Canada Centre Commentary

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.

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.

It’s more important than ever for Canada to invest in domestic production capabilities. Natural Resources Canada must update its value-added analysis to clarify the current state of the mining industry and guide sound industrial policymaking.

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.

The goal for the next Canadian decade should be simple yet ambitious: to support and scale at least 100 mid-sized, export-oriented companies that dominate strategic niches in global markets—Canada's own generation of Mittelstand-esque champions.

Canada’s path forward requires becoming a more productive trading nation that is less reliant on external forces and more capable of turning ambition into economic power. Walking away from the most consequential trade conversation of the next decade won’t get Canada there. It has room to negotiate with the U.S. and should use that leverage to secure the full and permanent removal of tariffs.

Trump and Musk are disrupting America’s scientific community, giving Canada a rare opportunity to attract top talent and position itself as a global innovation powerhouse.