OTTAWA, ON, Feb. 8, 2021 /CNW/ – With the world’s longest coastline and connected to three oceans, Canada is well positioned to be a global leader in the blue economy – an economy that creates good, middle-class jobs, while ensuring healthy oceans and sustainable ocean industries.
Building a blue economy that benefits Canadians from coast to coast to coast requires input from people in coastal communities and across the country. That’s why today, the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, the Honourable Bernadette Jordan, officially launched the engagement phase in the development of Canada’s Blue Economy Strategy. Whether it is through new products and technologies to enhance sustainability in the commercial fishing industry, exploring offshore renewable energy to transition to net-zero emissions, encouraging sustainable tourism in coastal regions, enhancing international trade, or developing new green technologies and practices in ocean-related fields, all Canadians have a vested interest in determining how to grow our ocean sectors responsibly and sustainably.
To kick off the engagement, the Minister will host a series of virtual roundtables with ocean innovators, academia, women and global leaders, and the fishing and aquaculture industries. Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) is also launching a Blue Economy Strategy website today, where Canadians will be invited to provide their views and input. Engagement will continue until June 15, 2021, and the feedback received will inform the development of this whole-of-government strategy, which will be released in late fall. Canada’s Blue Economy Strategy is expected to contribute to sustainable oceans, drive investment in our ocean industries, and create jobs in coastal communities as Canada charts its economic recovery from COVID-19.
Over seven million people live on Canada’s coasts and our ocean industries contribute approximately $31.7 billion to Canada’s GDP every year. With vast ocean spaces, and extensive oceans research capacity, we are in an enviable position to harness even more ocean growth potential in the years to come – and the consultations launched today are the first step in this important process.
Quotes
“Canada’s blue economy should be second to none. That’s why we’re developing a strategy to make our ocean industries more sustainable, more productive and more prosperous. This is about creating more long-term opportunities for our coastal communities, by working with the ocean on its terms. Canadians understand that action on climate change is vital to sustainability and economic growth, and building a thriving, sustainable ocean economy is no different. The Blue Economy Strategy will help steer federal investments and actions, on all three coasts, across all ocean sectors, toward a single goal: to get more Canadians working on and in the water.”
The Honourable Bernadette Jordan, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard
“A Blue Economy Strategy means long-term prosperity for coastal and Indigenous communities. A comprehensive strategy will reflect the input of all Canadians, further protect our ocean-based resources while increasing our competitiveness.”
The Honourable Seamus O’Regan Jr., Minister of Natural Resources
“Our government understands that Canadians have always had a strong connection with our coasts and waterways. The Blue Economy Strategy aligns and complements what is being accomplished through Canada’s Oceans Protection Plan. Together, with Indigenous communities and stakeholders, we’re investing in protecting the environment while growing the economy by working to create a world-leading marine safety system that improves responsible shipping, protects Canada’s waters and strengthens response measures.”
The Honourable Omar Alghabra, Minister of Transport
“The oceans are a vital lifeline for Indigenous peoples in Canada’s North and Arctic, for everything from hunting, to fishing, to the delivery of goods through Sealift. It is essential that the unique needs of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities in the North are reflected in Canada’s Blue Economy Strategy. This will help drive future activities that protect these waters while enhancing economic opportunities. That is why we need partners from across Canada to engage in the development of this important strategy.”
The Honourable Daniel Vandal, Minister of Northern Affairs
“If Canada is going to remain a leader in the blue economy, we need to continue to develop new technologies and solutions that allow us to increase productivity in our ocean sectors while enhancing their protection to ensure sustainability. Our world leading ocean-innovators will play a vital role in the future of our ocean sectors.”
The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry
“Our ocean economy will only continue to grow, and by having a comprehensive Blue Economy Strategy, we can ensure that our actions and investments are coordinated to ensure proper stewardship of Canada’s blue resources. This will in turn lead to long-term economic prosperity for those who depend on our ocean sectors, including tourism businesses in coastal communities.”
The Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages
Quick Facts
The World Bank defines the blue economy as the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs, and ocean ecosystem health.
