Ideas - How to measure 'prosperity'

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

It's safe to say right now the majority of us are feeling the pinch. Grocery and fuel prices are on the rise and the income gap between the wealthy, and everyone else, continues to grow. And yet, aside from the U.S., Canada is the strongest economy of the G7. A prosperous country doesn't necessarily translate to a fuller wallet for its citizens. Host Nahlah Ayed and panelists discuss how 'prosperity' should be defined and how that can be achieved.Guests in this episode:Hon. Lisa Raitt is a former Conservative cabinet minister, who now co-chairs the Canadian Coalition for a Better Future.Zita Cobb is a Fogo Island entrepreneur, founder of Shorefast which supports local economies and community development.Kaylie Tiessen is the chief economist at the Shield Institute.

Okay, three songs. You guess who there by. Three little birds, one love, and jamming. Yeah, that was a really hard quiz. These are all, of course, by Bob Marley. A whole lot of the world felt close to Bob and his music before and after his passing. But the guy who really knew him best was his son, Ziggy. On Q, Ziggy Marley will tell you about his new record and about the song he says, connect him to his late father, Bob Marley.

You can hear that conversation now. Just search Q with Tom Power wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. The vast majority of Canadians are feeling the squeeze. If you've been feeling like you're working hard but still falling behind financially, well, Statistics Canada has a possible reason for that. Its latest household income reading shows how Canadians have less money to spend

as prices and interest rates soar. It's a stark look at just how unaffordable, life has become for many. At grocery stores across Canada, a familiar story, the cost to fill carts and cars with groceries on the rise again. And the income gap between Canada's wealthiest and everyone else continues to grow. It's the richest 1% control more than half the world's wealth, and their share of the global pie is only getting bigger. Well, the gap between Canada's top CEOs and the average worker in this country is widening. Yet at the same time, Canada's gross domestic product shows growth, slowly, but surely.

So what does prosperity mean? And how should it, or even can it, be defined or measured? The Canadian Chamber of Commerce invited ideas to convene an on-stage panel at the Future Business Summit in Ottawa, and that's where we explored these very questions. I was joined by entrepreneur Zeta Cobb, the pride of Fogo Island, and founder of Shorefast, which supports local economies and community development. The love people have for the places they live is a source of national wealth. We just have to figure out how to enable it. Also on stage, Kaylee Teeson, chief economist for the Shield Institute.

Governments haven't really had to think that much about prosperity for like 40 years. We just thought, oh, as long as we're hitched to the United States, then everything will be fine. We know how that's working out now. And former conservative cabinet minister, Lisa Raite, who now co-chairs the Canadian Coalition for a better future. I started by asking them to share an experience that had a profound impact on how each of them understands the idea of prosperity. Lisa, I'd like to start with you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

And it's a delight to be here today. So full disclosure, Zeta Cobb was announced as the pride and joy of Fogo Island. I demand to be known as the pride and joy of Cape Breton Island. Henceforth, that is how you'll be referred to. Very important to me. And I guess that's where my memory comes from, quite frankly. I mean, I was raised by my grandmother, essentially, and I remember that when I was 18 years old, I was helping her, or I thought I was helping her, do her taxes.

And, you know, she's raising me, and I'm going off to university. We had a car in the house. She's keeping the house going. My grandfather had passed away, I guess, about 10 years beforehand. And I got to see her total income. And all she received was the widow's allowance, as it was then called, and old age pension. And her total income for the year was $12,000.

And she still had to pay taxes. And I remember how angry she was that she had to pay taxes. And I look back on it now now, and I think, oh, my gosh, you know, she was living month to month, paycheck to paycheck, bonus check to bonus check kind of thing. And how she was able to put it together, I still don't know. I never felt that I was without, but I know that she shouldered the burden on it for sure.

So when I see the prosperity that my kids have access to, it's a lot different than what their cousins have access to in Cape Bret. Revelatory, I'm sure, for a young woman. We'll come back and refer to that as we go along. Zita, your experience that you would like to share with us. A little bit like Lisa's, except I have lived in three centuries, and I think that pretty much defines everything about me. I was until I was 10. I lived on Fogo Island, an eighth generation Fogo Islander living in the 19th century, almost a pre-money society, people who fished, very confident, competent,

self-determining entrepreneurial people and rich in relationships. And the only blind spot, I would say, which ultimately was the undermining of it, was we didn't have any knowledge of the market. We traded our fish. We fished in individual family units and traded our fish, the salt fish, with the merchant who had market access. And then suddenly, when I was around 8 to 10, the 20th century arrived, in the industrialization of the fishery,

which, of course, took the economic carpet out from under us, and suddenly there was no fish, and we didn't understand what happened until my father finally figured out that they must be turning the fish into money. But the important thing about that time, and this is probably, of all the things I'll say today, the most important thing, the people of his generation, my mother's generation,

came together to be economic together, and they figured out how to start a call, up, they figured out that we had other species of fish, they figured out how to find markets, so they found a kind of economic self-determination. And that was the 20th century, and my father had said to me, when all this was happening, when you grow up, you have to go away and figure out how this money thing works because otherwise it will eat everything we love. So my career, I studied business, I figured out how money works, more or less, and my career was in wave division and multiplexing the little optical components that have enabled the digital age.

