So it goes.
Seventy per cent of Canada’s highest-potential startups launched in 2024 left the country. Not because their founders stopped loving maple syrup or hockey or the particular brand of apologetic politeness that makes Canadians so internationally beloved. They left because the math told them to. And math, unlike politicians, does not lie.
Here is a nation with the second-largest landmass on earth, the world’s third-largest oil reserves, a freshwater supply the parched globe will one day beg for, one of the most educated workforces in the OECD, and a national brand so trusted that Canadians sewing flags onto their backpacks get waved through customs with a smile in countries that would sooner deport their neighbours.
And we are losing our builders.
Not slowly. Quickly. Systemically. With the quiet efficiency of a country that has confused proximity to the United States with having an actual plan.
The Honest Ledger
There is a Hebrew concept — Cheshbon HaNefesh — that means a rigorous accounting of the soul. An honest audit. No flattery, no excuses, just the ledger as it actually stands. Every serious renewal begins with one. Canada’s looks like this: we export raw materials and import the finished value of them. We fund world-class research and then watch the talent who produced it relocate to California. We have interprovincial trade barriers that make it legally simpler to sell goods to Germany than to the next province over. We have pipelines that exist primarily as topics of discussion. We have a housing crisis so profound that the workers who build our economy cannot afford to live in the cities where it operates.
We have been, to use the technical economic term, a mess.
If you need a mirror, consider Norway. Population: 5.5 million — roughly the size of Greater Toronto, give or take a few reindeer. It has brutal winters, a jagged coastline, and no geographic advantage that Canada does not share or exceed. And yet Norway’s per capita GDP sits near US$100,000, nearly double Canada’s. Its citizens enjoy a standard of living that consistently ranks among the top three on the planet. At the Winter Olympics — the one competition where Canada might reasonably expect to leverage its climate — Norway leads the all-time medal table by a distance that is frankly embarrassing. They have won more Winter Olympic gold medals than any nation in history. We have the ice. They have the results.
And then there is the sovereign wealth fund. Norway took its oil revenues — the same category of resource wealth Canada has been sitting on and arguing about — and instead of spending them on the current fiscal year’s political priorities, built a fund now worth US$2 trillion. For 5.5 million people. That is roughly US$360,000 of invested national wealth for every Norwegian alive today, including the newborns.
Canada’s response to comparable resource wealth has been to argue about pipelines.
Size is not the explanation for any of this. We are forty million people. Norway is five and a half million. If geography were destiny, Canada should be lapping Norway in every category. The suggestion that our landmass somehow explains our underperformance is not a serious argument — it is a comfortable one, which is precisely the kind Canada has been making for thirty years. Norway did not become exceptional by accident or by virtue of being small. It became exceptional by making deliberate, disciplined, long-term decisions while other nations were making comfortable short-term ones.
The lesson is not complicated. The execution, apparently, is.
But here is the thing about Cheshbon HaNefesh. You do not take the accounting to despair over it. You take it to fix what is broken. The Hebrew tradition calls that Tikkun Olam — repairing the world. Not waiting for someone else to do it. Not forming a committee to study whether it needs repairing. Repairing it. Now. With your hands.
Canada has the hands. What it has lacked is the urgency.
That excuse has expired.
What This Actually Feels Like
Let’s be honest about something that the policy papers never say out loud. A lot of Canadians are disheartened right now. Not apathetic — disheartened. There is a difference. Apathy is indifference. Disheartened means you still care deeply, and what you’re seeing is falling painfully short of what you know this country could be. Kitchens across this country have had the conversation. Something is wrong. Something has been wrong for a while. And it’s hard to take.
That feeling deserves to be named, not managed.
Here is the honest answer to the question sitting underneath all of it: it is the leaders. Not entirely, not exclusively, but substantially. Canada has not had a shortage of brilliant, ambitious, hardworking people. It has had a shortage of institutional courage — the willingness to make the hard, long-term decision instead of the comfortable, short-term one. The builders who left didn’t leave because Canada failed to produce them. It produced them brilliantly. It just failed to give them a reason to stay. That is a policy failure. That belongs at the feet of the people who made those choices, not the people who lived inside them.
