Peter Foster: Dim-bulb R&D policy

The Jenkins report on R&D policies in Canada, which was released on Monday, starts with a bureaucratic fantasy. In 1874, two Canadians, Henry Woodward, a medical student, and Mathew Evans, a hotelkeeper, were in the race to build a commercial light bulb, but they couldn’t find backing. When Woodward applied for a U.S. patent, Thomas Edison saw the proposal and bought it. What, asks the report, if Woodward and Evans had been able to find investors? If only, it implies, there had been a government funding body.

If only I’d bought the Google IPO. If only I’d backed Wings of Erin in the 3:30. If only government policymakers had a time machine, they’d be able, literally, to “pick winners.” However, in the absence of Doctor Who’s Tardis, their picking sucks, not least because they attract glib rent-seeking losers, or genuinely innovative corporations that just can’t resist free, or cheap, funding either to do what they would have done anyway or, worse, wouldn’t have.

Canada has been lagging in innovation for so long that it has lagged itself into becoming one of the most successful economies on Earth. “Well,” bleat the statists, “then we must have been doing something right.” Sure, the government has been doing less. Canada got most of its experiments with government-funded failure out of the way the 1970s and 1980s. However, the fetish with boosting R&D just won’t die.

Private initiative has been trouncing the government-guided or government-assisted alternative for more than 200 years. Indeed, carefully buried and tactfully worded within the Jenkins report lies the conclusion that the “bewildering array” of federal and provincial government R&D programs just doesn’t work.

The good news is that the report wants to simplify the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program by restricting it to labour costs. The bad news is that it wants the money saved to be “reallocated” to new schemes.

One must here be somewhat sympathetic to the report’s authors since the possibility of scrapping, or even shrinking, R&D expenditures was never part of their mandate. Indeed, they were specifically instructed not to consider funding cuts, presumably so that the then-minority government of Stephen Harper wouldn’t spook any rent-seekers. Now they have a majority, we can only hope that R&D is on the secret agenda.