A Presentation to the 1998 P.E.I. Employment Summit Panel

 

Preparing for 21st-Century Opportunities

Copthorne Macdonald

 

The possibility of employment is rooted in unmet needs. The actuality of employment is rooted in meeting those needs. To take sensible actions concerning employment we need to ask ourselves not only about the unmet needs of our local community, but those of the global society as well. And not just what the needs are today, but what they are likely to be in the years to come. Geographic, trade, and economic barriers are all but gone today, and in the years to come it is from global needs that many of our local opportunities will arise.

In the paragraphs that follow I will discuss a number of employment possibilities which strike me as particularly appropriate for P.E.I., and potentially realizable. Some exist now. Others will take time, effort, and money to realize. My feeling is that unless we take the long view, and work toward an economy matched to the needs of the 21st century, our present employment problems will not only remain, but will probably worsen — as other provinces and other nations see the opportunities, and make the smart moves first.

 

Food — The World’s Most Serious Problem; P.E.I.’s Great Strength

World population is now 5.8 billion and is expected to rise by another 3.6 billion during the next 50 years, to 9.4 billion.1 As a world society we face many problems: global warming, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution of air and water, and resource depletion. But according to the Worldwatch Institute, the problem that seems most likely to cause severe disruption to the lives of our children and grandchildren is the world food problem.2 Sometime during the next 50 years there will be an extremely serious food crunch, as decreasing ability to produce food meets escalating demand for food.

The coming decrease in production is the direct result of humanity’s tendency to ignore the sustainable limits of its natural resources. Globally, we are currently faced with thinning soils, falling aquifers, collapsing fisheries, and expanding deserts in many countries. Grain yields — after undergoing dramatic increases during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s — are now rising at a much slower rate. Fisheries, too, are in big trouble. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 11 of the world’s 15 major fishing areas and 69 percent of the world’s major fish species are in serious decline. Not only have Atlantic cod stocks collapsed, but bluefin tuna stocks in the western Atlantic dropped by more than 80 percent between 1970 and 1993. And between 1970 and 1992, catches of silver hake, haddock, and cape hake decreased by 67 percent.3 The global annual harvest of oceanic fish has leveled off at roughly 90 million tons per year, with that level being maintained only because the decline in catches of highly desirable species are being compensated for by increased catches of less desirable ones. The one positive development in this picture is the growth of aquaculture which now supplies 20 per cent of the seafood consumed worldwide, rising from 7 million tons in 1984 to 23 million tons in 1996.4

At the same time that food supply is threatened, world population continues to grow, and the demand for grain, meat, and fish accelerates. Already, world population is rising faster than the world grain harvest is increasing, causing a decline in the amount of grain per person.5 The situation is made worse by the fact that as the standard of living begins to increase in developing countries, people can afford, and want, more meat and fish. To provide this animal protein, grain that people formerly ate directly is diverted to livestock production and aquaculture. Each kilogram of poultry or aquaculture-raised fish requires 2 kilograms of grain — or its equivalent in other vegetable matter. Each kilogram of pork requires 4 kilograms of grain. And each kilogram of beef produced by feedlot feeding requires 7 kilograms of grain.6 The effect is already evident in China. Two thirds of the increase in that country’s grain consumption during the 1990s can be attributed to increased consumption of meat and fish.7

P.E.I.’s varied mix of food production and research activities, and the high level of food-related expertise that goes along with those activities seems highly relevant to the coming food crunch. In 1996, P.E.I. fishers landed 99 million pounds of wild seafood — more than 8 species of groundfish, 10 of pelagic and estuarial fish, and 11 of molluscs and crustaceans. In addition, the province is home to 238 mussel culture sites, 791 oyster culture sites, and 13 finfish culture sites which in a recent year produced 141,000 pounds of cultured finfish.8 Our agriculture is both varied and productive. We have approximately 420,000 acres in a wide variety of crops, including potatoes, other root crops, cole crops, many kinds of grain, and a variety of specialty crops as exotic as ginseng and hemp. We have a substantial livestock industry too, which produced 352,000 hens and chickens, 118,000 pigs, and 95,000 cattle and calves in 1996.9 In addition, P.E.I. is the home of several food-related research organizations, including the Atlantic Veterinary College, UPEI’s Food Technology Centre, the provincial Department of Agriculture and Forestry, the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Research Centre, and the Centre for Animal and Plant Health. These organizations recently came together to form the Belvedere Life Science Research Group, a company that among other things "will focus on accessing international research and development opportunities."10 P.E.I. is also blessed with a world-class biotechnology firm (Diagnostic Chemicals), large state-of-the-art food processing plants, and manufacturers of food processing equipment.

