[ARTICLE] PEI's Only Hope?

[rfmcdonald]

From today's The Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson's article "PEI's 'brilliantly strategic' challenge":

CHARLOTTETOWN -- 'We have a half-generation to get it right." The urgency behind Wade MacLauchlan's warning is obvious. So is his determination to do something about "it."

The "it" is Prince Edward Island's future as a more prosperous place, with the path to that prosperity running through knowledge, innovation and the clustering of resources.

Tourism, agriculture, fisheries, a few scattered industries and, of course, employment insurance, regional development grants and equalization payments won't produce that "it." There's got to be something more to define the island as a much more innovative place.

Otherwise, warns Mr. MacLauchlan, who is the president of the University of Prince Edward Island, "we are at serious risk of losing the demographic race, seeing our own talented people leave, and failing to attract much-needed new people and investments."

Perhaps you would expect as much from a university president. This breed preaches the gospel of knowledge and innovation as the way to a better future. The question is whether governments are listening.



In Nova Scotia, for example, with its large network of universities, base budgets have not come close to keeping up with inflation. That's completely dumb, given that the province's universities represent one of its few (only?) competitive advantages.

In PEI, happily, the government of Premier Pat Binns seems to understand. UPEI's base budgets went up 6.7, 6.3 and 5.6 per cent from 2001-2002 to 2003-2004.

It isn't easy finding the money for these increases when the province's health-care budget is rising about 10 per cent a year. Many provincial governments have abandoned their universities' fight to keep up with inflation because health-care devours all discretionary resources. Ontarians will see that devouring dynamic on Tuesday when the McGuinty government slashes everywhere, raises taxes (in the form of fees) -- but tries to sustain the mighty health-care budget.

Every province knows the health-care system is utterly unsustainable, but apart from demanding even more money from Ottawa, they are at sea about solutions. They're as petrified of public opinion as the three federal parties. The results are intellectual constipation and public ignorance.

The health-care crunch has caught Mr. Binns's government, except that, to their credit, the Conservatives have found the necessary cash to keep UPEI growing.

Student enrolment has risen to about 3,900 full- and part-time students from about 2,900 in 1998-1999. Most of the new enrolment is from islanders, as more high-school graduates want to attend university. (The province's dropout rate is still above the national average, a big drag on its future.) Funded research has shot up. UPEI has risen from near the bottom to the middle of Maclean's rankings for primarily undergraduate universities. It doesn't mean much when universities move up or down a couple of places in that annual magazine survey. When a university jumps a lot, it usually means something interesting is happening.

Some key islanders seem to have understood that universities are engines of economic growth, escalators for the mobility of students and incubators of new ways of thinking.

New ways of thinking come hard to a tradition-encrusted place, where the politics remain profoundly local. But without them, insists Mr. MacLauchlan, this place that he says you "can get your arms around," will continue its quaint decline.

He's fired up about moving the province's agriculture beyond producing products, especially the almighty spud, into bioresource technologies, or figuring out how the chemistry of natural products can be used for other purposes.

The key -- whether in bioresource technology, animal science or whatever -- is clustering. Mr. MacLauchlan insists that "if we are not saying no to most things, then we lack the capacity to say yes to anything." (Are you listening, Prime Minister Paul Martin?) Focus and focus again is his mantra. Try for selected areas of excellence. Convince yourselves that you can be the best.

PEI, one of the windiest places in Canada, ought to be a national laboratory for wind-generated power. The province already gets 5 per cent of its power from wind (it has the largest wind turbine in Canada), but that share should be many times higher.

Clustering and saying "no" rub against the PEI grain. As in other areas of deep dependence, people from one town or county squabble over morsels of government money distributed even a few dozen miles away. Politicians, including federal ones, are encouraged to think small, to display what Mr. MacLauchlan calls "parish-mindedness."

PEI politicians are rewarded for what largesse they can bring home, a microcosm of what Canadians are seeing from the federal Liberals who have resorted to the grossest kind of pre-electoral pork-barrelling. It's as if the Martin crowd thinks of the whole country as a giant PEI.



Wade MacLauchlan is running the only institution that offers PEI a better future. Can PEI take up his challenge to be "brilliantly strategic"? The culture and politics of the place suggest no, but it's worth a sustained try.