Why is Canada Playing Checkers While the U.S. Dominates the Digital Chessboard?
How Canada's 20th-century economic playbook is costing the country billions in the race for digital and intellectual property dominance.
Editorial Team (ET)May 28, 2026
Canada is essentially bringing a 1980s manufacturing blueprint to a 21st-century digital chess match. While global superpowers aggressively lock down the invisible infrastructure of the future, the Great White North remains comfortably, and dangerously, stuck in the past.
This strategic inertia is already costing the country a staggering $500 billion annually, according to Jim Balsillie, the outspoken former co-chief executive of BlackBerry Ltd. (TSX: BB). Speaking at the Financial Executives International Canada conference in Ottawa, Balsillie delivered a blunt reality check to Canada’s economic elite, warning that the global economy has fundamentally transformed while Canada’s playbook remains frozen in time. The wealth of nations is no longer determined solely by what can be chopped down, mined, or loaded onto a flatbed truck. Today’s economic titans thrive by owning and controlling intangible assets, specifically data, artificial intelligence, and intellectual property (IP), and while the United States has spent recent years turbocharging its capture of these modern assets, Canada has remained stubbornly anchored to a decades-old tangible production economy model.
