John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here.Sonia Sennik: And Sonia, welcome to Disruptors x CDL: The Innovation Era.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, it feels like we’re under attack.

Sonia Sennik: I know John, three fights in nine seconds.

John Stackhouse: That used to be the Canadian way, and I had flashbacks to the Big Bad Bruins, maybe the wrong reference point, of the 1970s during that moment. And maybe Canadians, whether you like hockey fighting or not, need to reclaim a bit more of that elbows up spirit.

Sonia Sennik: I think they did in that moment, because I don’t know if you could hear or feel the roar of the crowd through the TV screen, but I could.

John Stackhouse: Yeah, that was a good old fashioned hockey game moment. And what a series it was. It felt like Canada regained a bit of our spirit. And I think we’re going to need more of that in the years ahead as we confront a very different North America, and frankly a very different world that’s going to be, dare I say, more bruising.

Sonia Sennik: Definitely a more bruising world, John. [00:01:00] So what happens next? Our Canadian government is scrambling to come up with an adequate strategy to address this looming trade war. We’re sort of in the in between right now as we wait to see the results of the ongoing trade negotiations.

John Stackhouse: And you hear this from various people, but it’s true, we can’t control Donald Trump, we can’t control the United States.

And this is a moment where we have to reflect on what we can control. And our economic productivity is one of those things. It’s been a simmering national crisis for years, and now it’s full on. If we want to export to different parts of the world, if we want to produce a bit more for ourselves rather than depend on the United States, well, we gotta get game on productivity in every sector.

Sonia Sennik: But just like in hockey John, we have to play it face off to face off. Forget what happened in the last play and just think about the next one.

John Stackhouse: And one of the things I’ve been reflecting on is the lack of focus on the digital economy. Of course, there’s a lot of concern about the auto sector, about steel and aluminum, about energy.[00:02:00]

Those are all critical, but there’s been barely a whisper about the digital economy, which is where millions of Canadians earn their livelihoods. And it’s an opportunity for growth and productivity in addition to what we can do in those other sectors.

Sonia Sennik: John, there’s a ton we can learn from countries like Estonia.

I know they have a population of less than two million people. They start with their citizens learning how to code at age five. All of their identification is digital. They can do their taxes in less than 15 minutes. Their health care records are available to them. It is truly an aspirational system that they have there.

And, you know, they’re a fraction the size of Canada, which presents its own challenges. There’s a lot that can be said about having that vision of the future, which they started decades ago, understanding that having a digital first economy was essential.

John Stackhouse: And what Estonia figured out, and there’s lots of others in this category, is that you don’t need a big population to scale.

It’s the story of Singapore, of Taiwan, of [00:03:00] Israel. This is an age when small countries can actually excel and even overtake much bigger populations using the power of digital technologies to get that scale. And that’s a moment for Canada. We’re 40 million, which actually is a pretty decent number, but using digital platforms, including the ones we’ll talk about today.

Can help us compete in the world as if we were 400 million people. That’s the power of 10x

Sonia Sennik: You may not need a large population John but what you definitely need is an openness to change and a change management process People who are excited about saying yes to new opportunities and new ways of doing things

John Stackhouse: and today we’re joined by someone who I think is one of the great thinkers about all things economy But especially the digital economy Daniel Debow.

Sonia Sennik: Daniel has been at the forefront of Canadian tech and innovation for years.

He founded several companies, one that exited to Salesforce and one that exited to Shopify. He’s also been a mentor at Creative Destruction Lab from the very beginning. Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Daniel Debow: Thanks for having me.

John Stackhouse: [00:04:00] Daniel, let’s start with a bit of your own background. Walk us through the companies you’ve created and maybe tell us something that you learned in the experience.

Daniel Debow: Sure. Background is Canadian, went to Western, traveled as a consultant to the States, went to U of T. And, and then I was involved, I’ve been involved sort of as an employee in co-founding three companies. David Ausip, David Stein brought me on their team at Workbrain that was sold to Infor. Another was a company called Ripple with David Stein.

We sold that to Salesforce. Another called Helpful with Farhan Thawar and we sold that to Shopify where I worked for six years. And then in parallel, been involved as a volunteer in a bunch of different places. One, as you mentioned, was one of the founding fellows at CDL and really engaged in the early days.

Very active annual investor in a lot of the sort of brand name tech companies in the country. I taught a class in public policy and innovation and sort of exponential technology at U of T Law School with Ben Allery, another CDL founder. And I’m on the board of Loblaws. in Canada. And [00:05:00] separately, I’m really into music.

And so my wife and I’ve built with some partners, something called Bonfire Collective, which is creating spaces for artists to play. And then from that, we also have, um, with some other partners, we’ve built something called 42 Communities, which is a real estate development firm that does creative spaces.

I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned along the entire journey is obliquity, which means, uh, the idea that if you try too hard to get to a very specific goal, it often doesn’t work, but if you kind of do the indirect meandering way, oftentimes things work out in a really positive way. And that seems to be my life.

I feel like a bit Forrest Gumpian, to be honest, and sort of just wandering around, trying to have fun and learn things. And it seems to have worked out pretty well.

John Stackhouse: Well, obliquity may be a great message for this discussion because we’re going to talk about how Canada can get at some of these epic challenges that we’re facing.

Daniel, with that in mind, tell us about your latest creation, Build Canada.

Daniel Debow: Well first, it’s not my creation. It is a volunteer [00:06:00] group of amazing folks who’ve come together around an idea. You have all these great builders in Canada, people who have built companies in various industries, whether it’s real estate, technology, healthcare, what have you.

And they have good ideas, in particular about how to grow the Canadian economy. And so we have this group of people who know a lot about how to grow businesses, but there’s a gap and the gap is the way that they talk, the time that they can commit, the energy that they have doesn’t match up with what policymakers or politicians need.

What those folks need is often detailed policy memos. They need to know the context, the reasons, the messaging. They need to know specifics like what law, what rule, what statute needs to get changed in order to affect this change. And so the mismatches you have great business people who are like tweeting into the wilderness or yelling into a chat room or maybe even writing an op ed.

But then you’ve got the recipients of those messages saying this is not enough. It’s not specific, detailed, or actionable. And so that was the idea behind Build Canada. [00:07:00] Get a bunch of people together who knew how to build. products and then get people who know a lot about public policy to advise them on creating this output, the product, which is a detailed, specific and actionable policy memo.

And so that’s what we did. We took, I just saw all these, um, great business people who had good ideas, these builders. And so we said, how about instead of 10 hours of your time to write a detailed memo or hiring a lobbyist? How about. Spend an hour with us. We’ll take the core of your idea. We’ll distill it down with this team and with LLMs.

I should be clear, like, we’re using an LLM pipeline to help do a lot of this research and analysis really fast and then getting it checked by humans who’ve actually done the job. And then that’ll allow us to put a platform together where we can put it on X and then put it on the internet and it’s gonna get attention.

And that’s exactly what’s happened. So, that’s our little obliquity story and that’s a little bit about what Build Canada is.

John Stackhouse: Take us deeper into the problem that you’re trying to solve here, because this has been a theme for years, [00:08:00] decades, actually, that Canada has been underperforming, certainly on productivity, but we’re in 2025, and it’s a lot more acute.

Daniel Debow: Look, I mean, there’s a specific problem which is, hey, we need to grow, and many, many people have talked about, like, things we need to do to become a more growth oriented, export oriented, competitive society. No question. The change has been coming, and for those of us who have been paying attention, it’s been extremely obvious.

I mean, I think the folks over at CDL have known for a long time. Ten years ago, I was lucky to be the host and MC of the first conference on machine learning and business and how this was going to change the world. And that is exactly what we’re living through right now. Now you can compound on top of that geopolitical changes, changes in the States.

And I think the big sort of moment of why now is that they’re starting to come home. People are starting to recognize that this is creating an intractable gap between the, the lifestyle, the freedom, the sovereignty, the nature of what it means to be [00:09:00] Canadian. And so as a result, like the big underlying why is we need to move away from, well, we’ll make an incremental change.

I think we need to be recognizing that there are some major changes to society that’s going to require in some cases, painful choices, it requires prioritization and focus. And if we do that as a collective, then we can be a very, very prosperous country, probably the richest country in the world. But if we choose to simply ignore it and try to say, we’re just not going to change.

And everybody is allowed to block this change. I think that might last for a little bit of time. I mean, we can just borrow more money. But eventually that situation becomes structurally untenable. And I think Canadians are feeling it, right? You can look at satisfaction with government. You can look at housing.

You can look at affordability. You can look at access to health care. Satisfaction is low with the deal that used to exist. And so that’s the thing, we need to fix that so that Canadians feel great about their country, that they’re contributing, they’re happy, that [00:10:00] people want to build, because that’s what drives the prosperity that makes the Canada that I think we all deserve, we all want to have.

Sonia Sennik: And so Daniel, you’re saying we need to fix that. I’m curious about the group of folks involved with Build Canada. What makes them believe that these activities can support the changes that you see are needed?

Daniel Debow: So I think there’s probably three mechanisms. The first mechanism is Uh, we call it maybe shifting the Overton window.

And the Overton window is this concept about ideas that are publicly acceptable or okay to talk about. Right? And we haven’t written a memo about this, but I’m just going to pick on it. But like milk and, uh, egg supply boards was like untouchable. Like you just can’t talk about them. That’s never going to change.

So I think one of the goals is to simply put out a bold ideas that understandably are going to make some people uncomfortable. And that’s okay because this isn’t like a secret plan. This is like publish on the internet and people should debate it and discuss it. But then you’re shifting the conversation towards.

Real change that of like things that have to get done. The [00:11:00] second goal is that we’re in this moment. You know, what’s the phrase about bankruptcy? It happens very slowly and then very suddenly like you sort of have stasis and then there’s this friction or this outside force that occurs. That’s like okay.

Now we got to change So I think we’re in a moment like that, and I think in particular, I think that there are policies being created by the change candidates, either the change in liberal leadership or the change of government entirely, and I think they’re open to new ideas, new ideas that, uh, gain some traction.

The third element is if you combine, hey, the conversation changes and people are willing to be open to change, I think engagement with the ideas, people engaging and saying, well, this idea that you have about like health, the idea that was proposed about like health care data portability, like that’s just an idea that should happen.

Maybe now is the time we should do it. So I think getting public discussion about these ideas happening, yeah. Moves the Overton window of people’s availability and it makes [00:12:00] the politicians available and open to the idea of like, Hey, maybe this is a policy that should be considered as we’re changing.

And I think there’s going to be change coming. That’s the mechanism.

John Stackhouse: What would be two or three changes you’d want to see fairly quickly?

Daniel Debow: So first thing, this isn’t about me, Daniel Debow. I’m not the one like, this is not my group. This is my thing. I want to really state that it’s important. What we’ve created is a platform, but some of the things that some of the builders want to see, let me go through.

So, Mike Litt, great entrepreneur. He talks a lot about changing the narrative around Canada and using the money that we spend on heritage programs and cultural programs to also talk about hey, this is a country of builders. And I think that’s actually a really important point that, that if we need people to feel it is an aspirational Canadian value to go off and build a company, I’m not just talking a tech company and CDL, I mean like a landscape business, a retail store, an online store, like those are things that people should aspire to.

Mike [00:13:00] Serbinis, another CDL, mentor has an idea about healthcare data portability and that this single action would lower the cost of health care, improve quality, improve wait times, reduce errors. That’s a pretty good idea. And there’s more coming. We’re going to have stuff on energy, on housing.

And what’s neat is it’s not just the tech entrepreneurs as builders have seen what we’re doing. They’re coming and saying, Hey, I’m in the oil patch. I would like to have my policy. I’m in the housing business. I want to talk about that. And that’s fantastic. People who build this country. As entrepreneurs sharing their ideas.

Sonia Sennik: I’d love for you to speak a little bit about the difference between what this initiative seeks to achieve here in Canada versus what many folks may be seeing in the news about unelected tech entrepreneurs in the United States getting heavily involved in operating government. I think it’s two very distinct approaches, and I’d just love for you to speak a little more about that.

Daniel Debow: Well, first thing is we’re not working for any party. Okay. This is a [00:14:00] nonpartisan activity. And I can tell you that both liberals and conservatives are reading and critiquing and giving feedback on this stuff. Then the people who are contributing support, both parties have supported both parties. So it’s nonpartisan.

The second is we’re not working for anybody. This is independent, right? Neither party has asked us to go do this. The third is, this is transparent. This is not like in a secret room. I mean, literally, we’re publishing papers. They’re not like drive by tweets and like fact free. These are like 10, 15 page detailed policy papers.

Now you might disagree with them, but they’re substantive. And, um, you know, one of the critiques people have come to me, they’re all, how are you going to go implement it? Are you going to go do this? I’m like, that’s not what anyone here signed up for in any way. The idea was to change the conversation, open the Overton window, get some provocative and bold ideas out there from builders, and then share them in a way that everyone can see, and then every party can choose to take some or all or none of these ideas.

John Stackhouse: Daniel, how much of this [00:15:00] was driven by the capital gains fight last year? That really cut deeply and personally for a lot of tech founders, a lot of Canadians beyond technology, but I was interested to see the response from the tech community, which was visceral, and it wasn’t just about the net cost of that.

It was about the signaling that came with that.

Daniel Debow: I think the short answer is, I don’t think it was that much, but I think what you’re talking about is the proverbial straw that broke a camel’s back. There’s just so many things over and over that send a signal, and this is what I was mentioning, why I like the story we tell about Canada.

My candid concern is the next Hundreds of thousands of young students who are aspirational who have not heard a message that going to build a company is a patriotic Canadian thing. And in fact, it’s consistent with the heritage of the country being builders, the giver culture, like let’s go give her.

And that [00:16:00] is Canadian. Let’s go make something happen. That is not a message. I don’t think that has been like strongly prioritized as the key message of what we should be telling the country. And so, yeah, the capital gains thing was sort of maybe another signal. of kind of a disdain of this group of people that they’re inherently selfish, inherently bad, they’re not helping, and they’re just not giving their fair share of what they’re doing.

I didn’t think it was a smart policy move. I wasn’t personally upset. There’s a lot of charts have been people’s dissatisfaction, and especially among young people. But you know, the one chart that I think if there were one thing, it’s not the capital gains one. It was the divergence in GDP per capita and GDP between the United States and Canada.

And you can put the line. Anywhere you want, but it’s very clear that we have diverged significantly in the wealth that we have for Canadians. And I think that chart, I saw that get passed around a lot. Kind of people saying like, you know, what the hell, what is going on here? This is not a good situation.

That’s not a trend that is [00:17:00] sustainable. You have to have wealth to redistribute it, right? Like someone has to create the jobs and the capital and pay the taxes because it’s not sustainable to print money and borrow money forever. You have to have an underlying economic base. And so I think that’s the catalyst trigger was like this awareness of we are not in the right direction economically.

And what is going on?

John Stackhouse: What Daniel do you think we need to come to grips with beyond the narrative, beyond the ambition right here in 2025 to get us back on that growth trajectory?

Daniel Debow: Probably a few things, you know, Roger Martin, former Dean of Rotman, and he was actually the Dean when CDL got started, wrote a great piece this morning.

And at the end of it, he said, like, yeah, just to be clear, it doesn’t mean I agree with what’s happening, but I’m just describing what it is. And the first step is to accept the facts. Right. So I think we’re like going through the stages of grief here, you know, first anger, then bargaining, then you get to acceptance.

[00:18:00] And I think the like, then three fights in nine seconds. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s good. It’s good for people to wake up and remember we have a country and to be proud about it and you have to fight for it, right. It didn’t come for free. So that’s, that, that’s maybe point two, but the first point, right.

Is you have to accept that the situation has changed the rules of the game. The rules of global trade have changed. And I think we have a desire to be like, well, we’re just going to go back. And oh, by the way, it’s just one orange dude who made all this happen. And I would prefer personally to think of that orange dude as a symptom of a whole bunch of underlying changes in the economy, driven by technology and trade and geopolitics, less of the cause.

So I think, point one, we have to accept that the world that we were living in, what got us here to be this amazing country, is not going to get us there in the next 50 years, because the world is different. There are massive other geopolitical competitors, you know, China, India, Africa, huge new demands for resources.

These things are [00:19:00] happening, and it’s changing our world. We are not going back to where we were, no matter how much we want to go back. The second is, Economics is the study of choices under scarcity. That’s the definition of economics. And we’ve forgotten the scarcity part, right? Which means you cannot say yes to everything.

You have to say no to a lot of stuff in order to be able to say yes to some things. You also have to maybe give up things that you really, really like. So as Canadians, we have had an ability for interest groups to block change. This interest group won’t like it. This regional group won’t like it. This set of unions won’t like it.

And so, they die. They just don’t happen. The public service won’t like this thing. It’s a well known economic problem. It’s the holdup problem. And I think we’ve become prey to that holdup problem for a bunch of reasons, but we have to move past it so that we can make some hard choices. The third one are some of the ideas that are coming out from this group and not just this group.

But we have to recognize that like growth is good for [00:20:00] everyone, right? Growth is good for the country. This doesn’t mean that we should become like a robber baron state where like we don’t have a social safety net. In fact, personally, I would prefer that we divert a lot of the corporate support and welfare and programs and incentives to individual support.

So that people as individuals have a very strong safety net. But we’re totally fine with businesses. failing and collapsing because that drives again, creative destruction drives some Turian creative destruction. Like companies grow, companies go as long as the people are okay, right? We have to become as a society more comfortable with more volatility in businesses.

And the way I think we should do that is redirect a lot to individuals so that they are capable of handling the volatility that the world is going to throw at us, like the world is going to throw this at us. We cannot become rigid. So this is this idea of resiliency. Resiliency often happens when you fail or when you break things.

And so if you don’t want any change and you want stasis, you [00:21:00] actually become a rigid society.

John Stackhouse: In some ways, Daniel, you’re getting at the founding concept of our country, which is peace, order, and good government. Do we need to change our mindset from a bit of that stability origin motto to something a bit more, some people may see as risky, some people may see as ambitious.

Some people may see as more materialistic. Is that the sort of conversation Canadians need to confront?

Daniel Debow: Yeah, I mean, I just don’t think it has to be as black and white. That’s the first point. Like, I do think that has to happen. Also, by the way, prior to POGG, Peace, Order, and Good Government, you had United Empire loyalists, right?

Like the loyalists were lit like Ontario. Southern Ontario was populated by people who were like, we don’t like this crazy revolution idea. We like the king. We’re coming up here, right? So like, do I think we have to whole hog flip that over? No. I think we have to think about how do we express peace order and good government in the right way.

So I would argue good government is an effective government. And I’ll tell you, since [00:22:00] we started Bill Canada, I’ve gotten texts and notes from very senior government officials. One of them said something to me that shocked me. He said, It’s one thing for government to be inefficient. Government will always be inefficient because it’s got like reserve powers.

Like you’ve got, you know, fire trucks waiting around for a fire to happen. You’ve got extra mass waiting for COVID to happen again. That’s inefficient. But what we’re becoming is ineffective. The direct quote was, the Canadian government cannot always affect the lawful orders of a minister. Like they just can’t do it.

That’s a problem, right? That’s not good government. That’s bad government, right? And so we have to get to a place where we have super efficient, highly productive, extremely good government services that are delivered to people in a way that they’re like, this is great. I appreciate that. Less than 14 percent of Canadians feel that they’re getting value from the federal government in the services that are being delivered.

That’s not POGG, that’s the opposite of that. So it’s not about abandoning who we are as Canadians. It’s remembering who we are as Canadians. That good government means efficient. It means effective. We have to get people to a place where [00:23:00] we accept that the world is rapidly changing and our approach to dampening those shocks is not the approach that we used to use.

We have to think about our own and we have to do this in a way that maintains sovereignty for Canada, right? Like, so it’s all wonderful to say open up banking, open up airlines, open up everything for global competition, competition inside the country. If the net effect of that is a complete hollowing out of major Canadian companies, then that’s not success.

We need to think about how we can look to say the Dutch or the Swedes that have built massive global export brands all around the planet and they’re still able to maintain their sovereignty, you know, Canada. Hasn’t done that as well. And we have to ask ourselves why and how we can get to that place.

Sonia Sennik: I think the theme of a lot of what you’re saying is objective setting, prioritization, being adaptable, buildings and bridges, they’re made to bend in the wind, they’re made to sway with the changing weather around them. And so [00:24:00] how do we build these structures in a way that will last, but also be able to withstand anything that goes on around our country and the structures there?

Daniel Debow: Yeah. And like, also be open to changes in the way we set it up. You know, the. POGG powers comes in our constitution where we have the Dominion Act and, and they were separate, you know, and, you know, we talk about interprovincial trade barriers today. Some of them are explicit, right? Some of them are like, you can’t sell booze in our province, you can’t export our milk, but most of them are just inadvertent.

They are a function of the fact that we distributed powers to the provinces and they all set up their own regulatory framework for different areas, whether it’s nursing or healthcare or trucking, and they just have different standards. It wasn’t intentional to block trade, but, so this is the point. We have to say like, okay, this thing that we had, the way we separated powers, the way we set it up, it doesn’t work anymore in the modern economy.

We have to be open to changing those things rather than zealously protecting the prerogatives that were written in stone. A long time ago,

John Stackhouse: [00:25:00] Daniel, just as we move to close, what’s the one message you have to especially younger Canadians who want to build their own companies, but also want to build communities and maybe by extension, the country.

Daniel Debow: Get out of your chat rooms, get off social media, go do something. We talked a bunch about CDL. CDL was Ajay and a few other folks getting together and saying, you know what? He saw this problem that we had all this great R and D coming out of U of T in particular, but it wasn’t being turned into companies.

And he said, I’m just going to fix this. And he did, and he enlisted people with this great idea, and he was unflappable, and also extremely adaptive. Like, we kept changing how we ran it and what we were trying to do to set it up so that it would grow and be fantastic. It wasn’t set in stone. It was like, we tried something, didn’t work, let’s try something different.

And we just kept learning along the way. That’s my message to young Canadians, is that you are able to make change happen. By the way, you’re also able to make change happen by being a builder. Go [00:26:00] off and build the company you want. It’s never been easier. Despite all this talk about barriers and regulations, it’s true.

But technology, as part of the change, has also been coming along to make it easier to start. I encourage people to try it. Even if you fail, you’ll learn a lot. And most importantly, you are being Canadian in the most amazing and true way to being Canadian if you pick up that task and start a company.

You’re building the country.

Sonia Sennik: For the record, we’re still iterating and changing at the Creator Destruction Lab. We’re still learning things.

Daniel Debow: Well, because I think actually this is the point built deep into the DNA of that organization and the mindset of how it was built is that nothing is set in stone.

We can always change it. If this is the way we used to do it, we can do it differently because the situation changes. Let’s adapt so that we can learn and then move quickly forward. And virtually every organization that is succeeding in the world today, and you can just look at it, go look up on, you know, your favorite AI or Google.

The number of companies on the S& P 500 who are [00:27:00] on the S& P 500, 50 years ago. Go do the same thing in Canada. And what you will find is shocking. And that tells us something about what we need to do to change in our country. Let’s adapt. It’s a great message.

Sonia Sennik: Thank you so much for sharing your insights and for the work you’re doing with the Build Canada group.

Daniel Debow: A pleasure. Thanks for having me on and thanks for the questions.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, what an exhilarating and challenging conversation. Daniel mentioned Mike Serbinis, a veteran of the Disruptors podcast, who is one of Canada’s great founders, building a company now called League. So we asked Mike why he had joined Build Canada.

