Aluminerie Alouette is one of a number of companies that successfully redirected a significant percentage of their shipments overseas to European markets in the face of U.S. tariffs.

Economic resilience

A week ago, things were looking pretty grim. Trade talks with Washington had collapsed, and the U.S. followed through with 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods — wine, hockey sticks, cement. Prime Minister Mark Carney described it as an “attack”, said Canada is “at war,” and promised dollar-for-dollar retaliation on American steel, dairy, appliances and electronics starting Sept. 8. By any normal reading, this should have been a bad week for the Canadian economy.

Then on Thursday, Statistics Canada reported the economy grew at an annualized 3.3% in the second quarter — the fastest pace in three years — while revising away the first-quarter contraction that had everyone muttering “recession” back in May. Exports jumped 3.6%, mostly autos. Business capital investment rose 2.3%, snapping five straight quarters of decline. And Canada posted its first current account surplus since 2022 — $8.8 billion, the largest since 2005 — on the back of a 27% surge in energy exports.

Put those two paragraphs together and you get the odd mood of the moment: Ottawa and Washington are supposedly in a trade war, and the Canadian economy just had its best quarter in years. As analyst Heather Exner-Pirot argued on X this week, the pessimists on both sides — the ones certain the trade war will wreck Canada, and the ones certain Canada can’t develop its resources fast enough to matter — are both getting over their skis. More potash, uranium, copper, oil, gas and gold are coming out of the ground regardless of what happens in Washington. The only real question is how much of the global market Canada actually captures.

Which brings us to Sept. 14-15, when Carney convenes 100 of the world’s biggest investors in Toronto to pitch a trillion dollars of Canadian nation-building. A new TD Economics report, timed almost too perfectly for the occasion, argues the country is sitting on the edge of a genuine investment supercycle: over $1 trillion in projects already proposed or approved through 2035, with upside to $1.5-1.7 trillion if Ottawa plays it right — enough to add $12,000 to per-capita output by 2035. TD’s list of preconditions is the same one everyone’s been reciting for a decade: faster permitting, competitive taxes, room for firms to scale, a skilled labour supply that doesn’t depend on last year’s immigration mistakes.

Build Canada’s position on all this hasn’t changed. We want a trade deal, but not any deal, and not at the cost of the growth agenda. Dollar-for-dollar tariffs on select American goods are a defensible response to the new tariffs, but they are not a plan. They don’t build a mine, train a welder, or shave a day off a federal impact assessment. The GDP and current account numbers are good news indeed, but it is mostly oil prices and a weak loonie doing the work, not policy. The summit in three weeks is an important step in finding out whether Canada can turn a lucky quarter into a decade.

L’effet Trump

Quebec premier Christine Fréchette dissolved the National Assembly on Thursday and asked for an Oct. 5 vote, kicking off 39 days of door-knocking that would, in normal times, revolve around Quebec’s place in Canada. This time is different. “My adversary is named Donald Trump,” Fréchette told reporters, launching her CAQ campaign in Quebec City. “He’s the real opponent. He is the one threatening Quebec. We have to fight him.”

The more telling data point belongs to the other side of the constitutional divide. Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has spent his entire leadership promising a sovereignty referendum “before the decade is out.” Last week he announced the PQ won’t hold one while Trump remains in office — pushing the vote past January 2029 so the question isn’t, in his words, “hijacked by the ups and downs of American politics.” A separatist leader back-burnering a sovereignty push to a foreign election calendar is not a familiar sight in Quebec’s political landscape.

The polling suggests it’s working for both of them, at everyone else’s expense. A Synopsis survey for La Presse, conducted Aug. 24-26 as the tariff fight peaked, has the CAQ up seven points in two weeks to 27%, essentially tied with the PQ’s 28%. The Liberals sit at 20%, the Conservatives at 14%, Québec Solidaire at 10%. Four years ago Legault’s CAQ was so far ahead the only question was who’d finish second. This time Fréchette is climbing out of a deep hole, pulling women and over-55 voters back on a message of economic stability.

Ottawa has spent half a century trying to argue Quebecers out of sovereignty. Trump may be doing it by accident. It will bear watching whether that holds once the trade war stops being the only story, and whether a federalist coalition built on fear of Washington survives when, or if, that fear eventually fades.

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This week in Building Canada

Aug 29: Construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway’s Western Division — the third transcontinental railway, intended to reach a new deep-water port at Prince Rupert — began with the first sod turned near Carberry, Manitoba on this day in 1905, two days before Alberta and Saskatchewan were officially created as provinces.

Aug 30: Charles Walcott discovered the Burgess Shale on this day in 1909, in the Canadian Rockies near Field, B.C.It is one of the most important fossil sites on Earth, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sep 1: Terry Fox was forced to stop the Marathon of Hope on September 1, 1980, just outside Thunder Bay after running 5,373 km in 143 days, when cancer was found to have spread to his lungs.

Sep 2: On this day in 1945, Japan surrendered, ending the Second World War. Canada’s war production ranked fourth among the Allies, behind only the US, UK, and Soviet Union, with Canada’s GNP having roughly tripled over the course of the war.

One upon a time in North America

What else we’ve noted

• Canada has recruited 64 global superstars in science research, three quarters of them from the U.S.A.

• Canada surpasses California as the largest legal cannabis market in the world.

• Canadian aluminum exports grew during the second quarter, largely thanks to a doubling of sales to markets outside the Unites States.

• Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Sabia has given his deputy ministers until March to come up with “bold ideas” focused on an “entrepreneurial mindset”

• Paul Wells has an interesting substack post on what really drove Canada to say no to the U.S. trade deal.

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U.S. President Donald Trump andd Prime Minister Mark Carney in Evian-les-Bains, France this passing June. (Photo: Evelyn Hockstein of Reuters)

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A Bump in a Centuries Old Relationship

In September 1911, Wilfrid Laurier put the best trade deal Canada had been offered in a generation in front of voters. Washington had agreed to open its market to Canadian farm goods, fish, and lumber, terms Ottawa had chased for four decades. It should have been a coronation.

But then the Americans started talking. President Taft mused that Canada had reached a “parting of the ways.” Champ Clark, Speaker of the House, said he backed the deal because “I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions, clear to the North Pole.”

Canadian manufacturers, who liked their tariff wall just fine, could not have scripted it better. The Conservatives campaigned on one slogan, “No truck nor trade with the Yankees”, and won 133 seats to Laurier’s 85. The deal died and Laurier’s fifteen years as prime minister died with it.

If any of this sounds familiar… that’s the point.

This morning, Canada woke up to news that there was no deal with the United States, with Canada claiming that the U.S. made “last-minute changes in the proposed terms [that] were unfair”, and the U.S. claiming that Canada made “new demands and walk backs of other commitments”. While the public doesn’t yet have the full details of what actually transpired, we do know the history, and the history can be instructive.

Canada and the United States have been signing, tearing up, and re-signing trade agreements since before Canada was a country. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 gave the British North American colonies free trade in natural resources with the US. Washington ripped it up in 1866. Little more than a year later, the colonies – suddenly cut off from their biggest market – confederated. It is only a slight exaggeration to say a cancelled trade deal helped create Canada.

Washington, November 15, 1935. Mackenzie King and Franklin Roosevelt sign the first Canada–U.S. trade agreement since 1854 — ending a five-year tariff war that deepened the Depression on both sides of the border. From Library and Archives Canada

Canada answered with the National Policy in 1879: a tariff wall of our own, meant to force a manufacturing economy into existence. It protected some industries. It also gave Canadians decades of higher prices and watched hundreds of thousands of them move south for opportunity. Protection has costs. It always has.

The pendulum swung back over time. The 1965 Auto Pact integrated the two countries’ auto industries and turned southern Ontario into a manufacturing powerhouse. And in 1988, free trade finally won the election it had lost in 1911.

The stakes in 1988 could not have been higher, with an election fought on a single question. John Turner called it “the fight of my life.” In the televised debate he told Mulroney, “I happen to believe that you’ve sold us out”; that with “one signature of a pen” Canada would be reduced to “a colony of the United States.” The same annexation fears that destroyed the 1911 deal filled the airwaves: free trade would erase the border, then the country.

Voter turnout hit levels we haven’t seen since. If Mulroney had lost, the agreement would have died, and Canada’s economic course changed for a generation. But he won. The deal survived. NAFTA followed, and with it the deepest trading relationship on earth: roughly $3.6 billion in goods and services crossing the border every single day.

Here is what 170 years of this teaches:

The Canada - U.S. relationship keeps getting renegotiated, and it keeps surviving. 1866, 1911, 1971, 1988, 2018, and now 2026. Every generation or two, the terms get torn up. Every time, a new arrangement emerges because geography, supply chains, and mutual gain are more durable than any politician’s mood.

Trade with the U.S. has made both countries richer. Two-way trade more than tripled after the 1988 agreement took effect. It now runs at roughly US$900 billion a year. Canada is the number one export market for more American states than any other country. Canadian energy powers American industry. Canadian aluminum and lumber build American homes. American capital and markets help scale Canadian companies. Eight million American jobs depend on it, and one in seven Canadian jobs does too. This is not a relationship where only one side wins.

As in any negotiation, the terms we get abroad reflect the strength we build at home. This is the lesson Canadians keep relearning. The countries that negotiate well are the ones with options, with productive economies, competitive industries, and trading relationships beyond one border.

In the coming days, we will likely see it all laid out in front of us. What was really on the table, what happened in the final hours of the negotiation, and was walking away and escalating a trade war the right move for Canada?

The bigger questions are still the ones we set out when this latest trade dispute began: how can Canada be more sovereign, more united, and more prosperous over the long term?

In 1911, Canadians rejected a deal out of fear. In 1988, they accepted one out of confidence. The difference between those two countries wasn’t the deal on offer. It was how much they believed in what they could build. How much they believed that they could be the masters of their own destiny.

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Stay Informed…

Build Canada will be providing comprehensive coverage and insight into all aspects of the USCAN deal.

We will continue to champion the truth that our nations stand most powerful when they cooperate, and that this temporary rift must be used as an opportunity to strengthen Canada. 🇨🇦🇺🇸

Our lovely newsletter author, Andrew Potter, is off on a well earned vacation. Enjoy this special writing by Lucy Hargreaves, CEO & Co-Founder here at Build Canada.

Transport Confessional

Back in June, Transport Canada published Transportation in Canada 2025, an annual report to Parliament on the state of transportation in the country that is mandated by Subsection 52(1) of the Canada Transportation Act. This one went more or less ignored until this week, when Charles Lammam of the Montreal Economic Institute read the document and wrote it up, observing that the section on structural challenges “reads like a confession.”

Transport Canada has a lot to confess. Canada’s transportation sector has recorded the worst total factor productivity growth in the G7 over the past quarter century, and the report does not expect that to change in the coming decade. Roughly eight per cent of global container terminal capacity is now partially automated; Canada’s share is effectively nil, which the report concedes leaves us unable “to compete with high-efficiency global gateways.” Regulatory requirements affecting transportation have risen substantially since 2006. Since 1981, the economy has grown about one and a half times faster than investment in the infrastructure that moves it.

None of this is news to the minister. In late March, at an Empire Club lunch at the Royal York, Transport minister Steven MacKinnon told a Bay Street audience that Canada has “deep and structural problems” in transportation: “We’re not modern enough. We’re too bureaucratic. We haven’t invested enough in our infrastructure. Other countries find us unreliable.” Paul Wells, one of the very few journalists in this country who pays attention to these things, watched the speech and interviewed MacKinnon afterward. In his write-up, Wells reported the minister’s own accounting of the damage: sixteen significant labour disruptions in the sector since 2019, with the CN and CPKC shutdown alone costing something like $340 million a day. MacKinnon added, without being prompted, that he was labour minister through much of it.

Wells also supplies the relevant history, and it is dispiriting. Ottawa launched a Ports Modernization Review in 2018. Reform legislation, Bill C-33, arrived roughly five years later. It was reported back from committee in the fall of 2024 and then died on the order paper when the 2025 election was called. In April, MacKinnon told Wells that new measures were coming in “late spring,” some of them requiring legislation, though he declined to discuss the form, shape or colour.

It is now the middle of August, which is certainly late spring, if it is still spring at all.

This is such a consistent pattern in this country there ought to be a Heritage Minute about it. Eight years of official attention to the ports file has produced one dead bill and a series of increasingly candid descriptions of the problem. The constraint has never been that Ottawa does not understand what is wrong, it is that understanding is where the process inevitably terminates.

Consider the automation paragraph, which is the one place the report explicitly indicts the actions of the government rather than, like, vibes. Canada’s missing automated port capacity is not just one of those things, like bad weather. Automation and manning levels were the central issue in the dispute between the BC Maritime Employers Association and ILWU Local 514. That dispute produced the November 2024 lockout, and MacKinnon, then labour minister, ended it by invoking section 107 of the Canada Labour Code and imposing binding arbitration.

It is striking to note that the new Transport Canada report lists that intervention among the year’s bright spots: binding arbitration “helped provide improved labour stability in other critical parts of the network,” it says. Yet two pages later the report laments the absence of the automated capacity that the dispute was about, without drawing the obvious connection: Binding arbitration buys labour peace, and the price shows up in the productivity chart.

The Ready-Rogers Industrial Inquiry Commission was commissioned in 2024 as a response to labour disputes in B.C. ports, with the mandate to “make inquiries into the cause of ongoing labour instability in the B.C. ports and to recommend structural changes to facilitate the free collective bargaining process.” It reported to MacKinnon in May 2025, and proposed a mechanism that would preserve the right to strike, create a statutory special mediator process, and restructure bargaining so that automation can be negotiated rather than deferred. Fifteen months on, that too is a document without action.

Budget 2025 commits Canada to doubling overseas trade by 2035. The Trade Diversification Corridors Fund and the Arctic Infrastructure Fund are meant to get us there. Both presume functioning transportation gateways the department’s own report admits do not exist.

MacKinnon told Wells that transport was his dream job, because “I like it when things work.” That is a better standard than most ministers set for themselves, and there is no reason to doubt he means it. But it is precisely this sort of thing that makes us despair of ever getting at the heart of what ails the Canadian economy.

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What will it take to build one Canadian economy?

In 2025 an external tariff shock pushed Canada to try again at dismantling its long-standing internal economic borders. For a rare moment, political will formed quickly, the file dominated headlines, and it seemed as if this was finally it — the internal Canadian market would unify.

Ottawa, to its credit, seized the moment and moved quickly on the file: Bill C-5 set up federal mutual recognition and removed all 53 federal exceptions to the Canadian Free Trade Agreement^.. Then, unfortunately, the file stalled. The provinces ran late on their own deadline to open direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, and Minister Dominic LeBlanc has conceded that the year-end goals may not be reached.^. It really seems that political and public attention has moved on.

For followers of the file, this is frustrating. Unifying the national economy is of utmost importance to unleash the Canadian free market, and author Wayne Pommen and Build Canada have put forward a new memo that proposes to put real federal money behind provincial reform with cash incentives for removing barriers.

We cannot dream of building a global economic powerhouse if there are ten segmented markets each acting in their own interest on regulation. If we wish to see our nation thrive, we must ensure the full Canadian market is available to all Canadians – both in labour supply and access to buyers.

The story of Float

Rob Khazzam, the co-founder and CEO of Float Financial, talks about what it takes to build something that changes not just industries, but economies.

This week in Building Canada

Aug 16: On this day in 1896, gold was discovered near the Klondike River in Yukon, triggering one of history’s greatest gold rushes and permanently transforming Canada’s remote northwest.

Aug 16: In 1812, Isaac Brock and Tecumseh took Detroit: 2,188 Americans captured, seven killed, no British losses. It cost the Americans an entire army and halted the planned invasion of Canada, the essential part of their war strategy.

Aug 18: The Ogdensburg Declaration, agreed to in a rail car by Mackenzie King and Franklin D. Roosevelt, established the Permanent Joint Board on Defense to oversee the collective defence of the north half of the Western Hemisphere.

Aug 19: On this day in 1942, Canadian forces led the Dieppe Raid. Designed to gain experience and test the equipment needed for D-Day, the Canadians paid a heavy price: There were 3,367 casualties, including 1,946 prisoners of war; 916 Canadians lost their lives.

Aug 20: The Imperial Economic Conference closed in Ottawa on this day in 1932. Chaired by R.B. Bennett, it proposed a zone of low tariffs inside the Empire behind high tariffs against everyone else — “home producers first, empire producers second, and foreign producers last.” This was Canada’s last serious attempt to diversify away from the American market by political will.

Aug 21: Canada’s largest recorded earthquake, magnitude 8.1, struck off Haida Gwaii at 8:01 p.m. PDT on the Queen Charlotte Fault, on this day in 1949. It was felt across BC, Alberta, Yukon, Washington, Oregon and Alaska, with no deaths.

Joe Fafard (1942-2019)

Joe Fafard was born September 2, 1942 at Ste. Marthe, Saskatchewan, a small agricultural community, to French-Canadian parents. He took a BFA at the University of Manitoba (1966) and an MFA at Pennsylvania State (1968), then taught sculpture at the University of Saskatchewan’s Regina campus from 1968 to 1974. Contact with the California ceramicist David Gilhooly pushed him toward his own experience as subject matter, and he began making figurative sculptures of the people around him along with the cows that became his signature.

