Ontario, Made in China

Awarding a contract to an overseas company when domestic manufacturing sector struggles is like inviting a Hannibal Lecter for dinner. Ontario's bureaucrats should have known that before placing an order for $1000 worth of Ontario provincial flags to a Chinese company.

But who could blame them? The $1000 funds allocation in the budget has to be followed as the Scriptures. Let's do the math. A Toronto flag manufacturer sells a flag for $18 dollars. Ontario can get them $13 a piece from China. It's 55 versus 77 flags. Problem solved.

Ontario veteran legislator Peter Kormos (NDP) was very outspoken about Made in China flags and in the framework of national, provincial and emotional reasons found a spot for the alleged quality issue. Now, quality is a subjective thing, for example JD Power made fools of themselves this week after coming up with a survey stating that notoriously substandard Jaguars and questionable Buicks are more dependable than Lexuses... but that's another story. Topically equally interesting and equally pointless result-wise thanks to the JD Power's way of collecting “data”.

Bag to the flag-gate. Yes, a flag is a symbol. Nothing more. Manufacturing a thousand dollar worth of Ontario provincial flags in Ontario will not make a difference to the province's struggling manufacturing sector. Neither will populism and fiery rhetorics.