Mike Serbinis: I’ve always been a builder. From the first cloud companies to eBooks, to transforming healthcare.

And that includes country building in Canada from theoretical physics at perimeter AI at vector and startups at CDL. After a near decade of falling productivity, Canada could be doing so much better. We need builders to get to work, [00:28:00] to build a better, stronger Canada. And so I jumped at the chance to support Build Canada with my first idea of freeing healthcare data to enable better outcomes for all Canadians.

Sonia Sennik: That’s Mike Serbinis, CEO and founder of League and co-founder of Kobo. And here’s Lucy Hargreaves, a former political staffer who is now VP of Corporate Affairs and Policy at Patch, a carbon removal startup.

Lucy Hargreaves: For me, it’s about scaling bold policy ideas that drive economic growth. Canada has so much potential, but we really need to shift from a default no to finding more ways to say yes to ambitious policies.

I love that this initiative brings together talented founders, policymakers, and industry leaders to move the needle, not just talk about it. The energy, the connections, and the real impact we can all create together is what makes this really so exciting for me.

Sonia Sennik: John, what a conversation about the future of Canada.

John Stackhouse: It left me both excited and nervous about where we’re going as a country, and [00:29:00] maybe you need that for a bit of that obliquity mindset that Daniel mentioned. We have a lot to come to grips with, and it’s not just about our narrative. There’s some serious choices that we have to make as a country. And as Daniel was talking, I was reflecting on one of his co creators of Build Canada who said to me once in a private conversation that one of the most expensive decisions you can make, maybe in any part of life, but certainly as a builder, is yes, Because when you say yes, you are eliminating all sorts of other choices.

It’s an opportunity cost. And as a country, we have to think hard about what we’re saying yes to when it crowds out those other opportunities. Of course, we have to say yes to the opportunities before us and pursue them aggressively. But we’re gonna have to make some choices as a country. And I think Canadians may finally, collectively, be coming to grips with that.

Sonia Sennik: If there’s one thing I’ve learned, as Canadians, we are always better when we work together. [00:30:00] I’m thinking of something like our CDL Rapid Screening Consortium that we built during COVID. We were the only country to stitch together a nationwide rapid testing program. And that all started with just a handful of people and companies that believed it was possible.

We can create incredible opportunities for our country when we link arms and build in the same direction.

John Stackhouse: A country of builders. What a great ambition. This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Thanks for listening.

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here,

Sonia Sennik: Along with Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Welcome back to Disruptors x CDL: The Innovation Era.

Sonia, today we’re talking about ag tech, which is short for agriculture technology, but that’s a mouthful, speaking of food. And ag tech has never been more important. We’re a big food producer as a country, and most of us as consumers don’t really appreciate how much technology, especially cutting edge new technologies, go into our food system.

Sonia Sennik: Thinking about the term AgriFood, we have a CDL stream called AgriFood, and what I learned over the last few years of running it is it means everything, from the seed planted for something to grow, all the way through to the system to consume it, and then manage the waste. It is everything. So I love systems design, as we’ve chatted about in our various episodes.

The concept of the AgriFood system in Canada is really exciting.

John Stackhouse: And yet, as much as Canada [00:01:00] is a leader in food production, I think we’re one of the top five food producers in the world. But we’re a bit of a laggard when it comes to ag tech. In fact, ag tech, even in the rankings of tech, is lagging. And we need to change that.

Canadians have had a wake up call this winter with the trade war now underway with the United States and the message from President Trump that maybe the United States doesn’t need anything that we produce. That’s actually not true. Americans do need a lot of our food. They need a lot of other things too, but would be in dire straits if they didn’t have our food and potash and fertilizer and lots of other things.

As we come to grips with perhaps a bit more of a harsher world and not just here in North America, we really need to up our game in all sectors, but particularly agriculture, where in some ways we have the most opportunity. But we’re going to need a lot more of that ag tech to do it more efficiently, to do it with more innovation, and to increase the value of what we produce for the world.

But Sonia, before [00:02:00] we get deeper into some of these questions, let’s start with a food question and the one that we’ve often used on this podcast, known as the breakfast question. How did you start your day?

Sonia Sennik: With Starbucks, John.

John Stackhouse: So you weren’t boycotting American Starbucks?

Sonia Sennik: Oh no, with Tim Hortons, John, can I take it back?

John Stackhouse: You can take it back. Although I heard of someone who boycotted Starbucks on Sunday and then when Canada got the 30 day extension on Monday said, look at the effect we had.

Sonia Sennik: Yeah, really impactful with that one latte. But I did enjoy a breakfast sandwich and a latte this morning. And do

John Stackhouse: you know

Sonia Sennik: where those came from?

A barista named Todd.

John Stackhouse: Oh, I mean, who grew them? And you probably don’t, because none of us know where we got our food

Sonia Sennik: from. What about you, John? What did you have for breakfast? And please, I mean, is it going to be muesli and something very healthy? And that’s fine if it is. No,

John Stackhouse: no, but I did have berries. Not really sure where they came from though.

And that’s a really interesting question in [00:03:00] ag tech and agriculture generally, because berries, a lot of them come from Peru and California, but as Canada thinks about what we can produce for the world and how we do this more efficiently. We actually can grow a lot more berries if we use more of the technologies that we’re going to hear about on this episode.

Sonia Sennik: John, did you catch any of the Grammys last weekend?

John Stackhouse: I actually got clips of it on YouTube, but I didn’t watch it beginning to end.

Sonia Sennik: So I think AgriFood and food is on the top of everyone’s mind because in Trevor Noah’s opening monologue, he made a joke about the increasing cost of maple syrup. So. John, how can Canada feed the

John Stackhouse: world?

That’s actually one of the great opportunities for the next quarter century. The rock star of the Canadian economy has been agriculture. In terms of the amount that we produce and sell to the world, it’s grown 5x and we’re doing it with fewer people because we’re using more technology. But we also have to realize that the rest of the world is getting better [00:04:00] at all of this.

I’ve always been impressed with how much Canada exports in agriculture. But when my colleague, Lisa Ashton, who’s going to join us shortly, started to dig into the numbers, it was startling to see how much market share Canada’s losing in different parts of the world. So it’s more competitive out there, which is a good thing.

And we, in turn, have to take that as a market signal that we need to up our game too. And we’re going to hear from two other guests, Evan Fraser and Alison Sunstrum, on the role that technology and innovation can play in getting us back to the front of the pack.

Sonia Sennik: But first, in the coming weeks, RBC will publish a new report on this topic.

And we asked Agriculture Policy Lead, Lisa Ashton, what are the key takeaways from this report?

Lisa Ashton: What I found most surprising is that Canada, while it’s still a leader in agriculture and food exports, it’s actually fallen from 5th to 7th place from the early 2000s to 2023. This has actually brought material losses to Canada’s [00:05:00] economy.

Equaling 23 billion if we didn’t lose share in some of our key agricultural food products globally. But there is lots of potential within the sector as someone that grew up on a farm in southwestern ontario I was exposed to the innovation that is coming out of Canada’s agricultural sector that really led to the mechanization And the improvements in productivity in the early 2000s but now that productivity is It’s slowing on an annual growth basis, and we’re seeing emerging economies like Brazil or Argentina start to eat up our share of global AgriFood exports.

But if we were to focus on one key thing moving forward, it would really come from the infrastructure development in our rural IT. When you look at farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, they have less than 50 percent of 5G coverage within the province, and that is truly holding them back from participating in the [00:06:00] digital economy.

So moving that forward would really unlock Canada’s potential to grow as an AgriFood export powerhouse.

John Stackhouse: You can find more of Lisa’s work at rbc. com slash Thought Leadership or follow us on LinkedIn. We’re now excited to have on the podcast two of Canada’s top thinkers on ag tech, Evan Fraser and Alison Sunstrum.

I’ve known Evan for at least a decade. In fact, long time listeners will remember him. on the pod talking about his book, Dinner on Mars. He’s a well known policy influencer and Canadian researcher at the University of Guelph and the director of the Aral Food Institute.

Sonia Sennik: And we’re joined by Alison Sunstrum.

She started our AgriFood stream at CDL-Rockies in Calgary. She had a vision for the importance of driving innovators and tech towards the agriculture industry in Canada. And she has been central to expanding it around the world. Also, John, Alison started in as an innovator herself, [00:07:00] building grow safe systems out of her garage, where she started with this idea of, could we start using data to track cows?

John Stackhouse: So we’ve got dinner on Mars and farming in the garage. Be a great conversation. Evan and Alison, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks, John. Thanks, John. Evan, you and I were just together at a food summit that the Aral Food Institute put on with ag leaders from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, scheduled before the Trump tariff announcements, but very, very timely.

And you and I did a keynote conversation on what we’re up against in this brave and scary new world. I wonder if you can give our listeners a sense of the role of innovation for ag producers in taking on this challenging, but also exciting new world.

Evan Fraser: My feeling is very strong that, Ag is on the cusp of a massive technological transformation that the same technologies that gave us internet are changing what [00:08:00] we eat and how we produce what we eat, how the food that we eat gets to us, and that that is about to go through a major change.

Technologies such as controlled environment agriculture that allows farmers to produce more food year round closer to the consumer I mean, we’re not there yet, but the potential is there to be quite transformative and to be honest the threat of a less integrated north america The threat of border tariffs, the threat of it being harder, not easier to move food across borders, I think just increases the temple at which innovation is going to happen in this space and is going to push investors like Alison, it’s going to push policymakers like the people we interact with, John, on a daily basis, it’s going to push them to be really interested in doing whatever they can to bring food closer to home.

Evan, where would you say Canada’s at on the global table? Super question. I mean, Canada is a net food exporter. We have a food trade surplus. Most of that is prairie related products. Beef, canola, wheat, crops that come from big farms in the [00:09:00] prairies are what we mostly export. What we mostly import, however, is the fruits and vegetables.

And because of Winter. I mean, we have winter, which means we can’t do fruits and vegetables close at home most of the year. So I think where innovation is going to perhaps play the biggest role in terms of the issues kicked up by the trade tariff war or the potential of a trade tariff war is really the fruits and vegetables and the broad area of perhaps controlled environment agriculture.

So when you think back, Ontario didn’t really have a big greenhouse sector 25 or 30 years ago. Now we have one of the world’s largest producing year round tomatoes and cucumbers, peppers, and increasing strawberries, which is really interesting for someone who grew up on a traditional strawberry farm, quite close to consumers.

Still embedded in international supply chains, of course, but still much more local.

Sonia Sennik: To go with a positivity sandwich approach, can we maybe learn a little bit, Allison, from you about what does Canada do really well?

Alison Sunstrum: One of the things that I think that we can do is think differently. [00:10:00] There’s a lot of things that we can do internally that many, many folks are talking about, like removing the restrictions between interprovincial borders and a number of things, but I’m going to give you examples from the CDL lab.

One of the packaging solutions that we saw in the lab a few years ago was a company called Ixon. And Ixon’s technology allows perishable foods like meat to be stored at room temperature for up to two years. This cuts refrigeration costs, makes distribution to remote or underserved areas more viable. I didn’t invest in this one, but if you think about it, if you could actually disrupt the cold chain, keep products on the shelf longer, this would enable us to react to a number of different trade issues, a number of different barriers.

And that’s the kind of technology that I really love. I love those things that think about how we can do differently [00:11:00] rather than responding to really counterproductive trade. Idiocy, and think about technology as a way to solve some of our problems.

John Stackhouse: Allison, that sounds all well and good, but I think as we all know, finding capital for ag tech has been a bit of a challenge.

Sonja, you and I were talking about this before the recording. I don’t quite get it. What, Sonja, are you seeing as the kind of frictions?

Sonia Sennik: I see incredible innovators in our stream, but the bar to invest in our early stage AgriFood companies seems to be higher than in some of our other streams. Is that a lack of a familiarity from our investor community with ag tech?

Why might there be a bit of a higher bar or a longer cycle before an investment is made?

Alison Sunstrum: You know, I’m actually going to take a bit of exception to that. I would say that the majority of people who invest look for really, really quick wins. And those people that look and like their capital preserved, but understand [00:12:00] that good solutions take a little longer.

I think those are our investors. I also think that we don’t understand the huge opportunity that Canada has in agriculture and technology to drive the industry. I did a quick back of the napkin, uh, calculation when I was speaking on a panel with John recently. And I looked at the fact that the Netherlands, which is a country that you can put into Nova Scotia, is four times more productive than we are.

Economically productive, output productive, you name it. So that’s a bit of challenge. The other thing that I would say is, you know, there’s a bit of correctness to what you say. Agriculture is driven by a number of things that are challenging. We’re hit by climate, we’re hit by a number of things that we can’t control.

So the risk in agriculture is high. I think that if investors understood this and we looked at new strategies, you’re [00:13:00] right, we’ve got to find a way to fund investment in agriculture.

Evan Fraser: If I could jump in here, I mean, one of the things that Netherlands does, I think, and Allison, you and I have talked about this at length, first of all, an agricultural product or two key components of agriculture are two of the top tier priority areas of the economy for the Dutch government.

So it is extremely high on the, on the radar of the government in the Netherlands. They have explicitly brought that triple helix together and the triple helix that they talk about is business, the academy and government together to focus on agriculture. They’ve done that. operationally, things like creating data sharing pools in order to make sure that they make better use than say Canada does of its data sharing environment.

So there’s a whole bunch of sort of tactical things and also cultural things that the Dutch do remember winters after World War II where there was hunger and starvation in that country. So from a cultural level through a policy level. They have seriously prioritized agriculture, and as a result, they way punch above their weight, whereas Canada, [00:14:00] alas, we don’t have those characteristics, perhaps, I would argue that we punch probably below our weight.

John Stackhouse: What should Canada choose, or at least think about choosing, if we could only focus on a few areas of ag tech?

Alison Sunstrum: We would focus on a bias to act, to deploy, and to take on new technology. I say that first and foremost because, um, picking a technology, the big enchilada in every technology is AI, robotics and AI, automation and AI, analytics and AI.

We as a country. We researched AI, we developed AI in our institutions. So let’s not lose this opportunity in agriculture. Let’s make sure that we can deploy AI to be more productive. So that’s the big one. [00:15:00] But the second one is let’s also think about actually taking up our technology. That’s the most important.

We have a tech debt in this country across all our industries. If you want to see where we’re winning, go to the Conference Board of Canada, look at the Innovation Report Card for Canada. It’s a better one. It’s still a D rating. But you take a look at that report card and you’ll see we must be spending more on bringing technology into our businesses.

Sonia Sennik: Evan, do you agree that adoption is critical here?

Evan Fraser: To John’s point, normally when someone says, what kind of tech do you want us to choose? The expected answer is something like, oh, we should double down on row crops or double down on some sort of commodity. And I think Allison’s Completely right in that.

She’s saying there is underlying sort of foundational technologies, robotics, data and artificial intelligence. And I would say genomics are the sort of the three and we should be as a country embracing the application [00:16:00] of those three foundational technologies in as wide a range of applications across Canada’s AgriFood sector as possible.

A commodity specific approach is not the right approach. We want to take a foundational technology approach of genomics AI data and robotics and drive those and I’m not going to presuppose what great idea some Third year computer science student in waterloo is going to have like I just want them to work and use those tools in agriculture And that’s where I think we’ll see the strengths

Sonia Sennik: We’re hearing the term precision farming a lot.

Would you say that the items that you listed there and the technological advances, is that the umbrella of precision farming? And do you have any examples of where companies are doing precision farming really well?

Alison Sunstrum: So precision farming is a term that came out of the internet of things, and it’s really looking at sensors connected to the internet, bringing information back, and then trying to optimize production through a precision format.

[00:17:00] That’s old tech. And so what I want to see is I want to see us pushing that envelope, next generation Predictive farming. I want to be predictive and I want to be automated. You cannot be automated if you are not able to predict when you should be going out in the field, when you should be responding with new products.

So from my sort of theorem, as I looked at the original days of data was kind of historical benchmarking data. Then we moved into a kind of real time data format. Then we started thinking about how could we mitigate risk and how could we increase profitability if we could actually predict, mitigate that risk very quickly before it happened, hopefully.

And so we’re now in this phase with AI and all types of technology that we can be predicting and responding sometimes before an occurrence.

Sonia Sennik: Evan, you co-authored [00:18:00] the book Dinner on Mars, which I learned was not, in fact, a dinner of Mars bars. It’s difficult to talk about the AgriFood industry without thinking about climate change.

Assuming that the atmosphere on Mars would be very different than this one on Earth, what do you think is the most pressing problem we need to solve related to agriculture and climate change?

Evan Fraser: There’s two ways of answering that question, and you asked me for one, I’m going to give you two. One is the, what’s called mitigation.

So, developing farming systems that don’t emit very many greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, I think agriculture and forestry, as the two biological based parts of the economy we’ve got, have the potential to not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also ultimately absorb them and be what we might call net negative.

As things grow carbon dioxide is pulled out of the atmosphere and ultimately can be transferred into the soil where it can be stored A lot of complicated science there But whatever we can do to reduce carbon emissions or greenhouse gas emissions and [00:19:00] tie them up in biological matter such as the soil Is I would say one of the two key priorities and we can do that using ranges of technologies often called regenerative farming, better livestock management, all sorts of things.

The other thing is we need to adapt to climate change. We’re not going to be able to mitigate our way out of this problem. We are going to have to adapt to changing environmental conditions and that means investing in agricultural systems such as drought tolerant seeds or heat tolerant cattle, dairy cows.

That will allow us to continue to produce as the earth warms up. So there’s a strong mitigation agenda and a strong adaptation agenda and technology is going to play a role in both.

Alison Sunstrum: I’m going to act as devil’s advocate here if I can to Evan, please. I think we only started talking about adaptation because we couldn’t figure out how to mitigate.

And so from my perspective, I really want us to focus on those technologies. That have the potential to change this [00:20:00] crisis point we’re in, and I generally don’t talk about crisis, but I have to tell you the economic cost of climate change is massive. If we look at what happened in Canada in 2024, by September, we had already had 7.

7 billion in insured damages from climate impact. It’s affecting our food supply, it’s affecting everything. So, we have to be looking at those technologies that can transform food systems sustainably. And we got to think about it really seriously. It’s not something that we can leave off the shelf.

John Stackhouse: And Evan, you’re trying to do something about this.

You’ve got a pretty ambitious new initiative out of the University of Guelph that’s aimed at helping, especially the next gen of innovators and entrepreneurs in ag tech, do something about this. Can you tell us more about it?

Evan Fraser: So, very happy that the federal government has awarded a national network that is led by the [00:21:00] University of Guelph but also includes Dr.

Lenore Newman from the University of Fraser Valley as co-chair to stand up something called Sustainable Food Systems for Canada. And the logic there is that many great innovation ideas, great entrepreneurs, whether they’re social innovators or have a commercial idea, they crash out because they’re not quite ready for something like Creative Destruction Lab.

They’re even too early for that. So what Lenore and I brainstormed was that there is a gap in Canada’s innovation landscape, specifically with regard to ag and food innovation, where really, really early stage pre incubator, pre accelerator stage ideas need some help and mentoring to get. Further along the pathway towards launching a viable company so that they can then stand up at a creative destruction lab session and have the right kind of pitch and the right kind of narrative.

So what we’ve created is sustainable food systems for Canada. It involves all of Canada’s ag and veterinary medicine schools, a number of colleges, a number of indigenous communities from the north. And we’re going to try to [00:22:00] create a training program based on micro credentials around ag and innovation.

A mentorship program specifically geared to help feed into the creative destruction lab and the bio enterprise type incubator accelerators. And what we’re calling a collision space, basically a place for a community to form around AgriFood at a national scale. Because unlike aerospace or automotive, we don’t sort of have a club or a place to gather as a community as often as we’d like.

And so we’re going to try to address that as well.

Sonia Sennik: Farming for Creative Destruction Lab. I love it, Evan. That’s a good point. I like that.

Allison, when people think of food technologies or agriculture, they may have a very dated view of what this looks like. In an effort to attract and continue to build world class talent in the AgriFood industry in Canada, what do you think Canadians need to know about the exciting opportunity here?

Alison Sunstrum: [00:23:00] Sonia, I love the farming for CDL Ag. I think that’s great, but I also like the thought that the farm team is not just from a traditional agricultural university background. Some of the best companies we get in CDL Ag come from every other stream, space stream, ocean stream, you name it, because agriculture really crosses the border of every type of technology.

And so the initiative that Evan and Lenore have started, I’ve just been their best cheerleader as they’ve gone through to get started. But I also think that we have to look at the fact that even within our own academic institutions, we have to say, Hey, do you know what a big opportunity that agriculture actually is?

And there’s some companies who were pivots from the energy stream and pivots from the space stream that are just driving massive change. One’s [00:24:00] actually creating phycocyanin through cyanobacteria. Which was a big part of dinner on Mars. So, we’re looking at future foods and future technologies and although we all think of agriculture like my granddad on a tractor plowing up a field, it’s not like that.

It’s in the lab. It’s in space. It’s in the soil.

Sonia Sennik: Evan, what should we get excited about in the opportunity to innovate in our AgriFood industry?

Evan Fraser: To pick up on what Allison just said. The farmer of the future is as likely to wear a lab coat, live in a city, work in a group that includes data scientists and marketers and whatnot, as they are likely to drive a tractor on their own in a rural countryside.

And we also need to do a better job of linking our conversations with technology back into the lived experiences of the producers. Both things are true. On one hand, we have this extraordinarily exciting explosion of innovation that is touching down [00:25:00] on all these different disciplines and these different departments and these different ways of life.

And as a university professor, I spend a lot of time connecting with young people to try to get them excited about this. And we also have to be doing a better job of grounding our innovations in the lived experiences of farmers. In other words, solving problems that today’s farmers already have. And so there has to be both approaches.

There has to be a innovator to farmer and farmer to innovator kind of emphasis. And there has to be a outreach into new disciplines in order to get young people from all walks of life excited about feeding the future and making money at the same time.

John Stackhouse: Evan, you’re reminding me of a report we did a number of years ago called Farmer 4.0 that looked at the digital farmer of the future and you and your team at Guelph were really helpful in putting that together and also communicating that across the country. How do you think we’ve done over the last few years on getting to Farmer 4.0? And what do you think would be the key changes and investments that we can make?

Evan Fraser: One of the things that I really like that I took [00:26:00] away from Farmer 4.0 is that the farmer of the future needs a good grounding in traditional ag science disciplines. So we’re not going to neglect soil science and animal husbandry and all that sort of traditional agronomic work. And they need a really good grounding in the STEM disciplines.

And we need to do a better job, a much better job of teaching young people the foundational skills, active listening, project management, group work, conflict resolution, oral and written communication. And that’s a lot to pile into a curriculum for an undergraduate, if we’re talking about a formal undergraduate, but we have to be doing those things.

I think we’re doing better, but we’re not doing anywhere near as good as we should be trying to do those three things simultaneously at the same time as we’re reaching out to the traditional farm community.

Alison Sunstrum: Actually, Evan, I think we’re doing good as it relates to the farm. I don’t think we’re doing as well in terms of policy, financing, driving that change.

So what you’re talking about on the farm can actually happen. I think we need [00:27:00] innovation to create transformative solutions. We need investment to scale and deploy the solutions. We need a robust climate policy to guide and incentivize change and collaboration to ensure equity and shared opportunity.

