If Canada wants to draw creative, educated professionals, it’s going to have to foster a progressive environment which is attractive to digitally-able, post-materialist, 21st-century citizens.

Wow.  Not sure I could agree more with this.  Hopefully this cathces on and people start to recognize how important technology, knowledge, and creativity are to this country’s future economic growth.

Its dangerous to draw conclusions from history that is too fresh, but I’m going to anyway.

Canada is a country with an essentially pre-industrial economy.  What I mean by that is our economy is based almost entirely or natural resource extraction.  Sure our extraction methods are more advanced today, but in essence ours is still a pre-industrial economy. 

In other words this country is a one trick pony.  This is fine when everyone wants that trick, like when commodity prices are high and demand is strong, as has been the case for several years now.  But what happens when demand craters, and prices tumble, as we’ve seen over the past couple months? 

Canada’s near complete economic reliance on natural resources is a dangerously precarious position, and one the entire country has willfully ignored while the good times rolled.  Unfortunately the good times are over and no one know when they’ll be back. 

This isn’t to say that low oil price mean the country is going backrupt.  Rather it is to say that while times were good and money flowed out of the ground anywhere you stuck a shovel, we had the greatest opportunity we ever haveto diversify what we offer the world, and make sure those good times keep on rolling.

However we squandered this opportunity.  Worse we as a nation do not even realize what we have squandered.  And the consequences will likely be a slow unraveling or global relevance and economic prosperity.

It didn’t have to be like this.  Canada has an incredible education system, and the kinds of cultural freedoms necessary to allow bright people to try crazy ideas.

Unfortunately Canadians are saddled with the most crushing complacency you’ll find anywhere.  Your typical Canadian’s highest aspiration is to get a government job.  Candian minds and spirits have been left fallow, and so the best leave while the rest remain to exacerbate the problem.

Canada should have the creative, cultural and knowledge industries to pick up the economic slack of crumbling commodity prices.  But we don’t have these industries because the human mind is the one natural resource this country sadly couldn’t care less about.

One of my favorite and former professors at CMU is Richard Florida, who has spent many years studying the relationships between creative work and economic productivity. Recently he moved from George Mason University in D.C. to the University of Toronto in… well… Toronto. Apparently Canada offers the kinds of intellectual freedoms and diversity that support creative work, and that many see vanishing from the U.S.

Now it seems that Stephen Hawking, frustrated with the stagnating pace of scientific creativity in England, is now considering a move to Canada.

I think what resonates with folks like Florida and Hawking, and so many more whose names don’t grab headlines, is that Canada is an incredibly tolerant place. And that’s pretty important when you’re in the business of thinking up crazy ideas–crazy ideas being the heart of creativity.

The dangerous counter current to this is exemplified in bill C-61(1)(2) — an intellectual iron curtain of sorts. The bill appears to assume that everyone carrying an electronic device or storage medium across our borders is a criminal mule for contraband bits. Should the bill pass into law here in Canada, border guards will likely be expected to confiscate property like laptops and cellphones on the slightest suspicion that they may contain such contraband bits.

What counts as contraband bits? Well the backup application you use to safeguard your work counts, because it technically circumvents DRM on your iTunes songs in backing them up. Reading the bill, it doesn’t seem that you would actually have to have made a backup of a DRM protected song to have committed a crime–merely possessing the software capable of doing so would be illegal. Sounds insane? I agree. It is.

Welcome to Canada Mr. Hawking, we will be taking your laptop now because it seems to contain documents that quote copyrighted material. Quoting, even in an academic context, is mostly illegal here Canada. We’ll take your wheel chair too, because we notice it has a USB port, which means it might also contain such illegal data and we can’t take any chances. Feel free to dispute our decision with… what’s that? you can’t communicate without your laptop? That’s unfortunate Mr. Hawking, but rules is rules.

So will Canada become a lightening rod for the world’s creative class, or an intellectual police state? The two are mutually exclusive, and I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that our future prosperity and democracy depends on the answer.

Update: Looks like the rumours may have been a little premature, and Hawking might stay in Cambridge.