What Happened to Canada’s Economic Strategy?

Canadian Lumberjacks | BCBusiness
What happened to Canada’s economic policy that will make us more than just primary resource workers?

Lost in the noisy debate about the oil pipeline that’s proposed to run through B.C. to Kitimat is an economic policy that we seem to have abandoned as the promise of billions of dollars is dangled in front of us.

You haven’t seen anything so far in this space about the Enbridge pipeline because, like many people, I’ve been torn between the factions for and opposed to the pipeline.

We’ve all been subjected to the mountains of verbiage issued by the pro and con pipeline groups. The pro groups cite the billions of dollars in economic benefits to B.C.; the con groups cite the eminent dangers in piping raw bitumen from the Alberta tar sands through a B.C. earthquake zone and putting it in tankers, to be carried through rough ocean waters, thereby threatening the entire coast in the event of an oil spill.

Each side is pulling out the heavy lumber to make their case – the pros by having the Prime Minister of Canada and his government essentially back the project and the cons by bringing up Hollywood stars, colourful native elders and anyone else they can find to oppose it.

No argument here that there should be much debate on the subject. The project is probably one of the greatest economic decisions to be made in the history of B.C., one which will shape the province for decades.

But I fear that in all the for-it, against-it simplicity something is being lost here.

I’m speaking of our – meaning not only B.C., but Canada as a whole – supposed strategy to no longer be simple primary resource workers, the “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Wasn’t that what we were under the British? And wasn’t it just a little while ago that we were bemoaning the fact that we were essentially America’s source of raw materials, forever condemned to be drones while they reaped the benefits?

Further, isn’t this pipeline project just another version of being such a drone – albeit for China instead of (or in addition to) the U.S.?

Seems to me we’ve been capitulating along this road for some time, despite the oft-repeated wish to be masters of our own fate when it comes to economics.

Already we’re shipping half the trees we cut down offshore to be milled and used for construction in the U.S., China or wherever. Whatever happened to B.C.’s lumber “industry”?

And already we’re exporting acres of rocks from our mines to be processed somewhere else.

Is it just me, or has the supposed plan to be reasonably self-sufficient in terms of industry and jobs been lost to the expediency of selling the rawest forms of our resources to someone else?

Yes, yes, I know all the problems with this strategy – that it’s too expensive to create higher-end industry here and that Asian countries are the world’s manufacturers these days. I’m even familiar with the little said, but mostly known strategy of exporting the pollution problems that come with secondary industry to “far away” places like China and other parts of Asia.

But what happens when our resources run out or start to diminish? What are we left with after that? Industrial policy doesn’t just mean building industries; it also means climbing the industrial ladder (as China is doing) to knowledge-based, creative and “clean” industries. You have to start somewhere, and we’re not even doing that.

So in this debate, let’s get off these pure for-or-against stands. Let’s start framing it in terms of benefit to Canada as a whole, not just to one province or a few companies.

Unless, of course, we don’t mind remaining as hewers of wood and drawers of water.