Canada leads in e-government, but can't market its products

If we are to continue to prosper, we must learn how to brand our products better and further extend the reach of our e-businesses

The good news, as The Globe and Mail reported recently, is that the Canadian federal government leads the world in re-inventing itself as an e-government. The bad news, says Profit magazine, is that Canada is the world's worst marketer of home-grown products. And the not-so-good, not-so-bad news, as reported in the April issue of this magazine, is that Canada gets a passing grade as an e-business nation. Sounds pretty Canadian. As usual, we're in a bit of a muddle.

But first, a tip of the hat to our feds. They're following admirably in the footsteps of functionaries before them who cleared the way for a coast-to-coast railway and secured the airwaves for a national broadcasting service in the CBC. Today's makers of a citizenfocused Canadian e-government will rank right up there with those earlier infrastructure builders.

Accords are a comin'

But a word of caution here. The backbone of our new e-government - the Internet - is increasingly subject to international accords. It's only logical, as the Internet becomes an integral part of our global village, that it should be subject to the rule of law. Those suspects in the Philippines who created the ILOVEYOU virus last year, for instance, could not be charged because that country had no cyber crime laws on the books at the time. So multi-nation agreements are in the works to make sure hackers, pornographers, fraud artists, intellectual property pirates, drug money launderers and other Internet miscreants can find no safe havens.

Beyond crime prevention, The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is figuring out how governments can equitably collect taxes from online transactions. The World Trade Organization is studying trade tariffs as they relate to Internet-based deals. The World Intellectual Property Organization is working on rules to prevent authors, software developers, musicians and other creative folks from being ripped off by unauthorized copying of their works off the Internet.

And there's no doubt that agreeable Canada will be first in line to join all these accords.

But we need to bear in mind that such accords signal the end of the freewheeling Internet. It became what it is because it wasn't subject to accords. So it burst forth untrammelled by regulators. As it did, however, other nations did better than we did at reaping the benefits.

There's something about the Baltic

The textbook case, of course, is Finland. Overnight, it seems, that tiny nation has become the world leader in cell phone use and production and is currently at the forefront of wireless Internet development. Less well known, but equally as impressive, is its Baltic Sea neighbour, Estonia. There, you can use your GSM phone to buy a Coke from a machine or pay for your parking. In fact, you can order and buy just about anything you need in Estonia over a GSM phone because it can send text messages - so all your purchases show up not on your credit card statement but on your phone bill. Mobile commerce, indeed.

How ironic that two distant countries - whose populations don't total up to much more than half of Ontario's - have grabbed brand identity for a technology first developed way back when by you-know-who in Brantford, Ont.

So we should take no more than small comfort in that fact that Canada is proving itself adept at e-government. If we are to continue to prosper, Canada must brand its products better, and further extend the reach of its e-businesses. And if we've missed the wave of the increasingly regulated Internet to carry us forward, we'd better find a new impetus.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Jun 2001
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