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Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Hi, it’s John here. This fall on disruptors, we’ve been exploring some of the big topics around climate change and speaking with some of the big players who are seeking climate action.
Speaker 2 [00:00:11] We called the series the climate conversations, and it’s fair to say the conversations are ongoing. As part of that effort, we’re bringing you special extended cuts of some of our most popular climate conversations. 2021 has been a pivotal year for our planet. Extreme weather put the need for climate action front and center, as did a high profile global climate conference called COP26, which happened in Glasgow. Among those who played a critical role there was Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of Canada, who now serves as the UN special envoy on climate action and finance. We talked with Mark about what he’s been up to, as well as his hopes for global economic transformation.
Speaker 1 [00:00:53] In this conversation from earlier this fall. Mark Carney, welcome to disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:00:59] John Stackhouse, a pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 1 [00:01:01] I want to ask a question that came to me this morning when I woke up because this is the 20th anniversary of 911 and there’s much debate about how much it changed the world in different ways. And we’re talking about climate. And I wonder why 20 years ago, the world galvanized around a horrific event and was able to mobilize, rightly or wrongly, trillions of dollars and mobilize nations, as well as individual action to change the world. And arguably, we have not been able to mobilize the same will or resources on climate. I wonder how you think through our different collective approaches to global challenges.
Speaker 3 [00:01:44] It’s a great question. First, and if you recall the urgency of 20 years ago, and I think we all who lived through that had the same reflection and certainly the first thing I thought about this morning. Same weather here today. Very different global environment. You know, there has been a lot of progress over those 20 years, but let’s focus on what hasn’t been accomplished and how much more difficult it has become to galvanize global action, as you say. And I think there is a couple of routes of that. One was how quickly the global goodwill of the response to 911 was dissipated within a few years. The global I mean, there were strong support among the allies, but obviously the Iraq War took a toll. And you know, the retrospect the stance of the Canadian government took at the time was a principled and the right stance in retrospect, but that created a bit of a fissure as well in our relationship, and that played out more broadly across a number of a number of countries. I think the second thing, though I’d underscore, is we had the financial crisis. You and I know that, well, we are from different vantage points lived and worked through that and the response to the financial crisis. The policy response was overwhelmingly an economic policy response in the run up to twenty seven eight. There was increasing focus on climate action at the global level. You know, the elements of the consensus of which you just spoke were there and within the private sector an increase in focus and I would suggest in the financial sector as well. It didn’t absolutely stop, but it was set back dramatically. As the issues in the financial sector became survivals, the issues from a public policy perspective became recovering. From then, what was then the worst economic crisis of anyone’s lifetime and had the prospect of moving into a depression if the right policy hadn’t been followed and that set back climate efforts almost a decade? We, in my judgment, we had lost decade, and I would say as well, John, that when we got back to the level of public urgency, maybe arguably a greater public urgency around addressing climate in the run up to the start of 2020, governments starting to come together, the financial sector starting to focus on this more. And then, of course, we had the Covid health crisis and economic crisis associated with it. And I given that history thought, Wow, this is 50. You know, this could be history repeating itself and will be set back again. What’s happened? And I’m sure we’ll get into this. This has been the opposite. The experience of Covid and the economic circumstances and the right economic response. Also, social response has galvanized climate action, so we are in a different.
Speaker 1 [00:04:44] place, different this time. Why are? Why is it not? Why is climate not relegated by yet another global crisis?
Speaker 3 [00:04:51] Well, yeah, I think there’s several factors. One of them is I’ll start with the negative, which is that it’s 10 years later and it’s that much later. It’s that much more obvious. The climate impacts. It’s much more urgent. That’s the first. The second is that technology has moved on quite substantially. So many more of the opportunities are economic today. It’s a question of will and getting capital to work and investment in the ground. I’m not saying that we’ve got all the solutions at an economic level to fully decarbonize, but there is a path for at least the next decade for a substantial progress that makes a big difference. I think thirdly, a number of governments and informally I’ve been involved in these discussions with a number of governments. They took a lesson from, you know, a few countries had a climate focused response to 2008 South Korea, elements of China, elements of the German fiscal response. And lo and behold, those countries established quite competitive positions, very competitive positions in key industries. Solar, wind as well, so the economic congruence, if I can say it that way, the alignment is much better now and it’s much better understood. And I think the last thing which is a softer point, if you will, or a values point in many respects, that’s a harder point. A stronger point is what lessons do you take from the health crisis? We undervalued resilience. We didn’t prepare for something that wasn’t just a possibility. It was a certainty. And there were ample warnings. So we undervalued resilience. We didn’t listen enough to science. We didn’t think about sustainability. And by and large, and you know, there are exceptions to this. But by and large, people’s response to Covid was one of solidarity. They did what they needed to do, not just for themselves and their families, but for others. And of course, all of those elements resilience, sustainability, solidarity, those values are what’s necessary to properly address climate. And if I go back, if you allow me to go back to my first point, which is the economic shifting, well, actually, you can marry them with jobs growth, dynamism of the economy if if you if you bring it together. So we’re in a different situation now, fortunately. And I think our individual and collective responsibility is to harness that as much as possible.
Speaker 1 [00:07:17] Let’s talk about values. Of course, the title of your book, which I read with great interest, it’s an excellent book for those who haven’t read it in a very serious book. And I mean that in a complimentary way. I read it concurrently with the Bill Gates book and wrestled with similarities and differences. I think you agree on many, many things, but stepping back, I found Gates. And this shouldn’t be surprising, perhaps for a math guy like him. A very technological approach. That’s what we would expect from Bill Gates, who was almost Cartesian, that this is a problem that can be solved and you take a more bit more of a moralistic point. If I can put it that way, it kind of Hobbesian. And as I compare and contrast the two works, I thought, and this is oversimplifying it, but there’s a real tension between man and machine, both in the cause of the climate crisis, but also in the solutions. And there are some, and one can question gates on those who believe this is a technological problem that can be solved. And there are others who say, No, this is a human challenge. This is a behavioral issue. And I wonder how you. Of course it’s both. But how you balance those two, because a lot of people would like technology to solve this. We don’t like technology to solve it. As with Covid, as with everything, it’s just easier if we have a machine or a device that can take care of a problem, we are harder to solve. We humans. But I wonder how you, you know in the balance, are weighing technology and human behavior as we get deeper into trying to solve this crisis.
Speaker 3 [00:08:56] Yeah, the way I look at it, as you say, John, it’s both. And I’d argue it’s there’s it’s a triangle. And I think we’ve talked about this a bit in the past and its benefits in the book, which is that we need three technologies. In order to solve this, we need the engineering technologies. And I referenced a moment ago that some of them are fully economic, profitable today when solar increasingly on the storage side, prospectively on hydrogen, they’re economic today. But we need those and I’ll use Bill Gates’s term breakthrough technologies, elements of green hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuels, direct air capture and even large scale carbon capture. You know, which is a big issue for Canada. We need those to become economic. So we need the engineers. We need the technological solutions. My argument or my perspective would be the scale of what’s required for those means that they won’t just happen, and they certainly won’t just happen in a timely fashion to address the issue, given the limited carbon budget. So we also need political technology, and that’s an odd phrase. But just to keep the structure, we need that consensus, which people have developed by and large. You see voting patterns, polling patterns, not just in Canada, but elsewhere. You know, that consensus is coming together in different political parties or political groups in different countries have different ways of mapping that to addressing the climate crisis in terms of what policies would be. But you need that consensus. And what I argue in the book and what I really believe about, of course, I believe it, but is that when you get a consensus around something like sustainability and you move out of a trade off the planet and profit, you know, sustainability today versus tomorrow and people say, no, we want the climate crisis addressed. We expect our businesses. Governments or financial institutions to be addressing this. This changes the value equation, it means that it is valuable to do things that reduce our carbon footprint that move us towards net zero and it becomes not just risky but actively harmful to the viability of a business. If you’re still part of the problem, if you’re not moving and that gets to the third leg of the triangle, which is financial technology, and that’s a lot of what the work I’ve been doing for the UN and run up to the Glasgow cop, which is and you’ve been helping with this as an institution is to put in place the plumbing of the system so that there’s proper disclosure about who’s part of the solution and who’s still part of the problem. That there’s new markets that help to invest in not just the breakthrough technologies, but carbon offsets and other things that are necessary to optimize the carbon budget to have bigger capital flows into emerging economies, creating those, but also to have the commitments of the financial institutions. And with that, the transparency about what they’re doing to solve the problem. And I’ve talked to, you know, Bill Gates about this a few times, and I think there’s a recognition that, you know, this is comparative advantage, right? Not surprisingly, you wouldn’t want me focused on the technologies of the future. I’m much better focused on trying to help the financial system get into place. And Bill and others absolutely invest in identifying the technological needs and investing in those. And if I can make one last point, just to put this in context, you know, direct air capture, which is a technology where, you know, we’ve got a great company, a Canadian company, carbon engineering, one of the leaders. It’s still a very expensive technology relative to a tonne of carbon taken out of the air. That said, very little money has been put into that area. And by thinking all the way through the decarbonization chain, if I can put it that way from solar and wind, that’s economic today to direct air capture, which arguably has to be part of the solution. Tomorrow, we’re shining a light on where money needs to go. And if you’re a venture capitalist, growth equity and entrepreneur and to some extent, a government for a primary research, well, you should be focused on those technologies of the next decade. The private sector can take care of the technologies of this decade at scale.
Speaker 1 [00:13:26] One of the questions you get into in the book is around capitalism and whether capitalism is fit for this crisis. And of course, there’s many models and executions of capitalism is not a monolith. But I wonder how your thinking is evolving coming out of this crisis, where we have mobilized trillions of dollars and it wasn’t capitalism, it was the state that mobilized that largely to avert an even greater crisis. I wonder what that tells us about the limitations of capitalism to solve these epic challenges and the tragedies on the horizon as you call them in the book, but also what the strengths are of capitalism there was that we need to hang on to or even invest more in
Speaker 3 [00:14:11] a moment ago you, you referenced Taubes and rightly so. So, you know, one of the points he made, obviously, is the fundamental role of the state is to his protection. And in his day and age, it was protection from war and violence within societies. So the state has a monopoly on violence that, if you will, as well. That’s his terminology. So it runs the police force, runs the army, et cetera. And that’s the implicit social contract with individuals. And if the state doesn’t do its job, you, you replace those who are running the state. Now, the idea of protection has extended over the centuries. It extends to financial stability, interestingly enough. So again, our world, if I can help you into mine where we do expect the Bank of Canada, we do expect the regulators to be thinking about the big risk. Obviously, we expect major financial institutions as well. But you know, the core bits of the state have an overarching responsibility. Think about those and act on them appropriately, organize ourselves so that if the US blows up as it did Canada, I mean, we can’t avoid some aftershocks, but our system doesn’t go down, which it did not. The same thing applies to pandemic preparedness, where the state has fallen down, and now the effort is OK, how do we organize ourselves in order to be prepared for the next health crisis, have adequate capacity, have action, work on a global level as well as the local level? And so there’s some lessons there that is not going to be provided by the market. That’s that those are roles of the state and within climate. What what’s the analog well, part of what the state has to do, and we’re moving in this direction in Canada to, you know, to the credit, is have a clear objective first point. Net zero by 2050, have a medium term objective, you know how to run a business. You know, it’s great to have a long term objective. What about a medium term objective and marking progress? So we have a 2030 objective 40 to 45 percent, or at least that’s as we’re speaking today. That’s Canada’s objective measure progress annually, but also put in place the policies in order to get there and have a degree of credibility and predictability about those policies. And so the classic example in Canada, and I think I use this example globally is the carbon price. We have a legislated carbon price that runs to one hundred seventy dollars by 2030, and that gives predictability for businesses and investors and individuals to start adjusting today. You know, no internal combustion engine vehicles, new ones by 2035. Again, our auto sector, you see it responding today is going to mean we’re more competitive in auto manufacturing as a consequence. So the state plays an important role. But you start to see and hopefully in my answer, where the state’s actions fulfilling its fundamental role in this case on climate starts to provide a path or some certainty. So then the market and capitalism, as you were terming it, can step in and really provide the solutions. And of course, the best elements of state intervention provide flexibility for the market to find a better way of, you know, in a world with one hundred and seventy two all their carbon price will what’s the what’s the right answer to deliver energy or to heat a building? Well, let’s have the market figure it out within that context and not overly dictate it, because the one thing I think we know is that the scale the problem is such that we need many, many solutions, and there’s probably some of them that seems somewhat unlikely at this stage, but smarter people and more energetic people can make them happen.
Speaker 2 [00:18:11] Coming up after the break, more of my conversation with Mark Carney. So stay right there.
Speaker 4 [00:18:21] You’re listening to Disruptors, an RBC podcast, I’m Trinh Theresa Do. Earlier this fall, RBC Economics and Thought Leadership released a report called, “The two trillion dollars transition: Canada’s Road to Net Zero”. It explores the costs and benefits of Canada’s shift to a carbon neutral economy and how it can fuel a new generation of Canadian innovation, from carbon capture technology to sustainable agriculture to the full potential of super charging electric vehicles. We look at all the ways for Canada to take a leading role in the fight for climate action and the economic opportunities they create. To learn more. Check out the link in the show notes of this episode and visit rbc.com/Net zero and follow disruptors wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 [00:19:12] Welcome back in the second half of my conversation with Mark Carney. We talk about some of the daunting timelines facing the world as we try to stem decades worth of damage wrought by climate change. And we also talk about the important role Canada can and should play in the fight for climate action.
Speaker 1 [00:19:30] Timelines, as you’ve put quite eloquently, are critical to this. We don’t have centuries, certainly, but there’s an important tension underway in the world. I would argue around timelines. When I talk to my environmentalist friends, I often divide them into two camps the 20 30 camp and the 2050 camp and the 20 30 camp are people who say we can’t really think too much about net zero by 2050. The crisis has to be solved by 2030, by getting emissions down by 40 or 50 percent in that range. And then the 2050 camp are those and I’ve heard Bill Gates speak to those who say, let’s, let’s not undermine the 30 year journey by trying to do too much in the 10 year. And now it’s a year journey to 2030, so maybe we’ll fall a bit short of 2030. But the real need is to get on the right path to 2050. And hey, it’d be great to have both, but just don’t let one undermine the other. Are you a 2050 or 2030 or are you going to be Canadian and say, you’re 20 40?
Speaker 3 [00:20:36] Yeah, exactly. I’m more of a 20 30 year. I think that I mean, experience in managing things the extent I have and I have some is that you need objectives that are within your timeline of responsibility. Let’s put it that way that you’re going to live to live with the consequences. Now that’s first reason. The second, just given how tight the carbon budget is, it is. It is essential. I think the third point I’ll make, which is tangential to this, but I just want to make it, which is some in the 20 30 camp, maybe not those you’ve talked to. But take the view. OK, well, we just need to radically change and shut down a variety of things. I think the lesson of the last 18 months is we’re not going to shrink our way to net zero. You know, we shut down a quarter of the global economy effectively, maybe more and only just met that seven percent annual reduction. We’re not going to shut down another quarter of our economy and then another and another. I mean, so we need to invest at scale to grow. The caveat I’d put to the 2050 camp and the Gates camp is that when you have S-curve adoptions, you don’t necessarily have to be a third of the way to where you need to be from a technology roll out because of the fact that compounding effective as new technology spreads. So the fact that getting into the teens percentage of vehicles that are electric vehicles in the latter part of this decade that is consistent with and that reinforced by government policy and the reworking of the capital stock in the in the auto industry that will be consistent with getting to where we need to, which is, you know, zero emission fleet. But we need to we need to deliver this. All of us play separate know related roles in it in a way that’s growing the economy. We absolutely need to grow the economy to do that and build the confidence I think we can. I think, particularly in Canada, I think it’s been underplayed to be candid, just the scale of investment that will come with a clean grid by 2035. The reworking of our auto sector, the effort so you know, my home province to move to net zero emissions for scope one CO2 emissions for the oil sands. I mean, that’s a $50 billion investment program, at least, if not more, with big knock on effects for jobs, positive knock on effects for jobs. So I know we need to deliver on that in our own ways. But as the confidence builds that this is part of our economic future as well as our environmental future, we will hold the coalition behind.
Speaker 1 [00:23:23] Well, let’s talk about some of the systems, the adjustments or changes that can, can, can get us there. You’ve talked about the opportunity. We have a piece of research from RBC Economics looking at the net zero pathways for Canada and estimating it to be a $2 billion project over 30 years for the country. In other words, it’s going to require $2 billion of investment, public and private. This is not all due to be spent by by government. And that’s a big number. But it actually breaks down in a fairly manageable way. Since two to three percent of GDP, we allocate two to three percent of GDP to to a number of things that are of great value to society. And there’s lots of ways we can do that even more effectively by mobilizing private capital to be a significant chunk of that of that $2 trillion. And of course, the two trillion dollars is going to lead to a lot of new companies new jobs, new even new sectors. If. Canada gets things, get things right. What do we need to get right in terms of the systems? And that includes the money flows. How do we get that two trillion dollars in the most efficient, effective way to the folks who can invest it optimally for themselves, but also for society,
Speaker 3 [00:24:50] normally for capital expenditure above 60 percent or so, a little more is internally funded by companies. You know they’re making a profit, they’re making cash flows and they reinvest that in their business. And the question will be for a variety of our businesses, our big energy companies or big automakers, as two examples are tech companies as well. How much of their money are they reinvesting in decarbonizing and becoming more carbon competitive? It will be a very important signal because of course, the less they’re investing in that, the more they’re running off their business, because in the end they’re going to need to be net zero to, you know, consistent with the rest of the country. So a reasonable proportion of this, not all businesses will work for this will make sense, but a reasonable proportion of this will come from business themselves as other capital expenditure does. The second thing is that clearly the bulk of it will need to come from private finance. I can make a case for and there is a case absolutely for government spending in newer technologies and kick starting things and knitting grid inner ties together. For example, in the electricity sector, there’ll be other examples. But the bulk of it has to come from the private sector, and there will be an expectation that those returns are market returns that they’re consistent with, you know, on a on a risk adjusted basis. They are consistent with returns that have been seen in the past. That is feasible. I’ll put it this way let me let me answer on a global basis and then come back. Well, I’m going to make a global point in a macro point just gratuitously, which is that orders of magnitude internationally take the whole world. The numbers are similar to your numbers, if not slightly bigger, probably two, two and a half percentage points of additional annual investment per year. If that were to happen, that would take up the so-called savings glut that has built up over the course of the last 20 years. One of the as you note, well, John, one of the things that’s developed is that people have been saving more investment as a whole. Hard investment has been lower than in the past. And that’s one of the reasons why global interest rates are so low. And that’s a whole other set of topics. But this is actually something that is manageable globally, but actually has a knock on effect. All things being equal of raising global interest rates to rates that you know, listeners would be most would be more familiar with historically, maybe not all the way there, but half of the way there and giving some returns to individuals on risk and risk free investments on their savings accounts on their own, their government bonds. Now governments, by the way, have to prepare for that. They can take the current situation for granted. So the short answer is too late for a short answer. But the short answer to your question is a chunk will come from the companies themselves. That’s what happens in the past, and particularly if they see it as an imperative for their competitiveness and their viability, their businesses. But the bulk will need to come from the private financial sector. The banks, the big insurance companies are ourselves through, you know, our RSP investments and others. And that will make sense in a world that values sustainability in a policy environment that’s consistent with moving towards net zero, that will be that will be profitable for those individuals.
Speaker 1 [00:28:21] You get to see Canada both as a Canadian on Canadian soil, but also from a from a global perch. How does the world in 2021 see Canada?
Speaker 3 [00:28:31] The world sees Canada in different ways, and it’s it’s a little hard as an insider, as a Canadian to add this up and balance it. But there’s a couple of lenses through which we’re seeing. We are seen as relatively from a climate perspective. We’re seen as a very carbon intensive economy and a need to like everybody, but maybe even as more than others to make a concerted effort to get that down first. First thing that’s that’s a perspective. The second thing is that we are seen as having a number of the solutions. So I mentioned the carbon price that’s seen as world leading. In terms of the approach, we’re seen as having a number of the technological solutions and expertize and innovation and drive, and that goes from a, you know, carbon. You’re in cement, carbon engineering and direct air capture to a very, very long legacy of innovation in our core energy industry. Oil and gas sector and others. And you know, there’s an imperative for that to be continued at scale and at pace. But we are seen to have that build up. We’re also seen as one of the more constructive international players, if I can put it that way. You know, we’re helping to build the system and recognize that the world needs to move forward together in order to solve this. So I, you know, I’m biased because I’m Canadian, so I’m going to say that the balance sheet is pretty positive. The judgment of us, and by the way, our financial sector is seen as very sophisticated and particularly our pension funds, that our institutions are seen as very welcome partners internationally and being part of the part of the solution here. So to, you know, to bring it together, I’m biased. So I see that on net were viewed positively, but everybody is going to be judged by results. And you know, the exam time is over the course of this decade. And so everything that we’re all doing in the end, this is an issue that there’s no style points on climate change right in the end. You’re either getting emissions down or you’re not. And if you’re getting them down or you’re doing it in a way that’s growing your economy is others. And we’ve, you know, look, we’ve got challenges. I think we all know that, you know, let’s get them out in the open, which I think we’re increasingly doing must get our best people on it and get moving.
Speaker 1 [00:31:07] What are the two or three most important things the country can do in the next 24 months?
