Industry and Technology Committee on April 30th, 2026

[Jim Balsillie]

Would Bill C-27 be good? Bill C-27 was written for the benefit of Silicon Valley. The idea that it wouldn't incorporate human rights into it and this spaghetti mixture of it....

I participate with the national security drafts in Washington with the GOP, and I can follow and understand it very clearly. This is a spaghetti mix of diversion. I'm quite sophisticated in these matters, and it took me three months with six experts to pull apart Bill C-27 and get my head around it. My Centre for Digital Rights wrote a 107-page critique of how you have to fix it.

If you want to do this stuff, stop the charade and let the erosion and the harms carry on: lose the culture of Quebec, hurt our children, weaken our economy and be vulnerable to security and predation. Let's stop the performance.

We all love this country, and we're all trying to make it better. As Professor McKelvey said, we have to go to substance and not performative stuff, because the world sneaks through the cracks of the performance.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you, Mr. Ste‑Marie.

Ms. DeRidder, welcome back to the committee. You have five minutes.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here.

Mr. Balsillie, thank you for joining us. It's great to have you again at another committee. We can ask some important questions. Your expertise is always welcome.

You mentioned that Canada has huge potential in the technological era and that our economy could really be stimulated through it. I agree completely. Innovation hubs like Canada's innovation capital, Kitchener Centre, are huge contributors to that. We also have these amazing minds coming out of our universities, who are turning into entrepreneurs and building our innovation.

Where is the government missing the mark here?

[Jim Balsillie]

There are two things.

Number one is that the government's thinking is rooted in the 1970s. There's no capacity for the contemporary realities. It doesn't understand how to govern this and that it works very differently. The research funding, the FDI programs and all of these things are not attuned to contemporary realities.

Since you talked about the hub here, we have to accept that over the past 10 years, for start-ups out of places like Waterloo with Canadian founders, it used to be that about 70% of them stayed in Canada. Now just over 30% of them stay in Canada. If any of you in business were losing 70% of your new customers every year, that would be a crisis. We have to start to relate to these people and talk to them and find out what's going on, why they're leaving and what the problems are.

Again, we can't do performative stuff, because the people just leave. I spend a big part of my time in philanthropy trying to encourage people to stay in Canada and build in Canada, and it's far too hard to make that case when, quite frankly, they're getting wind blown in their faces.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

I agree completely. I'm going to circle back to that, but I want to ask a question about trade, because you did focus quite a bit on trade in your opening statement.

As we head into this CUSMA review, do you personally see the U.S.'s broader strategy as shaping the terms of this negotiation to maintain advantage over our tech and data sectors?

[Jim Balsillie]

One hundred per cent. We're not prepared at all, not in the slightest. It's purely performative.

I've been involved in this. The U.S. now has a thousand experts on 26 committees by law of Congress, and they've been preparing. When we got into USMCA.... Imagine 26 committees. There are a million words in the USMCA, and you will not find the words “free trade” in it. Each of them gets 40,000 words for their sector to say what they want. They've spent six or seven years preparing, and we show up with an ad hoc group saying, “Yikes.” Then we run the clock, and they say, “Either sign it, or we're pulling the plug.”

Do you remember how that all happened? I wrote a piece saying this is going to be bad, and they've weaponized ambiguity, because they can restart in six and a half years. Our economy has diverged since then. They've put us over a barrel. We weren't prepared, and there is no preparation right now. I know the people who are in it. What will our response be when they put their next million words into it?

Again, we had a 1970s conception that it's hands-off, get out of the way, let it flow, because it's all shared. In fact, it's a win-lose, landlord-tenant situation, and we had no strategies to be the landlord, so we progressively became the tenant. We have so much potential and so many blessings, but now we're vulnerable to leverage in every aspect of our sovereign, democratic nation.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Have you personally been in conversations with the government to sound the alarm here and say, “Get prepared because this is what we're seeing?”

[Jim Balsillie]

Many times.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Have you been listened to at all in any way?

[Jim Balsillie]

It's not that they're adversarial. It's that they don't understand.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Period...?

[Jim Balsillie]

Period.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Okay.

