Energy Drivers – How can Canada navigate its economic challenges and position itself for sustainable growth?

00:00:00 - 00:01:03

Lance Mortlock

Welcome to the next episode of the Energy Drivers podcast. I’m Lance Mortlock, your host for today’s discussion with Dr. Jack Mintz, a world-renowned economist, author, academic and public policy analyst. Throughout our series, we invite Canadian energy and industrial leaders to engage in discussions on key issues, share insights, and pose challenging questions. We are pleased to welcome Dr. Mintz, one of Canada’s most distinguished scholars in public policy. As the President’s Fellow at the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary and a Member of the Order of Canada, he conducts research and provides leadership in areas such as tax policy, financial regulation and urban policy programs. Today, we will explore the ever-changing global order and the current economic challenges, and how Canada could position itself in an increasingly complex landscape. Dr. Mintz, thank you for joining our podcast.

00:01:04-00:01:07

Dr. Jack Mintz

Well, thank you very much, Lance. It’s a pleasure to be here.

00:01:08-00:01:30

Lance Mortlock

So, let’s kick off with, I always like to kick off these podcasts with an easy first question to kind of get the juices flowing. You’ve had a remarkable career in economics and public policy. So, to begin with, could you share a bit about your personal journey and have you always aspired to be an economist and an academic?

00:01:31-00:04:00

Dr. Jack Mintz

Well, it’s a very good question.

In fact, when I first started my undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta, I began in history because I always used to like reading history. I still do. But after my first year, I fell in love with economics, maybe because of its mathematical orientation, which at that time I didn’t realize I actually enjoyed a lot.

I then went on to Queen’s. I did my Master’s in Economics, at Queen’s University, took a year out, worked at the now defunct Economic Council of Canada, worked on a banking study. In fact, it ended up being my first publication later on, and rather controversial one, I should say, at that time, because I measured excess profits earned by Canadian banks, which the banking industry didn’t really appreciate.

And then I went on to do my PhD in England on Public Economics, particularly taxation policy. Then came back taught at Queen’s, and I was there for 11 years. But during that time, I went up to Ottawa for my first time working in government doing corporate tax reform, 1984 to 1986, which I wrote the document that came out on restructuring the corporate tax at that time, in [then federal Finance Minister] Michael Wilson’s very first budget.

And then, I went to the University of Toronto in 1989, did a lot of consulting work with the World Bank, IMF, OECD, etc. And then I was, called upon by, the Department of Finance to become the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist and to run a panel on business tax reform for the Minister of Finance at that time, Paul Martin, and the Deputy Minister, David Dodge.

And so I was up in Ottawa again for two years, then back at the University of Toronto after which I was asked to run the C.D. Howe Institute. So, I still stayed at the University of Toronto. I then taught 20% of the time and supervised some PhD students, as I ran the C.D. Howe Institute for seven years. After it was finished I was asked to start up the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, which I look upon as the feather in my cap, in a sense, as it was really, exciting to do a startup organization at that time.

And I’ve been at the University of Calgary since then.

00:04:01-00:04:29

Lance Mortlock

Okay. That’s a remarkable career that you’ve had. And I’m looking forward to kind of getting into some of the more specifics here, in your recent Financial Post article titled “Election Swagger is Over, now back to the future,” you highlighted some of the challenges Canada faces under the new government.

Could you share your perspective on the current economic conditions and what Canadians should be really focused on right now?

00:04:30-00:05:07

Dr. Jack Mintz

Well, I think I’ve been pushing this argument not only for the federal government, but also for the provincial governments, particularly Ontario, which is 40% of Canada’s GDP and also suffers from the same, you know, issues that I think the federal government in Canada faces as a whole.

Business, non-residential investment has been basically flatlined, over the past 10 years, which, of course is very serious, because if you want to build the economy and to have more goods and services produced higher incomes in the future, you need investment.

