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Preston Manning is the former leader of the Reform Party of Canada and a former leader of the opposition in Canada’s Parliament.
What is Canada’s strongest feature on the global economic stage? We don’t have the largest population on the planet. We don’t have the biggest GDP. We aren’t a financial powerhouse and we don’t have the smartest or most economically astute government.
But area-wise, we are the second-largest country on Earth, which means that we have the second-largest, or perhaps even the largest, stock of natural resources on the planet – an enormous source of strength and responsibility if we would only recognize it, capitalize on it, and make its future development and stewardship a national priority.
Unfortunately, the current federal government tends to regard the natural-resource sectors as relics from the past and even as environmental liabilities. It gets away with this negative posture because Canada’s increasingly urban population does not fully recognize how many urban jobs and incomes are actually dependent on the health and performance of the rural-based natural resource sectors – agriculture, energy, mining, forestry, and fisheries.
For the rest of this column: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-natural-resources-are-more-important-to-the-economy-than-city-dwellers/