So. These are the elements that needed to draw systemic shifts on farm. Sure. But also, we have to be driving that change everywhere.

Sonia Sennik: So well said. Allison and Evan, thank you so much for joining the podcast. This was a delicious conversation.

John Stackhouse: Thank you.

Sonia Sennik: Thanks.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, this conversation has been a great reminder of how so much in our world always comes down to food.

Without food, we don’t survive. And it’s important to realize that technology and innovation, which often are described in non earthy terms. really can make a difference to the earth and the food that it produces, as well as the water and so many other ingredients, quite literally, that go [00:28:00] into what helps us all thrive.

My mind’s going back to one of our first questions. What did you have for breakfast? And the berries that I got to eat. And thinking to Evan’s point about how we can grow those berries in our country, in winter, in controlled environments. Yes, we already do. But we can do that at scale, not just to feed ourselves, but if we do it well, help feed a lot of the world as well.

Sonia Sennik: I was struck by how Evan and Alison were so aligned on the farmer of the future, John. So that farmer who’s making those breakfasts we’re eating or food that’s coming to our table. Being an interdisciplinary spread of data scientists, folks with soils background, agriculture background, AI and robotics that the future of agriculture and farming is really at a transition point and Canada has an opportunity to capture this inflection point and grow our agriculture industry.

John Stackhouse: I think the message is let’s make farmer 4.0 a national hero. As well as a national ambition for future generations. [00:29:00] This has been Disruptors and CDL, the Innovation Era. I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and join us next time as we continue exploring the groundbreaking ideas shaping Canada’s economy and beyond.

Talk to you soon.

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here. Welcome back to Disruptors x CDL: The Innovation Era.

Sonia Sennik: I’m Sonia Sennik, the CEO at Creative Destruction Lab. John, I hear you’re in Davos for the World Economic Forum.

John Stackhouse: That’s right, Sonia. And it’s actually pretty late at night here, but it’s been an incredible week from Donald Trump’s diatribe, where he went against pretty much everyone in the world and laid out his plans for America first.

to some of the most fascinating discussions about artificial intelligence and where the world’s leading scientists and technologists are taking us in 2025.

Sonia Sennik: It sounds like an absolute whirlwind. Where should we start?

John Stackhouse: Well, let’s start with the mood and the mood after that Trump speech, which was heard around the world.

We keep hearing Donald Trump talk about the golden age and judging from a lot of executives, as well as investors here in Davos, there’s a lot of gold being made. The confidence in the U S economy [00:01:00] for this year is extraordinary. And the belief in Silicon Valley and especially AI is breathtaking. There is conviction right now, like I’ve rarely seen, and it’s going to drive a lot of markets and opportunities this year.

Sonia Sennik: So that’s the United States. I’m so curious, given you are in the room, 50 percent of all communication is body language. How is everybody else reacting during that virtual address from President Trump?

John Stackhouse: The room was packed. Hundreds and hundreds of people fighting over chairs. In fact, I saw Al Gore trying to find a spare chair and Christine Lagarde wrestling for one, but the mood was somewhat restrained.

Now, remember, a lot of people in the audience are European, and Trump didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about Europe. And then when he went after things like DEI, which he calls nonsense, You could hear the gas in the room. I suspect he didn’t pick it up, but tellingly there was no standing ovation.

And in fact, the applause was, I’d say polite.

Sonia Sennik: Well, politeness, this is something we’re great at here in Canada. I [00:02:00] am curious about how you feel that speech impacts our country.

John Stackhouse: Well, that was the headline, certainly for Canadians. He went after so many aspects of Canada and had nothing good to say, which is kind of remarkable because he goes after lots of countries and lots of regions.

But usually slips in a compliment, he’ll say something like, I love the Europeans after he’s trash talked Europe for five minutes. None of that for Canada. It was also interesting that his attack on Canada was unprompted. In fact, it came during an answer to a question about banking regulation. So I don’t know how Canadian lumber exports popped to the top of his mind when he was thinking about what’s next for the SEC.

But it’s a signal to Canada that we are top of mind and it’s not necessarily in a positive way. Now that said, he also spoke enthusiastically about a lot of things that Canada will be involved in. Energy, certainly, and his desire for energy dominance will include Canada, not just oil and gas, but [00:03:00] electricity and a lot of renewables directly and indirectly.

He also talked about the enormous demand for energy from data centers, from artificial intelligence, from cryptocurrency, which his administration is very enthusiastic about. All that crunching of data is going to have to take place somewhere, and as we’ve talked about on a previous podcast with Alberta’s Technology and Innovation Minister, Nate Gloobish, Alberta has a very ambitious plan that seems like it would fit in fairly well with the Trump administration’s view of where North America is going in the next half decade.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m sure you ran into the Canadian contingent from our government.

John Stackhouse: There was no one there from the Canadian government, Sonia. It was astonishing. Uh, even the investment agency that is mandated to drum up investment for Canada had no presence here and they used to be very visible. Say what you like about WEF, but every major investor in the world pretty much is here.

Sovereign wealth funds, big institutional investors, [00:04:00] pension funds from every corner of the world are here and they’re here to do business. So businesses from around the world are also here along with their governments. According that investment, and there was a real absence of Canada, and it was noted by more than the Canadians,

Sonia Sennik: there wasn’t a booth, a little flag, some decorative pens,

John Stackhouse: not even a cup of hot chocolate.

And by the way, it seemed everyone and their dog was offering hot chocolate on the main street. The Qataris, the Indians, even Meta had a fancy hot chocolate booth that had a lineup down the street, but no Canadians.

Sonia Sennik: No one does hot chocolate better than us, John.

John Stackhouse: Well, we got to prove it.

Sonia Sennik: One of the things that President Trump pushed for was NATO countries to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP.

Now just a couple months ago, Canada committed to meet NATO’s military spending target of 2 percent of GDP by 2032. And last year in 2024, for reference, Canada’s defense spending was about 1.3 percent of GDP. How do you [00:05:00] think leaders reacted to this push?

John Stackhouse: Well, I think a lot of countries are thinking very hard about how to increase defense spending, which is usually harder than it sounds.

Procurement number one is incredibly difficult. And then there’s the politics of it. Governments in Europe as well as North America are running deficits, in some places very big deficits. And they have demands for health care and education and other claims on the public purse. So doubling, in some cases, defense spending is going to be a tough sell.

Now, there’s also an opportunity to broaden what we mean by defense spending. And since this podcast is about technology and disruption, that’s where the conversation’s going. Cyber defenses, something Canada is actually very good at, is becoming a meaningful part of military strategies and artificial intelligence, which we’re going to talk about a lot more through the episode, is becoming more and more central to defense strategies everywhere.

It was interesting to hear the Ukrainians, including President Zelensky, talk about how advanced their technology is, [00:06:00] especially drones, which we’ve all read about and probably seen videos of. A lot of those drones are driven by artificial intelligence. And I was shocked to listen to a discussion between a couple of military experts about how the Russians and Ukrainians are learning from each other day by day, week by week during this war.

By capturing drones and other devices, tearing them apart and copying them, and then advancing their own technologies. This may sound inhuman when we’re talking about tens of thousands of people whose lives have been lost during this conflict. and all the suffering that is going on and unfortunately will go on.

But it’s important to note about our own defenses and it’s getting to be a more challenging world. So we will need more defenses to think that technology and innovation are going to be an important part of that. And those can lead to important civilian benefits as well.

Sonia Sennik: Well, John, there’s been this evolving conversation around the concept of dual use technology.

There’s so many different applications for emerging tech, software, hardware. [00:07:00] We’re living in a world where that term is becoming a little bit meaningless because almost everything could be considered dual use technology. For many of our listeners, their only interaction with a drone may be for photography, taking pictures of leaves changing color in the fall.

John Stackhouse: Yeah, this was a hot debate and whether these technologies and particularly AI are going to benefit democracies more or autocracies more. And it could go either way. We’ve never seen autocracies and I’d include China, Iran and Russia in that category with more technological might. And the ability to scale that technology.

And as we know, technology is all about scale. A wise person at Davos made, I thought, a profound comment reflecting on the history of autocracies and dictatorships, having always to rely on the will of the people. Throughout history, even in some of the greatest dictators. Have fallen to the uprising of people when their basic needs were not being met.

That’s starting to change with [00:08:00] technology. And you think of what AI can do when it can persuade at scale an entire population, when it can bring surveillance technology at scale 24 seven in everyone’s lives. That could make autocracies more powerful than we’ve ever known. On the flip side, democracies can also get better and better with these technologies.

Think of what AI can do to our public service. All the frustration that all of us have with the delivery of public services, private services too, but the frustration with government can be reduced, perhaps profoundly, with AI. When we talk about those budget challenges of healthcare. Well, AI is there ready to be deployed at scale to help us not only deliver better service and improve all of our health outcomes, but save money as well.

So it’s an incredible race that unfortunately is about more than technology. It may well determine the direction of where society goes. In the rest of the century,

Sonia Sennik: John, for sure. This world where lightweight technologies have the potential to make [00:09:00] massive changes totally transforms the calculus. And I like what you said about AI adoption and public service would love to see more and more productivity through some of those tools

with interest rates still being a major concern around the world. How did you find global leaders were framing the relationship between economic stability and the ability to drive forward with innovation? Debt financing is critical in the early stages of developing any new research and technology to be able to go to market.

And so a low interest rate environment is very friendly to those brave entrepreneurs that are going to take a risk on something that’s never been built before. In an environment where those interest rates don’t exist, you may find creative, ambitious people a little less incentivized to take that leap.

Was there a conversation about that with the global leaders that you were with in Davos?

John Stackhouse: Yes, and add to that A lot [00:10:00] of concern about regulation, like that was one of the topics of the week is regulation. And certainly Donald Trump has declared war on regulation in the U. S. We’ll see how far he gets in trying to reduce it.

Every new leader seems to want to cut red tape and then discovers that there’s more red tape than they ever imagined and there’s always some vested interest in preserving it. That said, I think government leaders everywhere are looking at the United States and then looking in the mirror. And saying, Hmm, maybe we got to do a lot more than we said we would do.

And we got to be faster at it. The Europeans, I think, are still in a bit of shock from the Trump election. And we’re really humbled by that finger wagging that he gave them. But they also said, you know what? We need this wake up call. We’ve got everything here in Europe. We’ve got skills. We’ve got talent.

We’ve got savings. Apparently they’ve got hot chocolate and they’ve got hot chocolate, but they don’t have technology to the level that they should have. And they know that, and they know that young technologists are leaving [00:11:00] Europe in droves are coming to the United States or coming to Canada. To start their businesses and they also know that their regulatory environment can be hostile to tech companies.

Trump made that very clear. He said, you pick on our tech companies, Apple and Google, you take them to court and you find them billions of dollars. Well, I consider that a tax and you know what he means when he says that he’s going to tax back. But it’s a signal to governments to maybe step back and let business be business and, uh, invent, create, fight each other and, uh, see where that, uh, leads, maybe have a bit of creative destruction as creative destruction lab inspires, but let those spirits thrive, not just in financial markets, but in technology and in science and in inventing.

All the great things that we’ve talked about on previous podcasts

Sonia Sennik: And really for an innovation ecosystem to thrive. You really need a mosaic of all different types of stakeholders pulling together. We see that through our partnership with our European CDL sites, [00:12:00] CDL Paris at SSA Paris, CDL Berlin at ESMT Berlin and CDL Estonia at the University of Tartu.

It’s incredible to see the community’s commitment to building their ecosystem and building connections all around the world. You’ve pointed to global shifts in trade policy as one of the top risks that you see. What changes do you think will shape the trade order over the next decade, and are we here in Canada doing enough to stay competitive?

John Stackhouse: No to the last question, and we have to treat this moment as a reckoning as well, not just in our relations with the United States, but in how we manage our own economy, in how we create those ecosystems, but let them thrive and in how we look to compete with every part of the world. The United States, in some ways, is a category of one.

It has size and scale and diversity across its economy that allows it to do things its own way, whether the world wants to play ball with it and trade with it or not. The U. S. can afford [00:13:00] to build walls, but it’s not going to build impermeable walls. It’s going to trade with all parts of the world, but it’s doing so from a position of strength and therefore will probably get stronger as a result.

Smaller countries like Canada have got to be nimbler, more creative, more dynamic. Think a bit more like Israel or Singapore in seeking opportunities. I was interested to hear the president of Singapore speak to these themes and he said, you know what, as a small country, you figure out pretty early how to make yourself useful to all sorts of other countries.

And I think Canada needs to wake up every morning and see how can we be useful, not just to the United States, but to all sorts of countries. We’ve got the resources, we’ve got the people, we’ve got our own dynamism. We just need to be more ambitious and more aware of the risks that are coming at us. And also celebrate our own successes.

It’s really interesting to hear Americans at this time celebrate themselves, leads to a lot of eye rolling. It was funny to hear Kristalina Georgieva, who runs the International Monetary [00:14:00] Fund this week, say that as a European, she grew up listening to her parents applaud something by saying. Well, that was pretty good.

So they never said it was great. It was a, that was pretty good. Then I watched an American walk down a few steps and they get a standing ovation. That got a good laugh from the crowd and recognition that, yeah, Americans sometimes overdo it, but they celebrate success. And that tends to lead to more success.

Sonia Sennik: John, you mentioned that this could be a bit of a moment of reckoning for Canada. What do you think is the most important thing for our country right now?

John Stackhouse: I think we need to come to grips with what we are excellent at. And what we can continue to be excellent at in a very competitive and increasingly competitive world.

And then secondly, map that against what our allies and partners need and are going to need in the years ahead. I was reflecting at Davos this week on Justin Trudeau’s First trip [00:15:00] to the World Economic Forum, where he made that infamous comment about Canada being a resourceful nation rather than being a resource nation.

And that was unfortunate because we’re both. And now the conversation sparked by Trump’s desire for energy dominance is very focused on resources and how can we supply energy, oil and gas, for instance, to the United States. Let’s think about the resourcefulness. That allows us to do that. The remarkable engineering talent in the oil and gas sector and in the electricity sector and in the fusion sector that can work with equally great talent in the United States and elsewhere.

To Canada’s advantage, how do we think about a remarkable talent in space? There was extraordinary conversation that I hope we can get into about the space economy and the new space race that is underway. We had a great episode with Chris Hadfield a few months ago on that, Sonia, and. There’s an opportunity there for Canada to differentiate [00:16:00] ourselves.

We’re the brain economy, which is thriving. We have many of the world’s great neuroscientists in Canada, as well as brain entrepreneurs. And there’s billions of dollars at play there. We can take advantage of that, and also take advantage of our abundance of natural resources. That’s always been the Canadian way, that balance.

But we need to have an honest look in the mirror. And assess what we’re good at, what we’re great at, and what we can lead with in this new age of competition.

Sonia Sennik: So what needs to change is how we approach the world with what we have to offer and identify with that ourselves. A friend of the podcast and colleague of ours, Professor Janice Stein.

Made the suggestion that we need to establish a quiet confidence in our strategic assets. Would you agree, John?

John Stackhouse: Yeah, I mean, you can be loudly confident or quietly confident. I think at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter as long as you perform and deliver. And that’s been one of Canada’s challenges in recent years.

We have been talking more than doing. And the world has noticed that say [00:17:00] do gap. We have not been executing to the degree that we said we would. And we’re now into a new show me period where we’re going to have to show the United States, but others, including ourselves, that we can deliver on time, on budget, and at a quality that we know we can, but we just got to do it.

Sonia Sennik: Listening to you, John, I’m thinking about the Olympics. It’s one thing to say, I want to go to the Olympics. It’s quite another to get there and then win a gold medal. Right now, Canada can adapt that own the podium mindset, which works so well for our athletes and maybe apply it to our business and industries.

John Stackhouse: Well, the Olympics is a good reference because we all celebrate the individual successes at the Olympics. But if you’ve ever been to or studied the Olympics, you know, the great athletes, even the individual performers show up with a team. And we have to do more of that as Canadians. And I don’t mean in the traditional flag waving big mission team Canada efforts, but just in strategically bringing together the right people [00:18:00] at the right time to connect with the right audiences.

That’s kind of like game day performance thinking. That’s the sort of attitude we need to have in Canada. And it was interesting at Davos to see countries. Be surprised, Mongolia, which has a really interesting economic ambition underway, showing up with the right collection of technologists, entrepreneurs, governments to say, Hey, we’ve got some game here as Mongolians, do you want to come check it out?

India was the same. I had a great conversation with our friend Raquel Urtizan from Wabi, the autonomous vehicle company. They will have autonomous driving trucks on highways in Texas this year and will be expanding beyond that. And that’s just the start of what Raquel and the hundreds of people on our team in Toronto are building towards.

And that’s the Canadian advantage. Canadian entrepreneurs with Canadian resources. Taking advantage of the U. S. market, doing that with a team behind them, that ecosystem, [00:19:00] including the great communities at the University of Toronto and Creative Destruction Lab that have allowed Raquel to do what she’s doing with Wabi.

Other great Canadian companies like Cohere, also here telling and selling their story. How, as Canadians, do we get behind that a bit more strategically? They don’t need big parades down the main street of Davos, but they need that combination of right people, right time, right audience to seal the deal.

Sonia Sennik: It’s all about the team behind the team. And I’m thinking of those pictures we’ve all seen of our incredible Hockey Canada teams winning the gold medal, whether it’s the men’s or the women’s team. As soon as they’re on the ice getting their medals, you see a flood of more people than the number of players and athletes on the team join them in that photo from physios to managers to logistics to truck drivers to the equipment team.

And when you think of that in terms of what it takes to create a thriving global business. You know, your country coming together behind you is an essential part of that. And I think there’s a [00:20:00] real theme of collaboration and celebration that I’m hearing, John, that folks were reacting to at Davos.

John Stackhouse: Yeah.

I’m glad you mentioned those words because I had written three words down and that was celebrate, cooperate, and compete. Those were consistent themes through the week at Davos. How do we celebrate whether it’s scientists or businesses or public servants? How do we collaborate, bringing people together to do more than they do on their own?

And then how do you create the right environment to have that competition, which we need to create hockey teams, to create companies, to create great technologies.

Sonia Sennik: I’m sure some of the folks listening who may spend time reading the latest headlines or scrolling through their app of choice have picked up on some signals of geopolitical fragmentation. And one of the many benefits of an interconnected world is the open sharing of ideas and talent across borders.

As you said. you know, celebrate, collaborate and compete. [00:21:00] John, after spending five days in Davos, what is your sense of the risks related to geopolitical pressures?

John Stackhouse: Well, they’re significant. I think everyone is realizing we are moving into a new era of history and what we have all perhaps taken for granted over the last 50 years is not going to be there over the next decade and probably decades beyond that.

We don’t know where the world is going, but it won’t be as global as it was. Most of us I’ve traveled the world for decades without having to think too much about it. But I’m old enough to have gone to a country called East Germany. And I still vividly remember going through the wall from West Germany to East Germany and feeling like I was on another planet.

It was a different system altogether. And we’re now moving into this era where we may have multiple systems in the world, like we’ve had in ages past. But that leads to inefficiencies, it leads to frictions in the world, leads to greater tensions, [00:22:00] and it leads to uncertainty. Which becomes iced into risk models.

So all the entrepreneurs listening will have to pay a bit more because of that uncertainty. We all pay for that uncertainty, whether we know it or not.

Sonia Sennik: We may be seeing more fragmentation and fracturing here on planet Earth while simultaneously heading to outer space more than ever. So orbiting back to one of our previous episodes, the dramatic drop in cost of accessing lower Earth orbit has unlocked new opportunities for space technologies to benefit humanity.

How was that economic transformation discussed? And where do you see the greatest near term opportunities with the space economy?

John Stackhouse: Two words. Launch pads. Maybe that’s one word hyphenated. Not sure. But whether it’s one word or two words, launch pads are hot. I didn’t realize that there is a scarcity and could be a significant scarcity of launch pads.

One of the best parts of Davos is there are dinners [00:23:00] that bring together the most interesting people you could ever imagine. And one night I got to go have dinner with the heads of space agencies from around the world, the India Space Agency, European Space Agency, Americans, Chinese, It was fascinating, as we discussed on that podcast, Sonia, to hear about the billions of dollars of venture capital money that is going into the space economy and all the private sector firms.

Of course, we know about Blue Origin and SpaceX, but around the world, there are more and more private sector entrepreneurs developing very ambitious space enterprises, both in low orbit and going to the moon, probably in big numbers before too long. And then we can all remember that comment by Donald Trump during his inauguration speech about planting the American flag on Mars.

That just highlights the ambition that I got to see from around the world, but there’s limited capacity, so there could be a supply demand imbalance. There was something like 140 orbital [00:24:00] space launches last year, and the people I had dinner with said, we’re going to be pretty soon seeing 100 orbital launches a week, and we have to start preparing for that.

And there are not enough launch pads on the planet for that. So interesting signal of both the demand to come and the opportunity.

Sonia Sennik: And we can’t leave this episode without me asking you about artificial intelligence and how it was discussed. You witnessed some really creative applications of AI at Davos.

Tell us more.

John Stackhouse: Yeah, I mean, what’s going on in robotics is incredible. I mean, we all have interacted with robots, but robot technology and especially the AI component is starting to really accelerate. So in just a few years, we’re going to see and touch and work with robots in all sorts of interesting ways.

But one of the most remarkable. Applications of AI And robotics was being carried out by a Canadian artist, Suquin Chung, who was born in Toronto, now lives in the U. [00:25:00] K. And she has trained a robot using sensory devices that read her brainwaves and train the robot to paint like her and develop creative patterns like her.

So I watched her. paint on a large canvas with a robot beside her. It was like watching two artists interact, except the robot was developing its own creative style and instinct based on the brain waves literally that were coming from her. Amazing to see the art, but what she is working towards is training the robot to be a creator when she’s gone.

It boggles the mind.

Sonia Sennik: The saying, art is timeless, hers may be truly infinite.

John Stackhouse: Think of what that can do for all sorts of other things in the world. I met a neuroscientist who’s developing ways of doing brain surgery without having to do the surgery, just like we do now with hearts. You don’t need to cut someone open to treat the heart.

He’s now doing this with the brain and [00:26:00] using AI to make it safer and also more sophisticated and more affordable because these procedures can be very, very costly.

Sonia Sennik: You know, John, in 2021, we started our CDL Neurostream, uh, this program supports founders pursuing commercializable opportunities in neuroscience.

And we’ve really learned from our neuro room that there’s a huge shift towards developing non invasive brain technologies. As you mentioned, an example is Augmental. One of our alumni developed smart mouthwear that allows you to control your phone, computer or tablet hands free. So this is especially useful for people living with paralysis.

It’s really exciting to think about how these technologies can be enabling to so many people around the world.

John Stackhouse: I think we’ve got a future episode there, Sonia, so let’s, follow up on that idea. I mean, this is all remarkable stuff and it sounds like sci fi, but it’s not sci fi. This stuff is happening in our world today and it’s going to scale.

very quickly through the rest of the decade, and could lead to very positive outcomes for society if we manage it [00:27:00] well. And that was one of the most important points at Davos this week, is how are we going to manage technology to ensure that it’s safe, to ensure that we are working towards the objectives that it was created for.

But also, How are we all going to work with and coexist with technology, be it software or those robots, because that is the future that’s coming at us very fast. This idea of cohabitation, it was Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, who said to a room full of business leaders, we will be the last generation of CEOs to manage a human only workforce.

