Build Canada: Entrepreneurs seek to boost Canada’s prosperity and productivity

Sonia Sennik: And Sonia, welcome to Disruptors x CDL: The Innovation Era.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, it feels like we’re under attack.

Sonia Sennik: I know John, three fights in nine seconds.

John Stackhouse: That used to be the Canadian way, and I had flashbacks to the Big Bad Bruins, maybe the wrong reference point, of the 1970s during that moment. And maybe Canadians, whether you like hockey fighting or not, need to reclaim a bit more of that elbows up spirit.

Sonia Sennik: I think they did in that moment, because I don’t know if you could hear or feel the roar of the crowd through the TV screen, but I could.

John Stackhouse: Yeah, that was a good old fashioned hockey game moment. And what a series it was. It felt like Canada regained a bit of our spirit. And I think we’re going to need more of that in the years ahead as we confront a very different North America, and frankly a very different world that’s going to be, dare I say, more bruising.

Sonia Sennik: Definitely a more bruising world, John. [00:01:00] So what happens next? Our Canadian government is scrambling to come up with an adequate strategy to address this looming trade war. We’re sort of in the in between right now as we wait to see the results of the ongoing trade negotiations.

John Stackhouse: And you hear this from various people, but it’s true, we can’t control Donald Trump, we can’t control the United States.

And this is a moment where we have to reflect on what we can control. And our economic productivity is one of those things. It’s been a simmering national crisis for years, and now it’s full on. If we want to export to different parts of the world, if we want to produce a bit more for ourselves rather than depend on the United States, well, we gotta get game on productivity in every sector.

Sonia Sennik: But just like in hockey John, we have to play it face off to face off. Forget what happened in the last play and just think about the next one.

John Stackhouse: And one of the things I’ve been reflecting on is the lack of focus on the digital economy. Of course, there’s a lot of concern about the auto sector, about steel and aluminum, about energy.[00:02:00]

Those are all critical, but there’s been barely a whisper about the digital economy, which is where millions of Canadians earn their livelihoods. And it’s an opportunity for growth and productivity in addition to what we can do in those other sectors.

Sonia Sennik: John, there’s a ton we can learn from countries like Estonia.

I know they have a population of less than two million people. They start with their citizens learning how to code at age five. All of their identification is digital. They can do their taxes in less than 15 minutes. Their health care records are available to them. It is truly an aspirational system that they have there.

And, you know, they’re a fraction the size of Canada, which presents its own challenges. There’s a lot that can be said about having that vision of the future, which they started decades ago, understanding that having a digital first economy was essential.

John Stackhouse: And what Estonia figured out, and there’s lots of others in this category, is that you don’t need a big population to scale.

It’s the story of Singapore, of Taiwan, of [00:03:00] Israel. This is an age when small countries can actually excel and even overtake much bigger populations using the power of digital technologies to get that scale. And that’s a moment for Canada. We’re 40 million, which actually is a pretty decent number, but using digital platforms, including the ones we’ll talk about today.

Can help us compete in the world as if we were 400 million people. That’s the power of 10x

Sonia Sennik: You may not need a large population John but what you definitely need is an openness to change and a change management process People who are excited about saying yes to new opportunities and new ways of doing things

John Stackhouse: and today we’re joined by someone who I think is one of the great thinkers about all things economy But especially the digital economy Daniel Debow.

Sonia Sennik: Daniel has been at the forefront of Canadian tech and innovation for years.

He founded several companies, one that exited to Salesforce and one that exited to Shopify. He’s also been a mentor at Creative Destruction Lab from the very beginning. Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Daniel Debow: Thanks for having me.

John Stackhouse: [00:04:00] Daniel, let’s start with a bit of your own background. Walk us through the companies you’ve created and maybe tell us something that you learned in the experience.

Daniel Debow: Sure. Background is Canadian, went to Western, traveled as a consultant to the States, went to U of T. And, and then I was involved, I’ve been involved sort of as an employee in co-founding three companies. David Ausip, David Stein brought me on their team at Workbrain that was sold to Infor. Another was a company called Ripple with David Stein.

We sold that to Salesforce. Another called Helpful with Farhan Thawar and we sold that to Shopify where I worked for six years. And then in parallel, been involved as a volunteer in a bunch of different places. One, as you mentioned, was one of the founding fellows at CDL and really engaged in the early days.

