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Let Commodities Lead the Way

July 8, 2015

There are two ways to diversify an economy: by responding to markets or by bureaucratic mandate. Smart governments will look to how the market is contributing to diversification in Canadian industry. Canada’s C-suite leaders, unfortunately, favour the bureaucratic mandate route, seeking more investment in the clusters of Toronto and Waterloo to drive more technology jobs. As recent history with BlackBerry (formerly RIM) has shown us, and before that Nortel, our country’s high-tech track record, so favoured by the diversify-by-decree set, is spotty at best. Rather than pump more money into sectors where the market is telling us it doesn’t want our products—or where we do not have a competitive advantage—a better strategy is to let the market illuminate a path to prosperity. In the case of Canada, that includes commodities and all of the ancillary skills, technologies and knowledge that are not only marketable but are in demand. Read the rest of this article at the Financial Post website.