Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson. Andrea Mandel-Campbell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Marston, the Hamilton labour activist, just shakes his head in wonder when he thinks of the country’s newest answer to foreign investment —a combination of cheap labour and low capital expenditure reminiscent of Mexico’s low-wage, assembly-for-export sector: “It’s minimum-wage jobs, transient workers and high turnover. To say call centres are a symbol of the future is idiotic.”

      Add that to the tens of thousands of skilled immigrants forced to work as cleaners and cab drivers, the software engineer who makes $57,000 compared with an American making $125,000,⁵³ while the Canadian cities with the highest family income— Oshawa, Ottawa and Windsor — are propped up either by American car makers or the government. Sweeten the pot with a number of important industries teetering on the brink, and the concept of an economy operating at full capacity becomes, well, relative.

      Canada’s performance is even more questionable when one considers all the Canadians who have been forced to leave the country because the high-quality jobs they seek simply don’t exist. The lack of globally oriented firms means that the career path for many is confined to the domestic market while foreign multinationals are increasingly relocating their higher-end jobs abroad, limiting their Canadian presence to sales positions. Schulich Business School launched its international mba program in 1988 with the aim of supplying Canadian companies with internationally minded graduates, but as Dean Horváth quickly learned, there were no jobs waiting for them when they got out. “So many ended up going abroad and they are still abroad, and it’s not getting any better,” he says. David Pecaut, senior partner with the Boston Consulting Group in Toronto, can attest to the problem. “I can’t tell you the number of people I can think of right now who say they would come back to Canada if they could work in a company that’s truly global,” he says. “They can’t find the opportunities.”

      Which is why Eamon Hoey, a Toronto businessman, is making sure his daughter doesn’t hit her head on the Canadian glass ceiling. “My recommendation to my daughter is to find another country. She’ll go to grad school in the U.S. or the U.K., and hopefully that’s where she’ll end up,” he says. “You can’t be proud of a country that truncates its youth, prevents it from accomplishing and sets up barriers and systems that create winners and losers.”

      Glen Hodgson, chief economist with the Conference Board of Canada, admits he’s also concerned about his kids’ future: “The realist in me is worried. Are we going to go down as a country? Because if you look at the data and use China as a litmus test, we’re not succeeding; we’re actually seeing our presence in the world shrinking.” Canada’s long-term economic potential, he says, is “clearly fading.” According to a study by Global Insight released in 2006, Canada’s growth is forecast to lag behind almost every other major economy within the next twenty years, slipping to below 2 per cent and a far cry from the 3.25 per cent of the 1980s.⁵⁴

      So, will Canadians be spurred to action? Husky’s Robert Schad doesn’t think so. “The Romans didn’t wake up until Hannibal was right at the front gates, and the reports came in every day. He was getting closer and closer, and nothing changed until he was there.” Schad figures Canada’s embarrassment of riches can keep a Hannibal-like incursion by global markets at bay for some time to come. “If things get tough, we will just sell everything off to keep the status quo — just like when you sell your last jewels for a piece of bread,” he shrugs. “We can sell off the future for a long time. We can sit on the sidelines for quite a while.”

      Maybe. Who knew that diamonds were buried beneath the Canadian tundra, or that Alberta’s tar-laden oil sands would pump out so many millionaires almost overnight? But while some have hit pay dirt, others are watching as their wells run dry. Just ask the residents of Kitimat, B.C. Founded more than fifty years ago, the picturesque town of ten thousand was supposed to be a model for the province’s industrial future. Neat housing subdivisions were carved out of the forest and rock along the northern coast, and industry was lured with the promise of government subsidies. Alcan built a massive aluminum smelter as well as a hydro plant. It was followed by a pulp and paper mill and a petrochemical complex operated by Methanex, the world’s largest producer of methanol.

      Yet there is growing unease in Kitimat as the population continues to decline and property values plummet. The town is slated to become the port terminus for an ambitious pipeline project that would transport crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to the B.C. coast before being shipped to Asia. But a lack of Chinese buyers for the oil has forced pipeline builder Enbridge to put the project on hold until 2014.* In the meantime, the community has been locked in a decade-long struggle with Alcan to upgrade its aging smelter. In 2006, Alcan finally agreed to go ahead with a us$1.8 billion modernization project on the condition that it be allowed to sell excess electricity from its nearby hydro dam — to the tune of $97 million a year — to B.C. Hydro. It’s a bitter pill for Kitimat, which argues that the aluminum maker was given privileged access to cheap electricity in return for providing smelter jobs. Instead, new efficiencies at the upgraded smelter would cut the workforce by 30 per cent.* But according to the company, Kitimat, with its high labour and construction costs compared with places like Cameroon and Brazil, is lucky to be getting any new investment at all. As Michel Jacques, head of Alcan’s primary metal group, noted, without a deal to sell its surplus electricity, “[i]t makes no economic sense for us to build a new smelter in B.C.”⁵⁵

      Methanex, the community’s other economic anchor, has already cut town. Too fed up to fight with municipal officials over high property taxes and increasingly gouged by the high cost of natural gas (a key ingredient of methanol), the company closed its two plants in November 2005. It is now embarking on plans to build a us$500 million complex in Egypt. “Our experience in Kitimat has been pretty sorry,” says Bruce Aitken, Methanex CEO . “Globally we are doing very nicely, thank you very much. But if we were dependent just on our plants in Kitimat, the company wouldn’t exist anymore.

      “I don’t think the government goes out of its way to understand the dynamics of what it is doing to industry in the province,” he adds. “Our companies will put up with it for a while, but eventually we will shut the plant down, and that’s it.”

      Sadly, the writing has been on the wall for Kitimat — and Canada — for quite some time. Michael Porter, the Harvard University professor and competitiveness guru, warned of the country’s “gentle drift downward” in a 2001 report he co-authored with Roger Martin, dean of University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.⁵⁶ The conclusion followed Porter’s watershed assessment of the Canadian economy a decade earlier, entitled “Canada at the Crossroads.” At the time, Canada had two options: either blaze a new trail based on innovative and globally competitive companies, or continue along the path of least resistance. “Canada,” Porter and Martin wrote ten years later, “took the lesser path.”

      As a result, Canadian companies that show potential will continue to be cherry-picked by Americans, depriving Canada of all-important head offices and the means to acquire global management skills.* When it comes to Canadian biopharma companies, says John Mendlein, “they are just going to get acquired by U.S. companies. Full stop.” Either that, or they will be overlooked altogether. According to a 2004 Conference Board of Canada survey, three quarters of foreign executives who responded felt that Canada’s business environment was “not favourable” for investing, citing, among other things, the slowness of companies to adopt technology and the poor quality of employees.⁵⁷ “They see Canadian workers in general as too often undereducated and lagging behind other workers in productivity,” wrote board president Anne Golden.⁵⁸

      Even China, which is scouring the planet for new investments, seems a bit circumspect. Despite initial panic that China’s Minmetals Corp. would acquire Canadian miner Noranda, negotiations trailed off in 2005. Not long after, the Chinese sealed a us$2 billion deal with Chilean copper giant Codelco, and they have invested billions more in Russian housing projects and Australian mining. More than six hundred Chinese-funded companies have set up in Africa over СКАЧАТЬ