The Strange Mind Of David Emerson

The Strange Mind of David Emerson

David Emerson is the man who was elected a federal Liberal MP and hours later became a Harperite reactionary in order to get a post as cabinet minister.

He’s the man who helped bring to B.C. a U.S. CEO for the new (Gordon Campbell) bungled BC Ferries corporation – the U.S. CEO having very likely never laid his eyes on a ferry before his appointment.  In Emerson’s and Gordon Campbell’s terms, it would seem, no Canadian was qualified to oversee the bungling they intended.

Emerson was the CEO for Canfor – a huge, forest products corporation – around the time his ally, Gordon Campbell slashed to ribbons the B.C. forest safety laws. 

It just happens that 2005 was the year of the highest number of forest deaths in B.C. – and, incidentally, the highest profit for Canfor, I believe, in its history.

Strange things surround David Emerson.  For some reason he is believed by some to be a deep thinker.  And he publishes, it seems, ‘think pieces’ pretty well when he wants to.

Wearing a demeanour of ‘reserved self-confidence’, Emerson works hard (?) at “Making Canada a leader in the global knowledge economy” – the title of his opinion piece on the subject (Vancouver Sun, Sept 9, 09 A15).

With the deftness we have come to expect from him, he builds an argument that we have “to blend global knowledge with our local innovative capacity to develop technologies and companies that can grow and thrive long term here in Canada”.

The argument of a nationalist?  You might think so.  But wait.  Emerson loads his argument to look nationalist while leaving out very key facts.  On purpose?  Who knows? 

Anyway, he says that Canada does well in public service labs and universities.  But “we suck when it comes to commercializing the applications of our research”. 

He doesn’t say why that is so – an absolutely key point.  I suggest he does not say why because to do so would spoil the rest of his column which says – as I read it – that we need to sell out the country even more than we have done already if we are to achieve David Emerson’s dream.

He tells, as reasons, the old, old, old propaganda story.  We don’t have a large domestic market.  Secondly, we have trouble financing innovative ventures.

The story of our weak domestic market is wrung out for everything David Emerson can squeeze from it.  He tells us – to score his point – that few “new innovative products and technologies achieve commercial success without markets of a half billion or more”. He suggests a list of countries we should collaborate with in order to achieve their kind of “commercializing” success. 

Let’s see.  The U.S. has about 300 million people.  Russia has 140 million. Israel has about 7 million, and even big Brazil has only about 200 million.  We may believe  - on David Emerson’s logic – that none of them has a snowball’s chance in hell of creating “new, innovative products and technologies [that] achieve international commercial success”.

But they do.  And they get those big markets.  And they do so for the reasons Emerson has no intention of explaining, it seems.  (I’ll explain further on.)  Instead, Emerson preaches “eternal colonialism” to Canadians.

What we have to do, in short, he writes is go to “global sources of capital”.  We need foreign rights unhindered in Canada.  We need “international mobility of skilled people” (which is to say ‘don’t train Canadians; import’.)  He suggests that we sink Canadian standards “in compatible approaches to product certification and regulation”.  (That is, accept lower standards from anyone who will ‘use’ Canada.)

Emerson describes the way Canadian companies [think of Nortel] are picked off.  A “company and technology that owes its very existence to taxpayers support is taken as a prize and an opportunity for another country.”

The solution – apparently a good one – is enhanced cooperation and sharing among universities and scientific bodies here and in – he says – U.S., China, India, Israel, Russia, Brazil, etc. (Obviously ‘successful’ countries.)  Fair enough.  And we need to develop larger investment pools, too.  Yes. 

But Emerson doesn’t recommend even what J.J.Brown did as far back as 1967 to improve Canadian development of invention (in his book Ideas In Exile, A History Of Canadian Invention).  Rather, Emerson skirts or ignores Brown’s key points – and the contemporary reasons we don ‘t commercialize “ the applications of our research”.

In effect, he writes, we need to erase our borders.  “International investors” need to be treated “like our own in terms of taxation and regulatory requirements”.  We need to make it “attractive and easy” for foreign venture capitalists here, he writes.

We need, he concludes, “a framework of open, integrated markets with substantial pools of venture funds to enable competition with the world’s best”.  After – we might say – handing over the country to what Emerson calls “the world’s best”, we should expect to see, shouldn’t we (?), their level of success here.  Shouldn’t we?

To get to that point, he asks us to remember “that over 97 per cent of the world’s new patents and technologies are not Canadian”.

That, I expect, is what Emerson intends as his knock-out punch to prove Canadians have to give their country away in order to “succeed”.  But it doesn’t come close to a knock-out punch.  Rather, it’s a blue herring (not a red herring).  A blue herring is a reactionary non-argument dragged in as if offered as a serious part of an argument, an argument that is really made on behalf of foreign, private corporate rule.

It is, in fact, much worse, for David Emerson needs to explain that statement, and he doesn’t.  First, 30 million people are not going – at their very, very best – to have a huge number of the “new patents and technologies” in a world that has 6 billion people – and climbing. 

But much, much more important is what I call the theft of Canadian invention and new technologies (which David Emerson doesn’t even mention). Canadian employees are so heavily foreign-employed (especially in big industry) by foreign corporations that a large number of Canadian inventions are patented to the foreign companies they work for – lost to Canada from the very start.  That is why David Emerson doesn’t explain, I suggest.  He would have to shoot gaping holes in his argument if he told the truth about Canadian invention.

In the second place, large multi-nationals DON’T do significant  research and development in Canada.  They do it in home countries and ship the result into Canada to branch plants.

Which brings us back to his statement that “few, new innovative products and technologies achieve international commercial success without markets of a half billion or more”.  As I’ve already pointed out none of the U.S., Russia, Israel, or Brazil has populations of a half billion.  China does – and its science, enterprise, innovative technology, banking, and investment capital are fiercely in the grip of government policy and control.  (And China is climbing fast in all the matters that concern David Emerson.)

The other countries have something David Emerson won’t mention.  They have governments that reject economic colonialism and colonial economic structures.  They have national policies of incentive and assistance in order to build enterprises owned and controlled in the country. 

They have powerful laws and policies to keep excellent invention at home and from being taken over.  They have patent protection and structures encouraging their own people.  They have laws – which they use – to limit takeovers.  They back venture and innovation at home through government assistance, investment, banking, and regulation structures.  They have on-going, persistent policies that release the energy and creativity of their own people in the construction of visible, independent, dynamic economies. 

Finland, with only 5 million people, does far better than Canada in that regard.  It has an international market for Finnish products and sits in an excellent position in stock market comparisons.  Its social insurance levels are admirable - all because it has national policies to develop Finnish innovation and enterprise.

David Emerson’s life – like his argument – is unconvincing.  He stands by, silent, while his friend Gordon Campbell hands over the potential trillions of dollars of energy value in B.C.’s rivers to U.S. ownership and control.  That is a visible, almost criminal, throw-away of Canadian entrepreneurial and innovative potential.

Why is David Emerson silent?  Read his article, and read this one.  The reason for his silence about the Gordon Campbell sell-out, I believe, will become obvious.  For he argues, I believe, for that kind of sell-out – under the guise of appealing for independent, strong new Canadian “innovative products and technologies”.