Quote:
Originally Posted by beyeas
This is fundamentally Nova Scotia's systemic problem for the last century. Every single government has vacillated between propping up dying industries, and hoping on the bandwagon of the latest economic saviour.
It is painful to change directions, and there is no doubt that the effect of that needs to be mitigated, but at some point we have to acknowledge that we are just falling farther and farther behind.
|
This is very true, and I think the "economic saviour" attitude is just as bad as propping up dying industries. There may be "good" times from windfall natural resource royalties and the like but the pattern of under-performance in NS isn't going to be corrected by stuff like that.
The province should be focusing on home-grown businesses and entrepreneurship. Even if the goal were to create high tech jobs, I think the province would get a lot more out of small business loans and targeted education funding. Much of the difference between a place like Halifax and, say, San Francisco, is just that it's much easier to get funding on good terms in California because the big investors are there. Another problem is that NS has high tuition and relatively poor funding for programs like Computer Science, even though they say they want high tech jobs. They think the way to fix the problem is to hand over millions to companies like IBM or RIM; there may be some room for that but it is the same old "plantation economy" format of past decades.
The attitude that government funding is a zero sum city vs. countryside battle is also really damaging and wrong. People in Halifax buy tons of stuff from rural NS. 2/3 of the population of the province is pretty much a part of the local HRM market and is tied very directly to its fortunes. There are also lots of opportunities for entrepreneurship in rural areas; it's easier to sell goods from rural NS around the world than it ever has been. The wine industry is one example where having the right skills and some capital can dramatically increase the value of goods produced in a rural area.
NS has also done a terrible job of encouraging immigration. Some people try to excuse this away by arguing that the economy is bad or that immigrants only want to go to big cities, but this does not explain why PEI attracts far more immigrants per capita than NS does. A more likely explanation is that the immigration levels could be higher and aren't because immigration is being mishandled by the province (which, by the way, had to send out refunds to hundreds of mentorship program participants).