The Paikin Podcast - Jim Balsillie: Is Canada Sabotaging Its Own Economy?

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

Jim Balsillie joins Steve to discuss how he thinks Canada is sabotaging its own economy, how we have consigned ourselves to being a low value-added petro state, why we are operating from an outdated playbook, and Canada’s productivity crisis. They then discuss a real made-in-Canada approach, why foreign investment is overrated, and how to create a more sovereign future for Canada. Follow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ThePaikinPodcastX: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.socialEmail us at: [e-mail]

Hi, everybody, Steve Paken here. One of Canada's most successful business people has been urging successive federal governments for years not to give away one of this country's best home court advantages. You all know Jim Balsely, one of the co-CEOES of Research in Motion. He was half of the dynamic partnership that brought the Blackberry to the world. Besides running his businesses these days, Mr. Balsali, through his chairmanship of the Canadian Council of Innovators,

is trying to get anyone in Ottawa who will listen to him to understand that Canada has got to be a tiger when it comes to protecting its intellectual property as a larger move to seeing this country not simply as hewers of wood and drawers of water, but also big players on the artificial intelligence and digital stage. We also talk about something that we always inevitably turn our attention to when we do interviews. Hockey, we both love it a lot, but one of us almost bought an NHL team. I'll give you a hint. That wasn't me. Jim Balsalli, coming right up, one-on-one on the Paken podcast.

Very happy to welcome to the Paken podcast, Jim Balsali, who is the chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators, and the former chair and co-CEO, of course, of Research in Motion. Jim, is great to see you again. How's life for you these days? Great to be with you, Steve. A life is nourishing and enjoyable. Thank you very much. Nourishing and enjoyable.

Those are good words to associate with. That's great. I want to dive in and start with a comment that you made, which I think is a good place to start and we'll open up this discussion well. You said we have a moment to reconceptualize Canada. And I guess we need to start by understanding what reconceptualizing Canada means to Jim Balsalli.

Well, the world has changed. in a degree of rapidity that's unprecedented in mankind. And Canada has bought into a form of almost extreme neoliberalism, both liberals and conservatives, that the markets will embed the norms that we want and take us towards them. And I've yet to see a true free market in the world anywhere. There's social constructs. And in this era of intangibles, where the market is created and changed by the government,

literally dozens of times a day, and it's cross-cutting to security and social dimensions, we have to rethink what's going to take us to the values that we so greatly want and seek. We need to rethink. Are we rethinking? No. And that is the problem. the world has changed in a degree in rapidity in the past 30 years, this unprecedented humankind, I can't think of a new policy or a new institution that has been birthed in that time. And so we have to start thinking of how do we capture our potential in this changed world? How do we ensure that the benefits of that economic potential translate into

the social and security outcomes that we're looking for. And I just think our current approaches are selling Canada short. As an example, our economy structurally is much closer to Russia's than it is to say, Scandinavians. And so we have all the potential of the world to be much more than that. And these new technologies cross over into impacting social well-being, mental health, societal harmony, democratic integrity, individual autonomy and privacy, and of course, security. And so we're going to have to start thinking of policies and institutions.

And when you look at the Trump behavior in the past year, he simply laid bare and cranked up a couple notches what's been going on for the past 30 years. So the ability to pretend it's not happening is just a lot harder now than it was, say, the year ago. We're certainly going to get to Donald Trump and what he's doing, both for the United States and to Canada. But I still want to mind a little deeper on this one here because you've been tough in your criticism in the past by saying Canada refuses to understand how prosperity is generated. What do you mean by that? Well, that is correct because 90% of the value of the standard impure is 500. is intangible assets, and intangible assets are negative rights.

