Globe2Go, the digital newspaper replica of The Globe and Mail

CANADA THE LAGGARD

Jim Balsillie, co-founder of the Council of Canadian Innovators, co-founder and former co-CEO of BlackBerry

Four decades ago, the traditional production-based economy began transitioning to a knowledgebased economy and, more recently, to a data-driven economy. This shift foundationally reshaped the international competitive landscape, and changed the structure and behavioural characteristics of companies, which became capital-equipment-light and worker-lean, yet operating at global scale and pulling in massive profits by aggressively generating intellectual property and data assets.

Canadian policy makers missed this shift and, as a result, our country started a steady decline in prosperity that continues today. Since 1976, Canada’s productivity performance has been the worst of all advanced economies, resulting in real wages remaining essentially stagnant since then.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development recently projected that Canada’s economy will be “the worstperforming advanced economy over 2020 to 2030 and the three decades after.” And the really bad news? There’s nothing in the current federal budget or associated economic development strategies designed to reverse this trend.

Unless we build the expertise inside our policy community to deal with the structural economic issues surfaced by the rise of the intangible economy, middle-class Canadians will continue to experience a financial squeeze, and our public infrastructure will continue its own path of erosion.

COVER STORY

en-ca

2023-01-07T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-07T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://globe2go.pressreader.com/article/282011856453684

Globe and Mail