Few doubt that knowledge is going to be the currency of the 21st century. And there has been much talk recently about helping "knowledge-based industrial clusters" to grow in Atlantic Canada.11 As indicated above, significant cluster formation is already underway here with regard to food, and P.E.I. is already in an ideal position to become one of the world’s leading food knowledge centers. Some would say that it already is, and I wouldn’t argue with that. Still, my hunch is that we could go much further in this direction — and create many high-paying jobs in the process. We have already begun to launch joint projects and working relationships with food-oriented multinationals, such as the joint effort between P.E.I.’s Solanum, Inc. and Monsanto Corporation to develop and market potatoes resistant to the Colorado potato beetle.12 Such projects strengthen P.E.I.’s image among those transnational corporations having interests in bioscience and food R&D, and cultivating more of them would obviously be beneficial.

I am suggesting that a strategic objective — formally acknowledged by government and diligently pursued by it and the private sector — should be to go beyond just cooperative projects, and induce one (and ultimately several) transnational companies to set up food-related research and development facilities on Prince Edward Island. Instead of focusing on bringing food production companies to the Island, as we have in the past, I’m suggesting that we now go after the R&D, knowledge-generating component of those companies. Scotland’s experience with its personal computer industry has something to teach us. That country successfully developed a strong production-oriented industry which has supplied over one-third of the personal computers used in Europe and 10 per cent of those used in the world. These, however, were "low value-added manufacturing and assembly plants."13 There was no R&D base to carry their industry further, no R&D base to spin off satellite firms that would take the industry in new directions. Things have worked out very differently where clusters of activity have had a knowledge focus: California’s Silicon Valley, Boston’s Route 128, and Ottawa’s telecommunications cluster, for example. Cluster experience has shown that once a dynamic knowledge-centred cluster has developed, it grows dramatically — in part because some individuals eventually leave the core institutions to start their own businesses — businesses which then add to the overall growth of the cluster.

Attracting a multinational food company to set up shop here is hardly a new idea. What is new, however, is the growing awareness on the part of such companies of the opportunities which the world food crisis will be presenting to them. Perhaps you have seen the series of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) ads on TV in which David Brinkley indicates ADM’s full awareness of their role in all this. I am suggesting that P.E.I. put its overtures to corporations in a new context — that we show that P.E.I., with its compact size, varied agricultural capabilities, existing fresh- and salt-water aquaculture operations, food and bioscience research infrastructure, and food-savvy people, will be an ideal place for conducting many kinds of 21st-century food research. It seems clear that the 21st century food game will be to produce not only high-protein grains in larger quantity, but to work out novel ways of producing as much animal and fish protein as possible with as little vegetable input as possible Doesn’t the concentration of resources here strike you as ideal for conducting that kind of R&D?

How would we ultimately attract an ADM, a Unilever, or a Nestle to set up an R&D activity in P.E.I.? Timing and "industrial intelligence" would both be critical elements. The firm would have to be approached at a time when one or more of its interests and needs could be met by some P.E.I. activity. For this to happen, some person or group on P.E.I. must recognize that such a situation exists. This means staying abreast of what the various transnational food companies are thinking about and doing. Then, when an appropriate pairing is spotted, an overture is made. I don’t know if the Belvedere Life Science Research Group would be interested in taking on that monitoring role; they are certainly knowledgeable about the P.E.I. situation, and the task seems to lie close to their mandate. Alternatively, some person or group within government could do it.

 

Other Knowledge-Focused Opportunities

We have certain basic needs that can only be met in a physical way: we need to eat food, drink water, build shelters, and burn fuel. We also look to the physical to create experiences of pleasure. We acquire beautiful objects. We travel to exotic places. We buy material things that make us feel good. We focus on the physical in all this, while almost always our real goal is a certain mental experience.

