Surranna Sandy
Reflections from The Globe and Mail’s Intersect26, Toronto, April 22, 2026
On April 22, I was in the room at The Globe and Mail’s Intersect26 in Toronto. Across a full day of conversation with trade negotiators, bank CEOs, premiers, defence experts, and civic leaders, one theme kept reasserting itself with unusual consistency: Canada has the assets. The question is whether we can act on them.
That is a harder question than it sounds.
The day opened with federal Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc joining by video from Ottawa and walking through the state of CUSMA negotiations with characteristic care. What struck me was not the technical detail, though there was plenty of it. It was a single phrase he used almost in passing: that prolonged uncertainty is itself becoming a structural problem.
He was right, and it deserves more attention than it typically gets. Even when agreements remain nominally in place, instability changes behaviour. It reshapes business decisions, delays investment, disrupts supply chains. Capital does not wait for clarity to arrive. It moves to wherever clarity already exists. And Canada, right now, is generating too much hesitation and not enough confidence.
LeBlanc was frank about the October 2024 moment when Canada and the United States were exchanging term sheets and came close to a deal that would have significantly reduced sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, and automotive goods. That deal did not close. The conversations were interrupted. What we are left with is the ongoing cost of that gap: industries operating under tariffs that have fundamentally broken their business models, companies like Algoma Steel that absorbed $225 million in tariff costs last year alone, and are now scrambling to reorient supply chains that took decades to build.
The Algoma CEO, speaking later in the day, was precise about what that reorientation actually looks like. Not a pivot. Not a reset. A slow, expensive, uncertain rerouting of production toward Canadian needs, including plates for wind towers, steel for bridges, and submarine supply, while trying to survive the immediate shock. He said what many in the room were thinking: the integrated supply chain between Canada and the United States was built over thirty to forty years. It cannot be unwound in twelve months. What is needed is not just diversification but survival, and the government needs to be active, not just attentive.
Pace was the word that kept returning throughout the day, and not as a minor operational frustration. It was framed, repeatedly and seriously, as a competitiveness issue.
Canada has told itself a flattering story about its slowness for a long time. What may have started out as thoughtful and consultative has become mired in delay, drift and duplication and calcified into something that looks like process but functions like paralysis.
The defence procurement conversation made this even starker. One speaker noted that in Ukraine, the cycle from identifying a threat to developing, iterating, and deploying a new drone technology takes four to six weeks. Canada’s average defence procurement cycle, from requirement to delivery, runs over ten years. That is not a gap. That is a different universe. And it is not sustainable in a world where the pace of threat has permanently accelerated.
The new Defence Investment Agency is a recognition that the sequential, three-ministry procurement process is not fit for purpose. Whether it will actually change the speed of decisions, whether it has the authority, the people, and genuinely different rules, remains to be seen. Healthy scepticism is warranted. Good intentions housed in familiar structures tend to produce familiar results.
CIBC’s newly appointed CEO Harry Cullen offered something I found genuinely clarifying. He has spent significant time abroad and said that what strikes him, returning to Canada, is how strong the country’s reputation still is internationally. Stable. Reliable. Resource-rich. A serious place.
But then he said something that cut through the optimism: capital has been flowing out of Canada, both financial and human, because we have not yet fully realized the potential everyone agrees we have. Young Canadians are making rational decisions about where to build their careers and their lives. Businesses with North American operations are directing growth capital south. Not because Canada is broken, but because Canada keeps making itself harder than it needs to be.
That is a different kind of problem than the ones that get the most attention. It is not dramatic. There is no single villain. It is the cumulative effect of friction, internal trade barriers, duplicated regulatory processes, slow approvals, provincial fragmentation, that adds up, quietly, to a country that is harder to operate in than its advantages justify.
One of the most frustrating observations of the day was that many of Canada’s biggest constraints are not mysterious. They are not hidden. They are not new. We know most of what slows us down. The issue is whether we are prepared to remove it.
John Bolton, appearing in conversation later in the day, offered a perspective that was uncomfortable in the right way. He said plainly that Canada has not met its NATO defence spending commitments for a long time, and that when polite, sustained American pressure to change that produced nothing, it took Donald Trump’s aggressive approach to finally move European allies. His implied question: what does that say about how Canada responds to pressure versus urgency?
It is worth sitting with. Canada tends to move when the crisis is immediate and undeniable. The challenge now is that many of the things that will determine Canada’s position in ten years, energy infrastructure, defence capacity, domestic industrial capability, trade diversification, require decisions made well before the urgency becomes undeniable. Resilience has to be built before it is needed. Countries that wait to discover they need it tend to discover it too late.
The final voice of the day that stayed with me was Mohammed Hashim of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. In a room that had spent most of the day focused on capital, procurement, pipelines, and trade, he made a point that deserves to land with the same weight as everything else: the Canada we are building has to be one more people can actually participate in.
This is not decorative. It is not a soft counterpoint to the hard economics. It is part of the same argument. A country where younger people feel structurally excluded from housing, from economic opportunity, from a sense that the system is oriented toward their future, is a country that will lose talent, erode trust, and eventually lose the political legitimacy it needs to do hard things. Growth that does not carry people with it is not durable. Execution at scale requires a population that believes the project is worth executing.
By the end of the day, the question Intersect26 kept circling was not whether Canada has strengths. It does. Not whether Canada has opportunities. It does. The question was whether Canada is capable of acting on them in time, and with enough speed, coordination, and follow-through to matter.
Canada has spent a long time relying on a story about itself: stable, resource-rich, well-regarded, full of promise. Much of that story is still true. But in a tougher, faster, more contested world, those qualities do not carry the same weight if they are not matched by execution.
At some point, a country has to do more than describe its advantages. It has to prove it can use them.
That is what the day brought into focus. Canada’s problem is no longer vision. It is execution.