As a government your target shouldn’t be numerical. It should be to get out of the way and let people and businesses get on with answering the question 'is this really the best we can do with the time and money?' Photo by HYUNGCHEOL PARK/Postmedia

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Matthew Lau wrote in FP Comment recently about the plethora of national plans and strategies the Carney government has been introducing — three last week alone, for AI, forestry and eye care (this last spelling out Ottawa’s vision for vision, a federal jurisdiction the Constitution does not actually mention).

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My own bugbear is the government’s passion for numerical targets. I asked Google’s built-in AI about it and it came up with — more or less instantly, in that annoying, smartest-kid-in-the-class-waving-his-hand way it has — a tidy little essay about seven different policies that have numerical targets. Other sources provide even more examples.

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Thus we plan to double our non-U.S. exports to $600 billion a year by 2035, including a 50 per cent increase in our China trade by 2030. (Not 40, not 60, but 50.) We’re going to spend $2 billion on new AI initiatives to increase our business adoption rate from 12 per cent now to 60 per cent by 2034. (I wonder if my asking Google about all these numbers counts as a business adoption?) This is supposed to create 250,000 new AI jobs by 2031, which will help people buy the 500,000 new homes a year we’ll be building to go along with the electric grid we’re doubling by 2050, though without encroaching on the 1,600,000 square kilometres of land (the equivalent of 282 Prince Edward Islands) that Ottawa will be setting aside as part of its Nature plan, not to mention 700,000 square kilometres of ocean (equal to 37 Lake Ontarios).

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I gather in the trade this sort of thing is called a “measurable mission.” You don’t just want to state admirable but fuzzy goals. A precise numerical target is a whip to crack over the heads of functionaries if they malinger or try to subvert your goals. But the measurables are moronic. The Carney government’s fixation on doubling this, tripling that, growing a bilateral trade flow by a given percentage by an arbitrary date certain brings to mind the five-year plans of the former Soviet Union — which is no longer with us mainly because of the idiot mis-allocations such plans led to.

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Reasonable people and organizations do not set arbitrary numerical targets and then move heaven, Earth and all parts in between to achieve them. Instead they look at their options in an incremental way, asking about each: what are the costs and benefits? In your household, do you say: Honey, I think we really need to increase our furniture spending over the next three years by 20 per cent. Or do you ask your partner(s): Sofas are on sale for $X this week. Do you think we need a new sofa? What else could we be doing with the money, including saving it? How long do you think our current sofa will last? When will we need to begin downsizing? And so on and so on, with millions of very micro decisions all adding up to macro outcomes.

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And why is the government involved in decisions about trade flows at all? Whether we trade more or less with China or anyone else is best decided by Canadians and Canadian companies. We need product Y, they will say to themselves. Who’s selling Y these days? And on what terms? And how does their price/quality ratio compare with their competitors’? If the resulting decisions lead to more trade with a given country, so be it. But if not, so be that, too.