It's The Economy, Stupid

….to my last post.

How many times have you heard (or said) the following style of statement:

You have to have a good education system to foster economic development.

You have to have a good health care system or people won’t move to the community and you won’t have economic development.

You need to have safe communities to have successful economic development.

Good highways are critical to economic development.

You need a competitive tax regime to foster economic development.

And on and on. Remember our erstwhile gym teacher/Premier said recently that we needed to be in good shape to become self sufficient.

In fact, it really is one of those [insert your pet issue here] kind of scenarios. You need [industrial parks] to have economic development. You need [an arts and cultural focus] to drive economic development. You need [successful small biz] to have economic development.

But how come nobody turns it around? IMO, that’s an even more important analysis.

You need successful economic development to [have the funds for health care]. You need successful economic development to [have the funds for education]. You need successful economic development to [properly fund safe communities].

The reality here is that it is essentially an eco-system that feeds on itself. Education supports ED, successful ED leads to better education outcomes.

So, with that as the premise, why have we increased provincial funding in every one of the areas I mention above – except economic development?

Something to think about.

Okay. All of this stuff makes some level of sense.