He said, my successor is going to have to manage a human workforce and a digital workforce. And we’re only starting to figure out how to do that. Not just from a technology point of view, but from an organizational behavior point of view. How do you build teams of agents to work with teams of humans and teams of agents [00:28:00] to work with other teams of agents and collaborate with the humans?

Sonia Sennik: We’ve been cooperating with machines for centuries. What’s novel about this moment in time is our conversation about agency between humans and machines. I think more to come in future episodes on that one.

John Stackhouse: Someone should be concerned about, but I hope Sonia, people can reflect also on how much there is to be hopeful about.

If we do things right, there are incredible opportunities in the world right now. Amazing innovations in science and technology here on earth, under the oceans. and out there in space. So it actually is a great time to be alive despite all the risks that we see around us and the fears that we rightly talk about.

Let’s not forget about the opportunities as well that can overcome those fears.

Sonia Sennik: This has been an amazing discussion John, thank you so much for reflecting on your time at Davos and get home safe.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, thank you. Looking forward to being with you in the studio for our next episode. For now, this is Disruptors, an RBC [00:29:00] podcast.

I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and join us next time as we continue exploring the groundbreaking ideas shaping Canada’s economy and beyond.

John Stackhouse: Talk to you soon. If you want to read more about this year’s World Economic Forum, check out our new report, Davos 2025, at thoughtleadership.rbc.com. Or follow me on LinkedIn.

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here. Welcome to Disruptors x CDL: The Innovation Era.

John Stackhouse: And Sonia, welcome to 2025. Happy New Year.

Sonia Sennik: Hey John, a very happy Y2K. 25 to you. How were your holidays?

John Stackhouse: They were ChatGPT pretty good. In fact, they almost went sideways because of ChatGPT. I tried to lay out an itinerary and got a very good plan. But for the wrong year. I’ll blame myself for being a substandard prompt engineer. How about you?

Sonia Sennik: Mine was, I would say, a light touch digital holiday season. Mostly Mission Impossible movies.

John Stackhouse: Those holidays are often the best, the kinds where we get to unplug. Unfortunately, unplugging is not a big trend in society right now, and that’s going to have a lot of consequences. I’m excited to be talking in this episode about the power struggle, as we called it in a recent report that’s coming from all [00:01:00] those ChatGPT queries and so much more. We’re going to need a lot more power, a lot more juice, a lot more electricity. I was struck by one fun fact over the holidays that one, okay. ChatGPT query uses about 10 times as much power as a typical Google search.

Sonia Sennik: Absolutely, John. As our reliance on computational power grows and grows, so does the demand for sustainable energy solutions. And part of that is data centers. To use AI models, requires computation. In order to have massive amounts of computation, you need massive amounts of energy. It’s front of mind right now for policymakers and world leaders alike.

John Stackhouse: That’s both exciting and a little bit concerning. I’ve read that simple training models are taking on more and more power. And in fact, the power used to train ChatGPT 4 versus 3 is up 5x. If you just think of two prompts that many of us might have done, those would be equivalent to powering your [00:02:00] iPhone overnight. So think of the power that’s going to be needed when all of us are doing that hundreds or maybe thousands of times a year.

There’s already a bit of a gold rush on to power all those data centers. Our research shows that there are 15 gigawatts of data center projects in application in Canada, which would produce the same amount of electricity that’s consumed in a year by 10 million homes. It’s a daunting challenge, but also a huge opportunity for Canada.

We have all the energy sources that are needed, whether renewables to power much of the world’s data center economy

Sonia Sennik: As intelligence increasingly relies on electricity, how can Canada innovate to meet the growing energy demands sustainably? So today we’re exploring how startups and policymakers are balancing this equation, meeting the rising energy demands without compromising sustainability.

John Stackhouse: We’ve got a new report out from the RBC Climate Action Institute called Climate Action 2025. It’s our [00:03:00] annual assessment of how Canada is doing on the journey to net zero. The report is full of amazing and interesting data. But one of the points I wanted to highlight here is a section that we call the “Idea of the Year”.

And our Idea of the Year is electricity. We have an opportunity and a need to invest significantly right now in our electricity capacity, because while we’re feeling the pinch today, think of what it could be like in the 2030s. Here’s one of the authors of the report, Shaz Merwat, who’s the energy policy lead in the Climate Action Institute.

John Stackhouse: We asked Shaz what the biggest challenge is in getting all this done.

Shaz Merwat: The key theme of this year’s report is really around electricity, and the key challenge there is really just growing the grid. Up until before this mad AI gold rush, we really were focused on greening the grid, getting off coal, to switch to renewables.

But AI has changed that. AI is a substantial draw of power. We’re talking a [00:04:00] tripling in load demand from here to 2050, all within a rate regulated return sector. So not only are you trying to meet that demand growth, but you’re also trying to keep electricity affordable to the average consumer throughout that entire journey.

That’s the challenge.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, listening to Shaz, what do you think the biggest opportunity is for us this year?

Sonia Sennik: It’s going to sound like an answer I give often, John, but innovation. The opportunity to evolve how we think about producing electricity, delivering it, and creating the data centers of the future.

Sonia Sennik: And Alberta’s Minister of Innovation, Nate Glubish. We’ll explore with him how policy and industry can work together to support Canada’s leadership in this space.

John Stackhouse: Minister, welcome to the podcast.

Nate Glubish: Thanks for having me.

John Stackhouse: It’s remarkable to think back to 2024 and all that evolved rather quickly on the AI front.

John Stackhouse: And Alberta was often leading the conversation, particularly when it came to data centers. Kevin O’Leary had [00:05:00] that eye popping announcement of the $70 billion opportunity. But you’re also laying out a pretty ambitious innovation strategy for Alberta in what we might call the data economy of the future.

Maybe give us a quick sense of where you think Alberta can be going out a decade.

Nate Glubish: Well, in a nutshell, we want Alberta to be one of the most innovative jurisdictions in all of Canada and one of the most innovative in the world. And we know we can do it. We’ve been investing in AI research long before it was cool.

It started 20 years ago with the foundation of the predecessor for the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute when we recruited global superstar, Rich Sutton, and built a team around him and gave him resources. And lo and behold, 20 years later, Alberta is known around the world as one of the top five research jurisdictions for AI.

John Stackhouse: Data centers are increasingly a key part of that. Where’s the advantage for Alberta?

Nate Glubish: We know that there are going [00:06:00] to be hundreds of billions of dollars of investment made over the next five to 10 years across North America alone to build out more data center computational infrastructure. And we believe that Alberta can play a significant role in helping to meet that need.

We released Alberta’s data center strategy at the end of 2024 to send a signal to the world that we intend to be one of the destinations of choice for this infrastructure. And we’re happy to work with anybody, whether you’re an investor, developer, a user of AI technologies. We want to work with you to help make sure that you get the compute infrastructure you need built.

Sonia Sennik: How do you see our position globally? What are the key points you’re driving home with regards to how we can really lead in data centers?

Nate Glubish: Well, I’ve been traveling all over the world to talk about AI data centers and to promote Alberta’s vision. And what I hear, no matter who I talk to, it’s the same. The two most important factors are access to electricity at scale and [00:07:00] speed to market.

So, Alberta has a lot of unique advantages that can hit home on each of those two points. First of all, we are blessed with an abundance of natural resources. We have some of the largest natural gas reserves on planet Earth. And we have world class expertise that knows how to develop it responsibly. Any new AI compute infrastructure is going to require net new power generation built right alongside of it.

And so one of the things that’s unique about Alberta is that we already have a regulatory framework that contemplates the locating of power generation resources right next to the industrial load. We’ve been doing it in the oil sands for decades. We can work with industry to say, well, if you want to build a natural gas fired power plant right beside a data center so that you have all of the power that you need right on site and you don’t need billions of dollars of transmission infrastructure and distribution infrastructure, this is one of the only places on Earth where you can do that.

So we’re going to work with industry to make Alberta the easiest place to get [00:08:00] to construction of this new infrastructure.

Sonia Sennik: How soon do you think it’ll be before we see a carbon captured natural gas-powered data center in Alberta?

Nate Glubish: So Alberta is also a world leader in carbon capture technology. We have millions and millions of tons of carbon that has already been captured and sequestered underground. This is some technology that’s been pioneered over the last 10 years by Alberta companies and about Alberta researchers and innovators.

Nate Glubish: And so if there’s any place on planet earth where it makes sense to build a natural gas fired power plant that is net zero with carbon capture, it’s in Alberta. What we’re seeing right now initially is again, speed to market is the most important thing. So folks are focusing on how do I get the natural gas power approved under construction and in the queue so that we can get up and running right now.

Let’s keep the carbon capture as an option later. And once we get the project up and running, once it’s cash flowing, once the power is [00:09:00] powering a data center, which is now creating a value-added tools and services that the world needs and is paying for, then they can invest in the crime and capture. So we’re optimistic that this is possible and that there’s no better place in Alberta to do it.

John Stackhouse: Now, I don’t need to remind you or any of our listeners. It’s obviously 2025 and we’re into a new era, certainly in terms of our relationship with the United States. And there’s going to be a lot on the table this year. How are you thinking about the dynamics between Canada and the United States in the years ahead, in terms of the data economy and all that you’ve been talking about here?

Nate Glubish: I think over the last several months, as we’ve seen, President-elect Trump talk about some of his plans when he takes office later in January.

Of course, this is a pivotal moment for Canada. We’re facing the threat of tariffs. So, what our approach in Alberta has been generally is to say, look, Canada has always been a great partner to the US. We [00:10:00] supply millions of barrels a day of oil and gas to American markets. And then they go and they refine it and they turn it into value added products and they export those all around the world.

So, we are enablers of enormous job creation and wealth creation in the US we’re good partners in that. And we want to continue being good partners in that.

And so we want to send that signal to President-elect Trump and his administration that we’re here to be good partners with you. We bring a lot to the table. You rely on a lot of these things. It helps to create jobs and wealth and drive investment in the US. And it also benefits Alberta. It’s a win win. Let’s not rock the boat here.

And let’s talk about data centers specifically. Look at the NASDAQ. What are the top companies on the NASDAQ? What is the lion’s share of the market cap of the stock market in the US?

It’s all of the big tech companies. And their biggest threat to being able to continue growing and to realizing their fullest opportunity is access to electricity at scale in order to power the data center infrastructure that they are going to [00:11:00] need. Texas can’t do it all, Oklahoma can’t do it all, Ohio can’t do it all, and Alberta can’t do it all.

But together we can do it, and Alberta needs to be a significant part in that equation. So our message to the US is let us help you solve this problem. It’s a once in a lifetime problem, but it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. We’re here and ready to help, ready to scale, ready to power your hyperscalers and to power all of the innovative companies in North America that need this technology.

We’re here to help so let’s work together.

Sonia Sennik: Minister, I wonder how Canada can take this opportunity to really set the bar for world class data centers. How can we innovate on the cooling technology, the robotics, the design, everything that goes into building the data centers of the future? How do you see attracting and inspiring researchers and innovators and creatives to come together to rally around us building best in class facilities?

Nate Glubish: Well, I think that was an underlying motivation behind Alberta releasing our AI [00:12:00] data center strategy in December is to send that signal to the entire world to say, we aim to be one of the most exciting places in the world for the development of this technology and for the construction of this infrastructure.

The folks who are going to be innovating and creating the new tools and the new technologies that will bring about next generation advances in AI data center technologies, whether it be cooling, processing, load management, whatever it might be, they’re going to want to be located close to large installations at scale, which is why the Wonder Valley project, we haven’t really got into the details on that one just yet, but that’s why this one is such an important opportunity for Alberta.

Imagine if the largest data center complex in the entire world is located in Alberta. Of course, companies who are developing next generation technologies that that will go into these installations are going to want to be close to the biggest and the best. And hopefully as we continue getting more and more folks up to speed on all of the advantages we have, all the infrastructure that we intend to, to see [00:13:00] developed that the folks who want to play a role in the next generation of these technologies, will see Alberta and and see Canada as a logical home for them.

John Stackhouse: Minister, tell us a bit more about the Wonder Valley project and also what you are hoping it leads to.

Nate Glubish: I got to give a lot of credit to the municipal district of Greenview. Long before data centers were in the public consciousness, they got together and said, you know what, we want to be entrepreneurial. We’ve got a lot of land. We’ve got a lot of expertise. We got a lot of infrastructure. We know that we could be a destination for large industrial projects at scale. We don’t know what kind of projects they’re going to be. Perhaps there’ll be oil and gas related, but we know that we can be a host to this.

So what do we need to do to make our municipality attractive? And so they got to work in basically saying, well, what are all of the approvals in this large parcel of industrial zoned land that we have that we could actually [00:14:00] go on spec and get done so that as long as some kind of future infrastructure project fit within these goalposts.

That we could say, oh, approvals are already done. Consultations are already done. We’ve done all the legwork. We saved you years and years of time. And so that’s exactly what they did.

And so now fast forward to today, they didn’t know it was going to be a data center. But once those dots got connected, it just made perfect sense.

So Kevin O’Leary and his team have said: Okay, well, if we’ve got a lot of these approvals in place, what do we need to do? We need to build the power generation. We need to source the gas. And then we need to get the data center up and running. So, the vision for this project is it’s going to be an off grid project.

They’re going to build their own power generation. They’re going to build in their own redundancy. The natural gas from the region will be brought into site. It’ll be converted to electricity on site. The electricity will be fed into the AI data center on site. And, the economies of scale of being able to do it that way, where you don’t need all the transmission and distribution infrastructure, and you’re located right next to the [00:15:00] gas, allow for them to have natural gas fired power at extremely low cost, which is making this a very attractive play for them.

Nate Glubish: So their plan right now is to build the first, I think, one and a half gigawatts of power generation, and that’s what they’re working right now on lining up the investment for. And they’re hard at work on all the engineering and building the partnerships with the natural gas players, building partnerships with first nations in the region, working with the municipality, etc.

Nate Glubish: Once they’re able to get the natural gas power generation in construction, that will be the signal that the hyperscalers and all of the other customers for the AI compute infrastructure are going to look at and say, you just started talking about this, and now you’ve got one and a half gigawatts of power underway, and it’s going to be ready in a year and a half to two years.

Nate Glubish: This is a game changer. And you’re also talking about scaling this to between five and seven gigawatts of power on this single site. So it’s very exciting. It has the potential to be up to $70 billion of investment into Alberta. [00:16:00] It would lead to the largest data center installation in the entire planet.

John Stackhouse: You kicked off the conversation, Minister, talking about Alberta’s journey in AI, which goes back decades, and frankly, we at RBC have been lucky to be part of that. You are more than the Minister of Data Centres, you’re the Minister of Technology and Innovation. I wonder, as we wrap up, if you can give us a sense of where you see Alberta in the years ahead in the innovation space beyond data centers?

Nate Glubish: Sure. Well, one of the biggest opportunities for Alberta to really make its mark and send a signal to the world that this is a really exciting jurisdiction, i f you work in technology, if you use AI, if you’re excited about the possibilities of this, that Alberta would be the place for you to call home. Or at least a place for you to invest or to expand.

And that is for the use of AI inside of government. So. We’ve recruited a new Deputy Dinister in my department. His name’s [00:17:00] Janet Golford. Uh, it comes to us from FinTrac from the federal government. He was their head of AI and he actually has expertise in building AI technologies. He did it in the private sector before with his own business.

Nate Glubish: He’s done it in government at the federal government level and now is helping to support my vision to use more technology in government. And I’ll give you one example. So we all like to complain about procurement in government. It takes forever. It’s painful. Like for us to procure anything, it takes at least seven months.

Nate Glubish: So, imagine a world where we could get the folks who need to procure something in government together and say, what do you need? Let’s just talk it through. Okay. Let’s upload all of that stuff into a procurement GPT engine that we’ve built. That’s secure. It’s on a private server. It’s, it’s all in house.

Okay. And have it automatically parse all of that and then put it into a trade agreement, compliant RFP and make it super easy so that in minutes, instead of months, you can actually design your RFP. And then on the flip side, working with the folks who want to bid on doing work with the [00:18:00] government, have a GPT platform and portal that they can go through and say, link your website, upload all of your documents, all of your PDFs, all of your marketing materials, upload all of your white papers, anything you’ve published about what, what you’re offering.

Nate Glubish: Okay. And it’ll automatically parse this and match it to the RFP. And then in minutes, give you an assessment to say, okay, we think this is what you’re proposing to bid on and how you’re proposing to do it. So that then it literally in minutes, you could apply to an RFP. Our vision is to say, how do we go from seven months to seven days?

And maybe even overshoot that and get shorter. How do we use AI? Use these new tools? They’re not the tools of tomorrow. They’re the tools of today. And that’s one out of dozens of examples that I could give you of ways that we’re looking to harness AI to improve how we do business as a government. And our hope is that as folks start to see more of this, get off the ground, that they’ll say, wow, Alberta is an exciting place to be, I got to spend some more time there.

John Stackhouse: You’ve got the energy, you’ve got the infrastructure, you’ve got the people. And as you’re laying out [00:19:00] here, you’ve got the ambition. I hope we can have you back to talk about how Alberta is racing ahead in this exciting new age, happy to come back anytime. Thanks for having me.

Sonia Sennik: Thank you so much Minister for your time.

Sonia Sennik: Now we’re thrilled to be joined by Doug Beach, CDL-Rockies mentor and chair of Eavor Technologies. Doug is here to discuss how advanced geothermal energy solutions could reshape how we power our intelligence. Doug, welcome to the podcast.

Doug Beach: I’m really happy to be here. Thanks a lot.

Sonia Sennik: So electricity has always been important. But why does it matter now more than ever?

Doug Beach: Well, I think the key thing on top of everybody’s mind is the consumption of data processing and the incredible demand or increase in demand that’s driving at the increment. So we’ve got energy and everything, and now we have even more demand coming rapidly.

Doug Beach: And the stability of the supply of the energy is so incredibly important relative to the information processing demand. And so [00:20:00] that’s, that’s another societal rub that will have to be met.

John Stackhouse: So, Doug, we’re talking about data centers as if they’re kind of the new, new thing. And of course, they’ve been around for decades. Give us some insight into why in 2025, the energy demands of the information age, which is what data centers are all about, may be different.

Doug Beach: Well, I think the obvious one is just the explosion of AI and the ubiquity of the availability of AI in that large language models offered by so many participants right now mean that you’ve democratized access.

So you’ve got all manner of people trying to do all manner of things experimentally right now. And it’s driving a lot of demand that we don’t necessarily know the value of yet. And, all the participants are in a bit of an arms race in order to meet that demand. And so, being available 24/7, 365, stably, and fitting in around all the other [00:21:00] streaming demand and other such entertainment demand I would call it is just incredibly important. People will not accept latency and disruption.

Sonia Sennik: The foundation of our evolving intelligence economy is energy, no doubt. And Doug, you spend a lot of time working with CDL Alumni company, Eavor Technologies, where they’re advancing closed loop geothermal technology. How does a company like Eavor fit into this puzzle?

Doug Beach: Eavor fits into it in several interesting ways, particularly in the local dimension of Canada. We’re starting out as essentially an export technology. So we’re creating a technology that will enable energy development almost anywhere on the planet. And it’s going to necessarily be cheaper at places that tend to have more heat.

We’re starting in places that have energy security problems primarily and that have higher prices. So the beginning parts, as you can see, Eavor is scaling in [00:22:00] Europe and targeting those spaces, Japan, and others. Eavor is developing additional technologies that will advance this further and ultimately allow the development of energy even into Canada, but that will still be a little bit of time down the road.

Doug Beach: One of the interesting things that is happening inside of Alberta relative to the development of advanced geothermal technologies is a focus on developing drilling technologies and Eavor is working in Alberta with the Alberta government to develop a technical specialization capability within the province that we’ll advance drilling for, certainly forever, but for other geothermal technologies, other commodity development technologies too.

Sonia Sennik: What barriers would you say, Doug, are the most significant as a company like Eavor scales?

Doug Beach: Generally speaking, you know, the first thing that was important ever was not having to [00:23:00] reinvent the wheel. So, being able to go to places that had regulations and governance that dealt with the production of geothermal energy and property rights around geothermal energy and all of the things that have already developed around other industries, hybrid, hydrocarbon industries and stuff, how do you own what comes from the space then where you’re developing it?

And how do you know that there’s longevity around that? And how do you manage those processes? What is the process for permitting and ownership of rights to permit? And then consistent treatment among the technologies that solar, wind, hydrocarbon, and geothermal are all competing on a consistent playing field?

Those are the things you may need to look for. The rest of it is energy markets, and those are well developed.

John Stackhouse: Doug, there are some people who will hear this and think, is this the best use of scarce [00:24:00] energy resources to essentially power the processing of data to enable Americans to do their ChatGPT queries and ship it to Canada to process and ship back. Shouldn’t we be using our strategic advantage in energy for something a little higher value? What do you say to them?

Doug Beach: Well, a couple of things. One, the market will sort that out. And so to the extent that a dear resources being mispriced right now, ultimately, that’s going to draw on margins inside of the people who are providing LLMs and that kind of stuff. They will ultimately have to, to drive their own market discovery process, at least internally, if not externally, to the extent that they decide to develop their own energy, which a lot of them are doing.

If you look at the deal that Microsoft did with regard to Constellation Energy and the restart of Three Mile Island. So, if you look at [00:25:00] those kind of considerations, you can recognize that the value of this dependability, predictability, clean, and the premium that they’re willing to put on it.

And so, bridging to another concept, and that is this could be a moonshot opportunity in certain ways where the value of all that certainty to these participants means that they may bring on additional resources of energy based on values that they have.

Doug Beach: Only they presently see and that directionally should unload the system relative to other demand. So, to the extent that nobody else was looking at bringing on Three Mile Island or bringing on an Eavorloop installation or an SMR or additional hydro in remote northern Canada. potentially that can be anchored by this kind of base demand to go with that new base supply and [00:26:00] potentially offer an overhang of additional capacity. I think it actually can change the entire supply demand setup.

John Stackhouse: There’s another view out there that data centers are essentially another version of warehouses for the information age, kind of low value. And yet they can be very sophisticated and there may be an opportunity here for Canada to become a world leader in all that goes into data centers. Are you seeing a Canadian advantage emerging in the data center economy and how do we both keep that and build on it?

Doug Beach: Yes, I see some really interesting things going on. Another colleague, uh, inside of CDL is actually working with a group of people to potentially develop a string of data centers in Alberta that would ultimately consume natural gas, I believe, and deliver CO2 into the developed environment and deliver CO2 sequestration facilities in the region.

And one of the big advantages that Canada offers is we’re cooler, [00:27:00] and, in so many ways, but in terms of energy wise, we’re, we’re cooler in terms of temperature. And that’s creating an opportunity to create a clean information supply that. It’s kind of a unique offering based on the resources that Alberta has, but I think that model could be done in Canada and other places using their local energy capabilities.

And that’s moving faster than, for example, Eavorloops will be developed in Canada, sadly on the one hand, but happily on the other.

Sonia Sennik: Doug, thank you so much for your time. This was awesome.

Doug Beach: I really appreciated giving it a go.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, when we started this episode, I was feeling a little bit guilt stricken. About all the power that would be required for some of my frivolous wanderings into the world of generative AI, not to mention all the serious work going on in that space. But having listened to Nate [00:28:00] and Doug, I see the opportunity here, for Canada particularly to not just develop the energy sources for the digital economy and for an age of gen AI that we’re already well into. There’s also an opportunity to build whole new approaches to innovation right across the economy.

