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Agriculture employs about 1.5% of the population of Canada according to the world bank. It's heavily automated and while crucial, it will never be able to emplo

by eloff 7y ago

Agriculture employs about 1.5% of the population of Canada according to the world bank. It's heavily automated and while crucial, it will never be able to employ a large fraction of the population. You can't wind the clock back to the 1900s without undoing all the gains made in the last century. Alberta needs to look to Norway and Dubai for how you diversify away from oil in earnest.

LeoTinnitus 7y ago
While it's not realistic, I guarantee that if you initiated the homestead act again in the US, people would do it. Free land and basically full autonomy? I'm 100% certain there is a sizeable chunk of those types in the US and Canada that would make that trade. The reason the homestead act died was cause businesses lobbied the government to get rid of it so as not to give lower income types a choice. They had to work in their factories to survive.
- eloff 7y ago
  Most of the land you could do that with is agriculturally unproductive. Which is why it's federal land to begin with. Some of it is natural parks, and I don't want to see that turned to agriculture. I really don't think it's that simple at all.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
I don't know about Dubai but here in Norway we really are not making as much effort to diversify from oil as we should. A lot of companies are still heavily, in many cases totally, dependent on the oil business. Norway does have one advantage over some other producer countries though in that a lot of the oil business here is on the service side and has customers all over the world so it is less dependent on Norway's own oil producers. Of course this comes with its own risks, oil demand, currency fluctuations, embargoes, etc. Another difference is that Norway was already a sophisticated mixed economy before the oil came along and the state had the foresight to keep the bulk of the oil revenue out of the internal economy so that while it contributed, and still contributes, a substantial fraction of GDP it has relatively little effect on inflation in the country. On the subject of agriculture, that is also quite different from Canada. Norway has relatively little arable land, most of the country is granite upland so farms tend to be small, at least in comparison to prairie what producers, very often family run. We can't grow much wheat because the climate is not congenial so most of the local corn production is rye and barley. The state supports farmers here partly to maintain a degree of self sufficiency in food but also to prevent depopulation of the inner and northern areas; farmers and their families create a demand for schools, mechanics, doctors, dentists, shops, etc. I doubt that any of that will translate into Canadian conditions. And the current right wing government has been reducing the degree of self sufficiency in recent years.

by eloff 7y ago

LeoTinnitus 7y ago

While it's not realistic, I guarantee that if you initiated the homestead act again in the US, people would do it. Free land and basically full autonomy? I'm 100% certain there is a sizeable chunk of those types in the US and Canada that would make that trade. The reason the homestead act died was cause businesses lobbied the government to get rid of it so as not to give lower income types a choice. They had to work in their factories to survive.

eloff 7y ago
Most of the land you could do that with is agriculturally unproductive. Which is why it's federal land to begin with. Some of it is natural parks, and I don't want to see that turned to agriculture. I really don't think it's that simple at all.

kwhitefoot 7y ago

I don't know about Dubai but here in Norway we really are not making as much effort to diversify from oil as we should. A lot of companies are still heavily, in many cases totally, dependent on the oil business. Norway does have one advantage over some other producer countries though in that a lot of the oil business here is on the service side and has customers all over the world so it is less dependent on Norway's own oil producers. Of course this comes with its own risks, oil demand, currency fluctuations, embargoes, etc. Another difference is that Norway was already a sophisticated mixed economy before the oil came along and the state had the foresight to keep the bulk of the oil revenue out of the internal economy so that while it contributed, and still contributes, a substantial fraction of GDP it has relatively little effect on inflation in the country. On the subject of agriculture, that is also quite different from Canada. Norway has relatively little arable land, most of the country is granite upland so farms tend to be small, at least in comparison to prairie what producers, very often family run. We can't grow much wheat because the climate is not congenial so most of the local corn production is rye and barley. The state supports farmers here partly to maintain a degree of self sufficiency in food but also to prevent depopulation of the inner and northern areas; farmers and their families create a demand for schools, mechanics, doctors, dentists, shops, etc. I doubt that any of that will translate into Canadian conditions. And the current right wing government has been reducing the degree of self sufficiency in recent years.