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But then, the folly of such schemes does not reside in any weaknesses of administration, or even their inevitable politicization.

They could be run by St Francis of Assisi, with a team of Nobel scientists to advise him, and they’d still be a terrible idea. Yes, even if you call them Superclusters.

The Trudeau government would like you to believe that, because it is handing out the money to bunches of businesses in geographic proximity to one another, rather than one at a time, with a university president on hand to pick up the cheque, it is doing something new, and not simply combining two well-known Liberal predilections, picking winners and regional development, into one.

All that we know is, by a remarkable coincidence, this elaborate process resulted in exactly one Supercluster for each region

What gives it a veneer of novelty, if not respectability, is the observation that businesses in similar fields do indeed sometimes “cluster” together, often around a research institution of some kind, and that in some cases this propinquity does result in something that is more than the sum of its parts — attracting top-flight talent, for example, who know that if they are not well-treated at one firm they can almost literally cross the street and find a job at another, or start one themselves.

But it is one thing to observe a thing in retrospect; it is quite another to create one from scratch. The record of governments trying to force clusters into forming is about what you might expect. Of course, with enough money you can certainly create something, possibly even something of value. The question, always, is whether it is of greater value than what might have been created with the same money, put to a different purpose. No one doubts governments can shift resources from one industry to another, just as they can from one side of the country to another. It is whether there is any net benefit in doing so that is in doubt.