And what I take from all of that is that humans, all of us, at least I haven't met one yet, that's not embodied, social, and meaning-seeking. Place holds all of those things. Thank you for that. Kaylee. Well, I come from the perspective of a geriatric millennial, so that's how I'm going to talk about prosperity. Geriatric millennial, for those of you who are listening on the radio,

It means gray hair and proud of it and young face at the same time. So that's what we're talking about. And I've been thinking a lot about my job search when I was graduating 20 years ago and thinking about the people who were hiring right now coming into internships and co-ops and the different experiences that they're having. So when I graduated, I was in Thunder Bay and I was working two jobs in order to graduate without student loans. And you could do that, first of all.

So I could work towards graduating without a student loan. I was working at Swiss chalet and the regional bank manager came in. He really liked my personality and thought that I was personable and I had leadership potential. And he said, I think you should come and be a bank manager. Will you please

apply and work for me at the bank? I was like, well, that was easy. And I don't think that shows at all like me being different than anyone else in my generation. It shows how different things are today. It was so much simpler than I had a resume. It was digitized. I could email it, but I also printed it off. And I went in and I shook people's hands and said, please hire me. And now it's, those interactions are all done through artificial intelligence. You don't get human interaction. Everyone is optimizing for

looking the best that you can. And then there isn't anything sort of real that's being exchanged anymore. and I think we're missing that and that's part of what I've been thinking about when it comes to prosperity. Such an interesting diversity of experiences here, but I do want to set a benchmark for the rest of this conversation by asking you one other question

to all three of you. Thinking about that background and what you've done in your lives since those early days, how prosperous do you think we are here in Canada right now and I'll start with you? Yeah, okay. I think we are not as prosperous as we could be

or we should be, considering how big of an economy we have. So I was talking with a friend last week, and I mentioned that Canada is the 10th largest economy in the world, 10th largest economy in the world. And she said to me, well, then how come we're all so poor? Very, very good question. I think we need to ground this in comparing ourselves to our own history, not necessarily looking at other countries. And what I found is that the stats are kind of bleak. So GDP growth is supposed to be 1.7% this year, that's faster than any other G7 country aside from the U.S. So we should be kind of proud of that, but it's much slower than it was before the pandemic or right after the pandemic. A few other things that we know. Food bank use has doubled in the last six years, meaning people

can't afford to buy food, people who are working two jobs. Why isn't our economy producing jobs that are capable of providing enough money for people to buy food. The genie coefficient, which is a measure of inequality, is getting worse in Canada. It's gotten worse since 2019. It's a slow decline, but it's there, and I suspect we will see an even bigger decline when new numbers come out for 2024 and 2025. Home prices. Everybody thinks about home prices a lot. So since 1981, the price of a home, an average home went up 163 percent. Average wages, 20 It's a huge difference. So you have to work harder and longer to save for a home. We also know 40% of workers go to work feeling bored. Like their skills are not being used. So you've invested in

yourself either through a trades program, through university, starting your own business, all sorts of things. And then what happens is your skills aren't utilized. You're not being challenged. Totally. And then the last one I'll give you, because this one was really fun to figure out, is that compared to 1986, we all have to work 40% more in order to afford a Big Mac. 40% harder or more.

An average worker used to be 10.3 minutes to buy a Big Mac and now it's 15. So it's just another way of comparing how much harder we have to work in order to buy things that we love if you love hamburgers. Incredible. That's a very comprehensive answer

but I feel like there's still more to say about this. So Lisa, just when you think about prosperity and I know you do a lot. What concerns you most? What's on your mind when you think about that? So I love the stats, and that's kind of what we do at the Coalition for a better future. We have 21 key performance indicators

that we've been measuring for about four years now, and unfortunately, the trend is not in the correct direction. So this year, what we said is, okay, I think we've had enough of seeing where the trend is going. It's time to execute. The key for us, though, why do we measure these key performance indicators? it's because many years ago we saw that short-term thinking on economic growth wasn't actually beneficial for the economy writ large.

So we gathered up, along with other folks, about 140 organizations who agree that long-term economic growth that is both sustainable and inclusive is incredibly important for this country in order to be prosperous. And the execution has start happening. We get to be a little agnostic, quite frankly, on what the policies are, but we're happy to measure governments on their policies, and it's not just the federal, it's everyone across. The one thing that we've stumbled across

has been our focus on youth, and it's not even, you don't look like an elder millennial. That's very nice, geriatric millennial. Okay. I'm an old Gen Xer, right? I'm almost a boomer, but are you a boomer? Definitely maybe beyond. Oh, okay.