From present indications, by the middle of the 21st century many resources will be in short supply, and prices for those resources will be high. As a consequence, individuals worldwide will acquire fewer material things. The overall human impact on the environment will still be large, but per capita impact will be less. Strangely, I expect people of the mid-21st century to have a much richer mental life, on average, than we do. The trend, in fact, started some time ago. For example, to listen to Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto at the turn of the last century you had to bring together a superb pianist, a full symphony orchestra, and a concert hall. That’s a lot of physical infrastructure to create a totally mental end product. Today, with a pair of headphones and a Walkman you can listen to Rachmaninoff’s Third with better sound quality than if you had been sitting in one of the poorer seats in that concert hall. Another example: Pick up any telephone and you can have crystal clear conversations with people on the other side of the world. You do that, or communicate with them via keyboard and the Internet, at a tiny fraction of the cost and energy consumption involved in traveling there to have that conversation. One more: Instead of libraries and bookstores full of paper-and-ink books, our urge to read will soon be met by downloading text into book-size handheld electronic readers.14 And as I speak, artists, writers, scientists, and other affinity groups are meeting — not in the coffee shops of Paris as artists and writers did a century ago — but sipping coffee at home in front of their computer screens while their conversations span continents. In short, we are becoming better and better at getting to the heart of the matter — the experience itself — and are doing so with less and less impact on the physical world. This appears to be the way of the future, and since geography doesn’t matter in this electronically-mediated world, there is no reason why some of the coming innovations can’t originate in P.E.I., and bring their economic benefits to P.E.I.

 

The Internet, CD-ROMS, and the Rest of the E-Realm

The Internet reached P.E.I. in the early 1990s when UPEI got connected. Soon after, CA*net was formed, and Islanders in droves got connected. Today, P.E.I. has its own fibreoptic, high speed, broadband communication network, complete with broadband connection to the outside world. This gives us a world class communication infrastructure, and levels that particular playing field. If we don’t make it in this new environment, we’ll have no one to blame. In the e-realm, geography is irrelevant. Imagination is all.

The task before us is one of creating electronically-mediated activities which meet human needs, and will, at least in some cases, make money. Among the opportunities I see are:

 

A Couple of Other Possibilities

Recycling-Connected Businesses

P.E.I. is moving into recycling in a major way, and that is good for employment. The Worldwatch Institute reports that "for every 150,000 tons of waste, recycling creates nine jobs, incinerating creates two, and landfilling just one."15 Beyond employment at the basic collecting-and-sorting level, recycling can also create new economic opportunities. People elsewhere are using the sorted waste coming out of the recycling process as feedstock for new businesses. In the United States, for example, there are numerous mini steel mills which use only scrap steel as feedstock, and mini paper mills which use only waste paper. And consider this Danish program:

One way to reduce waste is to redesign industrial economies to emulate nature so that one industry’s waste becomes another’s raw material, a science that is becoming know as industrial ecology. In the industrial zone of Kalundborg in Denmark, a network of materials and energy exchanges among companies has been formed. It involves a wide variety of linkages: the warm water from cooling a power plant is used by a company with fish farms; sludge from the fish farms is sold to a nearby farmer for fertilizer; the fly ash from a power plant is used as a raw material by a cement manufacturer; and surplus yeast from a pharmaceutical plant producing insulin is fed to pigs by local farmers. . . . A $60-million investment by participating firms in the transport infrastructure to facilitate the exchange of energy and materials has yielded $120 million in revenues and cost savings.16

I urge both government and private sector organizations to step back and view their waste problems from this broader point of view. Just possibly, there are some previously overlooked opportunities for both reducing waste and creating jobs.

 

Meshing the Needs of Older Islanders and Students

In 1996 there were 8,161 Islanders age 75 and older, and 937 long-term nursing care beds. The average age on admission to a nursing care facility was 83.5.17 With increasing longevity, and baby boomers starting to reach retirement age ten years from now, these numbers will only grow.

In talking with older people who live alone, are getting frail, and have various health problems, their almost universal wish is to remain at home for as long as possible — hopefully for the rest of their lives. The provincial government has a "Home Care" program, but its primary focus is meeting the health care needs of older people; "our home support workers do not do vacuuming." Certainly, having one’s health needs met contributes to quality of life. But as one ages, ordinary tasks such as housecleaning, meal preparation, snow shoveling, and basic home maintenance become burdensome — and eventually too much to handle. Seniors have also identified loneliness as a problem, and have expressed the desire to associate with young people.18 At the same time, post-secondary students at Holland College, the Tourism and Hospitality Institute, UPEI, and various private-sector schools are struggling to get an education with as little debt burden as possible.

My hypothesis is that a program could be devised that would bring students into the lives of older people in various ways — from shoveling snow and fixing things to living in, vacuuming, and cooking a meal or two a day. Some of the student’s compensation could come from the older person in the form of cash, or in some cases, room and board. It might also be in the economic interest of the government to contribute to the student’s income — given that providing the older person with alternative housing or institutional care would cost the government (us, we) considerably more.

