Ontario Liberals

A Liberal minority government, one seat shy of the coveted majority.  The turnout was a record low and many pundits are saying that the Progressive Conservatives and Tim Hudak frittered away a golden opportunity to unseat the Ontario Liberals and Premier Dalton McGuinty. Some cynical journos are folding their arms decrying the state of politics as reaching an alltime low with inflammatory rhetoric…sometimes, ironically, shovelling more inflammatory rhetoric onto the fire. {As an aside, I really don’t recall the alleged Liberal insinuation Coyne is referring to, let alone it entering into the political discourse in the 2007 election. If someone has a reference/quote/cite, please comment.}

Some are saying the “hat trick” comment by Stephen Harper at derailed Hudak’s Tories::

My take is that the Ontario Liberals dodged a bullet. They lost their majority, losing 19 seats to the PC {-12} and NDP {-7}, but hold on to power. I thought McGuinty was in trouble, but the Liberals ran a smart campaign given the circumstances and it paid off. This election could have been much worse for the Liberals. While watching the election from New York and Illinois, all of the campaigns {well, let me clarify, the big 3} were appealing to centrism and there were big issues that really motivated voters to go to the polls. My guess is that explains the low turnout more than anything {BTW, Elections Ontario will be looking into the decline.} After all, the PCs and the NDP were left with the charge of advocating a change, but not too much change, since the mantra of this election was the middle of the road. I think the big winner is Andrea Horwath, leader of the Ontario New Democrats, who increased her political capital in this election, as well as her likability and visibility. The Conservatives in Ontario at the provincial and federal levels must be scratching their heads to a certain extent. A Liberal implosion at all levels failed to materialize and the idea of a new era with the Conservative Party of Canada being the natural governing party of Canada seems far from a certainty.

The province of Ontario is increasing funding for 6,000 graduate students in high demand areas such as engineering, health, and environmental sciences. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government is set to increase funding for 60,000 total students by 2015-2016.

I think this is a step in the right direction for Ontario and Canada to address the innovation and productivity gaps that plague the economy. AnnaLee Saxenian, author of Regional Advantage, examined the innovation clusters of Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Massachusetts. Historically, both are areas with strong technical universities that were generously funded during the Cold War, but what emerged in California was a culture of innovation.

“In the 1970’s both the Route 128 complex of Boston and the Silicon Valley were centers of high technology industry, but by the 1980’s the Route 128 area was stagnating while the Silicon Valley, after experiencing economics shocks, was moving ahead to become the unchallenged global leader in high technology. The difference in the two areas was not in resources or location but in their commercial culture. Route 128 firms tended to be insular and proprietary, whereas the Silicon Valley firms were open and linked by social and economic networks which enabled them to adjust to the vissitudes of market shifts.”

In today’s Toronto Star, an article on a Toronto Board of Trade report cited a need for increased regional coöperation among the economic development entities in the Greater Toronto Area. The report cites the regional transportation planning of Metrolinx as an exemplar of regional planning. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for the development of Toronto as an innovation cluster, but I think the big challenge won’t be in terms of funding, but in terms of creating an innovative localized culture that permeates the regional institutions, including government, higher education, hospitals {in medicine and healthcare}, and business. So, I can see the Ontario Liberals touting plans to integrate their higher education policy with one for regional innovation incubation. The MPP for Toronto Centre, Glen Murray, is the Minister for Research and Innovation, which runs the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE). One on the ONE members is MaRS, an organization designed to bridge science, government, and business, which the Ontario Liberals have committed funding to::

“To continue to foster that environment, Murray announced a $2.25 million commitment over the next three years for MaRS so that it may continue its mandate to foster innovation in Toronto by harnessing expertise from across academic and business sectors to aid in launching and developing companies. MaRS will become one of 14 centres in the province-wide ‘Network of Excellence’ being built to foster innovation.”

Toronto is a confluence of different types of capital and global flows, with high levels of educational attainment, being a landing area for immigration, serving as a financial centre, and being a hub for the culture industries. What I’ve been reading is that much of Canada’s innovation occurs in extraverted industry clusters, which would tend to dilute regional advantages that take advantage of localized networks. The exception being the entertainment and culture industries. What I don’t know is what the business culture is like in innovative sectors in Ontario–is it more like California {informal, open, networked, greater mobility} or Massachusetts {formal, closed, hierarchical, and path dependent} in the 70s and 80s? The stakes are high, given the state of the economy and hopes pinned on innovation for future growth in GDP and jobs, which Murray is keenly aware of::