Three centuries. Three centuries. I'm doing the math in my head, but it's not We have age diversity here. That's not mathing. So we, Gen Z, for example. And we have Amicklellan, who is the co-chair of this organization with me. And I have been able to go to a couple of different universities and talk to students.

Nick Nannos does some polling for us to see what the vibe. We're doing a vibe check with the kids out there. And, you know, they're worried. One of the statistics that we like looking at is called neat. So not in employment or education or training. and we're at about 12% of our youth are in that category. That is stunning to think about that they're not doing anything at the moment. We can't afford to have that happen.

So prosperity for me is kids not being despondent about their mental health, about ability to buy a house, or whether or not they're going to have a career because they're being displaced by AI, which is exactly what we're hearing out there. And looking to other places like the United States as the place where they want to move, It's still happening. People are looking at the states. I know we're all on this elbows up thing,

but trust me, both capital and people are moving to the U.S. for a different life. Canada is considered a prosperous country when looked at from other places in the world. And I wonder, Zita, just what your senses of what's happened to our prosperity? Well, I think we have the potential to be prosperous, but I don't think we have achieved it. And I would say, let's think about it this way. the economist wrote a book called a third pillar. And he says human societies, let's including our Canadian one, rest on three pillars, markets, governments, and communities. And certainly, we have 5,000 incorporated communities in our country, of which fewer than 10

have more than half a million people to give you a sense of the scale of our country. And I would say if you go across the country, which I do a lot, people are not feeling prosperous and it's not just a feeling because I think the community pillar has been hollowed out and we will build strong societies when we figure out how to keep those pillars in some kind of a balance and how to do a better job of coordinating across the pillars which I think we really haven't done and so to give you an example let's say 50% of our GDP comes from small and medium-sized enterprises. Small and medium-sized enterprises account for about two-thirds of private sector employment.

I think about 16% of our bank's portfolios are dedicated to SMEs. And of the 5,000 communities in our country, as best we can figure, about 10% of them have access to commercial lending. That means the other 90% don't have access to commercial lending. and if you have it outside of the half a dozen big centers, you can count on it being very expensive. And so for the people that are running businesses, small businesses, medium-sized businesses,

entrepreneurs, you can't get access to financial capital. And that is not just enraging, but discouraging. So to underline kind of what you are all telling us, there's something called the Atlantic Council Prosperity Index. I'm sure you've all come across it. And it considers six components. Income, health, education, environment, status of minorities and inequality. It reported that in 2024, Canada dropped to 20th on the Prosperity Index ranking.

And I really want to get out what it is that's at play here. And of course, it isn't just one thing. I would like to start with you, Kaylee. You mentioned inequality, growing inequality. You talked about greater reliance on food banks. There's also this trend where we've never heard. had as many billionaires globally, more than 3,000 worldwide, and they hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of people on Earth. And crucially, perhaps, they've been more visible than perhaps in

all of history. I'm just wondering what you think that does to our sense of prosperity. The first thing to say is just that aside from a sense of declining prosperity, we are facing declining prosperity. So the vibes piece is like, it's not vibes. It's because people aren't able to afford the things that we want. And when we're only comparing, if there's policy makers who are saying, oh, it's just the billionaires, like, making you feel like you should be able to afford more than you do, or than you can, then we're actually missing the point. And so we have to be pretty careful about that. But we also know that billionaires are certainly part of the problem. The competition laws in Canada, in the United States, were getting weaker. In Canada,

last year and the year before we actually tightened up our competition laws quite a bit, and so we'll be able to discipline the market a little bit more, which will be incredibly important in making sure that we have a competitive economy, which is very different than a monopolized economy. One of the stats that I didn't bring up earlier is that business starts have been declining quite dramatically. In fact, half the number of people who started a business 20 years ago started a business in 2024, and that's access to capital, as Zeta mentioned. There's a report recently that showed small business owners feel like they can't compete in the market

because we don't have the right competition laws. And so tightening those up a little bit will make it so that more people can access and compete in the market and access prosperity through their own communities and then growing more globally. And so those are some of the things that we need to be doing. Lisa, I wanted to come back to your story about the Coalition for Better Canada and your most recent scorecard, which is really kind of hard reading, painting a very troubling picture, GDP per capita, as you mentioned,

growing at only half of its pre-pendemic rate, business investment falling, widening inequality, and again, the youth unemployment. What would you put, what's the malaise underlying, do you think, all of that? Is there one thing,

that kind of takes the bulk of the responsibility? Yeah, malaise, I think, is a great word. I think a lot of it has to do with Canada is not as risky in terms of taking decisions. We are very risk-averse as a nation. That's why when you see entrepreneurship, you have to celebrate it because we aren't fostering it. But, you know, Zeta knows a lot more about entrepreneurship than I ever will and can speak to it a lot better.

