Publications: Lawrence Zhang

Canada’s path to lasting competitiveness lies in strategic indispensability: specializing in a small number of high value-added goods or services that the world can’t do without. Ottawa must continue making explicit decisions about what gets built and what does not; otherwise, it risks spending heavily with little to show for it.

Treating cars like canola is not strategy. Using industrial platforms as bargaining chips for commodity access risks locking Canada into a permanently resource-heavy economic structure, one in which manufacturing capacity cannot be easily rebuilt and its absence reshapes the economy for decades.

Canada’s first major test of its reformed competition law centers on Amazon’s pricing rules, but the Competition Bureau’s case risks punishing a policy that lowers prices for consumers and mistaking competition on the merits for anticompetitive conduct.

Real sovereignty in digital systems isn’t about where servers sit. Canada should build sovereignty into contracts and cryptography, embedding control and security through procurement rules, Canadian-cleared personnel, and encryption safeguards.

Canada should approach exploratory talks regarding a Canada–EU digital trade agreement with caution. Greater alignment with the EU may appear to provide a hedge against U.S. influence, but in practice it risks importing a framework that impedes the potential for Canada’s digital economy and industries while raising compliance costs.

The Bureau should not treat algorithmic pricing as a risk category in itself. The relevant concern is not whether pricing is algorithmic, dynamic, or AI-enabled, but whether it is used to harm competition or consumers. Addressing that will require focusing on market context and firm conduct rather than the type of tool used.

Canada has zero entries among the world’s top 50 science and tech clusters. Waterloo is the best candidate for elevation. To make that happen, the federal and Ontario governments should create an incentive: Tech start-ups based in Waterloo, as well as firms outside Canada that relocate meaningful R&D and innovation production to the region, will pay no tax for a decade.

Canada needs a new federal institution that makes its innovation system more than the sum of its parts: a Canadian Innovation and Industrial Transformation Agency. This institution wouldn’t replace programs. It would govern them coherently, strategically, and at speed.

Canada stands at a pivotal moment to leverage its natural resource boom into long-term industrial strength by tying faster permitting and land access to reinvestment in innovation. A modest levy on resource extraction could fund a new federal agency focused on turning Canadian R&D into real production and globally competitive advanced industries.

Canadian firms are underinvesting in productivity-enhancing capital such as machinery, software, and advanced technologies. Without targeted reforms to boost investment and improve data collection, Canada risks falling further behind in global competitiveness and economic growth.