The first Canadian Geomatics Conference was held in Calgary last week.  The opening session includes a guest presentation by Glen Hodgson, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the Conference Board of Canada.  The Conference Board of Canada prepares an annual report card, How Canada Performs, that assesses Canada’s performance relative to other countries in different areas including innovation, education and skills, health, society, economy, and the environment. On the 2009 report card, Canada moved from a “B” to an “A” on its education performance, was assigned “B” grades on its economic, health and social performance, but got a “C” on environmental performance and a “D” on innovation.  The dismal performance on innovation and how geomatics could contribute to solving the problem was the theme of Glen Hodgson’s talk.

Productivity Crisis in Canada

Wealth generation depends on three factors human capital, investment, and innovation.  Canadians work just about as hard as Americans (98% of US working hours per capita), the capital investment in Canadian industry is comparable to the US, but Canada’s productivity (multi-factor productivity or MFP) is just 82% of US productivity and the trend is getting worse. Canada ranks somewhere in the range of 12th to 14th in the OECD with respect to innovation.

The structural challenges that are making this a very serious issue right now are the aging workforce and the strong loonie (Canadian dollar), which has just about reached parity, after falling as low as 63 cents a number of years ago.  According to Glen Hodgson, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was good for the Canadian economy, as has been the reduction in capital taxes.  But the weak loonie over the past few years has been bad for productivity, because it reduced the economic motivation to innovate. He also said that whereas the US economy lost 8 million jobs in the current recession and those jobs haven’t been regained, in Canada 400,000 jobs were lost and virtually all have been regained.  That is certainly good news in the short term, but because it negatively impacts productivity it may not be good for the economy in the long term.

Geomatics and Productivity

Glen Hodgson’s main point was that the geomatics industry, which has historically been a world leader in innovation, can contribute to improving Canada’s productivity.  The last federal budget, which was about $225 billion, talked a lot about innovation so this is a Federal priority.  As I have blogged about in the past,  Australia and more recently New Zealand have attempted to estimate the contribution of the geomatics industry to the gross domestic product.  They also attempted to estimate the significantly larger contribution the geomatics industry could make with the appropriate government policies.  In Canada there is an initiative underway, supported by the Geomatics Industry Association of Canada (GIAC) and other organizations, for a national geomatics program. 

At CGC 2010, Prashant Shukle, Director General, Mapping Information Branch, Natural Resources Canada, organized a four hour discussion with representatives from the Federal and provincial governments, academia and the private sector to discuss the what and how of accelerating this effort, which looks very promising.