[Jim Balsillie]

I'm trying to tell you that the government is locked in a bygone era. That's why I use the metaphor of the stroke. If you've ever read books on strokes, you can try to persuade someone they have a right arm and they don't believe you. “No, I have no right arm. It's not there.”

I could go chapter and verse. It says we have the most free trade agreements in the world. If they're instruments for regulatory remote control, then we're the most shackled in the world. They're instruments of shackling, not of enabling, if you don't approach them with expertise, which it did not. It approached them with a 1970s production liberalization model, and then it gaslights by saying we're the envy of the world.

When I engage with these people.... Europe fights tooth and nail and refuses to concede to the very things Canada conceded to, because it knows it's the end of the game.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

I have one question for Professor Lambert.

You mentioned that we focus a lot on research, but we've missed the mark with commercialization in the government's current strategy. I want to talk specifically about how the Minister of Digital Innovation just came out with a new program to build the world's most advanced AI supercomputer. When I went into the application screening, only non-profits and post-secondary institutions could apply for it.

Do you think that by not including industry we're again missing the mark here?

[Lisa Lambert]

Yes, because I think we look at it, again, as a research project. We're not looking at the long-term investment with this and how we can actually make this a tool that businesses can leverage.

It will be the same for AI and quantum. These are platform technologies that you can build new business models on top of. Having a platform and tools available that businesses can actually leverage and for them to be a part of that, we can say, for the quantum sector, that industry is incredibly far ahead. It's mind-blowing. Things can happen right now in industry that can't happen in research around the scale that they're moving up, but they're also very concerned about their IP and keeping things saddled down in how they're working, because they are in a global race for this.

If you want to be at the forefront of this, you have to have industry at the table. The pace that industry can move at is far quicker than research or a lot of non-profits, in these cases. It can add in other layers instead of having the key players within that, but again, you need to have a conversation or at least have an understanding of which industry is at the table and look at the long-term benefits for Canada.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you so much. I'm out of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you.

Colleagues, we are running over time. As a reminder, we have committee business to tend to.

I'm going to have to take a minute off of your time, Monsieur St-Marie, and two and a half minutes off Mr. Falk's and Mr. Bains' time.

Mr. Bardeesy, the floor is yours for five minutes. Go ahead.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm going to try to get a question in to each of the witnesses. I'll start with Mr. Balsillie.

You mentioned the sovereign AI strategies that different entities have, and one of the pillars of our forthcoming strategy for Canada will be building a Canadian sovereign AI foundation. You get the opportunity to see lots of innovators participating in the sovereign AI stack, or in the compute stack, to be precise. You mentioned the talent and the opportunities that exist within the talent in Canada.

Could you say a bit more about which parts of the stack you think Canada can be especially competitive in?

[Jim Balsillie]

I feel gaslit with the over-rotation on a network LLM, and that's no criticism of a company that's trying to make its way. By far, and I've been on this for a long time, the critical part is the data. You cannot separate data compute from the software stack. It's going to have to be a public utility. If you put in your health care data, are you going to give that to a corporation that can then do what it wants?

The most important thing is to think institutionally and actually put the data to work as a critical input of this. Then, whatever's in the stack for AI and compute, just make sure you have a couple of competitors. It's a vendor relationship thing.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

To be precise, then, are there players in the AI health data space that are ready for prime time, in the way that you describe, in Canada?

[Jim Balsillie]

It's kind of like saying, “Do we have good athletes?” but you don't have a playing field for them to play on. If you haven't made the health data available in an environment that's properly governed to do it, you foreclose on the potential. That's part of the reason we've seen erosion; we haven't created an environment.

The U.S. uses its hyperscalers. Other countries in Europe and Asia use state structures, and so on. We're just not in the game, or we give it away to foreign multinationals, and then we don't get the benefits.

There are good companies out there, and I think they would love to work with that data. We should do the exact same thing for defence, which we're not doing right now. We just foreclose on the game and take ourselves out of the high value-added, security-enhancing stuff.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

You think, specifically in health care and defence, there are good companies and good talent that is ready. Is that correct?

[Jim Balsillie]

There's tremendous opportunity out there, but they need an environment in which to perform.