On Turning a Made-in-USA Crisis into a Made-in-Canada Mission

 

By Don Curren

 

                                                        

Unfortunately, it seems to have been an American who coined the phrase, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

It’s unfortunate, because it’s extremely relevant in Canada at the moment.

As with many great “quotations,” the actual provenance of that phrase is murky.

But rather than dive into a deep rabbit hole about that, let’s, for the purposes of this discussion, accept the following version, spoken by former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel, as definitive:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

His fellow Chicagoan, libertarian economist Milton Friedman, was even more emphatic about the importance of crises in precipitating change.

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around,” Friedman said.

(We’ll meet Friedman again in a minute or two.)

The crisis I’m referring to here, of course, is the crisis US President Donald Trump plunged Canada into when he started his campaign of threatening our country’s sovereignty, belittling our leaders, and inflicting economic damage with real and threatened tariffs.

Rham’s general point about crises and the opportunities they create is particularly true of the crisis we find ourselves in.

The crisis triggered by Trump has revealed with punishing clarity what we need to change to achieve our extraordinary potential as a nation.

It’s revealed with how vulnerable our crucial dependency on the US makes us in two key areas: our economy and our security.

And the opportunity it presents to us is the opportunity to fix that.

But before we address that, I’d like to explore briefly how we got ourselves into this situation, as I believe that might help shed some light on how to fix it.

I don’t for a moment accept the notion Canadians find themselves in this situation due to laziness, ineptitude, or “stupidity.”

The companies that cultivated export markets in the US rather than elsewhere were simply executing in the neoliberal version of capitalism that emerged as dominant in the last few decades of the 20^th Century, the version that emphasized the maximization of shareholder value in the short term that was articulated persuasively and influentially by the aforementioned Milton Friedman.

And that orientation was implicitly sanctioned and expedited by the federal government in its pursuit of free trade with the US through the negotiation of the original Free Trade Agreement that went into effect in 1989 and its expansion to include Mexico in the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994.

The Canadian businesses that focused on the American market were just doing what the prevailing version of capitalism told them to do.

That approach worked well, as long as the US remained a reliable trading partner - until January 20, 2025, when Trump was inaugurated as the 47^th president of the United States.

The next few weeks revealed the vulnerabilities in the Canadian economy that the neoliberal version of capitalism had created.

They were a visceral reminder our country had developed a critical co-dependence with its massive neighbor to the south.

We discovered – or were forcefully reminded – that we were rather like adult children who remain dependent on their parents for too long.

It seemed that, collectively, we have been living in kind of arrested adolescence, dependent on a “parent” that had been mostly benign for decades but suddenly turned hostile.

Of course, analogies between people and the nations they create can be misleading.

Nations are much more complicated; they tend to be cyclical and go through a broad range of changes and transformations in response to the vicissitudes of history.

Canada might seem quasi-adolescent now, but it has, in the past, been an adult.

It’s lived through events that have forced it to grow into maturity rapidly and faced up to those circumstances in a more-than-impressive way.

The obvious examples are World Wars I and II. Especially the latter, where Canada joined the fight against fascist tyranny two years before the US and played a role in defeating it that far outweighed the size of its population and economy.

It's the bravery, strength and resilience Canada has demonstrated in the past that make me confident it can prevail against the challenge posed by the current psychopathic leadership of the US.

The first step is clarity about the situation that confronts us.

I believe the signs Canadians understand the seriousness of the threat are superabundant.

The surge in patriotism in evidence across the country – and particularly in Quebec – is one such sign.

The willingness to discuss and tackle homegrown obstacles to growth and prosperity – interprovincial trade barriers being a key one - is another.

And the sharp decline of support for the Conservative Party of Canada, its leader Pierre Poilievre and his imitative brand of populism also reflects a deeper dimension of the self-awareness awakened by Trump.

It’s not only that we don’t want to be assimilated by the US. It’s that we don’t want to live in a country that’s remotely like what the US is becoming.

We are repelled by what’s happening in the US and want to reaffirm our own values in response.

We want to keep our country a bastion of freedom, equality, and compassion and the rule of law, however imperfect a realization of those ideals it might be.

The problem now is how to ensure that we create a secure, strong and sustainable Canada that can continue to embody and pursue those ideals.

That means acknowledging the issues that, along with our excessive focus on the US as an export market, have undermined our prosperity and economic strength and resilience.

Those include interprovincial trade barriers, our lagging productivity growth, our failure to diversify our economy, the “brain drain,” and our chronic inability to fund research and development effectively.

The first step is to ensure that we have leadership that unequivocally embraces those ideals.

We have, fortuitously, the opportunity to do just that in less than one week’s time.

We also, fortuitously, have an usually stark choice between a leader who is clearly committed to preserving Canada’s independence and its distinctive value system – Liberal Leader and incumbent Prime Minister Mark Carney – and one who’s commitment is questionable - Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

Ensuring that Carney is elected is job one.

But it’s only the  beginning.

It’s imperative that Carney and the rest of Canada’s political and economic leadership build on the momentum for positive change that’s been unleashed in the last several weeks.

Carney has recognized that the current situation is an opportunity for Canada, as well as a calamity.

“It’s a crisis, but it’s also a massive, massive opportunity,” Carney said in February, when he was running for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

To say it’s not going to be easy is, of course, an understatement.

It’s going to take a willingness to move quickly, and to experiment. To embrace new ways of doing things, see if they work, and if, necessary, discard them quickly.

It might also require a re-imaging of the roles of government and business in shaping the economic and social order.

Which is where we encounter Milton Friedman for the third time.

Just as I suggested there’s a compelling argument that short-term, profit-maximizing thinking is what created our excessive dependence on the US as an export market, there are compelling arguments to be made that we need to re-examine its overall dominance in our approach to capitalism.

