Canada can capture a $500-billion economic opportunity if it overhauls its policies to mirror those of the United States, says former BlackBerry Ltd. co-chief executive Jim Balsillie.
The U.S. has adjusted its policies as the global economy transforms, he said, pointing to policies such as the Artificial Intelligence Action Plan, which defines AI as a crucial element of national power, the Genius Act for digital currencies and various tariff and intellectual property (IP) rules to rework global trade in its favour and ensure that U.S. technologies shape future market rules.
“These are not isolated, disparate initiatives, but part of a coherent policy framework for economic and security dominance globally. U.S. statecraft for value chains … is a capacity and playbook Canada must build,” he said in a keynote speech at the Financial Executives International Canada conference in Ottawa on Wednesday. “If our policies reorient to 21st-century economic statecraft, I believe we can recapture … $500 billion annually.”
Balsillie said those who thrive in today’s economy own and control intangible assets such as data, AI and IP, and the U.S. has “turbocharged their capture,” but Canada’s economic game plan has stayed stuck in the decades-old “tangible production economy era,” while the new assets of the new economy require different strategies.
At the same time, he said Canada has also botched the handling of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement that has entangled the country in a broad range of restrictions that changed how Canada governed data platforms and algorithms to the benefit of U.S. tech giants.
Balsillie said Canada can reverse the tide if business leaders and policymakers take action to build sovereign compute capacity for AI, national digital rails — infrastructure that allows digital payments to be transferred between parties regardless of currency or country — and domestic and cross-border enterprise banking focused on small and mid-sized businesses.
Tokenization, whereby digital tokens represent everything from financial and physical assets to IP and data on a blockchain, and unified ledgers, which bring together tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits onto one platform, will play a fundamental role in the future of finance and asset management, he said.
“Anything that can be tokenized will be tokenized. Europe and Asia are already building these rails into their financial systems,” he said. “The question for Canada is, who will own, control and regulate the system Canadians use? Without urgent action, we will default to foreign platforms governed by foreign rules.”
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