Canada's Productivity
Canada's productivity is not in really good shape now. Among its G-7 partners (Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and the U.S.) , it has the lowest rate of growth in economic productivity over the past 25 years while it ranked second in productivity only to the U.S. two decades ago. What was the problem? Why was the situation getting worse and worse? While the problem seems to be getting more serious as the new millennium approaches, Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister, and Paul Martin, the Finance Minster, have played down the productivity issue, saying there is no clear-cut evidence that it is a significant problem. In fact, the high income tax rate compared to the U.S. causes lower salary for those highly skilled workers, which leads to their departure for better pay and more opportunities in the U.S. Also, the Canadian federal government spends too much money on themselves such as building political empires and providing services that duplicate those delivered by other provincial or municipal governments. Besides, Canada has a poor performance particularly in areas related to technology and communication industries. We certainly need a lot more to be done to improve productivity from various sources.
Technology is crucial for productivity too, since Canada has done a poor job in technology and to support those technological talents. Just like Anand Bahl and Kim Cameron, they decided to be part of high-tech talent to the U.S and they sold their privately owned software company, Zoomit Corp. of Toronto, to Microsoft. Anand Bahl and Kim Cameron actually didn't look for a buyer; somewhat Microsoft approached them as they found their company has potential in market. Anand Bahl and Kim Cameron created a software program, which from the e-mail system called the "meta-directory" which allows companies to integrate and manage a variety of related computer files, images and applications from different suppliers. They couldn't get any finance help in Canada and not many people could understand the technology and expected their company to get beaten by a bigger player and wiped out. In fact, their product works and even Microsoft hire them along with 11 of 30 Zoomit's employees to work on integrating meta-directory software into Windows 2000. They were very happy to be accepted from the world's largest and most powerful firm because they had such a struggle to try to prove their product. They criticized the attitude that they encountered in Canada which Canadian companies assumed the product wasn't good enough and they forced to focus on the U.S. which right now about 90% of their sales revenue come from large American companies. The comment that they gave was Canada has world class programming talent, but they have to have a chance and somehow recognize by others, and talent is one of the few things Canada will have left if we let this situation gets worse. Another improvement that should be made is to put more money on education and provide a stable and attractive working environment for highly trained graduates. The loss of these highly trained graduates, estimated in the thousands annually to the U.S. The more opportunities, higher salaries and lower taxes are the main reason to draw their attention. Besides, there are not enough well trained and highly educated people to teach at universities and specialized schools, skilled Canadians who leave because of better pay and more job opportunities elsewhere. Besides, numbers of Canadians are willing to study in the U.S every year. In 1997, 23,000 of t
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Approximate Word count = 1560
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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