Sonia Sennik: Absolutely, John. And that saying goes, history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes. And I’m thinking about how when we started our open pit mines in Canada, we naturally placed our smelters and refinery right nearby.

We had innovators in that space, building new processes and engineering systems that had never existed before. Listening to Minister Glubish talk about how the opportunity to create these data centres right next door to limit the transmission costs and complexity in transmitting electricity to these incredible energy sources, I had flashes of the comparison to where we’ve seen ourselves before here in Canada.

[00:29:00] And now we have an opportunity, as you mentioned, to build an innovation ecosystem around this to create truly best in class data centers and energy production facilities, attracting talent from all over the world to Canada to build on this.

So how can we engage with innovators and creators that are developing robotics, cooling systems, energy delivery, design efficiency for data centers? I’m excited to see the applicants we get into Creative Destruction Lab this year in and around this amazing challenge and opportunity.

John Stackhouse: It’s a new age for data centers and all that goes into them, and Canada can lead the way.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, thanks for the conversation.

Sonia Sennik: Thanks, John, and a big thanks to Minister Glubish and Doug for joining us today.

Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and join us next time as we continue exploring the groundbreaking ideas shaping Canada’s economy and beyond.

John Stackhouse: This is Disruptors and CDL, the Innovation Era.

John Stackhouse: I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Talk to you [00:30:00] soon.

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here. Welcome to Disruptors x CDL: The Innovation Era, where we explore the transformative ideas and leaders shaping our world. We’re wrapping up the year with a look back at the tech stories of 2024 and some of what may lie around the corner in 2025. Sonia, it’s been an incredible ride.

Sonia Sennik: John, it feels like just yesterday we were recording the teaser for this series. Now Canada is nine Taylor Swift concerts older and seven episodes into this season of Disruptor’s The Innovation Era.

John Stackhouse: We didn’t convince Taylor Swift to add another era to her tour. The innovation era, that is, but we did cover a lot of ground from the rise of AI and the biotech boom to the bold frontier of commercial space and the EV revolution.

It’s been a whirlwind, but Sonia, I have to ask any personal favorites from the season?

Sonia Sennik: That’s definitely a tough one, but I’d have to say the space economy episodes were otherworldly. There’s something so thrilling about [00:01:00] imagining Canada as a leader in commercializing the final frontier. And listening to Commander Hadfield talk about the opportunity we have with exploring the moon, with advanced technologies and robotics, it just sparked curiosity and imagination in the best way.

John Stackhouse: And to add to that, the entrepreneurs we got to talk to who are adding real economic value to space exploration right here from Canada. I also loved the episode on how AI is transforming education. There’s so much fear out there about what things like chat GPT may do to our ability to learn. And yet we were able to hear from education pioneers, Janice Stein and John Baker, among them, about how generative AI may create the best days yet for learning.

Sonia Sennik: Absolutely, and a one to one tool that can enable personalized learning, leaving time for teachers and educators to spend time in relationship, getting to know their students, and supporting them I loved how the theme of that episode ended up circling around this idea of generative AI and AI as [00:02:00] tools that complement the need for connection and the relationship between the teacher and the student and peers in shared learning environments.

And that was a really unexpected gem out of that conversation. And now as we close out the year, we’re going to take a step back and look at the big picture, the trends that shaped 2024 and the ones we’re keeping our eyes on for 2025.

John Stackhouse: That’s right, Sonia. Joining us for this conversation. is someone who knows the Canadian innovation landscape better than almost anyone else.

Sean Silcoff is the Globe and Mail’s technology reporter and a widely respected speaker and author on all the big tech stories in this country. He’s been tracking the ups and downs of tech this year, and he always brings such sharp insights. Sean, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me on. It’s great to be in conversation with you, especially about the extraordinary year that we’ve just had, and probably an even more extraordinary one that lies ahead.

Sean, I want to start first with a simple question about what in your mind is [00:03:00] the tech story of 2024.

Sean Silcoff: Well, I think it’s probably the election of Donald Trump. I don’t think we can deny that particularly considering he has Elon Musk and Peter Thiel in his corner. Of course, two of the giants of tech both came out of the PayPal mafia.

It’s probably pointless to discuss Elon Musk. He’s at the moment anyway, Donald Trump’s right hand person. He’s going to be leading this Doge experiment. And of course, as a business person, Elon Musk made headlines all over the place. SpaceX capturing that rocket on the way down. Probably one of the most significant things in any industry or science of the year.

There’s no denying that. Continued evolution of the EV business. And there’s perennial questions about Tesla and, uh, of course X and people leaving X, what X has become the fact that all the people leaving X seems to have made blue sky a big thing. So we’ll see. So I think maybe that actually makes Elon Musk the tech [00:04:00] story of the year, but.

I think Donald Trump, we don’t know what is going to come with his election. Of course, on the Canadian side, we’re waiting for all kinds of tariffs, but I think looking ahead, there’s big questions like, will he ban Tik Tok? You’ve got all these efforts underway. DOJ, the FTC are really going after big tech.

It’s not just Tik Tok. It’s also Meta. It’s Amazon. It’s Google. And I guess the question is, what does Trump do? Does he continue that? Does he keep Lina Khan? Does he fire her at the FTC? So I think where this is all going is probably one of the biggest questions.

John Stackhouse: You’re making me think, Sean, of an old adage that in the next decade, Washington is going to take over Silicon Valley, unless Silicon Valley takes over Washington, that may be playing out right before us.

I’m fascinated all year, but especially now, just to look at. Tech valuations through this year, the total asset value of Silicon Valley is probably bigger than the district of Columbia right now. [00:05:00]

Sean Silcoff: Yeah, no, it’s incredible. And it wasn’t long ago that tech was important, big and valuable, but now it’s really central to everything.

And I think this election and the people behind Trump and Vance point to that. Now, if we look at Canada, this is kind of the year of the comeback. I’ll give you a few examples, wealth simple, you know, a year, two years ago, we were writing about how they were laying people off, how their valuation was being slashed.

They weren’t growing. Well, this year they’re back up to $5 billion valuation. This is one of the most successful years a Canadian tech company has ever had. A few other examples is a company called Clutch. We were writing about them. Being a death store, you know, maybe a year or two ago. Well, they cut deeply.

Their revenues are back up ahead of where they were. A company called D2L, the old Desire2Learn. It was, I think, the last company to go public in 2021. Share price crashed. Well, it’s now trading above its issue price for the first time in three years. Even quantum [00:06:00] computing, I mean, D-Wave, which, you know, the very first quantum company to go public.

Of course, CDL people will know about D-Wave. Suddenly, its share price is spiking along with every other quantum company out there. It’s almost like a meme stock. The other thing I would say, and I think we’ll talk about this later in the podcast, is one of the big stories of the year in Canada is the very cranky mood of the ecosystem.

People are really not in a great state of mind. I think the whole capital gains tax really left a sour taste in the mouth of a lot of people. Valuations are still down. It’s still a very difficult fundraising environment. A lot of companies that were public have gone private because they just couldn’t get the good valuations.

And there’s a lot of people who are threatening to move away from Canada. They’ve kind of had it here. So they say they don’t want to come back until they see some sea change in the government and the government’s attitude toward tech, toward productivity, toward prosperity. So I think there’s a lot of anxious people in the ecosystem who’d like to [00:07:00] see the channel change.

Sonia Sennik: Folks must be throwing their opinions at you all the time with regards to, you know, what is the problem here and how can we fix it? What would you say is the most commonly cited reason for the perceived issues that we’re having here in the Canadian tech ecosystem?

Sean Silcoff: I think a lot of Canadians would say this, and I think it’s even more extreme in the tech community.

The Trudeau government is tired and needs to be put out of its misery is what you hear from a lot of Canadians. But I would say that that is an extremely highly held view. opinion among tech people. You can’t find a person in tech who doesn’t want to see the back of this government. And I mean, the super clusters kind of came.

Nobody really talks about it. Nobody’s very excited about it. The AI strategy, a lot of people would argue, we wrote a piece about this last year of the scene is. Not really doubling down on the things that mattered in [00:08:00] terms of building prosperity. You sort of need a whole of government approach and a prosperity agenda to wealth creation.

And I think a lot of people are frankly disappointed in a government that came out strong and said, you know, we’re the innovation government. It just hasn’t delivered on a lot of the promises.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, is that the kind of mood you’re hearing at CDL? Is tech become the kind of cranky pants of our land?

Sonia Sennik: I don’t know if they’re an Oscar or a Cookie Monster but I’d say that there’s a lot of conversation about talent and how we have just the incredible talent based researchers, and that’s fantastic. But in order to scale large commercializable businesses, as you know, you need folks that understand how to execute and be truly operationally excellent to build sustainable businesses that can last decades and innovate and dynamically change with the times.

And so I’d say in a marketplace like the United States, where you have thousands of people who have run [00:09:00] companies over 500 or whatever it may be. That pool is just smaller here. So how do we continue to attract those folks that can be a complement to our great research community and help us build these companies, these internationally relevant and significant companies in Canada?

I’d say the tone is very much on how can we execute better? How can we be operationally excellent? How can we inspire and motivate? I think John, you and I discussed, it’s not a lack of ambition and big goals. The pathway between having an idea and bringing it to life is execution and operational excellence.

A lot of conversation is around sharpening that here.

John Stackhouse: Can I seize on that word, ambition? Because Harley Finkelstein, who we all know from Shopify, stirred the pot by saying Canadian tech. Doesn’t have enough ambition, Sean. What’s your take on that?

Sean Silcoff: Well, I just spent the better part of the year putting together a story to refute that.

I’ve been collecting the names of companies that have hit a hundred million or [00:10:00] more in revenue in Canada for some time. And I started to think early this year, you know, it’s an awful lot. Let’s try and find out how many there are. And it was a lot larger than I thought it might be. I thought it might be 20 or 30.

When I started out, I hit 71 and I know there’s more. These are real large companies. There’s the new term. It’s not unicorn. Now it’s a centaur, the idea that, you know, sent its play on words, sort of a hundred million in annual recurring revenue. And you have to remember how far this ecosystem has come.

When I started writing about this stuff, 13 years ago, Nortel was dead. BlackBerry was on the way down and the companies were small. They were undercapitalized. They were being picked off by foreign acquisitors. Tech was like 1. 6 percent of the index. And what I found with the story, which was very refreshing is there’s a ton of these companies.

They’re doing really well. They’ve got optionality. If even a fraction of that 71 that I did found goes public, we’re going to see a transformative effect on the public markets. We’re doing pretty well. It’s [00:11:00] hard to be next to the world’s largest economy. And, you know, if you compare us not to the United States, but to Britain or France or Germany or Norway or big successful economies, I think you’d find we’re doing pretty well, even Israel, which of course is a tech powerhouse.

And sometimes I think, well, we need to be a little bit patient and a little less cranky, and to stand back and realize and celebrate what we do have. And that was the point of the article. Fortunately, it’s been very well received and well read. And I hope it helps to change the narrative a little bit and maybe give people pause next time they say, Oh, to hell with Canada.

I’m going to move to the States where I can do what I want and create unlimited wealth for myself and, and just be happy. We need to be more of an Ernie. Yes.

John Stackhouse: So interesting and fair comments about the liberal record polls suggest that we will see a Polly of government in 2025 and probably one with a strong mandate, Sean, what’s your read of the conservative party’s view of technology and what they have to say.[00:12:00]

Sean Silcoff: Well, you know, of course they’ve been sticking closely to their talking points, which seems to have worked well for them, you know, axe the tax, build the homes, their slogans. They haven’t really said much about tech, except they seem to be very pro unleashing the competitiveness of entrepreneurs and getting out of the way and that sort of thing.

I don’t think we’ve yet seen what their platform is, but let’s not forget it was the conservatives who gave us two major policies that really set the stage for the comeback of the tech scene. One of them was section 116 change to the tax code that made it a lot easier for foreign venture capitalists to invest in Canada.

And that really unleashed a lot of investment here. And then, you know, we talk about the Vicky program, the venture capital catalyst initiative. That was actually a conservative program, a different name, venture capital action plan. So. Conservatives have authored some successful programs that have helped the innovation landscape and, you know, Poilievre was part of that government.

I know that [00:13:00] he’s got quite a few senior tech leaders in the country speaking to him on a regular basis. So, I know he’s hearing their concerns. It would be nice. If this was a pro entrepreneur, pro business building, pro prosperity election, and if all the parties had robust programs to bring into it, conservatives, liberals, NDP, whoever, I have no doubt there’s going to be something in the Poilievre platform about this.

But he’s kept that fairly close to the vest so far. So it’d be nice to see whatever change is coming happen as soon as possible.

Sonia Sennik: Sean, I’m curious, you, of course, wrote your incredible book about RIM at their peak, losing the signal, and what they missed when they were at that top of the mountain. Sitting here in December 2024, What might some of the big tech companies today be missing?

Sean Silcoff: Oh, that’s a great question. I like this concept [00:14:00] of the hidden defect.

You’ve heard the term core competence, right? It’s, it’s sort of a thousand types of books written about this subject core. The what’s your core competence. And I like the, uh, the question, what’s your core incompetence? You know, what’s the hidden defect inside your company? What’s the thing you can’t even see that if it suddenly shows up on the horizon could, uh, upend you completely.

Okay. How are you constantly looking to tear yourself apart and put yourself back together? Jeff Bezos did this in 2003 for the first time, I think in 2003, the revenues growth dropped below 30%. And he said, Oh my God, we like, how do we find the digital versions of everything we sell and how do we get into that business?

And the amazing thing about that is Amazon. It wasn’t even a 10 year old company. It was probably one of the most innovative companies in the world. And this small group he put together to try and figure out how to go after digital markets. They couldn’t get anyone in the rest of the company to join that group.

Think about that. Like already people were entrenched in their ways in a nine year old [00:15:00] innovative company like Amazon. Well, we’re selling books, you know, we’re selling videos, we’re selling DVDs. This is the business that we’re in. And so even the most innovative companies, this kind of incumbency, this sort of comfort can settle in.

And the only way to overcome that is to just make everyone uncomfortable all the time. It probably isn’t going to get you the best employee engagement scores necessarily, but I mean, this is what success is built off, right?

John Stackhouse: 2024 was a very big year for AI and even greater expectations for AI in 25. How confident are you that the AI rocket ship is going to continue to soar through the year ahead?

Sean Silcoff: Well, adoption of AI is continuing. KPMG I think just came out with a survey that showed the number of Canadians using generative AI in their jobs is, is nearly 50%. That’s more than double a year earlier. A lot of companies are testing it out. They’re going from pilots to putting [00:16:00] into production. The technology is getting better and better.

I think there’s still some reticence on the part of companies, consumer facing companies to. Letter rip with the chatbots, you know, nobody wants a LLM fueled, uh, chatbot to, to say something that’s just untrue or weird to customers. And I think there’s questions about whether this big promise of AI is actually going to deliver real productivity gains.

I mean, so far the people using AI in their jobs say, well, it’s creating more work, but it’s not necessarily cutting my workload in half. I think we need to see a real strides made in, in the LLMs. Like this whole hallucination problem. I don’t, I don’t know how you get around that. I mean, Sonny, maybe you have some better ideas, but I think there’s been a big bill of goods that’s been sold.

I think also AI has to solve this enormous power usage problem. I don’t know if they make processors more effective or suddenly we bring nuclear power online and that’s not going to be suddenly either. I see some real constraints to the growth. For [00:17:00] men. The moment you start to see that maybe it’s not an infinite horizon, there’s probably going to be a giant pullback and a huge sell off in some of these stocks.

I don’t know what it means for Nvidia, but maybe we’re going to have a little bit of a hangover, an AI hangover in 2025. What do you think?

Sonia Sennik: So I’d offer that I think we’re only going to see more of it, the move from large language models to small language models, where you have the ability to control the inputs and effectively create more trust in the content that’s in those smaller fit for purpose models.

So I think we’re going to see a big increase in that. Also in 2025, a lot of people will be talking about agentic AI, this idea of orchestrating tasks. So right now, you know, let’s say John wants to go implement a model. He’ll pick model one for one task, pick model two for another task, pick model three for another task and so on.

This idea of orchestration and the coordination of tasks. which model to use when and for what purpose. [00:18:00] That’s going to be an evolution we’re going to see in 2025 where I think it’s going to become even more profoundly powerful. And your point about people feeling like there’s changes on the margins, that’s likely very true for existing processes.

I think businesses are going to start thinking, how do we transform the way we function, that now in a world where AI is available to us, we would design our processes completely differently. So being able to clear the deck and have blue sky thinking with this new impactful tool available to us, what would we do differently?

So, the adoption rate is something we’d love to see increase. I mean, CDL has something called our Putting AI to Work program, where we work with enterprises on their journey to adopt AI. The purpose of the program is to build the muscle within the enterprise of how to identify great use cases, and how then to apply craftsmanship and thoughtfulness to where and how you use these tools, because it very much is a [00:19:00] fit for purpose environment.

A lot of times we can fall into the conversation of, well, we can sprinkle AI on that, or just add AI to this, as in just add water, the Betty Crocker version. And I think we’re going to see a lot more conversation around agentic AI, as well as enterprises being very thoughtful about specific use cases that have process changes within their organization and enable those process changes.

Sean Silcoff: I agree with all of that. I think. Where AI is now is kind of like where the internet was in ’97, ’98, you know, amazing new technology, human imagination probably had not caught up to where the technology could take us or how we could use it. Web pages were very static. You couldn’t really do much e commerce.

There wasn’t much in the way of embedded video, but you knew that there was immense potential here. And then, you know, it probably took five to 10 years, maybe even more for things to fully catch up. So there’s no question, you know, the technology is going to get better. There are amazing things you can do with [00:20:00] it, but I think.

As long as there’s this mismatch between all the money that’s going into AI and the output on the other side that matches it, if you can’t see the return from all this investments in AI, I think that’s the hiccups I talk about. And certainly, I mean, the dot com bust was terrible. A lot of value was destroyed, but just look at the internet economy now.

I mean, you don’t call it the internet, it’s the economy, like the entire world, pretty much a big portion of the world runs through the internet. That was the dream, that was the hope in 98 when people were really streaming onto the internet for the first time in large numbers. And, and I have a feeling that we’re going to see something very similar to that in AI.

Sonia Sennik: Exactly. I think the term AI enabled will become obsolete.

John Stackhouse: So a couple of other crystal ball questions. One is crypto. Is ’25 going to be the year of crypto? [00:21:00]

Sean Silcoff: You know, I have such a hard time with crypto. It’s like, it’s, I still see it as a solution looking for a problem.

John Stackhouse: But we’re now going to see a U. S. government administration that is. Hyper enthusiastic about crypto.

Maybe that doesn’t do anything for that fundamental challenge of it possibly being a solution looking for a problem, but that’s going to focus a lot of resources and perhaps even regulatory space for more innovation with crypto.

Sean Silcoff: Well, you know, if, if they can take all the, uh, the complications out of Ethereum network, for example, so that you don’t have to have one entity in one country, another entity in another country, you know, People not allowed to buy and sell the stuff in, in certain countries that opens up a whole world of possibility.

I mean, I think being able to build business processes onto the blockchain is interesting given how much the price of the thing goes up and down. It’s still the plaything of speculators and. You’re right. I don’t think we’ve ever seen an [00:22:00] administration that seems to be as dedicated to making the strides towards bringing legitimacy and modernization to this interesting emerging area of technology.

Ask me in a year. I really don’t know what to expect. I mean, if it just makes it easier to trade Bitcoin and that’s it, well. It’s just going to make things a little crazier, but you know, there’s a lot of potential in these technologies and it would be nice to see more dedication to making it easier to use, to experiment with and, and to build business processes onto these blockchains.

It’s not much of an answer, but I think that was Sean saying best wishes and warmest regards to crypto.

Sonia Sennik: Thank you.

John Stackhouse: I’m curious what we all think are going to be the most interesting companies and trends to watch in 2025. Sonia, maybe you can kick it off.

Sonia Sennik: Yeah, something at the core of what we’re experiencing right now is trust.

I think what you can trust, how do we establish verification and trust in this very dynamic and ever changing [00:23:00] world? We’re going to have more conversations about the concept of trust, whether it’s the information that you’re reading, whether or not AI can manipulate an article that I read differently than the way John reads it.

Who you’re interacting with on the other side of a digital transaction or communication. I see a big conversation and lots of technological advancements around trust. And then, of course, that leads into dual use technologies. So the concept of dual use, what does that mean? What does that mean in a world where almost anything can be considered dual use?

I see 2025 being a year where we’re really thinking about those questions and where innovations are needed to evolve us into this world of an increased space of trust.

John Stackhouse: Sean, what, uh, what’s top of mind for you looking at the year ahead?

Sean Silcoff: Well, I’ll tell you the thing I would like to see, and I don’t think we will see it sadly, a huge focus on trying to protect kids from being sucked even further into their smartphones and toxic social media sites.

Kind [00:24:00] of an all hands on deck approach to a banning smartphone use in school, keeping kids off social media. I think there’s some hope there. I just wish this was a top of mind focus because as a mental health crisis everywhere, frankly, and I think social media excessive use of smartphones is probably at the heart of it.

And I think it’s one of our biggest crises right now. Financially, I think we’re going to, we’ve seen a lot of secondaries this year, which is the secondary has kind of replaced the IPO and the big M and a transaction. I think we’re going to see a lot of that because until the markets roar back, I mean, this year, Clio did a $900 million secondary that’s bigger than almost every tech IPO ever in Canada.

I think we’re going to see some more big stuff like that. And I think that’s kind of holding the line until the markets open up more for that kind of financing.

John Stackhouse: So you’re not seeing next year being a year for IPOs. Not yet.

Sean Silcoff: I think we’re heading toward them maybe toward the [00:25:00] back half of 2025. I mean, the economy is doing its work.

It’s slowed down, unfortunately, but that has meant that inflation has come down. Interest rates are coming down. This is the moment when things start to kind of turn up. It may not feel like that for a lot of Canadians, for a lot of. A lot of people in the global economy, but this is the moment when you start to see a more optimistic horizon.

John Stackhouse: We’ve talked mostly about software. One of the things I’m thinking about for the year ahead is hardware and particularly military technology. We’re going to see a lot more money going into defense, both in the United States, but also here in Canada and Europe. You hear a lot about NATO commitments and that’s one important part of it.

But a lot of that spending it’s yes, of course, for warships and icebreakers and maybe submarines, but a lot of it is going to go for technology. We’re seeing that with the dronification of our border and all that will go with that, which is going to be fascinating to watch a lot of opportunity there for innovators, for entrepreneurs.

Big customers [00:26:00] there in defense departments, but also a lot of concerns for society to think through in terms of surveillance, in terms of the possible dual use of these technologies and particularly civilian applications. We’ll see. Concerning times, great opportunities come with that, but something we all need to remain alert to.

Sean Silcoff: Right. We’ve all been worried about, , AI, , Skynet, Terminator stuff, but I think the new tech boogeyman is going to be the drone, the armed drone. We’re already seeing stories about it. It’s kind of freaky, especially if these things can fly under radar and do a lot of damage. It raises a lot of interesting and troubling questions.

