The Current - Jim Balsillie's prescription for Canadian business

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

He built a global company from Waterloo, Ont. and he says more Canadian businesses could do the same, if they didn't keep making the same strategic mistake. The former co-CEO or Research in Motion argues Canadian businesses and policy-makers aren't doing enough to create and protect its intellectual property — and that's holding us back more than tariffs. We talk to him about why he's an economic nationalist — and what it will take to bring Canada's economy into the 21st century.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. It has been a tough year for Canadian businesses with the ever-changing tariff situation and trouble with two of our biggest trading partners. But according to my next guest, our biggest problem, perhaps is not Donald Trump, it is of our own making. Jim Balsely is the former co-CEO of Research in Motion, the creator of the Blackberry. He is now chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators and runs his own private investment office, and he joins me in our Toronto studio as part of our special series talking to Canadian business leaders about this moment and how we get through it.

Jim, good morning. Pleasure to be with you, Matt. Good to see you here. You led, as you know, one of the most successful technology companies this country has ever produced. We're speaking in the city of Toronto, where many of the key. technologies behind AI were developed, and yet you argue that Canada is being left behind. What is the big error, the strategic error, that you see business in this country making right now?

I would say more policy community than business, but certainly business too. The world changed in the last 30 years in a degree in rapidity, unprecedented in human history, where the wealth and power came from owning ideas and data. And we didn't reoriented our policies to owning those. So we took ourselves out of the big money. So we invented AI, but we basically gave away the intellectual property. And we have no strategies in our policies to make data into a strategic asset. So let's get into that.

But for people who don't, if they don't swim in the waters that you do, explain IP. What is it and why does it matter? Well, 90% of the value of the standard of poor's 500 is intangible assets up from 17%. So the intangible assets are worth about $50 trillion roughly in the United States. And it's a government-granted monopoly where you have the right to stop somebody from using your idea. And so this is a technical realm that works exactly opposite free trade. It's about spreading monopolies, not spreading free trade. So when you look at things like the USMCA with a.

million words in it. You will not find the words free trade. There were no tariffs getting rid of. So what was it all about? Is it about, it was about regulatory remote control to encircle the knowledge assets of data and IP so that they can capture rents. And that's what intellectual property is. How much money is in there? I mean, if we're talking about owning IP and controlling IP, how much money? Well, as an example, in the IP and data, the new emerging data industries. In the last 15 years, they've added about $18 trillion of market capitalization to the U.S. firms. And if you look at Canada in the last 15 years, if we had kept pace with

the United States in this data and AI era, we would have over a trillion dollars annually more in our GDP. That's $25,000 a person. So the divergence between us and the United States is is principally a product of inattention to where the money and power is in this contemporary era. So how did that happen? You mentioned artificial intelligence. I mean, two of the godfathers of AI come from this country. And yet, if you take a look at the patent holders globally, Canada is not on the list of top 100 patent holders for artificial intelligence.

Why don't we own more of that? Well, we conflate invention with innovation. You can invent something, but you don't. don't own it. And owning it is a very technical realm. It's very predatory and geostrategic. And so even today, Canada spends in the 20s of billions of dollars every year in innovation, has no strategies of any consequence to own the innovation outcomes, nor do we have any data strategies to turn that into a productive asset. So it's a policy thinking rooted in a bygone era of a production economy of the 1970s.

That it's a good idea to invent something, but owning it perhaps was less of a priority. Yeah, it used to be if you invented something, then you kind of co-located it with your production and that if you had a branch plant and you did a little bit of R&D, they would make it here and you'd get all the good jobs and the manufacturing. But very few people actually work in manufacturing anymore, about one in 12 of Americans work in manufacturing. So all of the money and all of the power comes from the kind of non-manufacturing parts of it, but our policy orientation has focused on manufacturing.

Now, when you look at aspects of our resource economy, whether it's critical minerals, oil and gas, agriculture, and lumber, I'm all for that. I'm 100% supportive of that, but it should be an and function where we do that, we capture the value add of the AI data intellectual property. And we've had no policy attention to that. And the number one thing I advocate for, both in the business community and in the public service, is building capacity because this is a technical realm. It's a strategic realm. There are no economic allies in this game

because somebody has to be the landlord and somebody has to be the tenant and everybody wants to be the landlord. So you're not friends economically. You may be friends in a, you may be ally security, but it's a rivalrous economic structure. So what do we do about that? How do we go about changing the approach of Canadian business

so that they better take advantage? of, as you say, the wealth generating possibilities of IP. Well, we have to jettison this naive and sentimental view of the world that we're all economic allies, that these things like friend-shoring and stuff like that are fanciful ideas. It's all about more national approaches. It's all about updating capacity and being more sovereign and value-ad, because every other country is doing that. And we haven't done that.