00:05:08-00:05:10

Lance Mortlock

Can you explain that in layman’s terms to our listeners?

00:05:11-00:06:41

Jack Mintz

Okay. So, the size of the economy is measured by adding up all the incomes that are earned in different sectors of the economy. What’s paid to labour, what’s paid to owners of capital, etc., landowners, etc. And you add that all up and that’s what’s called, gross domestic product, which is GDP, which is the sum of adding up all this income being paid out across all sectors of the economy. In real terms, once you adjust for inflation, GDP per capita since 2015 has not grown at all for a decade. In fact, it’s the only case amongst the G7 countries. France and Germany and European and Japan haven’t been, growing very fast either, but they’ve been growing, at least in their GDP per capita. The United States has had the best growth. And this is including the pandemic year, which was 2020, which was a very bad year.

But even including that year, the US grew 11% cumulative growth over that period. And so, Canada has been falling behind. And when you have lower incomes being generated, it starts creating a lot of stresses on the economy, including brain drain, where young people feel they don’t have the opportunities that they have here so they could go, for example, moving  to United States. In fact, that has been happening to some degree. There’s been an increase.

00:06:42-00:06:44

Lance Mortlock

You know, what’s the scale of that? Is it big numbers.

00:06:45-00:09:49

Dr. Jack Mintz

Well, it’s very hard to tell. Because the difficulty is that Canada doesn’t have very good emigration data. We have good immigration data  people coming into the country, but not very good data for people leaving the country. So, people look at the US data on Canadians that have moved to the United States. But we don’t have aggregate data to look at what  other countries people are moving to as well. But it did pick up quite a bit after 2020. We’re talking about 130,000, 150,000 people per year, which adds up to fairly large number over time.

We don’t really have good data to say that young people or older people, but there’s lots of anecdotal evidence that, you know people have in terms of graduating from universities in Canada and then taking jobs in the United States. So, the brain drain can be a serious issue. And that’s partly because now US incomes are almost, 40% higher than in Canada, in US-equivalent dollars.

And so, that’s an issue, where you start falling behind, you start getting a stress, where you start losing your best and brightest, going elsewhere. We’ve also had other challenges that are facing the economy, of which, of course, the latest one, has been the America First strategy, which is reordering trade around the world. We can get into more detail later but that’s ’s going to have an impact on the Canadian economy as well.

And then, of course, we also depend on growth in the United States, particularly, which has been fairly robust which has been   good for us. But we’re now expecting because of some of the trade issues or the tariffs being imposed by the US, on its own growth. But also some of the geopolitical disruption that’s going to today and all those things sort of slow growth.

One other item I did mention, which is important is of course, the rise in inflation that we had after 2020, because interest is a payment to people to not only give them a return on their savings, but also to compensate for inflation that erodes their wealth. And so, the real interest rate which takes out inflation is very important. And that has gone up from almost zero or negative, before 2020. And now it’s in the area of 2%. And I’m talking about worldwide, not just Canada. And so that means we’re in a different world today than we were in the pre-pandemic period. And it’s going to have an impact, obviously, on growth, but at least the governments are getting inflation down.

But they are facing much higher debt than they’ve had in the past. And so debt levels and interest being paid to cover the cost of government services has gone up quite a bit. In fact, in Canada, we’re now spending over $80 billion a year at the federal and provincial and municipal levels.

00:09:50-00:10:16

Lance Mortlock

On that thread, when you think about the proposed economic policies that we’re seeing, what are your expectations?

Do you foresee them impacting our future? Because I mean, you paint a picture that isn’t great, but here we are. We’ve got, you know, new policies being developed as we speak. And launched as we speak. Are you optimistic?

00:10:17-00:11:35

Dr. Jack Mintz

I think there’s some areas that I’m optimistic on. And one of them is technology. Artificial intelligence, obviously, I think is going to have a huge impact on the world economy and on opportunities.

