One question, 17 answers.
Last week, Be Giant set up a vintage Polaroid camera at the U.S.-Canada Summit hosted by the Eurasia Group and RBC. The event pulled together several hundred senior leaders from both sides of the border at a charged moment, with the CUSMA review looming and the relationship between the two countries under more strain than it has been in a generation. Between sessions, we put the same question to everyone we could pin down, including premiers, ministers, CEOs and an astronaut fresh from lunar orbit: what’s the biggest thing Canada needs to do right now?
You’d expect 17 people from 17 corners of Canadian life to pull in 17 directions. And while there is variance among their responses, a singular message is clear: the window is open now and won’t stay that way. It’s time to build, act, move and invest.
Here are the Polaroids we took on the spot, and the words each person chose to sum up their best advice for how to move forward.
Jeremy Hansen, astronaut, Canadian Space Agency
“I just came back from orbiting the moon on Artemis II with Reid [Wiseman], Victor [Glover] and Christina [Koch]. And the one thing that strikes me about Canada is we need to recognize that we’re just a little bit more important on the world stage than we think we are. Sometimes we keep ourselves small, and we have a lot to contribute. There are lots of challenges on the planet that we can use space to address, and Canada has the genius and experience that we can leverage to make lives better in Canada and around the world.”
Mina Mitry, co-founder and CEO, Kepler Communications
“We need ambition. That’s it. When I set out to start my business in 2016, we had this great ambition to go launch satellites into low Earth orbit, and it attracted the right kind of people around us. It brought back Canadians into Canada who wanted to work on something as ambitious as what we were doing. We need to be able to replicate that throughout the country.
Bradley Harker, president, AxiaPonte Advisory
“There are trade issues between the U.S. and Canada, but they are not insurmountable. A strong Canada is great for the U.S. A diversified Canada is great for the U.S. And for all of the doom and gloom, Canada remains our best friend and our most important trading partner. So I would look past some of the language you may hear on social media or out of the White House and really focus on the history of partnership that we’ve had for the last 150 years. Engage often, and let’s get a deal done.”
Janice Stein, founding director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
“One big thing that Canada needs is to pick up speed. And when you pick up speed, you make mistakes. If we truly want to create an economy that is dynamic and innovative, we need to be forgiving when our political leaders, our public servants or our private sector leaders make investments that fail. Because eight out of 10 will fail, but if two out of 10 succeed, that is a big win for this country.”
Jaxson Khan, CEO, Aperture AI
“Canada needs to invest in the next generation. Right now, young people are struggling with job disruption and fear about artificial intelligence. They’re also really struggling to rent or buy homes. There’s a lot of uncertainty. Statistics suggest the older generations are very happy and the youngest people in Canada are not. That generational divide is really something we have to tackle as a country through investments in education and housing. We need to take the concerns of young people seriously.”
Evan Solomon, minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation
“We are in a unique, challenging moment – almost a mission moment right now – to make Canada a place where you can have a great job, and you can keep your innovation here. My focus is building a strong economy of the future with digital technologies like AI that are pro-worker so that Canadians are served by the innovations, not the other way around. The benefits will impact health care, governance, jobs – that’s what our AI For All strategy is all about.”
Abigail Hunter, executive director, SAFE Center for Critical Minerals Strategy
“The biggest thing Canada needs to do right now is focus on short-term big gains, particularly when it comes to energy security and critical mineral security. These are massive undertakings, really ambitious agendas, and so you have to go step by step – eat the elephant, bite by bite.”
R.J. Simpson, premier, Northwest Territories
“The one thing Canada can do at this moment is take advantage of the fact that we are a large country with enormous resources – and half the country is almost undeveloped. In the northern part of Canada, we have a lot of advanced mining projects, but we don’t have a lot of infrastructure. And we are working toward building that out – building roads to resources, building Arctic ports. That’s going to open up a ton of resources and really is going to set Canada up to be a world leader in mineral extraction and mineral processing. I have a vision where those minerals are then going to be used to manufacture products in Canada that are based on Canadian innovation.”
Sinead Bovell, founder, WAYE (Weekly Advice for Young Entrepreneurs)
“Canada needs to establish an indispensable role in the 21st-century supply chain. You often hear about AI sovereignty, or technological sovereignty, and I think it actually has to be much more nuanced than that. Sovereignty is really tricky when you look at an entire supply chain – but indispensability isn’t. Indispensability is usually at the intersection of your historical advantages and where you see the future going.”
Eliot Pence, founder and CEO, Dominion Dynamics
“The thing that Canada needs to do today is to remember its past. We built incredible things 50, 60 years ago. We can build them again, but we need to have the ambition to do what we did in the past again, today.”
Brian Kingston, president and CEO, Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association
“The most important thing that Canada can do right now is, as the prime minister says, to control what we can control. Our economy is heavily dependent on access to the United States, and that is the top priority. However, we don’t control the outcome of those negotiations. So as we work through that relationship, we need to make Canada more competitive. And in the automotive industry, that means positioning Canada as the best place in the world to build, manufacture and assemble vehicles. How do we do that? It’s simple: we have to reduce the regulatory burden that faces manufacturers in this country. We have massive mineral wealth – critical minerals used in EV batteries – and we can position this country as one of the best places in the world to build next-generation vehicles.”
Goldy Hyder, president and CEO, Business Council of Canada
“Seize the moment. This is the opportunity for Canada, and we just need to move with speed, urgency and ambition.”
Sean Boyd, board chair, Agnico Eagle Mines
“Canada needs to get into action mode. There’s been a lot of discussion; it’s time to get moving on big projects. But in order to do that, we need a strategy and a plan. So it’s important to work together, [with] industry government partnering, sharing knowledge, sharing ways of doing things, and getting big projects built, getting important businesses expanded and creating value in those businesses. We’re one of Canada’s biggest mining companies and we just announced a $3 billion project in Nunavut. That’s going to open up that area and do a lot of good for the community.”
Jennifer Varey, director of communications, reputation and marketing, Enbridge
“What Canada and Canadians can do right now is to keep up the momentum. There’s a lot of positive energy, there’s a lot of determination, there’s a lot of resilience – just keep that going, and act on all the big ideas and the big things that we’ve set out for ourselves.”
Emeric (Rick) Duha, board chair, Business Council of Manitoba
“The CUSMA agreement has a scheduled date of July 1. Business leaders across the country need a lot more certainty on what that’s going to mean. It’s obvious that we’re not going to have a new agreement by that point in time. Does that mean that there will be duties across many products? Does that mean that we’re going to have to change our business strategy? I think the most important thing for Canada to do now is provide more certainty in our relationships with our major trading partners – both the U.S. and Mexico – and some certainty of what life will look like after July 1.”
Abhinav Singhvi, CFO, Volatus Aerospace
“Canada needs to move faster on the procurement cycle. Investors in Canada are very good at funding predictable revenue. But one thing that any investor dislikes is uncertainty. The Canadian procurement structure today brings a lot of uncertainty. So that’s one place I believe Canada should adopt the way the U.S. is doing that right now. Their procurement structure and capital structure have merged, where the government itself has started funding the defence companies. It’s actually de-risking the order book, and the private capital is following for the scale-up. For the government, it’s better technology, more jobs, higher GDP. For the company, access to capital, more growth and scale, larger market access.”
Ian Staples, vice-president, treasury and capital markets, Peoples Group
“Canada needs to invest in its people through training and education. The pace of change in technology is so rapid now – I think a lot of folks will be left behind if we’re not equipped to handle it. It’s important to continue to have a society where everyone feels valued and that they’re contributing to the benefit of the overall economy.”