We thought it was a shared global destiny, and we were preyed upon. So so much of our... You think we were naive? Extraordinarily naive. Yeah, yeah, of course. And where did that come from? Well, I don't know. It just liked the way the world was.

Canada did great for 50 years after World War II. It was a good gig, and the world changed, and we didn't. And we had innovation. reports that sounded like a production economy report, even though all of these other countries were building the capacity to own their ideas, I mean, China owns over 500,000 patents at the state level. There are almost 2 million patents granted globally in AI. We took ourselves out of that game for no reason that I can, I can see to justify other than stuck in outdated thinking of the 1970s. So we've consigned ourselves to a low value-added command.

economy, very similar in structure to Russia's, when in fact we have all the ability to be much more like Scandinavia or Western Europe or U.S. And you have to understand that that gap of a trillion dollars, that's $25,000 a year per person that we've diverged from the U.S. in 15 years. That could pay for all of our social programs, our health care programs, our our defense, our parks, all the things we value, they're expensive. So you need prosperity to pay for them. And you've got to go where the money is. And the money is in these intangibles, which I repeat, constitute 90% of the value of the S&P 500.

Do you think, how would you characterize the opportunity that's presented to this country right now? I mean, again, the prime minister, and we can talk about him in a moment, but the prime minister and others see this as a moment, right? that the global order has been rattled by our neighbors to the south and that we need to figure it what the way forward is. So what do you see as the scale of the opportunity? Well, if we reoriented, say, half of that trillion dollars we've eroded vis-a-vis the America, now that's $500 billion a year. But I do have to say that Trump just turned up the volume of something that's been going on for 20 years.

This is not a new phenomenon. Canada's been preyed upon it. When USMCA was signed, everyone was trumping, we have a trade deal. It's remote regulatory control. They put in a poison pill to press a reset button in six years. Here we are. These are not new phenomena. This has been going on for a long time.

And that erosion over the past 15 years is not Trump. That's Obama. That's Trump. That's Biden. That's the way the world works. So I think what Trump did was. was because he was so brutish about it, it gave us a wake-up call. But the wake-up call is not for a recently changed world.

It's a world that's been changing for 30 years. Do you see leadership in this country answering that wake-up call? I'm starting to see signs of it. I ask you this in part because in the spring, before the election, you were very critical of the liberals. You said Mark Carney will not make Canada more prosperous. Are you sticking with that? I think, and I don't think Prime Minister,

I think Prime Minister Carney missed an opportunity to reorient Canada in this budget. And my deep interaction with the PMO and the PCO said, it's coming next year. And I feel like it's Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football, that we have to reorient now. There's nothing in the budget to reorient to own our ideas. They're just giving more money for research. There's absolutely nothing for turning data into a strategic asset. They're still giving all the benefits to foreign firms in these various programs. No, I think this was a missed opportunity for strategic reorientation to the realities of the contemporary economy.

And yet they put in some provisions for a new digital currency, a stable coin. And it shows me they're prepared to work on frameworks when they understand. And they understand payments. They understand macro banking and currency. So it says to me they still haven't understood how productivity is driven in the 21st century. So no, I do not think this budget was. a missed opportunity to reorient to these contemporary realities. However, again, as I said a moment ago, I'm pleased that we're harnessing our physical resources. That's a kind of 1950s business

plan. By all means, get that to market. But I would like to see the end function where we start to participate in these value-outed aspects. So that's a rethink in some ways of our place in the world, right, and who we think of ourselves as in that world. But why did we consign ourselves to a low-value-ad place. Canada was the third country in the world to put satellites in space. We're the first ones to do coast-to-coast subsection sub-second telecommunications. We've invented many things. So what is it that came into our sense of consigning ourselves to low-value ad? And if you

look at all of the current negotiations going on, Germany, we'll give you raw materials and you do refining, we'll send uranium to India today and so on and so forth, or we'll send unrefined bitumen down to the U.S. and so on. We keep consigning ourselves to a low value-outed position. Where you believe we should be doing that stuff. We have all the ability in the world to participate in more value-ad, especially as the world has changed in this regard over this past 30 years, and that will restore our, I think, our appropriate prosperity and sovereignty and security. You want to build that leverage of resilience and sovereignty so that you're not

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What could the country be, do you think? What could we be? Well, Canada has enormous potential that it has let erode over the past 30 years. I think if we started to value out our minerals, not just to just ship them raw, but to turn them into the valuable products

that people want, we can value it. where agriculture, we should control our data and value add our agriculture. So we have the ability to be much more prosperous, much more resilient, much more sovereign, creating these really good jobs and really good companies. But it starts with orienting domestic firms, domestic capacity, domestic value add. And our economic strategies has been to give that away to foreign firms and they come here for a branch plant, not understanding that the manufacturing role is shrinking in terms of a, its jobs and value at.

