Considering out of the near trillion dollars spent in the stimulus only 17 million can be directly equated with anything remotely green tech-and out of that is mostly items about retrofitting homes and buildings to be more efficient, modernizing the energy grid, developing better batteries, and making federal buildings into “high-performance green buildings” (quotations theirs not mine). Only ONE line item in the litany of stimulus items gets to the heart of the matter for me which is creating long-term jobs from new technologies and methods. The Innovative Technology Loan Guarantee Program with its 6 billion dollars allocated is what I had been waiting for; wanting to see. And as I scrolled down the Stimulus Bill and looked at all the items on the bill for the first time I felt very disappointed that the number next to that particular one wasn’t much larger.

Innovative technology is what gets us out of recessions and depressions. The printing press, the cotton ginny, the automobile, the computer, the internet, these technologies disturb and challenge the social order and reallocate funds naturally from investors to the industrious and vice versa as new and exciting markets emerge internally and globally. Technology is at the very core of economic stimulus and therefore by my rationale should be given far more importance.  Too bad I didn’t remember the numbers and specifics of items last night or have all these fancy links and stuff- could’ve saved myself from appearing a whimsical and naive utopian daydreamer (which is how successful older businessmen and politicians inevitably make younger and determined progressives like myself often feel when we forget to sensor our wild opinions) But if I’m disappointed with such a small fraction-though otherwise large on its own- going to green tech and technology in general down south, imagine how I felt when the Canadian Government didn’t even bother to review the idea of protecting Canadian technology developed by Nortel from being acquired by Sweden’s telecomm giant Ericsson. The government claimed that there was no reason to block the sale on grounds of security concerns, which some had raised. Of course there are no security concerns…it’s Sweden. It’s not like they’re Somali pirates or even some opportunistic Hobbesian state clamoring for lebensraum.

What the Canadian government should’ve been questioning the sale on is the basis of the long-term competitiveness of Canadian technology in the 21st century being impacted by this. Even though Nortel has become nearly a carcass (being dropped from  major stock exchanges, going through bankruptcy) it still had the estate of a respectable corpse. Canadian companies and particularly RIM should have received more support from the Federal and Provincial Ontario government in order to keep Nortel or at least its technology and intellectual capital (which has also benefitted from so much tax payer money in the past) a Canadian asset. And even some Ontario MPs have now admitted that it was a failure of government that helped seal Nortel’s fate- government at all levels. So that’s two rounds in my opinion, of government failure to support our tech industry’s future.  Sorry Sweden, we’re good buddies and all, theVancouver Canucks first line is all Swedish (which means that both Alain Vigneault and subsequently myself have placed a huge amount of trust in them) so it’s not like we don’t trust you. But we’re really still developing our hig-tech sector relative to most other developed countries. Nortel, has been a part of that growth and development. Our domestic tech-industry is weakened by this sad saga of atrophic failure and abandonment. The implications will likely slowly unfold as we move forward. And moving forward takes intertia.

Investing in technology gets the economy moving- it gets economies moving. Making sure our technological innovators don’t get picked off by foreign companies- that protects our economic future. I’m not trying to sound protectionist, but there are cases when a company and its assets should be protected or assisted by the state. Unocal being a prime example. The sale of Unocal to Chinese state owned oil interests was eventually prevented by the US Congress - but now China is buying Alberta and it’s oilsands instead; putting Canada in a potentially difficult position. And the only win-win way out of it is new energy technology to meet the demands of China, the US and the rest of the planet; because more of the same technology = more of the same problems. Which is why I say more new stuff please. More new technology, more investment, more biotech, more greentech, more nanotech. Because the more we invest in technologies of the past, the more we will stay in the past and the problems of the past persist. And the more Canadian high-tech companies that get bought out by foreign interests, the more difficult our own long term interests will be to realize in the future.

Damn, I wish I had wrote this blog yesterday….

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