He worked in ceramic and later bronze, casting at his own foundry in Pense. His subjects ranged from fellow artists, including Picasso and the Saskatchewan painter Jan Wyers, to politicians such as Pierre Trudeau and Tommy Douglas. The National Gallery installed his Running Horses (2007) at its Sussex Drive entrance in 2011. He died of stomach cancer at his home outside Lumsden on March 16, 2019, aged 76.

What else we’ve been reading

• As a corrective to a lot of the recent hype, Trevor Tombe argues in the Hub that the Canadian economy is not, actually, on fire. And it looks like Quebec and Newfoundland are close to a deal on Churchill Falls.

• The CAF held a drone testing showcase event at a NATO range in the Ottawa Valley this week. And Canada is looking to acquire a long-range strike system that has proven effective in the Ukraine war.

• It’s going to be a busy weekend for Canadian trade negotiators in Washington. Canadians are in a fighting mood, and many want illegal firearms from the US to be on the negotiating table.

• What has 448 wheels and is currently crawling between Edmonton and Fort Saskatchewan? A de-ethanizer!

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Put away the scorecards

If the buzz coming out of Ottawa and Washington means anything, Canada and the United States might be coming close to something resembling a deal on trade. According to the latest reporting, the two countries have traded detailed proposals for an interim agreement ahead of the August 19 deadline, when Donald Trump’s threatened 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods (imposed, if you’re keeping track of the various invented pretexts, over wildfire smoke) are set to land. The shape of the swap seems to be that Canada lifts its retaliatory tariffs on US autos, ends the provincial bans on American alcohol, loosens procurement rules that favour domestic suppliers, and adjusts how it applies its dairy tariff-rate quota. In exchange, Washington trims, but crucially, does not remove, the Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos and lumber that have been strangling those sectors since last year.

Within hours of that reporting, the commentary sorted itself into its usual two camps. Dairy Farmers of Canada declared that “food sovereignty is not for sale.” Quebec’s premier says the SAQ will keep American booze off the shelves no matter what Ottawa signs. On the other side, Carleton’s Fen Osler Hampson reached for Munich, casting Carney as Chamberlain: an appeasing leader playing a weak hand, buying time through concessions that will mean nothing to a negotiating partner who doesn’t consider himself bound by his own signature.

Both camps are answering the same question: did Canada win or lose this round against Donald Trump? But this is Trump’s question. His entire theory of trade is that it’s zero-sum, that someone is always being taken advantage of, and that the job of a leader is to make sure it isn’t you. Once you accept that framing, “elbows up” and “capitulation” are the only two things a deal can be. Every clause becomes a scorecard entry under one of those two columns.

We need not accept this way of looking at it. Trade, done right, isn’t zero-sum, so the question worth asking isn’t who won the news cycle. Our focus should be narrower, less partisan, and frankly more boring: does this specific package leave Canada more sovereign, more united, and more prosperous than the status quo? If yes, take it, and stop with the performances about it. If no, we should say so on the merits of the deal, not because any concession feels like losing.

That is why it is helpful to actually run down the list of what seems to be on the table. Some of the items look good, others not so much. The alcohol ban is the easiest call. In many areas Canadians have already voted with their wallets, as American products here have been hammered by boycott as much as by policy. Restocking American rotgut with clear country-of-origin labelling costs Canada almost nothing and lets the market keep doing what it’s already doing in many sectors. We can adopt the same logic on dairy. Indeed, Canada lost the 2023 CUSMA panel ruling on exactly this dispute, under a different American president. Conceding a fight you already lost fair and square isn’t capitulation.

The procurement issue is more interesting, and this is where the “sovereignty and prosperity” test actually finds some traction. If loosening Buy-Canadian rules means cheaper, faster infrastructure, that’s worth doing on its own terms regardless of what Washington wants in return. And there’s a bigger prize sitting in plain sight that has nothing to do with the Americans at all: Canada still hasn’t fixed interprovincial procurement and trade barriers, a rules problem entirely of our own making and entirely within our own power to solve. Any negotiation that keeps Ottawa and the provinces talking seriously about internal trade is doing more for national prosperity than anything Jamieson Greer can offer.

The Hampson warning still deserves a hearing, though not the precise one he’s making. The real risk isn’t appeasement in the abstract; it’s the actual track record on this. Carney has already cancelled the digital services tax, agreed to split toll revenue on the Gordie Howe Bridge, and rolled back Canadian-content rules for streaming services. Each one was pitched at the time as a good-faith gesture that would unlock American reciprocity. None of it has been reciprocated yet, and likely never will be. If the concessions on the table now follow that same script, where Canada gives, the tariffs stay roughly where they are, and Washington moves on to its next complaint, then this isn’t a strategic pause bought with patience. It’s just the same American bully tactics, with concessions pocketed and new items added to the wishlist.

Recent polling suggests that Canadians are growing tired of Washington’s games, with more than three-quarters of respondents preferring a good deal over a fast one, and a majority — including a striking share of Conservative voters — rating Carney’s handling of this file as good or acceptable, CPC leader Pierre Poilievre’s objections notwithstanding. The country appears to have quietly concluded that its own long-term interests, not the partisan “Elbows up/Elbows Down” scorekeeping, is the only thing worth tracking.

That’s the standard this deal, or any deal, to which any deal should be held: not whether Mark Carney out-negotiated a man who thinks Canada is nasty, or whether he sold Canadians a bill of goods with his “rupture” rhetoric, but whether Canada comes out the other side of this more sovereign, more united, and more prosperous than it was going in. Everything else is noise.

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“Logging”

George Agnew Reid, 1888, via Canada The Unknown Country

Build Canada Merch

Summer is racing away, but there is still time to get styling. Head over to 🛒: shop.buildcanada.com

Understanding Canada: Why aren’t we winning more?

This week in Building Canada

Aug 9: Nine Canadian peacekeepers were killed on this day in 1974 when their aircraft was shot down by Syria. This day is now commemorated as National Peacekeepers Day.

Aug 10: On this day in 1960, John Diefenbaker’s precursor to the Charter, The Canadian Bill of Rights, received Royal Assent, Diefenbaker’s precursor to the Charter.

Aug 12: At 12:40 am on this day in 1992, Canada, the US, and Mexico announced the completion of NAFTA negotiations.

Aug 13: The Canadian Women’s Army Corps, integrating women into the Canadian military, was established on this day in 1941.

Aug 14: On this day in 1937 Mackenzie King established the Rowell-Sirois Commission (Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations). The landmark inquiry into federal-provincial fiscal relations eventually shaped equalization payments and forever altered the fiscal and political structure of the federation.

Canada’s Peacekeeping Monument

Reconciliation, better known as the Peacekeeping Monument, sits just off Sussex Drive in Ottawa, flanked by the National Gallery on one side and the American embassy on the other. Unveiled on October 8 1992, it’s the product of a 1990 design competition run jointly by the Department of National Defence and the National Capital Commission, launched at a moment when peacekeeping was still considered a signature Canadian export rather than a faded Cold War artifact.

The winning team was entirely British Columbian: sculptor Jack Harman, urban designer Richard Henriquez, and landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander. Harman, who was already known for public commissions such the Harry Jerome statue in Stanley Park, cast three bronze soldiers — two men, one woman — standing watch atop two converging concrete walls rising out of a bed of broken rubble. The walls meet at a single point, meant to represent conflict resolving into peace.

What else we’ve been reading

• “Canadian governments should be concerned about wider trends pushing us away from caring about economic growth,” writes Mike Moffat in the Globe and Mail.

• A group of former high-level public service executives and private-sector CEOs is aiming to advise the government on how it can better execute the priorities of Prime Minister Mark Carney and Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Sabia.

• Students from a Calgary high school have become the first Canadian winners of an autonomous-vehicle competition at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology summer institute.

• Canadian Olympic hero Clara Hughes talks about the summer job that taught her the importance of willpower.

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Great Expectations

Fifty years ago this past week, in a driving Montreal rain, a 20-year-old high jumper from Vancouver named Greg Joy cleared 2.23 metres, beat the reigning world record holder, and took silver at the Summer Olympics. For decades afterward, CBC ran a clip of that jump as the final image in its sign-off O Canada montage, filed alongside beavers, canoes, snow and mountains as an artifact of the official national identity.

Joy’s silver was the best moment of an Olympics Canada was proud to host. And like all good hosts, we were more than generous with our guests, letting them have all the glory. Montreal 1976 remains the only Summer Games in history where the host nation failed to win a single gold medal. Sure, we more than doubled our medal count from the previous two Olympics combined, but Joy’s near-miss in the rain was as close as we came to glory on our own soil. We turned his silver into a national icon because it was the best we had.

Then we did it again. Twelve years later, hosting the Winter Games in Calgary, Canada once more failed to win gold, making us the only country to host two Olympics and not hear its anthem played in triumph.

By the time Vancouver won the right to host the Winter Games in 2010, somebody in Ottawa had had enough. Own the Podium, a non-profit launched in 2005 for exactly this purpose, was blunt about it: fund the athletes who could actually win, and stop pretending that participation was the point. It worked wonderfully. Canada took 14 golds, which at the time was the most any nation had won at a single Winter Olympics, punctuated by Sidney Crosby’s overtime goal against the Americans in the men’s hockey final. For two and a half weeks, Canada played the way it likes to imagine itself playing all the time: to win.

Alas, the commitment to winning didn’t last. Own the Podium saw its mission diluted and the funding dried up, with predictable results: at the Milan-Cortina Games this past February, Canada won only 21 medals, five of them gold, with losses in both the men’s and women’s hockey finals. This marked the fewest total medals Canada has won at a Winter Games in two decades, and did nothing to reverse the 30-year-low gold count Canada hit at Beijing four years earlier.

None of this is really about high jump, or hockey, or what happened in February in Italy. It’s about the theory of the Canadian state that Own the Podium briefly interrupted but which Milan-Cortina quietly confirmed: we treat winning as something nice that occasionally happens, rather than the deliberate outcome of a system we have created. We fund broadly instead of ruthlessly, measure effort instead of podiums, and generally take a “just happy to be here” approach to international competition.

When we do get serious, it is Ottawa writing a cheque for a fixed window of time, but eventually the appetite for victory fades and everything reverts to the mean. A country that spent decades re-airing a silver medal every night has made a kind of peace with something, and that something is not being the best.

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Build Canada published a memo this week, “Play to Win, Canada,” that puts its finger directly on the problem. American college athletics alone raise roughly 24 times what all of Canada’s sport and recreation charities raise combined. Ottawa’s Athlete Assistance Program tops out at around $26,100 a year for our most decorated competitors, and the national sport organizations that support them say their real purchasing power has fallen by a third since 2005. We ask our best to carry the flag on a training allowance that wouldn’t cover the rent in most Canadian cities, then act surprised when we find ourselves trailing the Swiss or the Norwegians or the Germans.

The memo’s answer isn’t to propose another line item in the federal budget. Instead, it is looking to the private sector for support. It proposes tax-credited “Team Canada Accounts” that any Canadian or company could pay into directly, suggests that a slice of the now-enormous provincial sports-betting take be redirected to athlete development, and proposes a permanent, independently governed sport endowment so the whole system stops living program to program on the mood of whoever happens to be in office in Ottawa. Canada Soccer’s foundation raised $25 million from private donors in eighteen months once it built a proper vehicle to ask. The appetite is evidently there, we just need to build the infrastructure to meet the demand.

This is, in the end, the same argument Build Canada keeps making about everything else in this country, from the pipelines to the housing to the power grid. Canada is not short of ambition, and we have never lacked people looking to clear the bar. What we lack is the institutional will to build systems that turn a good try into a gold medal on purpose, every four years, rather than once by accident.

Sport is just the version of this argument that has a scoreboard attached. Everywhere else Build Canada has looked this year — the pipeline that needed a special summit just to produce a memorandum of understanding, the submarines still years from the water, the AI strategy that talks about adoption instead of building — the shape is the same: real ambition, a burst of government urgency, and then a quiet reversion to mean once the cameras leave.

Greg Joy himself has said that Canadians used to hope for a medal; for a few years after Own the Podium, we expected one. That’s the real measure of whether a country wants to win: not the hope, but the expectation. Right now, in sport as everywhere else, we’re back to hoping. This is a part of our national character that simply has to change.

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Mary Pratt (1935-2018)

Jelly Shelf, 1999; Oil on canvas, 55.9 x 71.1 cm

Mary Pratt was one of Canada's most celebrated realist painters, renowned for her luminous still lifes of domestic subjects — jars of jam, fish on tinfoil, sliced fruit — rendered with photographic precision and an unsettling emotional intensity. Born Mary West in Fredericton, New Brunswick, she studied at Mount Allison University, where she met fellow painter Christopher Pratt, whom she married and moved with to Newfoundland. Working often from photographs, she elevated overlooked household scenes into meditations on light, labour, and the quiet undercurrents of domestic life. She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1996.

This week in Building Canada

Aug 1: Slavery was abolished across the Empire, including Canada, on this day in 1834. While this freed fewer than 50 people outright in British North America, Canada’s role in the slavery story is best known as a post-1834 haven for American fugitives.

Aug 2: John Lorn McDougall becomes Canada’s first independent Auditor General, under the newly passed Public Accounts Audit Act. The office was created after it emerged that the previous auditor (the deputy minister of finance moonlighting as his own watchdog) had covered for Sir John A Macdonald retaining control of secret funds after leaving office.

Aug 3: Canada’s first infant heart transplant was performed on this day in 1989, led by Dr. Wilbert Keon at the Ottawa Civic Hospital.

Aug 4: On this day in 1914, Canada entered The Great War as part of the British Empire. It was a conflict that through industrial mobilization transformed the country from a rural economy into a manufacturing nation.

Aug 7: Happy birthday Sidney Crosby, born on this day in 1987.

What else we’ve been reading

• More than 10 000 federal public servants applied for the early retirement package that was offered this spring. So far almost 7000 have been approved, with 41 applicants rejected.

• The Canadian Armed Forces has issued a new directive on “spiritual reflections in military settings.” It replaces "prayer" with "spiritual reflection" as the default public-facing act at CAF ceremonies. A spiritual reflection is explicitly defined as not using religious-specific language (no invoking God, etc.), and is meant to hit themes such as gratitude, remembrance, hope, and integrity without doctrinal content.

• The federal government has given Canada Nickel the go-ahead to build a new nickel mine in Northern Ontario. The project was referred to the federal Major Projects Office for regulatory fast-tracking in November. And Canada economic growth beat expectations in May and is now on track for annualized growth of 3.4 per cent.

• American pop star Ariana Grande has teamed up with Apathy is Boring an organization that educates youth about democracy, to encourage concert-goers in Montreal to vote in the upcoming provincial election. And former federal cabinet minister Chris Alexander is running for mayor of Toronto.

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Canada sketches a Plan B

On July 26, 1923, some fifty thousand people packed into Stanley Park to hear Warren Harding speak. He was the first sitting American president to set foot in Canada, and Vancouver received him accordingly with a twenty-one-gun salute from the Canadian Field Artillery as the city thrilled at its own sudden importance. Harding rewarded them with a sermon on the miracle of the undefended border. “No grim-faced fortifications mark our frontiers,” he declared, “no huge battleships patrol our dividing waters, no stealthy spies lurk in our tranquil border hamlets.” The friendship between the two nations, he assured the crowd, required no written guarantee to endure. It was, he said, a friendship that consisted “not of perishable parchment, but of fair and honourable dealing, which, God grant, shall continue for all time.”

He then played a few holes at Shaughnessy, begged off early because he wasn’t feeling well, continued down the coast on his speaking tour, and was dead within the week. Yet the words he spoke in Vancouver were carved into granite in Stanley Park where he had spoken, and there they remain, on a monument most passersby now find inscrutable, to a president most Canadians have forgotten, celebrating a proposition this week’s news has pretty much demolished.

Harding had it precisely backwards. His confidence was that the relationship between Canada and the United States was too sturdy to need a document, but the lesson of the past eighteen months is that the documents we do have are worth almost nothing at all. This week, Donald Trump imposed fifty per cent tariffs on a long list of Canadian goods, from wine to cement to hockey sticks, that will apply whether or not those goods are covered under CUSMA. The continental trade agreement his own first administration negotiated and signed did not slow him down for an afternoon.

Nothing illustrates the point better than the saga of the bridge. The Gordie Howe International Bridge — built at a cost of $4.7 billion, financed entirely by Canada, connecting Windsor to Detroit — is scheduled to open to traffic on Monday. It was conceived as the physical embodiment of Harding’s thesis, but instead it stands as a monument to hard feelings. Earlier this year Trump demanded, as the price of allowing it to open, that Canada hand over half the ownership and a share of the tolls on a structure it had paid for, complaining that it had been built with too little American steel. On Friday, after the new round of tariffs landed, Ottawa cancelled the joint ribbon-cutting that was scheduled and held its own ceremony on the Windsor side, with no Americans invited.

