Waste of money
Re: There’s $ 950M we didn’t need to spend. Andrew Coyne, Feb. 17
Andrew Coyne is right. The government is wasting $950 million with its industrial Superclusters.
In Growing the Next Silicon Valley, Roger Miller and Marcel Côté showed that high- tech clusters form naturally in most large cities. They found that government financial support achieved limited success. This has been the Canadian experience with previous cluster-related initiatives.
Miller and Côté state that governments help grow clusters when they create economic and social milieus that encourage entrepreneurship. The Trudeau and Wynne governments, however, have been anti- business. They have increased taxation and employment costs and have destabilized regulation. They also undermine social support for entrepreneurship. Successful Canadians who make it to the top one per cent of earners are accused of “not doing their fair share.” In contrast, President Trump cut taxes, pared regulation and signalled strong support for innovative businesses. Canadian entrepreneurs and investment will move to the U. S. until our governments understand how to encourage entrepreneurial behaviour. David Griller, Ottawa For a government that for the last two years has been unable to come up with a fix for their broken employee pay system one has to wonder if their kick at trying to pick a winning set of industrial superclusters will ever be successful. It’s a huge gamble that should raise the eyebrows of Canadian taxpayers. While I certainly agree that industrial clusters are important drivers of economic growth and strength, it is well established that, for the most part, they evolve and grow naturally. Canada is actually awash in industrial clusters. I cannot see how our government experts could possibly pick five winners from this lot, technology is moving just too fast, what looks good this year may be outdated two years from now. When the Liberals took power they renamed Industry Canada to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada so they could include the buzzword “Innovation” so they should therefore innovate, use our tax dollars wisely and focus on what is important to this country: develop and implement policies to improve workforce skills, provide funding support for smarter R & D programs and develop and implement programs to help companies focus on continuous improvement.
With Canada sitting in 22nd on Bloomberg’s 2018 Innovation Index, they don’t seem to be working very well. It may be time for a soul searching review of Canada’s approach to innovation and to the support of it. Perhaps our officials view their supercluster initiative as a good start, but I fear that it may not turn out that way. Bob Atkinson, Victoria, BC