But I look at it this way. I think those who have are doing very well, thank you very much. And they don't want anything to change. And those who are striving are so freaked out and so worried about the future. You know, you talk about this K-shaped recovery. It's very true. You've got some people who are doing great in this economy and others who are not doing as well.

And the numbers are very different from one another. You definitely have a larger chunk of people who are not experiencing recovery as opposed to those who are having a really good recovery at the moment. A lot of it's tied to whether or not you own your own house, quite frankly. And the other thing I want to say, you know, when you talk about that Atlantic Index, you mentioned income is one of them.

That is fundamentally where Canada has lagged behind. the rest of the world. We just simply do not pay salaries. How far back do you know? I have no idea how far back. How behind? Sorry, how far behind? I'll give you a head-to-head kind of example. Let's say that you're going into software development in the United States. You're going to start at $300,000. And if you are doing it in Canada, you're going to get $150. And that's U.S. versus Canada. And American companies know that. They know that they can pay less for us up here. And you want to know why people accept a lower income because they think that their health care is free. Therefore, they don't need to be paid more because you don't have to pay for a premium for your health care.

So it's all a very strange psychological excuse that we tell ourselves, but it's too. And then the last thing I would say about why income is low is that sometimes the government has policies that keep the incomes artificially low because of the fact that they don't let competition to happen necessarily. when it comes to those smaller medium-sized enterprises. Zeta, what do you think underlies a struggling economy? Again, very big question, and I know there's one answer,

but what sticks out in your mind? I think there might be one answer, actually. Oh. I think that it's because the financial economy and the real economy have become bifurcated. So in my long lifetime, which I'm 67, just to be clear, it used to be that in the 50s, the real economy and the financial economy,

and the financial economy were the same size, more or less. And now the financial economy is five times more. I think these figures are probably a couple of years old. The financial economy is five times bigger than the real economy. And so if you are an actor in the financial economy, you're doing just fine. If you're an actor like most people in the real economy, you're not doing just fine. So when my father said in 1967 they must be turning the fish in, money, he actually named financialization without knowing that he did. And I think we haven't yet,

we're going to figure it out, I know we will, but we haven't yet figured out how to create the enabling conditions in our country for true development. So that investment, and we're all very focused on investment, wherever it comes from, although I would like to ask us as Canadians, if we are not willing to invest in our own country, why should we expect other people to do so? But let's assume we're going to belly up to the bar all of us and invest in our own country and others are going to join us in that.

The opportunity, and that's not enough, the opportunity then starts for us to figure out how to make that real development that is geographically distributed, that we are doing investment, economic development, business development, sector development, and community economic development, and individual skill development, all at the same time. Figuring out from investment to that spectrum of development in 5,000 places, of which, by the way,

637, I think, are indigenous communities, that is a delicious challenge that's going to take us together across governments, markets and communities. Social entrepreneur Zeta Kopp, on stage with me at the 26th Future of Business Summit in Ottawa. We were joined by Lisa Raite, former conservative cabinet minister and current vice chair of global investment banking at CIBC and Kaylee Tieson,

chief economist at the Shield Institute. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. You know, every day on up first, NPR's Golden Globe nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next?

At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow up first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. At a time when income inequality continues to escalate and yet GDP remains steady, How should we be thinking of prosperity? GDP or gross domestic product is basically the total monetary value of all goods and services produced within a country in a specific time. I asked Kay Lee Tiesin how useful GDP is as a snapshot of our prosperity. It's useful because we need many measures, and that's one. But I think that might be one of the only pieces that makes it useful.

Kuznitz, the economist who invented, I'm using air quotes, invented this measurement, GDP, also didn't think it was a good measure. And after it kind of got rolling and caught the attention of policymakers, he said, wait, stop, I don't think this is the best way to be moving forward. There's actually this great cartoon that I remember just from my economics education where he's saying, like, wait, no, I've made a mistake. I'm sure that's not a direct quote from him. But it doesn't actually capture what we need. There's a constellation of factors when it comes to prosperity that we need to be measuring. In Canada, when you think about the actors, the corporations, the governments, the institutions that are all acting in order to create prosperity, some of what we're facing

as a country, and we face this for a long time, is actually like the age of extraction. I'm not talking about mining. But I'm talking about foreign ownership and control, the digital economy where our time gets extracted, where we are owned, our data is extracted and owned by others and then kind of used against us, as well as just generally so much of our economy is owned by foreign actors. And intellectual property. Yeah, totally. Also intellectual property.

And then it's other folks, not people in Canada, who are then making the big decisions about what's happening here for us instead of us making those decisions ourselves. How valuable is the GDP still at looking? I mean, we can't escape using the GDP as a measure, but just how valuable Zeta do you think it is to still have that conversation? Well, I think it's a starting point. I think its sibling, which is GDI, gross domestic income, is a better measure because that is a measure of how much at least stays here.

