Astro Jet wrote:

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69Laurentian wrote:

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Yes, our economy will soon be service based instead of manufacturing based....or is it that way already?

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Same thing happened to England a hundred years ago - remember when it used to be called the workshop of the world?  What is going on is inevitable, it's the division of labour where goods are manufactured in the country where it is most efficient to do so.  This has been going on for centuries.  Countries will continue to manufacture goods that are not efficient to transport over long distances or are particular to the needs of that country.  We will have to become more educated and develop more high skill industries where our education and training is superior to lower skill and wage countries.  Much of manufacturing is in many ways a low skill activity and will seek out the most efficient location of producing that product.  We are world leaders in oil and gas and mining technology and expertise, this is something we can and do export all over the world where Canadian firms are recognized as being leaders.  We have to concentrate more on areas like these that no one else does or doesn't do as well as us. 

Some of you know that I work in the mining industry.  We do not spend our time crying and complaining and asking for handouts.  We sell our product on the world market and are subject to world prices and must compete against every country and wage structure in the world.  How do we do it?  We have developed processing techniques at our mines and smelters that allow us to extract more minerals more efficiently from more complex forms of ore, many of which contain undesireable dirty by-products that others cannot handle, than anyone else.  We  receive ores from all over the world that no one else can process.  We recognized opportunities and specialized to deal with them.  This is an ongong process, we just don't sit on our laurels either.  And some of you are probably aware that miners and the workers at our processing facilities are extremely well paid, both unionized and non-unionized.  We compete on the world market against low wage countries because we do stuff they can't.

We have many engineering and construction firms and those that build equipement for them that are world leaders.  We have RIM (Blackberry), Bombardier and others.  Many see Toronto becoming the world leader in finance, rivalling NY and London, partly because of how well our banks have done weathering the world wide economic slowdown.  Bottom line, we have to learn to adapt, become smarter, provide more high value added services and move on and stop crying about stuff that it makes no sense for us to do any more.

 

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427carl wrote:

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         Exactly!   double the CPP and   run Hillar for PREMIER!

 

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67HEAVEN wrote:

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73SC wrote:

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I can see it now, a black G8 GT for the Premier's car.

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 No, no. The Premier's car is a '67 Grande Parisienne 4-door hdtp........black.......hidden headlights.......dark windows.........chauffered by C2.

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