John Stackhouse: I think warfare has always been a catalyst of technology and I’m not defending war, but it’s, I think it’s a fair observation and we’re starting to see some extraordinary tech advancements in both the Ukraine war and what’s going on. In the Middle East and over the next few years, we’ll probably see more of that to come.

Sean, it’s been great to [00:27:00] have you on the podcast.

Sonia Sennik: Thanks, Sean.

Sean Silcoff: Thank you for the invitation. Really enjoyed this.

Sonia Sennik: Thanks so much for joining us today. And special thank you to Sean for sharing his thoughts and insights on the tech landscape in Canada.

John Stackhouse: If you’re interested in how disruptive technology, and especially AI, will continue to shape our world from the opportunities to the challenges, stay tuned for more episodes in 2025.

Sonia Sennik: As always, you can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. And if you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and tell us what topics you want us to explore next.

John Stackhouse: This has been Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Thanks for listening.

Talk to you soon.

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here. Welcome back to Disruptors x CDL: The Innovation Era, where we’re exploring how innovation is shaping the future of Canada and the world. I’m John Stackhouse from RBC.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik from Creative Destruction Lab.

If you’re like me, you may be listening to this on a public transit bus somewhere.

My daily commute in Toronto on the TTC has been made infinitely better by podcasts, and I’m enjoying the Toronto buses a lot more since they were electrified. It’s one of the biggest climate action efforts underway in Canada to get diesel buses off the road and a new generation of EV buses in their place.

There’s been a lot of headlines this year about the economic challenges of EV manufacturers and of battery companies. But one area where innovation is thriving is in larger and heavy duty vehicles.

Sonia Sennik: That’s right, John. And it’s not just about big batteries. AI is helping manufacturers change the way they make vehicles and also how those vehicles operate.

[00:01:00] But this transition isn’t just about technology. It’s about creating a robust, interconnected ecosystem to support the new technology. So in 2022, GM completely retooled the CAMI assembly plant in Southern Ontario in record time. To become the new global manufacturing home of BrightDrop’s fully electric delivery vans.

BrightDrop vans are compatible with emerging charging infrastructure and are designed to operate with zero tailpipe emissions, directly contributing to cleaner air in cities. This makes the CAMI assembly plant in Canada Our first full scale electric vehicle manufacturing plant. The vans represent a pivotal shift within the transportation infrastructure of businesses and cities.

John Stackhouse: There’s a lot of shifting going on as well in the bus industry. There’s now something like 5, 000 electric buses on the road and the target is 20, 000. But the transition is complicated. You don’t need to be a big city mayor to know that most cities can’t afford those new fleets and riders aren’t willing to pay more.

It’s also been challenged by infrastructure. [00:02:00] I remember a Toronto official telling me about the moment he discovered one of the TTC’s new buses couldn’t complete a long, hilly, suburban route with enough charge to get back to the depot. It’s just one of the many small challenges that manufacturers and operators are working their way through for all of our benefit.

Sonia Sennik: Logistics. Canada must be strategic about strengthening our whole EV supply chain and focusing on where we could build and should build capacity. And when we say supply chain in this context, we mean all the processes involved in the production, distribution, and support of EVs.

John Stackhouse: So as the saying goes, fasten your seatbelts, we’re going to take you on a special journey today in how we move people and goods in a more cost minded way.

As well as climate minded age. We’ll talk to the CEO of the New Flyer Group, a Winnipeg company that’s making a big portion of North America’s electrified buses. But first we’re joined by Kristen Aquilina, who’s president and managing director of GM Canada. Which is trying to [00:03:00] revolutionize the delivery van business from its Cammie manufacturing facility in Southwestern Ontario.

Kristian, welcome to the podcast.

Kristian Aquilina: Well, thanks John and Sonia. Great to be here. And I look forward to talking to you about GM today.

John Stackhouse: Listeners will quickly wonder about your accent, Kristian. Tell us a bit about how you came to Canada and where from.

Kristian Aquilina: I’m originally from Australia as the accent might give away.

I started with General Motors there in Melbourne that was under the brand of General Motors Holgan and that’s where my journey in the automotive industry started and of course had some great opportunities working for a large organization like that to work in many parts of the world and landed here in Canada just last year.

John Stackhouse: Well, we’re almost at the end of 2024 curious how you and GM are seeing the EV market both leaving this year and casting ahead to 2025.

Kristian Aquilina: Well, 2024 has been a period of incredible growth for our EV business. We’ve brought on a portfolio of EVs under the [00:04:00] Chevrolet brand and the Cadillac brand and also just more recently GMC.

We’ve just seen incredible growth where it’s around 20 percent of our sales now and really has become an important line of business for General Motors. And at times we’ve managed to outsell the likes of Tesla and others in the marketplace to be number one in the market on EVs, which many people wouldn’t think of when they think of General Motors.

That’s something that we’re very excited about.

John Stackhouse: As EV share 5 to 10 to 15%, what are you learning about consumers and what are they telling you right now?

Kristian Aquilina: Yeah. So what customers are telling us. Is when it comes to an EV and they make that switch to an EV for the first time, the first thing that is apparent is just the convenience of their automotive life under an EV.

Some of the reticence and maybe the hesitation around EV adoption might be a fear of inconvenience, but the fact of the matter is that an EV owner who charges at home [00:05:00] may never go to a gas station, never need to go to a gas station. The charging happens overnight while they sleep. And that gas prices that they avoid by doing that and the electricity prices that can optimize because they can choose when they charge their vehicle and really the whole anxieties that perhaps they had before entering the EV space before they did it do melt away pretty quickly when they realize the benefits and get to experience the benefits of an EV ownership lifestyle.

Sonia Sennik: Kristian, on the transport and delivery side, can you share more with us about BrightDrop and how does it play into GM’s broader strategy for an all electric future?

Kristian Aquilina: Well, as we work towards the greater electrification of our portfolio, we saw that there was equally a need. to address part of the transport fleet and the commercial space.

So the first EV to be produced and the only EV to be produced in Canada right now is a Chevrolet BrightDrop van. [00:06:00] And these vans originated as a delivery van, but our customers quickly took that and said, basically this vehicle can do far more than just act as a delivery van. So let’s treat it as a broader commercial van offering and with its varying capabilities made for North America and all wheel drive and two wheel drive and vehicle mass capacities, we can really satisfy a market opportunity.

So it’s doing the job of taking quite CO2 producing vehicles off the road. Customers are loving the convenience and the cost savings that come with running a large fleet of vans that are powered by electricity rather than gas or diesel.

Sonia Sennik: Kristian, a recent Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association report highlighted the challenges with EV infrastructure, and I’m curious to understand what role GM sees for itself in addressing these gaps in Canada, and how critical is infrastructure to general consumer adoption?

Kristian Aquilina: I think it’s actually the number one issue, Sonia, in terms [00:07:00] of unlocking greater EV adoption. It’s one of probably the greatest barriers to greater adoption that we see. I think the opportunity exists for Canada and its layers of government and its electricity producers and distributors to actually come together and collaborate with the likes of General Motors and perhaps others.

To map out kind of a broader strategy that is required to support this transition. When it comes to the consumer point of view, often a customer considering an EV may be hesitant on the basis that, oh, I cannot charge my car when I need to in, you know, a remote location, but often that is maybe a once or twice a year kind of occasion for everyday use cases.

In fact, the average Canadian driver drives about 40, 42 kilometers per day. You do not need charging infrastructure on every corner to supply the needs of most [00:08:00] Canadians. That would be cost prohibitive and not necessarily deliver great economic and efficient outcomes. However, a strategic approach that uses the best data driven decisions on where we can optimize for locations and the speed of charges and the uptime of charges.

Now, that becomes a strategy, an intelligent way forward that is working with various levels of government and infrastructure providers and perhaps brings out a more commercial outcome, economically efficient outcome. And we can use actually AI to come up with those outcomes. We’re doing that in the U. S.

right now with our partners there in the charging infrastructure space. In Canada, there’s a real opportunity to get organized around this mission. And just to put it in perspective, the CVMI. Also talked about the number of charges that we need throughout the country in order to satisfy the mandated outcomes that the government has legislated for.

And quite frankly, it’s eye watering 40,000 new charges per year for the [00:09:00] next 10 or 11 years. We can be smart about when to place those charges and where to do it in order to optimize for the most economic efficient outcome.

John Stackhouse: Are the needs for those chargers in the broader infrastructure, very different for fleets and heavier vehicles, school buses, delivery vans than they are for passenger vehicles. And how do we balance those competing needs?

Kristian Aquilina: Yeah, I think they’re quite distinct, John. The use cases for those sorts of larger vehicles, such as a BrightDrop van, is have slower charges, less costly charges, but a lot of them in one location that you return to.

Whereas from a public infrastructure perspective, a relatively low cost charger at the home will satisfy most of the population. But there is anxiety around being able to charge when you get to the other end of that trip or when the colder weather sets in and that range reduces a little bit because of [00:10:00] the way that the chemistry behaves.

So in order to do that, we need to have strategically located charges that are reliable and are fast enough. To make it as convenient as it is as having one at home, and that is all achievable if we can get man to walk on the moon, we can definitely be able to solve a charging problem in Canada, and I think like you are suggesting through your question, there is a segmentation of what seems like a big overwhelming problem or a big overwhelming thing to solve for segmenting it, breaking it down into the use cases just like we did in In this conversation can really sort of provide some relief here and say, you know, it’s not as big and overwhelming a task as it seems up front.

Sonia Sennik: One of the trends we’re looking to understand is this interconnectedness between all the different aspects of bringing EVs to the road, whether it’s delivery vans, transportation, large transport or consumer vehicles. So that vertical [00:11:00] integration, one of the examples we were looking at is GM’s recent offtake agreement with the Canadian Graphite company in Quebec.

So how do you see local sourcing strengthening Canada’s role in the global EV supply chain?

Kristian Aquilina: That’s just a great example of the advantages of nearshoring or onshoring. Some of the activity that we would in the past naturally go out to a supplier base located vastly throughout the world in order to come up with the product, the end solution.

Here is an opportunity where Canada can get involved and very much active in the trends to bring onshore or nearshore some of the activity here closer to where the customers are. That particular agreement that you mentioned is also a supply chain security action to make sure that in times of supply chain disruption, like we’ve seen in the past that we’ve got something closer to home and something easier to get our hands [00:12:00] on on key critical materials that that’s required to build a battery.

The Nouveau Mon graphite agreement is not just an offtake agreement. It’s our investment in that organization to make that project real. It’s to bring graphite that is predominantly only being mined in China onto North American soil into Canadian soil, extract the material process it in Quebec in the same location in the same province in which it’s extracted, and then be a source of that component that’s needed to build batteries in our North American plants throughout the continent.

And I think that promotes a healthier and stronger automotive industry in this country for the longterm. Thank you.

John Stackhouse: Kristian, you kicked off the conversation with a lot of enthusiasm about where EV adoption is right now and where it’s going. As you maybe think a bit longer term over the next few years, what both excites you most and what do you think will be the biggest challenges that we’ve got to work through?

Kristian Aquilina: Well, we’re still in transition of a [00:13:00] pretty significant technological change in our industry. It’s sometimes politicized, and it’s not necessarily a smooth transition in terms of consumer adoption and acceptance. The challenge comes from ambiguity and the disruptive nature of it. At the same time, that brings enormous opportunity too.

That’s what I love about disruption is that whilst more than 50 percent of those affected by disruption run away from it or want to shield themselves from it, there’s a smaller percentage that run towards it and look for the opportunity within it. And that’s where I see our role here as a business leader and perhaps an industry representative to see how uncertainty can be quite damaging to a profit and loss statement.

But it can also be quite inspirational if you can solve it through. The resources capabilities that you have as a company. So that is what I’m excited about. And you talked about the vertically integrated nature of how we’re [00:14:00] talking about the EV transition, and it goes beyond just solving the infrastructure.

We want the materials from those batteries that we create. At some future point to displace freshly mined product at some point. So we want to recycle those batteries. So we’re getting into the examining that, but then beyond it, where are the opportunities for industries and new employment and new industrialization to spring off these initial innovations in EVs.

We’re just scratching the surface of it. So that’s what I’m excited about.

John Stackhouse: Can hear the excitement in your voice. And that line run towards the disruption, that’s the spirit of our podcast. I think we may borrow that line from you in future episodes. Kristian, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Thank you. It’s been a delight talking to you both.

Next up, we’re joined by Paul Soubry, president and CEO of the Winnipeg company, New Flyer Group, which is leading the evolution to global zero emission mobility. Paul, welcome to the podcast. [00:15:00] Thanks, John. Much appreciated. I got to tour your factory a number of months ago and was so impressed with all that you’re literally building, but also the complexities of making a bus.

I’m a daily bus user. Many of them are new flyer vehicles. I had little idea what goes into the manufacturing of those vehicles, especially as they get electrified. Maybe you could just briefly introduce our listeners to New Flyer for those who aren’t familiar with the Winnipeg company.

Paul Soubry: Well, it’s a really wonderful Manitoba Western Canadian story founded in 1930 here.

New Flyer started off with various structures and so forth of vehicles at that time and then in the 30s and 40s really focused only on buses. Over time, the business became the market leader in North America for transit buses, and then as we got into the 2010s and so forth, we really started to diversify to become what we call a pure play, a bus and coach manufacturer, and of course, all the stuff that’s tied around that.

So today we own New Flower, which is the largest transit bus manufacturer in North America, MCI Motor Coach Industries, which ironically also founded [00:16:00] in Winnipeg in 1932, North America’s largest motor coach manufacturer. We own the world’s largest double deck maker, which is headquartered in Scotland called Alexander Dennis that you would see when Toronto and go or you’d see it in Vancouver or you’d see it in Vegas.

And then we have a small business in the States in Indiana called Arbok that makes kind of specialty shuttle type buses and then around that all kinds of parts of service, but 9000 people close to 4 billion U. S. in sales. We got about 100, 000 buses on the road and service right now.

John Stackhouse: I want to ask you, Paul, about the evolution to electric vehicles and as more and more municipalities particularly are buying electric buses, you have the fascinating challenge of also changing your company and your assembly lines and how you work with your customers.

Tell us a bit about what you’re up against and where you see the opportunities going.

Paul Soubry: So a little context, Jada, so we’ve been building zero emission electric buses since 1969, Seattle, San Francisco on their trolley networks, Vancouver, and then as we got [00:17:00] to kind of 28s, 9s, 10s, we played around with fuel cells and battery electric and so forth.

It was a very interesting yet painful learning process. When we started to deliver battery electric buses in earnest, we also had at the same time, the big SPAC dynamic in the United States and in Canada, where we had a whole bunch of people coming to the market. We’re going to change this game overnight.

We’ll be the Tesla of buses. They’re coming. They’re going to change. You have to think about it not that of a vehicle perspective, but it’s an ecosystem. So you go walk into a transit agency and pick Winnipeg Transit. There’s two major garages. There’s 250 buses at each garage. The trial of some electric buses were five or seven.

It’s jerry rigged in the corner. You got charging infrastructure. You make it work. Now we’re in, they’re in really in earnest making orders, 50, 100, 200. So imagine your depot that’s set up to fuel diesel buses with all trained diesel mechanics and so forth now having to migrate and move towards the zero mission.

And so you got to get charging in there. You got to train all these people. The bus is the easy part now. [00:18:00] It’s that whole ecosystem that’s the hard part and doing it efficiently. The next part of that is where the hell is this power going to come from? I think the study in Winnipeg is that if we electrified 500 buses and charged them every night, that’s the equivalent of 35, 000 houses of electricity.

Not trivial. So that’s why this whole evolution thing is that we’ve got to play the game of migrating the vehicle and the propulsion system, the telematics and understanding what’s going on, state of charge of the batteries, the burndown of the batteries and so forth. We also got to understand what’s happening at the depot and the energy and the charging and the optimization of the fleet and so forth.

And then of course the vehicle gets that much more complex with batteries or fuel cells and so forth. And the skill change from the average technician at a transit agency, or even a driver, goes from X to Y.

Sonia Sennik: So the fuel cell buses in 2010, you mentioned in passing, it was interesting, but painful. What did you learn from that fuel cell innovation process that now perhaps you’re bringing into how you’re talking about the EV transformation?

Paul Soubry: At that time, the fuel cell [00:19:00] was the prime mover, the propulsion system. So you get this massive fuel cell, you don’t have a diesel engine, which means you need a significant amount of hydrogen. By the way, it’s not available at every street corner. That ecosystem around the fuel cells, the reality check came in.

So then everything migrated to battery electric buses. When we first started working with just battery, we thought, holy smokes, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to have very small batteries because they’re expensive and they’re heavy. We’ll have charging all over the routes. Then you start to realize the complexities of putting distributed charging throughout cities, right?

This is not trivial. So then what happened? The pendulum swung. We want all these batteries on buses. So the more batteries you have, the less people you can have, right? Expensive, heavy, parasitic load, all this other stuff. The fuel cells made its way back in where now we build electric buses with small fuel cells.

So the fuel cell’s job is just to top up the battery. So when we hear people say our batteries or fuel cells going to take over electric propulsion in buses, quite frankly, it’s an electric story. And how do you extend the range? One strategy is fuel cell. Here’s the other dynamic that [00:20:00] I think really hit me is, pick a transit agency.

I don’t know. Brampton transit, really progressive customer. They’ve got this capital investment in this very large fleet. They’re not going to hand the fleet over or wipe it overnight to put a whole bunch of zero emissions in there. There’s still your and my tax dollars in there to evolve that fleet over time.

Which goes back to that evolution story, it’s not just the technology and the training and the systems, there’s capital value in there that we got to make sure we phase out over time. And therein lies a very different dynamic than you and me choosing an electric car or an ICE car.

John Stackhouse: The cost of the vehicle is also an interesting challenge, same on the passenger side, but different scale. How do you work with municipalities and maybe other levels of government on the cost issue and how are you thinking about driving down those unit costs?

Paul Soubry: It’s a really important one, John, and when you walked through here, you saw the complexity.

First of all, the average person has no clue how customized vehicles are. Just to give you a little flavor, we’ll make, I don’t know, [00:21:00] on the transit bus side, 2, 000 2, 200 units a year here in North America. Last year, we created 68, 000 new part numbers for 2, 200 buses. Why? Because every city, every customer wants to customize elements with their bus.

So in addition to the rapid customization and variation, which includes non recurrent engineering, tooling, whatever, you also got this huge uplift of inflation that happened over the last couple of years. The good news we have in public transit is it will likely be the first all fleet to be converted because the government can control that.

It’s publicly funded. The bad news is that the there’s an outpouring of money upfront originally to not only fund the higher, more expensive buses, which by the way, we believe will be cost neutral over the life cycle. Cause you have less maintenance costs, but there’s that upfront cash. The other thing is they had to help operators understand how to invest in charging infrastructure.

And again, it’s not a couple of chargers. We just stick to the roof of a depot. It’s a big deal, which then goes back to why we as a company need to be part of the ecosystem, not just, do you like my bus? How many do you want? And what [00:22:00] color? It also pushed us into a dynamic that maybe we may not have totally thought about.

We’re now offering infrastructure charging solutions. So we’re acting as a general contractor where we’re bidding the bus, but bidding the charging infrastructure and trying to work through a customer to make sure that ecosystem works from day one, as opposed to the city of whatever, buying a charging system that doesn’t match with the bus and then all the complexities.

So the funding, thank God we have. Very successful and very prominent investment from both the Canadian, UK government to get that started as opposed to a pure economic business that says, Oh my God, I used to buy a truck for a hundred grand. Now you want three 50. Are you kidding me? And then I need all this charging stuff.

We have the bad news of we’re the guinea pigs, but the benefit of going first.

Sonia Sennik: Paul, folks may be visualizing an assembly line and the concept may give the illusion of standardization and your stat on the 68, 000 new parts last year is staggering. So I guess you’re saying getting potential alignment on some design specifications would help the [00:23:00] industry move faster.

Pardon the pun.

Paul Soubry: There’s no question on speed, but also Sonia on economics, we did this calculation of the permutations and combinations of side windows on a bus, everything from thickness tent frames is pushing in, pushing out. There’s 97 different configurations, which then means my aftermarket parts team and my service team has this infinite support dynamic associated with it.

So I think as the bus has got more expensive and the batteries and whatever, I think the sanity is going to get us back to configuration and that can drive optimization rather than pure customization for customization sake.

John Stackhouse: We all know there’s a change coming in Washington. You’ve had to adjust a fair bit with buy America as American customers want you to manufacture a good chunk of the vehicle locally, but you’ve strategized around that. But now you’re into kind of a new chapter in North America. How are you thinking about the next few years?

Paul Soubry: Well, a couple of things first on on the vehicle [00:24:00] itself and the different propulsion systems. We made the strategic decision when we started to get into zero emission in earnest that we do two things. We would design platforms or frames of buses that could accommodate any kind of propulsion system. So diesel, natural gas, hybrid, zero emission, battery, fuel cell, and so forth.

So that allows us to adapt depending on certain customers and the pace of adoption. The other thing we decided to do is not to build the zero emissions on separate production lines. Now, inherent in that is some inefficiencies, right? Because putting a zero emission through in the wires and the complexity is different than a diesel.

So you have labor inefficiencies, but we also have infinite flexibility that if it goes faster, we adapt faster. So that’s one of the things that I, I hope, and I think that that will prove as a good decision. With respect to the new administration, United States, there’s all the bluster around tariffs and will the Trump administration kill all the funding for green vehicles and on and on and on.

Some of what I just said plays into that. The other issue is that our business is really oriented towards buy America dynamics. And so for those that [00:25:00] don’t know that when a customer in the U S uses federal funds, 70 percent of the material must be U S origin and certain functions must physically happen in the United States.

For example, we build a shell here. You can’t put a door or an air conditioner. You got to physically do it in the United States. So over the years, as that went from 50 to 60 to 65 to 70 percent content, we’ve migrated, unfortunately, tasks, supply chain skills to the United States. We’re on both sides of the border.

We’ve just announced recently, we’re going to work to build all Canadian vehicles for Canadian customers here. I think we’re going to have to continue to read and adapt. Some stuff may get more expensive. If our transistor radio gets more expensive, unfortunately, with tariffs and so forth, you and I are going to pay for it, right?

As opposed to the supplier taking it. So that’s the reality of bus prices going to go up, which may then indicate the funding dynamics out of sync and so forth. Here’s the good news that I see it. I don’t make typewriters that are ultimately going to get replaced by computers. We make buses and coaches that may change in type, size, propulsion, color, systems, but the [00:26:00] buses aren’t going away.

They are fundamental to every city as the backbone of those cities. So we’ve got to keep adapting our product offering and the surroundings around it, as opposed to worrying that I’m going to get disrupted in what I make. We’ll see how tariffs go, but it’s a game we’re going to have to figure out how to play.

I think we’re positioned from a good starting place because most of our supply chain is U. S. origin anyway.

Sonia Sennik: Paul, obviously you have such a depth of knowledge in this space, and it’s been really enlightening to understand the different levels of innovation that are taking place all at the same time.

What would be your messaging to a customer, someone who takes the bus, in understanding what the future of transportation looks like from your perspective?

Paul Soubry: I think that’s a really good question, Sonia, because I’ve been in the business 15, 16 years now, right? Buses have been moving people for 70 years. And for most of that, the choice of the bus and everything about it was always the same in terms of fuel it with a diesel.