And then we need to go further and say, and how is that distributed? So where do these, where does this accumulate and how is it distributed? So I think it's GDI. I'm another thing that we talk about all the time. is this relentless talk about productivity, which is another one of these measures. It's the most simplest form, it's GDP divided by the number of hours worked.

That's not taking into account capital and the role of technology and all that. And so, yes, we have to keep an eye on that, but if really all we were trying to grow is productivity, we'd make one giant factory in Toronto with one employee, and then we'd have really good numbers. And so I think the measure of distrable, distribution geographically. I really want to keep bringing us back to geography because I sometimes

think we don't love our country. We don't love the geography of our country. If we use geographic thinking and fall in love with the Canada we have and it's 5,000 communities and then ask ourselves, how do we create the enabling conditions for prosperity, for development? I mean, one of the first things we would realize, besides the aforementioned lack of access to financial capital, which basically makes most of our country a bunch of stranded assets because Canada has no assets that are not in a place. Full stop. People are in a place. So enabling conditions, access to financial capital, capital. You cannot develop an economy anywhere without transportation. We are one of the few countries in the OECD, maybe the only one, that does not have a regional air access strategy.

And that hurts us in different ways. It hurts us because we can't develop. It also hurts us because we don't know each other. You cannot travel in this country, well, partly because there are no roots. I'm not sure how you do get to Sudbury come to think of it. Let's alone Capus casing or someplace. So we haven't laid down this basic transportation infrastructure for development. And so communities wither, and we wring our hands some more and say, oh, it's not fair or whatever, but we just haven't worked together across the pillars to do it. And because we don't know each other, it hurts our ability to have a unifying Canadian narrative. Joe Clark's great sentence, which is Canada is a community of communities. Now let's get us working together.

We've talked about, at least touched on the national context, as you say, the community context. I want to just throw another index at you from kind of an individual context. Year after year, Canada keeps dropping also in the world happiness rankings. And apparently this year is at an all-time low. And that's according to the World Happiness Report, 2025, published by the Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford. How does the idea of happiness fit into the picture of prosperity? Oh, if you're not happy, you are making plans to leave where you are. I think that's what it comes down to. The only thing you can do is move.

And I think that probably helps with Zeta talking about community building for sure, because if you don't have a community and you're unhappy. I wanted to touch on one thing, if I may. Let's eat of mention about a lack of a plan for regional air travel. You're bang on, and every single time the country hits a crisis, the first thing to go is the connectivity to the smaller communities. And that's just the nature of the market that we've allowed to proliferate here. And it can only be solved with the government pillar,

the market pillar, and the community pillar working together. It's the same as housing. You cannot solve it in the market or government. or community alone. Yeah, I agree with you on that. That's an important piece to remember. And, I mean, I think there are some communities, for example, I think Sydney, Nova Scotia is trying to do something right now. Oddly enough, you can't, at one point, you couldn't get a flight between Sydney and Halifax. You'd have to fly to Montreal first, or you have to fly to Toronto to go from Sydney to Halifax. So you can see that it's very difficult. The prosperity and the

happiness do go hand in hand with one another. If you don't have access to, you know, you. Timely health care, you're not going to be happy. And possibly the reason why you don't have access to timely health care is your country's not prosperous enough to properly fund it. It's all tied to one another. And like I said before, with respect to the coalition, we have been noting for many, many years that all of these KPIs are going in the wrong direction, except for a few. Some are going, like, I'll bring some brightness. So there's this thing called a narwhal. I looked it up. I picked up my phone so I could take a look at up. So we've called this thing a narwhal, which is a

startup that has one billion market capitalization. We set a goal of 17 by 2033. I think right now we are at like 24. Like we've completely blown over the cap. So what's the secret there? Obviously, well, we're brilliant people in Canada. No, I think we are. I think we're brilliant. I think we're in genius. I think we are, we punch way above our weight in terms of understanding and knowing and developing. I mean, CEOs that come from Canada populate companies all over the world and they're very very, very strong. But a lot of what happens is what you've already mentioned, which is our intellectual property is sold. The company gets picked up by somebody else because, you know, founders do have the ability to make a choice of what they want to do with their own personal

company that they founded. You can't stop it. I do not advocate for government regulations saying that you cannot do what you want to do with your company. And there are very hungry companies in other parts of the world who will always take advantage of it. But on the happiness point, I just, I want to come back to that idea and Zeta. It's interesting to note that in the same study that I mentioned, it was Canadians in their 20s who reported the lowest level of happiness. What do you make of that? Whether we're 20 or 67, we are physical creatures.

We need to feel safe. We need access to food and water and health care. So our physical needs need to be met. I think if you don't see, you're not living in a decent place and you don't see away to a decent place. So your very survival feels uncertain. That's not a good start to happiness. We are social creatures.