Pre-COVID-19, Canada’s ocean-based economy contributed significantly to national Gross Domestic Product (GDP), adding approximately $31.7 billion annually (1.6 per cent of total GDP) and nearly 300,000 jobs across a broad range of sectors.
DFO will continue working with federal partners, including Transport Canada, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Infrastructure Canada, Global Affairs Canada, regional development agencies, and others, to advance this whole-of-government federal initiative.
Indigenous peoples will be engaged through ministerial and departmental roundtables, and all Indigenous peoples will be able to share their views about how a Blue Economy Strategy could better serve their economic and environmental priorities through the online engagement website. Indigenous peoples bring vast knowledge and valuable experience given their longstanding and close relationship with Canada’s oceans.
The Government of Canada has taken strong action and leadership in the area of ocean protection and conservation. This includes ongoing actions under the Oceans Protection Plan, and a public commitment to protect 25 per cent of Canada’s marine and coastal areas by 2025, and 30 per cent by 2030. The future success of our blue economy will be enabled by this comprehensive environmental agenda.
Associated Links
Stay Connected
SOURCE Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) Canada
For further information: Jane Deeks, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, 343-550-9594, [email protected]; Media Relations, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, 613-990-7537, [email protected]
Lack of business investment is the main culprit. Canadians are digging holes with shovels while our competitors are buying excavators
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Published Mar 28, 2024 • 5 minute read
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It speaks to the seriousness of the situation that the Bank of Canada is not so much taking the gloves off as slipping lead into them.
Senior deputy governor, Carolyn Rogers, came as close to wading into the political arena as any senior deputy governor of the central bank probably should in her speech in Halifax this week.
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But she was right to sound the alarm about a subject — Canada’s waning productivity — on which the federal government’s performance has been lacklustre at best.
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Productivity has fallen in six consecutive quarters and is now on a par with where it was seven years ago.
Lack of business investment is the main culprit.
In essence, Canadians are digging holes with shovels while many of our competitors are buying excavators.
“You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘in emergency, break glass.’ Well, it’s time to break the glass,” Rogers said.
She was explicit that government policy is partly to blame, pointing out that businesses need more certainty to invest with confidence. Government incentives and regulatory approaches that change year to year do not inspire confidence, she said.
The government’s most recent contribution to the competitiveness file — Bill C-56, which made a number of competition-related changes — is a case in point. It was aimed at cracking down on “abusive practices” in the grocery industry that no one, including the bank in its own study, has been able to substantiate. Rather than encouraging investment, it added a political actor — the minister of industry — to the market review process. The Business Council of Canada called the move “capricious,” which was Rogers’s point.
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While blatant price-fixing is rare, the lack of investment is a product of the paucity of competition in many sectors, where Canadian companies protected from foreign competition are sitting on fat profit margins and don’t feel compelled to invest to make their operations more efficient. “Competition can make the whole economy more productive,” said Rogers.
Using the Monopoly board game as a prop, Williams, the party’s critic for pan-Canadian trade and competition, claims that in every sector, monopolies and oligopolies reign supreme, resulting in lower investment, lower productivity, higher prices, worse service, lower wages and more wealth inequality.
Williams said that Canadians pay among the highest cell phone prices in the world and that Rogers, Telus and Bell are the priciest carriers, bar none. The claim has some foundation: in a recent Cable.co.uk global league table that compared the average price of one gigabyte, Canada was ranked 216th of 237 countries at US$5.37 (noticeably, the U.S. was ranked even more expensive at US$6).
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Williams noted that two airlines control 80 per cent of the market, even though Air Canada was ranked dead last of all North American airlines for timeliness.
He pointed out that six banks control 87 per cent of Canada’s mortgage market, while five grocery stores — Sobeys, Metro, Loblaw, Walmart and Costco — command a similar dominance of the grocery market.
“Competition is dying in Canada,” Williams said. “The federal government has made things worse by over-regulating airlines, banks and telecoms to actually protect monopolies and keep new players out.”
So far, so good.
The Conservatives will “bring back home a capitalist economy” — a market that does not protect monopolies and creates more competition, in the form of Canadian companies that will provide new supply and better prices.