The program could be run by a private sector organization, by the government, or through direct contractual arrangements with the individuals providing the service. Some training would be desirable — matters of safety, how to access local help and support services, and ethical dos and don’ts — but it need not be extensive. What I am talking about involves a caring attitude, basic life skills, and common sense — not rocket science or nursing care.

 

Education for the 21st Century

Obviously, if many young people in the 21st century are going to be making their living in knowledge-based activities, then getting the right sort of education is going to be more crucial than ever. Of obvious importance is scientific knowledge, computer skills, the ability to find the information you need — and as indicated in the last seciton of this paper, some business basics.

We also need educational programs that are more tightly tailored to individual needs. At one end, we have students who have difficulty learning. There already exist special education programs to help students with such problems, but there have been indications recently that much more needs to be done. It is the school system’s responsibility to see that everyone learns to read and write, yet there are high school students with very poor skills in these areas.

Then there is the middle group. In this fall’s Speech from the Throne, the government announced that it would be modifying the "non-university preparatory curriculum, to make it more meaningful and appropriate to the needs of students." An excellent move.

Finally, there are the most capable students — to whom little attention is paid, and few special accomodations are made. This is a disservice to our best and brightest; they need challenge, and the best possible secondary education. Beyond that, if we hope to attract world-class knowledge-based corporations here, we’d better have in place a world-class university preparatory curriculum. One exists that we could easily import into our system. Nova Scotia has already done it. I refer to the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program — an internationally recognized program of academic excellence for highly-motivated high school students.19 It is one of the programs offered at the Southwest Regional School Board’s Park View Education Centre in Bridgewater, NS. It is a program that would be recognized immediately by officials of transnational corporations. That, along with our low crime rate, freedom from long commutes, and low-pollution environment would constitute a very attractive quality-of-life package.

 

A Job for Everyone Who Wants to Work

As a kid, growing up in big-city suburbs, I was being prepared for the life of a corporate employee. My father worked for a large corporation. Both of my grandfathers worked for large corporations. The fathers of most of my friends worked for large corporations. The broad-brush picture was clear: graduate from high school, go to university, and find the best corporate job you can.

There was an exception to this pattern. Every one of my Jewish friends was being groomed for the entrepreneurial life, for running his own business. Their fathers and uncles all ran small businesses, and there was a real spirit of mutual aid in the Jewish community. The community was, in a sense, a vast entrepreneurial support system. Businesses helped other businesses, and taking young people into one’s firm was just part of the social ethic. If you were a Jewish kid you knew that you would be an entrepreneur, and knew that the community would provide you with on-the-job training. You knew that when you were ready, Uncle Harry or some friend of your father would provide you with an entry level job in his business.

Where I lived, back in the boom times of the 1950s and ‘60s, there were plenty of employment opportunities. In P.E.I., today, that is not the case. There are not jobs for everyone who wants one, and that has been the situation for a long time. Along the way, governments have tried to stimulate job creation. Back in the 1970s the federal government tried to create jobs directly. LEAP, Opportunities for Youth, Company of Young Canadians, and other programs provided employment that lasted for awhile but wasn’t self-sustaining. More recently, the federal government approach has shifted from the direct provision of jobs to the stimulation of entrepreneurial activity. ACOA was set up with this in mind, and has had mixed success. The provincial government’s approach has largely been one of trying to increase employment by attracting established companies to set up plants in P.E.I. This approach, too, has had mixed success.

Many people look at government in a dichotomized me-versus-it way, when in fact, government is we, it’s us — an action-outpost of society. When the government acts it is really all of us acting, and past government efforts to increase employment have been best-efforts expressions of our intention as a society to increase employment.

Government action is one way that society can express its will to help, but as we saw in the example of Jewish culture, there are other ways. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of creating additional employment that is completely painless. No matter how it’s done, one person or many will be making some level of personal sacrifice to make it happen. Consider the following six ways of creating employment:

