Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
I didn't mean literally flag waving by mounting a national flag to the front of the house kind of thing. I mean treating it as a big deal that there are Swedish companies out there in whatever sector. Clearly there must be some degree of that going on based on kool's posts.
As I said before in an earlier post, I don't feel that kind of attachment to Canadian companies. Why would I? They aren't mine. I don't know why a Swede would feel some unearned sense of pride or accomplishment from seeing an IKEA store while on a trip to Australia or wherever. I mean, there's economic value attached to having recognizable names so it's great if you can be like Apple and create a lucrative image that surrounds the products themselves. But I don't think it's necessarily some great cultural triumph for Sweden apart maybe from the fact that you can get Swedish food around the world at IKEA stores.
As for manufacturing itself, I don't have any trade sector expertise, but as I've said before I suspect there were calculated decisions made along the way to open up the country to foreign trade in exchange for access to the big lucrative market next door. I think it has worked out fairly well. Maybe settling for making car parts instead of Avro Arrows isn't the sexiest thing around, but as a means of improving prosperity it hasn't been bad.
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I guess it's the tangible argument.
We have all sorts of statistical methods of showing how good things are, but that's intangible. You can't see it rolling down the street, flying through the air or by holding it in your hand. It's an abstraction.
But watching a Boeing 747 roar overhead on takeoff, holding your iDevice in your hands and looking at your Chevrolet Corvette in the driveway is a very tangible thing. We built this in America. It represents the best of what we can do in this country and how our country can compete with the best of what the world offers.
We've had shades of it here, obviously. You can look out at any major airport in this country - the turboprops (Dash 8, Q400) and jets that fly out (CRJ, CSeries...err....A220) represent some of the best our aeronautical engineers can produce. 15 years ago, you could hold in your hands the best smartphone money could buy - a BlackBerry, designed right here in Canada. 25 years ago, one could load Corel WordPerfect/Quattro Pro on their PC and see a program that could compete with Microsoft. If you flip on a light switch in Ontario, you have lights that are mostly powered by our indigenously-designed nuclear power reactors - ones that don't need enriched uranium.
I don't know. It's the emotional argument, I guess. Companies like Magna are great (and very much important to our economy), but they don't inspire. Don't get me wrong - if I had to focus on something that will power Canada into the 21st century, I'd look at not-sexy things too - there's less competition from everybody trying to take you out when you're designing a 10% more efficient alternator or something, but I can still see the argument for something to fly the flag from.
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