That sounds great. But at the same time, the Conservative formula for fixing things appears to involve more government intervention, not less.
Williams pointed out the Conservatives opposed RBC buying HSBC’s Canadian operations, WestJet buying Sunwing and Rogers buying Shaw. The party would oppose monopolies from buying up the competition, he said.
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The real solution is to let the market do its work to bring prices down. But that is a more complicated process than Williams lets on.
Back in 2007, when Research in Motion was Canada’s most valuable company, the Harper government appointed a panel of experts, led by former Nortel chair Lynton “Red” Wilson, to address concerns that the corporate sector was being “hollowed out” by foreign takeovers, following the sale of giants Alcan, Dofasco and Inco.
The “Compete to Win” report that came out in June 2008 found that the number of foreign-owned firms had remained relatively unchanged, but recommended 65 changes to make Canada more competitive.
The Harper government acted on the least-contentious suggestions: lowering corporate taxes, harmonizing sales taxes with a number of provinces and making immigration more responsive to labour markets.
But it did not end up liberalizing the banking, broadcasting, aviation or telecom markets, as the report suggested (ironically, it was a Liberal transport minister, Marc Garneau, who raised foreign ownership levels of air carriers to 49 per cent from 25 per cent in 2018).
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The point is, Canada has a competition problem but solving it requires taking on vested interests. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has indicated he is willing to do that, calling corporate lobbyists “utterly useless” and saying he will focus on Canadian workers, not corporate interests.
“My daily obsession will be about what is good for the working-class people in this country,” he said in Vancouver earlier this month.
Even opening up sectors to foreign competition is no guarantee that investors will come. There are no foreign ownership restrictions in the grocery market (in addition to the five supermarkets listed above, there is Amazon-owned Whole Foods). When the Competition Bureau concluded last year that there was a “modest but meaningful” increase in food prices, it recommended Ottawa encourage a foreign-owned player to enter the Canadian market. It was a recommendation adopted by Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, to no avail thus far.
But it is clear from the Bank’s warning that the Canadian economy requires some shock treatment.
Robert Scrivener, the chairman of Bell and Northern Telecom in the 1970s, called Canada a nation of overprotected underachievers. That is even more true now than it was back then.
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China’s annual “Two Sessions” conference has for decades revealed the party agenda to the faithful. This year’s meeting offered them little, a startling development given China’s huge economic and financial challenges – a property crisis, export shortfalls, demographic decline, a loss of confidence among consumers and private business owners, and growing hostility in foreign capitals. More than ever, China needs Beijing to act, to point the way to future action. The failure to address this need at the Two Sessions suggests that China’s leadership has run out of ideas.
Most telling was the absence of the traditional press conference. Every Two Sessions meeting has included a space for China’s leadership to interact with both domestic and foreign media. The senior men in government were not always forthcoming at these exchanges, but their evasive answers at least pointed out publicly what matters they considered touchy or awkward. When this year’s press conference was cancelled, one can only conclude that the good and the great in the Forbidden City worry about being embarrassed.
The authorities did announce a real growth target for 2024. They set it at “around 5 percent.” In one respect, this information can only be described as bland. It was expected and is very close to last year’s pace. In another respect, however, it confesses failure of a sort. It is, after all, barely over half the real growth rate China averaged up until 2019. And with all the problems, it is not clear that China can even make that rate. Last year the economy had a tailwind from pandemic recovery. None of that is in play in 2024. Meanwhile, the authorities never explained how they intended to achieve the growth.
Infrastructure spending was mentioned, one trillion yuan ($132.9 billion) worth of it. Infrastructure is China’s default form of economic stimulus. But little was said about how China would finance such spending. Local governments, the usual source of infrastructure financing, face huge debt overhangs, some so severe that they cannot even meet the public service needs of their populations. True, Beijing said it was ready to take the unusual step of issuing central government debt to finance the spending. But even that raises questions. The government already faces record high budget deficits. The emphasis on “ultra-long bonds” may hint at how difficult financial matters have become. Long maturities will delay the need to repay the debt and show that Beijing does not expect an immediate return from its spending.
