I'm a Picker of Pixels and Writer of Hypertext

As with many people who attended the University of Waterloo, I took an economics course with Larry Smith.  He's not so much a lecturer as a stand-up comic whose material is all about economics. 

In one lecture, he talked about the size of the Canadian economy.  Thanks to our inferiority complex, we assume we're insignificant at everything, but we actually have the tenth largest economy in the world.  (And back when I was taking this class, we were ranked even higher, as the BRICS hadn't started passing us.)

So he asks the rhetorical question of how we became so prosperous, and answers it by saying that we are "hewers of wood and drawers of water," miners and farmers and so on.  He pauses, looks around, and asks, "Who wrote that down?  Scratch that out!  I can't believe you fell for that." and then he goes on to reveal that our economy has long been powered primarily by industry and services.

I keep thinking about that class whenever I see the latest round of Canada's Economic Action Plan ads.  Those ads have been criticized for a while for being thinly veiled Tory campaign ads on the public dime.  And there's also the fact that a party that emphasizes small government and fiscal responsibility is spending tens of millions of dollars to tell us about the new government programs they've created. 

But the recent ads are more focused on selling the Tar Sands to us.  It's not so much that they are trying to win us over on the environmental question, but that they're trying to get us to like the idea of a Canada focused on resources.  We're told about all the ways that not-so-resource-endowed areas of the country can contribute, usually by building things that the resource extractors can use.  It's not real convincing: I don't see Quebeckers getting excited about Alberta's oil just because they get to build the buses that the workers take to the drill site in Fort McMurray.

I'm not surprised that the Conservatives are going to bat for the oil industry, but I'm not clear on why they're insisting on promoting a big misconception about Canada's economy.  The ads even emphasize that the resource industry employs a million Canadians; that sounds good until you remember that there are 33 million of us.  Surely it would make sense to make us feel good about all aspects of our economy.  You know, tell us about how we're building cars that are burning the oil from Alberta.