People take part in Canada Day celebrations at LeBreton flats in Ottawa, on July 1.Blair Gable/Reuters
Dan Breznitz is the Munk Chair of Innovation Studies at the University of Toronto, as well as the co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s program on innovation, equity and the future of prosperity. He served as the Clifford Clarke Economist for the federal Department of Finance during 2021-22.
Any follower of Canadian news is overwhelmed by the amount of doom and gloom about Canada’s economic future. Rightly so. We should not only be worried, but also forcefully demand that Canadian businesses finally embrace innovation to significantly improve productivity, and that our government focus less on symbolic politics and more on putting the country back on track.
I would be the first to admit that in this series I have been at the forefront of this choir of despair, documenting our alarming decline, how systemic and deep-set our problems have become, how unproductive and lacking in innovation our business sector is, and how our government is structured in a way that ensures it is not fit for purpose.
However, amid this angst we need to also look at our great achievements as a society. We must stop, take a collective breath, and realize that we are still one of the world’s most successful societies – not a small accomplishment in a world that is deeply troubled and offers less and less hope for more and more people.
There are two important reasons why we should do this:
First, while it is important to know where, how, and why we stagnated and declined, it is at least as important to know what our strengths are and how to build on them as we work to define the future we want to have. Canada has had ample examples of great successes, where we stuck with ideas and people for years against the reigning common wisdom of the time.
Geoffrey Hinton’s recent Nobel Prize in Physics brings to three the number of Canadians that have won the award in the past six years, with Donna Strickland being one of only five females to ever win it, exemplifying our ability to accomplish the most astonishing achievements. What we must do is to learn how to amplify such successes and use them to build our economy.
But, most importantly, looking at where and how we as a society have been excelling for the past three decades reveals to us our choices as a society – the things we truly care about. It allows us to identify the principles and essence of Canada and what we want being Canadian to mean. We chose where we wanted to excel, and against all odds, in our quiet humble way did so despite the constant drama of politics. As we build a vision of future Canada, let us make sure it has more Canada in it.
Our most impressive achievement is the fact that we are the world’s most just, inclusive and hopeful society. That doesn’t mean that we are as just and fair as we should be. It certainly does not mean we were in the past, or that the creation of Canada as a country was just and fair. However, in the past three decades, we have done much to address that.
The late John Rawls is the most important modern philosopher of justice, a pioneer of the view that sees justice as fairness. His most famous litmus test for a just society is known as the veil of ignorance. In that setting we are tasked to build the structures of the just society – but must do so under the condition that we do not know in advance where in that society we individually will end up. Thus, as you try to build a just society you make your choices not knowing if you will end up on the top, in the middle or at the bottom of the social and economic ladder, what gender and race you will end up being, how athletic or intelligent you will be, or even how beautiful.
So, using the veil of ignorance test, ask – as a baby coming into this world – where do I most want to be born?
The answer is – Canada!
This is something of which we should all be immensely proud. In a very troubled world, we have created a society that Canadians want to use as a foundation upon which to build the future for their children and their grandchildren.
The OECD better life index allows us to quickly see the areas in which we excel – which are many – and celebrate them. However, if there is one thing that truly reveals society’s ideals as well as its fundamental choices about the future, it is the way it educates its children. Not only is this the way society buttresses and imparts its principles, its also embodies its hopes for the future. Furthermore, K-12 education systems are a long-term investment. Therefore, their outcomes over time aggregate the choices of multiple governments led by different political parties, reflecting society’s overall values.
A look at the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – which has been measuring 15-year-old students’ proficiency in mathematics, science and reading in 81 countries every three years since 2000 – reveals what choices we have made to realize our aspirations.
Our scores should make us all proud. We are still a global leader in the quality of our education system. Canadian students score higher than most in what a modern society would view as the minimum needed proficiency to excel in the knowledge economy, and a higher percentage of our students achieve the highest proficiency levels. Still, despite this achievement, our academic performance has been on a decline over the past decade, which should make us worry that our systemic decline is now reaching the best of our institutions.
Furthermore, when one considers Canada’s size, diversity and large immigrant population and realizes that the world’s top five performers are all either city-states (Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau) or two of the world’s countries with the least immigration (Japan and South Korea), the true degree of our success and persistence in investing in our future becomes clear. However, even more impressive is the fact that we are a global leader in making sure every child has access to a good education.
