It’s time Canada showed its real strength to the world.

getty

For a brief moment in the early 2000s, Canada sat at the center of the global mobile revolution. Through the company Research In Motion, later renamed BlackBerry, Canadian engineers effectively invented the modern smartphone category.

Their devices combined mobile email, secure messaging, and portable computing in a way that transformed how professionals worked. Governments, corporate executives, and world leaders carried BlackBerrys clipped to their belts. The device became so culturally embedded that the nickname “CrackBerry” captured how addictive its instant communication felt in an era when most phones still existed primarily for calls and text messages.

But technological leadership is not the same as technological dominance. While BlackBerry pioneered the smartphone concept, the next wave of innovation came from elsewhere. Apple reimagined the device around a touchscreen interface and an app ecosystem with the iPhone.

Samsung rapidly scaled hardware innovation and global manufacturing. Huawei and other Chinese firms leveraged massive supply chains and aggressive expansion into international markets.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry struggled to pivot from its keyboard-centric design and secure email niche toward the emerging broader consumer ecosystem. As the author of Artificial Intelligence Basics, Tom Taulli noted, “It fell behind on innovation, kept its app ecosystem closed and proprietary, and failed to recognize the rise of consumer-driven IT buying.”

In the end, Canada had created the category but failed to control its future. And the BlackBerry story has since become a familiar cautionary tale. It’s a reminder that innovation alone is not enough if a country or company cannot translate invention into long-term competitive leadership.

Risk Aversion Wears a Polite Mask

Because Canada is often labeled a “nice country,” Canadians can feel like risk aversion is a virtue. It shows up in words like prudence and consensus. But consensus is not neutral. It has a cost.

As Forbes contributor Cheryl Robinson notes, “Consensus leadership presents significant challenges in practice. One of the primary issues is the glacial pace of decision-making.” In a slow world, glacial decision-making might be survivable. In an AI-shaped world, it’s self-sabotage dressed up as collaboration.

When I listen to founders, investors, and operators across Canada, I hear the same frustration in different accents: We have talent, we have ideas, we have research, we have decency—why do we keep losing the value capture?

The answer is rarely intelligence alone. It’s posture.

Stop Exporting the Upside

Canada loves to say we invented things. I’m less interested in the brag and more interested in the pattern. We contribute to foundational breakthroughs, and then we hesitate at the commercialization phase—right when the world starts writing the real cheques.

For example, Canada played a foundational role in the development of modern artificial intelligence. Researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio were among the earliest champions of deep learning, helping revive neural networks at a time when much of the AI field had moved away from them.

Their work, carried out largely at Canadian universities and supported by research institutions such as the Vector Institute and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), laid much of the intellectual groundwork for the AI systems that now power everything from search engines to language models.

Canada invested heavily in fundamental research and academic collaboration, creating one of the world’s strongest clusters of AI talent and ideas. Yet when it came time to commercialize those breakthroughs, the center of gravity shifted elsewhere.

American technology companies such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind built the platforms, scaled research capitalization, and turned those ideas into globally dominant products and services.

Many of the techniques pioneered in Canadian labs now sit at the heart of technologies developed and controlled by U.S. firms. The pattern is familiar in Canada’s innovation history: world-class scientific discovery at home, followed by global market leadership emerging somewhere else.

That mismatch is what has led to the unfortunate “brain drain” of ambitious Canadians moving to places where capital moves faster, where procurement is bolder, and where scale isn’t treated as suspicious.

From Brain Drain to Boldness

To combat these challenges, Canada desperately needs a new approach. As Laurent Carbonneau writes in an article for the Council of Canadian Innovators, “We cannot let the world – and Canadians! – think that our country is a second-best option for innovative investment.”

It’s time for Canadians to stop playing nice.

When I say this, I’m not saying Canada should become cruel. I’m saying Canada should become serious. Serious about intellectual property. Serious about scaling. Serious about buying from our own innovators. Serious about moving at the speed of the moment, not the speed of our comfort.

Because if we don’t shift from politeness to power, we will keep producing talent for other nations’ balance sheets. And we’ll keep calling it “the Canadian way,” as if that makes it acceptable.