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Today in pet peeves about provinces... while packing for the move, found my much-requested slide deck from my 'Economic Myths of Manitoba' speech several yrs ago. A couple of samples for the #mbpoli crowd... 
It was a blunt tirade, b/c those myths serve as a sort of reverse antibody, attacking healthy realities which try to invade the MB political bloodstream. Take the "Hydro defines us" silliness, even though MB ranks 4th or (most often) 5th in annual prov'l hydro output rankings...
...and (based on whatever baseline year this was... 2013 2015?) just one (1) hydro complex in Newfoundland & Labrador has enough capacity to outdo the entire Manitoba Hydro network.
/4 (Hell, why not keep going). I covered some other ground: how MB's low wages meant that it was actually in the middle of the pack rather than having an "affordability advantage" vis-a-vis real Western Cdn cost-of-living standards...
/5 And I showed how reviewing even the most basic grain and shipping records will demonstrate that the Panama Canal had little real impact on Wpg's economy after the rocket-fueled 1890s-1910s boom, despite so many legends to the contrary...
/6 ...and covered off a couple of other gems. But the most important argument I was building to, one that amounted to a mea culpa, was built around the conservative critique of Manitoba's sluggish growth; a critique I'd had a bit part in helping to establish in the 90s.
/7 The basic 90s refrain was: Manitoba's public sector was so big that it crowded out the private sector. But in the present, I made the comparison to Saskatchewan, which had become a much more dynamic economy in recent years, but...
/8 ...in deference to notoriously cautious and state-friendly prairie voters, both conservative and social democratic govts resisted bringing down provincial public sector $ as a % of GDP, in defiance of that argument.
/9 And yet, SK's economy surged on a series of real and per cap metrics, even though it is still smaller in pop than MB, and more isolated. Why? What was different? The distinction is hilariously subtle, but still critical to outcomes...
/9 It's not that MB had too much public sector $, per se. It had less than SK did at the same point, in similar circumstances. It wasn't overemphasis on the public sector, but MB's hostility to private sector investment that produced an incredible gap...
Sorry, /10-11 .[Those are Statscan numbers, btw] ...that basically meant the MB economy was trying to rev up with, at times, less than a third of the horsepower that a smaller, similar neighbor was running on.
/12 And that chart is where some of my final columns in the @WinnipegNews came from, like this one. ..winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analys…
/13 The intellectually-lazy, myth-driven MB excuse is "SK has oil." And while there's a longer conversation on that, the short version (as the chart partly makes clear) is that SK was pulling in private investment into a lot of sectors, not just oil...
/14 ...and the easy one to demonstrate just how shortsighted MB myth-driven economic thinking can be, take manufacturing. If MB should be able to dominate SK in anything, it's that. And yet, even after some tough blows, SK was still nipping at MB's heels in late 2018 despite -
/15 - body blows to SK's oil sector. Why? One reasion: SK spent yrs saying yes to new food processors & other firms while MB/Wpg policymakers enjoyed the self-destructive luxury of saying no to industry on industrial land (Cf. winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/C… and Olywest, etc..)
/16 et cetera. And touching on *comparable* choices like that is why I think I got reactions like this (below), even from people who might disagree with some of my points...
/17 Ultimately, the common refrain - both good, and bad - in Manitoba's economic myths (and Winnipeg's among them) is a sort of hot/cold fatalism in which geographic determinism drives whether things should be better or not.
/18 "Whoa is us, a Canal 000s of miles away killed our growth." No discussion of the dozen domestic factors (from the City's legendary real estate boom/bust to the choking of the Grain Exchange) that would have had a more direct impact.
/19 "We'll be rich if we just develop more hydro to full potential! It's our geographic destiny!" Who cares that the capital cost of that potential, and the practical challenge of moving that power from MB's "central location" to real markets is staggering?
/20 "Resource booms further west passed us by, so, we'll make it into a virtue by saying our cost-of-living is cheap, no decisions required!" No consideration of the lost wage factor that was hitched to that thinking.
/21 But all that contrasts with the unwillingness to sell, to open up to, to push, to nurture real strengths that are often the opposite of the Official Sales Pitch and the "strategic" geo-determinism that came with it.
/22 I'll stop there for now, but maybe come back to this thread and that point tomorrow once I've got more packing & Toronto work out of the way...
/23 PS: I have absolutely no frickin' excuse for mispelling "Woe," I'm not even sure that was autocorrect's fault. For shame.
/24 (PPS: Yes, of course I've checked shipping records for Canal/Pacific shipping route impacts beyond just trusting than that wonderful chart of 1924 grain movements, before anyone says wth)
/25 PPPS: One more note for tonight, looking back. The "Real Flaw" graphs are on the same scale, of course: millions of dollars. In other words, SK was already drawing *billions* more per yr as a matter of routine by the late 1990s *in real terms*, even with a smaller population.
/Next Day... I'm busy, and sick. But to take 2 tweets to end this on a positive (as I did with the original speech), Manitoba has many advantages it doesn't promote, nurture or sell: great research output, great mid-sized family firms that need help (not subsidies) to export,
/Next Day 2... a great agri-food sector that is underrated b/c MB policymakers still don't get that food is cool, and an unlikely finance sector that could be leveraged into something bigger with some imagination & policy fixes...
/Next Day 3 - but I'll save details on that for another day. What most of the real assets have in common is that they're about people, not geography, and output that transcends place rather than is limited by it (higher value add, etc.)
And with that, #mbpoli, I'll stop for awhile. Good hunting.