And now the dynamic of it’s not a bus anymore, it’s the ecosystem. And it’s not a light switch because you got to [00:27:00] evolve to it. I think the same thing is going to apply in trucking or delivery, local delivery vans and so forth. The vehicle is kind of the easy part, right? The issue is you got to optimize the system.

And that’s a different higher order thinking for financing it, cashflow management, maintenance, procurement, life cycle, asset management, spare parts, and on and on and on. The interconnectedness of all things. Amen. Yes, exactly. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Paul. Sonia, pleasure to meet you. John, thanks for the opportunity.

Sonia Sennik: It was so fantastic to speak to both Paul and Kristian about the evolution of EVs. I loved how we kept coming back to this sense of interconnectedness between the systems surrounding the technology, not just the technology itself. As Paul said, it’s not just flipping a light switch.

John Stackhouse: I felt at times like I was in an MBA class listening to amazing case studies, even as they’re unfolding.

Both stories, New Flyer and GM and the BrightDrop line, are good reminders of how complex [00:28:00] the energy transition is. It’s not just about creating a battery and convincing consumers to buy a new vehicle. Entire supply chains have to be remade. They can’t be remade overnight, so whether you’re a city thinking about your fleet or a manufacturer thinking about retooling your lines as you go, or a consumer thinking about how you, uh, replace the vehicles in your driveway, all of this is complex.

It’ll take time. But boy, is it fascinating.

Sonia Sennik: I think one of the sayings I really appreciate and I think is true in this case is that innovation is only as impactful as the ecosystems that support it. And I felt that rang true with everything that Paul was communicating and what Kristian was saying about how much we’re transforming the future of transport.

John Stackhouse: Well, as we’ve often said on this podcast, innovation is a team sport. There’s very few companies that truly innovate on their own. They build partnerships. They work with their supply chain, they even work with their competitors. And of course. their customers listening to what they’re looking for and wanting.

Sonia Sennik: And they really [00:29:00] drive innovation.

John Stackhouse: Why don’t we park the conversation there, Sonia?

Sonia Sennik: Well, thanks for tuning in to this episode. If you’re as passionate as we are about understanding the intersection of advanced technologies and real world applications, be sure to subscribe and leave a review.

John Stackhouse: This has been Disruptors, an RBC podcast in collaboration with Creative Destruction Lab.

I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here, and welcome to Disruptors x CDL: the Innovation Era. We’re doing a special two part series on the space economy, and I’m joined by my co-host, Sonia Sennik, the CEO of Creative Destruction Lab, which has its own special space stream. That just tells you how big the space economy is these days.

Sonia, great to be with you again.

Sonia Sennik: Thanks so much, John. It’s awesome to be here. Today, we’re hosting part two of our discussion on the space economy. And this time we’re diving into examples of Canadian companies who are building the future of space. To put it into perspective, Morgan Stanley’s space team estimates that the roughly $350 billion global space industry could surge to over a trillion dollars by 2040.

John Stackhouse: That’s right. This is not just the stuff of Nassau and maybe Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. There are thousands of companies, including many Canadians and two that we’ll hear from today, that are active way up there as well as down [00:01:00] here. If you listen to part one of our special series, you would have heard Commander Chris Hadfield, who of course has been to outer space and back, talk about just how big the opportunity and ambition is.

Sonia Sennik: And he contrasted that against just how little we know. And how much more there is for us to explore and learn about outer space. With the cost of accessing lower earth orbit dramatically lower than it’s ever been, the opportunities are truly endless.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, after a conversation with Chris, I was thinking about what the container ship did to globalization and how space transportation may do the same.

For history nerds, you’ll know that the container ship was born out of the Vietnam War. Where the U. S. military had to ship all sorts of stuff to Asia and then were sending back empty containers. So some bright entrepreneurs developed a business out of container ships, and thus was born in many ways what we now call globalization.

We may be seeing the same thing with what Musk and Bezos are doing [00:02:00] with space transportation today.

Sonia Sennik: And now our global supply chain is going to include reusable rockets.

John Stackhouse: So what do you call globalization when it includes another planet? Universalization, John. I’ll go with that. Joining us today will be Christine Tovey, the former CTO of Airbus Group North America and an aerospace veteran, who will tell us what her new company, Wyvern, is doing up there in space, as well as Mina Mitri, who’s the CEO and founder of Kepler Communications, a Toronto based satellite company.

Let’s dig in. We caught up with Christine at the CDL Space Session. Have a listen. Christine, thanks for being on the podcast.

Christine Tovee: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks, John.

John Stackhouse: So a bit of background. Why VERN came through CDL was founded with the broad goal of providing actionable intelligence of Earth from space to enable a sustainable future for humanity.

So no small ambition there. Why think small when you’re in space? Give us a sense of what inspired the vision.

Christine Tovee: Well, I think [00:03:00] Wyvern was unique in terms of its enthusiasm and cohesion of its founding team. So four young people, mostly out of the University of Alberta. Unique in the sense that two of the founders were women.

So we had a 50 percent female founder team and truly their joy to work with the enthusiasm, the collaboration, the insight that we have, but also one of the other reasons why I think Wyvern was amazing is we were combining a disruption of how the business of space was happening with real technical innovation.

And I would say going through CDL, that combination of both business and technology disruption is relatively unique and one of the reasons why I thought Wyvern had a great future in front of it.

John Stackhouse: And six years on, tell us a bit about your progress.

Christine Tovee: Six years on, we’re now at approximately 35 employees. We grew up in COVID, so we’re [00:04:00] practically a virtual company.

So there are engineers and employees from all the way from Halifax, all the way to Campbell River, Vancouver, as well as we have a few American employees down in Colorado. We have just finished another financing round, so we just raised six million dollars U. S., you know, in a very difficult financing environment.

We’ve got three satellites on orbit. We’ve got two more launching in 2025. Space is hard, so there’s a lot more lessons to learn about getting the imagery down. If you don’t know what hyperspectral imagery does, is we take images of the Earth in many different colors. So beyond what the eye can see. And you can combine these different colors to learn different information about what’s happening on the earth in terms of chemical composition, soil moisture, temperatures as well.

So you can learn a lot about what’s going on and therefore get into decision making and to optimize a number of things. So. We have a number of [00:05:00] clients in agriculture, in mining, defense, obviously is still very much interested in imaging, that’s naturally the number one client for this type of imaging.

But we also get very unique requests, we’ve been asked about the health of coral reefs, the Great Barrier Reef, we also are looking at invasive species, we’ve just done a use case on forestry where we can actually identify different kinds of trees in a forest. What’s also exciting is this data used to be quite bespoke, and not a lot of people had access to it, nor did they have the expertise to work with it.

So it’s a real discovery journey, both for us in terms of that space journey, but also for clients wondering what more can we do that’s going to impact so many other areas.

Sonia Sennik: Christine, I think you beautifully illustrated in your response there, just how many different industries space companies can touch with the hyperspectral data that you get and the opportunity with AI to really [00:06:00] leverage that and harness those prediction tools to better support their businesses.

It’s all very new and exciting. So what is the biggest piece of education you’re giving to business leaders as you’re discussing with them the opportunities with your tools and technology?

Christine Tovee: Yeah, so first off Wyvern focuses on the data. We certainly do have an AI and ML deployment plan, but we’re also looking to partner with people who can do the application.

So on the layer of data is the applications. Now, what has been an education? Of such is what can people rely on the data for? So it’s quite a process to take down zeros and ones from a sensor that’s detecting light over 500 kilometers away from the earth and then turn that into something called an image.

And that’s what we do really well. Then it’s a matter of, well, what does this image tell you, and how do we deal with some of the discontinuities, the discrepancies in it, and what does it mean, and certainly [00:07:00] something that’s really relevant right now is what’s truth in an image, and what is processed. AI is making this even more of a challenge to explain it, because AI can do a whole bunch of stuff, and you don’t really understand what it’s doing to the image.

But how do we maintain what we’ve kind of called pixel truth? So making sure that the customer, whatever their application, whatever their analytics is, can trust that the data is of ground truth.

Sonia Sennik: Just to pivot to how you get those images and how you get that data, is you actually send CubeSats into lower Earth orbit. Now, not all satellites are created equally. Can you give us just a very brief primer on the difference between a CubeSat and satellites that we’d be more familiar with?

Christine Tovee: So it’s true.

Our first three satellites are CubeSats. If you’re in the know, we talk about CubeSats in terms of units. So this is a [00:08:00] 6u or 6 unit size. CubeSat. It’s small. It’s small. It’s the size of a microwave, essentially. It was literally packed in a suitcase and hand carried onto a British Airways flight to Vandenberg to be launched.

Yes, it had its own seat on the BA flight. I come from military satellite communications where we’re talking about a satellite that is in the tons that would fill this room and would be launched into an orbit that’s 36,000 kilometers away from the earth, which means it’s moving very slow compared to the earth.

In fact, it’s stationary over a point. With smaller sats, you put them into what we call low Earth orbit, which, like I said, is around 500 kilometers above the Earth, and they’re moving very fast. In one day, in a sun synchronous orbit, we’re going over the Earth 24 times. As it slowly moves along the equator, So it covers the full circumference of the earth in one day and it does that every day.

So it’s a very fast moving [00:09:00] satellite and we want more of them, but also we’re actually moving to what we’re calling a small satellite. So about a hundred kilograms next. And there’s some very big advantages to that as well. The orbits won’t change too much. But with a larger satellite, you actually get better pointing accuracy just because you have more mass, your conservation of momentum stabilizes the platform.

And certainly if you’re taking photos, if anybody’s sort of had a shaky hand when they’ve been trying to take a photo, you want stability for that platform. And so a small sat, which is about a hundred kilometers, provides extra stability. It also provides extra what we call space, weight and power. And so with power, you can also do a lot more on board processing.

So I talk about the technology challenges that we have is there’s, there’s two really that Wyvern’s trying to solve. It’s how do we take a good image? And we’re working on deployable optics for that. And then there’s, how do I manage the data? Because [00:10:00] one of the big challenges of hyperspectral, when I talk about multiple colored images, it means every time we’re taking 32 images of the same spot.

And that’s a lot of data, like we’re into the gigabytes of data. In 32 different spectroscopies. Yes, in 32 different colors. And the next generation is going to be even more colours. So it’s a data management problem as well. So being able to move into a constellation or an architecture where I do some of the processing and the A.

I., the M. L., the analysis of the images on board before I have to move all that data to the ground is also a big change.

Sonia Sennik: So what’s wonderful about this is it’s such a chain of innovation. It is. An innovation in the hardware, an innovation in how you take the photos, an innovation in how you power and process on board can lead to an innovation to the data that you get.

And then how I do or don’t manage my farmland or how I do or don’t manage my mine site. And so that broad spectrum of [00:11:00] industries that you’re about to touch is really exciting. What do you see as being in the next 10 years, the biggest barrier for you bringing that to life and getting engaged with businesses all around the world?

Christine Tovee: Well, I don’t think it’s going to take 10 years. I think it’s a real five year planet as such. The barriers are, I’d love to see more launch companies and more launch opportunities because these are not massive constellations in terms of the Starlink thousands of satellites, but to cover the earth and to get the latency and the timing, you need 40, 50, 60 satellites to cover the earth in a meaningful way.

So access to launches is one thing. Reliability and being able to launch to exactly where I want it to be. I’m really interested in getting to a point in space that is really meaningful, especially when you’re trying to coordinate 40 satellites, I do not need them all bunched up into the same orbit.

Thank you very much. The challenge is also going to be managing technology from different generations and obsolescence and make sure it all works together. So there’s [00:12:00] a massive coordination, change management, change management, again, the operations are complex, the mathematical calculations are complex.

This is another area where I think AI and ML is going to help us just to manage that complexity and understand how performance varies across the satellites and the imaging capability. The space is also going to be an area where we’re going to be more security driven. We’re seeing the world change from everything from more space debris.

So we’ve got to monitor our satellites and make sure we keep them safe. Radiation, being able to de-orbit, but also there are cyber attacks. There’s a hypothetical where hack a satellite, hack a satellite, you know, take control of the TTC links. So those are the challenges.

John Stackhouse: As you laid out, you’ve got a great five year plan, but what’s your dream for Wyvern and what do you need to get there?

Christine Tovee: Well, the dream for Earth is to be able to see what’s happening on Earth at any moment. I remember [00:13:00] reading once about a story where a river up in Yukon essentially disappeared overnight and by the time people realized what had happened, they had no clue why this river was suddenly gone. I’m hoping Wyvern we never miss something like that again.

We’re living in such a connected and complex world that things happening in one area of the world actually have huge impacts somewhere else. And being able to see those two things at the same time, especially on a climate change level or something like that, understanding our connectivity across the globe, I think is one of the missions of Wyvern, and I think this data can really help.

The other way is There’s the moon next, there’s the solar system. Can we expand to a cislunar and a solar sort of environment where we’re doing hyperspectral imagery all over the place?

John Stackhouse: You don’t think small?

Christine Tovee: No.

Sonia Sennik: Never.

John Stackhouse: Christine, great to have you on the podcast. Thank you.

Sonia Sennik: It’s been a real pleasure.

Our [00:14:00] second guest is Mina Mitri, CEO and founder of Kepler Communications. Mina, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. You have a background in aerospace engineering from the University of Toronto. How did you decide to build a startup?

Mina Mintry: Oh, well, that’s a long story. I’ll try to give you the bridge version.

During my undergrad and my master’s, I had the privilege of leading a not for profit called the University of Toronto Aerospace Team. We started out with about five people that were volunteering to build these heavy lift aircraft that were remote controlled and tried to carry as much weight up as they could.

three year period where I was responsible for the team. We took it to a group of about a hundred volunteers doing a range of things from building our own rocket engines from scratch, designing drones, and ultimately launching satellites. So we had the opportunity to put down a levy in the university of Toronto, where each student would pay a portion of their tuition to support our launch campaign going up into orbit that was unanimously [00:15:00] voted in, which was really cool.

But it was through that experience that I really learned what was happening inside of the space sector. Gone are the days where it’s nationally held by trillionaires, and I mean the government of the U. S. or the Soviets of the time, and now space has become democratized, it’s really accessible for all, where we could mix laughing gas, aluminum powder, and candle wax to make our own rocket engines from scratch.

Yep. Somebody permitted us to do that, but all the way through to developing and launching microbiology payloads on a student based levy is really a great opportunity to realize what was happening inside of the space sector. I got together with some of the smartest folks that I knew at the time, which were really top of their field in the world.

And we got together and decided to build Kepler.

John Stackhouse: Mina, I think you just gave away your IP. I didn’t realize laughing gas was the critical ingredient, but we’ll see who takes advantage of that. Tell us a bit about the Kepler story.

Mina Mintry: The Kepler story builds off of this idea that we were seeing space access become so democratized.[00:16:00]

You had sit and run competitions that were going out and building, launching, operating spacecraft, made us realize here is the opportunity where people have democratized access through launch or through regulations or through a myriad of different ways in which spaces become more accessible. And while there’s been a heavy amount of investment into launch, There’s been very little investment into communications, and so we set out with this vision to bring internet access outside of this world, the same internet that we’re so enjoying today, but bringing it into space so that any object in space becomes completely free.

indifferentiable from your networked printer and that might be a good or bad experience depending on how you’ve used network printers in the past and hopefully it’s been positive but generally it means that you’d be on your phone able to access any asset that’s in orbit in the same way that we so do here on earth and that was the grand vision.

And so we set out to do that in 2016. We raised a little bit of capital, [00:17:00] launched our first satellites that were proof of concept validation, allowed us to acquire spectrum rights. And then we moved into developing our product into 2018 and raised two successive financings. Thereafter, and today we’re a team of about 170 people split between the US, Canada, and Europe launching a constellation that’s entirely built in house here in Toronto, and that provides connectivity to the range of applications from human space flight to earth observation missions, to national scientific and defense oriented applications.

John Stackhouse: You and I were together recently, Mina, and I made an offhand reference that I thought Canada may need an Elon Musk to propel us with a bit more ambition into the space economy, and you glared at me. I needed no words to know what was on your mind, and that was that we have plenty of Elon Musk equivalents, you being, I think, one of them.

Tell us a bit about your ambition. How big can this get?

Mina Mintry: John, those are your words, not mine. So I think I’d say we have an [00:18:00] incredible opportunity here in Canada because we have the talent capacity to near do anything. We have highly motivated, highly skilled people that come out of university, just ripe for opportunity.

And if they’re provided that opportunity in Canada, we’ll see incredible growth inside of the space sector. If we don’t provide them that opportunity in Canada, they’ll actually just move. They’ll go to the US, they’ll go to Europe, they’ll go where they can match their ambition with their talents and be rewarded for it.

And so I think in Canada, we have an incredible moment where we can provide a massive space economy. We have a really unique talent base that could be put to work inside of this ecosystem. And we just need the right mission and ambition to support them.

Sonia Sennik: The European Space Agency awarded a group led by Kepler Communications a $36 million euro contract to develop a low Earth orbit optical relay network.

This is the first time ESA has awarded a contract to an [00:19:00] effort led by a Canadian company. Can you tell us a bit more about this project? And congratulations.

Mina Mintry: Thank you so much. I think this project follows a broader theme that we’re seeing, which is that governments are increasingly moving away from government owned, developed physical hardware, and moving towards procurement of services, where traditionally these government customers would go out and they procure the physical hardware, they’d specify a requirements list that was like an inch thick of paper, and you’d have to read every bit of that paperwork to deliver on a hardware good.

Now we’re seeing a shift in governments where they say, okay, you as a contractor, we’ll take on the liability. You’ll deliver the end service to me. And so we were successful in that opportunity because we are commercially led, commercially driven, developing our own technology, our own network. And the European Space Agency saw an opportunity to take advantage of our commercially developed infrastructure and fulfill their need just by buying [00:20:00] services instead of buying physical goods.

And so this is happening not just in Europe, but in the US and everywhere around the world. And giving governments access to capability on a timeline and a cost that otherwise would just not be possible. And so that is what ultimately led them to the decision to kind of say, okay, we’ll take advantage of the Kepler network.

We’ll use some of the services on there, but we have a few things we’d like you to fine tune. And that Delta design effort is very small for us. It allows us to move fast. And at the same time, provide something to the European Space Agency that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to gain access to.

John Stackhouse: Mina, you’ve been talking about low orbit satellites and in our previous episode with Chris Hadfield, we talked a bit about that, but also about going back to the moon and all the opportunities out there on the moon and beyond. That’s very exciting. It opens our aperture. to literally a universe of opportunities.

A lot of what’s going on in space is actually [00:21:00] almost within arm’s reach in low orbit. Give us a sense of what’s going on out there up in the sky that we can literally see.

Mina Mintry: So we’re actually seeing activity in space and three main regimes and beyond. So the three are low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, geostationary orbit, and beyond would include lunar activity or other exploration type missions that are predominantly government led.

Low earth orbit is where the majority of the activity is. That’s anywhere between, you know, 200 kilometers above the earth to about 2,000 kilometers above the earth. And there were Experiencing the range of Earth observation missions. So these are missions that want to observe the Earth or some property.

That could be the weather. That could be measuring the location of aircraft or shipping vessels. It could be taking just regular pictures. It could be radar data. We’re also seeing human spaceflight, and that’s predominantly being done in low earth orbit, so the International Space [00:22:00] Station is set to retire by 2031, if I’m not mistaken, and we’ll see the advent of private space stations that are meant to be replacing the International Space Station effort, and there’s a lot of interesting parties that are vying to do this, and partnering well outside the space sector to establish them.

I think Axiom Space is one of them that recently announced a partnership with Prada to develop their, their astronauts or the spacesuit. And in medium earth orbit, you’re seeing a lot of activity as well, where you’re looking at replacements for GPS, alternative pointing, navigation, and tracking mechanisms.

Geostationary is the historical most used orbit. And the reason why geostationary orbit is really interesting is because whenever you fly something in geostationary orbit, you stay fixed with respect to any point on the earth that you’re observing. So if I fly a geostationary satellite above Toronto, I will always see Toronto.

Cause it’s rotating at the same rate as the earth is rotation [00:23:00] and geostationary orbit is already experiencing some new and interesting technology applications where we’re seeing satellite servicing take place. There was actually commercial missions that went up to extend the life of geostationary satellites.

And then the exploration side of things where we have lunar mandates, we’re going to see, uh, Hopefully our first Canadian astronaut fly around the moon, Jeremy Hansen. We’re expecting the lunar gateway to take place, which is the next generation of the international space station, but hosted, you know, closer to the moon.

And there’s a whole range of both commercial and government led activities there, but in general, this is the result of democratized access to space.

Sonia Sennik: And Mina, as the number of satellites and missions increase, we hear a lot about space debris and managing all of the stuff that is now in lower Earth orbit or in orbit around planet Earth.

What do you think are the most pressing concerns for orbital management and sustainability?

Mina Mintry: Yeah, for us, the most pressing concern is really [00:24:00] uncontrolled space debris. Controlled space objects, or even large space objects. are really manageable. We’ll get notification of what’s called a conjunction.

That’s where there’s a probability that we will be within a defined orbital sphere of another object. And for large objects or controlled objects, there’s awesome operator to operator dialogue. That we can always see, and it cuts across geopolitical borders, where we have those conversations with near any operator who all have the same incentive, and it’s the safety of their space assets.

Where we struggle is for uncontrolled objects, so think like defunct bodies, and ones that are really small. There are some interesting recent news articles that talk to, you know, the micrometeorites, space debris, and the damage that can cause to solar arrays on board spacecraft, and that’s the type of stuff that we worry a little bit about.

Which is how do we build redundancy in our systems to make sure we can manage for those micrometeorites, which might be a loose bolt or a nut [00:25:00] or something that’s come off of a pre-existing satellite that is flying at 7. 4 kilometers a second and going through the body of your satellite.

Sonia Sennik: And it’s whipping around planet Earth effectively infinitum. So how much can we expect that we’ll have more conversations about management of this issue over the next few years?

Mina Mintry: Yeah, we’ll always have more conversations about it, but there’s two sort of real mitigating factors. One, space is really large. If you think of the surface area of the earth, we do okay to get billions of people.

In and around and can traffic manage individuals and in space. That’s just a much larger surface area covers the whole of Earth. And so space being so large really helps to mitigate for that problem. And then the second thing to keep in mind is building redundancy in your system so that they can tolerate one of your solar cells and of itself getting destroyed by micrometeorites and having redundancy to be able to manage it.

Regardless, we always want to have conversations about this because it’s an issue where you see increasing amounts of space debris, and we want to make sure we have [00:26:00] sustainable use of space for decades or hundreds of years to come.

Sonia Sennik: Mina, what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs aiming to grow their space ventures in this increasingly competitive landscape, but exciting landscape?

Mina Mintry: I think the main thing I would, I’d focus on is the persistence you need. In this role, because the sector, the domain, the talent wars, everything in between, it’s just that there’ll be day after day challenges. I’m sure this applies to any entrepreneurship, not just in the space field. If I were to give one piece of advice to any entrepreneur aspiring to be in the space sector or any other sectors, just persistence is the most important attribute.

Sonia Sennik: And yet he persisted. Mina, thank you so much for your time.

Mina Mintry: Thanks for having me.

John Stackhouse: A big thanks to Christine and Mina for sharing their perspectives. And if you didn’t get a chance to listen to episode one in this special series, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts and hear our extraordinary conversation with [00:27:00] Commander Chris Hadfield.

