So, yesterday, the Government of Canada ended two years of tediousness by announcing the winners of the supercluster process.

To briefly recap.  At some point in 2015 or early 2016, the Liberals became enamoured with the idea of technology superclusters, mainly because they got to spend money on hip-sounding industries in a spatially-restricted manner, which meant they could claim points on both the economic growth and regional development scorecards.  To this end, they invited groups of businesses (large, medium & small in carefully balanced mixes) to join together with local universities/polytechnics/colleges to come up with ideas for collaboration on a single theme or idea which the feds could fund to the tune of $150-200M apiece.  This generated a few dozen applications that were whittled down to just nine last fall, on the basis of criteria which were never spelled out beforehand (but which we were assured was “rigorous”).  After another four months, and another equally opaque process (but, we were assured, was run by “experts” and was “merit-based”) the government came up with five superclusters:

• The Oceans Supercluster (Atlantic)
• The AI-powered Supply Chains Supercluster (Quebec)
• The Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster (Ontario)
• The Protein Innovations Supercluster (Saskatchewan)
• The Digital Technology Supercluster (British Columbia)

Are you as gob-smacked as I am?  A rigorous, merit-based process that magically awarded one supercluster to each region of the country?  And one that gave money to the projects in *exactly* the areas the minister is known to favour (Advanced manufacturing, digital tech and AI)?  I mean, what were the odds?

If there was anything less appealing than the obvious playing out of a “merit” charade, it was the announcement ceremony itself which was, in a word, nauseating.  The Minister of Science spent a stomach-churning minute or two introducing the Minister of Innovation in terms better suited to a wedding toast than a policy announcement.  The Minister of Innovation responded by telling the Minister of Science how “incredible” he thinks she is (note to opposition parties: I will give my vote next election to any party which pledges not to have its Ministers introduce each other using language out of a damn high school yearbook).

And oh God, Minister Bains’ speech. It was the kind of performance that actually makes everyone in the room dumber for having listened to it.  “What is a supercluster,” he asked. “Qu’est-ce que c’est une supergrappe?   Well, it’s a Made-in-Canada Silicon Valley that will create tens of thousands of jobs!  A supercluster is a jobs magnet!”  Cue actual, apparently serious talk about how this funding means a new chapter for the Canadian economy and how it’s a great day for the middle class, ad nauseam.

It’s appalling. Twenty-eight months in the portfolio–and this is the best he can do.  Seriously, drop $950 million on anything and it creates jobs.  The utter lack of anything resembling counterfactuals in the way Liberals tout the benefits of superclusters borders on the ridiculous.  This is not just a politician thing, by the way – it’s actually baked into public policy.  If you take a look the Performance Indicators that the Innovation Ministry is planning to use to evaluate the project, there are – apart from trivial measures such as “number of participating organizations” (watch the definition of “participating” get bent out of all recognition) such marvellous things as “number of high-growth firms as a result of ISF [supercluster] funding” (emphasis added), as if this is in fact measurable.

But you know what’s not a performance indicator?  Diversity.  Which is interesting, because boy did the Minsters engage in an orgy of self-congratulation about how important diversity was going to be in these projects (note: only one of the five supercluster CEOs is a woman).  They got the Superclusters to Sign Pieces of Paper!  Guaranteeing Diversity!  And that’s important because Inclusive Growth, blah blah blah.  It was a very weird form of cognitive dissonance.  I mean after all, one of the Ministers in the room – Kirsty Duncan – has spent most of the last year going on about how very similar pieces of paper, signed by universities regarding gender equality in hiring over the past twenty years, do not in fact yield the results required.  So, it’s really not clear what all the smugness was about if there was no way to hold the clusters to their promises on this.

No doubt lots of good science is going to get done from all this funding.  No doubt jobs will be created (though if that’s really the goal there are probably cheaper ways to achieve it).  The communities in which these projects are located will surely benefit.  And there are certainly worse ways to spend public money.  So, despite everything, congratulations and best wishes to all who won.

But Dear God save us from more wretched events like yesterday’s.  And let us never spend public money like this again.