The importance and danger of the productivity mantra.

We held a conference the other day in Toronto that got me thinking about the limits of policy making. It was put together by Northern Ontario Businesses' sister company. ITWorldCanada. The meeting brought together the top CIOs (Chief Information Officers) in Canada. The purpose was to help them get to know one another, share best practices, and begin to consider how to have more influence in their corporations and, more broadly, with policy making at the provincial and federal levels.

One of our speakers was John Manley, who spent a considerable amount of time as deputy prime minister in the Jean Chretien government and at various times was our finance minister, foreign minister and Minister of Industry Canada. His first love and, I think, most effective contribution was at Industry Canada where he took the question of "innovation and Canadian competitiveness" very seriously and made some initial progress.

In 1993 he became Industry Minister and in 1994 produced a document called "Building a More Innovative economy." He can take credit for ensuring that Canada was the first jurisdiction in the world to have all of our schools and libraries connected to the Internet. He spoke tirelessly about the need for increased productivity and was a part of an administration that increased federal government support for Research and Development substantially. It is still a passion of his.

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The sad reality, however, is that Canada, even after all this effort, is slipping badly on the productivity front. The former minister listed sufficient metrics to prove the point ten times over. I'll give you a snippet.

In 2003 and 2004 growth per output in the business sector in Canada was essentially zero. In the United States the growth has been 3.5 per cent a year since 2000. We are 25 percentage points behind the U.S. and we are ranked 17th among the top 30 industrial nations.

A prime indicator on productivity is our investment in "Information and Communications technologies (ICTs). In Canada we invest less than half they do in the United States on a per-worker basis.

This is a failure that cannot be put at the foot of government. It is a failure of the business culture in Canada, one that has been protected by a low Canadian dollar for a generation.

By now (if you are still with me) you are thinking "I know all of this!!" The other thing you are thinking is that this is one of the most boring columns I've written in a while.

You are right on both counts.

Productivity is not sexy. It is not a problem like Global Warming where we can point to Hurricanes and floods and say I told you so with film at eleven. It is not like George's War or Canada's peace making (as opposed to peacekeeping) missions, which include death and conflict.

I don't think talking about macro productivity is very useful. To begin with it is disconnected from life, and secondly it doesn't differentiate between stupid productivity and smart productivity. To be relevant this discussion has to be tied to communities of interest and productivity needs to be tied to common sense.

Stupid productivity is getting the unit cost of a log so low you can send it to the Japanese and they will send it back as furniture. Smart productivity is understanding the true value of maximizing a resource with innovative and productive value and components. This comes from a conscious business culture. Stupid productivity is getting the unit cost of a high-polluting car so low we can all afford to help choke ourselves to death. Smart productivity is building a green car first and efficiently. Stupid productivity is scraping the bottom of the ocean floor with huge trawlers that cut the cost of fish and destroy the ability of nature to recreate. This kind of productivity kills you.

All roads lead to education. We need Science and Engineering to be productive and liberal arts to help us consider the impact of what we do.

Michael Atkins is president of Northern Ontario Business. He can be reached at [e-mail].