Ron – you’ve made a fair point. While the tone of my post was critical (I’m frustrated by this!), I asked at the end whether this was the right call. In many ways, you’re right: looking at tax breaks as a budget and assigning them where they’ll do the most good is certainly a well considered means of making decisions.

That being said: I don’t think encouraging data center investment is mutually exclusive with encouraging other industries. Nor do I imagine the benefits of a data center industry to be restricted to headcount considerations.

Manitoba’s economic strength comes from its diversification. Call centers and manufacturing are important, to be sure, but are vulnerable to global demand, resource prices, currency values, etc. Data centers offer Manitoba a new and future facing industry, and Manitoba offers data centers real value – why not diversify?

Here in the US politicians seem to want to build tax centers so they can spend money on pork projects. But then they give the taxes away in incentives for several years. We should have forced GM to bring offshore jobs back to the US before allowing them to shutdown plants here.