It’s going to certainly increase productivity, which means that people are going to be able to produce more, given the labour resources we have and the amount of capital that we have available. And so that will be a very positive thing. And one thing that worries me about Canada is whether, we’ll be taking advantage of these new technologies or whether we’ll be left behind on that as well, because there’s huge amounts of money now being spent in the United States on artificial intelligence and incorporating it in business practices. And we’re going to have to do the same. So that’s one area to be optimistic about.

The other area, I think is, changing the orientation in government policy today in Canada, which I think is very important. The last election I think was critical because for the first time, it became an election about economic growth. In other words, you didn’t hear promises we’re going to spend more money on redistributing income in Canada.

We’re going to need to start bolstering the economy.

00:11:36-00:12:00

Lance Mortlock

So, on that, I mean, when you reflect on the last few years, Jack, several factors have hindered our economic growth and reduced, I think, Canada’s appeal to investors such as market uncertainty, regulatory complexity being prime examples. From your perspective, what should be the top priorities positioning Canada as a more competitive player in the global economy?

00:12:01-00:15:51

Dr. Jack Mintz

First of all, let me talk about trade.

To begin, I think there’s been a lack of understanding of Canada vis-a-vis the US objectives for tariffs. You can argue whether they’re good or bad objectives, doesn’t matter. But there’s three reasons why the U.S is moving towards the use of tariffs again, which we forget, you know, tariffs were a source of revenue for governments, in fact, a lot of lower-development economies still rely significantly on tariffs.

The United States now is looking at tariffs as an important source of revenue. And the people around Trump have argued that we want to have tariffs for the revenue in order to so that we can fund the income tax cuts. In fact all the discussion around the federal deficit right now, people have forgotten that there’s no tariff revenues that are included in the measure of those deficits. And so, right now, for example, the past month, the US government raised $25 billion in tariffs on a yearly basis. That would be $300 billion over 10 year if it kept the same revenue.

I’m not saying they will, but, you know, that’s $3 trillion, that would cover a big part of that deficit right now that it’s being projected. So, I think the revenue motivation is very important. And I think we’re going to probably see in the long term, some tariffs, which could be like 10%, 15% on a long-term basis in the United States.

The other argument is that the Americans are focused to drive certain industries back into the United States this is  steel, aluminum, the auto industry, and it’s not for jobs only, it’s also for national security reasons. The argument that you can’t have an armaments industry unless you have your steel industry, your aluminum industry and your critical minerals too. You have to have that and your chip manufacturing and things like that. So that may suggest that there could be certain selective tariffs that the Trump administration will use. And that may continue for a long time, just as Biden kept a number of them that Trump said as well.

And so selective tariffs like that may continue for some time. And, then the other one is correcting the trade balance. This is what the reciprocal tariffs are all about, I think those will generally disappear. You know they’ll be negotiations, and you know, elimination of a lot of them with different countries, which is what the Americans are pushing for. So, those I have more confidence will be gone. But I think the combination of selective tariffs and the general revenue tariffs, I think will be a challenge for Canada, particularly the auto industry. So, this gets into how do we manage this whole trade issue. There’s two ways of dealing with it.

One  is trade diversification, which has now become a goal of the federal government in Canada. There’s some sense to that, but it’s not easy. If you want to diversify all of the auto industry trade, we’re not competitive internationally for autos, I mean, we’re tied into the US and the Mexican markets and it’s not going to be easy to diversify a sector that right now, 82% of the autos that are produced in Canada are exported to the United States.

So, almost all of our auto trade almost everything  is directed to the United States. So, trying to start selling to Japan and Europe, will be a very significant challenge. I think if anything, all we could do is replace what we imported from the United States  ourselves, but we don’t have a lot of lines of different models.

So, that’s a big issue that’s facing Ontario, particularly that I think the since tariffs are going to remain for some time. And it will drive investment down to the United States in the auto sector. And it will slow the Ontario economy, particularly.

