Will Premier Dalton McGuinty ever learn? He has put another banker in charge of the province’s Jobs and Prosperity Council. Has the lesson of Don Drummond been so soon forgotten? Drummond was TD Bank’s contribution to budgets. Now Royal Bank’s President and Chief Executive Officer Gordon Nixon is going to tell us how to create prosperity and jobs in Ontario.
While there is no doubt that Mr. Nixon runs a very profitable and far-flung banking enterprise, it is basically a bank. You just do not consider it a hotbed of job creation and innovation. Bankers and entrepreneurs are not necessarily compatible species.
It smacks of the Don Drummond experience. Drummond reported to the province that they should cut all government expenses and balance the books for the province. At one point, we thought the exercise was designed to make Ontario Treasurer Dwight Duncan seem more human. All it proved was that Duncan had no worthwhile ideas of his own other than to sell the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) headquarters in Toronto. (If he had offered to sell the LCBO, we would have paid more attention.)
But to have any banker chair a council delegated to the task of advising the government on ideas and methods to create jobs and improve financial growth in the province is, to say the least, questionable. That is like creating a firewall against innovation. It is a built in discouragement to putting forward ideas. You have to be able to take the allowances for failure far beyond the levels bankers will accept. We have to encourage entrepreneurs, not bankers.
Entrepreneurs are far below any bankers’ horizon. The start-ups draw first on what is known as ‘love money.’ This is the hidden reserves of society that are kept away from the bankers in pantry cupboards and under the mattress. This is spent and gone before the entrepreneurs reach for the venture money. Banks are still a distant target because, for them, you need regular cash flow and assets.
Ontario’s manufacturing muscle will have to be replaced without much help from Harper’s Conservatives in Ottawa. We have an educated population. We have a tradition of entrepreneurialism. We can innovate. We can build. And, with respect for RBC’s Mr. Nixon, Premier McGuinty does not know what he is doing..
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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