All of which is probably necessary, if somewhat unsatisfying theatre. But the problem facing the Carney government, and Canadians more generally, is that despite persistent American complaints about Canadian retaliation, our response to the tariffs and other forms of economic strong-arming by the U.S. has been largely theatrical. Carney is facing increasingly loud calls to get tough, to fight back, to stand up for Canada and Canadians. And while the prime minister said this week that “everything is on the table” when it comes to responding to the new tariffs, his options are limited – as the Americans well know.

First of all, the hit from the tariffs will be unevenly distributed across the country, making a unified national response pretty difficult. Second, the U.S. has already made it clear that they will tolerate no pushback or retaliation whatsoever – that the tariff hit is only allowed to go one way.

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So any big blunderbuss response is probably not on the table. Instead, the more consequential Canadian response to what is coming from Washington is happening elsewhere, and it amounts to something Harding (and his Canadians audience) would have found unthinkable: a grim-faced Canada is rebuilding the fortifications.

Consider the week’s defence file, which ran alongside the tariff drama and drew a fraction of the attention. On Monday, Canada became the first observer nation in the Global Combat Air Programme, the British-Italian-Japanese effort to build a sixth-generation fighter. This is happening even as the government’s order for eighty-eight American F-35s sits under a “review” now in its sixteenth month.

Of course, observer status in the fighter programme means no money committed, no industrial workshare, and no vote. At best it gives Canada possible future options, while signalling that we are willing to redirect our attention and our alliances.

It is of a piece with the rest of the week. In Charlottetown, the premiers finally agreed to let Canadians buy wine and spirits shipped from another province, and to work toward recognizing one another’s workers by year’s end — an overdue effort to thicken the domestic market now that the export one has turned difficult. The logic is the same as the fighter file: If you cannot count on the customer next door, you build alternatives, at home and abroad, and keep every door ajar. It is less a strategy than a hedge, the posture of a country quietly arranging a Plan B before it has to name one.

Still, the direction is unmistakable, and it is the reverse of everything the granite in Stanley Park promises. Harding swore that no battleships would ever patrol these waters. A century on, his hosts are buying twelve submarines from Germany. The compact of fair and honourable dealing that Harding spoke of has expired. What might replace it is the very thing he was so sure we would never need.

This week in Building Canada

July 25: Fought on this day in 1814, the Battle of Lundy's Lane was the bloodiest engagement of the War of 1812 and the deadliest battle ever fought on Canadian soil. Taking place near Niagara Falls, Ontario, the gruelling close-range combat lasted well into the night, ending in a bloody, inconclusive strategic stalemate.

July 26: Warren Harding became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Canada, stopping off on Vancouver in his way back from Alaska in 1923. He died exactly one week later, on August 2.

July 27: On this day in 1921, Frederick Banting and Charles Best produced the first working pancreatic extract in their laboratory at the University of Toronto.

July 30: The Trans-Canada Highway was officially opened on this day in 1962, sort of. It actually had two official openings thanks to federal-provincial spite: BC premier W.A.C. Bennett held his own ceremony at Revelstoke on July 30, 1962, calling it “BC Highway 1,” then boycotted Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s own opening at Rogers Pass on September 3 in protest over the funding deal.

July 31: Summer is fleeting. Get outside!

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IMAX and The Odyssey

The movie event of the summer is a three-and-a-half-hour adaptation of Homer, and at the heart of the experience is a Canadian invention. IMAX was dreamed up by four Canadians who founded the company in Montreal in 1967 and sketched the name, short for “maximum image,” on a restaurant placemat. Their first permanent screen opened at Toronto’s Cinesphere in 1971.

The Odyssey is the first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film, and is the fulfilment of the founders’ original dream — a Hollywood epic in the format’s largest, purest form. Audiences are lapping it up. The Odyssey had a $124.5-million opening weekend, nearly a quarter of the North American gross claimed by IMAX’s own screens, pushing the company’s share price to near its highest levels since the company went public in 1994.

The Canadian at the heart of this movie’s story, though, is a quieter figure. David Keighley, born in Toronto in 1948, was IMAX’s first chief quality officer — the man who, for five decades, made certain the image on the screen matched the ambition behind it. He oversaw post-production on more than 500 films; for years, no IMAX print left the lab without his personal approval. He reviewed the dailies for The Odyssey just days before he died last August, at 77. The film closes with a dedication to him, and the new camera built to shoot it is called the Keighley.

What else we’ve been reading

• One of our new favourite Substacks is The Canadian Explorers by Ethan Marcoux. This week he has a great interview with Matthew Lombardi, founder of the Icebreaker newsletter on Canadian defence.

• University of Toronto math professor Jacob Tsimerman has won a 2026 Fields Medal, the top global honour in mathematics. Over at Be Giant, Luc Rinaldi has a good profile of Tsimerman.

• According to David Coletto at Abacus, socialism is back in the conversation — 39% of Canadians under 30 view it positively. Among those 60 and over, 21% do. Read his analysis here.

• It’s been over a year of Donald Trump’s tariff war on Canada, and polls show Canadians increasingly want to put up a fight.

• The McFlurry was invented in the summer of 1995 a McDonald’s franchise owner in Bathurst, New Brunswick. Now the city wants to erect a monument to celebrate the tasty treat.

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You Are the Progress

By: Ronnen Harary

We all have certain skills we are gifted with when we come into this world, inborn abilities and personality traits that define who we are. What is your gift? It may take a while to figure out, but when you know, you just know, because you feel most like yourself whenever you’re doing it. You step out onto your school’s track for the first time, and you can run like a gazelle. You pick up a guitar for the first time, and it just feels natural in your hands. The chords and the progressions, it all makes sense.

You’ve still got a long way to go. You’ve got hours and hours of diligent practice ahead of you before you reach a technical mastery of whatever it is. But the positive feedback loop of enjoying it and wanting to do more of it happens almost right away. There’s no friction. It’s effortless. You know you’re using your gift when you can lose yourself in something and the whole idea of time falls away. You sit down to the task, and the next thing you know you look up and hours have gone by. You’re in the flow state. Your energy level peaks and stays high. You have the ability to channel ideas and influence people around you in a positive way because those people are now your mirror; they’re reflecting back to you the energy you’re putting out into the world. Simply put, it’s you when you’re being your most authentic self. Whatever that is for you, that’s your gift.

Sadly, some people never get the opportunity to identify their talents when they’re young. No one ever showed them the right door to open, so they don’t learn until later in life that what they love is travel or photography or cultivating a garden, and only then are they able to try to align their lives and careers with their gifts. Others of us are lucky enough to know in our bones from a young age what we’re meant to do, and whatever hardships I may have endured in my youth, in that respect I was one of the lucky ones. Thanks to my parents, I grew up immersed in the world of business and commerce. I saw what made it exciting. I saw that what made a good business thrive, more than anything, was people. Business, at the end of the day, is nothing more than humans interacting with other humans. How people organize themselves, interact, and collaborate—­ that’s what defines what any particular business is, and that’s what I loved about it.

I went into business knowing I wasn’t employable in most traditional fields because of my dysgraphia. I probably could have held a job in sales, and given my passion for real estate I might have been successful doing that, but for the most part I knew I’d need the freedom to do things my own way. I’d spent all of my high school and college years stuck at a desk, taking three hours to do work that the other kids could do in less than one, bending my brain to force it to work within the confines of how other people wanted it to work. It was excruciating. But from the day we started Spin Master, I did the opposite. I designed my day to work the way my brain worked, and it was liberating.

When I come into the office, I’m scheduled in meetings from the moment I arrive until the moment I leave. I never take lunch breaks. I’ve only gone on five business lunches in my life, and I mean that literally. I can count them on one hand. I never go out to restaurants, and I never sit at my desk and eat by myself. I’ve eaten every single lunch of my career in a meeting. Once I’m going, the meeting cadence is back-­to-­ back-­to-­back-­to-­back-­to-­back-­to-­back, just this crazy flow of one meeting giving way to the next. Which works for me because of the way my brain functions. I don’t like to take notes, I don’t want to write memos or talk over Slack, and the way I assimilate information best isn’t through reading. It’s through face-to-­face conversation and dialogue. So that’s how I’ve always structured my day.

The ideas and thoughts that I’d struggled to express on the page in school, now they were all free to come bursting out of my mind, ready to be implemented to help the business grow.

Controlling my environment at Spin Master also meant controlling who I was able to meet with and what information I was surrounded by. In a world with so many distractions, controlling the information that flows into your brain is critical to shaping decisions to move your business forward, and for me, having the ability to do that was a gift. The word that comes to mind is “idiosyncratic.” Given the idiosyncratic way my brain works, if I had been forced to spend my whole life working in a structure and on a schedule dictated by someone else, conforming to their culture and environment, I don’t think I ever would have achieved anything close to what I have now.

Like me, you know your own idiosyncrasies, the way you need to work in order to maximize the talents and gifts you’ve been given. Whatever culture you create will begin to take on characteristics of your personality, and you’ll be able to mold that institution to maximize your productivity, to amplify your strengths and surround yourself with people whose strengths make up for your weaknesses. (Because you will never be great at what you’re weak at; it doesn’t work that way.) The most important thing is to work in a way that matches who you truly are. There are tons of business books out there that will tell you a million different tips and tricks for the best way to succeed. But what none of those books have is an understanding of who you are. The truth is that there is no right way or wrong way to run your business. There is only what’s right for you. The results will back it up, and that will point the way forward.

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Ultimately, the big question you have to ask yourself is not just Am I putting my talents to use? but Am I putting my talents to good use? Have I aligned the use of my gifts with my true purpose, with a goal that I find meaningful and worthwhile? The reality of this world is that you can be a very smart, very gifted individual who gets paid to use your talents for something you don’t believe in at all. You can do that and still achieve stellar results and attain great material success. On the surface, you may appear to have it all, and you may even tell yourself that you’re more than satisfied with the life you’ve led. But deep down you’ll know that’s not true. Your soul will know that it’s not properly aligned, and that frustration will manifest itself in unhealthy ways, whether it’s anxiety, boredom, procrastination, or something worse. You’ll end up creating workarounds to make yourself feel happy even though you’re not.

Your true purpose can be anything that excites you, anything that impels you forward. It’s a thing you believe needs to get done. Somewhere in the world, there’s a hole that has to be filled and you’re the one who’s meant to fill it. That could be something you need to do for yourself, for your community, or for the whole of society. It might be working with children or the elderly. It might be making music. It might be developing cutting-­ edge technology with AI.

There is literally no limit to your choices. When it comes to living a purposeful life, there are many different paths to take. Public service and the nonprofit sector both offer meaningful opportunities. But in my experience, starting a business is one of the most dynamic and powerful ways to go about it. Business is creativity in motion. It’s an expression of what you care about and how you want to see the world. When you start your own business, you begin to make the change you want to see on that very day. You decide what product or service you’re going to provide based on what you believe the world needs. You decide which customers you want to benefit from those products. You decide how you’re going to treat people, from the wages you’re willing to pay, the hours you expect people to keep, and the range of benefits you’re going to offer.

You decide how you want to treat the environment. You decide if you’re running a company that won’t tolerate financial kickbacks or sexual harassment. And if more businesses were created, there would be more diversity in the business world, fewer large corporations, and more real engines for innovation, which would create the most jobs and spark the most ideas for new business in the future. Simply put, when you start your own business, you’re not just protesting and petitioning for progress.

You are the progress.

Summer Merch

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This week in Building Canada

July 18: The Selkirk Treaty was signed by Lord Selkirk and Indigenous leaders in 1817, making it the first treaty between settlers and First Nations in Western Canada, securing land along the Red and Assiniboine for the Red River Colony.

July 20: British Columbia joined Confederation, becoming Canada’s 6th province, on this day in 1871.

July 21, 1836: Canada’s first railway, the Champlain and Saint Lawrence Railroad, officially opened, running between La Prairie on the St. Lawrence and St-Jean on the Richelieu, financed by John Molson.

*July 22: Fur trader and explorer Alexander Mackenzie reached the Pacific Ocean, becoming the first European to cross North America north of Mexico, in 1793.

July 23: On this day in 1983, Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet midway between Montreal and Edmonton, and the crew glided the Boeing 767 to an emergency landing at a former RCAF base in Gimli, Manitoba, with no serious injuries. The cause was crew mistaking pounds for kilograms, leaving the aircraft with only 45% of its required fuel during Canada’s metric transition.

July 24 On this day in 1874, Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans patented the electric lightbulb in Toronto, a Canadian breakthrough that Thomas Edison later bought and commercialized.

*“From Canada, by land…”

On July 22, 1793, on a rock face above an inlet drawing Pacific tidewater, a 29-year-old Scottish fur trader mixed vermilion pigment with melted bear grease and scrawled a message to posterity: “Alex Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.” Then he turned around and went home.

It was the understatement of the century. Alexander Mackenzie had just become the first European to cross the North American continent north of Mexico, fully twelve years before Lewis and Clark set out to do the same thing with the full backing of the American state, an army detachment, and a presidential mandate. Mackenzie did it with nine men, his loyal dog, and a 25-foot canoe. He had missed George Vancouver’s survey ships, probing the same inlet from the sea, by a matter of weeks.

It was actually his second attempt at the crossing. In 1789 he had followed a great river northwest from Lake Athabasca, convinced it would deliver him to the Pacific. It delivered him to the Arctic Ocean instead. He called it the River Disappointment, but today it is known as the Mackenzie River.

Mackenzie was a partner in the North West Company, and his transcontinental crossing was, at bottom, a business trip as he searched for a viable trade route to the Pacific. That had the pattern of Canadian exploration for two centuries, as the men who mapped this country — La Vérendrye, Hearne, Thompson, Fraser — were not sent by kings or parliaments. They were sent by fur companies chasing beaver, and the commercial infrastructure they built did the work that armies did elsewhere. The web of posts, routes, and relationships with First Nation laid down by the Montreal traders and the Hudson’s Bay Company became the factual basis for British claims to the Northwest and, eventually, the territorial inheritance of the Dominion of Canada. Our border with the United States runs where it does in no small part because the fur trade got there first.

Mackenzie understood the stakes better than most. In 1801 he published his journals and called openly for a unified British commercial empire spanning the continent. London mostly ignored him, but the country he sketched was built anyway.

Paraskeva Clark (1898–1986)

Paraskeva Clark was a Russian-born Canadian painter who brought revolutionary Petrograd to staid Toronto. Trained under Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin in St. Petersburg, she emigrated to Canada in 1931 and became the country's most outspoken advocate for socially engaged art, famously declaring that artists must "paint the moment." She was commissioned during the Second World War to document women's contributions to the war effort, and was a member of the Canadian Group of Painters.

What else we’ve been reading

• A new survey finds Canadians overwhelmingly support growing the country’s space capabilities and developing launch infrastructure at home. And 53 per cent of Canadians continue to go out of their way to buy Canadian.

• A report from the Fraser Institute found that I5 of the last 25 years, one or more provinces with higher living standards received equalization while a province with lower living standards did not. And writing for the MLI, economist Trevor Tombe has some thoughts on how to fix it.

• Anthropic is putting $10 million into Canadian AI research. And Quebec and Alberta are working together to integrate AI into government.

• Godin guitars has built a signature bass/six string double-neck guitar for indie darlings of the moment Angine de Poitrine.

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Carney bearing gifts

On his way to the NATO summit in Ankara last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney stopped in Halifax to announce the largest defence procurement in Canadian history. Canada had picked Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems as the “preferred bidder” to build up to twelve submarines, beating out its only rival, South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean and its KSS-III boat.

The reported price is around $24 billion for the submarines themselves, and by some estimates as much as $100 billion once decades of maintenance, weapons and infrastructure are folded in. The 212CD is a joint German-Norwegian design, and both countries agreed to give up their own places in the delivery queue so that Canada’s first boats could arrive by 2034, with a final contract targeted for the end of 2027.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had warned allies not to show up empty-handed, and the Prime Minister carried the news to Türkiye like a hostess gift. The choreography peaked on Tuesday when Carney, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre gathered to admire a small plastic model of a submarine that will not touch salt water for at least eight years. It was a fitting image for the week: three heads of government examining a scale replica of a capability none of their countries yet possess.

Strip away the staging and there is good news here. Canada is replacing a fleet of four elderly submarines, only one of which is currently seaworthy, with as many as twelve. For a country that claims three oceans and can presently patrol them with a single boat when the weather cooperates, this is a must have, not a nice to have.

But even more striking is the pace. Ottawa named a preferred bidder in under a year and roughly five years ahead of the original schedule. Set against a procurement system that took two decades to not replace these submarines, moving this fast counts as a minor miracle.

There is also a story that goes beyond the boats, and it has to do with the compass bearing. Between the submarines, an $800-million buy of Norwegian Kongsberg strike missiles for the future fighter fleet, a share of a Swedish Saab radar-plane program slated to be largely built here, and the launch of talks toward a Canada-Germany strategic partnership, Canada spent the week tilting quite obviously toward Europe. Merz called the sub decision “bold” and promised “a new era of co-operation.” Canada is also standing up a Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, which will be a Canada-led multilateral lender with eight countries behind it, to pull private capital into allied supply chains.