It means it's an owned idea that you have the right to stop somebody from using that, as opposed to this jacket is a physical asset, it's a positive right, it's rivalrous, only one person can wear it at a time. But the design for this jacket is non-rivalor risk, a million people can have at the time. And if I own that idea, I have the right to stop somebody from copying that. And it's a completely opposite toolkit. So when you look at quote unquote trade deals, they're much more about spreading monopolies rather than spreading competition. And we came at them at an article of faith that they're good no matter what,

not understanding that they're instruments of regulatory remote control and you have to come at it with an agenda for what you want to advance for the benefit of your economy, not that this is some shared destiny of reasonable shared proportion of outcomes for everybody. It's much more a win-loss environment, thus that invites strategic behavior, and thus a relatively smaller open economy of Canada has to be much more strategic, much more nationalist approaches, much more front-footed, and yet those considerations have been absent. And so that's one aspect of reconceptualizing Canada that I'm talking about. Before I ask you whether you're seeing enough of that right now, I do want to read something back to you that you said earlier this year, before Mark Carney became the prime minister in the spring, you said, I don't think we should consign ourselves to be a low value-added petrol state, selling a few other resources and a bit of agriculture.

While Canada was busy extolling the virtues of liberalized global trade and trying to expand commodity production, the U.S. was focused on owning intellectual property, controlling data, and changing the rules to make free trade less free. So my question is, has anything happened in the many months since Mark Carney became Prime Minister to make you rethink any of that statement? Well, no. When you look at the data-driven economy in the last 15 years, save since 2010, if Canada kept pace with the United States in this changed data-AI economy, we would have over a trillion dollars more in our GDP annually. That's $25,000 per person or $100,000. for family of four every year. And so I have yet to see a reorientation towards capturing data as a strategic asset for having intellectual property from the things that we invent, even though we literally have industry and innovation programs in the 20s of billions every year.

And now there's about well over two million patents granted for AI. So the fusion between IP and AI is almost complete. And yet I've yet to see any strategies of that in our programs, in the budget, in our trade agreements. The U.S. has over 700 experts by law that are advisors for trade in 26 advisory committees. Since for over 50 years, Canada has nothing. And so this understanding of the deep technocracy, the strategic predatoryness that's at play, the tremendous potential of Canada, it requires a substantial reorientation. And I saw the budget as a status quo.

Well, okay, if I were the prime minister, I'd push back on you by saying, what do you mean, Jim? I've got a minister first time ever in Canadian history for artificial intelligence, Evan Solomon. Doesn't that indicate some understanding of where things are at and where things are going? Well, just because you know the word AI doesn't mean you know how to manage it for the benefit of Canada.

They did a big grant Nokia for $340 million last week, calling in a Canadian company. The big grant for compute before that was $240 million to core weave. So there's a thin line between being strip-mined in this era of AI and capturing that strategic factor of productivity for the economic and non-economic benefit of Canada. So performative stuff doesn't mean that you understand how it works. For 10 years, we had industry renamed innovation and science, and yet we didn't have any appropriate innovation program. So this is a deep technocracy.

It requires an orientation to Canadian companies because they capture the benefits for Canada. it requires deep engagement. And what I've seen so far is a focus on taking commodities to markets, letting Germans refine our minerals, taking pure oil and gas. And I'm all for our resources. But I'm not seeing any strategies to own the ability or perform the ability to value out those. So if Francois Filippe Champagne's budget were rewritten in a way that might satisfy some of the things you're talking,

about here what might we have seen in it that would have been to your favor well there were several things we could see number one the government grant spends about seven and a half billion dollars a year in in uh research the 4.2 billion to granting councils 3.3 billion internal research every other developed country has strategies to capture generate the intellectual property and capture it for so that you can get rents for it um When you commercialize, Canada has nothing of the sort. Second of all, I would have seen strategy, want to see strategies where we turn our data with sovereign compute into a factor of productivity, not only for the non-economic benefits, say better health outcomes for better environmental research, but also for the economic outcomes where our companies could engage with that and use that in a managed way, say like the AI, the EU's AI factories initiative. Third, I would have wanted to see the beginning of advisory councils for trade like the U.S. has before we go into these negotiations, which are live right now.

