Driving growth: the Fred and Judy show?

Can you name the two people in Northern Ontario who can make or break the Northern economy? If you said Northern Development and Mines Minister Rick Bartolucci or Federal Industry Minister David Emerson, you have been reading this column too much.

Frederick Gilbert is the president of Lakehead University. Judith Woodsworth is president at Laurentian. At this very strange point in time, they control the switches that decide which way the train of economic development will go.

In a knowledge-based economy the path to economic development runs through the universities. A recent paper in the Cambridge Journal of Economics talks about how it works.

The authors, Jorge Niosi and Marc Banik have been studying the evolution of biotechnology clusters across Canada. They describe how star researchers in universities attract talent to a region. Spin-off companies settle near the university. As the cluster around the university develops, companies that are not connected to the university gradually get a bigger share of the action. The complicated process of getting inventions to market gets smoother and faster.

The challenge and the opportunity for Gilbert and Woodsworth is to encourage the same kind of innovation-based growth in Northern Ontario.

Mining is the obvious anchor for technological developments in the northeast. Forestry will be the foundation for the northwest. But neither sector can generate many direct jobs.

The universities have to attract star researchers. They have to develop new techniques that can be applied in the North. They have to help Northerners commercialize the techniques that their research produces. For the North to succeed, Laurentian and Lakehead must become international R & D leaders.

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The universities have to lead the campaign for economic growth.

Elected officials can't do it because they can't mobilize the universities. In any case they are hamstrung by Northern Ontario's jurisdictional mess. Rick Bartolucci, for example, is Minister of Northern Development, but forestry falls under David Ramsay, Minister of Natural Resources. Universities are under a third ministry. Rick just doesn't have all the marbles he needs to drive northern economic development. And to make his life more complicated, he is also Minister of Gravel and Salt for Southern Ontario. His job is like trying to make dinner and walk the dog at the same time. In snowshoes.

The situation is even worse at the federal level. Minister of Natural Resources Ruben John Efford has very little power because natural resources are under provincial jurisdiction and because industrial development related to resources is under the Minister of Industry. And to support university research the federal government has to infringe on provincial jurisdiction.

To break the logjam, the university presidents will have to draw on the lessons they learned when they created the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. They have to mobilize support from across the North. They have to be each other's best friends. Woodsworth will have to aggressively support forestry at Lakehead, and Gilbert will have to be a fanatic about mining research at Laurentian.

Their message should be simple. The North depends on mining and forestry, Ontario's mining and forestry is concentrated in Northern Ontario. All provincial and federal R & D and training funding for forestry and mining for the province should also be concentrated in the North.

Northern Universities are not research powerhouses yet. They are tiny institutions with few supporters outside of Northern Ontario. Like it or not, they are competing with older, bi ger and wealthier universities. Queen's and Toronto have tens of thousands of well-off alumni. They have graduates in high places. They have international reputations. For Laurentian and Lakehead to become the provincial leaders in their own backyards, they have to team up.

Woodsworth and Gilbert may not see economic development as a big part of their mandate. Universities traditionally focused on teaching and granting degrees. It was a revolution when society realized universities have a key role in creating knowledge. When Laurentian and Lakehead were created in the 1960s, their mandate included both education and research.

The notion that universities can make a region rich was in the in the air in the '60s, but economic development was not mentioned in the Acts creating Laurentian and Lakehead. Now thousands of researchers like Niosi and Banik have shown how universities drive economic development. The role of universities in the knowledge society keeps growing.

It is up to Woodsworth and Gilbert to teach their universities to wear new and bigger boots.

Dr. David Robinson is an associate professor of economics at Laurentian University. He can be reached at [e-mail].