Can Ottawa spark innovation? It hasn’t yet
Est-ce que l’innovation a des limites, et est-ce que le Canada en voit la forme ? Jeffrey Simpson dans le Globe and Mail interroge le financement fédéral pour la recherche et le développement. Il y met en confrontation les bonnes intentions dans l’histoire du Canada et les résultats généraux de celles-ci. Le résultat : tout ce qui devient gros et probablement aidé par ce financement, se fait manger tôt ou tard par d’autres provenant de l’extérieur, et le Canada reste ainsi tout petit :
Will all this do any good? The Harper government, like its predecessors, is sufficiently dismayed by lagging productivity that it is willing to shuffle programs around and create new structures. Whether government programs are at the heart of the problem is doubtful, given that the R&D tax credits have been among the most generous in the world.
Canada has industries that just don’t do much research and development, of which the resource extractive ones, especially oil and gas, are at the top of the list. The economy has never fully recovered from the collapse of Nortel, which was the largest private-sector generator of R&D in Canada. Now, Research In Motion, the newest flagship for high-tech R&D, is staggering.
Creative mid-sized Canadian firms are often sold to foreign interests. They become cogs in a big corporate machine that tends to do the bulk of its research in the home country, the classic example being Microsoft, which sells its products everywhere in Canada, sucks up talent from Canadian universities, especially Waterloo, but does no serious R&D in Canada.
