Southwestern Ontario’s Economy: Depending On Its Aorta and Stephen Harper
It’s kind of a weird time in Canada. Stephen Harper has just released his third report on all the stimulus money that was put out into the economy late last year. At the same time, the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff are bound and determined to defeat him this week effectively saying that he has failed Canada on the economy. With more than 7500 infrastructure projects on the go because of stimulus funding the question is who is right and what exactly is going on with our economy now?
Being here in Southwest Ontario I don’t think you have to be a rocket scientist to know what’s going on. While many economists in this world are looking at economic recovery starting with incremental growth rates in many of the G8 countries here in southwestern Ontario it’s not that way. Sure there have been some auto plants get a reprieve in places like Windsor and Ingersoll but our unemployment rate is still well over 13%. So the recovery if it comes can’t come soon enough for us here.
Of course writing about these things always makes me wonder when things are changing. In other words when am I going to see the vestiges of new jobs in southwestern Ontario versus Northeastern Alberta? I dunno. However I was talking to a businessman last week that gave me an example of just how bad it must be locally. He runs a fairly large agricultural business and he told me that several other nonfarm businesses had phoned him hoping that he could “farm out “some of his business to them. He told me that in his long career he had never had that happen before.
That shows you how long this economic recovery is going to take in places like South Western Ontario where the manufacturing base has been decimated. I have also thought long and hard about the Ford plant in St. Thomas Ontario. Simply put how do you replace all of these manufacturing jobs that have been lost not only over the last 12 months but also over the last several years? It surely is a tall order and it is something that we are kidding ourselves if we think getting back to any type of full employment in southwestern Ontario will be easy.
The question is how do we get there? Infrastructure spending is the right idea; in fact, you could say it’s the right idea almost all the time. For instance and economy cannot work without good infrastructure. Space or so regardless of economic calamity that is going on around us there always has to be a plan to improve and build infrastructure.
Take for instance highway 401 in Ontario. For those of you who do not live here it is the transportation aorta of Eastern Canada. If you travel the highway today from Windsor to the Québec border and then on to Riviera du Loop on Highway 20 highway its full of commerce. However I remember when I was a young boy traveling the highway to Expo 67 in Montréal as only a 2 lane highway at certain points in the journey. Now of course the 401 is being tripled as I write. The planning for that was many years ago. However nobody could imagine a Canadian economy without it. It’s all about vision and of course it’s all about infrastructure.
So there is always a need for good infrastructure and for the jobs that it creates. However I think you have to ask the question will southwestern Ontario be able to compete with automobiles from China and India? In other words is our historical manufacturing base ready to take on a new world, which doesn’t care where we have been before? Or are we still grappling with and not preparing to meet the new economy, which will emerge out of this recession? I would say the answers to those questions are quite complex and not necessarily positive. In fact I can hardly imagine our unemployment rate in this region of Ontario going down in the near future.
Needless to say that’s like saying I think everybody is going to take another breath. It’s easy to be a doomsayer when all you see around you is a result of economic recession. It’s also easy to say he’ll never compete with China and India assuming at the same time of course that they don’t have any problems, which they do. So being an economic fortuneteller is always a bit of a fool’s game.
Still, positive economic growth is much better than the alternative. The Bank of Canada Gov. Mark Carney has said that our economic recovery will depend to a great extent on everybody working together and everybody believing it’s going to happen. In other words it’s fragile at best and what else could he say?
Of course that’s why for the cameras Stephen Harper is saying he doesn’t want an election. He’s stammering something about the election will hurt the fragile recovery. Of course none of that makes much sense. Simply put, we’re all Canadians here and I’m sure none of us regardless of political stripe want to send the economy on a bender regardless of an election. Let’s hope this economic recovery reaches southwestern Ontario. And if there is election at the very least let’s hope these issues are brought to the fore.