: We already have quite a few of them. And in many cases, they developed organically, without central planning.

One is called Toronto. Another is called Montreal. There is one in western Canada called Vancouver. The respective economies of these metropolitan areas rival those of economically advanced nations (Toronto, for instance, produces the same economic output as Finland). They are hot spots for immigration, job creation, business innovation, creative design, sustainable urban planning and cultural expression.

That’s not to say that these urban centres haven’t all benefited from government money. The point, though, is that they have emerged as hubs of economic growth in a mostly organic way, without requiring formal anointing, and without having to go through an arcane application system which supposedly used an entirely meritbased approach but which miraculously chose a supercluster in all five of Canada’s main regions.

This leads us to perhaps the strangest thing about superclusters: If they’re so great, why don’t we put them everywhere? The geographical requirements for one seem simple enough: a post-secondary institution, some non-profit and quasigovernmental agencies, a few private corporations, and of course an exciting theme.

We could put one right here in Ottawa, for instance. Wouldn’t the world be better off with a “government innovation” supercluster?

And the best thing about superclusters? They’re cheap, apparently — cheaper, in fact, than the cost of hosting a two-day G7 summit in Charlevoix. And the return-on-investment is amazing, if you can believe the government’s projections that the current initiative will create 10,000 “good” jobs and an extra $10 billion in GDP (over 10 years) per supercluster.

From a government investment of around $200 million on each supercluster, that’s a cost of only $20,000 to create one single job that might, in turn, earn someone anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 per year. And in terms of economic growth, the $200-million investment that ends up creating $10 billion in extra GDP over 10 years would require an annual growth rate of around 48 per cent. If only the returns on CPP were so robust.

As an electorate, have we been reduced to having to swallow this nonsense? Have we become so enamoured with “innovation” that we have forgotten our senses? There are really only two options here that explain this: Our government is so naive that it truly believes it can generate a 4,900-percent return on its money over 10 years; or, the government believes it can get away with convincing the public of this garbage.

In either case, the outcome is bound to be a disappointment.