A car manufacturing plant will open in Ontario rather than a state in the southeastern US. Why? Because people in Canada have a better education, are easier to train, and have lower health care costs due to Canada's universal health insurance. Education matters.

CBC News reports (via Pharyngula)

"The level of the workforce in general is so high that the training program you need for people, even for people who have not worked in a Toyota plant before, is minimal compared to what you have to go through in the southeastern United States," said Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, whose members will see increased business with the new plant.

Some American states were willing to offer double the subsidies that Ontario is offering, but that extra money would have been used up by the higher costs associated with a worse workforce:

Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained - and often illiterate - workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment. "The educational level and the skill level of the people down there is so much lower than it is in Ontario," Fedchun said.

In addition to lower training costs, Canadian workers are also $4 to $5 cheaper to employ partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded health-care system in Canada, said federal Industry Minister David Emmerson.

Ontario is now looking to attract more industries, like biotech. You can be sure that such industries won't readily locate to areas in the United States where not only do workers need "pictorials" to learn how to use equipment, but people don't even learn evolutionary theory because of religious ignorance.

The problems that Toyota cited do exist elsewhere, but the religious and conservative backlash against biology, evolution, and science in the South has to be a contributing factor — if not immediately when it comes to manufacturing cars, then certainly in the long term when it comes to the technologies that will probably dominate the 21st century. That's the price we pay when our politicians refuse to live in reality.

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