  1. In those Trudeau-era employment-creation programs, tax dollars created jobs and paid people’s salaries directly. Some tax dollars came back, but not as many as had gone out. Here, society’s sacrifice took the form of paying taxes and/or increasing the deficit.
  2. In the provincial government example, the government has offered tax incentives, free waste disposal, loan guarantees, and other gifts from society in return for the creation of corporate jobs. Society has put out tax money up front to enable these things to happen. In the long run it may get its money back and more — or maybe it won’t. Again, our sacrifice is in the form of taxes.
  3. In the Jewish culture example, the pain was also financial, but not shared as evenly. Maybe Uncle Harry didn’t really need an extra employee. And training someone on the job meant a period of limited, and probably negative, economic benefit to the firm. Uncle Harry’s sacrifice was reduced company profit, or less take-home money at the end of the week.
  4. Another way to create employment is through sharing existing jobs. To date, this has happened when individuals were willing to share their full time job with another person, or were willing to work full time at their job for three or four years and then take a year off. In both cases, the sacrifice takes the form of reduced take-home pay. (The obvious benefit is time off.)
  5. Starting a new small business creates employment. At minimum, the new enterprise employs the entrepreneur, and in many cases it employs others too. The sacrifice here is twofold: tying up one’s financial resources in the business, and risking the loss of those resources. Here, the sacrifice is individual — but so are the benefits if the business is successful.
  6. Upsizing existing businesses and/or government activities. The pressure on governments to reduce their deficits and the pressure on corporations to increase profits and share price led to multiple waves of downsizing in the 1990s. The beneficiaries of this were taxpayers and shareholders. The sacrifice was borne by two relatively small groups of people: those who lost their jobs, and those who kept their jobs but now had a substantially heavier workload. The traditional (if unwritten) "work hard, be loyal, and you’ll have a job here" agreement had been breached, and since then uneasiness has reigned among the still-employed.

Canadians have not been happy about this. An Angus Reid / Southam News poll concerning "Public Perspectives on Corporate Responsibility" revealed that 77 per cent of Canadians felt that it is "not acceptable for large companies to lay people off while making high profits."20

Island and Canadian society can do something about this if we want to. Upsizing is something that governments and corporations can decide to do of their own accord, or could conceivably be made to do through public pressure and/or legislation. In any scenario we can imagine, however, there will be costs and there will be benefits. More government-related jobs will result eventually in increased taxes or a higher deficit. More corporate jobs might result in less profit and lower share price, though this is much less certain. Corporations have a reputation for using people efficiently, and in the medium to long run, an increase in the number of employees might well increase profits and share price.

At the moment, decisions about employment levels and cost/benefit tradeoffs are being made by companies themselves and governments in power. If society doesn’t like this, it can establish socially-acceptable groundrules and boundaries to restrict these sorts of decisions.

If these are the major employment-creation options, and we as Island society say that we want everyone to be employed who wants to be employed, then reality says that we must open our hearts and make sacrifices. What mix of the six approaches we choose, or what creative new combinations and approaches we come up with, is up to us. But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that employment creation is a free lunch. There is a payment required, and we need to decide — as a society — the various forms in which we want to make that payment.

My own preferences go something like this:

  1. As indicated previously, our provincial government should try to attract established, knowledge-based firms from outside the province when those firms agree to create long-term employment here at a reasonable cost to taxpayers per position created. Definitely not employment at any price, but the right kind of employment at the right price.
  2. I am also quite willing to see well-spent tax dollars go to the intelligent fostering of job creation through entrepreneurial activity. Here I include programs that would help individuals become self-employed, even if the enterprise turns out to be only a one-person micro-business. To this end, I would like to see:
  3.  
    • The introduction of business basics into the school curriculum on a widespread basis; everyone learns a little about starting and running a business. It would be great if this was not totally intellectual learning, but was to some extent hands on: Make something saleable. Sell something. Perform a service. Etc. Perhaps this hands-on part could be handled through an expansion of the the Department of Education’s existing involvement with Junior Achievement; perhaps through some other approach.
    • Private sector initiatives aimed at preparing young people for entrepreneurial activity: Apprenticeship programs. Coop (school/work) programs. Entrepreneurial internship programs. Giving kids jobs. What I’m suggesting is open-hearted support from the business community — something approaching the kind of support for an entrepreneurial life that my Jewish friends had.
    • Small, unsecured, low-interest loans to individuals for critical pieces of capital equipment (sewing machine, computer, log splitter, etc.) when the individual can demonstrate a high likelihood of being able to make a self-employed living if she or he has that equipment.
  4. As a follow-on to this Summit, I would like to see serious, reasoned discussion about the tradeoffs involved in establishing full employment here. If we as a society feel that there are present inequities, what reshuffling of costs and benefits would be needed to arrive at an acceptable level of fairness? And as individual employees, shareholders, and taxpayers, what price are we willing to pay? The heavy burden now borne by the unemployed can be lightened and spread around if we are willing to open our hearts, come to terms with the fact that full employment has associated costs, and personally accept a fair share of those costs.

