Canada faces a choice: step forward into the world, or be left behind.
There is a narrative about Canada that has been repeated so often it has started to feel like fact. That we cannot win. That our ambitions must go south to be taken seriously. That world-changing ideas need to be built somewhere else. History says otherwise.
There is a call for the brave, for the self-believing, and for those willing to swim against stagnancy. There is a chance to prove that Canadians can win.
In our roots, there is resilience. Canada was not built on excess. It was built on persistence.
There Is a Pattern in Our Roots
In the winter of 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting walked into a University of Toronto lab with an idea that most of the medical establishment thought was wrong. He had no research budget, no proper lab space, and no track record in endocrinology. He had ten dogs, a borrowed room, and eight weeks before the facility needed it back. Despite everything, he discovered something that changed the world forever.
One year later, a 14-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson was dying of diabetes in Toronto General Hospital. His blood sugar was sky-high. He had weeks, maybe days. The clinical team administered Banting’s discovery, insulin, for the first time in human history. Within hours, Leonard’s blood glucose fell to normal. He lived for another 13 years, long enough to see the discovery that saved him earn a Nobel Prize.
That story is not an exception in Canada’s history. It is the pattern: a small team, limited resources, enormous ambition, and a result that echoed across generations.
Canada tends to narrate its own story with excessive modesty. We celebrate our politeness and our stability. These are real virtues. But we have grown apologetic, underselling our capacity for bold, world-changing invention. We have lost our own self-belief, and with it, our capability.
The truth is more interesting. Canada has been building at the frontier, in medicine, space, computing, and energy, for centuries. Not as a follower. As a pioneer.
Building at the Frontier
In 1950, while researching hypothermia treatments, electrical engineer John Hopps at the National Research Council made an accidental discovery: a stopped heart could be restarted mechanically or electrically. He built the world’s first cardiac pacemaker. It was large, external, and needed to be plugged into a wall, but the principle was correct. Today, over three million people worldwide carry a direct descendant of Hopps’ invention inside their chests. Canada gave them another heartbeat.
In 1975, NASA invited Canada to contribute to its Space Shuttle program. What Canada brought was a robotic arm, the Canadarm, a 15-metre articulated manipulator that became the most complex construction tool ever deployed. Built by Spar Aerospace (now MDA Space) in Brampton, Ontario, it flew on 90 Shuttle missions between 1981 and 2011. It helped assemble the International Space Station. It serviced the Hubble Space Telescope five times. When astronaut Scott Parazynski needed to repair a torn solar array in 2007 while standing at the end of an extended boom 90 feet above the ISS, it was Canadian technology holding him there.
Canadarm2, launched in 2001, has been a fixture on the ISS ever since. It has captured over 50 visiting spacecraft, including SpaceX’s Dragon and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus. MDA Space is now deep into building Canadarm3, an AI-powered autonomous robotic system destined for Gateway, NASA’s lunar-orbiting outpost. Canada’s reach is getting longer. We are going to the Moon.
These are not stories of Canadian ingenuity waiting for American permission. They are stories of builders called upon to solve problems no one else could and who delivered.
The Long Revolution in AI
In the 1980s, when virtually every major research institution in the world had abandoned neural networks as a dead end, a British-born researcher named Geoffrey Hinton chose Toronto. He came because Canada was willing to fund speculative, long-horizon research through the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Work that the rest of the world had decided wasn’t worth the risk.
For decades, Hinton in Toronto, Yoshua Bengio in Montreal, and Richard Sutton in Edmonton worked in what felt like academic obscurity. They were studying the mathematics of how the brain might learn. Their colleagues thought they were chasing ghosts. The field was called “deep learning,” and virtually no one believed it would amount to anything practical.
In 2012, Hinton’s lab at the University of Toronto entered the ImageNet competition, the world’s most-watched test of machine vision. They won by a margin so large that it didn’t just beat the competition, it ended the competition. Neural networks weren’t a dead end. They were the beginning. The modern AI revolution, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and every large language model you’ve heard of, runs on architectures descended from work done in Toronto, Edmonton, and Montreal.
In 2018, Hinton, Bengio, and Yann LeCun shared the Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computer science, for their foundational contributions to deep learning.
Canada did not stumble into AI leadership. It invested in it patiently, for decades, when no one else would. Mila, the Quebec AI Institute co-founded by Bengio at Université de Montréal, is now the largest academic deep learning research centre in the world, with over 1,400 specialized researchers. The Vector Institute in Toronto, co-founded by Hinton, hosts over 1,000 researchers. Together with Amii in Edmonton, these three institutes form a national AI infrastructure that other countries are still trying to replicate.
This is what Canadian patience, ambition, and public investment can produce. Not a fast flip. A foundation that changed the world.
From Research to Runway
Canada’s innovation has not stayed in the lab. Shopify began in Ottawa in 2006 when Tobi Lütke, frustrated by the state of available e-commerce software, built his own. It now powers approximately 5 million stores globally, with a market capitalization of over $200 billion. Lütke, when asked why he hasn’t moved to the United States, replied simply: “Because I like Canada.” In a period when Canada’s sovereignty is under real external pressure, those four words became a rallying cry.
