Corporate Canada lacks courage, Deloitte poll suggests | Financial Post

Don't worry, the security apparatus will continue to interfere in the free market and save the day.

Come on comrades, get in there already and get this economy booming again!

There was a time when those who committed treason suffered a worse punishment than they do today.

People have probably read this story before in Nothing's New Magazine along with other earth-shaking revelations, such as Birds Still Fly South in Winter and Sun Still Rises in East

I think this is because so much of Canada's economy is based on "branch plant" industries where the Canadian management just handles the mundane day to day issues and relies on orders from the overseas head office for "big picture" decisions and strategic ideas.

And another huge sector of our domestic industry is just basic resource extraction like cutting trees and shipping the raw logs over the border, which doesn't require much innovation or risk-taking.

Another factor is I think a generational factor. My parents generation grew up in a Canada that didn't have its own flag or anthem and always portrayed itself as a quaint second-rate country of modest ability and aspirations. I don't think younger Canadians today think that way but the old guard is still the generation running things for now.

The younger generation in the IT sector is going to get a rude comeuppance the way everyone that came before them also learned. Canada is simply too expensive a place to have a really innovative and diverse economy. Tech is no different than any of the other manufacturing that powders out of this country on a regular basis. Anyone in tech that starts up in Canada finds out rapidly that pretty much everything that can be built here can be built for much cheaper overseas and that means anyone who isn't an executive at the Canadian head office will someday see their job disappear to Sri Lanka or China. The "new green economy" is going to crash and sink on the same rocky shoals of doing business in Canada that every other sector has gone through.

Manufacturing is the cheap outsourced labour. The real IT jobs are high-skill, high-education jobs in software development, computer engineering and machine learning, etc. and those aren't easily outsourced.

Apple manufactures their products overseas but directly employs 50,000 Americans and indirectly employees another 50,000 through suppliers and vendors.

Similar story for Google and others that are the innovative disruptors that Canadian businesses are too afraid to become.

Hewers of wood, drawers of water. And that is all.