Speaker 3 [00:31:13] I’d say the following one I’d lock down those 20, 30, 20, 30, five hard. And so the on the auto side, on the electricity side, I think that’s an imperative. I think the initiative in the in the oil sands to net zero oil sands, the private initiatives making that fully tangible, credible and moving it forward and appropriately scaled. I think having the whole of the financial sector organized for net zero and being transparent about being organized to net zero as a necessary facilitator of that. And you know, look, we can’t we can’t be moving backwards on anything as well. I think that that’s another point. As soon as you establish a reputation for stop, start on climate policy, people will focus elsewhere. If you establish a reputation that climate policies is headed in the right direction and the market can anticipate the future entrepreneurs, innovators, you know, investors, banks, others, they’ll put money behind the future and we’ll get there faster.
Speaker 1 [00:32:18] This was outstanding. Mark, thank you.
Speaker 3 [00:32:19] My pleasure. There is great pleasure.
Speaker 2 [00:32:23] That was Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada governor and the U.N. special envoy on climate action and finance. Stay with us in the weeks ahead. For more extended cuts of our most popular interviews from the Climate Conversations, a special multi-part series on disrupters. To hear the complete series, go to RBC dot com slash disruptors. Until next time, I’m John Stackhouse. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 4 [00:32:51] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by Jar Audio. For more disruptors content, like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit rbc.com slash disruptors.
Category: AI, Technology and Innovation
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Hi, it’s John here.
Speaker 2 [00:00:02] And it’s Theresa
Speaker 1 [00:00:03] Theresa. I know you’re something of a foodie, and I’ve always wanted to ask you, how much thought do you put into your carbon footprint when you’re cooking and eating?
Speaker 2 [00:00:13] Oh, I have put a fair amount into the carbon footprint of what I cook, so I kind of reduce my meat consumption as much as I can to try to consume plant-based alternatives. And I do think about how water intensive, different alternatives are. So something that I’ve learned through my cooking adventures in the pandemic is to go to the farmer’s market, find what is being produced seasonally, what’s available seasonally and then building your meals from that.
Speaker 1 [00:00:41] I’m glad you raised that because I find even for meat consumption, how valuable it is to talk to farmers or people who work with the farmers about the cuts of the meat you might be buying. So the closer we can get to the food producers, even though that’s not always possible, the better it is for our own consumption. You know, one of the challenges in Canada’s search for climate action is we don’t always know where the problem lies, and that includes what we eat wherever we may be in the country. Unlike, say, the oilsands, which are very concentrated in one region. Emissions from the production of food are distributed across the country and often hidden by bucolic landscapes or just our distance as consumers from the producers of our food. But there’s no hiding from the fact that farming generates about eight to 10 percent of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions. We all need food. Many of us love food and want to continue to enjoy sustainably produced food. And for Canada, that could be a huge opportunity to create more sustainable food products, not just for us here at home, but for the world.
Speaker 2 [00:01:41] We are definitely seeing more of those sustainable solutions on the food growing side, but holistically. We also have to address how food gets to our kitchens and the increasingly global supply chain for agriculture. I think it’s very important for consumers to understand where their food comes from, how far their food has traveled and reduce that physical distance between food growers and food consumers. My partner, James, his family owns an independent apple farm in Creamery, the Morrison Century Farm, and they sell their apples locally. Farmers markets, they accept visitors who come and buy apples by the bushel. And because these visitors does the actual farm, they may ask questions about how apples are grown and they get a deeper understanding of what it takes to produce food. And then I think that starts to help them truly grasp the real cost of having a meal and the role that they might play in the whole landscape.
Speaker 1 [00:02:32] I love apple farms and was lucky enough to be able to eat an apple right off the tree the other day and got me thinking a little bit. Trees are just as you were saying about the carbon footprint of that apple coming straight off the tree versus buying it, let’s say, in a grocery store. And most of us, if not all of us need grocery stores. It just makes food accessible, convenient and even affordable, but often creates a distance between us and the producer. And like so many things connected to the climate conversation, Theresa, a change in those very consumer attitudes is going to be critical. Will we ultimately pay for a more sustainable form of agriculture? You mentioned apples. Are we willing to spend an extra dollar or maybe two dollars for that apple because it’s locally produced and uses fewer chemicals? And does knowing that a producer is carbon neutral makes us more willing to buy from that producer, even if it’s not the cheapest option on the grocery shelves? This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m John Stackhouse
Speaker 2 [00:03:37] and I’m Trinh Theresa Do, welcome to the climate conversations. In this week’s installment of the Climate Conversations, a special multi-part series on Disruptors that’s exploring viable paths towards Net Zero. We talked to two influential players in Canada’s vital agricultural sector.
Speaker 1 [00:04:00] That’s right, after the break, you’ll hear my conversation with a pioneering farmer from Creemore, Ontario. Not far from that, apple farm trees are just mentioned who have some provocative things to say about the future of agriculture. But first, we look at the big climate challenges facing Canada’s largest food producers. There are few economic sectors more central to the debate about climate change than agriculture and food production. Our next guest has been thinking a lot about a warming climate and how his business may be contributing to it, but also affected by climate change, and it’s key to any solution. Michael McCain has been president and CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, one of Canada’s largest and oldest food producers, since 1999. In recent years, Maple Leaf has made carbon reduction a central focus and today claims to be the most sustainable protein company on Earth. Michael, welcome to disrupters.
Speaker 3 [00:04:52] John. Thank you for having me today on this very important topic.
Speaker 1 [00:04:56] You’ve been CEO of Maple Leaf Foods for a couple of decades now, and I just want to take you back to a moment when you realized that you had to make climate a strategic issue and what captured your attention?
Speaker 3 [00:05:09] Well, the science has been clear for some time. John, it’s certainly clarified over the last number of years, some more vividly. But it has been somewhat clear for a long period of time, and it’s been well known that agrifood is one of the principal contributors to the climate crisis we face. So we’ve been working for a long time trying to do the right thing to improve our footprint, going back for probably a decade. However, I’m reminded of a period of time several years ago when I’m sitting at Davos and in a luncheon discussion with 200 of the world’s leading activists, there are climate activists, food activists, animal welfare activists. I must say I felt a little bit like Darth Vader in the middle of the room. But you know, their whole thesis was the collective goal to eliminate animal meat production by 2035, and I’m the largest shareholder of the largest meat company in Canada. That’s a crystallizing point of view. You know, we had a bit of an existential moment inside our organization where we have to decide, are we going to put our foot in yesteryear and defend and promote all the good things we’re doing? Or are we going to recognize that these activists there may not be fully right, but they’re not wrong either. And that is much better and more productive for us to embrace the problem and embrace the reality that the agrifood footprint and specifically the meat footprint has not been appropriately managed over many decades and that we do need to change.
Speaker 1 [00:06:38] Talk to us about how it’s going at Maple Leaf in 2014. You set out to reduce the emissions. You’ve got five production facilities across North America, and you set out to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2025. It’s an extraordinary goal for just ten years. How how’s it going?
Speaker 3 [00:06:55] Well, actually, John, well, we’ve sort of taken this in two tranches. We established our first tranche of goals, which was a reduction of in our footprint of 25 percent by 2025. We’re sort of on track to that as we speak. We’re getting close to 2025 now, but most of the components of our emissions are down in the 20 to 22 percent range. But we’ve reframed those two years ago when we were one of the first companies to actually adopt science based targets at the time. In the fall of 2019, there were 290 companies, I think two in Canada. We were one of those to 290 globally.
Speaker 1 [00:07:36] And Michael, what does what does that mean?
Speaker 3 [00:07:38] Science-Based targets Once the Paris accord was adopted, it became painfully obvious to most leaders and science advocates around the world that the collection of target setting of most industrial organizations, the sum total of their targets were not credible and didn’t add up to the one and a half degree limitation that was established in the Paris accord. And it’s a central body that accepts applications for targets, reviews them with a very scientific lens for their robustness and their scientific integrity, to the extent that if everybody around the world adopted science based targets, which are, by the way, very aggressive, if everybody adopted science based targets, we would meet the goals of the Paris court simultaneously in 2019, following the very important architecture of avoid, reduce, recycle and offset. In that order, recognizing that you know the first three have to be committed to before you get to the third. We also became the very first food company in the world. To become carbon neutral now,
Speaker 1 [00:08:50] I wonder if you can walk us through a couple of the key decisions for you that got you to carbon neutrality. You’ve had to offset some of it. But what did you do in your own operations that got you down the path
Speaker 3 [00:09:03] again with the backdrop of a large constituency saying that you know you don’t deserve to be in business against the backdrop of an owner, operator and a family that has a 30 year generational view, saying, Do I want to own this meat company over a 30 year period on the back of being carbon neutral versus, you know, the alternative? And yet will we make less money? Maybe, maybe some, depending on how well we monetize that? You know, we don’t have to convince everybody that they should buy more from us just a few. But we just decided that that was the long term, better calculus to own a carbon neutral company, particularly in the context of the vision that we had established. So we did two years of analytics with some outside help just to make sure that we were not just making an impulsive decision, but, you know, to be the first in the world of that, we had to make sure that we were very careful in that in that calculus.
Speaker 1 [00:09:55] In 2017, you made the decision to enter the plant based protein market when you bought light life foods. Michael, how do you see Maple Leafs product mix changing over the coming years?
Speaker 3 [00:10:05] We see it as additive protein. The consumer’s migration today is they want more protein in their diet, not less. They want more choice in the proteins that they select plant versus meat. It’s the rise of flexitarians over vegetarians or vegans. And ultimately, there’s the evidence would suggest that it will be additive to meat consumption is not going to go away, which is over the course of the next 10 years. So it’s not a substitution effect that’s taking place here. We wanted to respect that need for choice and additive protein. We obviously want it to be in the growth markets. But the most important point unsustainability sustainability is plant based protein is not the answer to the sustainability challenges of the meat industry. The sustainability challenge of the meat industry are embodied in fixing the ills of the meat industry, not replacing it, like asking the transportation sector, you know, cars are our bad, so get people to walk to work. No, that’s not going to work. We have to fix the ills of the industry, and we believe that the footprint of animal meat production can be normalized to a sustainable level. And that’s our pursuit.
Speaker 1 [00:11:13] Walk us through a bit of that pursuit. What can the industry do to reduce its own footprint directly in the production of meat?
Speaker 3 [00:11:19] When you look at transportation, inbound transportation, outbound transportation, the movement of cars and vehicles, it’s a bubble on the chart, but it’s a really damn small one. The lion’s share of emissions in our footprint come from two sources. Number one manure and number two grains grain production. I mean, they’re overwhelmingly large bubbles manure because it’s methane. Methane, as you know, is 28 to one in the ratio of its impact on the environment relative to carbon. It is a very corrosive emission because of that concentration, and it shows up in intensive meat production manure in grains. It shows up in agricultural practice and agricultural practice that for a hundred years has unleashed carbon from the soil where it’s been for the millennia into the atmosphere, where it has been having the effect that we’ve all seen. But there are two technologies that are heavy hitters that are fundamentally game changers that have the capacity over the next 10 years to convert an industry from being one of the largest sources of the problem to being one of the only sources of solution. One of them is regenerative agriculture, and the other is anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion is a technology that takes the methane from manure, concentrates it intensifies it, captures it and convert it to a renewable fuel. To the extent that that can be economically applied across the animal meat production system, you convert that largest bubble into a renewable energy source with respect to regenerative agriculture. That’s reversing the negative effects of 100 years, 100 years of poor agricultural practice to not just release carbon from soil into the atmosphere, but actually convert it to sequestering that carbon from the atmosphere back into the soil where it belongs. There are agricultural practices that are tested time true if applied properly and consistently, have that sequestration capacity. It’s very, very exciting.
Speaker 1 [00:13:25] You mentioned consumers and the reality that while we all care about climate, we may not make it part of our food buying decision when we’re actually at the make me counter or in the in the deli. But what’s holding us back?
Speaker 3 [00:13:39] Consumers care, you know, in this order of preference, they care about what goes in their body first, what goes on their body? Second, what’s around their body? Third, and this one certainly falls into the third category. Number two is, you know, let’s put that against the backdrop of other issues connected to the food chain. Things like food insecurity. Affordability. You know, if you are single mother, two kids, one income operating on a budget. There are lots of considerations and carbon neutrality might be, you know, down on the list relative to other subjects. And so, you know, I also think that I also think one of the things that none of us do very well is we don’t calibrate Horizon. We tend to worry less about what’s going to happen next year, the year after 10 years from now versus what’s going to happen next week, next month, six months from now. We know that carbon neutrality in the end, the story of the carbon crisis, probably, and I’m sixty two years old problem. You know, it’s going to affect my life a little, but not a lot. It’s going to affect my grandchildren a lot. It’s going to be life changing, game changing for my grandchildren. So there’s I think consumers sometimes succumb to a little bit of the, you know, the horizon effect.
Speaker 1 [00:14:59] I wonder, as we move to close Michael, if you can give us a global perspective, you operate in Canada, you’re huge in Canada, but you also operate significantly in the United States and Australia. What are you seeing in other markets and what are you sensing around the world in terms of where agriculture is going, where food production is going? With respect to climate action,
Speaker 3 [00:15:20] I think if you did a heat map, John, you would find it the hottest in continental Europe, the coolest in Asia, kind of Canada, the North America kind of neutral. But there’s a lot of greenwashing and a lot of carbon denial in the U.S. industry. And I think to some degree, because we compete so directly with the U.S. that that has a bit of an overflow. You know, we have a three percent for three to four percent market share. And so we, you know, we can go into the U.S. marketplace and we’re the disruptor in that market and we are gaining a very pointed and well-known reputation for being leaders in this space. And you know, when you got three to four percent market share, you don’t have to convince everybody. You just got to miss a few people to favor you with some type of growth. One of the principles when we started down this journey and this was as important internally as it was externally was, we said, we’re going, we’re going to take the first step, but only on the premise of progress, not perfection. And I think that serves us well on this journey
Speaker 1 [00:16:17] might be a good message for a lot of listeners across the country as we wrap up
Speaker 3 [00:16:20] progress over perfection. It’s a good message for a lot of listeners to recognize that sometimes disruption comes with a lack of perfection.
Speaker 1 [00:16:29] Michael, thank you for being on disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:16:30] Thank you, John. It’s been wonderful to spend the time with you today.
Speaker 1 [00:16:33] Coming up after the break, we talked to an Ontario farmer who’s advocating for a new model of agriculture, one in which the goal is to produce less food, not more. So stay right there.
Speaker 2 [00:16:49] You’re listening to Disruptors and RBC podcast. I’m Theresa Dohme, RBC Economics and Thought Leadership recently released a report called The Two Trillion Dollar Transition. It explores the costs and benefits of Canada’s shift to a carbon neutral economy and how it can fuel a new generation of Canadian innovation, from carbon capture technology to sustainable agriculture to the full potential of supercharging electric vehicles. We look at all the ways for Canada to take a leading role in the fight for climate action and the economic opportunities they create. To learn more. Check out the link in the show notes of this episode and visit our bbc.com. Net zero. And be sure to like and follow disruptors wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 [00:17:38] Welcome back. Theresa. I’m really struck by something Michael McCain said about horizons and how we’re so focused on the immediate future that especially older generations, those in positions of power don’t look down the road at how much carbon emissions will cost our children and grandchildren. How do we overcome that Horizon’s problem?
Speaker 2 [00:17:56] I think it’s as simple as talking about it and creating empathy. If you’re someone who cares about the detrimental effects of climate change, but perhaps older members of your family don’t talk to them openly and without judgment, talk to them about the benefits of doing certain things sustainably and differently, like how much money you save by choosing energy efficient systems to power your home, or, in my case, with food. I’m talking to my parents, James, his family, about how easy and delicious it is to use plant based meat instead of meat. Me and you know, we’re seeing younger generations are forcing a shift in consumption habits, things like plant protein burgers, which is a major focus of maple leaf foods. So I do believe that it starts with influencing drone circles and hoping that they receive the message and can share that along.
Speaker 1 [00:18:44] Well, the challenges of getting to net zero are a problem confronting all generations of consumers and all sizes of agriculture operations. The 100 acre farm owned and operated by our next guest definitely falls into the smaller category, though he has an outsized influence in the sustainable agriculture movement over the past 15 years. Brant, Preston and his wife, Gillian have turned New Farm, which is based in Creedmoor, Ontario, 120 kilometers north of Toronto, into a thriving organic operation. They grow vegetables for restaurants, retail stores and wholesale customers right across southern Ontario. Brant is a former journalist, and his first book was called The New Farm. After 10 years on the front lines of the Good Food Revolution, it was published by Random House Canada in 2017 and offers a hopeful vision for farming’s future, outlining a model of agriculture built around three simple principles. First, to feed Brent’s young family. Second, to strengthen the environment. And third to nourish the local community. Brant, welcome to disruptors.
Speaker 4 [00:19:48] Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 [00:19:50] So I before we get going, but I think we need to be clear with the audience. You weren’t actually born a farmer. How did you get into farming?
Speaker 4 [00:19:57] It’s an interesting question. I’m not sure myself sometimes, but you’re right. I was born in Toronto. I grew up in suburban Toronto and worked in international development and human rights and journalism for a number of years. It was really after having a couple of kids and living in the city, my wife and I felt like we needed to do something really concrete and substantial about some of the big issues that we’re seeing around us, especially climate change. And there was really a motivation to have a hands on role in the fight against climate change that pushed us out of the city, and we bought a farm and have kind of never looked back. We sort of went into it thinking that there was going to be a trade off between our desire to farm in a way that was good for the environment and the climate and the amount of money we could make on the farm. And we’ve actually found the opposite that focusing on environmental issues and focusing on the climate impact of our farmers actually made our operation more profitable.
Speaker 1 [00:20:50] Tell us more about that because a lot of farmers who I’ve met over the years, but also in researching climate change and sustainability, will say it’s incredibly tough to make a buck to begin with, and now you’re adding on other costs related to sustainability. So how have you made it work where maybe some of your neighbors are a bit more skeptical?
Speaker 4 [00:21:10] In a couple of ways, I think, first of all, it takes time. So the economic benefits from climate friendly or environmentally friendly farming don’t materialize immediately. It takes some time and trial and error in order to realize those benefits. The other problem is that there’s very little support for farmers to make that transition. There’s not a lot of effort spent at our universities and research institutions on figuring out the ways that farmers can farm in a more environmentally sustainable way. And then also, there are very much short term costs. So the transition is expensive and it’s difficult. And I think because so many farmers are in such a precarious financial position, they don’t have the cushion to take a few years of losses in order to get these practices established. So I think that the precariousness of a lot of farmers in terms of the financial position means they’re very risk adverse and they don’t want to try out new practices, especially if it’s going to take three or four or five years for those practices to start paying dividends.
Speaker 1 [00:22:13] Earlier, we got to speak with Michael McCain of Maple Leaf Foods about a lot of these challenges across the agriculture industry and also in food processing, which his company is trying to take head off. They, of course, are much bigger than than your operation have capital and technology that you may not have access to, but there’s different challenges when you talk to your neighbors, whether it’s. The local coffee shop or wherever you catch up on some of these ideas, what do you suggest to them in terms of getting started?
Speaker 4 [00:22:45] Well, there’s some sort of low hanging fruit there practices that are low tech proven in use on a lot of Canadian farms that there’s very, very sound research showing that they can help reduce agricultural emissions and increase resilience. And so the easiest example is cover crops. So these are crops that are grown not to harvest, but to feed the soil and enhance their fertility on the farm in order to promote the growth of the cash crop that you want to grow. So we’ve been cover cropping on our farms for 15 years. The benefits are very, very obvious increased soil health, increased soil biodiversity, better water holding capacity in the soil, better ability to withstand drought and a really effective means of driving carbon down into the ground, pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and putting into the ground. They’re also a really good way to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizer that we use, and I think it’s really important to remember that nitrogen fertilizer is actually the single biggest source of emissions on Canadian farms. So anything we can do to reduce the amount of synthetic fertilizer we use on our farms is going to have an immediate benefit to the climate. So a practice like cover cropping is is something that’s really accessible to farmers. Well understood. We call it the gateway practice for environmental practices on the farm. It’s really, really beneficial on a whole bunch of levels.
Speaker 1 [00:24:06] If things like cover cropping are so sensible the way you’re, you’re laying it out, why? Why isn’t everyone doing it?
Speaker 4 [00:24:13] Because there’s an initial cost that takes three to five years, the research shows, before farmers start realizing the private economic benefits of cover cropping. And a lot of farmers don’t have that ability to spend three to five years losing money on a practice before they start making money on it. The other one is that there hasn’t been a lot of public research and education for farmers on how to implement this practice. So cover cropping seed mixes and cover cropping techniques have almost entirely been developed by farmers. This research, by and large, is not happening in our public universities, so there’s not a lot of information for farmers if they want to adopt that practice. So it gets to a whole bunch of problems that we see in the agricultural sector that are major input companies who have an interest in selling products to farmers are the primary funders of agricultural research and the primary funders of agricultural institutions in Canada. And cover cropping is, by definition, a low input practice that reduces the amount of things that farmers have to buy. It reduces the amount of expenses we incur in our farm, and that’s good for the bottom line of individual farmers. But it’s not necessarily good for the bottom line of the people who are who are funding agricultural research in this country.
Speaker 1 [00:25:31] Some people may argue that we need those inputs to increase production and increase efficiency not only to feed Canada, but to help feed the world to hungry and growing world. You gave a TED talk three or four years ago and titled The World Needs Less Food a very provocative title. Explain a bit why the world may need less food.
