Doesn’t the PM want a mandate?

Paul,

I have no doubt that the Harper gang avoided using words like competitiveness, productivity and innovation for mainly political reasons. But around 2005-2006, those reasons actually did make a certain amount of sense. Martin had been going on since about 2000-2001 about how as PM he was going to launch some kind of vague “innovation agenda” that would include all sorts of bold solutions and make closing the productivity gap with the U.S. as big a challenge as deficit reduction had been in 1995-1998. And in all that time he produced almost nothing. No concrete proposals, no legislation or major programs. Just a lot of blather which made those terms sound like empty buzzwords and didn’t give the opposition much of an incentive to counter him in those areas for fear that they might end up sounding exactly the same.

But as easy as it can be to pin all the blame on Harper for being shortsighted and overly political, the real problem is that it is extremely hard for ANY GOVERNMENT to come up with concrete, specific policies to address a problem as complicated as lagging productivity and make these policies saleable to a general audience. When you’re talking about balancing a budget, cutting taxes, or creating a new social program, the process is “relatively” simple and can be more or less controlled by the pols and easily understood by the voters. Which is why most governments tend to go down that route.

Another problem, difficult as it may be to acknowledge it is that innovation competitiveness and productivity frequently ARE just buzzwords which can be used to provide a vague justification for governments and businesses to try anything new and spend more in one field or another. During the 80′s productivity meant working harder and trimming the fat. In the 90′s innovation and productivity generally involved allowing web designers to come to the office in Hawaiian shirts and kick around hackey sacks during their 45 minute coffee breaks so that they could be more creative. In the 21st century, who knows?

In their defence, the Harper Tories may not be willfully ignorant or completely wrong. If you are a genuine free market conservative, then you believe that the state doesn’t make better decisions in areas like R&D and cannot be more effective at boosting productivity than businesses would be if left to their own devices. So it shouldn’t try to do anything to boost productivity except cutting taxes, eliminating regulation, and leaving businesses to their own devices. Your last column on the topic, in somewhat circular fashion, ends up making the case for this argument. In the U.S. it’s the private sector that plays the leading role in funding R&D, on and outside of the University Campus. In Canada the state pours out most of the cash and the results aren’t put to effective use, in large part because the same mentality that expects the government to be the prime mover behind every improvement in productivity, competitiveness, innovation etc. has also led to a tax and regulatory framework designed to maintain the dominance of a few big monopolists who have no real desire to “compete” or “innovate” when they can instead choose to sit back and be spoon fed with an endless menu of subsidies, tax loopholes (CSL), untendered contracts and regulations guaranteed to keep prices up and the competition out .