This week I ran into an attitude that I haven’t encountered since I worked in the printing and graphic arts industry. I asked town council for the opportunity to present Able Networks’ plan for a Regional Broadband Network in Eastern Ontario. I have received moderate to strong interest from neighbouring municipalities.
The reply I got was “our MIS plans our set for four years, you’re welcome to bid at that time.” First of all, I wasn’t looking to bid. And, who uses MIS anymore? This is a sign of where these folks are right now.
And, setting your plans in stone, as it were, for four years? Come on, the world is changing every day. How can we assume what we’ve decided will be adequate for one month let alone four years?
The town is really a beautiful place, lots of amenities for recreation, reasonably priced homes and relatively low taxes. It’s been getting more and more difficult to attract residential and consumer investment over the last few years.
Our base over the last 25 years is light manufacturing and a some big employers have left (one quite recently, 200 jobs, just closed down). And no one has come in to replace them. These jobs are gone. And they’re not coming back.
A few years ago, we had an effort to bring “high tech” here. This effort failed badly. The committee no longer meets, and I believe it has been disbanded.
The current council appears to be hanging its hat on tourism. Not a bad thing, though the town needs something else to rekindle and rebuild its economy. It needs a vision of the future, one that is not based on the success of the past. It has to be based on how people will live, work and play in the future.
In this century, natural resources and proximity to markets don’t add up to much. Not when you consider how easy it is to buy what is needed to make a product or service and ship it thousands of miles to sell it.
A massive shift in wealth creation is already underway. What began as a movement of labour overseas to reduce costs and increase profits, is being combined with a catch-up work ethic by people in those countries to create totally new, power-house economies.
Wealth comes to those who organize and innovate around opportunity. In the words of Albert Einstein, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
I hope our council opens their eyes before it’s too late to stem the tide.