No. In fact, that's really the lessons of economics. It's Economics 101 trade theory, which goes back to my comment about comparative advantage, that you can do some things really well, more cheaply than anybody else. You sell on the international market, you import goods and services that way, but if you try to do things where you're trying to go up the value chain altogether, you can actually end up losing money.
In fact, it's not all about jobs. When you measure value-added, you're talking both about returns on labour and on capital. If you have negative returns on capital, you may not be going up the value-added chain at all; you may be going down, in that sense.
We've had a lot of disasters in public policy in the past number of years that we should not forget about, whether it was building cucumber plants in Newfoundland, a car company in Nova Scotia…. I can go through a host of diversification projects in Alberta that ended up flubbing, costing the government billions of dollars in revenue ultimately and being a major loss to taxpayers.
The other thing is that you're taking resources that are being used for more productive uses and you're putting them into things with less productive uses. That actually has a very negative impact on the economy. What happens is that, sure, you may move up the value chain for a particular product, but if you're getting fewer profits, less output associated with it, or less production or less productivity associated with it, because you're drawing it away from other things that are producing better, then you actually have a negative effect on or loss to the economy.
That's the lesson of economics. That's why this whole focus that we've got to move up the value-added chain all the time has been dismissed over the years by just about every credible organization, including the World Bank and the IMF and many others.