Canada is living in a fool’s paradise on the entire issue of offshore outsourcing. Superficially everything seems dandy, but what we don’t know can hurt us big time.

Consider the U.S. situation. Andrew Grove, Intel Corp.’s founder and co-chairman, warned last week that offshore outsourcing — whereby work shifts from the United States to cheaper venues such as India, China and, yes, Canada — threatens to quickly turn U.S. computer software and services industries into bit players in the global marketplace. He suggested they could go the way of the country’s steel industry, which went from controlling 90 per cent of the global market to 10 per cent in the space of a few decades. Or like semiconductor manufacturing, where the United States dropped from 90 per cent of world markets to 50 per cent in 15 years.

The evidence is mounting. More than 500,000 technology jobs vanished from mid-2001 to mid-2003. The U.S. Department of Labour and market tracker Forrester Research say that by 2005, nearly 600,000 American jobs will have moved offshore, climbing to 3.3 million by 2015. While the bulk of these today are in computing, tomorrow they will range from management to architecture, legal services and product design.

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