Speaker 4 [00:25:53] Well, it shouldn’t be provocative because it’s I think it’s pretty straightforward right now. Globally, we have a glut of calories available at the household level on every continent, including South America, including Africa. We have more calories available on average than we need to keep us healthy as human beings. So a lot of the time, the people who are arguing for the necessity of a high input agricultural system, those higher input systems are producing a lot of things like corn and meat, calories that that are often going into highly processed foods that are not making people healthy. We see that malnutrition is, of course, a really, really serious problem. But malnutrition is caused by inadequate distribution of food, not by an absolute lack of food. And what we’re seeing everywhere in the world is that obesity related illnesses are rapidly increasing. And globally, obesity is now responsible for the deaths of three times as many people as malnutrition. So I think we need to get over this idea that we need to keep pumping inputs into our farms and producing more and more food to feed the world because the world is already, to a large extent, overfed.
Speaker 1 [00:27:09] One of the things that Michael McCain shared with us, which stuck with me, I find it fascinating is he challenge of getting consumers to pay for this. We tend to want to pay less for food, not more. We’re very price sensitive in the grocery aisle. There are, of course, great exceptions to that. But I think food producers, big or small know the challenge of convincing consumers to pay, especially to absorb some of what Bill Gates may. Called the green premium of sustainably produced agriculture in your experience, bred in farming, you’ve talked a bit about the investments you need upfront and the time you need, but at the consumer end. How has your thinking evolved in terms of what we humans are willing to absorb to help farmers produce in the way that you’re describing?
Speaker 4 [00:27:58] Well, I think I think first of all, it’s really important to recognize that as Canadians, we pay less for food as a portion of our income than any other country in the planet, except maybe the United States, and that we spend less of our time earning money to buy food than any other civilization in human history. So I think we have to start from the recognition that our food is ridiculously cheap right now. That doesn’t mean that people are going to gladly pay more for it, but I think we have to start from that recognition. Secondly, I don’t think that any big environmental or social problem has ever been solved by consumer behavior. So we’re not going to solve the climate crisis or the farm crisis by just convincing individual consumers that they need to pay more for their food. We need to ensure that people are paying the true cost of their food. And right now, a lot of food is really cheap because the environmental and climate costs of those food are externalized. They’re borne by not by the consumer, but by poorly paid farm workers, by farmers who can’t make a living, by the local environment that suffers because of the farming practices that are employed and from our climate. So we need to start paying the full cost of food, and I personally believe that means that Canadians are going to have to get used to paying more for their food. To be frank, whether they like it or not. And it’s also important to realize that a lot of the food that Canadian farmers are producing is going into food products where the very, very large majority of the price of that food product on the shelf in the grocery store is for things other than the cost of the money that was paid to the farmer is one egg, analysts told me a long, long time ago. If you doubled the price of corn, it wouldn’t make any difference on the price of a box of corn flakes in the store. Because those corn flakes, the cost of the processing distribution, the markup of all the people in the food chain, the packaging, the marketing that’s, you know, 80 90 percent of the cost of that product. So I think, you know, we’re not going to solve the problem of food affordability or accessibility on the backs of farmers. Consumers at some point are going to have to pay more.
Speaker 1 [00:30:11] Right. You’ve been farming for 15 years, roughly and seeing in very different ways the impacts of climate change. What do you see today that was not so evident a decade or a decade and a half ago.
Speaker 4 [00:30:26] We’ve seen very marked changes in climate over the past 15 years. Just on our farm. We have very, very different weather patterns now than we started with. What is really hit home is that we’re now entering an era of extreme variability. So we have colleagues who we’re in contact with on the Canadian prairies, who’ve just had a devastating year. They’ve had to they’ve had to go out to harvest their crops in the middle of the night because their equipment was setting their fields on fire when they’re working during the heat of the day. And it never occurred to me 10 years ago that that we would actually have farms burning because of climate change. It’s just absolutely remarkable. But here on our farm, we’ve had the best growing season we’ve ever had. We’ve had lots of rain, lots of heat, really, really regular rain, whereas the last two years we’ve had really bad drought. So I think what we what we’re realizing here is that we’re in an era of real unpredictability and that the practices that we need to employ to reduce our emissions are pretty much the same as the practices that are going to help us withstand that variability in the future. And so it’s a it’s an imperative for survival of our business to adapt to climate change.
Speaker 1 [00:31:39] This has been an inspiring conversation. Brant, thanks for joining us on, disrupters.
Speaker 4 [00:31:43] Thanks so much, John. It’s been a real pleasure.
Speaker 2 [00:31:46] What an interesting conversation, John. It sounds like a real challenge to be a farmer these days, you know, not knowing whether you’re going to have a bumper crop one year or a drought that wipes you out the next.
Speaker 1 [00:31:58] You know, it really gets back to what Brant said about not only embracing practices that reduce carbon emissions, but also learning to adapt to climate change is something I’ve always admired in farmers. They understand the environment and climate better than most of us, their livelihoods, and for many of them, their purpose in life is inextricably linked to the world around them, to the natural world, around them, which they want to strengthen through everything they do in farming.
Speaker 2 [00:32:25] Mm-Hmm. Absolutely. They are so incredibly resilient. Well, stay with us in the weeks ahead for more provocative climate conversations and cutting edge solutions. And you know, it’s impossible to. Talk about climate change without addressing oil and gas. Next time we explore how Canada’s energy sector is reinventing itself to meet its net zero future. Until then, I’m Theresa Do.
Speaker 1 [00:32:48] and I’m John Stackhouse. This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. Talk to you soon.
Back-to-school season will look very different this year. Most Canadian youth will return to physical classrooms after more than a year of on-again, off-again remote learning that took its toll. The numbers show that students experienced increased anxiety and depression from the stress of social isolation and the challenges of virtual learning, among other factors.
Recent research from Ontario’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) shows a large majority of children and youth experienced harm to their mental health during the first wave of the pandemic, with 70% of school-aged children and 66% of preschool-aged children reporting deterioration in at least one these key areas: depression, anxiety, irritability, attention span, hyperactivity, and obsessions/compulsions.
Mental illness is estimated to cost the Canadian economy $50 billion annually. If we’re to address the cascading issues surrounding it, we need to intervene sooner. We need to develop the tools, technologies and approaches that will ensure that the youth of today become the healthy and prosperous leaders of tomorrow.
In this Disruptors episode from Oct. 2020, host John Stackhouse interviews two leaders in the youth mental health field, Dr. Yuri Quintana, Chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Joanna Henderson, clinical psychologist and director at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Together, they explore how technology can and should play a role in helping young Canadians with their mental health struggles.
Listen to hear how when properly applied, technology can provide more access to services, knowledge and support.
And for those interested, try the Resiliency Quiz to learn more about how resilient you are today and the strategies you can adopt that will enhance your life-long resiliency. This quiz has been developed by Strong Minds Strong Kids, Psychology Canada with support from RBC Future Launch.
You can also check out these three articles from RBC’s 9-part Resilience 101 series that profile youth mental health leaders and organizations from across the country: How Going Virtual Helps You Access Services and Support, Creating New Life Lines for Youth in Rural Communities, and Taking a Small Town Approach to Youth Mental Health in B.C.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
How Tech Can Reshape Mental Health Care – for the Better
The unprecedented disruption brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has made this an extraordinarily challenging period for us all.
In-person interactions have been replaced with digital. We can no longer gather and socialize in lunch rooms, hallways or classrooms. Activities that bring our youth joy can’t be experienced the way they used to be. Coupled with new feelings of loneliness and fear of the virus, our country’s longstanding mental health crisis has worsened. Even before the pandemic, an estimated 75% of youth with mental health disorders did not access the specialized care they need. Wait times for counselling and therapy were often six months to one year in Ontario, for example. That backlog has only worsened these past months.
Another culprit? Our devices. The Canadian Pediatric Society says high school students now spend more than 7.5 hours per day on various screens, with 20% of high school-aged children logging five hours per day on social media alone.
There are clear links between screen time and mental health – and anxiety rates among youth are through the roof. Dr. Murali Doraiswamy, a physician and brain scientist at Duke University who joined us on a previous RBC Disruptors episode, says our brains are continuously adapting to the new things we’re doing in our lives – such as interacting with technology – and rewiring themselves. New research from the University of Calgary shows that 96% of those aged 25 and under report feeling moderate or high levels of stress as a result of the pandemic.
So how can we harness our increasing reliance on screens in a positive way, to deliver meaningful mental health support? With COVID forcing so many aspects of our lives to go digital – fast – the time to create lasting change is now – but there’s lots to consider.
“What we should be doing is co-designing,” said Dr. Joanna Henderson, a clinical psychologist and a director at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. Henderson was one of our guests on the most recent episode of RBC Disruptors, which delves into the potential risks and rewards of our growing dependence on technology during the pandemic.
Simply moving counselling sessions over to Zoom won’t cut it, she says
“Using technology to deliver services isn’t just about taking what we do in person and then offering it through the technological interface,” Henderson said. It is instead about leveraging the technologies that young people already use to develop new kinds of services for youth that deliver the kinds of support they need.
But users should be careful – there are thousands of problematic “health and wellness” apps, none of which should not be viewed as a one-stop solution. There are “probably 50,000″ healthcare-related apps out there, Said Dr. Yuri Quintana, chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Many of them don’t get used and part of it is that the style, the content and the way in which people connect to them haven’t been designed in proper ways or evaluated in proper ways,
Quintana believes a blended approach works best, noting that people have different needs, and may require a combination of approaches (apps, telehealth, in-person services) tailored to different individuals. He says it’s about creating new and different models by understanding how virtual services can be leveraged as part of an overall approach
“I think one of the challenges that providers will need to face is how to develop the right blend of services, both technology-based and in-person based for different individuals at different stages in their life. Part of what we need to do now is develop the research to understand what types of technology are appropriate for what types of individuals and what kinds of situations,” said Quintana.
“This COVID pandemic really has woken up people to the need to make services more accessible to everyone,” he said.
RBC’s committment to supporting youth mental health
RBC Future Launch is a 10-year, $500-million commitment (now in its fourth year) to help Canadian youth prepare for the jobs of tomorrow. The program provides funding to community partners across Canada which help youth access through: work experience, skills development opportunities, networking solutions, and/or mental well-being supports and services. Future Launch has released a report that examines how mobile apps can help address youth mental health issues.
RBC Foundation annually invests over $9MM CAD into the youth mental health sector across Canada and specifically as it relates to the innovative integrated youth services model: in the last 5 years, we have invested over $4.5MM across Canada in individual sites as well as provincial and national initiatives.
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Hey, it’s Theresa. I think it’s fair to say that this past year has been unlike any other, we are all looking forward to a return to something that looks just a bit like normal this fall. For some, it might mean those tentative first steps back into the office. For others, it could involve seeing a live show somewhere, anywhere with other people sitting next to us. But perhaps no group is more excited or anxious, or probably both about the return to this new normal than Canada’s youth. After a year of on again, off again in person learning, students are coming back en masse to the classroom in September in many cases. Unfortunately, they’ll also be bringing with them a year’s worth of mental health baggage. Covid presented a singular challenge to the mental well-being of all Canadians. But youth who are so reliant on social interactions for their development were particularly hard hit. This past May, the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa reported that 50 percent of all patients visiting its emergency department since the start of the year sought treatment for some form of mental health issue. Mental health is a growing concern for our educational system, our health care system and ultimately our economy, according to the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Mental illness is estimated to cost the Canadian economy 50 billion dollars annually. If we’re to address the cascading issues surrounding mental health, we need to intervene sooner. We need to develop the tools, technologies and approaches that will ensure that the youth of today become the healthy and prosperous leaders of tomorrow. This is Disruptors and RBC podcast, I’m trying to raise a. On today’s episode, we revisit an in-depth conversation between my co-host, John Stackhouse, and two of Canada’s top experts in the field of mental health. This is a cause close to our hearts here at RBC. Since 2008, we’ve invested more than 40 million dollars to help support the mental health of children and young people in Canada in 2020 alone. We raised eight million dollars through the reimagined virtual RBC race for the kids. We also partner with a wide variety of national organizations that are similarly committed to the cause. The need for action on mental health is growing. And as John explains in this conversation, which first aired last fall, so too is the need to do something different.
Speaker 2 [00:02:54] Consider just a few alarming statistics,
Speaker 3 [00:02:56] three quarters of mental illnesses emerge between the ages of 16 and 25
Speaker 2 [00:03:01] when most people are just joining the workforce. One in five Canadian post-secondary students is depressed or battling other mental health issues. And Canada’s youth suicide rate is the third highest in the industrialized world. Mental health is a journey that no one should take alone. And in that spirit, I’m joined today by two remarkable leaders in this field. Dr. Joanna Henderson is a clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health here in Toronto. She’s passionate about models of care for young people. Dr. Yuri Quintana cut his teeth here in Canada and is now the chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics
Speaker 3 [00:03:39] at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Speaker 2 [00:03:42] He’s also an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Joanna, Yuri,
Speaker 3 [00:03:50] thank you for being here and welcome to RBC Disruptors. Thank you. Thank you very much. What do you specifically focus on young people with your work?
Speaker 4 [00:03:58] Young people have, as you were pointing out, some of the highest rates of mental health needs. And they’re also our opportunity to change the future. Young people are on developmental trajectories that take them through their childhood, their adolescence, into young adulthood and into the next stage of life where they start to function autonomously and they need the skills and support to be able to do that successfully. If we don’t intervene early, we miss a tremendous opportunity to support young people in their development,
Speaker 3 [00:04:33] as we mentioned earlier. Young people are at a much higher risk of mental illness, yet they also have access and an affinity to technology that previous generations didn’t have is not an advantage or disadvantage.
Speaker 4 [00:04:46] From my perspective, it’s an advantage. It’s unavoidable that young people are connected to technology. It brings with it some risks. It brings with it some challenges to young people. And it also brings opportunity for us to leverage their connection to technology to in my view, what we should be doing is co designing with young people the kinds of technologies and interfaces with technology that help them in their lives.
Speaker 3 [00:05:15] When you think about technology and mental health, a friend or foe, I think when it’s properly applied, it can be very beneficial to many people, not just patients, but also people who are friends of the person that’s needing help. And for health care providers, unfortunately, sometimes technology is poorly implemented or people use it for purposes that weren’t approved. And so there are some potential dangers. But when properly applied, it can certainly provide more access to services, to knowledge and support services. And we’re trying to help individuals as well as organizations use that technology in the best way possible. It’s still early days, early months in this pandemic and in terms of some of the social change it’s led to. But the increase in screen time is phenomenal for all ages, but particularly for young people. Do we know yet if that is causing significant risks to mental health, Yuri? Well, I think the evidence with technology and apps is still in its early stages compared to other fields. Certainly, I think not having connection with other people face to face is something that people are looking at very strongly in terms of the detrimental effects of that. But the reality is that because of the infectious nature of this disease, we do have to keep physical distance and maybe social distance isn’t the right word, you know, because I think we do need to remain connected with each other. So I think technology can enable us to remain connected with our friends, with our health care providers. But it’s also true that spending too much time connected to technology doesn’t allow you sort of individual time to disconnect and decompress. And so there are some innovative technologies that, for example, monitor your screen time and alert you when maybe you do need to sort of disconnect and spend some time on nature. So I think we need to find novel ways to use this technology such that it complements our lifestyle rather than gets us even more addicted to the technology and isn’t helping us.
Speaker 4 [00:07:18] I think one of the challenges with technology and the interfaces that we’re currently using to connect, they lead to a sense of monotony, a lack of engagement, a lack of productivity. And we haven’t really been able to leverage the capacity of technology, I think, in ways that can really create opportunities. Given that we have to use technology so much, we need to be able to use it intentionally to support young people and continuing to feel productive. And I think there’s a risk in talking to a computer screen or staring at a computer screen for many hours, for example, of not feeling productive. And so it’s figuring out how do we support young people in doing what they need to do, like school or other things through technology, and pair that with actual activities that engage them with the real world and allow them to have that feeling of belonging and productivity that’s so essential at this developmental stage
Speaker 3 [00:08:24] and enjoying what you’re doing some of that through. Can you give us a better sense of what you’ve been working on and how that’s playing out?
Speaker 4 [00:08:31] Sure. So with Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario, where a network of mental health services across the province that up until the pandemic had a strong focus on being placed based so espace in the community where young people had co created the space. And could go to that space when they needed support and were able to access services with the pandemic, we needed to transform the way we offered service to young people in the context of our doors being closed, physically closed in some cases, or our physical services, our in-person services being greatly reduced. Initially, what happened was because we were in the context of the pandemic, people retreated to a position of, well, this isn’t a space for youth engagement. This isn’t a space where we can connect with youth to figure out the solutions to this big problem of how are we going to offer services. And instead, it is one that serves Ontario. We really pushed and we invested in continuing to have youth at the table to design our response. And we were able to really understand from young people that using technology to deliver services isn’t just about taking what we do in person and then offering it through the technological interface, but is instead thinking about how do we take the robustness of technology to offer new kinds of services and to use the kinds of things that young people already using technology to also deliver the supports that we need to deliver in the pandemic.
Speaker 1 [00:10:15] During the show, we also heard from Shanna McCracken, Shanna is the executive director of Frame, an Ottawa based network that connects mental health, health and social services framework’s with youth and young adults to accelerate the integration and implementation of youth care in Canada. Here’s what she had to say about gaps in our system that were revealed by covid.
Speaker 5 [00:10:38] What we’ve heard resoundingly over and over again from young people and their families is that, no, we do not have enough access. We are not seeing impact in their lives in the way that we would hope to as a system. And so I think what covid has done is that covid has really laid back there any sort of barrier or any gap that existed previously has been further highlighted through covid and the rapid pivot that our system has had to do to virtual service. Not all young people in their families have access. Not all young people in their families, and now even fewer than before, have the ability to navigate a very complex and often siloed and fragmented mental health and substance use system.
Speaker 3 [00:11:26] Joyner, what goes through your mind when you hear that
Speaker 4 [00:11:29] Shawna’s right on the mark, we hear that over and over again from youth and families, that their experience of the system is that it is fragmented, that there are multiple barriers, that it’s very difficult to access the services they need and want to be able to achieve optimal outcomes. The pandemic has definitely created even further gaps for young people who are particularly disadvantaged. We had young people who didn’t have enough food to eat. It’s really hard to address mental health concerns if you don’t have enough food to eat. And so we really need to think holistically about the needs of young people. We no longer can think of a system that’s divided up, you know, takes one young person and divides them into their physical health needs, their mental health needs, their educational needs. These are not separate things. Young people need to be thought of holistically. And the services we provide need to cut across all of those different areas. And we as a system have an obligation to work holistically and to integrate our services in ways that make sense.
Speaker 3 [00:12:34] So if I could pick up on that, I think the two key points that both China and China have mentioned is access is very important. And the types of wellness hubs that China has been meeting really creates a very welcoming, non-threatening environment where you can sort of access a whole range of support services. But we also need to sort of create virtual environments where people can access information services. One understudied area is social determinants of health. These are sort of different challenges that people have, economic circumstances or educational circumstances or where they live geographical. And so we need to start learning how to scale. And here’s where technology could help. But it needs to be done in a way that’s sensitive to the diversity of circumstances that people have. And so this Covid pandemic, as horrible as it is, really has sort of woken up people to the need to make services more accessible to everyone. Right now, we’re physically challenged because of the infectious disease nature. But how do we make this available to rural areas? How do we help those people who have other factors? And so I think a comprehensive evaluation of this needs to look at social determinants of health and how do we personalize services both on site and online that meet the individual’s needs. You both touched on the question of safety. I wonder if I can draw you deeper into that, because it’s hard for anyone of any age to discuss mental health and certainly to open up about it to and to seek help, given the massive disruption we’ve had to the way we live, the way we study, the way we commute. I wonder what you’re learning about the way that young people seek help. They’re no longer necessarily around the social safety of a school, for instance, or of a place of worship or of a community center where they may feel more comfortable. How is that being addressed? The challenge of safety in a more virtual world, even when it’s in a new physical environment like the kind you’ve been creating?
Speaker 4 [00:14:46] I think it’s a critically important issue to address. We’ve heard from young people in part their reluctance to engage in virtual counseling, where it’s a conventional in-person counseling, but now delivered virtually stems from concerns about being able to engage with mental health professionals safely and structurally as a system. We also make that worse by sometimes putting in place policies and procedures that are intended to protect the service provider, perhaps from liability or other things, like requiring people to be in a fixed place while they engage in virtual therapy so that if there was an emergency, we’d be able to locate them. But what that means is young people who might, when they want to have a confidential conversation, go for a walk or sit in a car so that they can feel comfortable. They have confidentiality. Those options aren’t open to them. So systemically, we’re creating barriers to young people being able to safely engage. And I think we you know, the pandemic has really shone a light on our failure. I think we really can look back now and see that we didn’t take those into consideration. And going forward, I would strongly advocate that youth need to be at the table in thinking about pandemic planning. They have great ideas, but we need to engage them and we need to engage them in the planning stages.
Speaker 3 [00:16:10] What should we have done differently in pandemic planning?
