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By Geoff Beattie, Contributor

Geoff Beattie is CEO of Generation Capital and former President of The Woodbridge Company. His interview series, “The Human Encounter with Geoff Beattie,” debuts this year. www.thehumanencounter.ca

There is a photograph, taken on June 6, 1944, of young men in the water off Juno Beach. They are wading toward France, rifles above their heads, the sea cold and the outcome uncertain. Most of them are between 18 and 24 years old. Less than eighty years after Confederation, they pushed farther inland than any other Allied force on D-Day — eleven kilometres by nightfall. Canada, young and uncertain of itself in so many ways, was exceptional that day.

What is most striking about that image is the ordinariness of the people involved. They were not special by birth or breeding. They were Canadian, which is to say they were a people who had learned, again and again, that when the moment arrived, something in them rose to meet it.

We have seen it more than once. For my generation it was Sept. 28, 1972, when a hockey team with an average age of 25 entered the third period of the deciding game against the Soviet Union trailing 5-3, in a hostile Moscow arena, with referees who seemed to belong to the other side. They tied the game. Then, with 34 seconds remaining, Paul Henderson scored the most famous goal in Canadian history. That moment was about something deeper than sport. It was about a country refusing to accept the story being written for it.

Twenty-nine years later, the town of Gander, Newfoundland — population 10,000 — received nearly 7,000 stranded passengers when American airspace closed on Sept. 11, 2001. It was the students who were mobilized first, accessing supplies, organizing logistics, turning a small airport into a small city. The world eventually made a Broadway musical about it. The people of Gander seemed genuinely puzzled by the fuss. It was, to them, simply what was required in the moment.

More recently Canadians responded to a crisis in our trade relationship. In the face of obnoxious political rhetoric calling us a 51st state, Canadians of all ages and all regions quietly responded. With no need for a national campaign or sloganeering, we stopped travelling south, made different purchasing decisions, and began to think about supporting homegrown products in a new way. None of this was about being anti-American: we simply chose Canada in the most Canadian of ways. Politely, respectfully and with absolute authority.

Having spent a career investing in and building great Canadian businesses, I can tell you with certainty: our greatest natural resource has never been oil or timber or even the ingenuity of the BlackBerry. It has been this. We meet the moment.

We are facing a critical moment now. And as always, it will be met best by younger Canadians. But meeting this challenge will require that all of us — including older Canadians — make some sacrifices and address an increasingly precarious imbalance between the possibilities afforded previous generations and those that represent the future.

In the spring of 2026, however, the view for young people in Canada is not an easy one. The unemployment rate for those aged 15 to 24 sits at 13.8 per cent — double the national average. Housing affordability hits the young particularly hard: 8 out of 10 young adults face severe housing challenges, according to StatsCan. It’s no surprise then, that the 2026 World Happiness Report ranks Canada 25th overall, but 71st for those under 25. Something is also going wrong in the interior lives of young Canadians. Among the many culprits are excessive screen time, social disengagement and a corrosive social media.

All of these sit within larger disruption. The economy we built on the basis of a strong partnership with the United States is being dismantled. It’s happening in the midst of a complete reordering of the global system. And let’s not forget that young people bear the costs — in climate, and in debt — of the mistakes their elders have made.

But here is what history keeps insisting, if we are willing to listen: disruption is not only a threat. It is also an opening. The realignment now underway in the global economy is the kind of moment that rewards countries willing to move with speed and conviction. Canada — nimble, educated, trusted by the world in ways America no longer is — has an opening it has not had in decades. The question is whether we have the ambition to meet it. This is the deal Canada must make with itself and the generations that will lead it in the future.

From an economic standpoint, Canada needs an entry strategy for the future, not an exit strategy from the past. That means building a serious industrial and economic architecture — in semiconductors, critical minerals, clean energy, agriculture, defence, and most urgently, artificial intelligence. In the years ahead, the most valuable commodity in the world will be intelligence — the capacity to generate it, refine it, and apply it at scale. The race has already begun, and Canada, with its research institutions and its talent, is better positioned than it tends to believe.