We need each other. We want to feel useful and have a sense of belonging, which means we need to have some kind of continuity in a place. And we're meaning-seeking, which means we want to get better. We want to learn. We want to develop our capacities. And if you're a young person in a community,

unhappy with the conditions, what are you going to do? You're going to leave. Well, you're going to leave, but depending on where you're going, you're probably, depends on where you go. You may not find, you may find a higher income. Are you going to find a place to belong? I mean, if we don't, no matter in which country we're talking about, the one south of us are our own, the civic fabric of lives. I mean, we are living in the most connected age, and we've never been lonelier. That's important. We don't have a ton of time left, but I'd like to devote the rest of it to just talking about how we redefine prosperity, how we can look at it differently. Kaylee's staying with you, you're likely aware that the word economy, I didn't know this,

but now I know it, originates from the ancient Greek word, or economia, which basically translates to household management or stewardship. So that's where that word comes from. How can we we use that idea to inspire us to think about prosperity beyond just jobs and industry and markets? It actually is a very inspiring way to think about the economy, and it's certainly not one that we think about anymore, thinking about the separation between the financial economy and the real economy, thinking about our homes, our places. Now we think a lot more of how do we grow a business to the largest size possible really quickly. Some of those things are very important to our prosperity, but it's nice to think about setting some of the other layers ahead of time. So at Shield,

we think about three pillars, sovereignty, prosperity, and governance. And one of the things that we're not doing specifically in the digital economy, we don't govern our economy. We ask this question, the digital economy, we ask this question of ourselves all the time. Can you govern your economy, yes or no? Are you talking about regulation here? Or what do you talk about government? Yeah, regulation, setting different rules, guidelines. Can you govern? Can you govern? the digital economy, yes or no. For many of the areas of our digital economy, the answer is actually no. We've given it up in trade negotiations. We've given it over to large companies that make the rules of the algorithm that just sort of intangibly gets into our lives. So we don't

have the ability, but in some areas we do. And then if we have the ability to govern our economy, are we actually doing it? And then we also think about sovereignty and what it means to have economic sovereignty, thinking about capturing more of the value from the activity that happens here. So jobs, that's the easiest one to think about it, and it's one that we've done better than some of the others, is making sure that jobs stay here. You think about Canada's by Canadian policy, and one of the biggest components is whether or not jobs are created. There's so many other pieces of value add there, though, like ownership, delivering profit to shareholders and the economy in Canada, delivering the ideas that are created here, making sure that the ownership

stays here and that we are building off of those ideas. It's called intellectual property, building off of those ideas, and then creating more companies in Canada that are operating here, making decisions here, stewarding themselves here, and then delivering benefits back to us. I imagine that's far more popular or interesting now than it was two years ago. Yeah. Governments haven't really had to think that much about prosperity for like, 40 years, we just thought, oh, as long as we're hitched to the United States, then everything will be fine. We know how that's working out now. Lisa, you might have a thing or two to say about that.

Yeah, it's funny. I so appreciate the work that both Zeta and Kaylee did because you're actually setting out a framework that allows me to think about things more than just emotionally. Because when I think about prosperity, it's very emotional for me as well. Back to your grandmother. I mean, it's... It is. And, you know, as you're talking about community, I mean,

The reality is that there's whole generations of Cape Bradeners who had to leave, because like you, the cod fishery collapse, the steel plant closed, and there are no jobs, and there's no future. So you move away to Ontario, and you have a house, and you raise your kids here, and you wait until you can go back. You long for home. There's no prosperity when you can't make that choice to stay home. Which many, many Canadians are forced to.

do. Right now, the same kind of situation is happening. When I left Cape Breton, you know, I often said that I want to go to a place where I know my kids aren't going to move away. And yet here I am sitting in Toronto where possibly my kids are going to move away because Canada isn't showing them a path to prosperity that they can envision for themselves. Do you feel that? Do you see that kind of emotion? I'm going to start to cry right now for God's sakes. Of course I feel. I'm a baby when it comes to that stuff. But do you see it out there in the community? I'm saying, are you meeting people who are repeating the same thought?

Well, I mean, listen, the saddest place I used to say is the Sydney airport when the grandchildren came home. Yeah. Zeta, you're nodding. Absolutely. It comes back to we are not only economic creatures. And back to the meaning of economy, it's about household. management. And so how do we do that in a world where financial capital has a natural tendency to concentrate and move away? And so we have to figure out how do we make money come down to the

ground and stay. And I think it's about stewardship. In each place, in our country. I think we should have an economic stewardship council. It doesn't have to be formal, but a place where all of the economic actors in a place, in that place, come together to steward the economy. That is, that muscular cheer that we have to grow is the most important thing, because if we can do that, we can be more coherent as communities, more coherent economic actors. Doesn't mean we have to agree on everything, but let's just agree on holding our economy so we can develop it. We know what our assets are. We know what we need. And if we're more coherent than governments and market actors know how to work with us, municipal governments are one part of that stewardship.