Speaker 4 [00:16:13] I think if we look at the education system and the transitions that needed to take place, what we can see is that there was tremendous immediate focus on how do we ensure that the curriculum. Continues to be delivered. How do we ensure that young people continue their learning of academic skills and what people were slower to respond to, where the broader needs that school needs for young people? If we had engaged young people in a planning process? I expect that they would have flagged for us very early on that many young people get meals at school. Many young people have adult allies at school that help them stay safe, then help them identify when things are unsafe at home or unsafe in their personal lives, and that the social supports and their mental health needs are often being met in the school system. And when we pivoted in the education system, those pieces were not the immediate focus when in fact young people will tell you all of these other needs are also met in that system. So how are we doing that as well? And there has been important work to meet the mental health needs through the school system. Some important investments for sure, but it wasn’t there at the outset. So that might be one difference that would have been in place if we had planned together.
Speaker 3 [00:17:35] That’s a great way of describing some of the challenges that have been bubbling up over the last many months. It makes me think of the metaphorical but also real hallway conversations that exist, whether it’s in offices or schools, hallways and the like, are where we often have the most honest conversations, where we share our feelings, where we come to grips with our problems in ways that we might not want to do in the more formal setting. And I don’t think we’ve figured out yet how to use technology for the hallway conversation that we need.
Speaker 1 [00:18:11] Hey, it’s Teresa again. I hope you’re enjoying this encore presentation of disruptors. And our look back at the pressing issue of youth mental health. If you like what you’re hearing, I’d encourage you to check out some of the many conversations John and I have had with Canada’s top leaders over the past year, such as our recent look at the burgeoning world of virtual medicine, where I talked with three of Canada’s health care innovators. You can find past episodes of disrupters at RBC, dotcom disruptors or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to John Stackhouse.
Speaker 2 [00:18:46] My guests today are Dr. Joanna Henderson of CAMH and Dr. Yuri Quintana of Harvard Medical School. I want to bring in another clip from Shawna MacEachern, of Frayme
Speaker 3 [00:18:56] we asked her about whether the shift to online mental health treatment during the pandemic is the right direction.
Speaker 5 [00:19:05] I think it depends what we do with it. I think it depends on if we will invest in understanding what works and what doesn’t. We can’t just keep adding things on to our system. We also need to make space to remove parts that are not meeting the needs. Covid could be a catalyst for us to take an opportunity and build something together that can be different. But I think it could also be something that creates a lot of damage. And I think we will see that for young people in their families and mental wellness overall in our country in the long run.
Speaker 3 [00:19:41] I sometimes think that this pandemic is like a white board for society and we have a chance to erase stuff that we want to leave behind and start drawing a new year. I’m wondering how we integrate online and virtual elements in mental health treatment while still staying in touch with the human aspect of keeping some of the traditions that we built up over the years. I think that’s a great question. And I think one of the challenges that providers will need to face is how to develop the right blend of services, both technology based and in person based for different individuals at different stages in their life. And so, for example, apps and in online systems could create new ways of communication, some which might be actually more beneficial and convenient. For example, text based chatting with a health care professional might actually be more beneficial for some people in certain circumstances. For example, if you don’t want to be overheard as to what you’re saying, but not everybody wants to have, for example, a text based chat or an online experience, and it depends on the particular circumstances. So part of what we need to do now is develop the research to understand what types of technology are appropriate for what types of individual and what kinds of situations.
Speaker 4 [00:21:01] I think another important point that Shonna made is just how do we also unemployment things that aren’t working because that challenges our system as well. And I think with technology, just like with in-person services, apps, other pieces of technological interventions as well as in-person interventions can become established without any evidence that they are actually helpful, then it becomes really difficult to implement them, to get people to stop using them or to stop practicing in a particular way. And that’s going to be as important as we shift to new ways of working. And we really think about transforming how we offer services. How do we get rid of old ways of working that may no longer be helpful or no longer contribute sufficiently to the well-being of young people? So that’s going to be important as well.
Speaker 3 [00:21:58] I think one of the quiet stresses of this crisis is the I’d call it the too much syndrome. There’s just too much of everything. It’s overwhelming. How are you thinking, both of you, about this incredible explosion of mental health apps that we’ve seen as not just during the pandemic, it was happening before. What does that tell you about the world around us? Joanna, maybe start with you.
Speaker 4 [00:22:23] I mean, I think it tells me a few things. I think, you know, the market reflects and influences, you know, young people. And so young people want apps. They want helpful things on their phone that can guide their behavior to help them feel strong and resilient when they’re faced with challenges, you know, at the same time. For me, it’s very concerning because I think what we’ve seen we’ve seen good apps be developed using evidence based approaches, co creation commitments to concretion. Working in that way takes time and commercial sort of opportunities are simultaneously arising. They arise more quickly. You know, many, many apps are being made available that we don’t know. Not only do we not know if they’re helpful, but we don’t know if they could be harmful as well. And so it really, you know, although young people are really keen to have apps as part of what they can use to support themselves and to support their peers, they also want to be sure that those apps can be helpful and useful. And we as a system, I think, need to ensure that we have appropriate policies in place to to regulate some of that.
Speaker 3 [00:23:42] And that’s kind of scary that many of these apps could be harmful. How do you assess what makes a good app and what makes an app perhaps harmful? So in the work that I’ve done with Johanna and a whole range of experts both in Canada and the United States, we took both a pragmatic approach of evaluating the methodology of how it was designed, but also a scientific approach for evaluating the outcomes. And I think that’s very key because a lot of these apps, we don’t have any long term studies and some of them don’t have any studies. Many of them don’t have any studies evaluating that. And so we need to invest in doing these evaluations and then being able to transfer that knowledge to health care providers to guide them towards what is known to work or what isn’t working. I think because of the need, there’s a rush for people to commercialize this and nothing wrong with sort of developing a business. But in that. People may not be actually properly designing these, and some of the apps may not have the best intent in mind, and so one of the things that we call out is to actually know who is developing it and whether there’s any scientific or health care professionals involved in the creation of that. One of the dangers is that some of these apps may be collecting all kinds of information without consent and without the best interest of the patient who needs to be providing oversight. Is this something the government needs to regulate health bodies need to take more ownership of? Or is it up to the technology platforms or each of us as consumers and patients, if you will? So I think there’s a role for all of those groups. But definitely I believe that science and health professionals need to play a leading role in this. And those could be scientists within the government or the government working with universities and other institutes. You know, when you think of what kinds of medications you take, you wouldn’t take something that hasn’t been evaluated or a medical equipment that’s been used. You expect experts who are properly qualified without commercial bias to have evaluated the safety of those devices. And so that’s part of what we’re discussing through these roundtables is who should be involved and how do we organize this? It has been done in other areas. So, for example, cancer treatments are very well funded organizations and it is happening in mental health. But we need larger organizations, larger efforts, and we need to look particularly at the aspects of technology because there are ways of collecting massive amounts of data from your phone and sharing it. And that needs to be certainly regulated. Do there need to be warning labels or some sort of tagging on apps to say that someone like you, Yuri or Joanna have studied it? Canada has looked at this and acknowledges that efficacy? Probably likely. I mean, I think when you look at Cigarette’s, they have warning labels and there was a lot of pushback on those labels. I think when you look at medications that are dispensed, you know, there are government agencies that do that. Certainly, I think something that hasn’t been evaluated for therapeutic use needs to have some sort of label. And we need to have that discussion as to what should those labels be and how should they be informed and how should we be thinking about the data challenge, because everything we touch digitally systems, algorithms, learn more about us every time we use a device. But there’s dangers, particular dangers when it comes to mental health and mental health, perhaps. How should we be thinking about that frontier? Because I can also imagine maybe in some ways it could be helpful, but something we would want to approach with caution.
Speaker 4 [00:27:31] Absolutely. You have it exactly right. There’s potential. There’s opportunity there. The ways that people interact with their phones, the things that they may post on social media, may ultimately be able to provide us with early warning systems for young people who are really starting to struggle. However, having control over one’s data, being able to consent in a way that’s informed, having information shared with you that is digestible and understandable to the person reading the information is critically important. And ultimately, I would argue we need to have young people engaged in these conversations so that the policies we do develop keep their needs and their interests at the heart of the discussion because those easily get lost. When we start to, you know, talk about commercial interests and government regulation, we can lose sight of the views of young people who are profoundly impacted by some of these things.
Speaker 3 [00:28:33] This is such an important conversation and I’m so glad we’re having it. A lot of challenges here, a lot of unresolved problems. And as we move towards close, I want to get a sense of what keeps you optimistic, what motivates you. You both work with young people who are often more creative, strong and resilient in all sorts of ways during what’s keeping you motivated and hopeful about the state of mental health care for young people right now in the midst of this extraordinary pandemic. I think what’s keeping me optimistic is that I see a growing collaboration from all kinds of disciplines health care, basic science, engineering, social sciences, government, private sector nonprofits, a growing number of people who recognize that no one group can solve this problem alone. And I think that collaboration will be key to move forward. And so even though there is a lot of challenges, I think we just need to continue to build on these collaborations. And I’m very grateful to the collaboration that I have with many Canadians who I’ve been able to stay in touch with. Even though I’ve moved to different cities around the world and I think Canadians are generally much more collaborative and engaging and have a sense of values of society, and I think that will position Canada to be a great innovator in the mental health, space and technology space. Joint of these can be dark days, dark weeks, especially as we move towards winter. What’s keeping you optimistic about the future?
Speaker 4 [00:30:04] Definitely the young people I work with. We have many young people who have had terrible experiences at the hands of the system, and yet they still stand up and put their hands up and say, I want to be involved in making it better. We have community members. We have corporations who are coming together and across the country. We have so many people who understand that system transformation means that we need to work differently. We can’t just keep doing the same thing and expect different outcomes. So that’s what keeps me going and keeping a focus on really thinking about how we want the lives of young people to be different in the future.
Speaker 3 [00:30:42] This is a universal challenge, mental health. And I think we were moving towards accepting that before the pandemic hit. There’s not a family, not a community in this country that doesn’t have mental health challenges. And we’ve become more comfortable speaking about that with each other. Nowhere near enough, but we’re moving in the right direction. And this conversation has been really helpful. And the work we’re hearing about is critical to helping us as a society move towards a more critical approach to recognizing the quality and efficacy and value of those assets. We need them. We need technology, but as they say, handle with care. I’ve also learned from this conversation that while we need more science in all areas of our life and we need more science in mental health, we also need to think harder about patient centricity and finding ways for patients to actually lead what we’re doing in mental health. That may be harder in this remote existence that we’re all getting used to also may maybe easier. It’ll be easier if we make it so, and that, in a way, comes back to all of us. So while this is a universal challenge, it’s also a universal opportunity for us each to play a positive, constructive role in our journey towards a better state of mental health.
Speaker 2 [00:32:11] My guests today have been Dr. Joanna Henderson, director at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and Dr. Yuri Quintana an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. My thanks to both of you for this important and really timely conversation. Thank you. Thank you. I’m John Stackhouse
Speaker 3 [00:32:28] and this is RBC Disruptors.
Speaker 1 [00:32:31] And I’m Teresa Do. Thanks for joining us on this special look back on youth mental health. Here’s hoping for a better school year for all students. Join us next time for a brand new episode of Disruptors as we launch our third season in September. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 6 [00:32:53] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by JAR audio. For more Disruptors content, like or subscribe, whereever you get your podcasts and visit rbc.com/disruptors.
Over the last year and a half, stories of resiliency have emerged all around us. Entire industries were transformed overnight…for better or for worse. Absence of in-person interactions, supply chain disruptions, and changing consumer behaviour were just a few “make or break” challenges faced by many in this country and beyond. But when we think about the organizations most affected by the pandemic, resilience describes not only the way many “bounced back,” but the ability to push forward and see what’s next.
We profiled three resilient Canadian business leaders from very different industries on a special compilation episode of the Disruptors podcast.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
Here are three learnings from their pandemic experiences:
1. Reshaping: Digital offerings in the arts can reach new audiences outside of Canada
Strict lockdown measures and the cancellation of in-person events hit the performing arts industry particularly hard. When the pandemic hit, Ontario’s annual Stratford Festival had rehearsals for its 15 plays well underway, and had been planning to officially open a new $100 million theatre. Instead, it had to pivot from traditional in-person theatre offerings to focus on an online content library. As of this past June, over two million people from more than 80 countries have accessed this content and digital has remained a large part of its strategy.
“The future is not only what it’s been in the past since five centuries B.C.—which is live performance and people coming together—the future will be enhanced with a different perspective, a new perspective that is also digital and can be spread right around the world,” said Antoni Cimolino, the Stratford Festival’s artistic director.
2. Rebounding: Ecommerce is only going to become more imperative into the recovery
Covid shone a bright spotlight on the ability to buy and sell nearly everything online, and converted many in-person shoppers to online shoppers overnight. In the rush, small businesses with no online presence were simply left behind. These small enterprises are crucial to the Canadian economy – representing 42% of GDP and 48% of new jobs, as outlined in our report, “Small Business, Big Pivot“.
According to a Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey, only 20% of small businesses were selling online pre-pandemic and 8% started selling online since. One of these business owners is Andrew Feenstra, owner of Halifax bike shop Cyclesmith. Feenstra digitally transformed his store during Covid—and reimagined what it meant to be a retailer. He cites preparation with a pre-existing ecommerce presence as a key factor to managing during the pandemic and encourages other small business owners to do the same. “I’m a bike shop guy, not an Amazon guy. So understanding how people buy online and how the purchasing is done is so different than in an in-store situation,” Feenstra said. “Ultimately, it’s all about preparation.”
3. Resolute: Stay true to your company mission and purpose in times of crisis
Kelly Schmitt, the CEO of charitable technology company Benevity is trying to “infuse a culture of goodness into the world”—a core value that helped steer the company, and the charities it connects, through the pandemic. With all of the current societal and economic issues around the world, people are looking more to their companies to help solve these issues, and that’s where Benevity comes in.
“When we think of a culture of goodness, it’s just the desire of people to really integrate their goodness or their purpose with their work lives. They’re not two separate things anymore,” Schmitt said.
“What we do and how we help companies and their people do good has just become even more relevant.”
Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Hey, it’s Theresa. So what is resilience anyway? I think many of us had to redefine that word in the past year, we realized that it wasn’t so much about getting through a rough patch, but instead navigating a never ending series of peaks and valleys, twists and turns, but mostly valleys in physics. Resilience describes the ability of an elastic material such as rubber or animal tissue to absorb energy, particularly from a blow and release that energy as the material springs back to its original shape. But when we think about the people and organizations that suffered body blows during covid resilience describes the way many figured out not only how to bounce back, but what new shapes to take. These resilient ones figured out a new way of doing business, of reaching new customers, of keeping the organizations afloat. And more importantly, they’ve prepared themselves for a post pandemic future. This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast, I’m Trinh Theresa Do. On today’s episode, we revisit a few of our favourite stories of resilience from the past year. Among them, a bicycle shop owner in Halifax who learn how to sell online and find a better way of packing boxes, and also a Calgary based startup that’s helping companies engage in charitable giving and, quote, infuse a culture of goodness into the world, something that was sorely needed during these trying times. But first, the inspiring story of the Stratford Festival. North America is the largest classical repertory theater company now in its seventh decade of operations. For the second summer in a row, Stratford has had to dramatically curtail its programing. It’s directing most of its performances online, although by the end of August, twenty twenty one, some limited in-person shows are expected on the shores of the Avon River. When we spoke with Stratford’s dynamic artistic director, Anthony Cimolini, last December, the future was less certain. There was trademark confidence and vision for success remained just as clear.
Speaker 2 [00:02:27] 2020 was incredibly challenging. We were beginning rehearsals and and well underway actually for many of the programs or doing 15 plays, introducing a new hundred million dollar theater. And we were stopped in their tracks. Our mission is to connect with people, to bring people together over great works of art and share them with a live audience. And suddenly, the one thing that we were built to do we couldn’t do the economic impact was huge. It was a 20 million dollar hit and staying connected with audiences was vital. And so we had fortunately been recording the plays. On our stages are Shakespeare productions, especially because we wanted to create a Canadian library of these great plays with this wonderful company. And so we have been doing that for many years. And for a while we question whether we should I mean, it was a million dollars for every one of these recordings, but I felt it was important to conquer geography. It was important to conquer time, to preserve these performances and to spread them around the world. So we created a film festival which unrolled over 12 weeks, and it was sent around the world. We showed 12 different films and we clustered them around the ideas that we were examining during this time of isolation. And it was seen by one point two million people around the world and about forty four percent of that one point two million people were from non English speaking countries. So India was our biggest market. And after that, Germany. And it spread the word of the Stratford Festival right around the world.
Speaker 1 [00:04:01] Stratford also launched its own online platform in twenty twenty Stratford at home, charging ten dollars a month for access to a wide variety of films and events. By June, twenty twenty one, more than two million people from more than 80 countries have used Stratford’s online work or attended one of its watch parties. Some people initially worried that going digital might dilute the Stratford brand. But Anthony told us that having a multi-platform strategy is something that will ensure the festival’s ongoing success.
Speaker 2 [00:04:33] We realized that producing work online digital production will be vital to the future. I think we’re all realizing that that, of course, the secret to theater is being there in person with others. And that’s what really makes it magical, that sense of immediacy where anything could happen. But I think in the future that’s going to have to be enhanced with access to all sorts of additional performers, understandings, ways of working through the digital medium. And we’re doing more and more work commissioning artists to explore what that means and new and exciting ways. So the future is not only what it’s been in the past since five centuries, B.C., which is live performance and people coming together, the future will be enhanced with a different perspective, a new perspective that is also digital and can be spread right around the world. One could have been worried that for a live performance venue to suddenly be spreading things digitally around the world would undermine your core business or wouldn’t appeal to your audience. And instead, we found new audiences. We come many people who’d never been to the festival before from around the world. I mean, we’ve always had an international audience. About thirty four per cent of our audience comes from outside of Canada. But now the pickup in South America and across Asia was extraordinary. And I think that it has introduced people around the world to this Canadian treasure. The response has been fantastic. I don’t think it’s everybody’s cup of tea. But from so many people during this lockdown, this time of isolation, it was a way of staying connected with these incredible plays and these words. And our first broadcast was King Lear with Colin Feuer. And who would have thought that in a time of Penda? Something like King Lear would give people solace, would give them comfort, but the communications we receive from people make this devastating play reconnected them to humanity, to the fact that things can get worse. I know that doesn’t sound comforting, but this great place says, hang on, guys, you are something worth something valuable to the world. And things could get worse before they get better. But ultimately, we will in some fashion come through this, maybe not all of us individually, but the contributions that we have made to our families through our work through are the the creations that we made in art, especially. We’ll survive. It will be a future. Shakespeare, of course, lived through the plague. There was a period of time from sixty five to sixty nine when the theaters were only open for about four months. And he understood and that’s actually when he wrote King Lear, he understood that there are times when we’ve got to just hang on to each other and and get through. And this is one of those times
Speaker 1 [00:07:30] strategist’s at home has been showcased in the festival’s Shakespearean films and original content. But now it’s also featuring content from other arts organizations across Canada, organizations that are looking for new platforms on which to share their original content. For Anthony, all decisions made in the past, both by the festival itself and the town that bears its name, give them hope for what the future holds.
Speaker 2 [00:07:55] It’s funny to look back and to look at the decision points that were made, the decisions that were made that actually bore fruit and a lot of it in the years ahead. And it’s hard to know those. I mean, our expansion into creating like three hundred different special events where we get to understand what the what the work in our stages means to the world we live in today. The recording of these films and other related material was all about trying to better connect in new ways with those around us, with audiences. And we knew that instinct was right. We had no idea it would become so critically important in the time ahead. Sometimes the decisions we make about value segments, about who we are, how we’re going to express ourselves has a payoff in the years ahead we can never anticipate. You sometimes wonder why theater flourished in Stratford, Ontario, this railway town that made some really important decisions years ago. They decided to create a park system in the middle of town. And even when other railways want to move in and destroy that park system, they refused and that park system grew. And then when the railways were going to close here in Stratford in nineteen fifty three and the crazy idea of starting a theater festival for economic development came up. It flourished because of the beauty of the surroundings. No one would have known back in 1911 when there was a plebiscite in this town and they turned down jobs to keep their parkland, that they were actually making the decision about the quality of life they wanted in the future. They were making a decision that would be a lifeline for for them 50 years later, because if they had ruined that parklands, there’s no way we could have had a theater festival here. So sometimes those critical decisions that we make, those decisions about who we are, what we believe in, what we want for our children, have payoffs in the years ahead that aren’t just a nice to have, but actually critical to survival.
Speaker 1 [00:09:53] Next, we hop on a bike and ride our way down to the other side of the country for an update from Andrew Feenstra. Andrew is the owner of Halifax Bike Shops. Michael Smith, which sells everything from Bells to Baskets, extends to cargo bikes. Few things captured the imagination of Canadians, more in twenty twenty than the idea of escaping for wild isolation and exploring the outside world on two wheels. Problem was how to get those hot wheels when everyone else is trying to do the same thing. And at the same time as retail stores were closing their doors in many parts of the country for sale. Smith in business since nineteen eighty six, the first few months of covid meant big changes and how they went to market and new definitions of what it meant to be a bike shop. Here’s part of our conversation with Andrew from last December.
