Canada’s experiment with socialized entrepreneurship is showing signs of failure. A report just issued from the Canadian think tank Institute for Research on Public Policy by Professor Guy Stanley from McGill University states that:

Canada’s national innovation system has many strengths, but is crippled by three glaring weaknesses:
there is a near fatal disconnect between the national science capacity and the national ability to commercialize the research; Canada’s traditional value chains are not evolving rapidly enough to ensure future prosperity growth; and the inducements or automatic regulators that would enable the system to heal itself without significant change are almost entirely absent.

So what to do — what to do? Free up the entrepreneurial forces in Canada and free up the markets? Dismantle the failing centralized economic planning and coordination in Canada? Not according to the author of this report. He calls for more government direction and meddling in the markets of Canada.

Unlike many of its more successful competitors, Canada has no microeconomic coordinating institutions of sufficient scale to re-align science, industry, and national prosperity or competitiveness objectives, or to accelerate the development of organizational competitive advantage.

“Microeconomic coordinating institutions” refers to agencies of the government that would direct the economy at the transactional level. It is not enough to have politicians trying to steer the economy at the macro level through tax incentives and other programs. Mr. Stanley so distrusts free men and free markets that he is calling for Canada to manage and steer business to business and business to consumer activities toward objectives set by bureaucrats in a new government agency.
We already are beginning to see the results of Canadian socialized medicine as their health care system continues to implode. I hope our neighbors to the north keep that in mind as they consider creating the same impossible solution for the rest of their economy.