In the fashionable theory of innovation, an embarrassment of riches stunts the growth of Canada, and especially Alberta. Abundant natural resources are said to stifle creativity. Energy price drops provoke disparaging comparisons to countries with other livelihoods and notably, nowadays, information and communications technology (ICT).

A commentary by the Canada West Foundation recites the view in vogue under the title The Albatross: Natural Resources and Western Canada’s Economic Future. “The traditional emphasis on natural resources perpetuates our overreliance on the bottom end of the economic value chain. Pulling stuff out of the ground, whacking down trees and growing grain all contribute to the western Canadian economy, but they also rely on highly volatile commodity markets and do not capture the value that can be added to them down the line.”

Similar thinking inspires a 268-page report – titled Innovation and Business Strategy: Why Canada Falls Short – by the Ottawa-based Council of Canadian Academies. The staples thesis, a university economics mainstay for 80 years, explains why. Canada is held back by a colonial past of importing technology to export resources, which breeds exposure to global market risks and a timid business culture. Breaking old habits is the formula for catching up with higher productivity in ICT-rich countries, notably the United States.

The theoretical critiques ignore realities of ICT use and 21st-century resource development.

In the U.S., digital tools are cornerstones of industries that look hugely productive on statistical charts of revenues per employee: health care, financial and insurance services. Texas billionaire Ross Perot, an ICT pioneer whose feats included a credible run as an independent presidential candidate against the first George Bush in 1992, made his fortune as a health-care computer contractor. Before the bubble burst in 2008, the financial sector’s share of U.S. gross domestic product doubled to eight per cent, or more than $1 trillion.

But big ICT users are vulnerable to market risks. Perot is also famous as the biggest individual loser ever on the New York Stock Exchange because the value of his shares in his computer firm fell $450 million on one bad 1974 day. The U.S. financial sector is forecast to lose at least $100 billion a year and 700,000 jobs in the current market spasms.

Economists are starting to question whether the natural resource sector deserves its dinosaur image. “Innovative firms are found across all industries,” says a research paper in the winter edition of Statistics Canada’s Canadian Productivity Review. The study proposes including resource exploration in national ledgers of wealth generation. “An expanded definition of innovative activity is necessary to analyze fully the role of scientific knowledge creation in advancing economic growth.”

Fashionable opinion needs to take Statistics Canada’s cue and quit ICT worship. To open minds, a wide streak of creativity is obvious in the energy industry. It lives and grows by mastering – partly with ICT – adversities from gyrating prices and costs to increasingly difficult resource deposits and regulation.

Gordon Jaremko