UK economist Mariana Mazzucato does that in her 2021 book Mission Economy:  A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, and I believe her thinking provides a rough blueprint for how Canada should tackle its current crisis.

Mazzucato believes the neoliberal form of capitalism has proven unable to address the issues currently facing us globally. She describes it as “dysfunctional.”

“There are a variety of different forms of capitalism, and we have the wrong one,” Mazzucato writes.

Her solution is a form of capitalism where government takes an active role in shaping economic and social development, which she refers to as a “mission economy.”

“Missions are about bringing a high level of strategic purpose to value creation. They are an admission that growth has not only a rate, but a direction – and that direction should have a purpose,” Mazzucato writes.

The purpose in this case would be ensuring the continued existence of Canadian as a strong, sovereign, independent and compassionate country.

Her historical paradigm for the idea of the mission economy is what transpired in the US in the 1960s after President John F. Kennedy called in 1962 for America to land a man on the moon and return him safely before the end of the decade.

Mazzucato explores in detail how the US government, through its agency NASA, drove the push toward achieving that goal, but collaborated extremely closely with the private sector.

She depicts the process as free-wheeling, flexible, creative and, perhaps most importantly, effective.

The US achieved its goal, and in the process spurred a wave of innovation and accelerated technological development that transformed the US and global economies.

What I’m suggesting is that Canadians should embrace a “mission” approach to a program of national renewal that would tackle the issues that have hobbled the country and prevented it from realizing its potential, starting with our excessive reliance on the US.

The federal government could take the lead, using existing agencies like the Export Development corporation (h/t to my Bluesky friend @brainchain.ca), or creating new ones if warranted.

But the private sector would have to be integrally involved. The entire process would have to be a genuine collaboration between the private and public sectors.

An obstacle that will likely be encountered is the suspicion of government-led economic initiatives, the “market fundamentalism” that’s part and parcel of the neoliberal, Friedmanite version of capitalism that prevailed in the last few decades of the 20^th century and the early years of the 21^st.

But, as Mazzucato and other economists and policy experts point out, market fundamentalism fails to take into account that markets don’t exist as some kind of natural phenomena that observe their own immutable logic independently of the needs of society and the individuals that make it.

Markets are constructed by societies and should operate for their collective benefit.  

“Markets are made, not born. They are public creations and have guardrails which should be democratically determined. Who makes them, and the rules that govern them are up to us,” write Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar in their book The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians.

Their book explores one of the issues that has stunted Canada’s economy – the excessive market power of some key corporations – and explores approaches to addressing it that echo Mazzucato’s ideas.

Another likely objection to the adoption of a “mission economy” approach to renewing Canada will be the cost, particularly since the federal government is already deeply into deficit finance territory and is already looking at the added expense of helping companies and individuals cope with the effects of Trump’s tariffs.

But Canada’s fiscal situation is still considerably better than that of the US and many other peer countries.

And if you’re ever going to open the fiscal spigots, an existential crisis seems like a good time to do it.

“The wrong question is: how much money is there and what can we do with it? The right question is: what needs doing and how can we structure budgets to meet those goals?” Mazzucato writes.

She points out that JFK and NASA were frequently called upon to justify the enormous expense of the Apollo project, but “in the end the pressure and urgency to ‘beat the Russians’ made the money come through.”

 “Indeed, the urgency to win is why money is always available for war-time missions – whether in the world wars of Vietnam or Iraq. Money seems to be created for this purpose,” she writes.

More generally, wars illustrate her broader point that governments can take a leading role in capitalist democracies in times of existential stress, and rally societies around collective goals in a truly impressive way.

It might seem like an overstatement, but Canada’s situation is in some ways like being in a war.

Given Trump’s confused and often infantile thinking on Canada (which I wrote about here), it’s difficult to gauge how serious his threats to our sovereignty are.

He has, for unclear reasons, backed off his more extreme rhetoric about annexing Canada in recent weeks, and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where the US would embark on an actual military invasion of its northern neighbor.

But in a way, that’s not the point.

The point is that the episode has revealed vulnerabilities and obstacles that we need to fix regardless of what’s happening south of the border.

They are challenging issues, and to resolve them we do need to mobilize in a way similar to the way we mobilized in the 1940s.

One of the most critical of those issues is our dependence on the US for security, and it needs to be a priority.

Fixing would require setting a clear and specific objective for defence spending as a percentage of GDP, identifying the key areas where spending is required to meet that objective, and then acting expeditiously to achieve it.

The same basic approach can be used in other key areas where Canadians want to make fundamental changes, such as diversification of export markets.

The process is perhaps a little easier in defence because NATO has established as a guideline defence spending of 2% of GDP, a level that Canada is not currently meeting.

But equally specific objectives could be established in other areas through a dialogue involving governments, corporations, and the public.

Mazzucato and other advocates of a mission-oriented approach emphasize the public must be involved in developing the objectives and outlines of the missions.

“For value to be created collectively, we most foster new forms of participation in that creation process, via a revival of debate, discussion and consensus-building,” she writes.

“For this, new decentralized forums are needed that bring together different voices and experiences, such as citizen assemblies,” Mazzucato writes.

From the instances she cites – Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal as a well as JFK’s moon shot – it’s also clear that strong, inspirational leadership is required.

I believe Mark Carney can rise to the challenge of leading a mission to renew Canada. A vote for Poilievre would be a vote for someone manifestly incapable of doing that.

The present moment, distressing as it is, affords us an opportunity to acknowledge our challenges, talk about how to fix them, and find the right “coach” to guide us through those difficult, but opportune, challenges.

In short - let’s keep our “Elbows Up” for as long as necessary, but then let’s have a national huddle, decide how we need to rebuild our team, and then get back out on the ice and play to win.