The most important issue is capacity. Canada embraced extreme neo-liberalism about 30 years ago just as the rest of the world was being much more hands-on. It was like a pilot where the skies got foggy and a mountain range was imminent, but we had the strategy of taking instruments off our planes while other countries updated their instruments.
Our number one job is to build the capacity of our civil service to actually craft these programs, to challenge bad ideas. I'm deeply concerned. We saw things like superclusters done with no IP or data strategy, and now there's just more money. We created an FDI agency with no analytical framework. We have no IP strategies for the billions in research funding. We do these research funds where we fund foreign financial companies and vaccine companies and so on, but it doesn't go to Canada getting the good jobs and getting the wealth effects. These are economic and non-economic, and it's called dual use.
We put ourselves in a hole through a strange orthodoxy that no one else in the rest of the world did over the past 30 years, and the first rule of holes is to stop digging.