None of this is happening in a vacuum, and the same American president who wants NATO members to hit a target of spending five per cent of GDP on defence mused yet again this week about taking control of Greenland. Faced with a security guarantor that treats a member state’s territory as a real-estate opportunity, Canada has quietly concluded that its supply chains might be better off running through Kiel and Kongsberg rather than through Washington’s moods. Yet Carney was also blunt about the price of admission: regarding the spending target, he said Donald Trump had won the argument, with Canada now pledging to hit the five per cent target by 2035.

But (and there is always a lot of buts when it comes to this stuff) “preferred bidder” is not a signed contract. That isn’t expected until the end of 2027, and Hanwha Ocean remains on the bench precisely because these negotiations can and do collapse. Also, the pledge to buy “up to twelve” submarines is doing an enormous amount of work, as is the five-per-cent pledge, which the Carney government has announced repeatedly and booked into the fiscal framework not at all. Canada projects it will spend about 2.1 per cent of GDP on defence this year. The gap between that number and five is roughly the entire military capability we have now, doubled.

Then there is the sales brochure. TKMS forecasts it will pump $86 billion back into the Canadian economy and generate 650,000 job-years across the whole project, with torpedo plants in Manitoba, non-magnetic steel in Welland, sub sections in Trois-Rivières and a combat-systems centre in Ottawa. Some of this is genuinely valuable industrial capacity. But the desire to sell every single procurement program as a regional development and jobs program is exactly the instinct that made Canadian procurement so slow, expensive, and ineffective in the first place.

As Philippe Lagassé put it, defence procurement isn’t like buying a car, it is more like deciding to renovate your house. What Canada has undertaken here is a rebuilding of our maritime capacities from their very foundations, and we has only just signed with the contractor. The harder thing, which often seems to be the thing Build Canada exists to nag about, is delivery. Announcing a submarine is trivial, compared to building a torpedo line, a combat-systems centre, and a navy three times its current size, while standing up a defence bank and holding 2,600 troops in Latvia. This is also the sort of work Canada has not done in a very, very long time.

Carney arrived in Ankara bearing welcome gifts. The trouble with a gift you have merely promised though is that, sooner or later, someone expects to unwrap it. Whether there is really a submarine inside the box, and everything else pledged this week along with it, is the work of the next decade.

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Build Canada. Actually.

Canada’s greatest adventurer is about to face his biggest challenge yet!

This week in History

July 11: The Lord’s Day Act, banning commerce on Sundays, was passed by Parliament on this day in 1906. It was effectively repealed in 1985, when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.

July 13: On this day in 1866, the steamship Great Eastern set out to lay the first working transatlantic telegraph cable, completed to Heart’s Content, Newfoundland on July 27, 1866. That’s the moment Europe and North America went from weeks-by-ship to minutes-by-wire communications.

July 14: Happy Birthday Moshe Safdie, the architect known for designing the National Gallery of Canada as well as the world famous Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

July 15: Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory were absorbed into Canada, Manitoba entered as the fifth province, and the North-West Territories were created on this day in 1870. It was the largest real-estate transaction by land area in the country's history and transformed Canada from a modest northeastern country into a continental empire.

July 17: On this day in 1897, the Portland steamship carrying Klondike gold docked in Seattle — igniting the gold rush and sending thousands through Canadian ports and supply towns,

At the Stampede!

Jeff Adamson, CEO of Neo Financial, sported a Build Canada tee while leading the Fintech Panel at the Stampede Tech Summit, hosted by House 831 and Tech Thursday, on July 6th. Photograph by Arvin Farsyad.

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Great Canadian Builder: Jack Poole

Over the past few weeks, whenever TSN’s World Cup panel threw to the crowds gathered outside its downtown set, viewers were looking at Jack Poole Plaza, the waterfront square beneath the Olympic cauldron, with the North Shore mountains looming in the background. Tens of thousands of soccer fans passed through without the faintest idea who Jack Poole was.

Jack Poole is the reason the 2010 Winter Olympics came to Vancouver and Whistler, and those games are still the largest event of any kind ever staged in British Columbia. In 2001, semi-retired and 68, he took a call from newly elected premier Gordon Campbell and agreed to chair the city’s Olympic bid for a salary of one dollar a year, expenses out of his own pocket. Decades earlier, Poole’s development company had given a teenaged Campbell his first paying job, as a labourer on a housing project at Babine Lake; the two liked to joke that Campbell had squared the account by handing Poole his last. For two years he ran the Vancouver 2010 Bid Corporation as volunteer chairman, doing the unglamorous work a Games actually demands to align three levels of government, the sports federations, and First Nations behind one vision. Vancouver won the vote in July 2003, and Poole stayed on to chair the organizing committee.

He never saw it. Poole died of pancreatic cancer shortly after midnight on October 23, 2009, just a few hours after the Olympic flame was lit in Olympia, Greece, beginning the torch relay toward the Games he had spent eight years securing. The plaza and the cauldron were named for him afterward. That the same patch of ground is now the natural gathering place for World Cup crowds is his legacy.

Before any of this though, Poole was a builder in the plainest sense. Born in 1933 in Mortlach, Saskatchewan, he took a civil engineering degree from the University of Saskatchewan, married at 17, and moved west. In 1964 he co-founded Daon Development Corporation on little more than nerve and a signed-over house, and built it into the second-largest real estate development company in North America. Then the 1982 recession destroyed it. Daon collapsed into bankruptcy protection, and Poole, once worth $100 million, was left broke, divorced, and holding the debts.

What he did next is the part worth remembering. He started over, co-founded what became Concert Properties, and rebuilt it into one of the largest developers in the province. The boom, the bust, and the refusal to stay down: that is the whole Canadian builder story compressed into one career.

It is also exactly the temperament he brought to the Olympics, with the same instinct to take on something enormous, carry the risk personally, and see it through to the finish.Vancouver is a world sporting city today because a developer from Mortlach decided it should be. The plaza is the least the city owes him.

What else we’ve been reading

At Montreal’s Startupfest, Harley Finkelstein talked about what Canadian founders need to do differently

Federal public servants are now required to be in the office four days a week. They aren’t happy about it.

Calgary economist Trevor Tombe has some ideas for making equalization less complicated, and better for national unity.

From Be Giant, a profile of theoretical physicist Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, the head of the Celestial Holography Initiative at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo.

Three months after his trip around the Moon, astronaut Jeremy Hansen is retiring from the Canadian Space Agency.

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It took two press conferences, two premiers, and roughly ten hours for the federal government to do what it has spent a decade insisting the market should do. On Thursday morning in Vancouver, Mark Carney stood with David Eby to announce the Canada-British Columbia Cooperative Prosperity Agreement — nearly $20 billion in federal commitments that Ottawa says will catalyze more than $200 billion in new investment. By Thursday evening he was in Calgary with Danielle Smith, announcing that Alberta had formally submitted the West Coast Pipeline to the Major Projects Office.

In case it wasn’t obvious, the B.C. deal is the price of the Alberta pipeline. Eby extracted a commitment that the North Coast tanker ban stays in place, plus federal assumption of financial risk for spills and financial compensation for B.C. if the pipeline proceeds. Mechanisms under discussion include an annual royalty payment and an environmental response fund. In exchange, he conceded what was always constitutionally true: pipelines are federal jurisdiction, B.C. lacks the authority to stop one, and the province will not go to court to fight it.

For her part, Smith seems to have accepted that a southern route the only way a new pipeline was going to get to the B.C. coast. The proposed line would run roughly 1,200 to 1,250 kilometres from Bruderheim, northeast of Edmonton, to the Roberts Bank Terminal in Delta. It would follow the existing Trans Mountain corridor at an estimated cost of $35.2 billion to $43.7 billion, with completion pegged between 2032 and 2034. The expected capacity is a million barrels a day, bound for Asian markets, and construction could begin as early as September 2027. The Major Projects Office has until October 1 to designate it a project of national interest, but it is hard to see how it would refuse.

Then there is the ownership structure, which deserves a long look. The federal government (through Trans Mountain Corp.) and Alberta (through the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission) would be majority owners; Pembina Pipeline takes a 10 per cent stake through construction, with an option to rise to 20 per cent once the line is operational. Pembina, notably, retains full discretion over its final investment decision and will not risk its own capital before then. After a year of both governments vowing to hold out for a private proponent, the private proponent’s exposure rounds to a dime on the dollar, exercisable after the risk is gone. The rest is you, the taxpayer.

Two more pieces completed the package: Ottawa, Alberta, and the Oil Sands Alliance have agreed on terms to launch the Pathways carbon capture project, projected at 16 million tonnes of emissions reductions per year. This was the condition attached to last year’s Carney-Smith MOU. And the $10 billion in Roberts Bank upgrades that Carney announced beside Eby just happens to be the terminus of the pipeline announced beside Smith, a connection Carney declined to draw out loud.

So, what was agreed this week, then is a route, a terminus, a builder, a fast-track referral, a carbon-capture launch, and, crucially for Carney in the short-term, something approaching provincial peace purchased in both B.C. and Alberta. What was not agreed to is the consent of the up to 125 Indigenous communities along the route, many of whom were consulted about a northern route that is no longer on the table. Still, the country decided to build something this week, and while there will be bumps and snags because there always are, we’ll take this post-Canada Day gift.

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Merch

The highly requested merch shop is once again open after a brief inventory outage. Looking to grab something for those summer days by the water? Head over to 🛒: shop.buildcanada.com

This week in Building Canada

July 4: On this day in 1886, the first CPR transcontinental passenger train arrived in Port Moody, B.C., completing the journey from Montreal in just over five days and opening the West to commerce.

July 6: Viola Desmond, a civil rights activist and businesswoman, was born on this day in 1914, in Halifax.

July 8: Tom Thomson drowned in mysterious circumstances in Algonquin Park on this day in 1917.

July 9: The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act came into force on this day in 1993, completing the ratification of the largest Indigenous land claim settlement in Canadian history and setting the stage for the creation of Nunavut in 1999.

July 10: Thérèse Casgrain is born on this day in 1896. The Quebec suffrage leader became the first woman to lead a Canadian political party.

Tom Thomson (1877-1917)

Tom Thomson is the ghost at the centre of Canadian landscape painting. Born near Claremont, Ontario, and raised at Leith on Georgian Bay, he spent his early career as a commercial artist in Toronto before Algonquin Park remade him. Beginning in 1912 he returned to the paark each spring, working as a guide and fire ranger and painting the bush in quick, loaded oil sketches — birch, burnt hillside, storm-bent pine. The results, worked up into canvases like The Jack Pine and The West Wind, fixed a way of seeing the Canadian North that still governs the national eye. He drowned in Canoe Lake on July 8, 1917, at thirty-nine, in circumstances that were never fully explained

Allez les Rouges!

Canada plays Morocco in Houston Saturday afternoon in the first Round of 16 game in Canadian history. We are serious underdogs against the 7th ranked Moroccans, but regardless of what happens it has been a great run, great fun, and hugely inspiring.

Extreme Canada

Canada does not need to become something else to compete. It does not need to abandon its character to achieve scale. The path forward is not to resolve the contradiction, but to lean into it—to recognize that the tension between humility and enormity is precisely what makes this country capable of extraordinary things. — Eliot Pence

What else we’ve been reading

Dominion Dynamics has raised $100 million, which CEO Eliot Pence is billing the Series A as the largest "in the history of Canadian defence”.

Can four SFU grads remake the electricity market with old EV batteries? Moment Energy bundles discarded batteries into packs that can store power for when it's most needed.

Located in Ashibetsu, Hokkaido is 'Canadian World', a replica of an old Canadian village, inspired by fictional Avonlea in Anne of Green Gables

Policy research we need: A new C.D. Howe memo on how to rein in Canada’s out-of-control tipping culture.

A new poll finds Canadians feel morally superior to Americans.

The Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz has ranked the top 100 Canadian movies of all time. Strange Brew ftw.

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As the sun rises on the Dominion of Canada, from Bonavista to Victoria to Iqaluit, families across the country are preparing to spend their day with friends and family at cottages and cabins or around barbecues and backyard decks. Others will crowd with strangers in familiar downtowns, enjoying the early Canadian summer and waiting for fireworks.

Some days, it may seem frustrating or impossible to love our home and native land, but on others, it’s laughably easy to appreciate all of the work that’s gone into making this mostly welcoming land one of the world’s great nations.

Today here at Build Canada, we are celebrating our relationship with this imperfect but lovable place, for what it has given us, and for the future we that beckons for our children.

Building that future, and ensuring that it is prosperous, strong, and free, is our mission here at Build Canada, and it is one that we will be pushing with renewed energy and creativity in the months to come.

To our fellow Canadians who have joined us on this journey, we are blown away by your commitment and your ambition for this place. All we could ever hope is that together, we can keep building the prosperous nation that is our privilege.

Happy Canada Day everyone.

The first Canada Day

From the closing passages of Donald Creighton’s epic The Young Politician, the first of his two-volume biography of Sir John A Macdonald:

Merch Makes its Return

Just in time for Canada Day. The highly requested merch shop is once again open after a brief inventory outage. Looking to grab something for those summer days by the water? Head over to 🛒: shop.buildcanada.com

The Canada I landed in was generous before it was anything else. I want it to stay generous. But it can’t be generous if it has nothing left to give. Canada must get as ambitious for itself as it’s always been for the people it takes in. A country that dreams and builds the way it welcomes: without hesitating, without apologizing.

The Painted Flag

Charles Pachter has spent six decades turning the most Canadian things imaginable — the Queen, the moose, the flag, the barn, the butter tart — into pop art. Born in Toronto in 1942 and trained at the Sorbonne, the University of Toronto, and Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy, he scandalized the art world in 1973 with his “Queen on a Moose” series, and never really stopped: a 1981 glimpse of a flag rippling on his farm north of Barrie sparked a lifetime obsession with the maple leaf, whose paintings now hang in the Prime Minister’s residence, Parliament, and the Canadian Embassy in Washington. His Hockey Knights in Canada mural still watches over commuters at Toronto’s College subway station.

Birth of Canada as a Nation, July First, 1867

James McIntyre

Hail Britannia’s noblest daughter,
Who is surrounded by the water
Of many a lake and broad sea,
Land of beaver and of maple tree.

Her lofty brow is wreathed with smiles,
For from the far Atlantic isles
In pomp have come their delegates,
All seeking to unite their fates.

With Canada great northern queen,
And now throughout the land is seen,
High festival and stately dance,
Triumphant nuptials to advance.

And soon shall Red River valley
And distant Vancouver rally,
To form this Empire gigantic
From Pacific to Atlantic.

James McIntyre (1828–1906) was Ingersoll, Ontario’s “Cheese Poet” — a Scottish-born furniture dealer and undertaker whose earnest, gloriously clunky verse celebrated Confederation, dairy farming, and Canadian pride in equal measure.

Some readings

From Andrew Potter, “Bring a bigger flag”, a short memoir of what we can learn from the Canada Days of the 1980s.

How Ukrainians share the soil with Indigenous Canadians, from the Counteroffensive newsletter.

“The State or the United States”: A warning from Dan Gardner about the dangers of letting go of Canadian culture.

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The house that no one would fix

On Friday morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood outside 24 Sussex Drive and announced what every Canadian already knew: the place is a wreck. Decades of deferred maintenance have left the official residence uninhabitable, an all-too perfect symbol of the nation’s inability to take care of its own institutions. Carney’s plan for fixing this place is a national design competition paired with a fundraising campaign to be managed by the Rideau Hall Foundation.

The scheme has drawn predictable unease over the private funding model that is being proposed, even though only individuals and philanthropic organisations, not corporations, will be allowed to donate. Despite the promise of donor caps (no one can donate more than 10 per cent of the total cost) and the commitment to make all donors public, the whole thing doesn’t sit right with many.

The more interesting question though isn’t what happens next to the building, and it isn’t how it will be paid for. It’s why it took this long, and what that tells us about ourselves.

The standard explanation is political math. No prime minister wanted to spend tens of millions of dollars renovating a mansion for his own use while ordinary Canadians struggled with the rising costs of food, housing, and other necessities. The optics were bad, the upside was minimal, and so the decision got deferred, and deferred again, until the roof was rotting. Fair enough. Politicians respond to incentives, and the incentives here were pretty clear.

But that explanation lets us off too easily, because the political math is itself something that needs explaining. It is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is that Canada has a legitimacy problem with its own national symbols.

In countries with confident, reasonably secure national identities, the maintenance of official institutions isn’t a political risk, it’s an expectation. Nobody asks the French president to apologize for maintaining the Élysée. Nobody expects the British prime minister to crowdfund Chequers. These are national institutions, and their upkeep is understood as a basic obligation of government. Citizens in those countries would be more alarmed by neglect than by expenditure. Even in the United States, the concern over what Donald Trump is doing to the White House and the National Mall stems from the fact that these things are seen as belonging to all Americans as a meaningful part of their national symbolism. The fact that Canadian politicians spent decades calculating that voters would punish them for fixing 24 Sussex reveals something very disturbing about how this country sees its own symbols and institutions.

