By Stan Chung

Op-Ed Commentary

Canadians love our public health care. We bring it up every time we talk to Americans.

This year, Canada will spend about $399 billion on health care. That works out to about $9,600 for every person in the country.

Governments pay for most of it. Drugs alone cost more than $50 billion.

But walk through a Canadian hospital and follow the money. Big companies like Pfizer and Merck sell the drugs. Companies like GE and Siemens sell the scanners. Microsoft and Oracle sell the computer systems. Most doctors run their own private practice and bill the government for their work.

We call the whole system “public health care.”

But private companies are doing very well inside it.

Then we go home and flip on a light switch. More than half our electricity comes from hydro dams. Nuclear plants make another chunk. Natural gas makes more. Behind that switch are government-owned power companies, private utilities, and Indigenous governments which partner on many of these projects.

So we are pretty comfortable with government running big things. We just don’t like to call it that.

This mix-up has a long history.

Back in 1945, a scientist named Vannevar Bush told the American president something simple: keep funding science. He said private companies could not afford to wait decades for research to pay off. Government had to do it.

So the U.S. government started funding universities and labs. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the Pentagon poured money into research too.

That money helped build things we now use every day. The internet. GPS in your phone. Voice recognition. Even early versions of the vaccine technology used for COVID.

The real invention was not any single gadget. It was a system that could fund new ideas before anyone knew if they would work.

America still does this. In 2023, U.S. universities did $108 billion worth of research. The federal government paid for more than half of it.

Even private companies get help.

The government gave $32 billion to businesses for research that same year. Nearly $19 billion went to aerospace companies like Boeing.

So when the government is the customer buying the fighter jets, nobody calls that communism.

Sometimes the good “communist” also knows how to be a great capitalist.

In 2010, the U.S. government loaned Tesla $465 million to help it build electric cars. Tesla paid it back nine years early.

NASA gave SpaceX almost $400 million to help build rockets that could carry cargo to space. SpaceX put in its own money too.

The government took a risk. Private companies built the technology. Everyone made money, including the people whose retirement savings are invested in these companies.

We tend to forget the government’s part once the company becomes famous.

Apple is the same story. Steve Jobs still had to build the iPhone himself. But he built it using computer science, GPS, and internet technology that governments spent decades and billions of dollars developing first.

There was a lot more help outside that garage than we like to remember.

Artificial intelligence is the newest version of this story. AI grew out of publicly funded university research and government-backed computer science going back decades. Now companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia are making fortunes selling it.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, started out as a nonprofit. Its goal was to build AI for the good of everyone. But building AI got very expensive. Nonprofits do not have deep enough pockets for that. So private investors moved in.

Elon Musk — the same man who built Tesla and SpaceX with government help — now criticizes OpenAI for becoming too focused on profit. There is something a little funny about that.

Meanwhile, China was watching closely. It already had a tool the Soviets invented: the five-year plan. Starting in 1928, the Soviet Union used these plans to build up industry fast. It came at a terrible human cost, through forced labour and famine.

China kept the five-year plan. But it combined it with something America had already figured out — pour public money into universities and science, then let private companies take it from there.

We call China’s approach to industry “communist government control.” But America has been doing versions of the same thing for generations, just with different words for it.

China connected the dots faster: universities, state funding, battery factories, electric cars, high-speed rail, and workers, all pointed in the same direction by five-year plans.

Then we see a BYD electric car for sale at a Canadian dealership and wonder how communists got so good at capitalism.

They kept their five-year plan. And they studied the capitalists closely.

Here is one more twist. Some of the best new ideas are actually very old ones.

As climate change strains the systems we built, governments and scientists are turning to Indigenous knowledge.

Knowledge about fire, forests, water, and land that was dismissed as old-fashioned for generations. Cultural burning practices are now shaping how we manage wildfires. Indigenous Guardians are monitoring ecosystems right here in the Kootenays.

We spent a hundred years building institutions to discover the future. Now some of those institutions are learning that people who have lived here a long time already knew a lot of it.

Maybe the next big breakthrough is not inventing something new. Maybe it is finally learning how to listen.

Canadians do the same trick with culture that we do with health care and electricity.

We complain about American culture taking over. We defend Canadian content rules. Then we go home and ask Netflix what to watch.

About three out of four Canadians pay for a streaming service. Netflix says its productions in Canada added $6.5 billion to our economy between 2021 and 2024, and employed more than 35,000 cast and crew members here.

We provide the tax credits, the film crews, and the mountain scenery. Netflix provides the algorithm and the next episode.

None of this means private companies do not matter. Pfizer still has to make medicine that works. Boeing still has to keep planes in the air. Apple still has to make phones people want to buy.

Markets are amazing at doing certain jobs. But markets do not build countries by themselves.

So next time someone says, “we need less government” or “run government like a business,” remember this: private businesses do not run armies, build power grids for a whole country, or fund 30 years of research that might never pay off.

Only governments do that.

Big government helped build Apple and SpaceX in America. Toyota in Japan. Samsung in South Korea. BYD in China.

Different countries, different recipes, same basic ingredient.

Canada has its own version of this story, and it is a bit like minor-league hockey.

We put public money into universities, research, and training. We are very good at developing talent.

Then the “big leagues” come calling. A company called ATI Technologies, built in Markham, Ontario, was sold to the American company AMD for $5.4 billion U.S. Ottawa’s Cognos was sold to IBM for about $5 billion U.S. St. John’s Verafin sold to Nasdaq for $2.75 billion U.S.

These are not failures. They are Canadian success stories. That is exactly the problem. We are great at developing the player. We are not as good at keeping the team together.

Geoffrey Hinton spent decades at the University of Toronto studying neural networks, back when almost nobody else cared about that kind of research. Canadian public funding helped keep his work alive. Eventually Google bought his company and hired him.

Today, the biggest AI companies in the world are American: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia. Canada can be proud that some of the earliest thinking behind AI happened here.

But we should notice the pattern too. We train the talent. We fund the research. We build the lab, sometimes even the company.

Then America signs the star player.

Ten years later, we buy the finished product back and call it the free market.

Don’t you love communism?

– Stan Chung has a UBC PhD in artificial intelligence of experimental sonic improvisation. Military funded? No comment.

---

Article Share

---