Canadians taught the world to type with their thumbs. We gave medicine insulin. These are not footnotes. They are evidence of what this country can do when it decides to.

None of the necessary change happens without leadership, and leadership requires accountability. That means something more demanding than the ambient cynicism that passes for political sophistication in our current moment. Meeting this moment means being engaged. Get involved politically. Express opinions publicly. Educate ourselves about the facts.

At the same time, demanding accountability is not the same as demanding miracles. Government operates under constraints that are real and structural — the ponderous and grinding pace of democratic consensus, the competing pressures of regions and industries and generations, the blunt limits of what policy can accomplish in the short term versus the long.

What civic life requires of us — particularly of younger Canadians who are rightly skeptical of institutions that have sometimes failed them — is a kind of informed patience. That means holding our leaders to account: show up, vote, write, organize, argue.

For young Canadians facing an economy that is genuinely difficult, with a geopolitical landscape that is genuinely frightening: what you are feeling — the anxiety, the frustration, the sense that you arrived at the party just as something went terribly wrong — is not weakness. It is an accurate reading of a changing and complex situation.

But consider the old wisdom: despite a foreboding context, it is not what happens to you, but how you react to it, that defines you. That is not a consolation. It is a challenge.

For those young people, the most practical advice is: Keep the technology you have grown up with in its proper place. The algorithms are designed to keep you inside your own opinions; they are, in that sense, the enemy of growth. Put the device down. Look people in the eye. Have the kind of conversation that doesn’t fit in a caption.

And while technology may, as it tends to, unlock great economic growth, remember to consider the so-called boring businesses — the ones that make and distribute the things a consuming society actually needs — because they will outlast the glamorous ones. Canada has a goal to build five million homes in the next decade, all of which require carpenters, plumbers and electricians. And for every plumber we need, we’ll need a business person with an idea, willing to see it through. Consider it all.

Of the many challenges young people face, one of the most alarming may be the struggle for connection. UNICEF data show that one in four young Canadians struggles to make friends. Connecting with each other matters. Because what the beaches of Normandy, the ice in Moscow, and the airport in Gander share is not courage in the abstract. They share the specific, irreplaceable power of people who knew each other and refused to let each other down. In this disconnected world of ours, there is real power when we enjoy the magic which comes from the power of the human encounter.

But this moment shouldn’t be met by young people alone. There are steps that Canada as a whole can take to ensure the success of the country — and it starts by addressing the inequality between generations.

If there is inequity between generations, it did not begin recently. Canadians who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s inherited a stable postwar order, institutions that functioned well, a housing market that rewarded patience rather than punishing arrival, and a global economy whose tailwinds were strong. Many of them did everything right and were generously rewarded for it. There is no shame in that. But it does create an obligation to those who follow.

This means something specific. It means Canadians with capital, with influence, with the accumulated advantages of decades of relative peace and prosperity have a particular responsibility in this moment. It’s time to tax capital instead of just income, because in this country accumulated capital is where the wealth is. But there also needs to be a chance to accumulate that capital. Young people might need income tax exemptions — say on the first $250,000 of income — while removing personal deductions for the wealthy. It’s time to get serious about equalizing wealth between generations. Recognize that the system which produced your success needs investment, and that investment is not charity. It is self-interest properly understood.

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What Canada and its young generations need right now is not a hero. It needs a system that works — in which young people bring their energy and new thinking, in which those who have prospered reinvest rather than retreat, and in which government is held to account as the steward of the whole. That is not a complicated idea. It is, however, a demanding one. It asks something of everyone, and it asks the most of those who have received the most.

That should not be a burden. That is the deal.

Canada has always been a country which underestimates itself, which is perhaps why it keeps surprising people, including its own citizens.

This is our moment. Canada is asking us, not to storm anything, but to show up — curious, engaged, and unafraid — and together. History, as it turns out, is not made by people who waited for better circumstances.

It is made by people who decided that these circumstances were enough. It is time. It is Canada’s time.

Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details