Evaluating Northern Ontario's Growth Plan-Part II: Employment Generation

This is the second in a series of posts in which I will present evidence in an attempt to evaluate the Growth Plan for Northern Ontario, which was released on March 4, 2011.  The 25-year plan was to guide provincial decision-making and investment in northern Ontario with the aim of strengthening the regional economy and its ultimate goal was to strengthen the economy of the North by:

• Diversifying the region's traditional resource-based industries
• Stimulating new investment and entrepreneurship
• Nurturing new and emerging sectors with high growth potential.

While the provincial government did commit itself to the development of performance measures for ministry specific initiatives that supported the implementation of the plan, I will be using a broader set of indicators of overall economic performance that are supported by the availability of readily accessible public data. In this first post, I will be looking at employment.

Google Trends: Plan Nord Versus Northern Ontario Growth Plan

Google Trends is a quick and popular way to assess the importance of ideas, events and trends by looking at the results of people’s web searches.  If the searches for something are trending up, it is suggestive that it is growing in importance.  One way of assessing the impact of northern economic development in Ontario at least as a concept that has seized the imagination is to conduct a Google Trends search. In particular, it is interesting to see what the impact of two northern development plans has been – The Northern Ontario Growth Plan and the Quebec Plan Nord.   I put in “northern Ontario growth plan” and “plan nord” for trends in the “region” Canada over the period all years (2004 to 2012) into Google Trends and downloaded the results.  I then graphed the results for the 2011 to 2012 period (See Figure)

The Northern Ontario Growth Plan was released in March 2011 while the Plan Nord was released a little later in May of the same year.  The Google Trends plot is not the number of searches but rather an index of the number of searches for a term to the average number of searches for the term over the time period.  For example, if there is a value in the graph of 5; this means that traffic is 5 times the average for the time period. As a result, it is a relative measure showing whether something is trending up or down.  The results were intriguing in that they reveal enough activity to show a rising trend in the wake of the release of the Plan Nord.  However, there was so little interest in the Northern Growth Plan that it did not generate enough activity to even register a trend.

This is not the same as saying the Plan Nord will be a success and the Northern Growth Plan will not.  What it is saying is that the Plan Nord seems to have generated a lot more interest on the web whereas the Northern Ontario Growth Plan has not.  The fact that the Plan Nord has generated so much interest could simply be better marketing but that in itself would tell you something about how the Quebec government values its northern development plan.  Or, it could be that people are more interested in Quebec’s northern development than Ontario’s.  However, it one truly believes that large groups of people on average are very forward looking and very smart, it also means they may see more potential in the Quebec Plan than the Ontario Plan.  Whatever way you look at it, it would appear that the Northern Ontario Growth Plan does not look very credible.  Google Trends has spoken.