Another week, another trip abroad for Prime Minister Mark Carney. On Friday he left for Kuala Lumpur to attend the summit of the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN). Then he will swing by Singapore to meet prime minister Lawrence Wong, followed by the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in South Korea at the end of the week.
Hitting the foreign circuit to avoid domestic problems is a well worn habit for Canadian leaders, and lord knows Carney has an entire Tim Horton’s of trouble brewing on the home front, even aside from the usual fractiousness of the federation. On Tuesday, the Auditor General released a series of performance audits on the Canada Revenue Agency, military recruitment, cyber security, and a few other programs. And while the Auditor General’s reports are almost always quite critical (it’s sort of the job), the one on CRA was disastrous. In her report, AG Karen Hogan found that the CRA rarely answers calls in a reasonable time frame, and when it does pick up the phone, it frequently gives customers inaccurate information. As for the military, they aren’t coming close to hitting their recruiting targets, and for those who do eventually make it into a uniform, well good luck finding a place to live.
And so on.
Carney knows there is an enormous amount of work to do to fix Canada. On Wednesday evening, he gave an address to a group of students at the University of Ottawa that was clearly designed to both set expectations and rally support for the federal government’s upcoming budget. After some by-now familiar throat-clearing about this being a “hinge point” in Canada’s history, Carney told the students that we need to build a Canada that is safe, secure, and sovereign, and what underpins all of that is making sure we have a strong economy. He highlighted the familiar steps his government has taken so far (Build Canada Homes, the Major Projects Office, the Defence Investment Agency, etc.), set a clear target of doubling Canada’s non-U.S.. exports within a decade, while warning of tradeoffs and hardships to come.
It wasn’t a bad speech as these things go, though we wish he would have given it in the proper forum, namely the House of Commons, where the opposition would have the right of reply. Many of the general themes and specific theses often seemed drawn straight from Build Canada memos or principles, and we were delighted to see friend and memo author of Build Canada, Eliot Pence, quoted directly and footnoted in the speech. Carney probably thought he had done all he needed to set the table for the November 4 budget before jetting off to Asia. He was even confident enough to float the possibility of a sectoral trade deal with the U.S. that could be announced as early as next week, with movement on steel and aluminum in particular.
Then, overnight on Thursday, Donald Trump blew everything up with an angry late night posting on his Truth Social platform, announcing the immediate end of all trade negotiations with Canada. The focus of Trump’s ire was ostensibly a $75 million ad campaign bought by Ontario’s Doug Ford-led Conservative government, directed at Americans, that uses a clip from a 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan that was critical of tariffs. Trump blew his stack, calling Canada “cheaters” and saying that Reagan actually loved tariffs, while the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute claimed that Ontario had taken Reagan’s remarks out of context. While Carney tried to shrug it off, he is apparently livid at Ford over the ad. The Ontario premier has promised to suspend the ad campaign, but he has agreed to do so only after it runs over the weekend during the first few games of the World Series.
Given all this, you might think that Carney couldn’t wait to get on that plane Friday. But maybe not. The APEC summit is expected to feature a head-to-head meeting between Trump and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, as the leaders of the two biggest economies in the world try to settle their trade dispute, which has become a major flashpoint of strategic competition, if not, yet, open conflict.
Canada is caught in the middle here, and it has probably not escaped Trump’s attention that just this week our foreign affairs minister Anita Anand declared that China was now a “strategic partner” of Canada. In this volatile and uncertain new world order, there is little distinction between domestic and international politics. The prime minister may find that trouble has a way of following him wherever he goes.
What’s new at Build Canada
Rebuilding Canadian Steel
Steel is everywhere. It’s in buildings, bridges, cars, ships, wind turbines, pipelines, household appliances, and medical equipment. For a modern, industrialized nation, it is as essential to the economy as food or electricity. This is why almost every nation in the world takes strong actions to ensure that they have a strong steel industry.
