How Canada Has Fallen Behind in the Global Race for Advanced Industries
The federal government’s Budget 2022 makes historic investments to help Canada boost its advanced technology competitiveness.
Unfortunately, if competition were a sport, Canada’s performance would be like the Montreal Canadiens: weak and declining. Indeed, Canada looks, in the words of America’s first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, more like a “hewer of wood, and drawer of water;” only in its case, a hewer of metals and drawer of oil.
But as Rob Atkinson writes in The Spec, why does this matter? Winning in advanced industries means a larger economy, a stronger dollar, higher incomes, fewer supply chain vulnerabilities and a robust defence industrial base.
In order to assess Canada’s performance, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s Hamilton Index examined data on seven key advanced industries: pharmaceuticals; electrical equipment; machinery and equipment; motor vehicles; other transport equipment (e.g., aerospace); computers and electronics; and information technology and information services.
While Canada’s global share of GDP increased from 1.95 percent in 1995 to 2 percent in 2018 its share of output in advanced industries collapsed from 1.8 to 1.2 percent. It’s global share of computers and electronics output fell 57 percent, while its share of motor vehicle industry share fell from 3.6 percent of world output to just 1.5 percent. Canada lost global share in all seven major industries, including in information technology and other services.
