Canada once had an ‘at the time’ super-modern steel industry. Stelco and Dofasco were on the leading edge of steel making tech, using the most advanced for-the-time automated systems. But they fell behind European and Asian technology, became inefficient, and essentially closed up shop. If Canada us to be competitive, we need to completely rethink how we do things. For instance, here is an example of the newest steel making technology that is carbon-friendly, and Canada needs to take a serious look at it.
This is the type of investment needed in Canada.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/sweden-green-hydrogen-powered-steel
Remember when the cool phones were Canadian?
Nortel think more recent RIM. They had the phone and just let it go because they didn’t think the iPhone without a keyboard would be a threat.
This would be real handy these days:
ATI Technologies
This discusses why we dont invest in productivity to stay competitive, at 32:30 he goes over whats happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOXgOLCm54A
Its also called Capital shallowing.
Capital shallowing refers to a situation where the amount of capital per worker decreases, often due to falling wages that allow firms to substitute people for capital. This phenomenon can lead to a decline in productivity, as seen in the UK where falling wages allowed firms to substitute labor for capital, leading to capital shallowing.
This is actually exactly what is happening in the US, where slave-wage states are substituting cheap labor for high-tech investment. They are opening up obsolete plants and running them on cheap labor. Provides abundant employment, but doesn’t provide a good living for the worker, nor long term security.
On the other hand China is doing the reverse - their labor wage rate is escalating because it is the national priority to move all workers into the middle income group, and companies have to comply or face the wrath of the government.
In China, they invested hundreds of millions in capital into coal fired electrical production, just to provide the energy to get the economy booming. Now they are investing in nuclear and solar, and they are closing down all the coal plants they just built to improve quality of life. They have so much capital available, they can afford to do this, and their government philosophy goes along with it, not only supporting it but demanding it.
We will see which philosophy wins.
The only way Canada can compete is to change our model.
In Regina there’s currently a Russian owned steel plant that could easily be converted to green power as it’s already running an electric smelter. In the 1970s it was employed owned. In my opinion there are options.
I watched in ytube we are doing well with small nuclear reactors. Its sad the amount of industry we had that used to be competitive.
As an American, cutting edge tech manufacturing isn’t something we do much of. In semiconductors for example, Intel is currently still working on their new node (probably made in the US and Isreal), but new Intel CPUs you buy are going to be tsmc made until then. And AMD and Nvidia, apple, etc are all making their chips at TSMC as well
A lot of tech companies are US based, but very little of the actual production process is done in the US. I guess that doesn’t matter if you just care about the money going to the US though, since buying an Nvidia made chip will still give money to the (us-based) company.
Actually, IBM is doing a LOT of research into chip assembly - in its huge mega-plant in Quebec. Also employing Canadian engineering graduated from Canadian universities to do the research. American universities just can not produce the quality of graduates Waterloo can. Even at MIT, around half of the graduate students are non-American born and educated.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trump-universities-war-america-coming-brain-drain