Speaker 2 [00:10:46] Twenty 20 was a very interesting year, very challenging. The big thing that we had to do was pivot and pivot changed the entire business or a bicycle shop in Halifax, brick and mortar. We went to almost 50 percent of our sales were done online for a few weeks. And that changed everything how we did our business. We never had a shipping area in our store. We now have three staff that are picking and packing orders and shipping them all across Canada. That is completely new roles and we have taken some of our existing sales staff that would normally help customers that are in the store to helping customers online. I’m a bike shop guy, not a Amazon guy. And understanding how people buy online, understanding how the purchasing is done is so different than in an in-store situation. So, you know, there’s a lot of training, a lot of adjustments on on running the business and investment. We had to invest a lot into our our website, our online platform and get everything all sorted. And a lot of this was done multiple years ago, but the top was just trickling before March and then it fell off wide open come March 15th, when everything was kind of a lock down and open for online basically, and curbside pickup that we that we had done and and to learn how to do it, we we copied other companies. Some of our staff had gone to other businesses and said, wow, they did an amazing job on their curbside pickup. How did they do that? Let’s copy it and learn from from some of the best in class.
Speaker 1 [00:12:17] The quick pivot online allowed Michael Smith to realize record revenues last year, but the success was not without its hiccups. The biggest challenge, it turns out, was learning how to ship boxes en masse.
Speaker 2 [00:12:30] Last November, we did nine boxes. This November, we did three hundred boxes shipping out and so doing it by hand does not work anymore. If we can save 30 seconds on every box that all of a sudden adds up to four hours of someone’s day, that is not spending time on that type of thing. So it’s really making it now. Now that we’ve seen where it can be and where it’s going, we now have a bit of a vision on that and then we can start to make those efficiencies. We’re actually changing the lay up of our basement. So it’s much easier for when the items come in and where the items go out working with Canada Post on their pickup schedules and things to make it quicker. And so we don’t have so many boxes sitting around waiting for pickup in our basement. So those things are going to get picked up faster and everything just becomes more efficient.
Speaker 1 [00:13:21] When we caught up with Andrew this June, he reported that online sales had settled at twenty percent of the total after a pandemic high of 50 percent in early twenty twenty before covid online sales amounted to just three to four percent. The shift led Andrew to invest in new software to ensure his website is better integrated with both the in-store point of sale system as well as Canada Post Cycle. Smith’s main shipping partner. Looking back, Andrew said that covid-19 pushed his business strategy ahead by four years in just fourteen short months. And we talked in December. And you highlighted one key lesson from his pandemic experience.
Speaker 2 [00:14:01] Ultimately, it’s all about preparation. You know, there’s there’s a few things that you learn as a kid and Boy Scouts is be prepared and that’s everything that is. Our success for this year is being prepared for it. Not that we could have known what Colvard was going to do, but we were certainly prepared for it in multiple years. So companies that all said, oh, get online, get your you can’t go and all that kind of stuff. We did that a few years ago, but it was such a small part of our business. But we were ready for it. That was probably the biggest thing that we’ve learned and going into each year, we always prepare for the next year. And that’s really where most other companies can learn, is literally be prepared and be prepared for the unknown, and then you’re going to be much, much better off for your own success.
Speaker 1 [00:14:45] Coming up after the break, we revisit a conversation that my co-host, John Stackhouse, had with Kelly Schmidt, the CEO of Calgary based software company Boniadi. They chatted about how the charitable sector learned to reach new donors in different and surprising ways during covid. So stay right there. You’re listening to Disruptors and RBC podcast. I’m Teresa Do. I hope you’re enjoying this encore presentation. If you like what you’re hearing, I’d encourage you to check out some of the conversations John and I have had with Canada’s top business leaders and innovators over the past year. One standout is John’s provocative chat on intellectual property and the future of Canadian innovation with Jim Balsillie, the former CEO of Research in Motion and the chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators. You can find past episodes of disruptors at RBC, dotcom disruptors or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, here’s John Stackhouse.
Speaker 3 [00:15:55] Canada’s philanthropic sector is the second largest on the planet. When you measure it on a per capita basis, we’re behind only the Netherlands and it contributes an estimated 151 billion dollars to our economy every year, or at least it did in 2018. Of course, last year was different from coast to coast to coast. Most charity walks, runs and rides had to go virtual or be canceled altogether. Even the bells associated with those iconic red kettles jingled a little less loudly this past holiday season. But against that bleak backdrop, we’ve seen some surprising, perhaps even prophetic, successes take the case of Brevetti. It’s a fast growing company based out of Calgary that’s trying to reinvent philanthropy. And it just reached unicorn status, giving it a value of more than a billion dollars. It’s my pleasure now to introduce Benevity’s newly announced incoming CEO, Kelly Schmidt. Kelly, congratulations and welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 4 [00:16:58] Thank you, John, and thank you for having me join today.
Speaker 3 [00:17:00] Maybe I can start with some background on Benevity. Many of our listeners probably don’t know it or maybe have only heard about it in passing. Tell us a bit about the company.
Speaker 4 [00:17:10] Sure. But is the category creator and market leader in a space that we call corporate purpose technology. So over six hundred and fifty companies, including RBC, use our platform to power their corporate goodness programs and engage with nonprofits. So whether that’s employee giving and company matching, community investment or grant making, volunteering, prosocial actions, you know, in our history we’ve facilitated over six billion dollars of donations and thirty four million hours of volunteering to over 300000 nonprofits around the world.
Speaker 3 [00:17:45] So a lot of numbers there to digest, Kelly. But before we get deeper into those numbers, I want to ask you about that so-called culture of goodness, which I think was a phrase coined by your founder, Brian Townville, who just handed over the CEO mantle to you. What does that mean?
Speaker 4 [00:18:01] Yeah, so culture of goodness, with all of the societal and economic issues around the world, people are looking more to their companies to help solve these issues. And so when we think of a culture of goodness, it’s just the desire of people to really integrate their goodness or their purpose with their work lives. They’re not two separate things anymore. And companies that promote these purposes and culture of goodness actually are more successful in attracting and retaining talent as well.
Speaker 3 [00:18:27] It’s interesting how much charity has changed in a short time. There used to be an expression I gave at the office, which was a way of deflecting from someone knocking at your door, asking, asking for money. But now, I guess with work from home, the office is everywhere. But our connection with charity is also everywhere. We want to give, but we also want to connect. How has been every kind of rethinking, reimagining charity in light of all that technology is changing?
Speaker 4 [00:18:53] Yeah, I mean, really, our platform was designed to democratize, if you will, giving and volunteering, and it allows employees to support the causes that they’re passionate about in the way that they want to. So it’s not just once a year arm twisting exercise for the charities that the company says are important, but it’s also your time. It’s opening it up to the causes that you think are important. It’s tracking prosocial actions such as getting groceries for a neighbor. Those are all of the things that the platform is enabling. And it’s interesting what you said earlier about giving in Canada, declining in twenty twenty, because we actually saw on our platform that in Canada, companies and their people stepped up and donations increased over 70 percent year over year in twenty, twenty two.
Speaker 3 [00:19:39] What’s going on there? Because that’s a that’s a fascinating divergence that overall there are some indications of philanthropic giving going down and yet you’re seeing that’s a massive increase. Why the difference?
Speaker 4 [00:19:50] Yeah, we tend to not use the word philanthropy too often at benefits because it is often associated with high net worth giving anybody is really a micro donation platform and it was designed as such. And so without considering the company match that might be provided, the average donation size on our platform is in the neighborhood of fifty dollars, yet over two point three billion was donated through the platform in twenty twenty. And so we’re seeing that close to 75 percent of companies have some form of program that supports their people, are doing good and rewards them for it. We saw many companies step up with matching campaigns all the way from one to one to five to one to deal with covid and racial equality movement and other issues in twenty twenty. And that drove a lot of giving momentum.
Speaker 3 [00:20:39] And how how is the Colvard crisis changing? I’m tempted to use the word philanthropy, but you’ve just suggested that may be an inappropriate word. How has Colvard changed opportunities around social good?
Speaker 4 [00:20:50] From my lens, I would say covid accelerated a lot of the trends that were already there. And so food security, precarious employment and housing, mental health. You know, many people were right on the edge with these issues before and just barely holding it together. And covid was the final straw or maybe the third strike and the impact of it was disproportionate on the charitable sector. So there was a time in twenty twenty, if you were a hospital or a food bank, you were getting more donations than you maybe knew what to do with. Yet if you ran a youth center or a science center or a place that was a hub of activity, that where you had to close your doors completely due to covid, your donations probably dried up and you were figuring out how to keep the lights on without selling off the furniture. And so a lot of the trends were already there. But I think the thing that’s going to persist is that many of these organizations to survive, they had to become online overnight. And so, as you said, there’s been no charity galas, no golf tournaments, the fundraising activity that they used to do just completely. Dried up, and I think this hybrid model of in-person plus online is probably going to be really powerful going forward, not just for how we all work, could do our jobs, but also for the charitable sector. If I think about the science center in Calgary here I’m on the board of, you know, now we can bring in experts from around the world online versus our online presence, just maybe being a Facebook page. And so it’s a good opportunity, I think, for the sector to experiment and find new ways of doing things and new ways to attract new donors and to grow.
Speaker 3 [00:22:17] I’m glad you use the word hybrid, because that’s a word that’s come up on a number of episodes through the crisis. We’ve come to call it the the hybrid hustle, which is what a lot of businesses need to to think about as they think towards the recovery. Whether you’re in retail or entertainment or finance, you’ve got to be online everywhere all the time, but also in person building and deepening the relevance. Kelly, I’d love to get your thoughts on one charity that’s been digital from the start and what we can learn from its experience during the pandemic.
Speaker 2 [00:22:52] I’m Todd Minocin. I’m the country director for Movember, Canada. It pays to invest in your in your digital infrastructure. We’ve been an online charity since two thousand and ten, basically. And having that platform ready and available for people to participate was a huge part of how we got there this year. We were in a position to kind of look at how to make incremental improvements to some of our technology that resulted in massive returns on on how it worked for people. The other thing that I think we really learned this year was that Canadians were ready to move to mobile for philanthropy. Our sense is when you’ve been sitting at home for eight or nine months, working on your laptop and ordering your life supplies on your phone beside you, making that switch to philanthropy on their phone with something we really noticed this year and felt like it was a significant difference in giving.
Speaker 3 [00:23:46] It’s interesting to hear Todd explain it that way, because we’ve become so comfortable with medical appointments, grocery delivery, conference calls, all on our phone, often on the same device, sometimes at the same time. But as Todd said, you’ve got to invest in the digital infrastructure and in the technology. I sense a lot of charities think they can just put up a webpage or have a site. And that’s their effort for
Speaker 4 [00:24:10] digital destination sites, as you describe them, typically aren’t overly successful because the challenge is how do you get people to your site? Right. You know, in a platform like ours, you can have access to 10 million users instantly. But the mobile piece is interesting. That was actually a part of our offering that we rolled out about a year ago. And so you can do all of your good on your phone. And when we think about the future and where it’s going, certainly we started by using corporations as the aggregator of people. But we want people to think of pulling out the inevitable app on their phone when they think of doing good in all aspects of their lives. And so their family circles, their friends circles, their sports teams, their kids schools, their churches. It’s not much of a stretch to think that you just pull out your mobile phone and track your good as as it happens. And as you move through those circles.
Speaker 3 [00:25:01] Another charity that turn to tech during the pandemic is one actually that I have deep personal connection with. I met our next guest more than a decade ago when he just lost his son and was exploring ideas around what to do about youth mental health. We spoke for a couple of hours and it was it was profound. It was a moving conversation that is with me still. He did far more than I thought possible, showing the incredible power of purpose and passion. He saw no choice but to do it. And now he’s been forced to reinvent fundraising again.
Speaker 5 [00:25:35] My name is Eric Wendler. I’m the founder and executive director of Jaga National Youth Mental Health Charity. We’re fortunate that our staff of forty eight happened to be mostly young people, so they’re pretty savvy, adapted quite well to the challenges of pivoting to digital. The beauty of it was we had already anticipated shifting a lot more of our work to digital, and we see it now as a real compliment to when things return to normal. And we have our are in person.
Speaker 3 [00:26:03] As many of our listeners will know, one of Juggs biggest annual fundraisers is the Jocke ride. But instead of a massive one day in-person event, Rodders took part virtually last year using apps like Swift and Strava. And Eric was thrilled to report they actually raised more money than they had anticipated.
Speaker 5 [00:26:22] So the target for twenty twenty was twelve hundred and fifty riders to raise a million dollars for Jack. Doug, on top of that we receive about two hundred thousand in sponsorships for sponsorships. Never left us. And we were shocked that we actually ended up with over twelve hundred and fifty riders, about 7500 donations, and instead of a million raised, we raised a million, three tenth. So we exceeded our target by
Speaker 2 [00:26:48] about 30 percent.
Speaker 3 [00:26:49] That’s really impressive. And when I hear the stories of the Jack Ride or the earlier example of of Movember, Canada, I think of digital relevance. And Kelly, I wonder how other charities can build digital relevance, which has increasingly become essential to success.
Speaker 4 [00:27:06] Yeah, I mean, many charities became online video first organizations basically overnight, even if they didn’t have a head start as some of these examples. And frankly, they can’t really fulfill their mandates unless they do that. And so now is certainly the time to experiment. The resistance to change is really low and and the cost to experiment has gone down. And so, as you said before, you know, when there’s a will, there’s a way we didn’t think visiting our doctors on zoomer by phone was was ever going to happen. And then overnight that changed. And so it’s probably going to be in person and online going forward. And, you know, depending on the organization and what they’re trying to do, there’s different ways to engage with their donors and to also find new donors through platforms such as anybody.
Speaker 3 [00:27:52] Kelly, how how do you see over the next while technology continuing to remove constraints for for charities and for those of us who want to both give and connect with social good?
Speaker 4 [00:28:04] Yeah, I mean, you’re not just restricted by borders anymore, that’s for sure. Well, that’s probably one of the biggest benefits there, John. We actually see a lot of cross-border donations facilitated through our platform, whether it’s to support Australian wildfires or the racial equality movement in the US. You know what a platform allows this for these causes to feature their content and for us to publish specific campaigns to support them. And we’ve got the benefit, I guess, of having aggregated about ten million users in our platform, that it would take probably a lot of money and a lot of time for causes to reach that many people all at once. When an event like this happens or when help is needed, it’s always.
Speaker 3 [00:28:45] A challenging time in the social good space, but it sounds like an incredibly exciting time to Kelly, where does he go from here, especially as we move out of crisis, into recovery?
Speaker 1 [00:28:57] You know,
Speaker 4 [00:28:57] I think, unfortunately, twenty, twenty one is going to be a pretty tough year as well. We’re certainly not out of the woods yet. There’s some positive signs on the vaccine front. But a lot of what we’ve seen and what we’ve learned in twenty twenty, you know, including around sort of this hybrid online in person model, it’s just unlikely to change. We’re unlikely to go back to a world where all of us sit in offices from eight a.m. to five p.m. every day as well. It’s just the world has changed. So we just think that what we do and how we help companies and their people do good has just become even more relevant. And so we’re just we’re going to be doing more of the same. Plus, we’re going to be focusing on engaging more internationally headquartered companies. We’ve been mainly focused on North America and as I said earlier, trying to engage people in different aspects of their lives. So not just their corporate life, but in their personal circles as well.
Speaker 1 [00:29:49] That was John Stackhouse in conversation with Benevides CEO Kelly Schmidt this past January, by mid-June, benefits reported having processed more than 800 million dollars in donations so far this year, with covid-19 relief in India brevity’s top cause, making up more than 10 percent of all donations. I’m Theresa Do. Thanks for joining us for this look back at some of our favorite stories of resilience from the past year. I hope you’ll join us next time for another special summer episode when we revisit the pressing issue of youth mental health. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 6 [00:30:31] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by JAR audio. For more disruptors content, like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit rbc dot com slash disruptors.
Over the last year and a half, the pandemic has made us more dependent on technology than ever before. Our digital connections are paramount, and as consumers embrace more Internet of Things (IOT) and smart devices, the pressure is on: our wireless infrastructure needs to keep up with increasing demand.
In June, the Canadian government launched its latest wireless spectrum auction—which raised a record $8.91-billion. The 3,500 megahertz spectrum is crucial in building out 5G services and securing Canada’s competitiveness in the global economy.
As Canada’s Big 3 providers roll out these fifth generation networks, how can we start thinking about the vastly different digital future that awaits many industries just over the horizon? In this Disruptors conversation from Oct. 2020, host John Stackhouse chats with Bell Mobility President Claire Gillies. Together, they explore what lies ahead for Canada’s wireless sector— and consumers in a 5G world.
Read on / listen to learn how Canada’s technological future can be shaped now—and why Gillies thinks 5G should be viewed as, “exploring the art of the possible”.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast
How Canada Can Win the 5G Race
5G has been touted as the most transformative technology since wireless services were introduced in 1985. The fifth generation of mobile technology, it’s expected to be 100 times faster than existing 4G networks in Canada, and much more responsive when sending and receiving data in real-time. Imagine downloading a three-hour HD movie in under a second on your smartphone. That’s 5G.
It’s not just about speed – picture firefighters wearing AR augmented helmets that allow them to see blueprints and thermal images in real time, or a doctor in Halifax performing a real-time surgery on a patient in Regina.
5G is a “game-changer for humanity,” according to The Financial Times – and it’s being rolled out in Canada as you read this.
There’s clearly a lot of hype, but what does it mean for Canada? We’re still in the early phases of capability, but by summer 2021, there will be an even greater evolution of 5G, when the CRTC auctions off the extremely high-frequency spectrum (3,500 MHz). And the time to plan for it is now. From agriculture to healthcare, Canada has some distinct advantages that we can capitalize on to help make us more competitive.
Claire Gillies, president of Bell Mobility, and a recent guest on the Disruptors podcast says 5G presents an opportunity to re-think businesses and organizations in entirely new ways, and explore “the art of the possible.”
“How do we use AR and VR in training circumstances? How do we use it to enable remote medicine and surgeries? Anything is possible but we all have to put our minds and our investments around making these things happen in the Canadian market.”
Canada is challenged by its limited scale and population density and will need to build robust infrastructure capabilities to get in the game. But we come to the table with a long record of innovation and a solid foundation to build upon.
“The promise of 5G is not so much about deploying infrastructure” said Keith Ponton a Senior Systems Consultant at IBI Group, a global architecture, engineering and technology firm. “The 5G race is around developing innovative technologies and approaches to leverage that.”
He points to Canada’s long history of leadership in agricultural innovation. “There are a number of 5G technologies that support the smart farms of the future that would allow us to be leaders in that space in a domain that we already understand.”
“It’s important for us to have a posture of a running start in this race. We don’t want to wait for the infrastructure to be fully deployed before we start thinking about the innovative applications that will be the platforms for business and innovation for the next 10 years,” he said.
The future we envision now will determine the future we build. 5G can facilitate the kind of real time, always-on connection that will be critical to the smart cities that lay ahead (think: autonomous vehicles, connected, sensor-enabled light posts and real-time transit capacity alerts).
5G will also translate into cost savings for municipalities across the country. The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association predicts that Vancouver could reduce congestion to the equivalent of taking 12,500 cars off the road thanks to smart traffic systems, Calgary could save up to $87M for households with 5G-enabled smart grid technologies and the small town of Kingston, ON could save $930K annually with smart street lighting.
It’s still early days in the infrastructure rollout but the time to innovate is now. Other nations are already capitalizing on 5G’s game-changing capabilities. Let’s not let the opportunity slip our grasp – or risk losing our competitive edge as a country of innovators.
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Hey, it’s Theresa. Perhaps, like me, you’re hearing more and more about the benefits of 5G, even though many of us are still stuck on the 4G highway or God forbid, the 3G side road. The promises are many — 5G or fifth generation wireless technology will deliver higher peak data speeds, more reliability, greater network capacity and a more uniform user experience. All the major cell phone manufacturers are pushing 5G enabled devices, though Canada is still playing a bit of a catch up to the world that’s all about to change. In June, the Canadian government began its latest wireless spectrum auction, and it’s considered the most consequential auction in many years. The 3500 megahertz spectrum is crucial in building out 5G services for Canada’s wireless players. 5G represents a unique opportunity to grab new customers and deliver profitable new high speed services. But the necessary investment to make 5G happen is also forcing consolidation in the wireless sector. Most significantly, with the proposed twenty six billion dollar takeover of Shaw Communications by Rogers, what will this new wireless landscape mean for Canada and Canadian consumers? And what does Canada need to succeed in this global 5G revolution? This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m Trinh Theresa Do. On today’s episode, we revisit an in-depth conversation between John and Claire Gillies, CEO of Bell Mobility, one of Canada’s wireless giants. They talked last fall before the spectrum auction in which Bell is a top contender, about some of the real world benefits of greater connectivity that will come from 5G’s implementation. Among them, everything from smart farms to smart cities and a whole lot in between. Without further ado, here is my co-host, John Stackhouse’s interview with Claire Gillies.Speaker 2 [00:02:18] Claire, thanks for joining us on Disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:02:20] Very happy to be here at such an exciting time in the wireless industry.
Speaker 2 [00:02:24] So we’re going to get into some of those opportunities and hear about some exciting examples of what can be done and what is being done with 5G. But first, I just want to set the table with a bit of an explanation about 5G. I’ve heard it referred to as transformational. The Financial Times, I think, called it a game changer for humanity. That’s a pretty tall order. What is it?
Speaker 3 [00:02:47] Well 5G, and what it stands for is it’s the fifth generation of wireless networks and it really is not an evolution, as you’ve described. It’s really a revolution in the wireless industry that will change the way we work and live and play, because what it offers is so many more new capabilities than the past generation of networks.
Speaker 2 [00:03:09] To give us a sense, especially for the non techies listening, of what the key differences are between 5G and 4G or even 3G for that matter.