Very active annual investor in a lot of the sort of brand name tech companies in the country. I taught a class in public policy and innovation and sort of exponential technology at U of T Law School with Ben Allery, another CDL founder. And I’m on the board of Loblaws. in Canada. And [00:05:00] separately, I’m really into music.

And so my wife and I’ve built with some partners, something called Bonfire Collective, which is creating spaces for artists to play. And then from that, we also have, um, with some other partners, we’ve built something called 42 Communities, which is a real estate development firm that does creative spaces.

I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned along the entire journey is obliquity, which means, uh, the idea that if you try too hard to get to a very specific goal, it often doesn’t work, but if you kind of do the indirect meandering way, oftentimes things work out in a really positive way. And that seems to be my life.

I feel like a bit Forrest Gumpian, to be honest, and sort of just wandering around, trying to have fun and learn things. And it seems to have worked out pretty well.

John Stackhouse: Well, obliquity may be a great message for this discussion because we’re going to talk about how Canada can get at some of these epic challenges that we’re facing.

Daniel, with that in mind, tell us about your latest creation, Build Canada.

Daniel Debow: Well first, it’s not my creation. It is a volunteer [00:06:00] group of amazing folks who’ve come together around an idea. You have all these great builders in Canada, people who have built companies in various industries, whether it’s real estate, technology, healthcare, what have you.

And they have good ideas, in particular about how to grow the Canadian economy. And so we have this group of people who know a lot about how to grow businesses, but there’s a gap and the gap is the way that they talk, the time that they can commit, the energy that they have doesn’t match up with what policymakers or politicians need.

What those folks need is often detailed policy memos. They need to know the context, the reasons, the messaging. They need to know specifics like what law, what rule, what statute needs to get changed in order to affect this change. And so the mismatches you have great business people who are like tweeting into the wilderness or yelling into a chat room or maybe even writing an op ed.

But then you’ve got the recipients of those messages saying this is not enough. It’s not specific, detailed, or actionable. And so that was the idea behind Build Canada. [00:07:00] Get a bunch of people together who knew how to build. products and then get people who know a lot about public policy to advise them on creating this output, the product, which is a detailed, specific and actionable policy memo.

And so that’s what we did. We took, I just saw all these, um, great business people who had good ideas, these builders. And so we said, how about instead of 10 hours of your time to write a detailed memo or hiring a lobbyist? How about. Spend an hour with us. We’ll take the core of your idea. We’ll distill it down with this team and with LLMs.

I should be clear, like, we’re using an LLM pipeline to help do a lot of this research and analysis really fast and then getting it checked by humans who’ve actually done the job. And then that’ll allow us to put a platform together where we can put it on X and then put it on the internet and it’s gonna get attention.

And that’s exactly what’s happened. So, that’s our little obliquity story and that’s a little bit about what Build Canada is.

John Stackhouse: Take us deeper into the problem that you’re trying to solve here, because this has been a theme for years, [00:08:00] decades, actually, that Canada has been underperforming, certainly on productivity, but we’re in 2025, and it’s a lot more acute.

Daniel Debow: Look, I mean, there’s a specific problem which is, hey, we need to grow, and many, many people have talked about, like, things we need to do to become a more growth oriented, export oriented, competitive society. No question. The change has been coming, and for those of us who have been paying attention, it’s been extremely obvious.

I mean, I think the folks over at CDL have known for a long time. Ten years ago, I was lucky to be the host and MC of the first conference on machine learning and business and how this was going to change the world. And that is exactly what we’re living through right now. Now you can compound on top of that geopolitical changes, changes in the States.

And I think the big sort of moment of why now is that they’re starting to come home. People are starting to recognize that this is creating an intractable gap between the, the lifestyle, the freedom, the sovereignty, the nature of what it means to be [00:09:00] Canadian. And so as a result, like the big underlying why is we need to move away from, well, we’ll make an incremental change.

I think we need to be recognizing that there are some major changes to society that’s going to require in some cases, painful choices, it requires prioritization and focus. And if we do that as a collective, then we can be a very, very prosperous country, probably the richest country in the world. But if we choose to simply ignore it and try to say, we’re just not going to change.

And everybody is allowed to block this change. I think that might last for a little bit of time. I mean, we can just borrow more money. But eventually that situation becomes structurally untenable. And I think Canadians are feeling it, right? You can look at satisfaction with government. You can look at housing.

You can look at affordability. You can look at access to health care. Satisfaction is low with the deal that used to exist. And so that’s the thing, we need to fix that so that Canadians feel great about their country, that they’re contributing, they’re happy, that [00:10:00] people want to build, because that’s what drives the prosperity that makes the Canada that I think we all deserve, we all want to have.

