Northern Ambition

On February 20th, 1959, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker stood up in the House of Commons and announced he was shutting down the Avro Arrow project and buying American Bomarc missiles instead. The roughly fourteen thousand people who built the Arrow found out a few hours later, over the loudspeakers at the Avro plant in Malton, just outside of Toronto. The Arrow was meant to be Canada's most audacious feat of engineering. A Canadian-made supersonic interceptor, built to defend Canada’s sovereign skies.

In the weeks that followed, some of the best engineering talent in Canada migrated to the United States, where roughly thirty of them joined NASA and eventually helped put Americans on the moon. This marked the beginning of a pattern that would repeat in the decades that followed.

In 2004, a researcher at the University of Toronto named Geoffrey Hinton, the great-great-grandson of George Boole, the man behind Boolean logic, was awarded funding from a small Canadian research program. The institute behind it, CIFAR, backed him to keep working on an idea most of his field had dismissed as a dead end.

That you could build machines that learned the way a human brain does, in layers.

After years of work, Hinton and two of his students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, built a neural network they named AlexNet. In 2012, it crushed the ImageNet image-recognition competition, nearly halving the error rate and sparking the adoption of deep learning as we know it today. What seemed like a dead end was suddenly worth everyone's attention.

In 2013, Google bought the small company Hinton and his two students had formed out of the AlexNet work. Sutskever left for California and, two years later, co-founded OpenAI. Fifty-four years after the Avro project shut down, the pattern held. Canada had built something worth keeping, and once again couldn't capitalize on it.

You might read this and assume the reason behind both decisions was money. And in some ways it was. But comforting ourselves by simply attributing this to money would be wrong. We need to look deeper.

The problem was never a lack of talent or workers. Canada has always had both. What it lacked was capacity, the home-grown heft to carry the cost of building something world-class and to capture the value once it worked. Canada did not have the scale or the trade relations to sustain a project as ambitious as the Arrow. When Hinton's work came up for auction, no Canadian company had the means to win it, the infrastructure to build on it, or the market to sell it. So the talent and the IP went where that capacity already existed. And that was almost always south of our border.

Which brings us to now.

The recent trade tensions with the United States changed something. Not because the Americans did anything wrong. They didn't. They simply hold the better hand, and they'll always do what's best for them. You can't fault a country for that. What the tariffs did was make the cost of our dependence impossible to ignore for the first time in decades.

But the answer was never to slam the door on the US and go find someone else to lean on. Trading one dependence for another isn't independence. The only leverage that holds is the leverage you build at home.

This is no longer a fringe idea. And it is one we need to embrace.

In January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney made a similar argument.

Canada's real advantage, he said, is that it can give itself far more than any foreign country can take away. He framed sovereignty as "the ability to withstand pressure," and that phrase is the whole game. Diversifying, hedging, spreading our bets across new partners, none of it is sovereignty. It is insurance, and insurance is temporary. You cannot buy the ability to withstand pressure. You build it. That is what building Canadian capacity is for, and what we should dare to build.

The only way out of this pattern that has persisted for decades is to build that capacity at home. Build a base strong enough to support and withstand ambitious projects that serve Canadians first and the world second.

This might sound like the hard part is behind us. But legislation and funding are the easy part. Building Canada's capacity asks for something harder. It asks for a country that cherishes the people who build it and lets them feel the work is not a job but a stake in something larger. A stake in building Canada. A place where people dare greatly and where ambition is most valued.

Northern Ambition.