We're just ad hoc reactionary strategies. Fourth, I would like to see an updated analytical framework for all of these grants to foreign companies so that we understand that the spillovers operate differently when you do low domestic value add, low sovereign control. and then what happens is you're vulnerable to predatory behavior or foreign decisions like we're seeing with the automotive and battery companies in Canada. These are all very predictable in a world that changes to intangibles, and yet we're using a playbook from the 1970s. I could go on, but those are four examples, and they're very simple, and none of them are about money. Well, I don't know this, so I'm going to ask this. I assume you're the kind of a guy who can call up the Minister of Finance and say, I've got some ideas for you. I get 10 minutes of your time and bend your ear.

A, did you do that? B, if you did, did he take the call and C, did you have that meeting? I've had lots of interaction with people with the PMO and the PCO, and they certainly know how I think about these things. And the Minister of Finance definitely knows how I feel when he was the Minister of Infrastructure during the sidewalk labs where he was leading the project to privatize government in our largest city. and then he was the industry minister perpetuating these things that eroded our GDP per capita

to the tune of trillion dollars a year over the past 15 years. So, yes, they know how I think, but they're stuck in old thinking. There's lots of corporate lobbying for foreign interests. One politician who I've been particularly impressed with is Wab Canoe. I chaired an economic panel for him. He's wanting to unlock all the resources of Manitoba. through the Churchill project and the mines, but he also wants to have sovereign AI and capture the IP

and grow Manitoba company. So it's that kind of national approach that I'm seeing at the subnational, that I think Ottawa should embrace much, much more. It needs a dramatic reorientation. Well, why aren't they then? If the argument you make is so compelling, which it sounds like it is, what's holding this back? Well, I think they're stuck in outdated thinking.

They think it's about bringing in foreign investment. So think about if a foreigner brings capital, they just want superior returns. That doesn't necessarily mean that translates into good jobs for high performing paychecks. Often these branch plant jobs are not very high paying or they're not very many of them, whether they focus so much on Amazon warehouses or tech branch plants. So they need to understand, they need to update their thinking. And I saw in the budget that they put in stable coins, which is a marketplace framework. And it means to me that they understand they're not afraid to work with frameworks.

And they understand the payment monetary system. But all these frameworks that I mentioned in terms of how trade works, not as liberalization, but as spreading regulatory remote control, how IP is managed, how data is managed, FDI spillover's work and much more. And then you've seen the very predatory as Trump national security strategy dropped on Friday, they're using an outdated playbook and they need to understand that these things work differently than the way they were trained. And it's important to know that in the top 50 developed countries in the world, Canada's

last place in the last five years in our GDP per capita growth, we're last place in the OECD and productivity over the last four years. Something's not working. It's obviously the playbook that they're using is misaligned, and it's a time for a reorientation and a revisitation. It's gone from a three-alarm fire to a four-alarm fire. Pretty soon it's going to be a five-alarm fire. So how loud do the bells have to ring before there's a recognition of what needs to be done?

you dropped a phrase in that last answer that I guarantee you many of the people watching or listening to this right now have never heard of before or need to know more about stable coin explain what that is well stable coin is really a tokenization protocol for money and when you tokenize something you have a digital representation of something that is not the token itself it could be real estate. It could be stocks. It could be bonds. It could be art. But in the case of stable coin, it's a digital token that represents money and in a stable coin, fiat currency. And Canada, probably rightfully, wasn't really that interested in this. But in the summertime, Trump dropped the Genius Act, which was very aggressive, very geostrategic and very predatory for the U.S. to become the global reserve, not only reserve currency, but almost fiat currency in a digital realm with U.S. dollar currencies. And so you've heard of these things like tether and so on. And so what's happened is because that to be a U.S. dollar stable coin, you have to keep the money in the U.S. by

their rules, it was a great risk to appropriating the role, the traditional role of the Bank of Canada and sovereign deposits in fiat currency in Canada. So there's been a reaction by the government to avail very quickly. They reacted, the ability to have digital Canadian dollar money available in a regulated, safe way in Canada. So that is some indication that they get what you're talking about, yes? 100%. As I said, when it comes to monetary supply and payment systems in fiat currency, they absolutely aren't afraid to respond to the threats. So it tells me that it's not that they're not, they're averse to responding. It's that they don't understand the nature of the threats

