Today I’ve chosen to write again about Canada, my home. We have an election coming up on April 28th and the stakes could not be higher so it’s all I’m really thinking about now. And while this piece is Canadian focused, I believe the lessons and recommendations I make for government and business leaders will resonate with our international readership. Enjoy.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has a new rallying cry: that Canada should be the richest country in the world. He recently tweeted a striking map from the Mining Association of Canada, showcasing our vast reserves of critical minerals, oil and natural gas, as evidence of our untapped potential as a country.
To be clear, Canada won’t become the world’s richest country by total gross domestic product anytime this century — if ever. With just over 40-million people, the math doesn’t work. What we could become is the wealthiest in terms of per capita GDP. While GDP per capita isn’t the only measure of prosperity, it remains a key one. So let’s aim for the top spot. How do we do it?
Canada’s economic model has long been underpinned by a simple formula: explore, extract, export. We discover untapped reserves of oil, gas or minerals, extract them using the latest technology and export them to the world.
Canada has historically benefited from foreign direct investment and has grown through global trade. This system worked well, underwriting the prosperity Canadians enjoy today. But the industrial economy of the 20th century is giving way to an innovation economy in the 21st.
If we want to guarantee our prosperity, security and way of life for future generations, we need to build on our expertise in the resource development industries to become a leader in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, blockchain and other industries that are shaping the future.
As it happens, resource wealth is not even a precondition for prosperity. Switzerland, Singapore, Ireland and the Netherlands are not richer per capita than Canada because they extract more from the ground. Even in the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, extractive industries represent a small share of GDP. Knowledge industries like finance, health care and technology far outweigh it.
Yet Canada is in a unique and enviable position. We are sitting on an underground reservoir of oil and other minerals, but an even deeper well of human capital. Resources are, by definition, finite. But human ingenuity is boundless, and talent is not our challenge.
For example, today’s artificial intelligence breakthroughs are built on machine learning algorithms pioneered at Canadian universities. Our researchers have played leading roles not just in artificial intelligence but in biotechnology, quantum computing, nuclear science, robotics and blockchain technologies.
Yet our venture capital industry
is just five per cent the size of the U.S. We invest only 57 cents on the dollar in capital spending compared to our neighbours to the south. New business formation has flat-lined. GDP per capita has barely budged in a decade.
How can we fix this? Here are some suggestions for our next prime minister.
First, Canada needs a national innovation strategy to compete in the industries of the future. The House of Commons standing committee on industry and technology has already recommended a national blockchain strategy, with regulatory clarity and consumer protections. The next government should adopt such measures quickly, and cast the net wider to include other technologies.
Second, Canada should take what has worked in resource industries and apply them more broadly in the economy. For example, flow-through shares helped fuel growth in mining, oil and gas, and renewables by allowing investors to offset contributions against taxable income.
Between 2008 and 2012, Canadian companies
raised $2.5 billion through flow-through shares. A similar mechanism could bridge Canada’s funding gap in AI, biotech and blockchain, where early stage exploration capital is just as critical as in mining exploration.
Third, if industrial policy is table stakes in the global economy, we should also support AI, blockchain and any other area where our global peers are making similar investments.
The Chinese government is guarding AI innovator DeepSeek’s team and technology like a state secret. The U.S. government has created an AI and crypto czar, is a model user of blockchain technology and has put limits on what chip-makers can sell to China. Caught in the middle, Canada must closely guard and commercialize our intellectual property and any new technology that emerges here, particularly from publicly funded university research.
Explore, extract and export — yes! But explore the best ideas, extract from the latest technologies and export the best finished products — software, hardware, medicine and more — which will transform industries and usher in a new age of human progress.
The wealthiest and strongest nations aren’t those that simply extract value. They are the ones that create it, defend it, monetize it and export it. Let’s ensure Canada continues to be one of them.
March 27, 2025
