That Foreign Competition Thing Comes Home

Tony Wanless | | Published: November 02, 2007

There's a human rights hearing going on in Vancouver right now that gives a glimpse in microcosm of what's happening on a global scale economically.

At issue before the BC Human Rights Tribunal is a claim by 19 Indo-Canadian veterinarians trained in India or the Punjab that the BC Veterinary Medical Association has discriminated against them by demanding they pass a stringent English language proficiency test in order to be licensed in B.C. The Indo-Canadian vets have already passed Canadian exams that involved language requirements, the group says, so the BC tests are really an attempt to keep them out of the field because they generally charge lower fees.

So the real issue is that Indian trained professionals work cheaper than “Canadian” trained. Sound familiar? It should, because the same issue is being fought between individuals and nations around the world.

Nobody in B.C. minded much when manufacturing work was outsourced to China, India, or a half-dozen other Asian countries. Labour unions saw job losses looming, but most “educated” classes just shrugged it off.

That was because they were protected behind specialized knowledge walls, and in Canada's case, professional organizations that were often more concerned with keeping people out than letting them in (note the continuing fight in B.C. over certification of foreign-trained doctors, when British trained are granted licenses immediately). Besides, most of the foreign competition was service work performed in other regions and therefore unable to compete for local business.

But that's all been blown out of the water in the past five years. Knowledge-based service work has been organized, particularly on the Web, and is hitting hard industries that thought they were protected.

You can get a website designed in India for a hundred bucks; digital art such as animation can be done for a song in China; financial service companies are having their analyses done by Indian MBAs for a tenth of the cost at home; sites like Odesk, Guru.com, and Elance, will link you to highly educated service providers from around the world to perform extremely complicated technology and consulting chores. Heck you can even get a “secretary” online who will organize your life, arrange your lunches, find gifts for your spouse etc for six bucks an hour. The common thread: the work is often high quality, and much cheaper.

The only difference between these manifestations of this global competition-is-cheaper trend and the B.C. veterinarians' fight is that the Indian competitors are here and not halfway around the world. And coming from

a mercantile and more competitive society, they're doing exactly what they do – competing, often with better service and lower prices. It's basic economics.

“Canadian” vets, protected for years behind cozy, non-competitive certification walls, apparently don't believe in basic economics. Instead they're still trying to use techniques that have been tried for years by every North American group trying to save its business model – claiming the work performed by foreigners is inferior, or substandard, maybe even dangerous. In B.C. they have a licensing body they can use to implement their protectionist arguments.

But the vets won't be able to hold back the tide forever. And neither will any other organization that prefers protectionism to competition. In the modern world, we're all interconnected.

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