and the changed economy for productivity. Or they would have responded in kind because while stable coins matter, IP and data consequences and the trade consequences and the FDI thinking is of much greater consequence than stable coins. And stable coins are a big consequence. So if you attend to something that's a framework that's important, but you miss three or four other frameworks which are very important, why action in one era and not in the other. And the only thing I can infer is they don't understand it. Well, okay, I know you're familiar with this phenomenon. So I'll put it out there, and I don't mean this to be a smart aleck in saying it, but there is something called the Dunning Kruger effect where we're too stupid to realize that we're not as good as we think

we are. Do you think maybe some of that is going on here? I think people have to understand. I understand what the Dunning Kruger effect is that the less you know about something, the more you think you know about it. And this is the realm of the most predatory, rich, geostrategic, very intelligent, very powerful companies in the world. And we have an ideological mantra that is very simple and benign. And I would say naive. And so I think there is a place for updated thinking, absolutely. I'm not trying to be pejorative, but it's just irrefutable.

that this is of the greatest urgency to Canada. And I know we're getting to it in a minute, but the Trump doctrine for national security just raised the ante somewhat predictably, last week, even higher, where it's the Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine, which is hemispheric dominance, and everything else is subordinate

to the U.S. strategic dominance in the region. And so if we want to be sovereign and prosperous and not a vassal state, then we have to respond to these structural realities, which with much, much greater urgency, much, much greater expertise. And this is the reorientation that I'm calling for. Well, since you've dropped it, let's continue along this path. And that is, yes, usually when a government drop something on a Friday, they don't necessarily want people to take attention to it. but clearly that's not the case this time. They want the world to know what they're all about. When this national, this new national, Trump-focused national security strategy was dropped,

and as we sit here taping this in the second week of December, they dropped it last Friday. I'd like to know what your initial impression was in terms of what you thought it meant for Canada. Well, it was dropped Friday morning, and it really encodes their thinking. And it was as strident as I expected, many of these strategic things have been going on for a long time, but there was a veneer of collegiality or a veneer of diplomacy. Trump has thrown that to the wayside and is very brutish about it. And he's unequivocal that it's U.S. standards, U.S. technologies, U.S. architecture, U.S. control U.S. rules. And when it comes in the Monroe Doctrine is hemispheric dominance, it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's quite antagonistic towards Europe and

European governments and their inadequacy. This is a very strident articulation of his worldview and he has a lot of power. I don't see any benevolence towards Canada or anybody else in his traditional allies. We're particularly vulnerable to this because we hitched our wagon to a set of beliefs that it's a rules-based set of orders, rules-based international order. And in fact, power and leverage was always there. And when you make yourself unusually vulnerable as Canada has with its neoliberal naivety, it's much, much easier to exploit. So when you hear gaslighting that Canada still has the best access to the U.S. market of any country in the world, but Canada is wholly dependent on the U.S. to a degree that's much greater

than any other country in the world, save maybe Mexico. and he's dangling the viability of the existing trade agreement before everybody. And that uncertainty effectively shuts down business confidence. And so it's not really reasonable to say we have the best access because we're far too dependent and it's all uncertain anyway. So this is not a time to represent things in a way that is in fact, not how business is acting and thinking. We got the first free trade agreement from Brian Mulroney's government. I guess it was 1989.

He won the 88 election and then brought it in in 1989. And I guess I want to know from you, as you've watched this now for, you know, almost 40 years, how did we allow ourselves to become so dependent on one market for our economic future? Well, it's been many things. Number one is when we went completely hands-off and disabled so much of our policy committee, not the least of which was our trade advisory groups, and the U.S. and other countries doubled down in their capacity. So we thought it was a hands-off world, and everyone else was hands-on. And so that's a point number one. point number two, there wasn't a sense of sovereign resilience and national autonomy so that, yes, you trade, but you still are able to be a resilient country that has its own health care and medical and military and things like that. And yet we just let so many other aspects of our country fade. And then you pair that with the changing world to intangibles where our policy toolkit did not pair with that, did not change with that.

