Cultural development of the North takes vision.

• Author: Robinson, David
• Position: Economically Speaking - Report

Jellsy-one-one arrived on Earth fairly recently. Jellsy brought a new way of thinking about the economy that we need here in Northern Ontario.

Jellsy isn't an alien: the letters JEL:Z11 are the classification number for cultural industries in the Journal of Economic Literature. There is a whole new field in economics about the economics of arts, sports and other cultural activities.

Statistics Canada's Satellite Accounts show how much cultural industries contributed to the economy in 2010: 703,900 direct jobs and $53.2 billion in income. That is four per cent of the economy. The mining industry, by way of comparison, provides 370,000 jobs. Ontario's culture industries added $23.8 billion to provincial income, well above the national average.

Cultural production is the most rapidly growing sector worldwide, according to UNESCO. Employment in industries like mining is shrinking, but culture is growing. Manufacturing is shrinking, but creative arts are blossoming.

Technology is making it cheaper to produce almost everything. People use the money they save for pretty cars, movies about superheroes, sports events, music, printed T-shirts and interior design--all products with more cultural content and less material content. We are consuming more cultural product all the time.

Technology is also replacing labour in many industries: where did all the labour go? More and more goes to cultural production. The problem for the North is that we are weak on the cultural industries.

There is a brilliant analysis of how economies develop using the "product space" model. This is a project that looked at the links between industries. According to the research, it is easier for a country to de velop new industries that naturally have links to their old industries. If Germany already exports chemicals, it is easy to begin exporting photographic paper. This is a modern version of the Canadian staples theory that showed that links to Canadian resource exports explained the Canadian pattern of development. Wheat exports led to farm equipment exports (Massey-Ferguson, for example) and transportation systems that in turn helped create an auto industry that let Bombardier become a Canadian transportation/aerospace giant.

There are no strong links from our Northern resources industries to the cultural industries. If the future really is culture, then the old Newfoundland saying: "You can't get there from here,"...