According to the Export Development Corporation foreign direct investment (FDI) in Canada was $26.1 billion in the first nine months of this year, up from $8.2 billion in 2004.
Geez, I wonder how much of that $26.1 billion in foreign direct investment came into New Brunswick? How about the $100+ billion in the past five years? At an average of 8,000 jobs per billion of FDI, even if we had received ‘our share’ that would have meant over 20,000 new jobs.
For those of you that care about such things, Ireland had $80 billion in FDI from 2001 to 2004 while Canada had $62 billion. To put this into perspective, that’s about $20,000 per person in investment in Ireland compared to $2,000 in Canada per person.
Imagine for a moment if Atlantic Canada was able to attract $20,000 per person in FDI over the next four years. That would be $44 billion in investment and would translate into something like 352,000 jobs.
Tee hee hee. Hoo, hoo, hoo. Ha, ha, ha. Excuse my outburst but that even makes me laugh.
To bad. They did it in Ireland.
Just a final note. There was over $2 trillion in FDI into just OECD countries from 2001 to 2004. It seems to me that if New Brunswick got on that train and started to attract its share of FDI, there’s a lot to go around. Or maybe we should continue to support the pizza shop down the street or the pet store. Small business, afterall, is the backbone of the economy as they say.
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/business/051129/b112962.html
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/13/62/35032229.pdf