And therefore, we became much, much lower value add, much more commodity based in our businesses or just lower cost arbitrage labor. And then it gets to a point where you've eroded all the economic resiliency in the country and you're being competed against. Mexico in dollars per hour for a worker, which is these are much more akin to developing economy strategies, even though we're a G7, developed a country. And then when you keep bringing U.S. branch plants to Canada, as an example, or foreign branch plants, they don't have a global product mandate. You're a branch plant manager. Your job is to perform to the region you're assigned, to the products you're assigned. And so we structurally disabled our ability to have companies that can pursue broader global product mandates because of the attention

for these branch pants. Evidence that the battery plant, if you're working for one of these battery companies and you say, hey, I have an idea for a new kind of battery. And I think if I design it here and I can sell it in Brazil, they'll say, get in your box and make what you're told to make and sell it to where we tell you to sell it because you're a branch plant. And so the policy has made us increasingly dependent on the United States while they exhort people to diversify our markets. Diversification starts with diversifying products, but we disable that through our branch plant mentality because markets are made up of products. I've spoken to many business leaders over the years who've said things like the free trade agreement made us made business in Canada quite

candidly, fat. It became so easy to go into the American market, and we didn't have to look any farther beyond that, and now those chickens are coming home to roost. Do you think that's accurate? No, not at all. And I would like to know who would say that that would purport to be a business leader. The innovators that I've known are very courageous, very outward-looking, sell all around the world. Yes, we have these product or these policy frameworks focusing on branch plants that naturally orient us to only sell the United States because that's the job they're given from their foreign headquarters or we have very powerful domestic service monopolies and oligopolis that don't have a mandate to go beyond the regional service model. So I don't think

it's a complacency whatsoever. I think it's a policy framework that has manifested this and that our global innovators are successful in spite of the public policy, not because of it. And these false myths that are created by people that I don't know who they are or what's their basis for doing that, our global traders succeed in spite of the public policy, not because of it. Imagine what would happen if we start putting the wind at their backs, not at their face. My goodness, Canada has so much potential. I guarantee you the person who told me that, the most recent person who told me that would not want me saying on this broadcast identifying him. But I'll tell you later if you like, as long as you promise to keep it

between the two of us. Has that person gone out and gotten purchase orders for Canadian high value out of goods globally? If so, not in a very long time. Well, then I don't think that's a credible characterization to say, well, gosh, these people are completely. because have you fought in the arena and actually dealt with the reality that's at hand? And so I think it's very, I think people have to be careful before they manufacture these false myths. I'm chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators. We have roughly 180 members. I'm inspired by their courageousness, their acumen, their world beating approaches, their fast growth, their profitability, their desire to make a better country. in spite of a government that overwhelmingly orientes towards foreign firms in all of its policies,

unlike any other country in the world. Imagine what they would do if we learned to work hand and glove with these companies, say just like the U.S. does with their companies. But what Canada so much, especially in the last 10 years, shares with the U.S. government, is they both work hand and glove with U.S. companies. Well, you are absolutely the right person who asked this next question. to, in part because you, I mean, you went to school in the United States, you know the United States, you've done lots of business in the United States, you know how absolutely ruthless and

vicious they can be down there as you try to do business with them. They're bigger than us, they're richer than us. They are clearly under Trump losing any interest in being buddies with us anymore. It's about win for them. It's not enough to have win-win. It's got to be we win and you lose. At least that's what I'm seeing right now. And I wonder if you're a small to medium-sized power like Canada going up against this kind of behemoth, what do you do? How do you stay competitive in that kind of a world? Well, the value-added intangibles economy is perfectly attuned to smaller economies because they can carve out tremendous value-added niches. Like when you look at the pharmaceuticals industry in Switzerland, or you look at the

silicon semiconductor industry in Taiwan, or you look at the things like communications in Sweden and much and or cybersecurity in Israel. So small countries or what North Korea has built over the past generation. So size isn't the issue for tech. It's it's owning something distinct and navigating and continuing to own it and extracting a rent. globally. So Canada has tremendous opportunity to use its health data for health products, to value-outed agriculture, value-added minerals, value-added energy, and much, much, much more than that. And it's really an orientation towards how do I move beyond the commodity role to a value-added one. And if you want to do that, you're going to quickly write a way, go to