Analyzing the PISA data sets reveals that the gaps between the highest- and lowest-achieving students, between localities and regions across the country, between and within schools, between students from all household income levels, and between immigrants (of which Canada has the greatest and growing proportion of in the world) and native-born, are among the smallest in the world. In short, no matter where you are in Canada and no matter to whom and where were you born, you have one of the highest chances in the world to excel in your studies and acquire the skills needed for a good life, and which society needs to achieve high levels of productivity and innovation.
Thus, our K-12 education system embodies a well-defined and widely shared vision for a successful, productive and innovative Canada. It is a vision of a labour force which gives our business sector an enormous comparative advantage by being highly educated, diverse, international and multilingual. Such a work force, if it can be matched with an export-oriented, diverse, highly productive and innovative business sector that is leading the world in engaging with knowledge and investing in the newest equipment and technology, should be the best foundation for sustained prosperity. If we had such a business sector it could offer Canadians challenging and well-paying jobs, allowing as many of us as possible across all of Canada to put into use the impressive education we have acquired.
Sadly, that vision is as far away from our oligopolistic, inward-looking private sector – characterized by as low productivity and low innovation as one can imagine. On one side we have the huge comparative advantage of highly skilled, highly educated, internationally oriented Canadians, and on the other we have a business sector which is mostly clueless as to how to use this advantage to win in global markets.
However, at least as importantly, such a vision is as far away as one can think from the vision the United States, Silicon Valley and Wall Street celebrate: A vision in which only a tiny sliver of the society – the geek elite, their financiers and their celebrity chefs – enjoys both good challenging jobs and immense riches. Instead, ours is a vision similar to what societies such as Taiwan, Singapore and Western Europe celebrate: A vision of a society with a business sector that embraces the true meaning of innovation – the act of applying ideas to develop new or improved products and services in any stage of production and in each and every sector of the economy.
This last sentence reads like it came from a government announcement or a public-relations brochure from a leading Canadian financial institution: a vague, spirit-lifting set of lofty ideals without substance or concrete ideas capable of being put to use. So let us make it concrete. Looking at the industry that built modern Canada – mining – shows us an example of how we could do so.
The common view is that mining is a dirty exploitative industry which we need to dismantle in order to have a carbon-neutral economy. The reality is that if we want to have a green transformation by 2050 we will need to mine at least an order of magnitude more of an ever-growing list of metals and minerals. However, if we try to mine those minerals using current techniques and global business structure of the industry – which moves rock thousands of miles, multiple times, just to process it into something useful – it would cause environmental damage that no amount of green tech could ever counter.
This suggests a unique opportunity for Canadian business and mining communities. The industry needs to be completely transformed in both the ways it operates (e.g., ultradeep mining, precision mining, full recycling to minimize tailing and utilizing the enormous amount of minerals left in the mountains of waste created by the past 100 years of mining), and the way it is processed (e.g., creating regional systems of processing, smelting and refining).
This transformation opens a generational opportunity for Canadian mining supply companies, first to test their ideas at home, and then to focus on becoming global export leaders. We might have lost the chance to have globally leading mining companies, but we can definitely expand the mining equivalent of Taiwan’s TSMC or the Dutch ASML in semi-conductors.
Sudbury offers us a model of how to do it. After the economic shock of the sale of Inco and Falconbridge to foreign multinationals, the city recovered by building a rich ecosystem of mining-equipment and services industries which have become exporters with the help of targeted policies. If we add to this already impressive success the promise of recent technologies – from automation to digitization and artificial intelligence – one can easily envision how by connecting those local ecosystems to our cutting-edge research infrastructure, mining can become a sustained source of local prosperity for communities across Canada. Furthermore, taking into account the need to build high-value activities in close proximity to mines to limit environmental damage, and we have a vision of how the industry can become the anchor for a high number of good jobs for people with different skills, from the trades to advance R&D. This model can be duplicated in multiple communities, and not just in the urban cores of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Mining is but one of many industries in which Canada has been gifted with a massive comparative advantage that could become a sustained anchor for our prosperity if Canadians were enabled, stimulated and supported in making Canada their global innovation hub. This is clearly what we hoped for as we have been collectively building the world’s most impressive K-12 and higher-education and research systems.
The Canadian social contract is built on the deeply held belief that all of us should have the opportunity to flourish – and be given the tools to do so. It is time we have leaders in both politics and business that listen and believe in our ability to build our own unique vision of prosperous Canada. More than ever before in our history, Canada needs more Canada.