Recipients of Superclusters cash don’t have to persuade consumers of the value of what they produce. They just have to be good at lobbying the federal Liberals
If you were to leave $950 million at the corner of Bloor and Yonge in downtown Toronto — in packets of twenties, it would create a pile roughly 1.45 metres square by 2.6 metres high — I can guarantee you the result would be a substantial boost to economic activity.
People in the area would pick up the money and spend it on goods and services. With such a sudden influx of cash in search of something to spend it on, factories would have to step up production; distributors and retailers would take on staff.
These new hires would spend their wages on more goods and services, leading to yet more new hires and so on. With such “spin-offs” included, the economic impact of dumping all that cash on the ground could be multiples of the initial outlay.
Of course, other regions might object if the money were deposited solely in Toronto. So you might want to divide the pile into, say, five, leaving them on busy street corners in different parts of the country: maybe B.C., the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec and, oh, what about Atlantic Canada?
And just to be prudent, you might not want to throw away all that money at once. So you might drop it in, say, five annual installments. And if you did all that you would have something approximating the new federal Superclusters program. I’m kidding, of course: it’s far worse than that.
For the rest of this article: http://nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-well-theres-950-million-we-didnt-need-to-spend