The Weekly Wrap: Canada’s future lies in both resources and resourcefulness

Chambers made a crucial point: the real key to unlocking higher levels of growth—what he called “outsized growth”—is cultivating entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and innovation. We need more Shopifys and Wealthsimples just as much as we need more mines and pipelines. What was refreshing about Chambers’ message was his “all of the above” perspective. For too long, our economic debates have been stuck in either/or thinking. Justin Trudeau famously said he wanted Canada to be known for its “resourcefulness, not its resources.” The Conservatives, by contrast, have sometimes leaned too heavily into the opposite framing—over-indexing on resource extraction as the sole engine of growth. But this is a false choice. We need both. This theme also came up in my soon-to-be-released conversation with Lucy Hargreaves, the president of Build Canada, a non-profit that works with entrepreneurs and founders to advance smart policy reform. In less than a year, Build Canada has injected real urgency and dynamism into these conversations. It couldn’t come at a better time. Our economy is stagnant. Productivity is low. Investment is weak. And alarmingly, we’re seeing high levels of business exits and not enough new firm formation. The engine of entrepreneurship is sputtering, and many prospective entrepreneurs or founders are relocating to the U.S. Reversing these trends requires a new policymaking mindset. Public policy should generally start from the premise that entrepreneurial success is worth celebrating and market-led wealth creation is a social good. As Chambers said, we need to send a clear signal: Canada is open to entrepreneurs and risk-takers. That starts with an “all of the above” growth agenda that boosts resource development and entrepreneurship. Our future depends on both. Toronto’s condo glut shows what bad planning leads to One of the challenges with policy and politics is that there’s often a lag between when a problem emerges and when policymakers fully grasp its causes and coalesce around a response. Canada’s housing affordability crisis began in earnest more than a decade ago, yet it’s only recently that we’ve come to a consensus on its underlying causes—namely, the interplay of excessive demand and inadequate supply—and how governments ought to respond. One can certainly argue that the policy response remains insufficient. But at least we’re now having the right conversation. The problem is that while we’ve been catching up to one crisis, another has taken shape—particularly in Toronto’s condo market. According to a recent report by Altus Group, just 42 new condos were sold in the City of Toronto in May. That astonishingly low figure points to a market that’s increasingly underwater. How did we get here, and how do we reconcile it with our broader diagnosis of a housing market with too little supply? A big part of the explanation is that developers overbuilt small, one-bedroom condos because that’s what the planning rules allowed. Municipal land-use and zoning policies made it far easier to build high-rise towers than detached, semi-detached, or even family-sized condo units. The result is an oversupply of small units, just as rising interest rates, elevated construction costs, and buyer uncertainty have caused demand to dry up. So we now face a paradox: just as we’ve come to a consensus on how to respond to too few homes, we now must also confront the opposite challenge—too many of the wrong kind of homes. What happens next? Projects will be paused. Land values may fall. Some developers may not survive. The market will need to reprice and reallocate capital toward the types of homes people actually want and can afford. It’s bound to be painful, but it’s ultimately necessary. Public policy should resist calls to intervene too heavily in this correction. But governments can help by accelerating approvals for more diverse housing types and ensuring that financing conditions don’t further constrain well-planned and viable projects. The key point is that our understanding of housing policy must once again become more nuanced. Policymakers must be capable of addressing both the long-term supply shortage and the short-term dislocations now emerging in places like Toronto’s condo sector. We cannot afford to take another decade to figure it out. Ottawa shouldn’t be in the business of book prize bailouts The Carney government has set out ambitious targets to control the growth of federal spending that reportedly extend beyond government departments and apply to Crown corporations like Via Rail and the CBC. But the real test of its fiscal discipline may come in how it responds to a funding request from a national book prize. The Giller Prize has existed for three decades. It’s an admirable civil society initiative that celebrates excellence in Canadian fiction. Until recently, it was funded entirely through private support, including a longstanding sponsorship from Scotiabank. That relationship ended last year, reportedly due to pressure from pro-Palestinian activists who criticized the bank’s investments in Israel. It’s an absurd reason rooted in the increasingly aggressive demands of anti-Zionist (and often antisemitic) activism. The result is that The Giller Prize is now seeking $5 million in federal funding to keep the award alive. Let’s be clear: The Giller Prize is good. It’s worthwhile. It contributes to Canadian literary culture. But that’s not enough to justify public support. Policymaking should be guided by principled criteria—market failures, positive externalities, and public goods. The Giller Prize, for all its value, doesn’t meet these tests. It’s been sustained by civil society for years. And many good and worthwhile initiatives continue to be. So why should the federal government step in? Why, to put it plainly, should my grandfather in Thunder Bay, living on a fixed income, be taxed to support a gala literary event in Toronto? There’s no sound policy rationale that says he should. This isn’t a knock on The Giller Prize. It’s a broader critique of how we justify government spending. If the Carney government is serious about controlling spending, it should start by declining this request—regretfully, respectfully, but unequivocally.