Sonia, it’s clear from both of these episodes that we’re at the dawn of a new space era and one that’s filled with potential as well as responsibility.

Sonia Sennik: Absolutely, John. Space is no longer just a destination. It is becoming a new platform for human innovation, imagination, and opportunity. We hope our episodes this week gave you insights into the opportunities ahead in the space economy.

Until next time, keep looking up and stay inspired.

John Stackhouse: And if you’re as passionate as we are about understanding the intersection of advanced technologies and real world applications, be sure to subscribe and leave a review. This has been Disruptors, an RBC podcast, in collaboration with Creative Destruction Lab.

I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Thanks for listening, and talk to you soon!

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here. Welcome to Disruptors and CDL: The Innovation Era, where we explore the transformative ideas and leaders shaping our world. And as always, I’m joined by my co host Sonia Sennik, CEO of Creative Destruction Lab. Sonia, it’s great to be with you today in person.

Sonia Sennik: Yeah, we’re kicking off CDL Space Session #1 for the 2024/25 program year.

And I’m beaming with excitement to talk to you about what’s happening in this industry.

John Stackhouse: I’m not sure that there are any astronauts around. In fact, actually, I see one across the hallway, so check that. But the lab and the broader Rotman School at the University of Toronto is buzzing with space entrepreneurs and innovators.

Sonia Sennik: There are a few astronauts and astronaut hopefuls in our orbit today, John. And we’re looking beyond our atmosphere to the rapidly evolving space economy. Rockets are being launched on a weekly basis and there’s never been a more exciting time to take a look at the major steps we are taking towards making [00:01:00] access to space more affordable and what that means for us here on planet Earth.

John Stackhouse: In fact, there’s so much to talk about when it comes to space that we’re going to devote two episodes to the topic, both recorded here at CDL Space Stream. And our real focus is going to be the economy of space. What are the opportunities out there? And how will space transform every business and every sector down here?

Sonia Sennik: John, living in a world where there are reusable rockets has profoundly transformed the opportunities for innovation. Think about it this way. In the 1970s, the cost to get one kilogram of water to space was about 20,000. Today, it’s closer to 2,000. And if SpaceX’s Starship hits its target of 20 per kilogram, everything changes.

Whether it’s launching new machines, robotics, or satellites to space, or testing healthcare technologies in space.

John Stackhouse: You’ve got a great motto that every company is a space company, and in episode two, we’re going to get to know some of [00:02:00] the most interesting Canadian space companies that are testing all sorts of frontiers.

But first, we’re going to set the stage with where we’re at in space exploration and what opportunities are coming pretty fast at us, especially in the economy. And I can’t think of a better person to do that than Commander Chris Hadfield, who’s our first guest today on the special edition of Disruptors and CDL.

Sonia Sennik: Commander Chris Hadfield, of course, is the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station, and the first Canadian to do a spacewalk. He founded the CDL Space Stream with us in 2018 to start engaging with startups from all over the world who have new ideas that will drive the future of the space economy.

He’s also not so bad at guitar and singing. Commander Hadfield, welcome to the podcast.

John Stackhouse: Good to be talking with you. Chris, it’s great to see you. You took millions of Canadians, I suspect, to space virtually, and you’re still trying to take us to space in very different ways. Maybe you can frame the conversation a bit [00:03:00] for us in terms of what we should be thinking when we think about space today.

Chris Hadfield: I think one of the best ways to get a sense of framing is to look at historical comparators. And so when you invent a new, let’s say, transportation capability, then how does that change the fundamental human condition and how do we all start to incorporate that? We dreamed about flight for hundreds of thousands of years, and then suddenly in 1903 the Wright Brothers created a vehicle where people could start to leave the earth.

And it was a whole foreign idea and almost an inconceivable idea. And when an airplane flew over in 1910, it was a huge local event. It was, you know, the magnificent men and their flying machines and all that other stuff. Now, people hardly think about it. And they were kind of irritated if your plane’s 10 minutes late or if you didn’t know what you know.

type of peanuts you got on board. And so we are in the early stages of a major redefinition of a new mode of transportation. How is it that [00:04:00] we are going to incorporate access to space for our robots, for our virtual presence, but also for our human presence over the next generation? When I was born, no one had flown in space.

All of this has happened in my lifetime. So it’s, it’s incredibly new. And the technology. That gets people safely to space and back is accelerating and accelerating right now, like never before, so that now a private citizen for the price of a luxury car can fly in space and people buy luxury cars all the time, how that’s going to play out, how people are going to incorporate that with the regulatory environment is going to be, and then what the human applications of that are vacations on the moon, vacations on a space station, vacations on Mars.

It all sounds fanciful. So did air vacations one long lifetime ago. So since I was lucky enough to go when we were the first people to fly in space, I wanted people to get a sense of it. What’s it like to live on a space station? What, what’s your day to day? What are [00:05:00] the risks that go along with it? But also what are the beautiful parts of it?

What are the advantages of it? What are the things you see that you could never see any other way? And I really look at all technology that way. There are downsides to it. How does this allow you to see and do things that were otherwise impossible? And Spaceflight’s just a wonderful, visible, visceral version of that technology.

Sonia Sennik: We’ve been working together for many years when you founded the CDL Space Stream with us here in 2018. And I remember the first year that we were getting applications. It was really tough to find companies that were focused on space entrepreneurship. Fast forward six years later, we have more applications for the program than we know what to do with.

I’d be really interested on your reflections, Chris, on just the evolution of the types of technologies you’ve been seeing over the last six years through the stream.

Chris Hadfield: Yeah, it’s still a new thing. People have sort of been raised with the fact that space is a rare and esoteric and a very difficult to access thing, and it’s not normal [00:06:00] in daily lives.

But if you give people just a moment to reflect, going, oh, well, wait a minute. When, I came to this thing today, I was using, My phone in order to navigate for me, and I checked the weather before I left home this morning, and I used the internet, and gosh, it turns out the internet is coming directly from space to my house, and so it’s becoming much more integrated.

And that’s not happening through hoping and through magic, it’s happening because people recognize, hey, if we could, for a reasonable price, put things into orbit around the world, what can we do with that? Or, if there are these things that are already in orbit, what can we do with that information and apply it in a way that becomes a viable business?

And that realization, it’s like a wave that’s been slowly building out in the ocean. And then as it gets closer to shore, the wave gets bigger and more and more people can ride it. And that’s where we are right now in the space stream [00:07:00] is people are recognizing what reusable spaceships have done to the cost of access to space that now suddenly there’s constellations of thousands of things up there.

And we have some amazing applications coming through in space medicine, remote medicine, things like earthquake prediction, but until you make that technological beachhead and then make that part of people’s common understanding and expectation of what’s happening, then no one’s going to spend any time thinking about it.

But we’re at that moment in history, and I think Creative Destruction Lab has been really pressing in recognizing, hey, let’s be on the start of that, and let’s start encouraging these space businesses that have been started here.

Sonia Sennik: I’ve been saying to John, every company is a space company. And one of the examples you gave there of the intersection of healthcare and space, we had a company last year in our Cancer Stream called Encapsulate. They created a tumor on a chip so that you could test treatments and therapeutics, [00:08:00] but they actually partnered with the International Space Station to test their tumor on a chip in microgravity.

And they were able to get tremendous results because the impact of microgravity on the actual tumor and the behavior of the cells was very different. Can you speak a little bit to the opportunity of testing healthcare treatments and therapeutics in space?

Chris Hadfield: Sure. There’s a couple of things. One is just what you just referred to, the straight environment itself.

If you’re trying to grow tissue or human cells or some, some part of the body, gravity is a big omnipresent downer. Yeah. Gravity is a downer as the line of the day. Gravity is an invisible heel grinding us into the ground all the time. And so if you’re trying to build something subtle or delicate, it’s really difficult to do on the surface, you know, on your petri dish. It’s not going to be very three dimensional. And so there’s been considerable success in building three dimensional human cell driven organisms on board the space station and protein crystal growth and that sort of thing because you just [00:09:00] can’t have a perpetually gravity free environment on earth.

So it provides it from a pure physical point of view. And there’s a lot of people thinking about how can we apply that and now that our launch costs are down, can we put up some sort of automated facility up there that creates something that is impossible or extremely difficult to build on Earth?

A bunch of people are working on that. The other is you often invent things on the frontiers of human experience. If everybody’s comfortable and everyone’s got enough food to eat and everybody’s going home satisfied every day, your desire to create something new is minimized. But if you’re out on the edge, then you recognize, man, we’re pushing the capabilities that we have.

And so let’s, let’s really try and understand how we could optimize given that a lot of our constraints are abnormal out here and the space station and space vehicles and the space environment provide that for us as well. It pushes people to rethink it because we’re in this new environment [00:10:00] and necessity becoming the mother of invention.

If you change the necessity because of the environment you’ve gotten into. Then your pace of invention comes up. And so the space station over its last, gosh, 24 years has proven to do that with the thousands of experiments that have happened on board. And there are physiological changes to the human body.

When you take away gravity, it almost mimics a lot of things to do with aging. You get a hardening of the arteries, arteriosclerosis, you get a shrinking of the heart. You get muscle wastage, you get osteoporosis, weakening of the bones. You get a suppression of the human immune system. All those things are happening.

And so it’s sort of the combination of the other two things. Here you are in this weird new environment and weird things are happening and they’re happening because of lack of gravity. You’re also get heavy radiation. And so now let’s use this as sort of a historical test bed to try and better understand how the human body works as an organism.

John Stackhouse: But then also what we can do to improve human health, not just for [00:11:00] astronauts, but for

everybody. Listening to you, Chris, you make the space station sound like Creative Destruction Lab. It’s CDL in orbit. But it also sounds kind of out of reach for a lot of people. Deep science is going on there, as it should, but not really accessible to Main Street.

How do we rethink space generally to connect with? Main Street and the mainstream of our economy and our society.

Chris Hadfield: Yeah, I mean, if you view the International Space Station as a laboratory, which it is primarily, it’s a big laboratory. We’re running like 200 experiments and everything else is just supporting the laboratory.

Well, then it’s sort of like every laboratory. I mean, there are laboratories all across Canada, and most people don’t even know they exist. And they’re doing necessary, interesting, worthwhile work, but people drive by it in their car and they don’t even know it’s there. So you need to look at it a little bit in what is the purpose of that laboratory and what is a measure of success for the [00:12:00] laboratory.

If you look at some of the agricultural research laboratories, of which there are several in Canada, if they are finding a new strain of wheat or, or growing better apples or whatever, then okay. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody needs to know about it on a daily basis. You know, they’re just doing their job.

And there’s a lot of that on the space station as well. And there’s a lot of that at Creative Destruction Lab. It’s a laboratory as the third word in the name says, it’s how do you take a bunch of variables, put them under an unusual set of circumstances to produce something they didn’t use to exist. To answer your question directly, John, if people don’t know something exists, it can never affect their thinking.

It won’t affect their decision making and it won’t allow them to apply their own creative abilities to contribute to it. So even though a laboratory may be functioning well, there is definitely a huge strength in letting people know enough about it that it, sparks a [00:13:00] curiosity and maybe they then want to know not just more about that laboratory, but how to support that laboratory or shoot if there’s really cool research on understanding the earth’s ionosphere, a high upper levels of our atmosphere and how it protects us from the universe.

If we’re doing experiments on the space station, someone might have not realized that, but going, Oh, wow, well, that’s, you know, I love the northern lights and I’m really curious as to how it protects us from meteorites and high energy particles from the sun. And, oh, that’s happening on the space station.

And because you have let people know the type of things this laboratory is doing, then people might say, you know, I was looking what to study in university, or I was looking what to do my undergraduate research thesis on, or I was looking for a book to read in the library this weekend. And so definitely you need to do the core function, and that is keep a safe space station.

And have it function as a laboratory, but there’s definitely an important piece of showing people what it’s doing of the outreach of the demonstration of its [00:14:00] capabilities so that you can not just take advantage of the brains that are working on it right now, but all the brains you can borrow and everybody else that’s thinking about it remotely.

Sonia Sennik: Maybe I can ask you a bit about something we can all see, which is the moon. With the advancement of robotics and surveillance and communications, we’ve been able to see more of the moon, but we’ve still only seen a very tiny bit. How important is the moon economy as part of the space economy going to be in the next five to 10 years?

Chris Hadfield: The moon is hugely important in human culture. It’s where our months came from. It’s part of our vernacular. It’s part of werewolves and all kinds of stuff, right? And it’s omnipresent in the night sky. And when there’s a Lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse, it’s huge and Stonehenge and all the rest of it.

You know, the moon and the sun are hugely important, but it was theoretical. It was unattainable until not very long ago. You know, when I was a kid, very first robots went there and then people started going there, [00:15:00] but it was still extremely difficult to get to. But now, because of 50 or 60 years of progress, our rocket ships are a lot better and simpler, and therefore, when something’s simpler and safer, it becomes much cheaper.

Suddenly, access to the moon is no longer an extremely rare event of a superpower, but it’s going to be like a place that people can go. You know, like Antarctica. Almost impossible to get to 110 years ago, and now thousands of people live there. The moon is different than most people imagine. If you were to peel it, like an onion or an apple, and lay the peeled moon out on the world, it’d be bigger than Africa, which is a huge continent.

It kind of gets destroyed by how we draw maps, but it’s huge. So, it’s as if we suddenly not just discovered an enormous new continent on earth, but now we can get there. And the really peculiar thing about the moon that is brand new in human history is it has no life. [00:16:00] There is no biosphere. There is no biome.

There’s no life to disrupt. The moon is a pure geological resource. It’s just four and a half billion years of the evolution of rock and chemicals and untapped geology. And we have literally just scratched the surface in a few places. We really don’t know. We’ve discovered vast reserves of water on the moon in the last 10 or 15 years on the order of 400 billion liters of water in the permanently shaded parts of the moon.

And so we’re trying to figure out what to do with this new capability. If you suddenly discovered something bigger than Africa, where you don’t disrupt any life, and you don’t really know what’s there, exploration and surveying is obviously the next thing to do. That’s what’s going on. Combination of people and machines.

Doing the surveying. And there are some things that machines do way better than people, but most of the surveying we do on earth, [00:17:00] we look at all the data and then when we really want to understand it, we send some people there to go look and that’s where we are with the moon, we’re going to do a whole bunch of robotic stuff.

And then we’re going to send some people there to go look, and perhaps as a parallel to Antarctica as well, initially, we just sent the boldest of explorers and a lot of them died trying to just get there or stay there. Shackleton or Scott or whomever, but as the technology got better, as we admitted steamships, and then airplanes became safer and safer and more and more people, and then people could start to live there and then start to winter over at the South Pole, one of the least hospitable places on earth.

And that’s common now. We all just sort of accept: “oh yeah, people live at the South Pole.” Of course they do. That’s what’s happening on the moon right now. A fascinating scientific place, a poorly understood and enormous mineralogical and geological resource, and a place that people can now start to go live and stay.

We’re at that moment in history and it’s being enabled by creative technology, but also a sort of an innate unquenchable human [00:18:00] curiosity. And the opportunity that comes when you cross those two things over.

John Stackhouse: We’ve been talking about how we can use space to disrupt ourselves, creatively, constructively. How can Canada take advantage of that? What do we have? What should we have to play a leading role in this next gen?

Chris Hadfield: If you look at how space travel is going to unfold, every milligram that got to space has been sacred up until now because the rocket technology was so primitive.

There was a sort of an unattainability of it just driven by the fact of how complex and therefore how dangerous and expensive it was to get to space. But what’s happening now is the cost of access to space is radically dropping because of improvements in rocket technology and miniaturization of computers and 3D positioning through GPS satellites and all the rest of that.

They’re all feeding together. So if we can now get to space more cheaply, [00:19:00] then what does that open up for us as a species and as a planet? And what subset of that might Canada be able to take advantage of? And we’ve been asking ourselves that question since right after Sputnik in 1957, when the Soviets launched the very first satellite during the international geophysical year, some smart forward thinking Canadians said, wow, we can put Satellites in space.

Well, let’s look at some Canadian problems and try and use our best technology and build something that will take advantage of that. And so we built a little research satellite to look at Northern lights and upper atmosphere and telecommunications, the ionosphere. It’s called Alouette, third country on earth and space.

And then we thought we’re a huge country with a small population. We could use the high ground to communicate with each other. And so. We built telecommunications satellites in the 60s and early 70s that led the world in telecommunications. So it was taking advantage of a new technological capability and serving a Canadian purpose.

And then we thought, what if we could radar map our whole country? [00:20:00] I mean, think about David Thompson, you know, a couple hundred years ago, trying to map all of Canada. One guy with a compass and a piece of paper, and he did amazing things. But we can map more of Canada in eight minutes from space than he did in a lifetime, just because of the high ground and the improvements of technology.

And so putting up a radar mapping satellite is another area that Canada led with Radarsat and then the subsequent constellations. But then when people go and we’ve been living in space now on the space station for almost a quarter century, what technologies do we need and what can Canada provide? We thought early on, let’s build robots, robotics, and we’ve been the world leader in space robotics, especially for human applications since the space shuttle first flew in the early 1980s.

Canadarm1, Canadarm2, and now Canadarm3 for going to the moon. That’s also a Canadian proven space technology. And then we have done a lot of the world leading [00:21:00] work in aerospace medicine. Canada invented the G suit. Canadian researchers have done so much of the work to make human flight safer and better understood.

And pushing back what all the rules should be on how we can make flight safe for people that spend a lot of time flying airplanes. And so extending our aerospace medicine expertise into space. And we’re doing that with the deep space medical challenge and things like that. And so I think we can extrapolate all of those into the future.

And part of what we look at Creative Destruction Lab is obviously bringing in all the leading technologies of the world. But as a Canadian, I’m extremely parochial and interested in what Canadian inventors and ideas have come up with And what of those ideas can either build on the previous Canadian technologies or are trying to step into an area that we’ve never been into before that will serve the global space community, but will serve the Canadian economy and Canadian needs at the same time.

John Stackhouse: You’re not only one of the most knowledgeable people I know [00:22:00] about all sorts of things, but one of the most curious. You’re constantly learning, which is inspiring. I’m curious what you’ve learned recently about space that can maybe inspire all of us.

Chris Hadfield: Some of the great big questions in space are the ones that I’m most intrigued by.

Obviously, what happened 14 billion years ago? We know there was something cataclysmic happened. We call it the Big Bang because we have the remnants of an explosion that happened 14 billion years ago. There’s all sorts of evidence for that. Nobody knows what happened before the Big Bang. We don’t understand what drove it.

But that’s quite intriguing to try and understand the very fundamental nature of the history of life and everything that went before it. And with the greatest telescopes that we’ve just built, that Canada has been part of, like the James Webb Telescope, we are now directly seeing early stars and galaxies from first generation after the big bang from over 13 billion years ago we can see the light from those [00:23:00] galaxies so we’re getting closer and closer to truly understanding the very origins of everything that we know on board the international space station with the alpha magnetic spectrometer a great big combine magnets and sensors it samples not just little atoms, but the things that make up atoms, sub atomic particles to try and understand how does matter work?

What is dark energy and dark matter? If you look inside an atom, there’s all those little things, the muons and the leptons and the bosons and things, which we’ve given names to, but we really don’t understand. And we’re starting to figure that out. What is the combined actual physics model that allows the universe to exist?

And we don’t know where gravity comes from. We can measure gravity, but we don’t have any way to manipulate gravity. And we’re not even sure that you can. But we didn’t even discover the electron until just over a hundred years ago, 120 years ago. And think how manipulating electrons [00:24:00] has radically changed life of being able to control electricity.

And maybe it’s impossible with something like gravity, but it used to be impossible with electricity. And so to me, pushing the very edges of what we understand that has allowed us to thrive as a species and really significantly in the last few hundred years to improve the quality of life of humanity, like 000 year history, we need to be responsible about it.

When you get a new toy, you tend to play with the new toy too much. The new toy becomes part of your normal and you build a system around it. The new technologies, the industrial revolution, we’ve reaped the benefits of it. Huge increase in population quality. We now need to make that sustainable. So how do we push all of our technologies so that we can understand how all this works together so that we can make 10 billion, make that sustainable [00:25:00] for the entire planet with a good quality of life.

Yeah. And to me, so many of the things we’re working on, whether it’s at Creative Destruction Lab or generically as a species, that’s what I’m most curious about. And how can I, with my particular set of experiences and ideas, how can I be part of a team of people that are doing that? And to me, that’s one of the greatest draws of organizations like Creative Destruction Lab and the people that it attracts.

Because it’s a bunch of folks trying to work on those great big problems with curious minds, but also with the drive and the unquenchable desire to get to those answers and incorporate them into our new normal. To me, that’s the most exciting thing going on in the world, and I’m super happy to be part of that.

John Stackhouse: I love it. I’ve got chills going up my spine. But I think what I’m taking away is that if you’re curious, there is no final frontier, even in space.

Chris Hadfield: Oh, no, curiosity is, here’s an interesting thing I read recently, we have taught, uh, some of the higher apes to do sign language, [00:26:00] and they’ve learned, some of the brighter ones, they’ve learned like 200 words, but they’ve never asked a question, and I found that really interesting.

They have an existential existence, and they’ve never had sort of a philosophical question. And I think that’s what truly separates us is our curiosity and our recognition that I want to take care of my hierarchical needs and I need to be fed and you know, all those things. But what really gives me not only a different advantage and perspective, but what really drives us and gives me satisfaction.

is my ability to imagine and therefore my ability to be curious and to try and understand things even better than we’ve understood them so far. That’s what gets me up every morning. I’m just burning with curiosity. How does everything work and how can I maybe help contribute to us all understanding it better?

Sonia Sennik: So imagination and curiosity is the uniquely human compass.

Chris Hadfield: It’s definitely what floats our boat. Whether it always gives us a direction, I don’t know. [00:27:00] But when I’m talking to a new person, as soon as I can get to our shared mutual curiosity about things, to me, that’s where the conversation always deepens.

The things we already understand, that’s just the platform that you’re standing on. But the stuff you’re looking at and wondering about, that’s the very essence of joyful discovery and recognition and progress forwards. And so, yeah, I think curiosity and wonder. Are the most childlike and also the absolutely most necessary of the human traits.

John Stackhouse: Chris, thank you for the conversation. Thank you for your curiosity. Never, never let it go.

Chris Hadfield: Great. Well, I was wondering what you were going to ask me about. Good to talk to you both.

Sonia Sennik: Thanks, Chris.

John Stackhouse: That was an extraordinary conversation. Sonia, what was one of the big takeaways for you?

Sonia Sennik: The biggest takeaway for me was just how much we have to learn about the moon and how important it’s going to be in this next phase of space exploration.

And the way Commander Hadfield framed it as, you know, imagine if you discovered a [00:28:00] new continent with no pre-existing biosphere or life to disrupt, but incredible resources. And to think that we’ve only explored a sliver of it? There’s just so much for us to learn.

John Stackhouse: I was reminded how the Big Bang is not a theory.

We know a lot about it and we’re learning lots and lots more and we’re getting close to answering some of those truly existential questions, which for us as a species driven by curiosity is so animating.

Sonia Sennik: And here on planet Earth, we have so many imaginative creators building new technologies for the next generation of space and the space economy. We’re going to meet two of them in part two. So get your space suits and set your phasers to fun. We’ll see you next time.

John Stackhouse: So join us for part two of our special series on space, the next frontier of innovation. I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: And this is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. Talk to you [00:29:00] soon.