Cohere, founded in Toronto in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, has become the country’s flagship enterprise AI company. When a large US firm offered to acquire them at a nine-digit price, the founders refused. Today, Cohere is valued at over $7 billion, with revenue growing more than three times over in 2025. CEO Aidan Gomez was direct about why: “I really feel that our country is under threat. I feel that the box of Canada’s sovereignty has been opened, and it can’t be closed.” That is not the language of a startup pitch. That is the language of a builder who understands what is at stake.
Waabi, founded by Raquel Urtasun, who previously led Uber’s self-driving research, is taking a simulation-first approach to autonomous trucking, training its AI in virtual environments rather than running millions of potentially dangerous road miles. Backed by Uber and Khosla Ventures, Waabi began deploying fully driverless trucks in 2025.
Then there is Reaction Dynamics, a Montreal-based rocket propulsion startup building Canada’s capacity to reach orbit independently. A small team, few resources, a hard technical problem, and a mission tied directly to national sovereignty. Canadian Dynamism in practice.
The Unifying Thread
Banting worked on borrowed time in a borrowed lab. Hopps was researching something entirely different when he found the pacemaker. The Canadarm was Canada’s entry ticket to the Space Shuttle program, pragmatic, collaborative, and technically extraordinary. Hinton and Bengio funded deep learning research through Canadian institutions for decades before the world recognized what they had built.
Canadian innovation tends to be long-term. It tends to be patient. It tends to emerge from people willing to work on hard problems, in unglamorous conditions, for timelines that nobody else believes in. It does not tend to be loud. That is both its strength and its weakness.
The strength: Canadian builders build things that last. Insulin. The pacemaker. The Canadarm. Shopify. The foundation of modern AI.
The weakness: We have been better at invention than ownership. We discovered insulin and sold the patent for one dollar each. We conceived the light bulb and sold it to Thomas Edison. We built some of the most important technologies of the 20th century and watched the commercial value accrue abroad. The world benefited, but Canada did not always capture what it created. A sapling that dies before it has the chance to develop its own strength is lost potential. We forced our greatest inventions to move to survive.
Canada needs to start owning, protecting, supporting, and being proud of what makes it great.
The Moment We Are In
The external pressure Canada faces, economic, geopolitical, and technological, is real. But it is also an invitation. An invitation to stop outsourcing our ambition. To stop equating “not losing” with winning. To remember that we have grown world-changing inventions in the fields where no other crops could survive.
The resources were never lavish. Capital has been leaving quietly for two decades. In 2005, Canada’s largest pension fund held 74% of its investments at home. Today it holds 12%. The builders have noticed.
The next generation of builders in AI, in space, energy, defence, biotech, and climate, are not starting from scratch. They are standing on the shoulders of Canadian resilience. On Banting, Hopps, Hinton, and Bengio. They are inheriting a tradition of patient, rigorous, and frontier-facing work that has quietly shaped the modern world.
They need capital that leads, not follows. They need investors willing to sit with hard problems and long timelines. They need an ecosystem that treats ambition as a Canadian value, not an export. Building here is not a consolation prize. It is the point.
There is an opportunity to triumph. We have struggled long enough. Winter is over.
What Canadian Dynamism Means
American Dynamism is explicitly about the national interest, building for America, strengthening America, and making America more competitive. That is a worthy and coherent philosophy.
Canadian Dynamism is something different. It has always been oriented outward. Banting didn’t sell insulin to Canadians. He gave it to the world for a dollar. The Canadarm didn’t build a Canadian space station. It built humanity’s. Hinton and Bengio didn’t create AI for Canada’s benefit. They published their research openly, and the entire world built on top of it.
That is the Canadian instinct: to build things so good and so fundamental that the world cannot do without them. Not to win at the expense of others. To build in a way that makes everyone better off and to be indispensable because of it.
It means backing founders solving hard problems. It means recognizing that resilience of supply chains, infrastructure, sovereignty, and health systems is not a niche thesis. It is the defining challenge of the next decade. It means understanding that the country which built the tools that assembled the International Space Station, gave the world insulin, and quietly invented the foundation of modern AI, is not a country that needs to apologize for its ambitions.
It means building flagships. Not subsidiaries. Not branch offices. Not features inside external platforms. Companies of global scale, owned and led from Canada, solving problems that matter and keeping the value at home.
The Canadian Moat
Dynamism is resilience, a deep patience for difficult problems, combined with a certainty that through hard work, the problem will yield. Patience is the Canadian moat.
Banting didn’t give up when the university laughed at his proposal. Hinton didn’t give up when the field of neural networks was effectively declared dead. MDA didn’t stop building after the Canadarm. They built Canadarm2, then Dextre, and now Canadarm3.
That is the spirit. The one still standing when the problem finally yields.
Canada has always been a nation of builders. We built at the frontier of medicine when it was dangerous and speculative. We built at the frontier of space. We built the intellectual foundations of AI when the rest of the world thought it was a waste of time. We are now building autonomous systems for the Moon, enterprise AI companies with billion-dollar valuations, and rocket propulsion for sovereign access to orbit.
The pattern is clear. The capacity is real. The question is whether the next generation of builders will be supported, with capital, community, and conviction, to build at the scale Canada is capable of.
The future must be claimed. There are flagships to be built.
Ethan Marcoux is a writer and researcher focused on Canadian technology and defence innovation, and the founder of The Canadian Explorers publication.
Amiral Ventures is a Montreal-based seed and pre-Series A venture fund backing Canada’s most ambitious founders in AI-native enterprise software, resilience, and sustainability.
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