What is at issue here is not just fiscal conservatism or even generic Canadian self-deprecation. It’s more specific than that: It is that the symbols of federal authority — the Prime Minister’s residence, Parliament, Rideau Hall — don’t command unambiguous pride across the country. For many Canadians, these institutions are associated with central Canadian dominance, or with Laurentian elite smugness, or with a colonial inheritance that still feels unresolved. That is why 24 Sussex isn’t just a residence, it is contested symbolic terrain. And when symbols are contested, politicians are more likely to flee from them rather than champion them.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s response this week was the perfect illustration. Standing outside Parliament (while living, it should be noted, at Stornoway, the official Opposition residence) he argued that restoring 24 Sussex should be nowhere near the government’s priority list given the housing crisis facing young Canadians. It was a clever line that was also an obvious exercise in strategic anti-institutionalism: he used the necessary repair of a national symbol as a partisan wedge, betting that enough Canadians have internalized the idea that investment in national institutions is somehow at odds with investment in ordinary people, rather than being a precondition for it. The alarming thing isn’t that Poilievre made the argument, It is how confident he was in his bet on how it would be received.

A country that understands what it is and what it stands for doesn’t make its politicians afraid to protect and maintain national institutions, it demands that they do. The commentary for years about the travesty of 24 Sussex has been to chalk it all up to the “failure of political will” by timid prime ministers. It’s actually a story about a country that hasn’t fully decided whether its own institutions are worth defending.

The post-election nationalist surge, which includes the renewed rhetoric around defending our sovereignty, the Buy Canadian impulse, the “elbows up” energy that carried Carney to a majority, is all premised on exactly the opposite proposition: that Canadians are ready to invest in themselves again. Carney said as much on Friday. “We will not let it crumble,” he said of 24 Sussex. “We will set it right.”

Maybe. Carney has done something smart, by getting pretty much every living former prime minister to back the renovation and provide advice on how to proceed. But that’s easy for them to do now, when they don’t have to wear the political consequences. It would have been nice if any of them had spent a dime of political capital on it when they had the chance.

Anyway, it will be great if the fundraising campaign hits its target, and the design competition produces something worthy of the site and which does not get bogged down in regional/ethnic/language politics. The test, though, will be whether Canadians greet this as an obvious and necessary act of national stewardship, or as an outrage to be weaponized.

By that standard, 24 Sussex isn’t just a building in need of renovation. It’s a referendum on whether the new Canadian nationalism is the real thing, or just a vibe.

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This week in building Canada

June 27: Women were permitted to enlist in the Canadian Army for the first time on this day in 1941.

June 28: On this day in 1919, Canada signed the Treaty of Versailles with its own independent signature. While it was indented underneath that of the British Prime Minister, it was a landmark step in asserting Canada’s emerging autonomy as a nation on the world stage.

June 30: The $1 coin was introduced on this day in 1987. While it was greeted with initial scepticism, the gold-coloured coin made of three-ply brass-plated steel, quickly earned the nickname “Loonie” thanks to the loon figure embossed on the reverse side.

July 1: On this day in 1867, the Dominion of Canada was officially born under the British North America Act. It was the founding moment of one of the world’s most prosperous nations.

July 3. Samuel de Champlain started building his Habitation at the foot of Cape Diamond on July 3, 1608. It was a fortified trading post with trenches, cellars and a palisade on the bank of the St. Lawrence.

Build on Home Turf

Regardless of what happens Sunday in Los Angeles against South Africa, what the Canadian men’s soccer team has given to Canadians is nothing short of magical: passion, inspiration, and hope. Here is a video made by Build Canada’s

And before Canada played Switzerland on Wednesday, Canadian fans held up printouts of the number 8 of star midfielder Ismaël Koné, who suffered a broken leg early in Canada’s second game against Qatar.

Linkages

• From Be Giant: Canada’s most optimistic entrepreneurs are in Atlantic Canada. But over on the Left Coast, 71 per cent of founders say the cost of living in B.C. makes entrepreneurship difficult.

• Governor General Louise Arbour announced 61 new appointments to the Order of Canada on Friday. It included the promotions of actor Michael J. Fox, businessman Donald K. Johnson, and soccer star Christine Sinclair to the rank of Companion.

• From the FP: We tariff ourselves more than Trump does thanks to interprovincial trade barriers that are the equivalent of a nine per cent tariff. And in The Line, Scott Stinson wonders if Canada’s NHL teams are doomed.

• The MLI has published “How Canada’s skilled immigration system went off the rails – and how to fix it”, a new study from Nino Melikidze and Steven Paolasini, two leading immigration policy reform advocates involved in the Build Canada network

• The CBC has joined the “giant, glittery mess” that is the Eurovision Song Contest. And Pierre Poilievre thinks Canada has too many “cause” months.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney attended the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, this week, pushing Canada's priorities of critical minerals supply chains, macroeconomic imbalances driven by Chinese industrial overcapacity, and foreign aid reform. He and the French President Emmanuel Macron announced a new defence and industrial cooperation agreement, which would advance collaboration in aerospace and quantum science. Carney left without a formal bilateral meeting with Donald Trump, though Carney did say that Canadian and U.S. officials held detailed, technical talks on trade issues.

Canada’s digital future

Over the past four months, the Carney government has introduced four distinct bills addressing Canada’s digital policy. Each is framed as a well-intentioned effort to tackle a specific problem: protecting children, catching criminals, modernizing privacy law, securing critical infrastructure. Taken individually, each is debatable on its merits. Taken together, they construct something Canadians have never voted for and barely debated: the legal architecture for a country where a single Cabinet-appointed body holds sweeping power over what you can say, see, and do online — while the government holds the tools to secretly monitor your activity.

That would be worrying enough on civil liberties grounds alone. But this is also a government that has made building a homegrown digital economy a central plank of its agenda. These two projects are in direct tension, and so far nobody in Ottawa seems to have noticed.

These are the four bills in question:

• Bill C-22 mandates every telecom and internet company to retain metadata on Canadians for up to six months. It also lets the Public Safety Minister issue secret orders compelling companies to build interception tools — while legally barring those companies from ever telling their users.

• Bill C-34 restricts social media access for children under 16, with Cabinet deciding which services the ban applies to. Enforcement requires age verification of every Canadian user — in practice, likely government ID or AI face-scanning, the same tools deployed in Australia and the UK. The bill also creates a new “Digital Safety Commission,” a Cabinet-appointed regulator with powers to investigate complaints, issue compliance orders, and levy fines of up to $10 million or 3% of global revenue.

• Bill C-36 claims to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, then strips the Privacy Commissioner, who is an independent Agent of Parliament, of all authority over private-sector privacy law, handing it to the Digital Safety Commission created under C-34. The Commission gets new powers to issue legally binding compliance orders and adjudicate violations directly, without court referral.

• Bill C-8, the cybersecurity bill, is the furthest along, having cleared the House in March and is before the Senate. It gives the Industry Minister broad power to issue binding and secret directives to telecoms, banks, energy companies, and other critical infrastructure operators.

Other countries have tried versions of these measures. Australia introduced its social media ban in December 2025. Six months later, its own eSafety Commissioner called it a “blunt force approach” drafted too quickly; 70% of young Australians reported it had little effect on their usage. What it did produce was a surge in VPN use, pushing young people onto darker, less-monitored platforms. The UK’s age verification drove VPN downloads to record highs for the same reason.

Protecting children online commands broad public support, while law enforcement has sought lawful-access powers for decades. Privacy law written before smartphones existed does need updating. Cybersecurity is a genuine and growing threat.

But good intentions don’t justify sweeping new powers over Canadians’ personal and digital freedom, especially when the architecture has almost no safeguards against future misuse.

When the government controls the regulator that defines “harmful content” and sidelines the independent privacy watchdog, it gains influence over the boundaries of public debate while removing one of the few institutions capable of challenging it. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a straightforward description of how regulatory capture works, and it is one of the most well-documented failures in public administration.

It is the cumulative nature of these four bills that is the issue. Individually, each might survive scrutiny. Together, they give a single Cabinet-appointed body a surveillance infrastructure, authority over content regulation, the power over privacy enforcement, and control over critical-infrastructure, with limited independent oversight of any of it.

This “trust us we’re the government” approach is a longstanding feature of Canadian governance, but there is a second problem here, and it bears on one of the most pressing issues facing Canada today: our ability to grow, nurture, and hang on to our companies.

The Carney government has made attracting digital talent and building a homegrown technology sector a central plank of its economic agenda. These four bills send the opposite message. Mandatory metadata retention, secret ministerial orders, sweeping content regulation, and a powerful new Commission with global-revenue fines do not make Canada an easier or more attractive place to build a digital company. They make it harder and riskier, at the precise moment when we can least afford to do so. A government cannot credibly tell entrepreneurs to build here while simultaneously constructing the regulatory architecture of a surveillance state. It needs to choose which Canada it’s building.

What is needed is genuinely independent oversight, narrowly defined and judicially reviewable powers, and limits strong enough to bind every future government, not just this one. Four major bills introduced in rapid succession, reshaping the relationship between Canadians and their digital lives, deserve nothing less.

This week in Building Canada

June 20: First day of summer! Get thee to a barbecue.

June 22: The Quebec Act received Royal Assent on this day in 1774. It revoked the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which had aimed to assimilate the French-Canadian population under English rule. It stands as one of the most significant pieces of legislation in the history of British North America, shaping the future of what would become Canada and contributing to the tensions that sparked the American Revolution.

June 23: On this day in 1985, a bomb exploded on Air India Flight 182 en route from Toronto to London, killing all 329 people aboard, most of them Canadians. To this day, the Air India bombing is still the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history. June 23 is now the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism in Canada.

June 24: On this day in 1497, John Cabot made landfall in North America, possibly at Cape Breton, establishing the claim to territory that would eventually become Canada.

June 24: O Canada, later to become our national anthem, was performed for the first time on this day in 1880.

June 26: On this day in 1959, Queen Elizabeth II and President Eisenhower formally opened the St. Lawrence Seaway — the culmination of decades of engineering and binational co-operation.

Trans-Canada Summer

This 1958 documentary narrated by Pierre Berton follows the Trans-Canada Highway from east to west, revealing the people, the resources and the geography of Canada while looking at the engineering feats accomplished in the building of the highway.

World Cup Fever

Canada won its first ever match at a men’s FIFA World Cup on Thursday, destroying Qatar 6-0 before a delirious crowd at B.C. Place Stadium in Vancouver. Striker Jonathan David had a hat trick for Canada, tying him with Argentina’s Lionel Messi for the scoring lead in the tournament so far.

Canadian joy was muted after the game, thanks to a a gruesome injury to midfielder Ismaël Koné, who suffered a broken tibia after a hard tackle from a Qatar player. Koné was taken straight to the Vancouver General hospital, where he was operated on by surgeons who had seen the injury live on television and rushed to the hospital to help.

Koné’s replacement was Nathan Saliba, who promptly scored on a free kick and held up his teammate’s jersey in tribute.

What else we’ve been reading

• Be Giant has a lengthy profile of Swish Goswami, a 29-year-old entrepreneur from Calgary who co-founded two companies, but is pivoting away from the hustle-culture, build-everything-at-once approach that characterized his early career. Goswami reaffirms his commitment to staying and building here despite the harder capital environment.

• Is his SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte canvasses candidates for the Great Canadian Novel.

• “Turning Complexity into Capability” is a useful new report from the Office of the Procurement Ombud explaining the defence procurement system in depth.

• The UK’s Government Office for Science has published a report outlining three possible scenarios for the future of AI in order to “promote consistency and coherence in long-term planning”.

• A new study from the MEI looks at the extent to which supply management drives up prices for Canadians, with low-income households the hardest hit.

• After nearly a century-long run, the CBC will no longer broadcast Hockey Night in Canada.

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On Friday afternoon at BMO Field in Toronto, Canada earned its first ever result at the FIFA World Cup, drawing Bosnia and Herzegovina 1-1 in its tournament opener. The country has been waiting forty years for something to celebrate at the world’s biggest sporting event. A point will have to do for now.

The first time Canada appeared at a World Cup it was Mexico 1986, and the team was a patchwork. The Boston Globe fairly, if ungenerously, described it as “filled with amateurs, indoor soccer players and NASL refugees,” a collection of players who had scraped through CONCACAF qualification and drawn a group of death with France, Hungary, and the Soviet Union for their trouble. They scored zero goals, took three losses, and came home.

What is less often noted is where those players came from. Of the 22 men on the 1986 roster, fifteen had roots in British Columbia. The team was not so much a national side as a West Coast club sent to represent the whole country. Soccer in Canada, to the extent it had any developmental infrastructure at all, was concentrated in Vancouver, through the Whitecaps of the old NASL, the community clubs, the habits that flowed from the immigrant communities that had settled there. Tony Waiters, the head coach, was a transplanted Englishman.

The current Canadian squad is a different kind of team. It is much more talented obviously, but differently constituted as well. The talent pipelines that built it run through the GTA and Montreal now, as well as Vancouver. The sport has migrated east and its demographics have changed, tracking immigration patterns, suburban club growth, and the academy systems built by the country’s three MLS franchises.

Consider the Quebec dimension. Six Quebec-raised players are on Canada’s 26-man World Cup roster, including goalkeeper Maxime Crépeau, midfielder Ismaël Koné, and midfielder Nathan Saliba, whose father played soccer in Haiti. That is a striking number when set against another data point from earlier this year: when Hockey Canada assembled its men’s team for the Milan-Cortina Olympics, not a single Quebecer was selected. The province that gave the world Maurice Richard, Guy Lafleur, and Patrick Roy, and which spent most of the twentieth century treating hockey as a form of cultural patrimony, went unrepresented, to the deep dismay of commentators in the province.

Soccer, meanwhile, is becoming Quebec’s sport, yet Montreal itself is on the outside looking in. When Canada’s major cities were invited to bid for World Cup matches, Montreal declined. Given the subsequent reports of cost overruns and municipal disruption in Toronto and Vancouver, Montrealers have spent the better part of two years feeling smugly vindicated about that decision.

Then Friday happened. More than 43,000 people packed BMO Field, a stadium that had been expanded from its usual 28,000 seats specifically for the World Cup. The cottage by the lake was transformed into a fortress of red. The crowd was loud, proud, and unmistakably Canadian, and when Cyle Larin equalized in the 78th minute the roar was audible from the waterfront. The team now moves west for its next two matches, and Vancouver is expected to match Toronto’s fervour. Montrealers might be forgiven for experiencing a bit of FOMO.

The old demographic story of Canadian soccer was that it existed mostly on the margins of Canada’s national identity — in immigrant communities whose loyalties ran elsewhere, in suburban rec leagues that produced players who, if they were good enough, would end up representing someone else’s country. The new story is different. The players on the current roster are, in significant numbers, the children of those immigrant communities, born in Canada, trained in Canadian clubs, representing Canada by choice and with genuine enthusiasm.

None of this is separate from the larger political context in which this World Cup is unfolding. Canada enters the tournament at one of the more uncomfortable moments in recent national life. There are separatist movements active in both Quebec and Alberta, and we have spent the better part of the last two years being economically threatened by our closest ally and neighbour.

But there’s soccer. Forty years ago, fifteen players from BC showed up and did their best against some of the best teams in the world. Friday afternoon in Toronto, a much different team, representing a much changed Canada, played its first game on home soil, and took its first World Cup points.

In a summer when Canada is deeply divided about what it is, what it wants to be, and whether it even holds together, soccer is helping answer part of the question.

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The boys of ‘86

On September 14, 1985, Canada played what was at that point the most important soccer game in its history at King George V Park in St. John's, Newfoundland. It was a modest outdoor pitch on the banks of Quidi Vidi Lake. If the Hondurans were baffled, so were the Canadians. Captain Bruce Wilson later recalled his bewilderment: “What the heck is the Canadian Soccer Association doing putting this biggest game Canada's ever played — in Newfoundland?”

No matter. Some 13,000 people packed the ground. Canada won 2-1 with goals coming from George Pakos and Igor Vrablic, and qualified for the next year’s World Cup in Mexico. The first game ball went into the reeds of a nearby river and had to be retrieved by a fan, and it eventually found its way into the Canada Soccer Hall of Fame.

What’s new at Build Canada

OAS costs $86 billion a year (more than any other federal program) and it’s growing faster than the deficit. Yet 400,000 seniors still live in poverty, while a retired couple earning $185,000 continues to collect over $18,000 in benefits.

Jeff Adamson’s latest Build Canada memo lays out a path forward: shift the OAS clawback to household income, phase out outdated tax credits worth $7 billion a year, end seniors’ poverty, and free up more than $13 billion annually for deficit reduction.

We have fiscal transfers and tax credits targeted to eliminate poverty. They are the federal government's biggest spending priority.

Are they effective? Can we do better? In the name of having a bit of fun with it, check out FISCAL PLINKO. Change your own policy and see how Canadians drop through the system.

Andrew Mynarski, VC

On the night of June 12-13, 1944, Pilot Officer Andrew Mynarski of Winnipeg was flying as mid-upper gunner in an Avro Lancaster bomber during a bombing mission against railway yards in Cambrai, France. A German fighter attacked the plane, knocking out two engines and setting the aircraft on fire. The crew were forced to bail out, and Mynarski had nearly made it to the escape hatch when he saw his crewmate Pat Brophy trapped in the rear turret. Mynarski crawled back and fought to free Brophy, but was pushed back by smoke and flames. He gave Brophy a final salute and bailed out, with his clothes and parachute on fire.