own in your intellectual property, controlling your AI data as a factor of productivity, and focusing on domestic firms. And those are exactly the things that have been absent from our policy orthodoxy for decades. Jim, I heard this story about you, and maybe you can confirm whether it in fact happened. And then I'll ask you another question coming out of it. And that is to say that when you graduated from university in the States, you know, we're having a conversation with a lot of your buddies. And, you know, this one was going off to to work at this Fortune 500 company, and that one was going off to work at another Fortune 500. And they asked you, which big American company are you going to hook up with? And you said,

I think I'm going to go back to Canada, and I'm going to go to a little place called Waterloo, and I'm going to plant my flag there, and I'm going to make it happen there. And the story I heard was they all kind of looked at you, kind of cock-eyed, thinking, why would you want to do that? You could absolutely do whatever the hell you wanted in America, but you decided to go home. presuming that story is accurate and presuming I've heard that correctly. My question is, here we are, like nearly probably four decades later, since you graduated from university, and you're still sticking it out in Canada in spite of the fact that no one's, no one appears to be listening to these admonitions of yours enough.

The question is why? Why do you stick it out here as opposed to just go down there and make it happen there much more easily? Well, I still have a lot of businesses in the United States. and I have a very active set of investments and businesses I own around the world, including the United States. So I'm prospering in my business activities. And there are a tremendous number of very good people in Canada

that want a better country in these realms that I've been talking about, and they encounter the policy orthodoxy, which really is a self-referencing constituency of entrenched people. And so if I can do some support with these people, if I can do some air cover, if I can provide some resources, to me it's the moral code that you carry the load, you think you can handle, you work to leave the campsite better than you found it. This is my country too. This is their country too. They all love it. And they want to see this potential. So I'm far from alone in this. There's a wonderful group that are working very hard in this. this and they're now being acknowledged and recognized that they were right. And how meaningful is it to reorient a country to a much, much more prosperous and sovereign and fair future because of the good policy advocacy of such a good cadre of people? And so I consider myself

very blessed to be able to be with them. I feel these are nourishing relationships. It's meaningful. Two-thirds of my day is my business is. More of it's outside of the country than inside of it. But that doesn't mean I can't do the very best I can in my policy and philanthropy, but I do it with a great, wonderful group of people, including the people of the Council Canadian Innovators, the people at CG, the people at Centers for Digital Rights, the BSIA, the Shield Institute, the Arctic Research Foundation, the Digital Governance Council. BASIA, it's BOLSILA for International Affairs, just to make sure everybody knows that. seven nonprofit institutions in the last 25 years. I believe in institutions. I believe in good people.

I believe in funding them. Is that story? I want to fact check that story. Is that story that I just told? Is that essentially right? A little bit true. There was a reception at Harvard and I met a guy named Rick Brock who was running a company in Kitchener, Waterloo. And I always wanted to be an operator, not a sort of a detached banker or consultant or investor. And they're a very distinct set of skills. And because I had CPA and but the MBA, he needed somebody to run his technology products division and also be the CFO. And it was about an 800 person company. So I thought that was a, you'd jump into the deep end to be an operator and learn how to operate something. And we were very, very successful. And then I thought, okay, I can do this. I know how to do this.

And I encourage people to get into operating rules to get that sense of, it's very different than something that you're an advisor and you're detached. It's a different skill set. But that is what led me there. And no looking back, no regrets, always building forward. I do want to take advantage of having you here on this show to ask you, because I don't think we've ever talked about this. There was a movie that came out a few years ago in which, well, Glenn Howardton portrayed you in the Blackberry movie. And I just wonder what kind of a job you think he did getting Jim Balsalli on film the way

he did? Well, it's a complete mockumentary. They were just having fun and making things up. Not 1% of what happened in the movie actually is factually correct. 1%? But not even 1%. No, no, no. None of these things.

