The Canadian High Commission in London has again built a website to help coordinate the Canadian presence at the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. The 2007 event attracted more than 50,000 people.
The folks at International Trade have released a new brochure to attract investment in Canada from wireless and multimedia companies: Canada as an investment destination for wireless and multimedia.
The report includes a few charts that demonstrate the competitiveness of Canadian labour rates for high tech workers. One of the charts compares management engineer salaries in Canada ($95K) versus Hong Kong ($97K), Denmark ($112K) and the US ($99). Of course, these were 2005 figures. Another chart compares the cost of software and multimedia talent in Waterloo, Ottawa, Montréal, Vancouver, San Diego, Dallas and New York.
What has the rise in the dollar done to Canadian competitiveness in these new economy jobs?
There are other factors as well. As Terence Corcoran recently wrote in his Invasion of the Policy Snatchers,
Maybe the objective [of the Competition Review Panel] is simply to stimulate debate to ultimately get to a “policy framework” that would tear down barriers that currently prevent Canadian entrepreneurs from competing successfully on the world market. If that’s the case, such things as high taxes, internal trade barriers, pro-union labour laws, statist health care, problems with education and training, infrastructure inadequacies and regulatory burden would be things to look at.
I’ll have some more thoughts tomorrow about the government using strategic spending as a means to drive an innovation agenda.
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