But the businesses that are there, big and small are part two. Even if there's a Walmart in your town, that is an economic actor in your town. Let's go figure out who's managing that place and get them to come to the table. Setting that table is the beginning of economic democracy. That's no doubt, you know, developed in your experience on Fogo Island. And I want to just, if you don't mind, just talk to us about whether you think that experience, whether it's realistic to try to apply a similar model to the incredible things you've done on that island, to other communities across Canada. I know you're trying to. We are. I mean, we've launched the National Institute for place-based economies. There's a mouthful. And it's not what we did on Fogel Island. Not every

community has a fishery. Not every community wants to have a tourism industry. It's a dance with the devil on a good day. But if you're going to do it, let's do it right. And so we have this sort of concept of economic nutrition always in front of our minds. And so let's talk about the process of asset-based community development. It starts with, what do we have here in this place? What do we we know? What do we miss? What do we love? What can we do about it? And that, what can we do about it is the, let's be economic together. And let's assume we've set the table. And we're in, Kelly, where'd you grow up? Leamington, Ontario. Leamington, Ontario. We're in Leamington, Ontario. We have an economic stewardship table, and we've gone through the process of ABCD-E for economy.

Then we're going to say, well, let's get the data. How are we doing? now here in Leamington. So what are the indicators, leading indicators, trailing indicators of our economies? Very difficult in our country to get economic data at the community level. We have a federal statistics agency, not a national one. So let's get the data so we can be economic together. Let's figure out who are our businesses that are here, what do they need, let's figure out where we go find some financial capital for that. Let's grow our literacy in business and in economy and in capital flows. You don't need to have an economics degree to be an economic steward. People ran your grandmother ran her house. And once we have gathered and we have the facts,

then we say, okay, where do we want to go? And if we can express that as a community, for sure, actors and market actors are going to line up. I mean, we're going to be having a conference in September, I gather, around investment in our country. Let's get our ducks in order and set a table. Something you said was incredibly inspiring, and it really underlines how important it is your experience,

is that you say that nation building is community building. I don't know how else. I mean, otherwise, you end up trying to build a nation without including the country. What kind of, like, it's the love people have for the places they live is a source of national wealth. We just have to figure out how to enable it.

When I ran for leader of the Conservative Party in 2016, my biggest takeaway, which I didn't win, as we all know, my biggest takeaway was a conservative in Newfoundland, is different from a conservative in Nova Scotia, is different from a conservative in Quebec, Ontario, go right across the country. Everywhere is different. Even though you share the same kind of philosophy and ideology, every community, every province, every place is different. So when you're a community of communities, it makes a lot of sense. But then you have to respect, have to have the respect across the communities as well to build the nation. Nation building isn't top down. It's bottom up, respecting the differences amongst everybody else. With that in mind, Lisa, where do you think

the place is of private industry in trying to rethink the idea of prosperity? What's their role? A big role. So at the coalition, one of the things, when I said we had 140 organizations, we made sure that it covered the gamut. It's just not business. It is including in their charitable section. It's including anything but government, quite frankly, we have within those 140. Because it rounds out an understanding, labor's involved as well. Very important to have a fully formed concept of what you're fighting for if you're talking about the economy. I mean, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that, you know, we're here, Chamber of Commerce during their conference, future of business summit. Chambers of Commerce have really important, important roles to play in communities, and it's more than just networking.

They can actually help steward and push forward and figure out exactly what are the economies that make sense and bring them in. And I would say take it a step forward. Everyone has to be involved, and we have to invite people in. Zita, maybe you can add to that. Just your thoughts on how business. and not to say that businesses don't do this, but maybe do more of this, is to think about prosperity as beyond the bottom line in a company, but also in a way that benefits communities and families of employees.

I mean, how can you inspire that on a large scale? Well, I think we can inspire it and we can demand it. It's two parts, and I very much agree with Lisa. We're not going to have prosperity without a whole bunch of ends. It's strong companies. It's thoughtful and strong governments, and it's strong community. and and let's keep going. I think the most important site of action for the country right now

is actually in communities. And if I have a call to action for us as Canadians is let's not be economy takers, let's be economy makers. And in every place, there are economic actors. Bring them together. A Chamber of Commerce is an actor. Municipal governments are economic actors. One of many in a place, not for profit. So if we can figure that part out and articulate some kind of economic vision and ownership matters, I do think that the closer to the ground

the ownership is, the more that company or organization's going to feel the heat and feel the duty of care to a place. I think one of the most horrible things that's ever been written was that Milton Friedman 1970 article which said that the only responsibility of a company was to make returns for its shareholders.

