The Tao of Regional Economic Development Seminars

Yesterday I attended a presentation on the plans for pushing ahead with a life-sciences cluster in the Charlottetown area. My claim of familiarity with life-sciences, that I helped parallelize an RNA folding algorithm, was more than enough street cred to get to talk to a few interesting people there.

The seminar itself was, unfortunately, the same economic development speech I've seen over and over again in this part of Canada. The presenter gave the usual speech about the population of Southern Ontario, the competitive advantages of the Ottawa research cluster because of the proximity of many different research firms, as well as the NRC and the other federal government research operations.

The goal for PEI is to, it seems, try and create this cluster by getting a bunch of different people to set up shop here all at once. They've even managed to get a new NRC research centre set up.

The problem, of course, is that you can't create something big out of nothing. The building the meeting took place in, the Atlantic Technology Centre, is a good metaphor for this. The PEI government wanted to have more hi-tech companies come to the province. And, since building a building is a bureaucrat's idea of accomplishing something, they poured millions of dollars into this fancy new office building downtown. The hope was that it would be a technology incubator, a place where small startup companies could have good facilities and office space. The result, predictably, is the same as what happened in Fredericton with the Knowledge Park buildings: a couple of big companies got most of the space, and they pretty much took over.

This makes one ask "why do we need government to subsidize construction for already-established companies?" We don't, of course, but as the buildings were nearing completion, they suddenly realized they would open and be nearly empty. The panic button was hit, and they went for the easiest way to fill up the building, offer it up to an established company. The end result is that taxpayers dump millions into what is supposed to create new high-tech, research-oriented jobs and we end up with a net gain of about 0 positions created and no new research being done.

The Knowledge Park, when I worked at NVision, it was filled completely with SmartForce and CGI, with us and one other small company being the only 'startups' in the place.

The end goal of this policy of encouraging agriculture research is to help move PEI farmers away from dependence on potato crops and towards more profitable niche markets. The majority of the people at the seminar, however, seem to be the same government officials who have had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, towards a more modern farming policy.

IF it's followed through with I can see this being a big help to a lot of farmers. A test farm, where they can show good yields for higher-paying niche crops, or organic methods, will be enough to convince a few farmers to give up on growing potatoes for 2 cents a pound. It's hard to convince an old farmer to risk his whole operation switching crops for the first time in his life based on projected numbers. It will be much easier if he can see money growing in the ground for himself at a test farm.

An attitude change will have to come from farmers at the same time, though. Their undoing has been relying on seed suppliers, who have 'taken care' of them for a long time, but slowly squeezed them for more and more each year, while they are being squeezed on the other side by their buyers pushing prices further and further down. Farmers need to take back a little more of the responsibility and the risk involved with doing business along with getting themselves into a more profitable area.

The cross section of high-tech and farming that may come together on PEI is an interesting one, and the need to take risks on one's own if one is going to be successful is something that the government can't come to grips with in their efforts to stimulate both economic areas. Though it's still a hell of a lot more than New Brunswick ever did in becoming the call centre capital of the universe.