Mynarski was alive when he landed, but he died of his burns later that day. His actions were the first for which a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force received the Victoria Cross, the highest possible war honour. The VC was awarded posthumously in 1946, after Brophy — who miraculously survived the crash of the bomber — was liberated from a POW camp and could tell the full story

What else we’ve been reading

• “Everything all at once”: Michael Geist has concerns that Bill C-34 is biting off more than the government can chew.

• This past week saw three stories in major news outlets citing anonymous Liberals who say Mark Carney yells. Jen Gerson says good for Carney. And Jennifer Robson offers advice for caucus management.

• The Montreal Gazette has a look at three Quebec electric battery champions that went bust. And former premier Legault tries to explain what went wrong.

• On Tuesday, Louise Arbour was sworn in as Canada’s 31st Governor General. In her speech, she challenged Canada to aim high: “To help Canada reach our full potential, we must adopt a new perspective, one that is ambitious and confident in ourselves and on our place in the world.”

• Scientific American takes a look at how Angine de Poitrine, the Quebec music duo, “play with neurobiology and physics to make viral music”

Get weekly, no-fluff insights on building a more prosperous Canada. Tap “Subscribe” now and be first in line for next week’s brief. Then forward this email to one friend who cares as much as you do—let’s build together.

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AI for All

When it comes to artificial intelligence, the federal government faces a clear challenge, which is that Canadians are highly suspicious of it. That is almost certainly why Prime Minister Mark Carney chose to unveil AI for All, Canada’s new AI strategy, at a hospital in Toronto on Thursday. The facility uses AI to flag patients at risk of deteriorating overnight, which is just the kind of application that makes the technology feel like an opportunity rather than a threat.

A new Angus Reid survey released Friday morning reveals the scale of the trust gap. Nearly four in five Canadians (79 per cent) agree that companies using AI to replace workers should face higher taxes. On the technology’s broader impact, Canadians remain more negative than positive. A third of the public views AI as beneficial; 36 percent consider it harmful. As Carney himself acknowledged at Thursday’s launch, Canada “ranks near the bottom of countries in AI training, literacy and trust.”

That’s a telling concession from a prime minister whose new AI strategy has, as a central ambition, to get AI adoption by business from 12 percent to 60 percent by 2034. And that is why the three pillars of the strategy are trust, opportunity, and sovereignty.

On the trust piece, the government is promising privacy reform, online safety legislation, AI watermarking standards, and an expanded Canadian AI Safety Institute with a mandate to evaluate models. There will be a National AI Literacy Initiative, AI learning kits for 3,000 educators, and trusted AI agents for every post-secondary student. It’s not hard to see the theory of change here: if Canadians learn to use AI, and if guardrails are in place, trust will follow adoption rather than precede it.

The problem is that this might be addressing the wrong anxiety.

Consumer anxiety about AI threats — such as deepfakes, surveillance pricing, and chatbot harms — is real, and the regulatory measures are a reasonable response to it. But there is more that is driving the anxiety of that 79 per cent. It isn’t so much a worry about how AI works as about who benefits, and who will be left behind. An adoption agenda doesn’t speak to that; what would speak to it is a strategy that gives Canadians a genuine stake in AI’s success, not as users, but as builders.

That’s the disconnect at the heart of AI for All, and the Build Canada community has been pointing at the solution since the strategy was first being designed.

Last December, Ajay Agrawal submitted a memo to the federal AI Strategy Task Force that made an argument worth reading alongside Thursday’s announcement. Agrawal’s central point was that setting a target to become the ‘best AI country in the world’ is meaningless. AI is a tool, and success will be defined not by some quantity of uptake, but in how the tool is applied to real problems with measurable outcomes.

In his memo, Agrawal proposed five “AI moonshots” on things like healthcare wait times and wildfire response, with ambitious targets whose success requires both the application of AI and the coordination capacity of government.

The memo reframes the entire question that sits at the heart of Canada’s approach to AI. An adoption target is a metric for Canada as a consumer of AI. A moonshot is a metric for Canada as a user of AI to solve Canadian problems. This is a different thing entirely, and generates an entirely different solution set. Building the data infrastructure, the system integrations, and the AI-native institutions required to cut healthcare waits by 90 percent produces exportable knowledge, Canadian companies, and durable public-sector AI capacity. Hitting 60 percent SME adoption produces none of that.

To its credit, AI for All contains an AI Missions Program that puts healthcare first, then energy, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and robotics, and it is the closest thing to Agrawal’s moonshot logic in the official document. The first mission targets faster diagnostics, improved patient care, and system efficiency. And there’s real money behind it, including $200 million in the missions program and $100 million for a health sector data space. This is good.

But the missions are downplayed while the strategy’s headline goals remain adoption metrics. The missions are presented as applications of the strategy rather than its organizing principle. Invert that architecture, make the moonshots the frame around which compute, capital, and talent investments are organized, and you get a different document.

You also get a fundamentally different answer to the concerns of the 79 per cent. The government’s opportunity pillar is, at its core, a defensive offer: AI literacy programs, work placements, re-skilling courses for mid-career workers. It tells Canadians that AI is coming and Ottawa will help them adjust. A moonshot strategy proposes to put Canadians on the offensive: your hospital, your school, your wildfire-threatened community is the reason we’re building this. The distinction matters, because public trust in a transformative technology hinges on whether you believe the people deploying it are working on your problems.

This is not an argument against the strategy. There is genuinely good work in AI for All, especially the supercomputer investment, the missions program, the CIFAR expansion from 130 to 200 AI chairs, and the Sovereign Technology Alliance with Germany. Compared to the vacuum that preceded it, it is a serious document.

The argument is about what’s missing, and about sequencing. The trust pillar is designed to make Canadians comfortable enough with AI to adopt it. The opportunity pillar is designed to cushion the transition. Neither gives Canadians a reason to want to build it, and that is the only sustainable answer to the anxiety those polling numbers are expressing.

Adoption is a response to change. Building is how you drive it. If Canada’s AI strategy is primarily an adoption strategy, then it has answered only half the question.

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Hunter Prize: Building Entrepreneurship

Where are all the business startups? The steep decline in entrepreneurship is a growing problem in Canada, which is why figuring out what to do about it is the focus of this year’s Hunter Prize for Public Policy, which is being run by The Centre for Civic Engagement in collaboration with The Hub.

This year’s prize will award up to $50,000 in total money for bold, practical, and fiscally responsible policy ideas aimed at reviving entrepreneurship and business formation in Canada, and we are delighted that Build Canada CEO Lucy Hargreaves and Board Member Jeff Adamson are on the panel of judges.

Build Canada in the News

As the federal AI agenda dominated the news cycle this week, reaction from the tech ecosystem was swift and split. Check out some of our appearances in the media this week.

• Where is Mark Carney’s Promised “Office of Digital Transformation”? — The Star looks into a key digital government commitment from the campaign trail that has yet to materialize. (The Star)

• Ottawa’s AI Strategy Includes More Than $2.3-Billion for Training, Adoption and Startups — A breakdown of what’s actually in the package, from compute funding to a new tech growth fund. (Globe and Mail)

• Canada’s New AI Strategy Sets Lofty Goals for Adoption and Growth — The Logic unpacks the ambitions behind AI for All and asks whether the roadmap is concrete enough to deliver. (The Logic)

• Canada’s AI Strategy Draws Mixed Reviews from Across the Tech Ecosystem — Viewpoints differed, but voices from across the sector largely agreed the strategy needs clearer timelines and greater detail. (BetaKit)

Alex Colville (1920-2013)

Born in Toronto in 1920, Alex Colville served as an official Canadian war artist in Europe from 1944 to 1945. Those wartime experiences never left his work, and he always remained aloof from the formal trends of the 20th century. He drew his inspiration from the most repetitive gestures of everyday life, placing unsettling juxtapositions of figures, objects, and animals in an ambiguous atmosphere of tranquil disquieting. His own summary of his worldview was characteristically blunt: “I see life as inherently dangerous. I have an essentially dark view of the world and human affairs. Anxiety is the normality of our age.”

That quality is nowhere more concentrated than in Horse and Train (1954, above), in which a dark horse gallops down railroad tracks toward an oncoming locomotive. The impending collision is only implied, the outcome unresolved. His silent, static images tell stories in brief, concise plots that do not always have a resolution.

Colville is widely regarded as the country’s painter laureate, a realist who made the familiar feel inexplicably, permanently charged. Among his most recognized commissions, are his designs for Canada’s centennial coins in 1967.

Canadian National Railways

June 6, 1919: The Canadian National Railways (CN) was incorporated, formed by merging the government-owned Canadian Government Railways with the recently nationalized Canadian Northern, then absorbing the Grand Trunk Pacific in 1919 and its parent Grand Trunk Railway in 1923. From the Intercolonial Railway, CN inherited a slogan that would define its public character for generations: The People’s Railway.

CN remained a Crown corporation for 76 years, until privatization through a $2.26 billion IPO in 1995. Today it is the only transcontinental rail network in North America connecting three coasts: Atlantic, Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico.

The 1958 NFB documentary Train 406 takes the viewer on a fast freight run from Toronto to Halifax, highlighting the incredible logistics required to manage a country-wide transportation network.

What else we’ve been reading

• At the Canada-Wide Science Fair held in Edmonton last week, the Best Project Award for Innovation was won by Gurnoor Kaur, a Grade 11 student at Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute in Kitchener, Ontario. For her entry, Kaur figured out a way of solving a known bias in pulse oximetry that has contributed to racial health disparities for decades. The It is Ok Eh newsletter has a great writeup on the importance of Kaur’s invention.

• In his latest Not Sorry newsletter, Bryan Danielson makes the case for starting from core principles to build ambition without apology. He almost seems to be channeling Eliot Pence, who in the National Post this week argued that Canada’s fact-first approach to ambition has it all backwards: The more successful approach is the reverse: begin with a vision of a future so valuable that others want to help build it, establish yourself as one of its authors and then make yourself indispensable to its execution.

• This week’s edition of People vs Algorithms, co-written by son of Saskatoon Troy Young, opens with a warning about the coming age of AI-driven customer service.

• And writing in The Line, Jen Gerson has some advice for people, especially Laurentian Elite-types, who feel inclined to weigh in on Alberta.

Get weekly, no-fluff insights on building a more prosperous Canada. Tap “Subscribe” now and be first in line for next week’s brief. Then forward this email to one friend who cares as much as you do—let’s build together.

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A special segment of this week’s newsletter written by Zander Fraser, Head of Content at Build Canada.

Toronto Tech Week

A magical week in Toronto wraps up as thousands of builders from across Canada, and around the globe, find their ways back home.

Inspired would be an understatement. Over the course of seven different Toronto Tech Week events, I met builders with smiles on their faces and a new found passion for building, here at home.

While some were quick to pour cold water on the empty “vibes” of the week, Satish Kanwar had the right response: vibes create momentum, momentum creates change. Yes, there are many imperfections with Canada’s tech scene, but passion, creativity, and ambition are not among them. This week, Canada successfully demonstrated that it has the drive and the motivations necessary to compete on the global stage.

Build Canada x Ada CX: What it will take to build in Canada

On Tuesday, Build Canada teamed up with close partner Ada CX to host an event called “What it will take to build in Canada”

Lucy Hargreaves and Mike Murchison took stage to discuss the evolving Canadian AI ecosystem, the upcoming Federal AI strategy, and the threats posed to the Canadian tech landscape by Bill C-22.

You can look through all of the photos here; there’s a very good chance we got one of you if you were there!

Toronto Tech Week: Homecoming

Bravo, Canada. Homecoming was one hell of a Canadian tech celebration. We laughed, we celebrated, we built our motives together. The memories of this event will stick in my mind for weeks.

First, Tobi Lutke captivated the whole room with his opening segment. Very rarely do I go to an event with 2,000+ attendees that’s dead silent, fully engaged with the speaker. He spoke many quotable lines, but I’ll share one in particular that caught my attention: “…build to be the best everywhere, not to be the best in Canada”.

Later in the programming was a panel hosted by our own Co-Founder & CEO Lucy Hargreaves, on Sovereignty, featuring Kepler Communications CEO Mina Mitry, Dominion Dynamics CEO Eliot Pence, and Cohere Co-Founder Nick Frost.

You have to check out this opening video they used for this panel. I’m still not sure who the video editors were, but wow. Props to them. I had goosebumps watching…

A special shoutout to Satish Kanwar and the Toronto Tech Week team for wearing their hearts on their sleeves this week and showcasing our nation’s incredible talent to the world.

This week in Building Canada

May 31: On this day in 1997, the Confederation Bridge opened. At 12.9 kilometres, it is the longest bridge in the world crossing ice-covered water (see below).

June 1: The Massey Commission issued its landmark report on this day in 1951. The commission's recommendations led directly to the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts, the National Library of Canada, and expanded federal support for public broadcasting and universities.

June 2: The Battle of Ridgeway, featuring Canadian troops against Irish-American Fenian invaders, took place on this day in 1866.

June 4: On this day in 1962, Canada's Nuclear Power Demonstration reactor near Rolphton, Ontario sent the first nuclear-generated electricity to the Ontario grid. It was the prototype for the made-in-Canada CANDU reactor that would go on to anchor a global export industry.

June 5: On this day in 1956, Parliament voted to pass the TransCanada Pipeline bill, ending the most explosive parliamentary debate in Canadian history and setting in motion a 3,700-kilometre natural gas line from Alberta to Montreal, the longest pipeline in the world at the time, and built on the contested principle that Canadian resources should flow through Canadian infrastructure.

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Confederation Bridge

The idea of a fixed link between Prince Edward Island and the mainland is almost as old as Confederation itself, as Canada’s 1873 promise to PEI upon joining included a commitment to reliable transportation access. For over a century that obligation was met by ferry, but the crossings were slow, weather-dependent, and regularly disrupted by winter ice. Proposals for a bridge or tunnel surfaced repeatedly through the mid-twentieth century, and the debate finally came to a head in 1988, when a plebiscite saw 59.4 percent of Islanders vote in favour of a fixed link.

A contract was awarded to Strait Crossing Development Inc. in December 1992, and construction began in the fall of 1993. All major components were prefabricated onshore, then floated into position across the Northumberland Strait. The total cost came in at $1.3 billion, roughly 30 percent over budget. The curved, 12.9-kilometre bridge opened to traffic on May 31, 1997, and remains the longest bridge over ice-covered water in the world.

The economic impact on PEI was immediate and dramatic. In its first year of operation, tourism spending increased 63 percent and visits to the Island topped one million for the first time in its history. The bridge transformed PEI from a place you had to make a special effort to reach into one you could visit on a whim, permanently reshaping its economy and its identity.

The definitive documentary about the building of the bridge is Abegweit, an NFB documentary by Serge Morin that is a day-to-day record of the construction. But this video by Strait Crossing is a neat look at the engineering behind it.

What else we’ve been reading

Canada slips into a technical recession as economic growth stalls. And a new study by the Fraser Institute reveals that investment in productivity-enhancing assets, such as factories, machinery, equipment, and intellectual property, remains below pre-2015 levels in Canada.

Prime Minister Carney announced this week that Canada has entered negotiations with Swedish defence company Saab to procure the GlobalEye aircraft platform. Then he went to New York and suggested Canada could help make America great again.

Pippa Norman of the Globe and Mail has a nice feature on the rebirth of Davie Shipbuilding as a player in Arctic sovereignty. And Canada will be building drones for Ukraine.

Canada has signed a deal to supply Germany with LNG from the B.C. coast. And Canada wants to boost trade with China by 50 per cent.

Former Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault announced his retirement as an MP this week. In celebration, the Western Standard expanded its lineup of Guilbeault jumpsuit swag.

Mildred Valley Thornton (1890-1967)

Prairie Grain Elevators and Rainbows, c. 1931

Born in Ontario in 1890, Mildred Valley Thornton trained at Olivet College and the Art Institute of Chicago before settling in Regina. Beginning in 1928, she devoted herself to portraiture of First Nations peoples, eventually amassing nearly 300 portraits painted with characteristic speed, most completed in under an hour. She also published Indian Lives and Legends in 1966 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. A significant figure in Canadian art, her work remains under-recognized.

Get weekly, no-fluff insights on building a more prosperous Canada. Tap “Subscribe” now and be first in line for next week’s brief. Then forward this email to one friend who cares as much as you do—let’s build together.

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There is a passage in Walter Bagehot’s essential 1867 book The English Constitution where he distinguishes between the “dignified” and the “efficient” parts of a constitutional order. The efficient parts do the actual work: Parliament, cabinet, the machinery of public administration. The dignified parts, the Crown above all, exist to inspire loyalty, to focus public reverence, to hold the emotional architecture of the nation together while the efficient parts get on with the frequently messy business of governing. Bagehot’s point is that a healthy polity needs both, where the dignified institutions act as a kind of psychic buffer, absorbing the friction that partisan politics generates while keeping the public broadly attached to the system as a whole.

