By Matthew Mendelsohn | Part of our Special Series: Always Canada. Never 51.
The Trump administration is engaged in an economic war of aggression against Canadians. Every day it becomes clearer that the United States is currently a threat to Canada and other democracies around the world. While we wish our American friends well and hope the U.S. changes course, that is not in our hands. Canadians need to prepare.
At Social Capital Partners, we focus on creating pathways for working people to build wealth, own assets and gain economic security. It has been our assumption that extreme wealth inequality and highly concentrated ownership of the economy lead to poor economic performance, civic unrest and democratic decline.
Nothing from the past few weeks leads us to believe differently. When most people don’t have a realistic chance to build economic security, and when they see a system stacked in favour of those who already possess wealth and power, bad stuff happens.
But good stuff is happening too. There is now a wide consensus that we need to be less economically vulnerable to Trump’s economic threats. We are buying more Canadian, investing more in Canada and putting aside relatively minor partisan and regional differences to stand in solidarity with one another.
We are likely at the beginning of a whole-of-society project as Canadians figure out how to mobilize collectively to reorient our policies, practices and investments towards building a stronger, more independent economy in the face of geopolitical threat.
During the free-trade debate of the 1988 Canadian election, Prime Minister Turner famously said that once our economic levers go, our political independence would follow. Canadians have mostly ignored that warning over the past 35 years and our businesses have oriented themselves to buy and sell from the American market, with treaty assurances about how that trade will work. But the current administration has no problem ignoring those agreements.
We are more vulnerable today than we were fifty years ago. We are a branch plant economy, and many of our largest employers do their research and development and hold their IP outside Canada. Many of our businesses have been bought up by American private-equity funds, our main streets are dominated by American chains and many of our largest natural resource companies are no longer owned by Canadians. And we don’t talk about these facts enough because our independent Canadian media has also been bought up by American hedge funds and cannibalized by American digital tech platforms.
Those currently waging an information war against us are hoping to destabilize and divide us, and instill a sense of resignation. But from across the country and across the political spectrum, the opposite is happening. Our commitment to unity has been overwhelming and the realization that we need to build a stronger, more dynamic, less dependent Canadian economy has become obvious. But we need to get busy.
Today, Social Capital Partners is launching a series of policy ideas that will help change systems and grow a more resilient, diversified and independent Canadian economy. Many of our ideas are for governments, but they are also directed towards others who hold wealth and power. We believe that those who control large pools of investment capital have a responsibility to put their resources to work for Canadian communities under threat.
Canada needs to try things we haven’t tried before. We need to do things we know we should have done a long time ago. We need to pursue ideas where the evidence base is strong and where we have straightforward policy and legislative levers. And we also need to try some crazy stuff.
Today, Social Capital Partners is launching a series of policy ideas that will help change systems and grow a more resilient, diversified and independent Canadian economy.
All sectors need to get involved, and government must be there to support and de-risk those efforts. Some things might not work—but failing to act quickly and ambitiously is by far the bigger risk.
Our series focuses on policy ideas that:
- Support Canadian economic sovereignty, advance ownership for Canadians and reduce dependence on the U.S.
- Advance the interests of workers, small businesses, the economically vulnerable and young Canadians who have known for a long time that our economy is not working well for them
- Include sufficient detail to be actionable so we can begin to implement them quickly
Canada is a big, powerful, wealthy country. We are at a moment of historic and geopolitical transition, and we need to seize this opportunity to build an innovative, sovereign economy that builds wealth for working people and supports a strong, inclusive democracy.
So, under economic threat from our powerful neighbour, what do we choose? Always Canada. Never 51.
Share with a friend
Related reading
Budget 2025 should bolster employee ownership to strengthen Canada’s economy | Canadian Dimension
Budget 2025 offers Canada a chance to make employee ownership permanent by extending tax incentives for employee ownership trusts (EOTs) and worker co-ops. In Canadian Dimension, Simon Pek, Lorin Busaan and Alex Hemingway write that doing so would boost productivity, reduce inequality and secure business succession, while keeping jobs and decision-making local. A modest investment promises significant economic and social dividends.
What being an employee-owned company means to me
For what it’s like to be on the inside of an employee-owned company, we spoke to a few of the 750 employees who recently became 100-per cent owners of Taproot Community Support Services, a social services provider across B.C., Alberta and Ontario. Rewards the employees highlighted include company morale and spirit, for sure. They also include financial rewards paid out annually to each employee as dividends. Last year, each employee would have received about $1000 to $1500 on top of their salaries—and as the company succeeds over time, the employees will share financially in Taproot’s success.
Wealth inequality in Canada is far worse than StatsCan reports
Our government’s best available data on Canada’s wealth gap excludes, by design, the wealthiest families in the country. As SCP Director of Policy Dan Skilleter writes, if we didn’t have the Parliamentary Budget Officer fact-checking Statistics Canada’s work, their numbers would tell us the top one per cent own only 2.5 per cent of all wealth – not nearly 25 per cent of all wealth in Canada, as the PBO reports. We like to think of Canada as a beacon of egalitarianism compared to our southern neighbours, but when you add in data from "rich lists" published by Forbes and Maclean's, our wealth concentration looks quite similar to the U.S.