The eternal waterboys take on the Yellow Peril

Read in my Globe today that Canada is giving Nokia Corporation $40,000,000 to research 5G technology. I find it pathetic in the extreme that we can’t support Canadian tech companies with that money.

Every now and then we manage, in spite of ourselves, to grow a world class enterprise, but they never last long. Usually they’re absorbed by foreign rivals. Sometimes they’re just mismanaged into irrelevance, like Nortel. Sometimes their founders get rich and lose interest, like Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. Funding think-tanks and hobnobbing with intellectuals is way more fun than tech, isn’t it?

So we hobble along while Finland prospers. Finland; a country with a population not quite the size of Toronto’s. Finland, where kids don’t start school till they’re seven… but beat us consistently in educational outcomes.

What’s their secret? Here in Canada we’re constantly told that our diversity is our strength. Do the Finns have more diversity?

No. So it’s obviously something else…

The context for this story is of course the brouhaha over Huawei. Since Canadians are incapable, in spite of our diversity, of developing leading edge technologies, we must be dependant on foreigners. Huawei, being a Chinese company, might use their 5G technology to spy on us. That would be bad. Using technology from Finland or Sweden or the US would be OK, because they’d never spy on us.

This is an absurd line of reasoning. Anyone who wants to spy on us will, regardless of where we source our 5G technology. There’s a thinly veiled racism behind this logic which is quite at odds with our “diversity is our strength” motto.

Sinophobia. Yup, we’ve apologized for the head tax, but the Yellow Peril is still a thing.

Good-bye Huawei, hello Nokia!