The Bruce Report

May I say that I have never been a fan of black holes.

Sitting out there in the universe like a bunch of fat boobs at a cosmic Arby’s, gobbling down super-sized clusters of stars, nebulae, light, heat, gravity, and just about everything else that keeps a law-abiding galaxy livable, they are the bloated, greedy barbarians of existence.

Or that’s what I have always been led to believe, until today. According to an Associated Press report, scientists have determined that black holes are, in fact, the most energy-efficient engines in creation.

“For the first time,” says the wire service article, “researchers measured both the mass of hot gas that is being sucked into them, and the unseen jets of super-speedy, high-energy particles spit out by them, and determined that they are 25 times more productive than anything man has produced, with nuclear power being the most efficient of terrestrial efforts.”

The Stanford University study’s original author, one Steve Allen, wants you to look at the results this way: “If you could make a car engine that was as efficient as one of these black hole engines, you could get about a billion miles per gallon of gas. In anyone’s book, that would be pretty green.”

All of which brings me to the federally convened Expert Panel on Commercialization in Canada.

At first sight, it looks just like an old-fashioned black hole: Staffed by private-sector fatties, it sucks money from the public purse as it works to score ever bigger happy meals for itself and its corpulent peers. And yet, a closer examination of its just-released study, ‘People and Excellence: The Heart of Successful Commercialization’, suggests that this particular assembly of quantum singularities might soon produce far more than it actually consumes.

After months of research and analysis, the panel – which includes East Coast fishing ubermensch John Risely of Clearwater Fine Foods – has emerged with a series of policy and funding recommendations designed to help Government improve the nation’s lagging productivity performance.

In a refreshingly pragmatic summation of its objectives, panel Chairman Joseph Rotman declared, “competition is global, change is rapid, and knowledge is a critical source of competitive advantage, [so] we decided to focus on issues where prompt action was possible.”

That makes sense and so, in fact, do many of the recommendations: Establish a new, business-led Commercialization Partnership Board to advise federal policy wonks; create a Canada Commercialization Fellowship Program to increase demand for talented workers and managers within the private sector; and launch a Commercialization Superfund to address specific gaps quickly and efficiently.

Most impressive, perhaps, is the panel’s clear-eyed appreciation of the key difference between a workable policy platform and a spin-laden wish list: money, and lots of it. The committee is calling for an immediate federal commitment of $278 million a year to fund its 11 recommendations – this amount, eventually rising to more than $1.1 billion annually.

But why such boldness? After all, Canada’s economy is in pretty good shape. Ours is the only industrialized country enjoying routine surpluses in its federal budgets and in its trade and current accounts. Unemployment is down. Household incomes are up.

What this argument fails to acknowledge, of course, is that Canada’s productivity growth, relative to its first-world trading partners, is moribund. As Thomas d’Aquino, President of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, recently observed: “Other countries are passing us by in raising their living standards because they have found ways to attract more investment, generate higher returns and create more jobs that pay higher wages. Over the past five years, we have lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs, in part due to the higher dollar and intensifying competition from developing economies, such as China and India.”

The appropriate response, then, is to invest in real measures that help transfer innovative, commercially promising ideas from the nation’s research labs to the private sector where they can be developed into goods and services that generate new sources of wealth (and, just as importantly, measures that help businesses acquire the skills, know-how and financial wherewithal to follow through).

It remains to be seen how the panel’s recommendations will be received by the ruling Tory government in Ottawa, which has, so far, skirted the issue of commercial productivity in its ironically dubbed “Stand up for Canada” campaign.

Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next thing we hear emanating from the nation’s capital is that giant sucking sound of the black hole of indifference.

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