Liberals think Trump gives Ontario an edge
The United States’ new campaign to keep foreigners out gives Ontario a big opportunity to attract business, the province’s economic-development minister, Brad Duguid, said during an eastern Ontario swing on Thursday.
The idea’s been obvious at least since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency in November, but it’s becoming an explicit government policy.
“In a very diverse, fiercely competitive global economy, it is a huge advantage to be seen as a beacon of diversity that works,” Duguid said in an interview. A lot of his job is selling big international companies that could set up offices anywhere on the merits of expanding here instead of in California or Massachusetts or North Carolina.
The quality of the local workforce is important. So are taxes and regulations and the ease of reaching customers. Sometimes competing means dispensing subsidy money to sweeten the pot when employers such as Cisco or Ubisoft or Huawei — or DRS Technologies, a U.S.-based military supplier Duguid gave $720,000 Thursday afternoon for a Kanata expansion — go jurisdiction-shopping.
The province’s $250-million-ayear “jobs and prosperity fund” and numerous regional development funds are the piggy banks. Duguid’s ministry claims credit for adding or keeping 17,500 jobs in eastern Ontario alone.
(DRS, as it happens, is gearing up for work on computer systems for new ships the federal government is buying for the navy, as part of a procurement that’s as much about distributing economic benefits from shipbuilding as it is about getting new ships.)
Besides DRS Technologies, Duguid in two days here visited craft breweries, Groupe TIF (which customizes trucks for freight and industry and got $320,000 in provincial money) and a roundtable with the fledgling cybersecurity industry in Orléans.
Is that the right role for a government in the economy? Duguid points to the multibillion-dollar bailout of the auto industry during the late-2000s financial crisis as a time when the Liberals’ approach saved hundreds of thousands of jobs.
“You have to build an atmosphere of partnership,” he said. Business owners like it when the government has their backs.
Now that Americans have elected a president who’s aggressively suspicious of foreigners, Duguid figures the promotional part of his job might get a bit easier. It’s not just what Trump thinks and says, it’s that millions of Americans evidently agree with him. Even after Trump’s order forbidding citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States was suspended by a federal judge, crossing the American border has made people more anxious than ever.
Duguid represents a riding in Scarborough, “the most diverse part of the most diverse city of the most diverse province of one of the most diverse countries in the world,” which he says meant he sometimes took for granted things about Ontario that others find surprising.
“The more I travel and talk to people in this job, the more I’m realizing how well-received this jurisdiction is,” Duguid said. Ontario has its cultural frictions — witness Ottawa city council’s hostility to an effort to declare the capital a “sanctuary city” this week — but fewer of them than a lot of places.
The chance Ontario sees to capitalize on U.S. hostility to foreigners is crystallized in a new commercial the government released Thursday, too. Billed as a celebration of Ontario’s 150th anniversary, it shows a hijab-wearing teenager being introduced to her new class, a black couple with a newborn, a young guy making a life in Toronto’s gay village, an Asian man joining his family, and so on, all to the updated lyrics of the province’s 1967 centennial song A Place to Stand.
“We will build Ontario,” the song goes as the music swells and “A place for all of us” appears on the screen in front of fireworks.
“That’s been in the works for a while,” Duguid said.
Of course there’s a lot to worry about in the time of Trump and Ontario’s overall posture is still defensive. Nobody can be sure what the president will do.
The minister and his ministry have been prepping hastily to work with border states to remind the new U.S. administration just how important trade with Ontario is to the American economy: 31 states sell more stuff to Canadians than they do to anybody else, and Ontario specifically is the No. 1 destination for exports from 20 of them, Duguid said.
Duguid is concerned about Buy American policies in government procurement and tighter restrictions on what can be called a Canadian product if it’s made with materials or parts from abroad, though Trump’s vocal complaints about North American free trade are mainly aimed at Mexico.
“Let’s just hope that we don’t become collateral damage,” he said.
In a very diverse, fiercely competitive global economy, it is a huge advantage to be seen as a beacon of diversity that works.