You've said that there's a role for the education sector in this, that our business schools are teaching management rather than teaching capitalism. What do you mean by that? Well, that's correct. Because when you look at the, for instance, I'll give a very concrete example. Last week, the deputy governor of the one of the deputy governors of the bank of Canada gave a speech that productivity is about efficiency and more output per labor and you've got to get more capital into machinery.

those are all production economy constructs. And when you think of a company like, say, NVIDIA, 35,000 employees. The chipmaker. Yeah. Five trillion dollar market cap. These companies are not about production output. They're about owned ideas where you get a rent.

And you establish standards and you have intellectual property and you wrap around software and you wrap around data systems. And when you do that, you can start printing. quite frankly, $100 billion companies, click, click, click. And that's not in our domain of business teaching. So what should students be taught instead? Well, they should be taught the geostrategic nature of how the global economy works. They should be talk about how to have strategic IP strategies.

They should be talking about how to have data sets that you have proprietary data sets that you can put a mode around and use that as a factor of productivity. So those are the realms. But if you actually look at the speeches from the prime minister or the Bank of Canada, they don't talk like that. They talk about output per worker, business investment, production. And that's, you know, buy new machinery and click out more widgets in the factory. That's not how wealth and power is made in the 21st century. What would you say to somebody who's, you know what, like we're a small country.

And we don't have, we can't compete against Silicon Valley, let alone China. that even if we were able to hang on to the IP, we would be swapped by those who are larger and better funded elsewhere. What would you say to people who put that argument back to you? I would say that is a thinking that applies to the production economy where scale matters because the bigger your factory, the more widgets you can put out. But the idea is economy is beautifully attuned to small shrewd countries that can own a critical part.

Think of all the pharmaceuticals in Switzerland, which is a small fraction the size of Canada, all the different technologies in Scandinavia, things in Taiwan, in semiconductors, Israel, and so on. The idea's economy is very attuned to small countries that want to really create focus strategies. And so it's actually an opportunity. Scale isn't the big thing.

But I go back to the fact that you need to understand, how it works. You need updated approaches. These are public private frameworks between businesses and government. And that's the recipe for capturing these rants in an ideas economy of IP and data. Go back to what you did. Research in Motion was a global company based out of Waterloo, Ontario. Could have gone anywhere? Stayed there. What were you doing differently, do you think? And what were you doing right? Well, I had some very good mentors in the United States on commercialization. and also very close relationships in the State Department. So when we went into these geostrategic issues,

we were like an American company working with the State Department. We had about 50,000 patents that we filed. And when I retired, my last quarter was $5.2 billion in revenue on a $20 billion realm. So I was experiencing world that I had not been taught. And I was very fortunate I had good mentors. And I saw how the game is played. And it's a really fun game. And I've replicated it in a couple other companies that I've had since then.

It's a technocracy of navigation. And that's what RIM did. And I'm simply saying to the policy community and to those I mentor here, this is the playbook that I see around the world. And we have all the ability to build the same success more in Canada. Did it matter where you were, where you were based? Well, I think the great benefit for us is that we had such a draw of talent from, the universities in Canada.

The ecosystem that was in. Yeah, the talent was really, really great. And that was, and then we were able to really tap into the U.S. capital markets through legal structures in Canada and, and then had really good mentors in the commercialization, the U.S. So it was, it was lightning in a bottle. I mean, the other side of that story, of course, is that the company was one of great national pride and success and then was overtaken by companies like Apple and Google. What do you think people should take from?

from that part of your story? Well, I left when we just finished a $20 billion year because I had a strategic disagreement with my co-CEO that they wanted to link it more to new hardware. And at that time, we had more revenue in our services business than Facebook and more users than WhatsApp. So I wanted it to be an open platform for messaging, and that's what you saw Facebook become

rather than tied to the hardware. But in many ways, I mean, the story of RIM is one of, not missed opportunities, but the iPhone comes out, this phone right here, and maybe the company doesn't take it as seriously as it did. And they had this enormous lead and then was overtaken by those other companies. No, I think, first of all, when the iPhone was launched, we were $3 billion in sales.