But here is where it gets complicated — and where Twain would probably light a cigar and say something insufferable and true: democracies get the leaders they tolerate. Not always the ones they deserve, but the ones the system was allowed to produce without enough resistance. Canada’s political culture has rewarded caution, punished boldness, and mistaken civility for vision for a very long time. That is a collective pattern, not a conspiracy. And collective patterns can be broken — but only by enough people deciding simultaneously that comfortable is no longer acceptable.
The discomfort Canadians are feeling right now is not despair. It is the sensation of a national consensus shifting. People do not get angry about things they have given up on. They get angry about things they still believe should be better. That anger, directed well, is the most productive force in a democracy.
Canada is not a waste. It is a country that has not yet decided to be serious.
That decision is available any time.
What Pressure Actually Teaches
The tariffs from Washington were not, if we are being coldly honest, the source of Canada’s economic vulnerability. They were merely the X-ray. The fractures were already there. We had simply gotten very comfortable not looking at them, because the American market was large enough and patient enough to absorb our ambitions while we debated amongst ourselves.
That arrangement is over. And the discomfort of its ending is — if a country is paying attention — an extraordinary gift.
Pressure clarifies. Communities that have survived centuries of external hostility understand this intuitively. The Jewish diaspora, expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1394, from Spain in 1492 — the same year, as history enjoys pointing out, that Columbus sailed west on money partly funded by Jewish wealth the Spanish crown had just confiscated — did not collapse under the accumulated weight of persecution. They built portable wealth. Skills. Networks. Education. Things that cannot be seized at a border. They practised Arvut — mutual responsibility, the radical operational idea that your neighbour’s ruin is structurally your ruin, and their flourishing is structurally yours. They invested in each other because they understood that social capital and financial capital are, at the level of a community’s actual survival, the same thing.
Canada does not need to be a diaspora to learn from one. It needs five things. Five clear, executable, stop-talking-and-do-it things.
One: Build a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Practise Tzedakah.
Tzedakah means righteous investment — deploying resources not merely for return, but for collective strength. Norway took its oil revenues and built a sovereign wealth fund now worth US$2 trillion. Singapore took fiscal discipline and did the same. Both nations exercise economic sovereignty that their geographic size should make impossible.
Canada has the resource revenues. What it has lacked is the institutional architecture to compound them rather than spend them in the current fiscal quarter. A national sovereign wealth fund — governed independently, insulated from electoral politics, mandated to take equity positions in AI, clean energy, agri-food, and advanced manufacturing — would change the equation permanently. Not grants. Not subsidies. Ownership. Canada currently subsidizes foreign companies to build things here and watches the value flow abroad. A sovereign wealth fund inverts that. The returns compound for Canadians, not foreign shareholders.
The governance model is everything. Political interference is the death of long-term capital. Run it like the Caisse de dépôt, not like a government program. Benchmark it against decades, not elections.
Two: Rewrite the Founder’s Equation. Apply Chutzpah.
Chutzpah is audacious, forward-pushing ambition. The willingness to bet on yourself when the cautious voice says wait.
Canada’s tax code has been that cautious voice, loudly, for thirty years. The United States Qualified Small Business Stock regime rewards founders with a capital gains exemption that makes building there arithmetically superior to building here. This is not a cultural problem. Arithmetic has solutions.
Raise the capital gains exemption to $15 million per venture — not per lifetime, per venture, because serial builders are precisely who a nation in Canada’s position needs to keep. Eliminate the 5 per cent minimum ownership rule that currently excludes early employees from the benefit. The person who joins a company before it has revenue is taking a real risk. When the company succeeds, they should participate in the real upside. Allow tax-free rollovers so that gains from one successful Canadian company flow directly into the next one, without a tax event that bleeds the ecosystem dry at the moment of its greatest momentum.