00:15:52-00:16:11

Lance Mortlock

How do we pivot in that case with Ontario, given how important, I mean, I looked at recent numbers that say from an automotive and a manufacturing perspective in Ontario that employs 500,000 Canadians. So, what happens to that and what does that pivot look like?

00:16:12-00:17:11

Dr. Jack Mintz

It depends, it’s different strategies. So if you look at what Australia did back in the 1990s, when Australia really pursued a number of economic reforms, much to their success, they wanted to include trade reforms with significant reductions in tariffs. They removed a lot of tariffs protecting their auto sector, and they made the decision, rather than subsidizing the auto sector, they would just let it go. And it didn’t mean that the whole economy fell apart and the resources were redirected to other industries where they could be quite competitive.

I think our pivot is going to have to be much more than trying to keep the auto sector going. We may lose auto production. In fact, it’s gone down a certain extent anyway over the past number of years. And maybe, what we’ll end up looking at is other sectors to grow the economy.

You know, Ontario’s got a very strong financial sector. We could develop technology a lot more than we do right now. And we also have mining that’s available in Ontario. So there’s a number of them.

00:17:12-00:17:22

Lance Mortlock

I’m quite optimistic, by the way, that the Ring of Fire and talking about it for decades, finally, this could be our moment that we actually build that out.

00:17:23-00:19:15

Dr. Jack Mintz

Hopefully, if we work out a good consultation with the Indigenous and their support, I think that’s going to be absolutely critical. Right now, we haven’t had any large mine developments for a couple of decades already.

The other the other big one, of course, is energy. There’s been a calculation done by some friends of  which I haven’t been able to check all the details, but the fact that we haven’t been able to build LNG and the fact that we turned down pipelines for oil, that. if you add it all up, the loss in GDP and the loss and potential employment associated with that was as much as the auto industry is today. People forget how much that we have hurt ourselves by blocking energy exports.

Now, there seems to be a change in mind at the federal level. I’m not sure quite yet if they’re really willing to pursue competitive exports, or whether they’re still going to, you know, such as requiring decarbonized oil and decarbonized natural gas, which I don’t think will be competitive, but we’ll have to see how it all goes.

These two, both autos and energy, are the two biggest export items.

They make up a third of our total exports. Energy is about 20% of our total exports to the world. And auto is about 11%. And so, those are going to be two challenges to really diversify. And that will depend very much on government policy. And the question is, can we maybe develop other things, you know, that we could diversify besides those sectors. There is mining, that is the other major export item that we have And when you look at the list of the top exports and coming out of Canada.

00:19:16-00:19:26

Lance Mortlock

But when it takes up to 20 years to approve a new mine, you know, we’ve got to optimize that can’t continue.

00:19:27-00:19:47

Dr. Jack Montz

No, it can’t continue.

And this is where, our challenge is going to be. I think at least there is a good intention, improving our ports and improving our regulatory system, etc. And I think this is great, but, you know, words are easier to say than actions. I think we will have to see how things evolve.

00:19:48-00:20:14

Lance Mortlock

Proof is in the pudding. And on fiscal policy, you’ve been very vocal about fiscal policy reform and, in particular taxation. In what ways should the tax policy change? And can you maybe expand a bit on why competitive taxation systems matter? Just from a simple perspective, given our audience is pretty broad.

00:20:15-00:21:29

Dr. Jack Mintz

If you had no taxes at all, that wouldn’t make much sense because then you would never be able to fund some of the public services that you need. For example, roads, highways and, you know, things that can’t be provided by the market economy.

Also, defence. So, zero taxation doesn’t make sense for any country and you don’t see it in any country. But neither does 100% taxation work either, because then you have no private sector. You’re basically having a communist country where everything is controlled from the top. As we know, the price system and the market economy provides signals about how to direct resources without having somebody at the top trying to figure it all out, which we know is impossible to do.