I mean, there was never a hostile takeover of RIM, never, anybody ever. There was never any regulators come at RIM or anything like that that they portrayed with cops coming on site. None of these things that they showed actually happened. the U.S. robotic stuff didn't happen. And we've got a Mark Wahlberg has been retained

by the alumni. He's actually doing an actual documentary of him. So Hollywood is actually doing a real documentary and they've been filming it and I don't know the status of it, but I think people want to have the real story told.

So in that scene where they sort of screw you out of buying the Pittsburgh Penguins and moving them to Hamilton, where you allegedly tell Gary Betman to F off and all of this. That didn't happen? No. It's all made up. Really? Okay. None of it. Speaking of you. Do you think business actually happens like that? I don't know. Look good on the screen. You know, I could, I certainly imagined, I imagine you,

part of me actually kind of wishes that you did, because I can imagine a situation where Canada got screwed out of having another national hockey league team, courtesy of you, and you, you know, you left the commissioner with a piece of your mind. Never happened though, right? No, no, no, no, completely made up. Too bad. Too bad. Well, let me ask you this. Is the, is the dream of being an owner in the National Hockey League and bringing another team to Canada? Is that well and truly dead in your life now? Well, it would have been a good investment at the time because the, the team was bankrupt. It was filing for bankruptcy. And it would have been very good. But I, I, I, turned. I mean, that closed. I don't think it's the same investment now. As you know, I own

50 recreational properties since then that I bought and I have all my other investments. So there's many ways to make money and have a return and really have a lot of fun doing it. As a Hamiltonian, though, I just cannot imagine how wonderful it would have been, particularly since they just put, what, $300 million into the old COPS Coliseum to bring it into a really first-class facility. How wonderful it would have been to have an NHL team there, you heading it up. It's fine if it works economically. If it works economically, it's really fun. I mean, I'm a businessman first and foremost, and it would have been a tremendously good investment.

But that was a different time and a different era. As you may know, I bought, I own about 50 golf courses and recreational properties. And that's one of the things that I have, one of the portfolios of companies in my businesses. So, yeah, if there's an opportunity, and I have certainly a lot of tech things, and two of them have gone public in the last few years and done extremely well. So, yeah, there's many different ways to prosper, and there's many different ways also to change things through public policy. So, yeah, it's been wonderful. Jim, you and I always talk hockey whenever we do an interview. we do all the serious stuff up top but then i always leave you with a trivia question and we're going

to continue that tradition here okay and i want to let everybody know i did not give him a heads up on this question right you can confirm that i've i've not told you what here here we go on dear and this is going to be a hard one i'm coming at you with a 95 mile an hour fastball right at your head here mr balsallie here we go i want you to name every single player in the history of the national hockey league who has scored more than 700 goals over the course of a career now there are eight of them go mike gardner chalesposito uh uh ovechkin yes gradsky yes that's four them you not mario no um um hull um brett hull correct that's five i'm stumped i'm stumped i'm No, come on, Mr. Hockey.

No. Oh, Gordie Howe. Gordie Howe is six. You got two more to go. Oh, gosh, I can't. I can't, I can. They're going to have to help me out. This guy, the number on his back, reflects an historic moment in his country's history.

68 on his back for the year of the revolution. Is that let me do? Percent. Mario C. 66. This was a teammate of Mario's. I can't remember. Yarmir Yager. Oh, Yager, of course. Right, right. Yeah.

And the last one is Le Pete Castor. The little beaver. French. Not Lefleur. No, never played for the Habs. But he was a king of a guy. Oh, my gosh. not Dion.

Yes, there you go. Marcel Dion. Okay, let the record show. You got six on your own. You got two with hints. I think that's pretty damn good, considering I ambushed you with that question. Yeah, but you're at the top of the top.

So anything less is still pretty good. I would say you got game in that area. Jim Balsley, it's really good of you to spend so much time with us here today on the Paken podcast. You've given us a hell of a lot to think about and continued success in all that you do. Thank you. Pleasure, Steve. Pleasure to be with you.