{"id":671104,"date":"2026-05-29T00:28:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T00:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/671104\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T00:28:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T00:28:15","slug":"canada-has-a-500-billion-opportunity-if-it-acts-more-like-the-u-s-balsillie-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/671104\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada has a $500-billion opportunity if it acts more like the U.S., Balsillie says"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Canada can capture a $500-billion economic opportunity if it overhauls its policies to mirror those of the United States, says former BlackBerry Ltd.<\/a> co-chief executive Jim Balsillie.<\/a><\/p>\n

The U.S. has adjusted its policies as the global economy transforms, he said, pointing to policies such as the Artificial Intelligence<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are not isolated, disparate initiatives, but part of a coherent policy framework for economic and security dominance globally. U.S. statecraft for value chains \u2026 is a capacity and playbook Canada must build,\u201d he said in a keynote speech at the Financial Executives International Canada conference in Ottawa on Wednesday. \u201cIf our policies reorient to 21st-century economic statecraft, I believe we can recapture \u2026 $500 billion annually.\u201d<\/p>\n

Balsillie said those who thrive in today\u2019s economy own and control intangible assets such as data, AI and IP, and the U.S. has \u201cturbocharged their capture,\u201d but Canada\u2019s economic game plan has stayed stuck in the decades-old \u201ctangible production economy era,\u201d while the new assets of the new economy require different strategies.<\/p>\n

At the same time, he said Canada has also botched the handling of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Balsillie said Canada can reverse the tide if business leaders and policymakers take action to build sovereign compute capacity for AI, national digital rails \u2014 infrastructure that allows digital payments to be transferred between parties regardless of currency or country \u2014 and domestic and cross-border enterprise banking focused on small and mid-sized businesses.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnything that can be tokenized will be tokenized. Europe and Asia are already building these rails into their financial systems,\u201d he said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Email: ylau@postmedia.com<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canada can capture a $500-billion economic opportunity if it overhauls its policies to mirror those of the United…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,103,67045,250672,101,9509,45560,292806,56664,21],"class_list":["post-671104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-canada","tag-economic-opportunity","tag-economic-statecraft","tag-economy","tag-global-economy","tag-intangible-assets","tag-jim-balsillie","tag-tyler-anderson","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}