We haven't gotten past that yet. I mean, we're trying to come back from it, but again, it matters who owns what. I am a big believer in business. It's the most powerful way we have of getting things done together. So let me ask you all, as we wrap up here, a two short conversation.

about this very big topic. But I want to ask you formally how you would rethink or how you would actually define prosperity the way it should be defined. What would you say, Kaylee? So thinking about this on two different levels, first the individual level, and then I'll move to the national level. Preparing for this podcast, I asked a number of friends and colleagues, like, what is your definition of prosperity? What do you think? I'm curious. And the words that came out were, often autonomy, resources, choice, control, knowing my kids are going to be able to have the life that I had and the one that they chose. So basically it's all about like autonomy, sovereignty, freedom, control, freedom, and resources. You have to have resources in order to do that.

And that doesn't mean siphoning up all the resources. It means having enough resources to access these sorts of things. So then at the national level, we're thinking, how does government create the conditions so that everyone has access to all of those pieces. And at Shield, we think about this. Again, I said, you know, governance and then value capture. And we're not doing either one of those in the way that we could in order to be delivering prosperity for folks. And then the other piece is making sure that we have ownership and control

over as much of the economy as we can so that we can be making the decisions for ourselves. And if we have more of those two things together, then we'll be able to steward our own prosperity. Very good. Lisa, how would you define? So I think about it now through the lens of the coalition for a better future.

And this is why we say that we want long-term economic growth that is inclusive, sustainable. And the reason why we use inclusive and sustainable isn't necessarily about environmental sustainability. It's about the fact that the economy exists and continues on. So you make sure that it has, has long-lasting effect. In indigenous culture, they say seven generations. That's a great idea. I like that idea. I incorporate that into the notion of sustainability for an economy.

On the inclusivity side, it's not just trying to figure out who should be in the room. It's making sure that when you are growing an economy, that you have a good idea of how many, for example, indigenous employees are in the C-suite, how many of them are in management positions, how many women are actually involved? Are we bringing all of the powerful tools we have out there, all the big brains we have out there into our economy? And I like measuring that as well. I think that's a measure of prosperity.

So I would substitute the word long-term economic growth for the word prosperity and prosperity equals an economy that's inclusive, that is sustainable, and that we're all working together at every level, both the community level and the national level. And Zeta, please. I want to pick up the word that Kali used, which is agency. I think agency, a sense of agency, individual agency,

is a prerequisite to dignity. And I think prosperity is not feeling like you're on thin ice all the time, that you're standing on solid ground, there's somebody standing next to you. You have a sense of the people who came before you, and you have a sense that the sum of your work and your effort, will add up to something for the people that are going to come after you. And I think we have more power than we think we have as individuals

to start things, to build things, to recruit the pillars of government and markets to our agendas. We only have a couple of minutes left, but I wonder if we could use that by imagining, and I love this idea of agency, of our own agencies, as individuals in determining the kind of life we want to live. Just what is one step that we could all take as individuals to perhaps enhance our chance or opportunity

at becoming more prosperous, in every sense of the word. Lisa. Find a community group to join and start building your community out. I think that's what it is. Don't sit at home, streaming, get out there, and join up with other neighbors. And we're living a very isolated life these days, very individualistic.

And if you start building your own connectivity, I think it's better. So go out and join something. I am so with you on that, Lisa. In the Fogel Process Films, which were initiated by the National Film Board and Memorial University in the late 60s, there's a beautiful, they're all beautiful. And they're like textbook case for how you do community economic development. They're very relevant now. Anyway, there's this fellow named Andrew Brett, who was a fisherman,

and he's speaking to the camera, and he's quite nervous. and he says, this is like we were facing certain resettlement at that time, he said, we have to hold fast and stop being so contrary one to another. And I think this is the call to all communities to do that. Go out of the house, join something. And if there's nothing to join, start something. Focus on your economy. Now, you're not going to be great economic stewards if you haven't built some kind

relationship together to start with. But most communities have relationships. We just don't know how to be economic together. More economic together. Kaylee, the final word is yours. Oh, man. Thinking about creating prosperity for the next generation, I think there's so many things that we need to work on building together. So coming together in communities and talking about how we can govern our economy differently, the rules that we can set differently, and then speaking into government about that so that they will change the rules in a way that benefits us in the future is an incredibly important thing for us to do. Kaylee, Lisa, and Zeta, what a privilege to listen to all of you. I wish it was longer than an hour. But thank you. Our time is up. Great. Thank you so much.

Thank you very, very much. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Kaylee Tieson is the chief economist for the Shield Institute. Former conservative cabinet minister Lisa Raite is vice chair of global investment banking at CIBC and co-chair of the Coalition for a Better Future. Zeta Cobb is the founder of Shorefast, which supports local economies and community development. This episode was produced by Nicola Luxchich with help from Tom Howell.

Recording production oversight from Francois Apertier and audio engineer Pascal Jobin. Technical production, Emily Caravaggio and Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.