Sonia Sennik: And so Daniel, you’re saying we need to fix that. I’m curious about the group of folks involved with Build Canada. What makes them believe that these activities can support the changes that you see are needed?

Daniel Debow: So I think there’s probably three mechanisms. The first mechanism is Uh, we call it maybe shifting the Overton window.

And the Overton window is this concept about ideas that are publicly acceptable or okay to talk about. Right? And we haven’t written a memo about this, but I’m just going to pick on it. But like milk and, uh, egg supply boards was like untouchable. Like you just can’t talk about them. That’s never going to change.

So I think one of the goals is to simply put out a bold ideas that understandably are going to make some people uncomfortable. And that’s okay because this isn’t like a secret plan. This is like publish on the internet and people should debate it and discuss it. But then you’re shifting the conversation towards.

Real change that of like things that have to get done. The [00:11:00] second goal is that we’re in this moment. You know, what’s the phrase about bankruptcy? It happens very slowly and then very suddenly like you sort of have stasis and then there’s this friction or this outside force that occurs. That’s like okay.

Now we got to change So I think we’re in a moment like that, and I think in particular, I think that there are policies being created by the change candidates, either the change in liberal leadership or the change of government entirely, and I think they’re open to new ideas, new ideas that, uh, gain some traction.

The third element is if you combine, hey, the conversation changes and people are willing to be open to change, I think engagement with the ideas, people engaging and saying, well, this idea that you have about like health, the idea that was proposed about like health care data portability, like that’s just an idea that should happen.

Maybe now is the time we should do it. So I think getting public discussion about these ideas happening, yeah. Moves the Overton window of people’s availability and it makes [00:12:00] the politicians available and open to the idea of like, Hey, maybe this is a policy that should be considered as we’re changing.

And I think there’s going to be change coming. That’s the mechanism.

John Stackhouse: What would be two or three changes you’d want to see fairly quickly?

Daniel Debow: So first thing, this isn’t about me, Daniel Debow. I’m not the one like, this is not my group. This is my thing. I want to really state that it’s important. What we’ve created is a platform, but some of the things that some of the builders want to see, let me go through.

So, Mike Litt, great entrepreneur. He talks a lot about changing the narrative around Canada and using the money that we spend on heritage programs and cultural programs to also talk about hey, this is a country of builders. And I think that’s actually a really important point that, that if we need people to feel it is an aspirational Canadian value to go off and build a company, I’m not just talking a tech company and CDL, I mean like a landscape business, a retail store, an online store, like those are things that people should aspire to.

Mike [00:13:00] Serbinis, another CDL, mentor has an idea about healthcare data portability and that this single action would lower the cost of health care, improve quality, improve wait times, reduce errors. That’s a pretty good idea. And there’s more coming. We’re going to have stuff on energy, on housing.

And what’s neat is it’s not just the tech entrepreneurs as builders have seen what we’re doing. They’re coming and saying, Hey, I’m in the oil patch. I would like to have my policy. I’m in the housing business. I want to talk about that. And that’s fantastic. People who build this country. As entrepreneurs sharing their ideas.

Sonia Sennik: I’d love for you to speak a little bit about the difference between what this initiative seeks to achieve here in Canada versus what many folks may be seeing in the news about unelected tech entrepreneurs in the United States getting heavily involved in operating government. I think it’s two very distinct approaches, and I’d just love for you to speak a little more about that.

Daniel Debow: Well, first thing is we’re not working for any party. Okay. This is a [00:14:00] nonpartisan activity. And I can tell you that both liberals and conservatives are reading and critiquing and giving feedback on this stuff. Then the people who are contributing support, both parties have supported both parties. So it’s nonpartisan.

The second is we’re not working for anybody. This is independent, right? Neither party has asked us to go do this. The third is, this is transparent. This is not like in a secret room. I mean, literally, we’re publishing papers. They’re not like drive by tweets and like fact free. These are like 10, 15 page detailed policy papers.

Now you might disagree with them, but they’re substantive. And, um, you know, one of the critiques people have come to me, they’re all, how are you going to go implement it? Are you going to go do this? I’m like, that’s not what anyone here signed up for in any way. The idea was to change the conversation, open the Overton window, get some provocative and bold ideas out there from builders, and then share them in a way that everyone can see, and then every party can choose to take some or all or none of these ideas.

