Radarsat, MDA, and the Brain Drain
April 9th, 2008 by Chris Ellis | 3 Comments »
The news of the sale of the Radarsat satellite system bothers me to a large degree. This bother is one of my very few expressions of Canadian nationalism—ie upholding our intellectual prowess. This, like many other nationalistic feelings, may be based on mostly nothing and probably does not reflect reality.
Example: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in Brantford and this is heralded as a Canadian invention. Too bad that the company that bears his names is well behind the times in innovation and general competitiveness, but Canadians still pin the “invention of,” the “discovery of,” and the “creation of” above our hearts for all to see. A few other advances worthy of note would be insulin or even the Fields medal for mathematics.
Back to Radarsat and MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates. Other than Radarsat, MDA is associated with the Canadarm—one of the most visible forms of Canadian technological nationalism around. Now one of my fellow bloggers may slug this under deterministic history, but what the hell.
Why has no one tried to relate the sale of MDA to Avro Arrow?
Yes, I do understand that companies get bought and sold all the time and that this may be one of those everyday cases, and I do fundamentally disagree with the NDP’s idea of protection, but a portion of this company’s R&D costs were provided by the government—see the article from The Economist. Will this ever be recouped, either in the form of cash or use of the technology? I doubt it.
Just as the Arrow’s engineers went to the US to put their Canuck brains toward the American space race, all the knowledge that was accumulated will be lost to the United States.
In the publishing industry, the loss of intellectual knowledge and assets in the form of people is a daily occurrence. How many writers, illustrators, and poets pull the tent pegs and move down south or elsewhere? In a way I believe that losing so many people—and therefore intellectual oomph—could be because of how we try to maintain it here. The more we fight brain drain, the more it affects us.
Government grants and subsidies keep people from bolting—but only until the money runs out or the government cuts the program. We need investment from industry to maintain our own brain wealth. RIM has taken the step to invest in the long term and cemented a relationship with the University of Waterloo. Why hasn’t a wealthy BC firm stepped into purchase MDA, or better yet an oil-rich Alberta firm? After all, couldn’t Radarsat be used to snoop for more of the liquid gold up in the northern undiscovered country?
Weekly News on the Radarsat via Google News.
looks like the government agrees with you – http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/413252
Interesting. I wonder if the US firm will cry foul and invoke some random NAFTA rule….
“In the publishing industry, the loss of intellectual knowledge and assets in the form of people is a daily occurrence. How many writers, illustrators, and poets pull the tent pegs and move down south or elsewhere?”
There are a variety of reasons for this. One — and one which I wish was discussed with a little more vigour inside the pages of Canadian media (do we really need Rick Groen telling us that the novel is doing fine and then have him use recent U.S. and British books almost exclusively as examples?) — is we are simply too complacent in this country. Canadian writers, artists, etc., move elsewhere sometimes because the money is better, but as often as not because they become frustrated by an attitude that pervades Canadian letters and tends to assume that genuinely new ideas are simply not how one produces “real art”.
There is a lot of reaction in English Canadian culture, and it is too often of a knee-jerk sort. South Korea, with approximately the same population and GNP as Canada, has a much more vital cultural scene. And one reason for this is simple: Koreans take more chances. English Canadians need to rid themselves of the “interesting-but-not-quite-for-us”-ism that afflicts this country in a big, big way, and acts to suffocate new ways of doing things artistically.