Speaker 3 [00:03:20] There’s three primary elements that come into 5G that really advanced. Number one is speed and capability of the network. So we’ll see a dramatic improvement in the speed of networks as we move forward. Number two is the latency or the quickness, the responsiveness of the network. And the last piece, of course, is some of the services. And, you know, I refer to it as the ability to do slicing and different capabilities within our network that will afford us new options for things that we can build.
Speaker 2 [00:03:53] And what does slicing is an interesting term. What does slicing look like for most of us as users?
Speaker 3 [00:03:58] So you can think of it as instead of every service or application getting equal access to the network, it’s the ability for us to take a portion of the network and allow individuals or applications to use a dedicated quote unquote lane, if you want to think of it in the highway example that we’re all so familiar with and with that, you can explore different services to accommodate that need. It could be someone who needs very high speed, dedicated access in emergency circumstances. And oftentimes I talk about that in the form of public safety. If in case of an emergency you would take a slice of the network and you would dedicate it to those individuals responding to the crisis so they could in an uninterrupted way deal with the state of emergency. That’s just one of the examples of slicing. And now there’s multitudes of things that go along with that.
Speaker 2 [00:04:56] I suspect most people feel like they’ve been hearing about 5G for at least a few years now in other parts of the world. They’re moving ahead fairly quickly, especially in Asia. Where are we at now, Claire, in terms of 5G in Canada? And what does the timeline look like in terms of these opportunities coming to be so?
Speaker 3 [00:05:15] The Canadian market is still very much and what we would describe as an early 5G phase based on the current network spectrum and combinations that we have available to us. And what happened in Asia is they saw the different frequencies of their network become available sooner. So in South Korea, as an example, they had access to three point five gigahertz. If we look south of the border in the US, they’ve done some millimeter wave auctions for Canadian market. We’ll see the three point five megahertz spectrum auction happen next summer, the summer of twenty one, at which case then you’ll see another evolution of 5G that will, of course, add more and more benefit to the end users
Speaker 2 [00:06:00] in Korea is such an interesting example because just in 12 or 18 months, they’ve moved rapidly ahead with 5G. What sort of things should we be learning from Korea and get prepared for going into deeper into the twenty twenties?
Speaker 3 [00:06:14] There’s definitely a few things. So the first thing was, of course, how the government supported them. They really rapidly deployed and made the critical spectrum combinations available for 5G early. And then the second thing that really happened is the major operators in that country really focused on urban areas. And so what it did is it gave the end users immediate benefit where they could feel that density change. And the third thing, of course, was the providers really. To deliver services, they took full advantage of the 5G capabilities.
Speaker 2 [00:06:51] I fear one of the things we’re missing as Canadians is the transformational opportunity not just across the economy and not just for consumers, but for organizations of any size, shape or form if this technology is as powerful as it’s it’s laid out to be. And we’re clearly seeing in Asia that it is clear what should we be thinking about in terms of using this technology to make Canada more competitive?
Speaker 3 [00:07:19] It really is for businesses, I think, at this point, and exploring the art of the possible, thinking about how we should change our businesses in ways that we’ve never dreamed of before. How do we use air in VR in training circumstances? How do we use it to enable remote medicine and surgeries? And the list goes on and on. But it’s sort of this idea of, you know, anything is possible, but we all have to put our minds and our and our investments behind making these innovations happen in the Canadian market.
Speaker 2 [00:07:53] So it’s not just about thinking faster and it will be faster, but it’s rethinking your business or your organization in entirely new ways. And to understand that better, we reached out to someone who has a quarter century of experience in the telecom industry, who’s helped build smart city infrastructure in the US and India. Keith Ponton is a senior systems consultant at IBI Group, and he told disruptors these are early days, but there’s so much possibility for Canada right now.
Speaker 4 [00:08:23] A lot of the measuring sticks we have for five ground carrier deployments, how many carriers have deployed, how many cell sites, how many handsets are deployed? And that’s a very early indicator of who’s leading the pack. But I think the promise of 5G is not so much about deploying infrastructure, but it’s about the applications that will develop typically in a three to five year window after the base infrastructure is available. So well, Canada, because of our population density, tends tends to not lead in those discussions compared to a country like South Korea. It’s important for us to to have a posture of a running start in this race. We don’t want to wait for the infrastructure to be fully deployed before we start thinking about the innovative applications that will be the platforms of business and innovation for the next five to 10 years.
Speaker 2 [00:09:20] Such an interesting point about density and scale. Canada does not have certainly Asia’s density or scale. Claire, without those two factors, how do we accelerate?
Speaker 3 [00:09:32] I think, first of all, as Keith pointed out, it’s important that we get the network coverage and availability in place. And so that’s what the carriers are working very quickly on now. And then there’s a series of different partnerships that we have to encourage this innovation and thought leadership. And we’re really investing not only in businesses, but also in the education infrastructure within the country to explore new ideas. How can we use augmented reality? How will smart cities evolve? When we look at things such as cell research and machine learning and mobile computing, how will all of these factors play a role in how we leverage the fulsomness of the 5G investment that we’re making? And so how does Canada play a role? We get behind it. We get behind it as government. We get behind it as business leaders to make change happen and continue the reputation, quite frankly, that this country has had in terms of being a technological leader.
Speaker 2 [00:10:39] We also ask Keith how Canada can maintain or build on that reputation.
Speaker 4 [00:10:44] You know, my answer is to focus on what we as Canada have as advantages. What we don’t have is a huge population density and large cities on the scale of some US markets or South Korea or even European cities. But what we do have and bring to the table is a lot of innovation and experience. So going beyond the ability to deploy infrastructure, I think the 5G race really is around developing innovative technologies and approaches to leverage that. For example, certainly Canada has a long history in terms of agricultural innovation and leadership in that market. And there’s a number of 5G technologies that support the smart form of the future that would allow us to be leaders in that space in a domain that we already understand.
Speaker 2 [00:11:33] I’m glad Keith mentioned the Smart farm because that echoes the report we put out a couple of years ago called Farmer 4.0, which looked at the digital transformation of agriculture and the skills as well as technology. That Canada needs to be a food producing power in the twenty twenties and thirties, a couple of summers ago I visited a farm outside Saskatoon where the farmer was testing a self-driving harvester. Picture this, a machine going across the prairies with no driver turning up and down the field on its own. And actually, there were a couple of guys chasing it from time to time with laptops, trying to correct the coding. And as I talk to the farmer about how this would transform his operation, he said a few things that really stuck in my mind. One obviously was the ability for him to spend his time doing other things. He didn’t need to sit on a vehicle going up and down the field. He could spend his time studying the data, for instance, that was coming off the vehicle that really excited him. But he wasn’t sure how that was going to happen because networks are not consistent. And until we get there, it’s going to be a little harder for farmers to take advantage of these new technologies, the way that other farmers, especially in Asia, are starting to seize on the technology. Is there the desire and capability of Canadian farmers? Is there all the pieces are there? So how is the country? Do we help pull them together?
Speaker 3 [00:13:10] No, you’re absolutely right. And, you know, the term smart farm is really very on point. And you think about all of the different things that technology will now allow us to measure at scale with 5G, because obviously the cost to deploy a wireless network in some of these more rural and remote markets is very efficient. But I want you to think about agriculture. And there’s an example of something we did with a winery able to measure wind speed, temperature and humidity levels for people who are thinking, in that instance, managing their crops, that you can expand that to many other smart agricultural aspects of the Canadian market.
Speaker 2 [00:13:54] I’m so glad you raised the winery example. We profiled another winery on disruptors a few years ago and spoke to a winemaker who was able to control the vineyard with her phone. She was kind of sitting on stage as well as direct the drones that were working with weather sensors. All kinds of fantastic stuff to see. But I think we take for granted the network that makes that possible. And if you don’t have that speed, the low latency, you’re not able to control all those devices. And all of this really kind of opens up the door to the Internet of Things, which is another bit of a cliche these days, but is a really important way of thinking about the economy of the future, that we have all sorts of devices, drones, appliances, but factories and vehicles connected. And of course, they’re connected by networks. And it’s not just business leaders, any organization, we hospitals, schools, local community associations, how should they be thinking about these opportunities clearer as we look into the future?
Speaker 3 [00:14:59] Well, first of all, I think this has been a moment in time where everybody is really reflecting on what the future needs and what their business needs are and their personal needs are as they as they look to advance. And so in that moment of reflection, I think a lot of organizations are looking at transformative technologies. So, you know, the first thing, of course, for anyone is you can have the service application, but you need a couple of different things. The first one, as you said, is we need the network coverage. Right, without an incredible network partner, really, the application is not relevant. It’s not valid. It can’t work to its optimum capability. And so choosing the right network partner and making sure that we have a robust connectivity infrastructure in Canada is key. And we, of course, drive that mandate each and every day at Bell, then I think it really is about conversation and exploration. There are many, many experts and this is where I know our technical teams that love to have these conversations with, you know, to use your term disruptors, people who really want to be change agents. And what you find is those individuals who are looking at transforming their business. They get the first start. You know, they make that progress and then others will rapidly follow. And, you know, we have some terrific examples. There’s one specific tank company and they completely change their business. They change the way their fleet went out into the field. They changed the way they monitored. And as a result, they were able to improve their operational efficiency dramatically. You can imagine what happened, people followed, but they had the advantage of being there first. But to your point, you know what’s critical? Have a conversation. I can tell you that we have a team of people who have experience and they want to explore options and develop new solutions for you and can steer you in the right direction. So businesses don’t need to try and figure these things out on their own.
Speaker 1 [00:17:11] Hey, it’s Theresa again. I hope you’re enjoying this encore presentation of disrupters in the second half of the program. John continues his conversation with Clare Gillis and also speaks to the chief digital officer of one of Canada’s most innovative cities. If you’re liking what you’re hearing, I’d encourage you to check out some of the many conversations John and I have had with Canada’s top business leaders and innovators over the past year, such as our special Earth Day episode, where I talk with two environmental pioneers who are using block chain to help fight climate change. You can find past episodes of Disrupters at RBC dot com slash disruptors or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to John Stackhouse.
Speaker 2 [00:17:58] Today, I’m chatting with Clare Gillis, the president of Bell Mobility, about the 5G revolution and the truly connected economy is going to usher in. One city that’s on the cutting edge of 5G is Hamilton, Ontario, which was once known as the steel capital of Canada and is now home of the Innovation Factory at McMaster Innovation Park. Hamilton has also been named as one of the leading seven intelligent communities of 20 20 by the Intelligent Community Forum. That’s why we reached out to the city’s chief digital officer, Cyrus Tehrani, to get his take on the possibilities 5G presents for both consumers and business.
Speaker 5 [00:18:37] The analogy I give it, I think of it for myself as I look at my smartphone and I really can’t live without it. I know that’s a big statement to make. I can live without it. But the functionality that it provides me in my life on a day to day basis, I can’t imagine being lost that now, whether it’s something even like Google or Waze or whatever, that’s all because of the speeds that 4G enabled. And I think we’ve all had that experience where you go to an area where it’s 3G or 2G or something else, you’re like, oh, I can’t even use Google Maps. It’s not updating. So think about the opportunities that potentially exist. How much more new use cases can be evolved that we haven’t even imagined, but it won’t be until it’s fully probably adopted and deployed. And we definitely don’t want to be behind and looking at, I think, other regions and saying, oh, I wish we could do that, but we don’t think about how to make that investment or make it a priority.
Speaker 2 [00:19:28] Clear what communities we’ve just heard from Hamilton be thinking about to position themselves for perhaps a very different future with 5G.
Speaker 3 [00:19:38] As cities are constantly building and renewing their infrastructure, there are opportunities to integrate 5G and IOT technologies along with that that will revolutionize the way they do business and allow them to actually proactively monitor and manage potential risks. So as we are continuing to move forward and progress as we come out of this very challenging covid period, I think building better is absolutely the right way to think about it. And building better means building with connectivity, building with insights with our end users in mind, whether those are consumers or whether those are business owners.
Speaker 2 [00:20:22] I think of the example of smart parking, which would be fantastic. I’d love not to have to drive around the block multiple times waiting for a spot to come open. I’d rather get notified or have my vehicle notified and take me to the spot as it’s becoming available. More broadly, how do cities make a compelling case for the investments that will be needed?
Speaker 3 [00:20:45] For me, it’s always around. What’s the return on the investment, whether it’s the citizen experience or whether it’s a reduction in the costs that a city is operating at and how they can reinvest those dollars in new things to make their community better and stronger for the citizens who live there.
Speaker 2 [00:21:03] I suspect coming out of this crisis, another area of opportunity will be health care as we look for more home care, for less centralization, perhaps, of a lot of health care services. That’s going to depend on technology. That depends on networks. Again, what should we be thinking about in terms of the health care revolution that may be upon us and what 5G can do to accelerate that?
Speaker 3 [00:21:27] You can imagine in the future that we could have a one of the best surgeons in the country and Toronto operating on someone in northern Alberta remotely at a distance through the connectivity that we provide with 5G. So it just in terms of making availability of the very best in health care accessible in a democratized way to everyone, this is going to be a game changer, I think, for all of us and not just here in Canada, but also the role that we’re going to play in the global economy.
Speaker 2 [00:22:00] And it’s not just some of those kind of sci-fi examples that involve robotics. Stuff that’s happening today can be accelerated and even transformed with this technology. We published a report a while back called Paging Dr. Data, and it looked at how data is is transforming health care, but really needs to transform it far more in different international studies. So that I’ve looked at it seems most of the focus right now is on manufacturing and the industrial sectors. Perhaps that’s because that’s where the money and efficiency gains are. Should we also be thinking in those directions? It’s not just cities and health care systems, but how do we transform our industrial base in this country as we continue to face more and more competition?
Speaker 3 [00:22:49] I mean, you talk about manufacturing and retail. You think about improving automation, providing visibility into things such as the. Supply chain, where parts are moving, all of these elements are thinking about how do I how do I use data, you know, whether that’s heat sensors, whether it’s movement control and again, many, many other applications and saying, how do I make this better, faster, more efficient for my organization? And as a result, many of those things will also pop out benefits to the business, as well as end user benefits. That will, of course, further create an attitude towards that business from a consumer.
Speaker 2 [00:23:35] As we look at Asia, the adoption rates there are accelerating and the enthusiasm for 5G, you see this in business surveys is really significant in not just in places like China and Korea, but in South Asia and India. And there seems to be a bit less enthusiasm in North America. And I wonder, Claire, how we can balance those sometimes competing forces in our minds.
Speaker 3 [00:24:04] Earlier in the conversation, we talked about how the third generation and the fourth generation of networked technology have changed the way businesses have participated in the economy. And I just as you fast forward into 5G, you cannot imagine that it won’t have that same sort of revolutionary change on the way that we do business. And there will be this notion of first mover advantage. There’s also more so than I think there’s ever been, John, that we live in this global economy. And so it’s important that as Canadian business leaders, we think about, you know, what are the changes and how do we embrace them and how do we use them to our advantage, not only here in our own market, to deliver better business results, better consumer experiences, but also how we use this as a catalyst for our future in the global economy.
Speaker 2 [00:24:59] I wonder, Claire, as we move towards close, how we can ensure that we have those productive gains? One of the challenges always with technology is that there is an enormous consumer appeal, and that’s terrific. But it’s also important to ensure that frontier technologies also go to the productive side of the economy. How do we ensure that 5G does indeed do that and leads to great and broad benefits for society?
Speaker 3 [00:25:26] One of the things I think of that is really critical is just how far reaching this networked technology will be. So we’ll talk about things like leveraging 5G to provide high speed Internet access in more rural communities who haven’t historically had access to that level of service. And we spoke previously about access to health care and applications of that sort. So I really do think that, you know, when we look at businesses, we look at consumer access. It’s about how we’re changing the game, how we’re reducing expense in some areas to explore and invest in other areas. And this is just this is going to be one of those examples. So whether it’s rural broadband access, virtualize health care or cost savings benefits that can be reinvested to explore new areas for businesses. This really is the moment in time that that’s critical for us to look at the future and to make investments and change for the future.
Speaker 2 [00:26:30] It’s interesting to think of this as a moment in time. And as I sit here looking at my phone, which may be the most important inanimate part of my life, and that’s probably true for many, if not most listeners as well. It’s hard to imagine future moments where the phone and devices will be even more powerful and more significant parts of our lives. But they will be because of the power of what we know they’ll be able to do in the years ahead. There can be downsides to that that we’re all familiar with. But the opportunity for society, for organizations, for business and communities is far greater than the risks. My guest today has been Clare Gillis, the president of Dell Mobility. Thanks for sharing your time and your thoughts.
Speaker 3 [00:27:18] Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 [00:27:21] But I also like to thank Keith Ponton from IBI Group and Cyrus Tehrani, the chief digital officer for the city of Hamilton, for their perspectives on the potential of 5G. I’m John Stackhouse and this is Disruptors and RBK podcast.
Speaker 1 [00:27:36] And I’m Theresa Do. Thanks for joining us for this special look at the 5G revolution. It’s a fast moving world and we’ll keep you updated on the latest developments in the next season of Disruptors, which launches after Labour Day. Join us next time for another special summer episode where we check in on some of our favorite stories of entrepreneurial resilience from the past year. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 3 [00:28:05] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by JAR audio. For more Disruptors content, like or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit rbc dot com slash disruptors.
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Canada’s technology sector is having a year unlike any other. In the first half of 2021, Canadian tech companies raised nearly as much venture capital as they did in all of 2019. Twenty-two companies have had financing rounds of $100-million or more during this stretch—while 10 achieved “unicorn” status, now valued at over US$1-billion each.
One of those unicorns is Toronto-based Clearco—founded in 2015 to help entrepreneurs raise money through revenue-sharing agreements. This past June, Clearco raised $215 million in a round led by Japan’s SoftBank; this followed a round in April that quintupled Clearco’s valuation to $2 billion.
In this season finale for Disruptors, an RBC podcast, host John Stackhouse speaks with Clearco co-founder and Dragons’ Den superstar Michele Romanow about the crazy pandemic year for Clearco, her entrepreneurial journey—she’s also founded a coffee shop, caviar fishery and mobile couponing app—and what she thinks it will take for Canada’s booming tech sector to continue to “kick butt and take names.”
Notes:
To learn about Clearco and its financing model for entrepreneurs, follow this link.
If you want to understand more about the record VC year for Canadian tech startups—and how that looks in the global context—check out CB Insights’ State of Venture Q2’21 Report via this link (registration required).
In this episode, John also mentions a new report from the RBC Economics and Thought Leadership Team called The Coming Creativity Boom: How human ingenuity will power the 2020s. To read it, go to RBC.com/creativity.
Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Hi, it’s John here. We’ve just been through the most extraordinary in some ways the most unbelievable economic disruption of our lifetime. But, you know, there’s one sector that has thrived through the pandemic and of course, that’s technology. The tech sector is booming in Canada. The boom actually started several years ago. It was driven, of course, by lower interest rates, new tax laws, a lot more venture capital and the rapid shift toward digitization. But it was also fueled by a new generation of tech entrepreneurs who not only wanted to take risks but were committed to building global companies in Canada in twenty twenty one, a lot of those startups started to take off. Just look at the first six months of this year. Canadian tech companies raised nearly as much venture capital as they did in all of twenty nineteen, and that was a pretty good year. Twenty two companies have had financing rounds of one hundred million dollars or more and we’re not even through summer and ten of them have achieved unicorn status. You’re probably familiar with the term unicorn. It refers to companies that are valued at at least a billion US dollars. A few years ago, you could count Canadian unicorns on one hand. Today, it’s in the double digits. Canada is now the third most productive tech ecosystem in the world after Silicon Valley and China. That’s in terms of invested capital. But as we look beyond the pandemic, what will it take to sustain this boom? What will it take to keep this talent here in Canada with their companies? And how can Canada continue to nurture homegrown talent and build a new generation of global tech champions? This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast, I’m your host, John Stackhouse. On today’s program, we’re taking a closer look at Canada’s tech boom, a scene through one of this year’s biggest success stories. Toronto-based Clearco, formerly Clearbanc, was founded in twenty fifteen as a way for startups to raise money through revenue sharing agreements. Since then, Clearco has been able to lend more than two and a half billion dollars to more than fifty five hundred companies. This past June, Clearco raised two hundred and fifteen million dollars in a round, led by Japan’s Softbank. This followed a round in April. The quintupled Clearco’s valuation to two billion dollars, delivering the six year old startup into Canada’s exclusive Unicorn Club. My guest today is the co-founder of Clearco and one of Canada’s best known tech entrepreneurs, Michele Romanow. Over the past 15 years, Michele has launched a coffee shop, a fishery, a mobile couponing app, and now with Clearco, a pretty revolutionary moneylender. She’s also one of the stars of CBC’s Dragons Den. Michele, welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 2 [00:03:10] It’s great to be here.
Speaker 3 [00:03:12] So it’s hard to believe we’ve been in this crisis for roughly 18 months. Sometimes it feels like 18 years.
Speaker 2 [00:03:19] It does definitely closer to 18 years than 18 months.
Speaker 3 [00:03:25] So what have you learned?