 

Notes

1 Brown, Lester R. and Jennifer Mitchell 1998. "Building a New Economy" in Lester R. Brown, et al., State of the World 1998. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 174.

2 Brown, Lester R. 1995. "Nature’s Limits" in Lester R. Brown, et al., State of the World 1995. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 5.

3 Fish stock decline information from McGinn, Anne Platt 1998. "Promoting Sustainable Fisheries" in Lester R. Brown, et al., State of the World 1998. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 60-61.

4 Aquaculture figures from McGinn, 1998, p. 60.

5 Brown, Lester R. 1994. "Facing Food Insecurity" in Lester R. Brown, et al., State of the World 1994. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 186, Figure 10-6.

6 Brown, 1995, p. 15, 17.

7 Brown, Lester R. 1998a. "The Future of Growth" in Lester R. Brown, et al., State of the World 1998. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 15.

8 Data from P.E.I. Department of Fisheries and Environment, 1996/97 Annual Report, Appendix.

9 Data from 1996 Annual Report, Department of Agriculture and Forestry.

10 See P.E.I., 2nd Session, 60th General Assembly, Speech from the Throne. See also Hansard: Hon. Wes MacAleer’s announcement in the Provincial Legislature on 1 May 1998.

11 Nordicity Group Ltd., et al. for ACOA, Prospects for Growing Knowledge-Based Industrial Clusters in Atlantic Canada, July 31, 1997.

12 P.E.I., 2nd Session, 60th General Assembly, Speech from the Throne.

13 Nordicity Group Ltd., et al. for ACOA, Prospects for Growing Knowledge-Based Industrial Clusters in Atlantic Canada, July 31, 1997, Part 1, page 17.

14 Four manufacturers are about to introduce these electronic readers. See the Globe and Mail, Saturday August 8, 1998, Weekend Edition, Arts Section C, pages 1 and 17.

15 Brown and Mitchell, 1998, p. 171.

16 Brown and Mitchell, 1998, p. 171. Their source: "Industrial Ecology: Case Histories," Indigo Development, Competitive Industries in Sustainable Communities Through Industrial Ecology, CA.

17 P.E.I. Health and Community Services, Annual Report 1996-97.

18 Corporate Research Associates for Prince Edward Island Department of Health and Social Services and Veterans Affairs Canada, Prince Edward Island Seniors and Veterans Health Study, October 1996.

19 Information about the International Baccalaureate Program and its history is available on the Internet at http://www.ibo.org/ See also the Web page of Nova Scotia’s Park View Education Centre at http://www.pvec.ednet.ns.ca/Academic/ib/HOME.HTM

20 "Public Perspectives on Corporate Responsibility." a National Angus Reid /Southam News Poll, March 29, 1996. http://www.angusreid.com/pressrel/corpresp.html

 

 

About Copthorne Macdonald

Copthorne Macdonald is a writer, independent scholar, and communication systems engineer. He writes about the nature and development of wisdom, new perspectives on mental and physical reality, and creating a sustainable future. His published works include five books, contributions to two others, and over 130 articles and column installments. His books include BRIDGING THE STRAIT: The Story of the Confederation Bridge Project, TOWARD WISDOM, GETTING A LIFE, and ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES — a textbook for Grade 10 science classes on P.E.I. Cop’s life and perspectives were the subject of a radio documentary that aired in the fall of 1995 and the spring of 1996 as part of the CBC’s IDEAS series.

While still an engineering student, Cop Macdonald developed the slow-scan TV system that came to be used worldwide in ham radio, and received a national award from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers for his paper describing the system. During the 1960s he held several engineering and engineering management positions, including Manager of the Electronic Design Department at Ball Brothers Research Corporation in Boulder Colorado, and Director of Research at Vidcom Electronics in New York City. During the 1970s he was a columnist with two U.S. national magazines: CQ, THE RADIO AMATEUR'S JOURNAL, and THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS, and was an Associate Editor of the latter. After immigrating to Canada in 1975 he worked as a hospital orderly at P.E.I. Hospital, was Activities Director at the Provincial Home for the Aged, and helped start the Brecken House program for the house-bound elderly. In the early 1980s he ran Prince Edward Island's Ener$ave energy audit program, and from 1985 through 1997 made his living doing commissioned writing for governments, corporations, and nonprofit organizations on topics such as renewable energy, energy conservation, and forestry. He is now retired, and is enjoying scholarly writing and keeping up The Wisdom Page at http://www.wisdompage.com/