High-tech dreams won’t save our economy

Some say the future of North America’s economy is not on the industrial shop floor, but in the cloud. Unfortunately, the practicality of that argument is stuck up there as well.

Let’s take Apple, for example – the Holy Grail for digital evangelists, who seem to remind us everyday that the tech empire is not only one of the most valuable companies on the planet, but one that has created more than 60,000 jobs worldwide.

Trouble is: it’s really not that many.

According to The Economist, Apple, Amazon and Google – the three corporate crown jewels of Generation Y – collectively employ only 113,000 people, which is less than one-third as General Motors in the height of the 1980s.

One of the most prevalent illustrations of this paradigm came last year, when Apple unveiled its new half-a-million-square-foot data centre in Maiden, North Carolina.

Located in a town where the unemployment rate nears 13 per cent – four percentage points higher than the national average and six points higher than the Canadian average – the facility is expected to employ a measly 50 full-time workers at capacity. That’s less than half as Newfoundland-based sonar manufacturer Marport Deep Sea Technologies (number five on PROFIT‘s list of Canada’s fastest growing companies) – and I bet you haven’t heard of them.

Now, that’s not to say the Apples of the world don’t have a role to play. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. For example, as of September, Techvibe’s number one Canadian startup, Hoot Suite Media, employed nearly 50 people. In today’s labour market, that’s nothing to scoff at.

But the truth is: traditional manufacturing operations, propelled a culture of innovation, play a much more significant role in determining our standard of living. Here are the stats:

• In Canada alone, more than 1.8 million people are employed by the manufacturing sector – about 15 per cent of the entire Canadian workforce;
• One in three jobs (or 30 per cent of Canada’s GDP) rely on exports; and,
• Every dollar of manufacturing output generates $3.05 in total economic activity.

I think we all can agree that the path to sustainable growth is not a single-pronged approach. It will take diversity, public-sector support, a greater integration of partnerships, and – most importantly – specialized knowledge and skills. The cloud, so to speak, is a major part of that blue sky. So, however, is our ability to produce both raw materials and finished goods.

It is no secret the global landscape of business has fundamentally changed. Yet, we as Canadians don’t need to reinvent our identity; we must simply re-engineer what we’ve always been good at.