Written by Goldy Hyder, President and CEO, Business Council of Canada
The collapse of trade talks between Canada and the United States over the weekend is the latest reminder that we live in an era of uncertainty and unpredictability. In only a few years, geopolitical rivalry, supply-chain disruptions, technological change and a series of economic shocks have overturned long-held assumptions about globalization, security and prosperity.
That upheaval is affecting us all in so many ways. Households are facing higher prices. People are less certain about their jobs and anxious about the future. Businesses are more cautious about investing. It’s unsettling. The world we thought we understood no longer works the way it used to.
Governments around the world are responding by organizing economic policy around sovereignty and resilience. Canada recognized the shift early and has been leading in its approach.
The federal government has adopted an activist approach to the economy, not just through supports for tariff-affected workers and businesses, but also by derisking private investment, identifying projects of national significance and expanding its role in housing, infrastructure, defence and strategic industries.
For business leaders, the practical question is how to respond constructively to this changing policy landscape.
Traditional business priorities, such as growth, productivity, competitiveness, fiscal discipline and open markets, remain essential. But achieving big national goals in this new environment will require business and government to work together more deliberately.
That requires moving beyond identifying problems to collaborating on solutions. Businesses can bring expertise, information, investment and operating experience to the table. Governments can create the policy and regulatory conditions that allow projects to proceed quickly and efficiently. Better information-sharing would help. So would more implementation-ready proposals from business and stronger coordination across jurisdictions.
Against this backdrop, the Business Council of Canada (BCC) launched the Strengthening Canada project in May. The national consultation is bringing business and policy leaders together to consider how Canada can strengthen its economy and institutions in a more uncertain and rapidly changing world, and how the business community can make a constructive contribution.
We began with a comprehensive survey of BCC members: CEOs and entrepreneurs who lead many of Canada’s largest and most influential companies.
Four broad themes emerged from the survey and subsequent conversations.
Canada must develop its capacity to build a more resilient and sovereign economy. Business leaders overwhelmingly recognize that economic security, resilience and sovereignty now deserve greater policy attention. Canada has many of the assets needed to succeed, but must strengthen the institutions, infrastructure and productive capacity that turn those advantages into results.
Government will need private sector help to deliver on its goals. Ambition is not enough. Canada must be able to approve projects, mobilize investment, coordinate across jurisdictions and implement decisions at record speed. Businesses can contribute the expertise, investment and operating capacity needed to turn public goals into results.
Government has a role in fostering strategic sectors but should exercise restraint. Industrial strategy and targeted intervention may be necessary in a more fragmented global economy. Public policy action, however, should be disciplined, transparent and focused on genuine strategic needs rather than broad or permanent market substitution.
The business community should help shape the capacity-building agenda. Companies can contribute expertise, data, practical solutions and investment commitments, helping governments design initiatives that can be implemented and scaled.
Based on these findings, the BCC is holding a series of roundtables across the country to discuss the ideas in greater detail and identify practical solutions to the challenges Canada faces.
The conversations are centred on two practical questions: What policy, regulatory or institutional change would allow Canadian companies to invest more, build faster or hire more people? And beyond policy, what could the business community contribute to help Canada develop the capacity to deliver?
Our work is ongoing. The aim is to build an agenda that is ambitious, credible and grounded in the experience of those who invest, build and operate across Canada.
At a moment when the world is changing quickly, Canada has an opportunity to combine public ambition with private-sector capability and to turn resilience and sovereignty from aspirations into durable national strengths.
Very well said, Mr. Hyder. In our upcoming book, "Rebuilding Canada after 60 years of Bad Policy," Ian Lee and I reinforce your thesis.
Preface
This book argues that the tariff shock of 2025 did not create Canada’s vulnerabilities. It revealed them. For roughly sixty years, successive Canadian governments of both major parties built an economy, a federation, and a political culture optimized for comfort and proximity. We spent decades treating a single customer as a permanent partner, process as a substitute for decisions, and regional vetoes as the price of national unity. In 2025, the bill arrived.
Donald Trump did not invent Canada’s export concentration, its productivity gap, its internal trade barriers, or its regulatory paralysis. He found them and used them. That distinction matters. A country that mistakes the messenger for the message will spend its energy on the wrong problem.
We wrote this book because the comfortable assumptions no longer hold, and because the official conversation has been too slow to admit it. One of us spent decades building a technology company from a $35 investment and later governed a national capital. The other has spent three decades studying strategy and public policy at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business and has appeared before parliamentary committees more than fifty times. We come from different professional worlds. We arrived at the same conclusion: Canada’s structural problems are real, measurable, and largely self-inflicted. Another task force, another advisory council, or another round of carefully worded communiqués will not fix them.
The first two-thirds of this book are diagnostic. They examine how Canada constructed its dependency on the United States, how a culture of vetoes and process accumulated into national paralysis, how protectionism and regulatory accumulation raised costs for ordinary households, and how a governing consensus concentrated in the Quebec City–Windsor corridor consistently deferred hard choices. The final chapters turn to prescription. We set out five practical steps we believe are necessary for renewal. Readers who accept the diagnosis are free to reject parts of the prescription. We ask only that they confront the evidence before they do.
A word about tone. This book is deliberately unsentimental. We have tried to write the analysis we wished someone had written while the comfortable assumptions still held. It is not “balanced” in the sense of giving every interest group equal airtime. It is balanced in the sense of trying to be true. Where the evidence points to failure by Liberal governments, we say so. Where it points to failure by Conservative governments, we say so. Where it points to structural features of the federation itself, we say that too. The goal is not to settle partisan scores. The goal is to describe what happened so that Canadians can decide what to do next.
We are not arguing that Canada is a failed state. It is not. We are arguing that Canada has been guided for too long by a set of assumptions—about the permanence of American goodwill, the sufficiency of process, the wisdom of protecting incumbents, and the political cost of decisive action—that no longer fit the world as it is. Those assumptions produced real achievements: relative stability, a functioning bilingual framework, and a social safety net that still matters to millions of people. They also produced the vulnerabilities that became impossible to ignore in 2025.
We ask the reader to test the argument against their own experience. If you work in an integrated supply chain, if you run a business that has waited years for a regulatory decision, if you are a young person calculating whether the better opportunities lie south of the border, if you live in a region that feels governed by people who do not live there—measure what follows against what you already know. The numbers in this book are drawn from public sources. The patterns are visible to anyone willing to look.
Canada still possesses the resources, the talent, the institutions, and the geography to build a more resilient and more prosperous country. What it has lacked for too long is the political will to choose. This book makes that choice clearer—and harder to avoid.
Larry O’Brien
Ian Lee, PhD
August 2026
This is a practical approach as a Canadian Business plan to strengthen our economic base but will strength our National security objectives