This is not generosity toward the wealthy. It is what every serious innovation economy has understood: the state’s return on founder-friendly tax policy — in jobs, in corporate taxes, in retained IP, in national capability — exceeds the revenue foregone by an embarrassing margin. Israel is smaller than Vancouver Island. It built one of the densest startup ecosystems on earth. Canada has more to work with. It needs more Chutzpah.
Three: Honour the Wealth Transfer. Live Arvut.
In the next decade, 76 per cent of Canada’s small business owners will exit. The value at stake exceeds $2 trillion. Roughly half has no clear succession within the family. Left to market forces, it flows to private equity — stripped, optimized, and hollowed out. The employees who built those companies become a line item. The communities those businesses served feel the extraction.
There is a better model. First Nations communities, with growing populations, improving capital access, and a proven preference for long-term ownership over short-term extraction, are positioned to be among the most consequential business acquirers in Canada’s next chapter. Unlike private equity, they tend to keep management, honour what was built, and reinvest locally. The compounding effect — jobs retained, revenues recirculated, communities strengthened — is something no arbitrage model can replicate.
Employee ownership trusts, aggressively incentivized through tax policy, extend this logic further. When the people who built a company can own it, everything improves: retention, productivity, community investment, institutional memory. This is Arvut as economic policy. Wealth staying within the community that created it.
Four: Own the Knowledge, Not Just the Land. Pursue Da’at.
Da’at is deep, applied wisdom — intelligence transformed, through discipline, into compounding advantage.
Canada has world-class research. It commercializes almost none of it. The gap between what our universities produce and what our economy captures is not an innovation problem. It is a structural problem, and structural problems have structural solutions.
Canada has not reviewed its tax competitiveness and investment framework comprehensively since the Carter Commission of the 1960s. The 1960s. A Royal Commission on Tax Competitiveness — operating on a fixed public timeline with binding deliverables, not academic leisure — would provide the intellectual framework the next generation of Canadian policy actually requires. Pair it with a National Economic Council staffed by people who understand IP law, AI systems, and modern trade agreements, and you begin to close the gap between what Canada knows and what Canada earns from knowing it.
Pick four sectors. Climate technology. AI governance. Precision agriculture. Advanced manufacturing. Concentrate resources there with the commitment of a country that intends to lead, not participate.
Five: Execute. Stop Studying. Repair the World — Tikkun Olam — Starting Now.
During COVID-19, Canada moved faster than anyone thought possible. Decisions that would normally absorb three years of committee review happened in three weeks. The country discovered it had a capacity for urgent, decisive action that peacetime had buried under process.
That speed is available again. What is required is the conviction that the moment warrants it.
Dismantle interprovincial trade barriers with the political will previously reserved for vaccine rollouts. Build the infrastructure Canada’s energy sovereignty requires. Compress permitting timelines from a decade to a year through process reform, not environmental compromise. Hold the federal workforce to the productivity standards demanded of the private sector that funds it.
The hybrid model Canada needs borrows from Trump’s economic nationalism exactly one thing: the willingness to act with speed and conviction on behalf of the national interest. It discards everything else and replaces it with the Canadian values that actually distinguish us — community investment, Indigenous partnership, long-term stewardship, and the institutional seriousness of a country that does what it says it will do, on the timeline it commits to.
The countries that navigate disruption most effectively share one characteristic. They do not treat crisis as an interruption to normal life. They treat it as the curriculum.
Norway didn’t transform overnight. Israel’s startup economy was a policy decision made in the 1990s that took twenty years to compound. Canada’s renewal will not be announced in a press release. It will be built — by founders who stay, by First Nations communities who acquire and grow businesses, by workers who demand their government move with the urgency the moment requires, by citizens who stop re-electing people who mistake talking for doing.
Canada has spent decades treating itself as a fortunate country. It is. But fortune is not a strategy. It is a starting position. What you build from it — that is the story. And good stories, as the writer Phyllis A. Whitney once observed, are not written. They are rewritten.
Canada’s rewrite is happening now, one decision at a time, whether the government is making the decisions or not.
The only question is who holds the pen.
So it goes. But it doesn’t have to.
Notes Beyond the Map 
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