But also, you need to rely on taxes that do less harm to the economy. Every tax is negative, it’s just that some taxes are worse than others. And so we really need to pay attention to the taxes that are particularly harmful to the economy and rely less on them and rely more on those taxes that aren’t as harmful.

But also we have to remember how much government do you need in the economy. Right now, it’s about 42% of GDP is government expenditure.

00:21:30-00:21:50

Lance Mortlock

Yeah. There’s a famous quote from Winston Churchill, you would have heard of this quote, and he says, A nation that tries to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up out using the handle. What do you think about that? Are we trying to tax ourselves into prosperity?

00:21:51-00:22:17

Dr. Jack Mintz

It’s funny. I’m just writing something on income tax reform, and I used that very quote. No, you can’t tax yourself into prosperity. But we have to remember that, you do need a certain level of taxes, as I said, depending, to the extent you want government services. But maybe we need to spend more attention on how much money governments spend. And that requires improving productivity in the government sector as well as getting rid of those programs that really aren’t effective. And I can go through a whole bunch of those.

00:22:18-00:22:31

Lance Mortlock

Yeah. I mean, earlier this year, you discussed capital gains rollover as a measure to maintain competitiveness. Can you explain how this policy could benefit Canadians and businesses, especially in the current global economic climate?

00:22:32-00:23:54

Dr. Jack Mintz

 Capital gains rollover, is, I wouldn’t say it’s the be-end of the  end-all that would shock the economy into a much higher state, but it would be very important for venture capital. It would be very important for very risky type capital investments. Instead of paying capital gains right away, if they’ve put their money into an alternative, which in principle should be a better alternative, so this would potentially improve productivity, it reduces the impact of what’s called the lock-in effect, where people lock in their money into, less performing assets in order to avoid triggering capital gains taxes, rather than putting their money into better assets.

And so capital gains rollover is really a way of taking away a distortion caused by capital gains taxes that are on realizations. The difficulty is it allows people to defer their capital gains taxes even further and allows it to be less taxed than other sources of income. And so it creates another distortion. But I think a number of countries have gone the way of introducing rollovers, partly because they know it plays a very significant role in risk taking, and generating and encouraging startups etc.

00:23:55-00:24:24

Lance Mortlock

Another critical component for safeguarding our economy is reducing trade barriers. Last week, or a couple of weeks ago, you published an article in which you argued that reducing interprovincial trade barriers may not be as impactful as pursuing other opportunities. Can you maybe explain why this is the case, and also instead what are the key markets for Canadian free trade opportunities in your mind?

00:24:25-00:25:59

Dr. Jack Mintz

Well, on interprovincial trade, it’s always useful to get rid of some barriers. It’s also useful when we have harmonization of policies across provinces to reduce distortions.

But that’s not part of the trade barrier discussion. The trade barrier discussion is about licensing arrangements with regard to the labour mobility. It’s about reducing regulations or at least moving towards more harmonization of regulations, like trucking regulations.

There’s value if we could reduce some of the trade barriers. But when you look at the trade agreement, not only in Canada but elsewhere, they often avoid or they often exempt certain government policies, including taxation. And so, if a government really wants to protect an industry, it’s pretty easy to do it, without putting in a tariff or putting in a non-trade barrier, it could put in a preferential treatment of under the tax system for a particular activity.

A good example is Ontario. They’re running around saying we want to reduce interprovincial trade barriers. But in the meantime, as they did in their last budget and that they’ve done in previous budgets, they have a lower excise tax on wine, beer manufactured in Ontario compared to imported beer and wine. And so, it’s a perfect example. And they’re not the only province, by the way, and several others do.

To me, the number one trade action is to have a deal with the US and try to reduce tariffs as much as possible,  may not go to zero.

00:26:00-00:26:12

Lance Mortlock

Do you see also a long-term pivot that makes sense for the Canadian economy to trade more with Asia and Europe and not to be so reliant on our biggest, most important customer south of the border.