John Stackhouse: Daniel, how much of this [00:15:00] was driven by the capital gains fight last year? That really cut deeply and personally for a lot of tech founders, a lot of Canadians beyond technology, but I was interested to see the response from the tech community, which was visceral, and it wasn’t just about the net cost of that.

It was about the signaling that came with that.

Daniel Debow: I think the short answer is, I don’t think it was that much, but I think what you’re talking about is the proverbial straw that broke a camel’s back. There’s just so many things over and over that send a signal, and this is what I was mentioning, why I like the story we tell about Canada.

My candid concern is the next Hundreds of thousands of young students who are aspirational who have not heard a message that going to build a company is a patriotic Canadian thing. And in fact, it’s consistent with the heritage of the country being builders, the giver culture, like let’s go give her.

And that [00:16:00] is Canadian. Let’s go make something happen. That is not a message. I don’t think that has been like strongly prioritized as the key message of what we should be telling the country. And so, yeah, the capital gains thing was sort of maybe another signal. of kind of a disdain of this group of people that they’re inherently selfish, inherently bad, they’re not helping, and they’re just not giving their fair share of what they’re doing.

I didn’t think it was a smart policy move. I wasn’t personally upset. There’s a lot of charts have been people’s dissatisfaction, and especially among young people. But you know, the one chart that I think if there were one thing, it’s not the capital gains one. It was the divergence in GDP per capita and GDP between the United States and Canada.

And you can put the line. Anywhere you want, but it’s very clear that we have diverged significantly in the wealth that we have for Canadians. And I think that chart, I saw that get passed around a lot. Kind of people saying like, you know, what the hell, what is going on here? This is not a good situation.

That’s not a trend that is [00:17:00] sustainable. You have to have wealth to redistribute it, right? Like someone has to create the jobs and the capital and pay the taxes because it’s not sustainable to print money and borrow money forever. You have to have an underlying economic base. And so I think that’s the catalyst trigger was like this awareness of we are not in the right direction economically.

And what is going on?

John Stackhouse: What Daniel do you think we need to come to grips with beyond the narrative, beyond the ambition right here in 2025 to get us back on that growth trajectory?

Daniel Debow: Probably a few things, you know, Roger Martin, former Dean of Rotman, and he was actually the Dean when CDL got started, wrote a great piece this morning.

And at the end of it, he said, like, yeah, just to be clear, it doesn’t mean I agree with what’s happening, but I’m just describing what it is. And the first step is to accept the facts. Right. So I think we’re like going through the stages of grief here, you know, first anger, then bargaining, then you get to acceptance.

[00:18:00] And I think the like, then three fights in nine seconds. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s good. It’s good for people to wake up and remember we have a country and to be proud about it and you have to fight for it, right. It didn’t come for free. So that’s, that, that’s maybe point two, but the first point, right.

Is you have to accept that the situation has changed the rules of the game. The rules of global trade have changed. And I think we have a desire to be like, well, we’re just going to go back. And oh, by the way, it’s just one orange dude who made all this happen. And I would prefer personally to think of that orange dude as a symptom of a whole bunch of underlying changes in the economy, driven by technology and trade and geopolitics, less of the cause.

So I think, point one, we have to accept that the world that we were living in, what got us here to be this amazing country, is not going to get us there in the next 50 years, because the world is different. There are massive other geopolitical competitors, you know, China, India, Africa, huge new demands for resources.

These things are [00:19:00] happening, and it’s changing our world. We are not going back to where we were, no matter how much we want to go back. The second is, Economics is the study of choices under scarcity. That’s the definition of economics. And we’ve forgotten the scarcity part, right? Which means you cannot say yes to everything.

You have to say no to a lot of stuff in order to be able to say yes to some things. You also have to maybe give up things that you really, really like. So as Canadians, we have had an ability for interest groups to block change. This interest group won’t like it. This regional group won’t like it. This set of unions won’t like it.

And so, they die. They just don’t happen. The public service won’t like this thing. It’s a well known economic problem. It’s the holdup problem. And I think we’ve become prey to that holdup problem for a bunch of reasons, but we have to move past it so that we can make some hard choices. The third one are some of the ideas that are coming out from this group and not just this group.

But we have to recognize that like growth is good for [00:20:00] everyone, right? Growth is good for the country. This doesn’t mean that we should become like a robber baron state where like we don’t have a social safety net. In fact, personally, I would prefer that we divert a lot of the corporate support and welfare and programs and incentives to individual support.