Speaker 2 [00:03:26] Oh, my gosh. I have reconfirmed myself that I am an extrovert. And this was a totally new level of resilience for me. I never thought in a million years that Clearco would be a remote company. We had a rule about everyone was in the office. Everyone had to move to Toronto and we just continued on, I wouldn’t say without a beat. There was lots of things that happened during that period that we had to learn from. But I think that is going to be so liberating. And it was actually really interesting. So there was a lot of work, a lot of actually a lot of the early work RBC produced on this, saying that the pandemic was a huge setback for women because effectively they had become both workers in their home and kindergarten teachers and everything. And I think I am very hopeful that that’s actually quite temporary, because what we did in this pandemic is we proved that working from home was not I am at home doing my laundry, checking an email once an hour. I am actually working from home. And when you think about the long term effects that that is going to have on women and families, I think that is going to be absolutely game changing. And so that was a huge part of learning through the pandemic. And then the last thing that was probably very relevant is, I mean, we raised more than three hundred million dollars from a zoom screen. And this was an industry that everyone said you had to meet in person. You had to get to know other people. And I think that there was a contraction in deals with probably the very beginning. And then people just said, well, look, the world has to go on. And and so we’ve kind of found ourselves in in a new paradigm.
Speaker 3 [00:05:13] Can we jump, Michele, to the state of entrepreneurship? Because this this this crisis has been devastating for a lot of entrepreneurs, been liberating depending on the sector for entrepreneurs. You are a serial entrepreneur, how do you think entrepreneurship has changed because of this crisis?
Speaker 2 [00:05:34] I think everyone now has to think digital first, and I think we probably would have been in another twenty, twenty five years of, you know, in person first, no matter what that means, whether that was retail or restaurant or whatever. And I think you’re right, there was lots of businesses that saw devastation. There was an equal number. I remember this season and last season actually on Dragons Den, just seeing these extraordinary businesses. I remember there is one that’s like you know, it’s an app that shows you where you can bring your dog. The whole revenue model was based on in-person events. And like all of these businesses pivoted. And they if you were a restaurant, you were figuring out how to do corporate events where you had sushi come in. And that innovation is actually extremely important that we have that because entrepreneurs are always throwing these curveballs along the way. And I think we got we got to see this. We were like we were on the front of the airplane on this. We saw this incredible rise in e-commerce and digital commerce. We saw double the amount of new businesses created in the US that in the US last year than any other year in the last 10 years. And I think that’s incredibly important because we can look at a small, narrow section of some brick and mortar businesses that were incredibly hurt. And effectively, what we did is we just put an enormous amount of government debt. And I think that’s going to have a lot of long term effects on those businesses. But there was a lot of people that basically said, screw it, this is my life with the virus. I am either not doing my job and I’m actually going to build my dreams. And I think that that is going to be such a win and we’re going to see this enormous growth of businesses. I mean, double the amount of new businesses were created. And so we look at this the same way that I started my career in the 2008 recession. I was there at the beginning of this group on an e-commerce phase where we had just started with kind of the early consumer tech and obviously the Airbnb and the Uber is just completely took off. But a lot of these were recession based businesses. And although we are not in a recession at all, we went through this kind of crazy economic cycle that I think net is going to produce some extraordinary businesses to watch because we’ve actually seen the creation of all of them this year,
Speaker 3 [00:07:56] these disruptive moments. And we call this disruptors for a reason or real pivot points for society and economies, whether it’s a recession or not. And we saw that in the in the financial crisis, as you said, that’s when Facebook and so many other companies took off because social norms change really, really quickly when this crisis hit. Did you having lived through a previous crisis? No. At the beginning that this was going to be a kind of reset in which opportunities pop out of left field.
Speaker 2 [00:08:29] I now consider myself very blessed that I finished engineering and two thousand seven I finished my MBA in two thousand and eight, I moved out to New Brunswick to build a fishery from scratch, which was producing sturgeon caviar. I was producing one of the most luxurious products, not the definition of things you do not need in a recession is caviar, right? And so I built this business of selling it and I still remember what September 8th of twenty felt like when it was like, oh my gosh, most families were saying they had lost, like, I don’t know, a third to half of their net worth. I was like, this is going to be so painful. And I think there’s nothing like I mean, entrepreneurs lived through crisis’s every day. I mean, I literally wake up. I always say there’s like two things. It’s like slap me across the side and had every week. I just don’t know what they’re going to be. But even in this situation, it was pretty difficult to stay calm. I think I what we did is we just kept hunkering down on saying, here’s what we need to know. We divided the company into one of six initiatives that we were all working on. We continue to put money into the market. This is when literally everyone else that was providing capital, whether it was square or everyone else, pulled back, we said, no, we think these businesses are going to do OK. We’re looking at data every single day to see how things are going in. Some of these trends we’re so interesting was like at the beginning of the pandemic, it was like no children’s toys and the children’s toys went through the roof because everyone was like, oh my God, I’m home with my kids. And there was all these weird friends that we’re watching were like, beauty is going to take a nosedive. It’s like no one’s going out anymore. And then three weeks into the pandemic, everyone’s watching themselves on Zuman beauty is not taking a nosedive anymore. So what’s the benefit of having all this data is that we were seeing it. And then I think the last part of it, managing through a crisis is just constant, transparent communication. I think for a company of our size, we did an all hands. I mean, we were two hundred people at the time. We did an all hands every single day at five o’clock. And I’d say 90 percent of all hands. I felt like I would say. I don’t know more than you we’re not going back to the office tomorrow. And here’s what’s happened. But it was it is not easy to manage through a crisis.
Speaker 3 [00:10:38] It takes a certain humility. And entrepreneurs get humbled every day, as you know, but also have to be super confident because no one’s going to have more confidence in your business than you. So you’ve got to be 100 percent confidence how when you’re going through this kind of turmoil, do you manage that need to be confident to be the leader, to know where you’re taking the place with that kind of daily or hourly humbling that a crisis looks on all of us?
Speaker 2 [00:11:08] You have a very close circle that you are incredibly honest with because you cannot you cannot at the end of the day, be fooling yourself. And you can be I think optimism and living in reality are very different things that many people conflate all the time. Right. They think that if I just ignore what’s happening and the fact patterns, I am ruthless around getting to the bottom of the story and why things aren’t working and why that’s not happening. That does not mean I can’t take what could look like a very negative spreadsheet and say, oh, God, so we’re doing this. And that is really it is separating optimism and separating reality, because I think those are two different things. Andrew and I were incredibly honest with each other throughout this crisis. Every day we were like, OK, this happening where are our assets going, how do we protect this? How do we keep going? Are we taking too much risk? And, you know, it’s a funny thing as you look back now. And one of the things that we did is we pulled out of international markets and now we wish we would have gone so much further. I mean, we we had launched the U.K. by October already. So it’s not like we had a we had a long pause, but I think we had that moment where we could have gone even stronger, even faster into doing things. So even when you think you’ve done an OK job of managing it, you still look back being like, oh, if I’d only known we were going to bounce back so quickly, I would have taken a couple more risks during this process.
Speaker 3 [00:12:33] But what gave you pause and what didn’t you see?
Speaker 2 [00:12:36] Oh, my gosh, we just had no idea what was going to happen. Like, we were we were all reading the same things, which is like the crisis is worse than. I was so worried that consumer spending was going to drop. I mean, we backed we put two point four billion dollars and fifty five hundred commerce companies. I am not a fool. If we see all of consumer spending drop, it’s going to be pretty difficult for us. So there was this whole there was real fear in what could potentially happen there. And then you just you don’t know what you don’t know. And we’ve we made it through.
Speaker 3 [00:13:13] Maybe we can pause and ask you to explain to our listeners what formally Clearbanc does.
Speaker 2 [00:13:19] So I’ll tell you the story. I had been a serial entrepreneur my whole life, built an e-commerce company myself. No one would find me because they just didn’t understand the business and didn’t think e-commerce businesses could do that. Well, sold an app to Groupon and then ended up getting cast on the on Dragons Den when I was twenty eight years old. And what’s important is everyone’s like, oh, that was so great. I mean when you’re me you just feel like the runt of the litter. You are the poorest one on the show and you are the youngest one on the show. So you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing. And so I took a totally different approach to looking at these businesses. And we see something like two hundred and fifty pitches back to back in seventeen days. A lot of things start to distill. This is my first time really being an investor and everyone’s kind of like, look, I want I want one hundred grand and I’m willing to give 10 percent of my company at the early stage. And yes, what they need the money for. And it’s always the same two things. I need it for inventory and I need it for customer acquisition, which is really Facebook and Google ads today. And so I remember thinking, like, why are founders using the most expensive capital in the world, which is always going to be equity to do something that really has a fixed term. I mean, you buy inventory, you can only market up three or four times. You buy Facebook and you’re hoping for a three or four times return stranger. And I put our heads together and I came back to the show the next day. This is in twenty, twenty, fifteen, twenty sixteen. And I was like a different deal type. I’m going to give you the hundred thousand dollars you’re looking for instead of taking ten percent of your company that alone forever. I just want ten percent of your revenue just to pay me back my capital plus six percent. So I was like oh that sounds like a load. And I’m like, no, it’s not alone. There’s no personal guarantee. There’s no fixed payment time. There’s no company interest. But most importantly, this isn’t debt. If you don’t pay me back, I’m not going to bankrupt your business. Totally different risk profile. And so the founder that day was like, yeah, I’ll do that. And that’s effectively the category we created is revenue share deals for founders. The only two options that existed before we did were really bank debt, which always has personal guarantees associated with it and is really in small business as a form of personal loan. And then on the other end there was venture capital and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of those. Venture capital is designed for people who are in the venture capital ecosystem. And so it is. And there’s been. So much published on this, it is extremely unfair the way that is distributed, because if you went to Harvard and Stanford and if you know the VCs, it’s not hard for you to raise an extra dollars. But to think about how large our market is, I mean, there was just a in commerce. Again, we find gas companies and mobile apps, just any commerce. There was twenty five million commerce businesses last year, five thousand of them VC funding. So not only does their product work well, if you’re raising venture capital because you have to take as much solution, you can use our capital for your ads and inventory. But we have a big a big, big, big market out there. And so know it’s hard to believe that off that little jewel off the show, we’ve been able to fund two and a half billion dollars into five thousand five hundred different founders. I mean, our mission is to find a million founders. We think that that’s big and bold and requires us to operate in most countries around the world. But we think we can do that. And the category was created out of Canada, which I think is just the coolest thing. I mean, I think Andrew and I probably thought we could start a company. I don’t ever think that we could start a category. And so that gives us a lot of pride.
Speaker 1 [00:16:33] OK, we’re going to take a quick break. But coming up, more of our conversation with Michele Romanow on the challenges of scaling up and the opportunities ahead for Canada’s thriving tech sector. You’re listening to Disruptors, an RBC podcast, I’m your host, John Stackhouse. You may have heard our recent two part series called The Creativity Economy. We’ve also recently launched a new thought leadership report on the skill for the twenty twenties. It’s called The Coming Creativity Boom. In it, Canada’s most creative thinkers share their insights on the country’s creative potential, discover how different creative types deliver value and how we can translate that into our country’s creative future. You can find it at RBC dot com slash creativity.
Welcome back. I’m speaking with Michele Romanow, one of the dragons on Dragons Den and co-founder of Clearco.
Speaker 3 [00:17:41] What would change is you, Michele, as you as the company grows, you know, to a two hundred and fifty employees.
Speaker 2 [00:17:48] we’re now four hundred.
Speaker 3 [00:17:51] OK, so youre four hundred, I’ll blink again.
Speaker 2 [00:17:54] And five zero people started on Monday. This week. I am just like blown away by the growth that I’m witnessing.
Speaker 3 [00:18:01] And you now have employees, I’m guessing, who you don’t know and you never know. How do you have to change as an entrepreneur? Because until now a lot of your businesses have been things you could wrap your arms around.
Speaker 2 [00:18:14] Yeah. So this is the hardest part of being a founder. Is that what gets you to stage one and stage two does not get you to stage two and stage? And it would be easy if the things that got you to stage one and stage two, everyone was laughing at you along the way. You get down to it and you get said no to so many times in this business. And I always think it’s important to share. Right. So we had this idea that we could give our founders money. We would just use the data sources from their business. We would have no personal guarantee as a backup plan. And I went around Wall Street in my high heels pitching all of these credit guys. And two hundred people said to us, I think the rudest ones said, you guys don’t even understand credit. This will never work. You’re going to lose your shirts. And we’re like, no, we’re pretty sure that these are the data sources that will be more indicative. Pretty sure that because we have access to this information every day, it will it will be a stronger source of data and signal. And so many people see so many people think this is like a cute business. So many thought people thought we would deploy twenty or thirty or forty million dollars and it would be like this cute little thing. And we’re like, no, no, no, we’re going to go we’re going to build an asset class. We’re going to build an asset class that’s bigger than venture capital because I have a I have a TAM that’s much larger than the town of companies that could possibly 10x a year. And so you callous yourself in a really good way where you’re like I am used to people saying no to me. I’m used to people saying I’m wrong. And I had to hear so much of that to get here. But what that does is it gets really scary because now I have to be a very different leader than I was at the early stage. And so my leadership style is always get my hands dirty, always get into the spreadsheet myself, call the customer myself. If something doesn’t make sense to my team’s telling me, it was like there is no task to lower too high for me. I will do it. And that’s an important I think part of leadership is to just lead from the front. But that is a completely unscalable form of leadership when you’re trying to enter ten countries in a year. So you have to work with coaches and people that can take you to that next level. And I have had to stop doing and in many ways things that actually hurt me because they were some of the things that that that made me so successful. And I get that this is going to be the hardest part of my journey, too, is changing the way that I lead. I used to have people could call me at midnight and I took their phone calls and I can’t have a one on one relationship with everyone anymore. And in many ways that completely breaks my heart. But I have to figure out now how to communicate on all hands. I have to figure out how to how to do different things. I think I would give you one last example, and I actually think this is a good example because it’s a little bit controversial. So we’ve got a couple of people thinking about it. But I I had a really interesting experience watching Uber scale. And one of the things that most people don’t know about the Uber story is they know the part of the story where Travis gets aggressive and then he’s kicked out. But they missed the part of the story where to build Uber meant fighting every single taxi union basically in the world. And most people are like, oh, yeah, it was a fight and it was a fight with the government. In many cases, it was a fight with the mob. And I knew actually many friends that had started competitors to Uber. That stopped because they had literally people show up at their door saying they would kill their family. This was not this was this is the definition of what you call a dirty business. Right. And the balls that it took to continue operating when you basically had a person in every city that didn’t want your business to fail, but they actually wanted you killed was very different. And I don’t think anyone ever gave him the respect for having to to build this in every city. And I think now all of us appreciate that this is an incredible public utility, that we now have drivers on demand. But imagine just going to the expression, having the empathy of what that must have felt like to do that in two hundred and eighty four hundred cities around the world. And then you build a little bit of cockiness. You understand that you always feel like people are going to take you down and then you. Lose the empathy for who he needed, the empathy for, which is at the end of the day, his own employees, his own teams and the drivers that funded his business. And this is this is I just it hit me so hard reading his story that the same thing that brought him to where he was was the exact same trait that brought him down. And that is why it is so bloody difficult to do this job as you scale, because he would have never made it there without that trade. And then that trade has to change and get more nuanced and get different. And I think it’s just an important part of the story because people I don’t think he gets credit for what that took at the early days. They just see how that became the fatal character flaw in the later days. And so I think there’s a lot to learn. And I try and be very humble. And that’s going to be have to be a part of my journey as well.
Speaker 3 [00:23:24] You’ve mentioned Andrew a couple of times, that’s Andrew de Souza, your business partner and life partner, and it’s always amazing to watch how you manage that. And I’m curious how your dynamics as the company grows and how you keep hold each other to account of each other, humble, but also balance that those growth challenges. Is it easier as a couple or easier as individuals?
Speaker 2 [00:23:52] I think there is there’s a lot of emphasis placed on the fact that we’re a couple when you’re when you have a cofounder, you just do everything together and you spend much time together and you have to learn how to work very well. And one of the things that makes Anthony such unique cofounding is we are actually very different business people. And Andrew is an incredible product visionary, has extraordinary ideas and the ability to implement those things. And I am a much maybe harder seasoned operator. So we actually what we’ve done today is we divide the company into what we call horizon one in horizon two. We think we have the luxury today of thinking about Horizon two, which is how do we create long term innovation, long term retention of our customers and incredible products that the world couldn’t even dream about. And what gives us the right to do that is my part of the business, which is Horizon two, which is making our numbers this year, which is, you know, it’s the vast majority of the org and making sure we’re operating and we’re launching these 10 countries and everything happens. And we have changed rules over the years. We have found different balances over the years. And then we’ve had to figure out how to balance our own lives as well, which is most couples plan date night because they want to see each other and they want to have uninterrupted time. By definition. I see Andrew every single day. So we have to plan on date nights where we do things better. And you just figure out these rhythms that are incredibly important to you as a couple and to you to your bringing often. I mean, look, I think it was it was great that we got to build something together. I still think he’s one of the best founders I’ve ever known in my life. And so it just comes from an area of respect. Last thing I would say with your partner is and I think Covid actually taught so many couples this is most couples had no idea what they did when they went to work every day. So you love someone, but when you get to see someone when at work and be really good at doing something in their career, they’re kind of like a whole new level of love that gets unlocked with that, which I think is always really cool.
Speaker 3 [00:26:00] That’s a beautiful thought. So your horizon one and his horizon two, is that. That’s correct. Yeah, that’s great. It could be a new and a new playbook
Speaker 2 [00:26:12] because every company has the same concept. It’s short term and long term. And we have to do both and we have to do both really well. If we want to be one hundred year old company, it’s got to be a horizon too. And if we don’t meet this year and what we need to do well, today, we don’t get the right to have a horizon.
Speaker 3 [00:26:30] Well, all of this is unfolding and unfolding very well for Clearco. We are in the midst of the most extraordinary a tech boom. But in some ways, it’s one of the most extraordinary business booms just in the last 12 months in terms of all sorts of asset valuations, but particularly in the VC space. What do you make of what’s happened in such a short period?
Speaker 2 [00:27:00] I actually think you’re probably better to tell me. I don’t think we have ever seen this level of whatever we want to call quantitative easing, printing money that we have ever witnessed the world see. And I think we saw a little bit of what that looked like in 2008 and how that that was still very slow. We were seeing asset prices increase very slow. I, I have no idea what that’s going to mean. And I think they’re far smarter people to talk to me about that. But what I can say is that tech is not is not having a different bubble compared to other asset classes, the same way that real estate is up, the same way that equities have tech is up really on that same cadence at this stage. I can tell you we’re not being valued today on potential in the future in a bubble. There’s an extraordinary amount of diligence at this stage, especially when you get a partner like Softbank that wants to understand how big this business and how big the TAM is and how well you guys are performing. And so I don’t I don’t think I would I would say that this is a bubble. I would say that we should be so proud of, like this new series of what should be close to it. I don’t know a handful of Canadian unicorns. And it’s exciting to celebrate now, but it’s important to remember that all the seeds were planted five, six, seven years ago as people were coming out, as there was more venture capital in the ecosystem as there. More support, and my number one thing is I would just beg Canadians that we cannot have tall poppy syndrome here, we have to root and we have to cheer for these companies to win, because the reality of tech companies is they are largely winner take all markets. The network effects you get on data are so powerful that you get to end up owning the market. And so when we talk about the things, I always think that there should have been a B in there and it should have been BlackBerry. And we have to think about how to not create great companies for Canada, but how to create great companies for the world because they will provide enormous dividends to Canada while doing that. And I think we have a tendency to just not celebrate successes the same way, or they we want to take people down when they’re getting successful. And that’s not how we’re going to win as a country. We don’t win if we’re all like, oh, let’s create a bunch of little Canadian oligopolies. That’s not a win. We’re two percent of the global economy and we need companies that are intrinsically global. And then by God, we get to share all of the Canadian values we like with the rest of the world. By building a company here,
Speaker 3 [00:29:37] what do we need to do to create more of those global winners and global champions?
Speaker 2 [00:29:44] Capital was a big part of the early equation, we’ve largely solved a lot of that risk taking is the other one. I would be lying to you if there wasn’t a lot of days I lied in bed being like, oh, my God, please, someone buy this company so I can I can, like, take a vacation with longer than 48 hours. And I’m so happy today. We kept we kept going. But we also had investors that were really supportive and we had customers that were very supportive for us to keep going. And we need that that global ambition. Right. If we continue to chop down people for God, anything from like traveling to operating in another country, which is not exactly like ours to do, we do this. We get very myopic as Canadians sometimes. And it’s just not how we’re going to win. We’re going to win because we think about we want to create something that’s dominant and we want to create a category. And it’s based in Canada. But it’s for the whole world.
Speaker 3 [00:30:41] And in many ways, you know, in a new echelon, you mentioned Softbank, one of the world’s biggest investors. You’ve got Maya Son now involved in your company. How does that change things?
Speaker 2 [00:30:56] It’s first of all, I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t until we were doing the press where we were like, we’re the first Canadian company Softbank invested in. And then we went back to Softbank and they’re like, yeah, you guys are. And we literally didn’t realize that until like a week ago. Look, it’s a it’s an extraordinary vote of confidence. It’s a reason to have a glass of champagne and to take a moment to pause and be like, that’s really cool. But it means that we are just at the beginning of our journey. I mean, Andrew and I have literally sneakers that same day one on them. And day one means we haven’t earned anything yet. There’s no laurels. Anyone can come and build something. And we need to have this attitude every single day. We have to keep building. And so I think this is like a great vote of confidence for Canada that companies like this can be built there. But I think it’s so bizarre to celebrate fundraising in a way, because at the end of the day, it’s external validation and someone believes in your company, but you’re also celebrating that you just sold a little piece of your company. It’s actually a bizarre thing. It’s like today Michelle and Andrew gave up another X percent. And at the end of the day, I think foundational in their business because they do all the work and investors are or can be hugely helpful. But thinking about the balance of dilution, which is effectively what our company was built on, is incredibly important.