00:26:13-00:27:51

Dr. Jack Mintz

First of all, 75% of our exports go to the United States. And so trying to shift away is difficult. But people forget the reason why trade happens in regions is because you get your best economic value that way. Transportation costs are less. Canada-U.S. have very similar cultures, which also means it’s easier to know the US economy as you might know your own economy.

It’s a lot more difficult to say you’re going to go to Asia, where you don’t speak the language, where you have to learn how they operate, things like that. Same thing in Europe. Yes, we can trade more. And I think internationally, it’d be great to trade with whoever we want to. And having options is valuable.

But in the end, the economics will drive us to the United States. Historically there’s been lots of discussion about trade diversification. It happened back in the early 1970s. It was a third option a paper that came out the federal government about, you know, trying to expand or trade with other countries and not be so reliant on the United States.

When the NAFTA agreement was solidified with also Mexico trade really took off after 1993 to our benefit. I think it’s very difficult to disengage without actually probably losing some economic returns if we think that we can easily diversify to other countries. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take advantage of those things if they can happen. But I don’t think it’s going to be that easy to replace 75% of our trade with 75%of trade going to Asia and Europe.

00:27:52-00:28:21

Lance Mortlock

But if you take a step back and you look at what the administration is trying to do south of the border to encourage manufacturing, to encourage investment in the US, I mean, the President himself has said, you know, he wants why are we making cars in Canada?

Why are we using Canadian energy? You know, why can’t we be doing more of this domestically? I guess my question is, is this strategy going to work economically? Can it work?

00:28:22-00:29:27

Dr. Jack Mintz

I don’t think a strategy is going to work in the longer run. I think there’s too much cost that’s being associated with that.

And he’s also creating with the America First strategy and the alienation of allies, which has important ramifications not only for trade but also for security. And so I think there’ll be eventual reversal, but it doesn’t mean that the United States will go exactly back to where it was, which it was before 2016,

So we’ve kind of moved to a more nationalistic trade policy that we hadn’t seen, for a number of years. I think there will be a shift back in the United States to understanding that they have to work with their allies.

So, the question is what can Canada get? I think what Canada will have to tide us over for the next several years, because Trump will be gone  in a few years time. But for something that’s going to be in the longer run, and I think to the degree that we can remove tariffs as much as possible. If we get it down to zero, I’ll be amazed. But it would be great if we can.

00:29:28-00:29:40

Lance Mortlock

Given the challenges faced by industries like energy in particular, what role do you think government policy plays in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in the energy space?

00:29:41-00:30:53

Dr. Jack Mintz

I think we are moving to a transition. There’s going to be new sources of energy that’s going to be desired, whether it’s going to be small nuclear reactors, geothermal, solar, wind, whatever.

And we are starting to see changes occurring there. And we’ll probably see more decarbonization, like carbon capture utilization and storage investments that reduces carbon associated with greenhouse gas emissions, especially in the oil and gas sector, but also mining, that people forget about.

I think we’ll also see a desire to try to keep pushing energy costs down as much as possible. One thing that’s been forgotten is that over the decades, we have reduced our requirement for energy as we’ve grown our economies. Economies have been growing roughly about 5% per year but energy use has gone up by like 2% or 3%.

So the amount of energy per unit of GDP has actually been declining historically, even before 1990, when we started talking about greenhouse gas emissions.

00:30:54-00:30:59

Lance Mortlock

So, does that mean energy is becoming less important over time to the Canadian economy?

00:31:00-00:31:54

Dr. Jack Mintz

No, it doesn’t mean that. It’ll still grow because economies are growing. And so there’ll be need for more energy.

But the point is that we’ve been achieving more and more energy efficiency. And I think that will be an objective of innovative policy, is to reduce the requirement for energy. Energy is absolutely critical for growth itself. A good example is  a book by Ian Morris, Why the West Rules for Now, he identified three major factors that lead to more growth. One of them being energy, the other two being innovation and urbanization. Going back 10,000 years explains a lot of economic growth, worldwide. And so, energy will always be very important.