Little was said about the property crisis with all its adverse economic and financial ramifications. Despite the need for bold action on this front, all Beijing has mustered so far are the “white lists” in which local governments compile a list of failing real estate projects for financing that the state-owned banks would review before advancing the funds. The amounts discussed so far, however, are tiny compared with the need, barely over 5 percent of Evergrande’s initial failure two and half years ago. Some weeks back, talk emerged about a plan for the government to take over some 30 percent of the housing market. Although such an action would have brought China other severe problems, it would have been big enough to disguise the property crisis. Nothing as bold or substantive as that got a hearing at the Two Sessions.
On China’s deflation problem, the authorities did indicate a target of 3 percent inflation for the year but said nothing about how they planned to achieve it. To be sure, deflation is more a symptom than a cause of the country’s challenges, which in part lie with inadequate demand for consumption and capital spending by private business, but neither did China’s leadership say much about these problems either. The only concrete suggestion was a promise by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) to cut interest rates more than the bank already has. Given the lack of an economic response to past rate cuts, this promise hardly seems an adequate answer. In any case, as soon as the conference ended, the PBOC at its own meeting decided against another interest rate cut.
Talk did center on new growth engines for the economy, what the conference referred to as “new productive sources.” There was little new here. Renewable energy, advanced technology, and electric vehicles led the list. Like so much else offered at the Two Sessions, the talk was all aspirational. No one suggested how China planned to promote these areas beyond what is already being done. Given the sorry state of China’s economy, that is not enough.
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If the Two Sessions is supposed to announce a guide to China’s future, this year’s meeting missed its mission, especially in the face of China’s many economic and financial problems. Perhaps more complete and substantive guidance will emerge at next month’s politburo meeting, but given how the Two Sessions went, that seems unlikely. China’s leadership seems to have run out of ideas.
The U.S. economy grew at a solid 3.4 per cent annual pace from October through December, the government said Thursday in an upgrade from its previous estimate. The government had previously estimated that the economy expanded at a 3.2 per cent rate last quarter.
The Commerce Department’s revised measure of the nation’s gross domestic product – the total output of goods and services – confirmed that the economy decelerated from its sizzling 4.9 per cent rate of expansion in the July-September quarter.
But last quarter’s growth was still a solid performance, coming in the face of higher interest rates and powered by growing consumer spending, exports and business investment in buildings and software. It marked the sixth straight quarter in which the economy has grown at an annual rate above 2 per cent.
For all of 2023, the U.S. economy – the world’s biggest – grew 2.5 per cent, up from 1.9 per cent in 2022. In the current January-March quarter, the economy is believed to be growing at a slower but still decent 2.1 per cent annual rate, according to a forecasting model issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
Thursday’s GDP report also suggested that inflation pressures were continuing to ease. The Federal Reserve’s favoured measure of prices – called the personal consumption expenditures price index – rose at a 1.8 per cent annual rate in the fourth quarter. That was down from 2.6 per cent in the third quarter, and it was the smallest rise since 2020, when COVID-19 triggered a recession and sent prices falling.
Stripping out volatile food and energy prices, so-called core inflation amounted to 2 per cent from October through December, unchanged from the third quarter.
The economy’s resilience over the past two years has repeatedly defied predictions that the ever-higher borrowing rates the Fed engineered to fight inflation would lead to waves of layoffs and probably a recession. Beginning in March 2022, the Fed jacked up its benchmark rate 11 times, to a 23-year high, making borrowing much more expensive for businesses and households.
Yet the economy has kept growing, and employers have kept hiring – at a robust average of 251,000 added jobs a month last year and 265,000 a month from December through February.
At the same time, inflation has steadily cooled: After peaking at 9.1 per cent in June 2022, it has dropped to 3.2 per cent, though it remains above the Fed’s 2 per cent target. The combination of sturdy growth and easing inflation has raised hopes that the Fed can manage to achieve a “soft landing” by fully conquering inflation without triggering a recession.
Thursday’s report was the Commerce Department’s third and final estimate of fourth-quarter GDP growth. It will release its first estimate of January-March growth on April 25.
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