Changing narratives

Stephen Marche, Jon Shell and Vass Bednar break down the details of "How Canada Wins at Trade". 

Stephen Marche, Jon Shell and Vass Bednar break down the details of "How Canada Wins at Alliances". 

Stephen Marche, Jon Shell and Vass Bednar do a deep dive on episode one of the new season of Gloves Off.

Building on lessons from a roundtable at DemocracyXChange 2026, this joint report from the Atkinson Foundation, Social Capital Partners, and DemocracyXChange provides strategies and democratic practices to build community wealth.

Canada's wealth gap appeared to narrow between 2019 and 2023 and we set out to make sense of this. SCP's Director of Policy Dan Skilleter, the lead author on our 2024 Billionaire Blindspot report, connected with sector colleagues working on wealth concentration and dug into all the best available data. What he found was that the dip was largely a mirage, driven by a pandemic housing boom that temporarily inflated the one asset ordinary Canadians hold: their home. Meanwhile, these soaring prices locked out an entire generation from building wealth altogether.

The Ontario Securities Commission wants to give retail investors access to private markets. But as Rachel Wasserman tells BNN Bloomberg, when you look closely, it starts to look less like democratization and more like offloading risk onto people with the least power to absorb it. Private equity is already underperforming and PE's biggest historical champions are quietly reducing their exposure. This proposal to offer retail investors access to PE stands to benefit the asset managers and intermediaries, with everyday investors bearing the costs and risks.

Canada is overdue for a broader debate on intergenerational fairness and how our taxes and benefits support—and exclude—different age groups. As Kiran Gill and Matthew Mendelsohn explain in Policy Options, we continue to live with programs designed by baby boomers to provide security to seniors, even if those seniors are well off. Meanwhile, young adults in our country face challenges entering the labour market, securing stable employment and saving to build some measure of economic security in the face of rising costs. They propose a policy designed to make the economy work for younger Canadians—a youth supplement to the existing Canada Workers Benefit. This youth employment supplement—aptly coined a YES!—could help rebuild financial security and allow younger adults to buy homes, finance education for themselves or their children and save for the future.

The federal government first proposed tax changes to facilitate employee ownership trusts in 2023. One of the key measures included in the fall economic statement that year offers a $10-million capital gains tax exemption to owners who sell their companies to their employees through the trust mechanism. But, as CP's Craig Lord writes, that exemption was only planned for three years and is set to expire at the end of 2026, unless the federal government moves to extend the measure. Advocates for employee ownership trusts say letting the tax exemption expire would undercut the model before it’s given a chance to shine.

We all want more investment in Canada's economy. But as SCP Chair Jon Shell explains in this video, when it comes to foreign investment in the Canadian economy, or FDI, we have to ask: is it investment that builds? Or investment that buys? Because these are two very different things.

Mark Carney's recent speech at Davos matters because it treats this moment as a rupture, not a passing disruption. It’s in this rethink, write Matthew Mendelsohn and Jon Shell, that there is also relief: “From the fracture, we can build something better, stronger and more just,” Carney said. “This is the task of the middle powers.” The world's middle powers are not powerless, but we have been acting as if we are, living within the lie of mutual benefit with our outsized and increasingly erratic neighbour. Without the U.S., the world's middle-power democracies are rich, powerful and principled enough that we can unite to advance human well-being, prosperity and progress.