A SNA-fu in the North.

• Author: Robinson, David
• Position: ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING - Economy of northern ontario

The formula I use for this column is simple: take an issue relevant for Northern Ontario, add some real economics, and try to make it entertaining. Unfortunately, I want to talk regional accounting. Regional accounting is actually important for the North. Regional accounting involves real economics. Regional accounting is also deadly dull.

Fortunately, regional accounting is a mythical beast in Northern Ontario. Mythical beasts are exotic, mysterious, sexy, and maybe even a bit entertaining. Regional accounts have been successfully introduced in Prince Edward Island and in Nunavut. They even have them in southern Ontario, but they never come north of the French River.

A properly harnessed System of Regional Accounts is a real beast of burden for managing the economy. It is actually impossible to run a country, province or a region without good economic data, and regional accounts are the minimum you can make do with. Naturally, all the sensible Northern politicians promise to bring home a System of Northern Accounts for us. For the entertaining part of the column. I'll call it a "SNA-fu."

We are talking about very old information technology here. Somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, governments created national accounts to keep track of production, income and investment. Before long, almost everyone knew at least a little bit about Gross National Product (GDP), and every policymaker with more than two marbles to play with could talk about trade deficits, economic stimulus and GDP growth.

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The newer European system of national and regional accounts (ESA 1995) makes it possible to describe the total economy of a region, country or group of countries, its components and its relations with other total economies. Without regional accounts like this, most of the wealth coming from Northern Ontario mines, for example, could appear as taxes and profits in southern Ontario and no one would know! Senior governments could be sucking the region dry and even they wouldn't know!

Without regional accounts there is no way to tell if the province and the federal government are spending as much in the North as they take out in taxes. Maybe the south is subsidizing Northern Ontario. Maybe the North is still subsidizing the south. I am almost 100 per cent sure that Michael Gravelle, the minister of Northern development and mines, doesn't know...