That year we doubled to six. The next year we went to 11th. The next year we went to 15. The next year we went to $20 billion. We're the fastest growing company in the world in the four years after the iPhone was launched. And yet, it's not the Blackberry that I'm using right now. It's the, I just wonder, back to that question. I mean, what should entrepreneurs from now, from this country now, take from the trajectory of research in motion?

Well, as I was saying, I was about to say, is that to quote the immortal Yogi Berra, when you reach a fork in the road, you've got to take it. And RIM had a fork in the road. Do they double down on hardware or did they become an open messaging platform for services? and you get strategic forks in the road and you have to navigate them very carefully and the terrain shifts and had we been embedded in the SMS planned as your social media,

would it have been the same world for RIM, but also for ad-supported social media? So the message is you have to always be clear-eyed and unsentimental in the strategic events that come at you. Are you optimistic about the potential of this country? You said that in some ways there have been missed opportunities, but at the same time, how do you see the future? Are you an optimistic? Matt, I'm an entrepreneur. You'll never find somebody more optimistic than me. We have so much potential, so many good people,

but there are subversive forces of self-colonization and self-underbinding. And so we have to call those out, that there's certain business associations and media, that there are more attuned, to foreign interests than the art of Canada's interest and any colonizing experience needs local enabler. So I champion those that see a better potential for Canada, that are optimistic about it, that want to be sovereign and more value out. We have to bat for our own team here because nobody else is going to bat for us. Who's more tuned to foreign interests? I mean, who is it that you're poking at there? Well, I mean, for instance, when there was privacy legislation proposed that was a dream for Silicon Valley and the Business Council CEO stood up

with the Minister of Industry and endorsed it. And it was a surprise launch to the domestic innovators and policy community. They also full-throatedly endorsed TPP and USMCA without understanding the poison pills in it. And these were U.S. designed structures. You have media outlets like the hub that says we don't need sovereign digital infrastructure. and the media is sponsored by Facebook. And so these kind of... Sponsored by Facebook in terms of Facebook's helping to float local journalism. Yeah, for an article that says you don't need sovereign infrastructure.

And so these, and of course we had levels, three levels of government and big parts of Bay Street advocating for the privatizing of government in Toronto and the Google Sidewalk. This is the Sidewalk Labs, kind of like Smart City kind of development. Yeah, well, if you're going to do this self-examination. subversion. And that, there's, there's an element of that. Can you imagine that happening in America that people say, oh, let's not be sovereign in America, let's not be value ad, let's let foreign interest control us. It's ridiculous. So yeah, we have a pocket of people like that, but we also have extremely good innovators, extremely good citizens who want a better country who are working. And that's why I helped co-found the Council of Canadian Innovators, because there wasn't a voice for

domestic innovators. There was a conflating of foreign tech and Canadian tech that what's good for Silicon Valley is good for Canada, which is a ridiculous assertion and presumption to have. And yet it wasn't long ago that that was the priority number one, for instance, of the Trudeau government. It was all about supporting foreign tech. And somehow we were going to get better. But in the era of that approach of business association, certain media and the government,

that's when we gave away that trillion dollars a year. And Matt, this is not abstract. This is big money. And if we don't reorient quick, which is my criticism of the Carney government, that trillion-dollar diversions per year is going to keep growing. But we have all the ability to close that gap, but we need updated approaches to do that. You've called yourself an economic nationalist. I think it's really interesting. I mean, you could be on a yacht somewhere doing whatever people do on a yacht.

And yet you are putting money into universities and think tank. and you try to influence public policy. Where does that motivation come from? Well, first of all, the moral code is to try to leave the campsite better than you found it. And I have a enriched life where I get to work with these wonderful people who want to build a better country. Like, I feel very, very blessed. And so it's my country, too. It's our country, too.

And if you want it, you're going to fight for it. it's given me so much opportunity that I'm so thankful for that I'm going to do the best I can with all these other good people to try to make it with the same kind of opportunities that I had when I was young, that young people have that opportunity for their future. You feel that that's an obligation that you have, having been successful that this is what you need to do. Yeah, the moral code is carry the load you think you can handle, and I do things I think I can handle. Jim Balsley, thank you very much. It's a pleasure, man. Jim Balsalli is the former co-CEO of Research in Motion, an entrepreneur, philanthropist,

and chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.