Watch the video on FacebookKitchener Centre is one of Canada’s leading tech hubs, yet the government continues pushing AI policy, not listening to the leaders building it.
That’s how you create a brain drain and push innovation, investment and talent out of Canada, and directly to the United States.
What Kelly says in this video
Automatic transcript; it may contain small errors.
You had mentioned that Canada has huge potential in the technological era that our economy could really be stimulated through it. I agree completely. Innovation hubs like Canada's innovation capital, Kitchener Centre is a huge contributor to that as well as we have these amazing minds that are coming out of our universities that are turning into entrepreneurs and building our innovation. Where is the government missing the mark here? There's two things. Number one, the government's thinking is rooted in the 1970s. There's no capacity for the contemporary realities. They don't understand how to govern this, that it works very different. So the research funding, the FDI programs, all of these things are not attuned to the contemporary realities. And since you talk about the hub here, we have to accept that over the past ten years, startups out of places like Waterloo, Canadian founders, they're going to be able to work with Canadian founders. We used to be about 70% of them stayed in Canada. Now just over 30% of them stay in Canada. Any of you in business were losing 70% of your customers every year, your new customer every year. That's a crisis. So we have to start to relate to these people and talk to them and find out what's going on, why they're leaving, what are the problems. Again, we can't do performative stuff because the people just leave. And that's part of my time in philanthropy, trying to encourage people to stay in Canada and build in Canada. And it's made far too hard to make that case when, quite frankly, they're putting wind in their face. I agree completely. I'm going to circle back to that. I just wanted to ask a question because you did focus quite a bit on trade in your beginning statement. And so as we head into this Kuzma review, do you personally have a clear strategy to shape the terms of this negotiation to maintain advantage over our tech and data sectors? Oh, 100%. We're not prepared at all. Not at all. Not in the slightest. It's pure performativeness. I've been involved in this. The US has a, it's now 1,000 experts on 26 committees by law of Congress. And they've been preparing. So when we got into USMCA, imagine 26 committees, there's a million words in USMCA. I've had the words free trade in it. Each one gets 40,000 words for their sector to say, this is what I want, that they've spent six, seven years preparing. And we show up with an ad hoc group saying, yikes, then we run the clock and then they say, either sign it or we're pulling the plug. Remember how that all happened? And I wrote a piece saying, this is going to be bad. And they've weaponized ambiguity because they can restart in six and a half years. And they're saying, well, we weren't prepared. And there is no preparation right now, I know the people that are in it. What is our response when they put their next million words into it? And so, but again, we had a 1970s conception that it's hands off, get out of the way, let it flow, it's all shared when in fact it's wind loss, landlord tenant, and we had no strategies to be the landlord, so we became progressively the tenant. We had so many potential and so many blessings, but now we're vulnerable to leverage in every aspect of our sovereign democratic nation. So, have you personally been in conversations with the government sounding the alarm here to say, get prepared because this is what we're seeing? Many times. And have you been listened to at all in any way? It's not that they're adversarial, it's they don't understand. Period. I'm trying to tell you they're locked in a bygone era. That's why I use the metaphor of the stroke, if you've ever read books on these, you can try to persuade someone they have a right arm and they don't believe you. No, I have no right arm. It's not there. It's not there. And I could go chapter and verse. It's, you know, it's like we say we have the most free trade agreements in the world. If they're instruments for regulatory remote control, then we're the most shackled in the world. So they're instruments of shackling, not of enabling. If you don't approach them with expertise, which we did not, we approached them with a 1970s production liberalization model and then the gas light saying we're the envy of the world. And when I engage with these people, Europe fights tooth and nail and refuses to concede to the very things Canada all conceded to because they know it's the end of the game.