Speaker 3 [00:32:20] As you become more and more of a global company, how do you stay Canadian and how do you avoid being swallowed up by other global players?
Speaker 2 [00:32:31] I think this is where founders have to really think long and hard about how they’re financed. They partner with because there’s certainly situations where you can have things that look like hostile takeovers or things like the public level where companies are given less of a choice to choose. But if you create the discipline around a good business model where you have you have capital and you have options, that gives you the right to continue to remain independent, to continue to show your values and to continue to build that way. And so I think we’re not explicit when we talk. We celebrate fundraising’s but we don’t talk about the more complicated part of fundraising’s, which is do founders still control their board if they still control their destiny? Are they in a position where and this is also founders jobs as well? I mean, if you are burning more money and if you put yourself on the treadmill where if you don’t raise every 12 months you don’t have a company, you’re allowing yourself to be controlled by another partner. And so having that discipline is exceptionally important. And that’s what allows you to really be the sailor of your own ship at the end of the day.
Speaker 3 [00:33:35] If we can have you back on the podcast in a year’s time, what do you hope we’ll be able to talk to about?
Speaker 2 [00:33:42] Oh, I think we’ll be able to talk about all the mistakes we made in a global expansion of what worked and what didn’t work and the advice I can give to other Canadians I’m trying to figure out how to do that. I think it’s going to be a really, really interesting time. The other thing that. So this is a funny one, John, I’ll tell you, because I always like talking about when I’m wrong. So you can always people with too much time can find interviews saying the reverse of I remember when I was first starting off as an entrepreneur, everyone talks about, oh, well, there’s just not enough talent in Canada and you’re going to have to go to other places to get talent. And that’s impossible. There’s thirty three million people in a country like there’s no way I out of talent. Like, that’s just that just seemed like such a bizarre concept. And today I understand what people say when they mean we are out of talent, because when you have a company that’s going through this growth stage, you need enough people on your executive team that have actually seen this before. And in the early stage, you can almost always bet exclusively on young folks that. Work their ass off that will just like figure it out, but the landmines are too big and the time is too fast. So I didn’t know things like how to hire an employee in ten different countries because they’re all different. And some of those people I couldn’t fire and some of those people like you can use these employment for like one tiny thing that that when people have seen this growth curve or this growth spectrum, they’ve gone through. And so that’s kind of and your CFO office and your chief people officer and a bunch of different things where you want someone that says, well, yeah, actually we had to do this. And when Salesforce was going to say it had to happen and we just haven’t built enough of these. I think half of our team is in the United States now. I mean, or how the product is and is in Seattle because she came from Amazon or our CFO was in San Francisco because he ran technology investment at JP Morgan. And we’ve all worked as a remote team. So it totally worked. But it’s one of the things that I was wrong about is that we are going to continue to need to figure out how to get great talent into Canadian companies because of the speed and the scale. If you’re asking founders that haven’t done this before to do it as trial by fire, the mistakes are just too big at this level. And so I finally got it and I was very, very wrong with this forth.
Speaker 3 [00:35:56] What an extraordinary conversation. Thank you so much for your time. Our guest today has been Michele Romanow from Clearco. Michelle, thank you.
Speaker 2 [00:36:05] Thank you for having me. It was wonderful to be here. And a great conversation.
Speaker 1 [00:36:08] I’m John Stackhouse and this is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. Stay tuned in the weeks ahead as we bring you some of our favourite episodes from the past year and update some of the amazing stories of Canadian resilience. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 4 [00:36:30] Disruptors, an RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. It’s produced and recorded by JAR audio. For more Disruptors content like or subscribe, where you get your podcasts and visit rbc dot com slash disruptors.
As part of RBC Thought Leadership’s deep dive into the Creative economy, Disruptors podcast host Trinh Theresa Do talked to Tom Waller, Lululemon’s senior vice president for advanced innovation and chief science officer about creativity in crisis, the importance of purpose and what he’s learned as leader of Whitespace, the firm’s in-house innovation and R&D team.
How would you define creativity within the context of what you do?
I joined the company nine years ago to look at the world of Lululemon and question what we could become with the assets that we have. Creativity in that sense was about saying what if? What if we could be more of a solution to our guests’ total wellbeing than just helping them get dressed? My job was to bring some codification to our approach.
It sounds like creativity was woven into Lululemon’s DNA from the very beginning.
I was attracted to Lululemon because innovation was everywhere. It didn’t feel like it was something they needed to add. It was something they needed to amplify. And an important thing was to not get too good at being Lululemon, to not get stuck in that identity that others would start to describe. Too many companies start to wallow in success and wonder why they see a diminishing return.
What else is integral to the creative culture of Lululemon? And how did you codify that?
There’s the science of feel and human connection. On the product side, science of feel is the primary focus. As we get closer to retail, the bull’s eye shifts towards human connection. Think about when you get dressed in the morning. You did that to yourself and it created a level of confidence. Understanding how clothes and other sensory inputs can shift your state of mind and directly affect the performance of tasks…as we codify those things, we can affect not just human-centered design, but we can understand the mechanisms that affect those behaviors and create for those.
What role do you think crises play in creativity?
A lot of incredible things are forged in crisis. And those of us that create now really do have a different level of influence in the future that unfolds. The fact that it’s been a health crisis is really interesting because we’ve all had a brush with mortality. So we’re able to really scrutinize what matters. And interestingly, comfort really matters.
What role does your Vancouver location play in the success of Lululemon?
When you live in a problem, you tend to want to create a solution. So being in the great outdoors, being in a temperate rainforest, being around the Pacific Northwest, we have something like 16 or 17 different climates that we can experience throughout 12 month cycles. So surprise, clothing companies evolve. And surprise, as soon as it’s sunny, people pile outside and try and be active. Lululemon being created here was not an accident.
How would you advise other companies seeking to grow the way Lululemon did?
The most important thing is to back up from the business model and look a little harder at the purpose. The business model encourages us not to change. The purpose encourages us to change.
You sometimes see big mature companies separate their innovation teams from the rest of the corporation to protect them. How do you ensure Whitespace remains in a safe space?
I don’t know if safe is the right mindset. In fact, my team would probably say the opposite. When I first coined the term Whitespace, it was because I was hearing this terminology, ‘there are these white spaces around us. There are these opportunities that seem to be empty that maybe we should go and populate.’ I didn’t want to be called the innovation team, because two things happen. One is everyone says, ‘oh, OK, they’ll do it.’ And then you instantly shrink the innovation capability across the rest of the company. Or you have the opposite, which is ‘how come they get to do it?’ And then you create a moat between business as usual and business unusual.
My founding philosophy is that projects own people. People don’t own projects. There isn’t one team that gets to own a separate set of projects, there are clearly defined projects with a different success criteria and a different cross-functional group. That is the talent that brings that to life.
There’s clearly at some point a handoff of the development work you oversee. What are the key factors that would push an idea to execution?
It’s not a relay race. So there isn’t really a handover. We treat it like a team sport. A different person is driving the bus, but we’re still on the bus, we just we provide a different service in that in that stage. The most important thing is that the goal gets scored and we stay there until the game is over.
What is the ideal mindset for a creative team player?
Tolerance for ambiguity. I tend to come across two types of people. There’s a person that waits for structure and a person that creates structure. The latter is preferable. We very much look for people that are able to sit in ambiguity and go, ‘hmmm, I’m on a blank sheet of paper here, but I’m just going to start doodling if nothing else.’ And this doodle turned into something. Not everyone is wired to do that. Not everyone can be trained to do that. We can give people the psychological safety to fail in adding structure to ambiguity. But it’s very much a people-powered thing and a rare and valuable skill.
As a company, how do you attract the right mix of those types?
What is really important is to be attractive to all types of people. We have to be able to look at the world like it needs us to create something. On the other side of the coin, we have to be able to deliver it. To be attractive to big thinkers is just as important as to be attractive to big deliverers. The best way forward seems to be, hire both.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
As part of RBC Thought Leadership’s deep dive into the Creative economy, Disruptors podcast hosts John Stackhouse and Trinh Theresa Do talked to Ajay Agrawal, the founder of the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), about the importance of goal-setting, how to recognize success and why everyone has the potential to be part of the creative process.
Ajay, tell us about the goals you had in mind when you created CDL?
The term “creative destruction” was lifted from a book by Joseph Schumpeter. The idea was that entrepreneurs have an important role to play in reimagining how to produce the goods and services for human flourishing. Universities are magical places. People get to do research and explore how nature works in all kinds of fields. But much of the research ends up in technical peer-reviewed journals that few people read. So the idea was, “What can we do to liberate those insights in ways that can benefit humanity?”
How do you see creativity and destruction working together?
Schumpeter referred to entrepreneurs as a “perennial gale of creative destruction.” Without entrepreneurs, capitalism would lead to a small number of very large firms that would grow and grow and collapse in on themselves because they became ossified. Entrepreneurs bring creativity. They think about how to solve problems differently, more efficiently, with more ingenuity.
How do you teach creativity in a business school?
People think of creativity and innovation as a virtue. In other words, the more innovation, the better. But innovation is a cost, creativity is costly. We start with, “What’s the objective and what’s the most efficient way we can achieve that goal?” That sounds really easy, and it’s surprisingly hard. Many organizations tell me about their innovation programs and I’ll say, “What’s the goal? How do you know if you succeed?” You’d be surprised how many can’t answer the question.
Is that because creativity is difficult to measure?
Yes—if you don’t have a goal. Universities are really important institutions because they’re an environment for people to be creative and innovate with no application in mind. Curiosity-driven research is very important for an overall research ecosystem. But to bring that into a commercial setting, it’s really important to have a goal so you can give creativity some direction.
How do you define creativity?
The process of developing solutions to problems that are better than the existing solutions.
Is creativity different in tech companies than in other businesses?
The businesses that I work with are usually very small and often pre-revenue. They don’t have all the bureaucracy a larger organization has. The creativity in these small firms is in the latitude they have to explore a very wide search space, often without a lot of bureaucratic limitations.
How can a large organization embed more creativity into its culture?
There are three key things. Step one, set a really well-defined target or goal. Step two is to give people the resources they need to explore solutions to the goal. Sometimes people need some time. If they’re expected to keep doing their full-time jobs, it’s hard to have the mental space they need to explore areas outside of their initial domain of expertise. Also, some financial resources—not a lot. Being lean often creates a better environment for innovation because they have to think about how to solve the problem without buying their way to the solution.
The third thing is a way to recognize success along the way. At CDL they have check-in meetings every eight weeks. You can’t set a goal and not have lots of little intermediate milestones because people would just get lost in trying to achieve the final goal.
Is there a difference between creativity and innovation?
I think of creativity as a process and innovation as an outcome. Coming up with the clever types of solutions to build that innovation, we think of that as the creative process.
Can goals be limiting to creativity?
Goals can be a great energizer to creativity, because the minute you set constraints, the creative mind gets to work on “How do I achieve the goal, conditional on these constraints?'”
How has the crisis challenged different approaches to creativity?
The primary distinction has been not being able to work shoulder to shoulder with people, and a lot of creativity requires collaboration. We used to have a lot of great solo inventors, the Leonardo da Vincis, Renaissance people who were polymaths. But as fields have become more complex, to really understand the frontier of the field, you need to collaborate across multiple people who are experts in different areas. It’s very hard to be an expert across multiple fields now. In COVID, the biggest thing has been learning to do all this collaboration online.
What are some of the secrets to collaborating virtually?
Collaboration, particularly among really smart people, can often lead to frictions. They have a competitive spirit and they have very strong opinions because they’ve developed a lot of self-confidence in becoming experts. Online communication can be very efficient, but you can lose a lot of the camaraderie-building that happens in person.
In the before-times, you would go for lunch and have some downtime and that would create some lubrication to help you deal with the frictions when you get back to work. So we try and create times that feel a little bit more like a lunch break.
Is creativity innate in certain people, or something that can be developed by anyone?
Everybody has the potential to play a role in the creative process. That said, it’s not a free ride. Every role requires developing the muscle to play that role. So anybody can play soccer, maybe not at an elite level, but you can play. But even if you have a predisposition to be a defensive player, you still have to develop the muscle, the skill set to play that role.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
As part of RBC Thought Leadership’s deep dive into the Creative economy, Disruptors podcast host Trinh Theresa Do talked to Brittany Forsyth, outgoing chief talent officer at Shopify, about maintaining a creative startup culture in the face of explosive growth.
Shopify is one of Canada’s most innovative companies. What’s the relationship between creativity and innovation?
Creativity is the space in which you play. Innovation is the outcome. It’s a measurement of how creative you’ve been and how bold you are in the execution. The creative space we’ve formed at Shopify allows for risk-taking, curiosity and resourcefulness, because generally when you’re being creative, you’re removing the constraints that sometimes have us all doing the same thing over and over again.
In that environment, what types of people tend to thrive and how do you find them?
When I made it to the exec team, on one of the off-sites, we were having this conversation around creativity and what it means. At this point, I thought it meant you get a lightbulb moment, you find the perfect solution no one else can see. Through that conversation, I had my own cheesy lightbulb moment, which was creativity doesn’t happen with the snap of a finger. It happens by connecting all the information over time and at some point all it unlocks a new thought. That was an amazing notion because it removed the constraints of someone either has it or doesn’t. We all have the ability to build it.
So when we bring people in, curiosity is foundational. We look for people that have a past track record of thinking outside the box. And a growth mindset, a constant learner.
How do you empower these people to grow and contribute to the company?
It starts with giving permission. What does it mean to fail? It’s actually OK as long as you don’t make the same mistake over and over. We do hack days. It’s three days where we stop what we’re doing and allow everyone to sign up for projects of their choice. Then we pitch them. We’ve had numerous hack day projects become critical builds of Shopify.
Most executives want new ideas, but they don’t want to change how things are done. How can companies embed creativity and new ideas into their processes?
The hardest part is when it challenges something so built into a company or that you’ve personally built. People have challenged me on something that I put my heart and soul into, and I have to listen to their feedback and ideas while also internally going through the emotional rollercoaster of, like, ‘this sucks, was I wrong?’ It takes strength. It takes maturity. It takes awareness. But if you can get there, the outcomes are just unbelievable.
You have to murder your darlings.
That’s the truth. One thing we always say is that once you create an idea, it’s no longer yours. You have to put it out there, you have to let go of it.
So how do you encourage people at Shopify to do that?
We try, even in feedback, to not ever make it personal, but about the idea itself. To be really clear on the problems rather than the person driving it. We also try and use a lot of data, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative. And we do a lot of project briefs. It’s easier to challenge ideas on that front. But I think it really comes down to walking the talk. Do you believe the best idea should prevail? If you do, you will find a way to share feedback that isn’t personal, that allows space to lick our wounds and move forward.
The notion of separating the person from the idea implies that many people can take different aspects of an idea to execution?
When building a project, we always have a champion, the most knowledge-based person on the topic. With Digital by Design, I was the champion so I have immersed myself in everything to know about digital work. However, I know that I shouldn’t, nor can I, make all the solutions on my own. So there’s a core team that’s working on it.
And just because you’re under a product team doesn’t mean you won’t be able to jump in and be a contributor to a talent project. I think it’s important to ignore the organizational structure and think of who’s going to challenge your assumptions the most.
How has the company been able to maintain its creative startup culture in the face of explosive growth?
I joined when we were about 20 employees, as the office manager. It was like, ‘you’re going to go get bananas,’ which was the snack of the office. ‘You’re going to book travel.’ I was like, ‘I just graduated H.R. so can I just dabble with a few things?’ Within a few months, we got our Series A funding and because of a few projects I had done, Tobi [Lütke] was like, ‘OK, you’re going to do more H.R. stuff.’ He saw an opportunity to grow someone. That hasn’t stopped. Every moment where we grew, I was invested in as an individual and I was the most unlikely, unorthodox person that should have been in that role.
When we went public, I was promoted about a year and a half before that to the exec team. I remember saying, are you sure you want me to do this? Every other company I knew actually brought in someone who had done it before. And one of the things that was said to me was ‘no, your lack of doing that means we’re going to solve in a new way.’ That’s a key to creativity, to challenge the status quo. I have never done H.R. in any other company. So when I get a problem, I just think about it in a very logical way. I’m still surrounding myself with people that have done it. I seek advice. But that lack of the scar tissue actually drives a new solution.
So the artistry of building Shopify, and really the team as a whole, is we hire teachers and students. Each person is a teacher and a student.
Can you describe ‘bursting’?
That’s when people come together in real life. We’re looking to solve gnarly problems, to get into a creative flow, have fun, build relationships. But it all has to be anchored in why we’re here, which is for our merchants. And so a lot of intentionality is going into it. We’re thinking about it as a hack day on steroids, meaning you come together between three to five days and you go deep with your team. We all know that moment where you’re in that creative flow, you’re all getting the right ideas out and you’re onto something amazing and it feels so good and it bonds you with these humans for lifetimes even.
You burst, you plug in, you charge up and then you go back and deplete it over time through your use. But then you go back and you plug in and charge back up again.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
As part of RBC Thought Leadership’s deep dive into the Creative economy, Disruptors podcast host Trinh Theresa Do talked to Josie Fung, executive director of I-Think, a non-profit organization based at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. I-Think partners with educators to foster creative problem-solving skills in students.
How would you define creativity?
What we’ve seen, having worked with hundreds of thousands of students, is that creativity is about having insights, seeing something that someone hasn’t seen before and doing something with it.
Does it have to be relevant to the ultimate stakeholder?
Absolutely. Creativity is often driven by a need that is unmet. For your creativity or idea to have value, you have to meet that need.Integrative thinking is a guiding methodology for I-Think. What is it?
Integrative thinking is this idea developed by [former Rotman dean] Roger Martin. When we have to make a tough decision, we’re often stuck between two ideas. A or B? Integrative thinking says instead of choosing, we’re going to create a new idea out of elements of those two ideas. On a practical level, there is no one way to do things and our job is to be constantly searching for new ways to approach problems.
How has Canada’s education system historically treated creativity?
When I was growing up, you went to art class to be creative. But now I think education is seeing that students are amazingly creative and our job isn’t to make them more creative. It’s to keep their creativity alive. About 10 years ago, Ontario came out with play-based kindergarten. That was a big signal to the system. We’re starting with kindergarten, but how do you infuse it throughout the system?
There are still people who see a divide between creative and noncreative fields. What do you think is stopping them from accepting that creativity can be useful everywhere?
Many of us went to school believing our job was to find the one right answer. And if you don’t get that right answer, you’re just wrong. Inherently, if you really want to be creative, you have to be unafraid that there are many possible answers that haven’t been discovered yet.
So as educators, what should they do to remove that fear?
One of the key ingredients for great creativity is diversity, meaning different people, different viewpoints. The second thing is how do we stop focusing on evaluation as the marker of success? What I hear from students is that by the time they get to our course, ‘I have this opportunity to see things in a totally new light. But I’ve never been asked to do that before.’ They keep asking us what the right answer should look like. But when I’m giving them a real world problem that doesn’t have an answer, there’s no right answer.How do we get their voices more involved in those discussions?
It’s about creating spaces where we’re giving those real world problems that students can solve. It turns out that students have just as good ideas as the rest of us, the rest of us being adults. Sometimes even better.How do we maintain that in these students when they enter the workforce and may be given even more constraints?
What we’ve seen is creativity actually thrives on constraints. When we started our work with I-Think we thought that if we gave students open reign on creating ideas, that would be the way forward. By giving a few more constraints, it actually helped channel their creativity.Is that is that the problem in the corporate world? The lack of constraints?
The challenge of the corporate world is that we have this unwritten social contract that the things we are, are the ways they have to be. In this pandemic, for example, we have this conversation that is on one side ‘we should never return to the way things were before.’ And on the other side, ‘we want things to be as they were before.’ Could we not ask ourselves, what have we learned in this last year?It’s been hard. It’s been tough, but what have we learned?
We have to remember in the corporate environment is that there is no creativity department. And sometimes when there’s no creativity department, it feels like that’s no one’s job, but actually it’s everybody’s job. How do we think about every single job as being a creative job?
Where do you think Canada ranks among the most creative nations?
I think Canada’s up there. But we have some choices ahead. What makes us really successful is our diversity. We have in a given classroom, sometimes as many as 21 different languages being spoken. Just imagine the number of experiences these students have, the perspectives they’ve drawn from their families. The more we can bring that around the table, the more we have the opportunity to create new and amazing ideas.
What does that future Canada look like?
Future Canada is a place where there’s a hub of innovation. And instead of thinking about tech and innovation hubs localized in one geography, it’s a nation of creativity. It’s a nation that generates all sorts of ideas, that fuels the world.
So what is needed to enable every single job to be a creative job?
It starts with our leaders asking the question of ‘am I hiring people because I want them to do a specific task?’ Are we a world of just asking people to do tasks and, check things off a list? Or are we hiring people and supporting people so they’re solving the biggest problems in the world?
What do you think is preventing some leaders today from doing that?
Quite honestly, I think sometimes our incentive programs are flawed because we’re expecting people to generate outcomes on a very short term basis, whether that’s from the expectations of the street or because of how our incentive plans are built.
And do you think classrooms have a role to play in changing those incentive structures?
I think young people do a great job of is asking those questions. And the key is how do we have people listen to them? Because there’s so much of richness and value in what students have to say.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.