So that people as individuals have a very strong safety net. But we’re totally fine with businesses. failing and collapsing because that drives again, creative destruction drives some Turian creative destruction. Like companies grow, companies go as long as the people are okay, right? We have to become as a society more comfortable with more volatility in businesses.

And the way I think we should do that is redirect a lot to individuals so that they are capable of handling the volatility that the world is going to throw at us, like the world is going to throw this at us. We cannot become rigid. So this is this idea of resiliency. Resiliency often happens when you fail or when you break things.

And so if you don’t want any change and you want stasis, you [00:21:00] actually become a rigid society.

John Stackhouse: In some ways, Daniel, you’re getting at the founding concept of our country, which is peace, order, and good government. Do we need to change our mindset from a bit of that stability origin motto to something a bit more, some people may see as risky, some people may see as ambitious.

Some people may see as more materialistic. Is that the sort of conversation Canadians need to confront?

Daniel Debow: Yeah, I mean, I just don’t think it has to be as black and white. That’s the first point. Like, I do think that has to happen. Also, by the way, prior to POGG, Peace, Order, and Good Government, you had United Empire loyalists, right?

Like the loyalists were lit like Ontario. Southern Ontario was populated by people who were like, we don’t like this crazy revolution idea. We like the king. We’re coming up here, right? So like, do I think we have to whole hog flip that over? No. I think we have to think about how do we express peace order and good government in the right way.

So I would argue good government is an effective government. And I’ll tell you, since [00:22:00] we started Bill Canada, I’ve gotten texts and notes from very senior government officials. One of them said something to me that shocked me. He said, It’s one thing for government to be inefficient. Government will always be inefficient because it’s got like reserve powers.

Like you’ve got, you know, fire trucks waiting around for a fire to happen. You’ve got extra mass waiting for COVID to happen again. That’s inefficient. But what we’re becoming is ineffective. The direct quote was, the Canadian government cannot always affect the lawful orders of a minister. Like they just can’t do it.

That’s a problem, right? That’s not good government. That’s bad government, right? And so we have to get to a place where we have super efficient, highly productive, extremely good government services that are delivered to people in a way that they’re like, this is great. I appreciate that. Less than 14 percent of Canadians feel that they’re getting value from the federal government in the services that are being delivered.

That’s not POGG, that’s the opposite of that. So it’s not about abandoning who we are as Canadians. It’s remembering who we are as Canadians. That good government means efficient. It means effective. We have to get people to a place where [00:23:00] we accept that the world is rapidly changing and our approach to dampening those shocks is not the approach that we used to use.

We have to think about our own and we have to do this in a way that maintains sovereignty for Canada, right? Like, so it’s all wonderful to say open up banking, open up airlines, open up everything for global competition, competition inside the country. If the net effect of that is a complete hollowing out of major Canadian companies, then that’s not success.

We need to think about how we can look to say the Dutch or the Swedes that have built massive global export brands all around the planet and they’re still able to maintain their sovereignty, you know, Canada. Hasn’t done that as well. And we have to ask ourselves why and how we can get to that place.

Sonia Sennik: I think the theme of a lot of what you’re saying is objective setting, prioritization, being adaptable, buildings and bridges, they’re made to bend in the wind, they’re made to sway with the changing weather around them. And so [00:24:00] how do we build these structures in a way that will last, but also be able to withstand anything that goes on around our country and the structures there?

Daniel Debow: Yeah. And like, also be open to changes in the way we set it up. You know, the. POGG powers comes in our constitution where we have the Dominion Act and, and they were separate, you know, and, you know, we talk about interprovincial trade barriers today. Some of them are explicit, right? Some of them are like, you can’t sell booze in our province, you can’t export our milk, but most of them are just inadvertent.

They are a function of the fact that we distributed powers to the provinces and they all set up their own regulatory framework for different areas, whether it’s nursing or healthcare or trucking, and they just have different standards. It wasn’t intentional to block trade, but, so this is the point. We have to say like, okay, this thing that we had, the way we separated powers, the way we set it up, it doesn’t work anymore in the modern economy.

We have to be open to changing those things rather than zealously protecting the prerogatives that were written in stone. A long time ago,

John Stackhouse: [00:25:00] Daniel, just as we move to close, what’s the one message you have to especially younger Canadians who want to build their own companies, but also want to build communities and maybe by extension, the country.

