Here's the difference between a booming economy and one forecast to plateau for a while.
Representatives from business and government in Alberta are in the United Kingdom looking for investment. They have as a foundation the tremendous success of a booming economy and a province that is widely known to welcome investment from anywhere.
Meanwhile, Kevin O'Brien, the Minister of Business will be packing up his trade show booth and heading to Qatar and Japan, of all places, to explore what are vaguely described as "opportunities."
He has as his foundation the province's well-deserved reputation as a place where the government makes it damn hard to do business. O'Brien will likely find he is as successful in peaking interest in his province as Albania was in the 1980s.
The plain observation here is that O'Brien has no leads, no contacts and nothing of consequence to accomplish. He is just going to do an old-fashioned junket: attend a few meetings, visit some trade shows and - at the end - pronounce on all the marvelous possibilities that exist out there. We've all seen it a thousand times and it typically produces exactly squat when it comes to meaningful results.
Of course, real business opportunities would be developed by the private sector businesses in the province, not by a provincial government minister. Consider, for example, that Fortis just cut an amazing deal to expand its portfolio without any help from O'Brien or his colleague Trevor Taylor.
This administration needs to recognize its economic development value consists entirely of creating the right climate for business development. Sadly, there seems to be an insistence that it - i.e. government, alone - is the engine to do anything.
Throughout the 1990s, the province's economy developed and diversified based on a simple understanding that government does not create jobs. By 2007, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have come to realize that their government has taken a leap away from ideas that have shown their value at home and abroad to return to policies from the 1980s that were known even then to be disastrously wrong.
What we have is an economy that remains underdeveloped and will remain so for some considerable time.
In the meantime, the best the provincial government has to offer is yet another cabinet minister on yet another publicly-funded trip to yet another bevy of exotic locales to explore yet more vague "opportunities".
The only ones who seem to get anything out of these safaris are the ministers and their retainers, who get to see the glories of thriving economies - everywhere else, of course - and the travel agents who book the passage.