In Canada however, decades of free trade with other nations that are competing on unfair playing fields has led to a heavy reliance on imports and a lacklustre industry. Chinese steelmakers in particular flood the market with products made under massive government subsidies and lax environmental standards.
At the same time Canada is burdening its own mills with carbon costs making it impossible to win back market share.
To fix this Canada must take action to give Canadian steel producers a chance: add tariffs on Chinese and other offshore steel, remove the carbon price on steel production, and use tariff revenue to protect industries hit by retaliation.
Budget Countdown
The budget is just over one week away! Over on our socials, we’re doing a budget countdown and highlighting key memo ideas we’d like to see prioritized in it. You can count down to the big day with us on our X/Twitter, LinkedIn, or Bluesky.
Donna Strickland is a Great Canadian Builder
Frickin’ lasers are everywhere, but they would be useless without chirped pulse amplification, which was developed by Waterloo professor and Nobel Prize winner Donna Strickland. She is this week’s Great Canadian Builder, with a profile written by Build Canada community member Nicolas Krause.
Build Toronto in the news
We’re also pleased to see last week’s Build Toronto launch event get covered in The Hub. “Toronto mayoral candidates are taking note,” it writes. “People are hungry to see Toronto live up to the potential we know it has.”
Events
Nearly 100 community members came out to the first ever Waterloo Meet Up hosted by the Builder’s Club. The room was lit ablaze with pro-growth discussion by a speech from Jim Murphy and the fireside with established founder Marcelo Cortes. To our community: this event started as just an X reply, and within a month it turned into something real. This is the speed at which we can build things if we set our minds to it. Want to host your own event? Join our Discord and start the conversation.
Build Canada also partnered with the BC Innovation Coalition to bridge the gap between the public and private sectors from across British Columbia to bring down the cost of housing in BC. We explored the policies that make it expensive to build (like a bylaw requiring flush toilets when more than 50 people are on site cause construction delays due to a shortage of flush port-a-potties) , how standardization using modular technologies can decrease, how to get to 1-day development permit approvals and discussed the costs of higher standards in building codes. Next month, we’re flipping the panel to explore the problems that regulators are seeing and are trying to solve.
Upcoming Build Canada events
Build Canada is partnering with Canadian Club of Toronto on a series of lunch events. The first two coming up are:
Nov 13: Building a Competitive Economy: Dawn Desjardins (Deloitte Canada), Brice Scheschuk (Globalive Capital) & Michael Serbinis (League) with Sean Speer (The Hub)
Nov 19: Nation Building through Infrastructure: Greg Grant (TC Energy), Dan Jolivet (EllisDon) & Andrea McLean (Fengate)
Also, there’s another Ottawa meetup on October 29th
On October 29th, Edmonton’s Tech Wednesdays with Build Canada at GRETA bar YEG. Registration is here.
Finally, we are hosting a lunch-hour book launch for The Dollar a Year Men in Ottawa on November 10.
What else we are reading
Real-Time Rails are coming, as Canada’s FinTech industry enters a new era of registered payment service providers.
Matt Gurney on why Canada can’t move on a foreign interference.
Prince Harry and and Meghan Markle have joined an international call for a ban on the development of an AI “superintelligence”
A negative review of “Elbows Up!” from Howard Anglin. An even more negative review from Ken Whyte.
Another hero brought low: A new study suggests Shackleton knew his ship, Endurance, wasn’t strong enough for the Antarctic ice.
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Let me try and understand your argument, Build Canada is happy that Carney is using its ideas in its plans, yet upset he's traveling abroad to sell trade ties with other countries' leaders? You know, you need to sell the stuff you build by developing clients. That's what leaders of governments and businesses should do at the highest level possible. Ministers don't have the same impact as a PM. Carney has ministers who are accountable to fix domestic things, while he sells Canadian trade ties. Are you suggesting that Carney stay home to micromanage his ministers, fixing things they can on their own? Who then sells Canadian trade ties to other state leaders then? Be practical.