Daniel Debow: Get out of your chat rooms, get off social media, go do something. We talked a bunch about CDL. CDL was Ajay and a few other folks getting together and saying, you know what? He saw this problem that we had all this great R and D coming out of U of T in particular, but it wasn’t being turned into companies.

And he said, I’m just going to fix this. And he did, and he enlisted people with this great idea, and he was unflappable, and also extremely adaptive. Like, we kept changing how we ran it and what we were trying to do to set it up so that it would grow and be fantastic. It wasn’t set in stone. It was like, we tried something, didn’t work, let’s try something different.

And we just kept learning along the way. That’s my message to young Canadians, is that you are able to make change happen. By the way, you’re also able to make change happen by being a builder. Go [00:26:00] off and build the company you want. It’s never been easier. Despite all this talk about barriers and regulations, it’s true.

But technology, as part of the change, has also been coming along to make it easier to start. I encourage people to try it. Even if you fail, you’ll learn a lot. And most importantly, you are being Canadian in the most amazing and true way to being Canadian if you pick up that task and start a company.

You’re building the country.

Sonia Sennik: For the record, we’re still iterating and changing at the Creator Destruction Lab. We’re still learning things.

Daniel Debow: Well, because I think actually this is the point built deep into the DNA of that organization and the mindset of how it was built is that nothing is set in stone.

We can always change it. If this is the way we used to do it, we can do it differently because the situation changes. Let’s adapt so that we can learn and then move quickly forward. And virtually every organization that is succeeding in the world today, and you can just look at it, go look up on, you know, your favorite AI or Google.

The number of companies on the S& P 500 who are [00:27:00] on the S& P 500, 50 years ago. Go do the same thing in Canada. And what you will find is shocking. And that tells us something about what we need to do to change in our country. Let’s adapt. It’s a great message.

Sonia Sennik: Thank you so much for sharing your insights and for the work you’re doing with the Build Canada group.

Daniel Debow: A pleasure. Thanks for having me on and thanks for the questions.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, what an exhilarating and challenging conversation. Daniel mentioned Mike Serbinis, a veteran of the Disruptors podcast, who is one of Canada’s great founders, building a company now called League. So we asked Mike why he had joined Build Canada.

Mike Serbinis: I’ve always been a builder. From the first cloud companies to eBooks, to transforming healthcare.

And that includes country building in Canada from theoretical physics at perimeter AI at vector and startups at CDL. After a near decade of falling productivity, Canada could be doing so much better. We need builders to get to work, [00:28:00] to build a better, stronger Canada. And so I jumped at the chance to support Build Canada with my first idea of freeing healthcare data to enable better outcomes for all Canadians.

Sonia Sennik: That’s Mike Serbinis, CEO and founder of League and co-founder of Kobo. And here’s Lucy Hargreaves, a former political staffer who is now VP of Corporate Affairs and Policy at Patch, a carbon removal startup.

Lucy Hargreaves: For me, it’s about scaling bold policy ideas that drive economic growth. Canada has so much potential, but we really need to shift from a default no to finding more ways to say yes to ambitious policies.

I love that this initiative brings together talented founders, policymakers, and industry leaders to move the needle, not just talk about it. The energy, the connections, and the real impact we can all create together is what makes this really so exciting for me.

Sonia Sennik: John, what a conversation about the future of Canada.

John Stackhouse: It left me both excited and nervous about where we’re going as a country, and [00:29:00] maybe you need that for a bit of that obliquity mindset that Daniel mentioned. We have a lot to come to grips with, and it’s not just about our narrative. There’s some serious choices that we have to make as a country. And as Daniel was talking, I was reflecting on one of his co creators of Build Canada who said to me once in a private conversation that one of the most expensive decisions you can make, maybe in any part of life, but certainly as a builder, is yes, Because when you say yes, you are eliminating all sorts of other choices.

It’s an opportunity cost. And as a country, we have to think hard about what we’re saying yes to when it crowds out those other opportunities. Of course, we have to say yes to the opportunities before us and pursue them aggressively. But we’re gonna have to make some choices as a country. And I think Canadians may finally, collectively, be coming to grips with that.

Sonia Sennik: If there’s one thing I’ve learned, as Canadians, we are always better when we work together. [00:30:00] I’m thinking of something like our CDL Rapid Screening Consortium that we built during COVID. We were the only country to stitch together a nationwide rapid testing program. And that all started with just a handful of people and companies that believed it was possible.

We can create incredible opportunities for our country when we link arms and build in the same direction.

John Stackhouse: A country of builders. What a great ambition. This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Thanks for listening.

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