Canada has always been a country thin on the ground when it comes to dignified institutions. The Crown, already one step removed from true royalty as represented by the Governor General, has for decades been treated by Liberal governments with a growing mix of negligence and condescension. The RCMP has been misused for years, deployed as a political instrument when convenient, starved of resources and leadership when not. The CBC has been allowed to drift into irrelevance and dependency in equal measure, its mandate wildly unfocused and its funding never quite sufficient to do the core job it has theoretically been assigned..

And then there is 24 Sussex Drive, the prime minister’s official residence, which has sat empty and deteriorating since 2015, its electrical systems a declared fire hazard, its plumbing failing on a regular basis, mould and asbestos throughout, costing taxpayers millions in basic upkeep while the government ran out the clock on successive promises of renovation.

The heritage community has a term for what happens when a building is allowed to decay through inaction rather than intent. They call it demolition by neglect. As a description of Liberal stewardship of our national symbolic heritage, it is hard to improve on. Justin Trudeau’s decision to order the Canadian flag to fly at half staff over federal buildings for the better part of a year — an act of national vandalism dressed up as mourning — remains only the most egregious single episode of this broad-based pattern.

Which brings us to the Snowbirds.

Last week, Defence Minister David McGuinty announced that Canada’s iconic 431 Air Demonstration Squadron will be grounded following the 2026 flying season until new aircraft arrive, with no firm timeline for when that might be. The CT-114 Tutor jets, which have been in RCAF inventory since 1963 and have served as the Snowbirds’ platform since 1971, will retire three years earlier than anticipated. The replacement, the government says, will be the Swiss-made CT-157 Siskin II, with new aircraft expected to become operational “sometime in the early 2030s.”

When it comes to the federal government, “the early 2030s” is basically a shrug emoji, a phrase that functions not as a firm commitment, but as an admission that there isn’t one. We are talking, at minimum, about a gap of six to eight years, but more than likely a full decade or more, during which the skies above the Peace Tower will be quiet on Canada Day, during which airshows from Abbotsford to Halifax will have to make do with foreign performers, during which one of the most effective recruitment tools the Canadian Armed Forces possesses will simply cease to exist. But more than anything, it is another thread snipped out from the already threadbare fabric that links Canadians to one another and to the country they share. In their time, the Snowbirds have performed over 2,700 air displays for more than 140 million people. That is the dignified part of the constitution doing its job.

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There is also the matter of the planes themselves. The controversy over the choice of replacement aircraft has been somewhat lost in the shuffle of the announcement, but it deserves attention. The CT-157 Siskin II is a turboprop trainer, not a jet. “It wouldn’t have been our first choice,” said Dan Dempsey, secretary of the Snowbirds Alumni Association and former commanding officer of the performance fleet. “As a G7 nation, all the other G7 nations that are flying aerobatic teams are flying jet aircraft. Dempsey’s preferred solution would have been to reduce the number of aging jets in service until 2030 to keep the team flying and the pilots rehearsed. But it was apparently not seriously considered.

Mark Carney’s Liberals have shown occasional signs of understanding that neglect is just demolition by other means. The injection of $755 million into national sports organizations in the recent spending update was a tacit acknowledgement that twenty years of stagnant funding had led directly to the disappointments of Milan-Cortina. But there is precious little sign of a more general appreciation that Canada’s symbolic heritage isn’t self-sustaining, that it requires a strategic understanding of what parts need shoring up, which elements need a bit of extra love and attention.

Carney’s appointment of Louise Arbour as Canada’s next Governor General is instructive here. Arbour is, by any measure, a distinguished Canadian. She is also a choice so predictable, so perfectly calibrated to the ideals of the Laurentian professional class, that it could have been generated by a chatbot trained exclusively on Globe and Mail op-ed pages. There was clearly no serious canvassing of this vast country of 40 million, no clear-eyed examination of what that office could mean to Canadians under fifty, or who live outside the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto corridor.

In trying to explain why the Snowbirds were being grounded, a clearly unhappy Carney came as close as he ever will to throwing his predecessor under the bus. And it is to his credit that he insisted McGuinty travel to Saskatchewan to make the announcement in person.

But it is hard not to wonder, in the end, whether things would look different for the Snowbirds, and for the country, if Dan Dempsey were a former Supreme Court Justice, or if 431 Squadron were based at CFB Bagotville rather than 15 Wing Moose Jaw.

— Andrew Potter

• Last chance to see the Snowbirds: Here is their 2026 schedule.

This week in Building Canada

May 23: The North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) were officially created and established in Canadian law on this day in 1873.

May 24: Canadian women were given the right to vote in federal elections on this day in 1918.

May 25: The Royal Society of Canada was founded on this day in 1882.

May 27: Under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Bank of Canada is nationalized on this day in 1938. It becomes a federal Crown corporation, as it remains today.

May 29: On this day in 1999, Julie Payette became the first Canadian to board the International Space Station as part of STS-96, the first shuttle docking of the ISS.

One year with the Snowbirds

A 2002 documentary by Mark Miller

New Memo: The AI Literacy Dividend

This week we sent the Standing Committee on Finance another pre-budget submission - this one on closing Canada’s AI adoption gap:

• A Canadian AI Subscription Deduction that would give individuals a 100% tax deduction on up to $3,000/year for AI subscriptions, tools, and training.

• A tiered AI Productivity Super-Deduction for businesses including 400% for CCPCs on up to $500K, and 200% for larger firms on up to $5M. The goal is to make the adoption decision a no-brainer.

• And a built-in sunset clause that tapers both deductions once Canada cracks the OECD top three for business AI adoption.

Check it out! Canadian businesses currently report AI adoption at 12.2%, against an OECD average of 20.2%. We think the tax code is the right lever to close that gap.

Brian Jungen (1970-)

Brian Jungen was born on April 29, 1970, in Fort St. John, British Columbia. Of mixed Dane-Zaa First Nations and Swiss ancestry, he studied at Emily Carr College of Art and Design before emerging as one of the most internationally recognized Canadian artists of his generation.

Jungen’s breakthrough came with his Prototypes for New Understanding series (photo above), in which he disassembled Nike Air Jordan sneakers and reassembled them into objects resembling Northwest Coast First Nations ceremonial masks. The work is deceptively simple in concept, forcing a collision between global consumer culture and Indigenous artistic tradition. He extended this method across a wide range of materials: sports uniforms, plastic furniture, and other mass-produced goods were transformed into whale skeletons, totem-like forms, and large-scale installations.

Jungen won the inaugural Sobey Art Award in 2002 and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 2010, and was awarded the 2025 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts, one of Canada’s highest honours in the arts. He currently lives in a cabin at Moberly Lake in northern British Columbia, where he has turned toward public art and a new practice making arrows in wood and carbon fibre, which he fires into objects as both sculpture and performance.

What it will take to Build in Canada

Toronto Tech Week is upon us, and we’re looking forward to seeing thousands of you at events throughout the week!

In addition to our CEO, Lucy Hargreaves, speaking at Homecoming, we’re hosting our own event with Ada, What it will take to Build in Canada.

Tickets are officially sold out, but you can still tune into the event at 8pm ET on our X and YouTube.

What else we’ve been reading

• De Havilland Canada broke ground on its new aircraft manufacturing facility outside Calgary last week. Marconi is back in Montreal as a military communications firm. And RIP Robert K. Irving, the co-CEO of J.D. Irving Ltd.

• A new Canadian army division will be centred on armoured vehicles, mobile artillery and drone warfare. But meanwhile, the military is asking military personnel to return some field gear to address “critical equipment shortages”.

• A panel appointed by the government of Newfoundland and Labrador has poured cold water on the deal that had been negotiated with Quebec to develop Churchill Falls.

• The celebrations after the Canadiens won game seven of their quarter final series against Buffalo caused a small earthquake in Montreal, according to a McGill seismologist.

• Canada’s History magazine (formerly known as The Beaver) has an in-depth feature on the history of the canoe, with big shoutouts to the Canoe Museum in Peterborough.

Get weekly, no-fluff insights on building a more prosperous Canada. Tap “Subscribe” now and be first in line for next week’s brief. Then forward this email to one friend who cares as much as you do—let’s build together.

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Canadian Kayfabe

In professional wrestling, “kayfabe” refers to the practice of presenting scripted storylines as real — maintaining the fiction that the feuds are genuine, the outcomes uncertain, the stakes authentic. The audience knows, on some level, that it’s performance. But the performance has to be credible enough that everyone can allow themselves to pretend otherwise.

As cynical as this sounds, it might be a useful frame for thinking about what happened in Calgary on Friday.

Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed what they are calling an Implementation Agreement: Ottawa will fast-track a new one-million-barrel-a-day pipeline to the West Coast, designated as a project of national interest by October 1, with construction approval targeted for September 2027. In exchange, Alberta commits to a rising industrial carbon price — $115 per tonne in 2030, $130 by 2035, $140 by 2040 — plus investment in carbon capture and storage through the Pathways Alliance.

The agreement is real in the sense that it exists, has been signed, and contains specific dates and numbers. Whether it represents a genuine commitment by either party to achieve its stated goals is a different question. The incentive structure on both sides suggests the worrisome answer might be no.

Let’s start with Carney. He needs this deal for two reasons that have nothing to do with oil actually getting to the coast. First, he needs to neutralize Alberta separatism, which has gone from a fringe position to a live political threat. Second, he needs to demonstrate that a Liberal government can be pro-energy while also keeping faith with the pro-climate values that animated the party under Justin Trudeau, as well as Carney’s own pre-politics worldview.

There was always a certain elegance in the way the original MOU linked a pipeline with carbon pricing. In Ottawa’s framing: no carbon price, no pipeline. In Alberta’s framing: no pipeline, no carbon price. The two conditions locked together like a handshake, suggesting that both sides had finally found a structure that aligned their respective incentives toward the same goal.

But here’s the thing: if the pipeline never gets built, whether stalled by British Columbia, by Indigenous rights litigation, by the courts, or by the absence of a private proponent willing to underwrite the risk, Carney still wins. He can say he tried his best to bring Alberta’s energy to market with the powers the constitution gives him. He also gets to keep his left flank happy, which may not be the coalition that elected him, but which remains a sizeable part of his caucus and his cabinet. The deal gives him political cover in both directions at once.

As for Smith, she has secured a carbon price that is materially weaker than what independent analysts say Canada needs to meet its targets. The Canadian Climate Institute, which published an assessment of the original MOU in February, concluded that even a $130 per tonne credit price would not be sufficient to return Canada to a trajectory consistent with net zero by 2050. Their lead researcher noted pointedly that if the MOU is the starting point of the negotiation, and it is already weak on climate policy, it will only get weaker. Alberta’s industry estimates the deal saves producers roughly $250 billion by 2050 compared to what the federal government’s previous targets required.

That is a very substantial win for Smith, achieved without building a single kilometre of pipeline. And if the pipeline never gets built, Smith wins even bigger. She gets to tell Albertans that she made a good-faith deal and was betrayed, yet again, by a Liberal government in Ottawa that never really meant it, or a federal structure that makes it impossible. That is precisely the narrative that drives separatist sentiment, and it is one she can deploy at a moment of her choosing.

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This is the game theory of what we might call Mutually Assured Kayfabe: Carney and Smith have designed an arrangement in which they each benefit from either outcome. If the pipeline gets built, both claim credit. If it doesn’t, each has a pre-scripted explanation that serves their political interests.

In a well-functioning political system, that kind of symmetrical heads-I-win, tails-you-lose incentive structure shouldn’t be available. Ideally, the incentives should do the opposite, driving opposing sides to an agreement neither side can afford to see fail.

What’s missing from Friday’s deal (conspicuously so, in Heather Exner-Pirot’s careful read) is the carbon credit price floor that was supposed to accompany the headline carbon benchmarks. It “will be initiated” in 2030, according to the agreement. What it will actually be set at remains unannounced. This is not a minor detail. It is precisely the mechanism through which the headline numbers translate, or don’t, into real investment incentives for emissions reduction. Its absence suggests it is still being negotiated, or that the number was too controversial to attach to a Friday afternoon announcement.

Canada has a growing tradition of landmark energy agreements: frameworks, MOUs, memoranda of intent, agreements in principle. What it has a much weaker tradition of is seeing them through, with one side or the other giving in at the slightest shift in political winds. The standard interpretation of all this is that Canada has a problem with execution.

But what if the real problem is not with governments being able to get things done, it is about them wanting to? The dark question facing Canadians about Friday’s deal isn’t whether this framework can lead to a pipeline. It is whether either party actually needs, or even wants, it to succeed.

— Andrew Potter

Tulip Fest!

The Canadian Tulip Festival traces its origins to World War II, when the Dutch royal family found refuge in Canada, and Princess Margriet was born in Ottawa. In gratitude, the Netherlands gifted 100,000 tulip bulbs to Canada in 1945, sparking a tradition that continues to this day as a symbol of peace and international friendship.

The festival itself was founded in 1953 by world-renowned photographer Malak Karsh and has grown into the world's largest tulip festival. This year it runs from May 8 to 18, 2026, at Commissioners Park in Ottawa, an 11-day celebration now in its 74th edition. Princess Margriet was even on hand last week to kick things off.

Emily Carr (1871–1945)

Born in Victoria, Emily Carr trained in San Francisco, London, and Paris before returning to paint the landscapes and Indigenous cultures of Canada’s Pacific Northwest. Largely ignored for decades, she gained recognition in 1927 when her work was exhibited alongside the Group of Seven at the National Gallery of Canada, cementing her place in the Canadian modernist tradition.

Carr’s mature work is defined by two great preoccupations: the spiritual vitality of the West Coast forest, rendered through swirling, energetic brushwork that transforms trees and sky into living forces; and the totem poles and villages of First Nations peoples, documented with a reverence few non-Indigenous artists of her era matched. She remains one of the foundational figures in Canadian art.

This week in Building Canada

May 16: The first successful hand transplant was performed by a team at the Toronto General Hospital on this day in 2002

May 19: James Gosling, creator of the Java programming language, was born in 1955.

May 20: The first referendum on Quebec sovereignty took place on this day in 1980, with the “No” side winning with almost 60 per cent of the vote.

May 21: On this day in 2015, Shopify completed its IPO on the TSX and NYSE — valuing the Ottawa-born e-commerce platform at $1.27 billion and heralding a new era of Canadian tech.

May 22: On this day in 1832, the first steamboat transited the newly opened Rideau Canal from Kingston to Bytown, inaugurating a commercial waterway that served the Ottawa Valley for a century.

Building Canada’s Entrepreneurial Economy

Canada's entrepreneurial economy is in serious decline. More businesses are closing than opening, founder emigration is accelerating, and 2025 marked the worst year for domestic VC fundraising since 2016.

In early May, Brice Scheschuk submitted a briefing to the House Finance Committee as part of pre-budget consultations for the 2026 federal budget, with suggestions for how to fix this problem. He proposes four structural fixes: shut down the sprawling federal innovation investing complex; mandate the Maple 8 pension funds to deploy $10B/year into Canadian venture for 20 years; eliminate capital gains tax on early-stage business investments and offset the cost by taxing primary residence gains above $750K for the wealthiest Canadians; and expand the Canada Small Business Financing Program into a genuine SBA equivalent with larger loan sizes and no forced personal guarantees.

Build Canada published Scheschuk’s briefing this week as part of our memo series, hoping to contribute to the broader public conversation on how Canada can compete for founders, investors, and capital.

Making the case for a United Canada

This past Monday, we were in Calgary with former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, Calgary Confederation MP Corey Hogan, and The Line co-founder Jen Gerson to talk Canadian unity, the Alberta separatism movement, and what we can do as a nation to promote Albertan prosperity.

Watch our full discussion here:

Build Canada + Toronto Tech Week

What it will take to Build in Canada

On May 26, we’ll be at ada’s HQ to discuss what it will take for Canadian companies to stay one step ahead & maintain its global leadership in the AI industry.. The event is currently sold out, but keep an eye on the official Luma page for a potential waitlist or last second spot openings.

Toronto Tech Week Homecoming

Join our CEO Lucy Hargreaves, and titans of the Toronto tech sphere from Shopify, Neo Financial, Cohere, Uber, Google, and more at HISTORY for Toronto Tech Week’s Homecoming. Visit the official Luma page to sign up. Registration is extremely limited.

What else we’ve been reading

• MDA Space has officially opened a new 185,000-square-foot satellite manufacturing facility in Montreal. And in Ottawa last week, the crew of Artemis II were greeted like returning heroes.

• A bi-annual survey of investor sentiment across global markets ranked Canada as the country seen as most attractive to investment, ahead of Germany and the United States. But the head of TC Energy says Mexico is eating our lunch on pipelines.

• There is a remarkable partisan age gap in Canada, with under 35s leaning Conservative and Boomers tilting strongly Liberal. Could it have anything to do with the bleak future the youth seem to be facing?

• In Montreal, the city’s strippers are threatening to walk out during the F1 race weekend. And former Canadiens defenceman P.K. Subban has fulfilled his $10 million commitment to the Montreal Children’s Hospital.

Get weekly, no-fluff insights on building a more prosperous Canada. Tap “Subscribe” now and be first in line for next week’s brief. Then forward this email to one friend who cares as much as you do—let’s build together.

Louise Arbour, a retired justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, will be Canada’s 31st Governor-General, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Tuesday. Arbour, who is 79, will be installed as GG in early June, succeeding Mary Simon.

