September 4, 2012 – MLI is quoted in two National Post columns today! In the first, National Post’s Andrew Coyne writes about the need for Canada to optimize productivity to combat an ageing workforce and he quotes MLI’s Brian Lee Crowley to make his point. An excerpt below from “Canada is still unprepared for ageing double whammy“:
Our prosperity in recent decades has relied, not on wringing more production out of each worker, but increasing the number of workers. Over the past 50 years, according to figures compiled by Brian Lee Crowley, Managing Director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canada’s labour force grew the fastest of any advanced economy, a 200% increase overall. But over the next 50 years, the labour force will grow by just 11%.
Of course, to some extent the problem may fix itself. It may be that it is precisely because labour was so plentiful that productivity grew slowly: Rather than give workers more and better machines to work with, business may have found it cheaper to just take on more employees. With labour now relatively scarce, the scales may tip the other way.
In the second National Post column, crude reporter Jameson Berkow writes about the West’s burgeoning energy innovation and he quotes MLI’s Philip Cross. An excerpt below from “Innovation heads west: Oil sands pick up Canada’s tech slack“:
Industry-wide innovation is the only reason why oil sands development is a profitable business today. It was the result of what Philip Cross, former chief economic analyst for Statistics Canada, likes to call “constant, relentless innovation,” the sort that is “always going on in the background.”
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