Innovate or die: How Canada is courting long-term failure
-Richard Poplak, Globe and Mail
“Sustained economic growth requires innovation, and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics.”
Uh-oh. Welcome to the truth north strong and free, gentlemen: That would be the country where the Conservative government has bet the farm – and the factory, and the next-gen Internet start-up – on the fact that the resource-extraction sector, by which I mean Alberta, will power growth for the foreseeable future.
…To that end, one of the most desperate, least advanced countries in the world has come up with a plan that looks exactly like Canada’s.
Big picture? Canada is un-developing. I’m not suggesting we leave our oil, gas and potash languishing uselessly in the ground. But the Conservative government is so overrun by special interests that we’ll all soon be working for the mining sector, if we aren’t already – 10 million square kilometres of frozen hinterland reconceived as the Yorkshire of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier.