Can Ottawa speed up?

The journalist Matt Gurney took to social media this week to give an account of learning to ski that nicely captures our current policy moment. Gurney, a reluctant late-adopter on the slopes, found himself one afternoon going faster than he had ever gone. He was thrilled, genuinely proud, and entirely convinced he was finally getting it. Then the other skiers blew past him, with some of them appearing to be smiling encouragingly as they whizzed by. But it was hard to see them clearly because he was still very, very slow.

Gurney meant it as a metaphor for Ottawa’s relationship with project approvals, and it landed, because what this week made painfully clear is that Canada is operating on two entirely different clocks simultaneously. There is the clock of government, and the clock of the world, and the gap between them is so deeply structural it is not clear how they can be brought into sync.

The world’s clock does not run at the speed of Canada’s consultative-legislative timelines. At the Public Policy Forum’s annual dinner in Toronto this week, International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol warned dinner guests that Canada had been too slow, that it had a golden opportunity, and that the cost of missing this train would be “incredible.” He was not speaking hypothetically. Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked off roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies since the American and Israeli bombing campaign against Iran began in February, prompting a global reckoning on energy policy. The window for Canada to become a major energy exporter to anxious allies is open, but it will not stay open forever.

Against that backdrop, the chorus of frustration from industry this week was striking. Cenovus CEO Jon McKenzie used four minutes of an earnings call to deliver what amounted to an indictment: Canadian policies had created a regulatory and investment environment “uncompetitive with the rest of the world,” ceding high-paying jobs, taxes, and royalties to countries like Russia, Iran, and Iraq. The Oil Sands Alliance published a statement calling progress on the federal-Alberta energy MOU too slow. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, standing in Carney’s office on Friday, told the Prime Minister directly: Alberta was “getting a bit impatient.“

Even Martha Hall Findlay, a former Liberal leadership candidate who helped found the Oil Sands Pathways Alliance, published a piece in the Globe this week calling for Canada to abandon its carbon capture and storage ambitions and redirect those billions into pipelines and export infrastructure. Her piece was not an exercise in climate denial, it was an argument about opportunity cost. Canada has limited capital, she wrote, and this is not the moment to spend it on projects with negligible global impact when the world is clamouring for what we actually have.

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But this speed disconnect is only part of the story. Another concern, which this week also illuminated, is not just about the pace of government, it is about its method.

Honda’s $15-billion EV complex in Alliston, Ontario, moved this week from a temporary pause to what looks increasingly like an indefinite halt. The project was announced in 2024 with great fanfare by Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford, billed as the largest single private-sector investment in Ontario history, and underpinned by billions in government subsidies. The government had picked its winner. The winner has changed its mind.

This is what picking winners looks like at scale. The Honda collapse is not an isolated data point; the entire EV supply chain strategy proudly assembled under the Trudeau government rested on a set of assumptions about market direction that have since been proven wrong, at significant cost to the public. But the problem was not just the assumptions; it was the model: highly centralized, heavily subsidized, driven from the top down, with the federal government effectively deciding which industries and companies would define Canada’s economic future.

That concern was echoed at the PPF dinner from an unlikely source. John Knubley, a former deputy minister at ISED and one of the evening’s honorees, used his acceptance speech to deliver a pointed warning. He had spent three decades in the public service believing he had the answers, he said, something he now saw as “intolerable.” Then he looked at what was happening in Ottawa today and said he was worried about the top-down policymaking happening in the Ottawa bubble. It was a striking thing to say at a gala celebrating the public service.

To date, the Carney government’s industrial strategy has copied the same basic architecture as Trudeau’s: Ottawa identifies priorities, deploys capital to shape outcomes, then measures success by the number of announcements. The risk is that what looks like a win in 2024 looks like a huge liability by 2026.

Which brings us to Friday. After a week of industry complaints, pressure from Alberta, and a global energy market screaming for Canadian supply, the Carney government released two discussion papers proposing changes to the federal regulatory framework, including one genuinely significant idea: letting cabinet green-light major projects before technical assessments are completed, with expert review running in parallel rather than sequentially. That is the structural change industry has been begging for, and it deserves acknowledgment. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce welcomed it, while carefully noting that investor confidence remains elusive.

One of the deep sources of the disconnect between government and industry is that under Justin Trudeau, “never” had effectively become the default timeline for major projects in Canadian bureaucratic culture. Once you internalize the assumption that nothing will ever get built, any motion at all looks like progress. And once you’ve decided that picking winners is what governments do, every funding announcement feels like success.

The gap between Ottawa’s clock and the world’s clock is not new. What is new is the unacceptable cost of failing to close it, which the Carney government seems to be finally getting its head around. What remains is the growing evidence that a faster version of the same approach will almost certainly just make things worse.

— Andrew Potter

This week in Building Canada

May 9: Folk musician Gordon Lightfoot was bon on this day in 1938.

May 12: On this day in 1870, the Manitoba Act created Canada's fifth province, the first step in governing the vast territory known as Rupert’s Land transferred from the Hudson's Bay Company.

May 13. Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to command the International Space Station, returned to Earth on this day in 2013 after five months in space.

May 14: On this day in 1946, Parliament passed the Canadian Citizenship Act, establishing for the first time that Canadians were citizens of Canada first — not British subjects who happened to live here. It was a quiet but decisive act of nation-building.

May 15: On this day in 1919, the Winnipeg General Strike began, the largest strike in Canadian history.

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New Memo: Reward Risk and Reinvestment

Last week we sent the Standing Committee on Finance a pre-budget submission with two tax reforms we think could meaningfully shift Canada’s productivity trajectory:

• A serious overhaul of the LCGE to keep founders building here instead of reincorporating in Delaware

• And adopt a distributed profits taxation that would stop punishing the companies actually reinvesting in themselves.

Check it out here on our recently revamped website.

Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–1960)

Paul-Émile Borduas was born in Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, the son of a carpenter, and trained as a church decorator under Ozias Leduc before studying in Paris in the early 1930s. He returned to teach at the École du meuble in Montreal — a respectable, if modest, career trajectory. Then, in 1948, he blew it up.

That year, Borduas co-authored Refus global, one of the most incendiary documents in Canadian cultural history. Signed by fifteen artists and intellectuals, it was a full-spectrum rejection of the Catholic Church’s grip on Quebec society — its conservatism, its authoritarianism, its stranglehold on culture and conscience. The manifesto cost Borduas his teaching position almost immediately. He spent the rest of his life in relative poverty, moving first to New York and then to Paris, where he died.

What makes Borduas more than a martyr to a cause is the paintings. As founder of Les Automatistes, he developed a practice rooted in surrealist automatism — spontaneous, gestural works in which pure creative instinct bypasses rational control. Leeward of the Island (1947), swirling and dreamlike, captures the movement at its most charged. His late masterpiece 3 + 4 + 1 (1956, above) is a spare arrangement of black and white, and shows how far he had travelled toward something harder and more classical.

Refus global helped crack open modern Quebec. The church has faded in importance, but his paintings remain as urgent and relevant as ever.

Events

The Case for a United Canada

We’ve hit capacity for Monday’s The Case for a United Canada. 🇨🇦

We look forward to joining Hon. Jason Kenney, MP Corey Hogan, and an audience of over 500 of you at the University of Calgary for an honest discussion moderated by Jen Gerson on what it will require to build a stronger nation.

Didn’t grab tickets in time? You can still tune into the event at 6pm MT on our X and YouTube.

Build Canada CEO Lucy Hargreaves was on a panel at the Canada Strong and Free conference in Ottawa this week, discussing the question: after a decade of decline, delay, and deferral, how do we get back to building? The conversation drew on government, industry, builder, and labour expertise to lay out the foundations any serious builder economy requires.

What else we’ve been reading

• Mark Carney says his government is getting ready to deal with 24 Sussex. And after years of delay and political interference, they finally broke ground on the Afghanistan war memorial in Ottawa.

• Summer job? What summer job? The job market for youth is looking worse and worse.

• The proposed design for the new House of Commons will feature a mix of desks for the front-benchers and benches with tray tables for those in the back.

• According to a new poll from Nanos, support for Canada spending 2 per cent of GDP or higher on national defence continues to climb. And Phil Lagasse has a long but useful analysis of the Defence Investment Act on his substack.

• Finally, this may be too Canadian even for us: The Tragically Hip have joined forces with Kawartha Dairy to bring you The Tragically Chip, an ice cream that is “maple whisky flavoured, with dark chocolatey chunks and a black cherry ripple, made right in Bobcaygeon, and a portion of proceeds supports @BreakfastCanada.”

Get weekly, no-fluff insights on building a more prosperous Canada. Tap “Subscribe” now and be first in line for next week’s brief. Then forward this email to one friend who cares as much as you do—let’s build together.

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The Carney government’s Spring Economic Update arrived on Tuesday flanked by a cluster of announcements that added up to something like a governing philosophy: when the Canadian economy faces a structural problem, the answer is to build an institution to address it.

This is not a new; it has been pretty much the governing philosophy of this Liberal government since 2015. And the Spring Economic Update is pretty much the kind of document Justin Trudeau could have tabled. From the increasingly vapid sloganeering (”Canada Strong for All”) to the sector strategies for every industry under the sun to the new institutions stacked on top of old ones to the transparently bogus smiley-face presentation of the government’s debt situation, it’s time to face the facts. Justin Trudeau is gone, but his spirit haunts us still.

The headline item was the Canada Strong Fund, billed as Canada’s first sovereign wealth fund. Capitalized at $25 billion and equipped with a retail investment product so that ordinary Canadians can “share in the returns,” it is designed to invest in strategic projects across energy, critical minerals, agriculture, and infrastructure. The model, Carney suggested while standing in front of some steam locomotives at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, is Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global.

The Canada Strong Fund is not that. Norway’s fund is financed by decades of oil surpluses; Canada’s will be financed by borrowing, against a federal debt now exceeding $1.2 trillion and a projected deficit of $66.9 billion this year. Norway’s fund deploys capital abroad as a structural safeguard against political horse-trading; Canada’s will deploy capital domestically, into projects the government has already decided are strategically important. What Norway built to prevent is precisely what the Canada Strong Fund is designed to do.

Writing in the Globe, Andrew Coyne noted that the government’s own update inadvertently exposed the problem: in the course of explaining why the new fund is needed, the SEU lists all the institutions already doing the same work — the Canada Infrastructure Bank, Export Development Canada, the Business Development Bank, the Canada Growth Fund, the Canada Indigenous Loan Guarantee Corporation. These, the government assures us, are “already playing a critical role.” The Canada Strong Fund will “complement these efforts.” But if these institutions are already doing the job, what remains for the new Fund?

The deeper problem is what the SEU doesn’t address. Canada’s GDP per capita has slipped to 38th globally. Business fixed investment declined for the second straight year in 2025. The government’s own long-term projection is for inflation-adjusted growth averaging 1.7 per cent — half the rate of the 1970s and 80s, a third of the postwar decades. The “whole of government competition plan” unveiled in the update amounts, as Coyne puts it, to a watery promise to limit “the potential negative impacts on competition that can, often inadvertently, stem from government policies.” This is pure Trudeaunomics.

On the same day the SEU landed, the Financial Times published a piece citing Canadian leaders from the forestry, oil and gas, and automotive industries lamenting that regulatory reform, supposedly central to the Carney agenda, is floundering. Even Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem, in an interview this week, identified regulatory approval timelines as the primary barrier to foreign investment. “These regulatory approvals, they are in place for well-intended reasons,” Macklem said, “but they’re having unintended consequences.” He offered a polite verdict on the SEU’s direction (”encouraging”) before adding: “a lot of it is about execution.” From one central banker to a former central banker, that’s a warning dressed in diplomacy.

Not everything this week warrants the same skepticism. The selection of Canada to host the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank — a new multilateral institution providing low-cost financing for NATO defence projects — is a genuine strategic win. All of Canada’s Big Six banks have signed on alongside major international players including JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank. If it comes together, it could put Canada at the centre of a significant reorganization of Western defence finance.

The outstanding question is where it will be headquartered. Four cities are competing: Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. The smart money points to Montreal, which is, of course, the only Canadian city the federal Liberals seem to think exists when distributing marquee institutions. Toronto’s financial depth, Vancouver’s Pacific positioning, and Ottawa’s proximity to national security infrastructure will all be duly weighed before the government presents us with the decision it has clearly already made.

Mark Carney is a serious person, and his diagnosis of what ails Canada is largely correct: over-reliant on the United States, under-invested in productive capacity, running out of time to address a productivity crisis that has been building for a quarter century. The problem is not the diagnosis. It is that his prescriptions keep arriving in the same institutional form that his predecessor reached for, and which only made the problems worse.

The regulatory environment that is deterring private investment is not going to be fixed by the Canada Strong Fund. The productivity gap is not going to be closed by the Defence Investment Agency. The drift toward managed decline that Carney himself identified as a national crisis is not going to be reversed by complementing the Canada Infrastructure Bank with yet another arms-length institution.

Carney ran as the man who understood the crisis facing Canada. The Spring Economic Update suggests he remains captive to the assumptions that produced it.

Kazuo Nakamura (1926–2002)

Kazuo Nakamura was born in Vancouver in 1926, the son of Japanese immigrants. During the Second World War, he was interned as an “enemy alien” — one of some 22,000 Japanese Canadians forcibly displaced by the federal government. He resettled in Toronto, studied at Central Technical School, and in 1953 became a founding member of Painters Eleven, the group that introduced abstract art to English Canada.

What set Nakamura apart from his fellow Painters Eleven members was less technique than philosophy. Where others worked in the expressionist tradition, he was absorbed by the relationship between art and science. He read science journals seriously and came to believe the two disciplines were engaged in the same project. “I think there’s a sort of fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature,” he said in 1956. “In a sense, scientists and artists are doing the same thing.”

That conviction shaped everything he made. His “inner structure” paintings of the 1950s used layered geometric forms to evoke the hidden architecture of the natural world. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, he moved toward grid paintings incorporating the Fibonacci sequence, laboriously inscribed works that amounted to a search for ultimate order in apparent chaos.

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This Week in Building Canada

May 2: On this day in 1670, the Hudson's Bay Company was incorporated by Royal Charter of King Charles II, launching North America's oldest corporation and one of the world's great trading enterprises. Also on this day in 1939, the National Film Board was created.

May 3: The act to create the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was introduced on this day in 1873.

May 4: The Royal Canadian Navy was founded on this day in 1910.

May 5: On this day in 1973, CN Tower construction officially commenced in Toronto, a 40-month project that produced the world's tallest free-standing structure.

May 6: On this day in 1984, the first section of the Coquihalla Highway in BC was approved for funding, the the most challenging highway construction project in Canadian history.

Also in 1931, actor William Shatner was born in Montreal. Here he is singing O Canada for the NFB:

Spring Economic Update

"This Spring Economic Update points in the right direction, but Canada cannot incrementalize its way out of a productivity crisis. There is real progress here – on procurement, SR&ED, and the discipline of cutting consulting spend. This is the warm-up. Budget 2026 will be the true test of whether this government, with a new majority, can boldly execute the vision needed to build a 21st century innovation economy."
— Lucy Hargreaves, Co-Founder and CEO, Build Canada

On Tuesday, Lucy attended the Spring Economic Statement press release. The update was packed with financial data, policy announcements, and fiscal projections, and our objective, as always, is to present this information through a builder’s lens.

Read our full statement here, and see our scorecard below.

EVENTS

The Case for a United Canada

Calgary is showing up. The highly anticipated event has reached full capacity but do not stress. We have a waitlist & overflow room available. Grab tickets while you still can here. 🇨🇦

On May 11, join Hon. Jason Kenney, MP Corey Hogan, and an audience of 500 others at the University of Calgary for an honest discussion moderated by Jen Gerson on what it will require to build a stronger nation.

What it will take to Build in Canada

Toronto Tech Week is right around the corner, and Build Canada and Ada CX are teaming up to host a killer mixer. 🇨🇦 On May 26, join us for an evening of panel discussion with Lucy Hargreaves and Mike Murchison as we outline what it will take to make Canada an AI powerhouse. The event is near capacity. Get your tickets here.

What else we’ve been reading

• Be Giant has a long profile of Eliot Pence, the founder and CEO of Dominion Dynamics who is “turning Canada’s defence procurement upside down”

• After twenty years of underfunding, Ottawa is finally putting real money back into amateur sport. Own The Podium!

• Hockey fans in Buffalo finished O Canada after the singer’s microphone malfunctioned, validating the widely held view that Buffalo is a colony of Toronto.

• The National Post published a feature called “Lost Decade” that included thirteen charts showing how much Canada suffered economically during the Trudeau years.

• Hydro-Quebec has taken the lightning bolt out of its logo so they don’t jinks the Habs in their series against the Tampa Bay Lightning

• Maggie Helwig has won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize in Political Writing for her book Encampment, an in-depth look at the lives of homeless people in Toronto.

Get weekly, no-fluff insights on building a more prosperous Canada. Tap “Subscribe” now and be first in line for next week’s brief. Then forward this email to one friend who cares as much as you do—let’s build together.

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