In fact, it’s absolutely critical. But the question is how you source it and how you can make it both efficient technically, but also, cost efficient as well.

00:31:55-00:32:10

Lance Mortlock

Lastly, what’s your outlook for the Canadian economy in the medium term? What advice would you give to Canadian businesses and policymakers to prepare for the challenges and the opportunities ahead?

00:32:11-00:33:23

Dr. Jack Mintz

I’m probably a little more negative on the short term because I do think the next two years are going to be tough, partly because of these trade disruptions, partly because of other geopolitical disruptions, higher interest rates, , and the fact that Canada’s actually not going to rely on population growth to grow the economy.

It’s going to be relying, it’s going to have to improve productivity. And that’s going to take some time to get things done. In the medium term, I am actually optimistic that, especially the way governments and voters that are thinking today that we do need to start reestablishing the basis for more economic growth in this economy. If because that’s how you’re going to be able to pay for things, whether it includes your social safety nets or roads and highways, education and health care and all the things that people put value on.

So I think that change in attitude is going to be very helpful. What I would like to see this government policy that really unleashes the animal spirits in the private sector. I think that’s what’s been missing the past 10 years. And that’s not through governments interfering with business decisions, it’s with governments getting out of the way of business decisions.

00:33:24-00:33:42

Lance Mortlock

Yeah. So short term, a little bit more pessimism, medium term, more optimism. Before we conclude, any other thoughts or insights that you’d like to share with our listeners?

00:33:43-00:34:35

Dr. Jack Mintz

I think the one insight that I’ve always had in public policy is how hard it is to predict the future even with the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, etc., I always like to remind people what it was like in 1913.

Did anyone around the world expect that there would be two major wars and a Great Depression in the next 45 years. And of course no one did in 1913. And so we’re sitting now in 2025, what the world will look like at 2050, I don’t think it’s that easy to predict.

And there could be all sorts of things that will evolve over time. Some good, some bad, but we’ll have to see. But I think one of the good things is technology and how that can really help along. But I’m not going to sit here to predict where that’s going to take us yet.

00:34:36-00:34:58

Lance Mortlock

Yeah. I mean, technology alone, we spent $2.5 trillion on digital technology last year as a planet in one year. Incredible. Thank you for your time and insights. Appreciate you joining the show. It’s been a pleasure to have you join in and share some great perspectives.

00:34:59-00:35:00

Jack Mintz

It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.

00:35:01-00:37:00

Lance Mortlock

For our listeners, we encourage you to reflect on today’s discussion and share your thoughts with us. You can reach out to EY via the attached contact details or join the conversation on social media.

Finishing another great episode. I’d like to share three final messages with our listeners. Number one, proactive policymaking. The new federal government has an opportunity to provide more market certainty and reduce risks. Policymakers must take proactive steps to address the current economic challenges and foster growth. Canada needs a more conducive investment environment, and policymakers need to help stabilize our economy while promoting sustainable growth with smarter regulation, government trade and tax policies.

Number two, I’m optimistic about the future. Although it’s difficult to forecast Canada’s economic future, as Dr. Mintz mentioned, he did also highlight that the outlook may change based on encouraging domestic and foreign investment, as well as fiscal policy reform that we’re poised to implement. Canada needs to focus on the future opportunities rather than dwelling on the failures of the last decade.

And finally, number three, collaboration for innovation. There’s an urgent need for collaboration between government and industry to drive innovation and resilience in the Canadian economy. Building a strong partnership between the public, the private sectors is crucial for fostering an ecosystem that supports innovation. Together, we can tackle pressing issues, leverage resources and create a more resilient economy that benefits all Canadians in the years to come.

So once again, thank you for joining our podcast, and we’ll see you on the next episode.