(Reworked version of another Bluesky thread. Note to self: This is not an efficient way to write.)

So the federal government is convening a industry-labour summit today to figure out, per the Globe and Mail, “how Canada can attract more investment, dismantle internal trade barriers and find new international customers as the threat of U.S. protectionism looms.”

Talking is good and planning is better, but I have to say that I don’t have high expectations for this summit to produce a workable blueprint capable of addressing the Trump threat. In particular, I’m worried that the federal government and the business sector continue to underestimate the enormity of what’s happened.

For example, while Canadian Chamber of Commerce president’s “all hands on deck” language sounds impressive, her calls for lower taxes as a response to Trump’s aggression suggest a business-as-usual mindset.

Calls for lower taxes is business boilerplate, trotted out whenever there’s a perceived threat to Canadian competitiveness. It’s in the business playbook. But it makes no sense in the face of a threat that will almost certainly require a massive expansion in government capacity, not least to help businesses diversify their markets.

Public policy experts, and here I’m drawing on John Kingdon’s foundational work on how policies get adopted, have long recognized that actors use crises to advocate for their pre-existing policy preferences. Rather than working from the problem to find a solution, more often than not policy entrepreneurs use the emergence of problems to promote the preferred solutions they already have in their back pocket.

That’s why I’m not holding out much hope for today’s summit. It takes time to come up with bold new plans, especially if you’re a business or organization that has operated under the same rules for three-plus decades. With the exception of Jim Balsillie, most business and labour leaders were not advocating for the complete reorientation of Canada’s economy away from an overdependence on the United States five months, or even five weeks, ago. Which means that they likely haven’t done the work needed to come up with what a month ago would still have been seen as radical proposals.

From this perspective, calling for tax cuts is as expected as they will be ineffectual.

There are a couple of exceptions where we can expect movement, precisely because of the presence of a pre-existing constituency. Economists and many policymakers have been calling for internal free trade for decades now, which means they could probably move fast (or start to move fast), should the political will be there (this, BTW, is textbook Kingdon).

An east-west energy corridor, maybe, for similar reasons, though that would be one for the history books: “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” anyone? It would be one of the greatest ironies in Canadian history if Justin Trudeau, hated in Alberta, were to deliver the west-east energy corridor that his father couldn’t, and which kinda poisoned Alberta against the federal Liberals for generations.

The problem is that there is so much more that would need doing to actually reorient the Canadian economy. Such as: massive CBC funding. Serious rebuilding of physical infrastructure. Reinvestment in education and training. Investment in government planning capacity, not consultants. Actually diversifying trade, not just signing trade agreements. These things cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. Which means higher taxes.

Then there are the things that nobody is talking about yet but that are equally, if not more, important. The United States is dismantling its regulatory state and sabotaging its statistical databases. Our two governments are interdependent. We need to stress test and reinforce Canada’s and the provinces/territories’ regulatory and statistical capacity. Otherwise US chaos will become ours.

Also underdiscussed: the vulnerability of our electronic infrastructure. US tech has bent the knee to Trump. They control the “cloud,” the servers on which a lot of Canadian businesses and organizations store their data. Elon Musk has penetrated the US Treasury Department and now has access to untold data on Americans, US businesses and, almost certainly, business that operate in the US. If I were at this summit, I’d raise the spectre of widespread corporate espionage. And if I were a university or researcher working on economic, socially or politically sensitive issues, I’d begin assessing my vulnerability yesterday.

I wrote the Third Option piece in part because I recognized that people were calling for it in all but name, but without appreciating the history, including why it has proved unworkable in the past.

To be clear, I believe that Third Option-style policies are absolutely essential, but it will take effort to go down that path. I also wanted to highlight that what’s needed involves a massive transformation of Canadian society, one we haven’t seriously considered in decades. In other words, this isn’t something we can tax cut our way out of. Calls for tax cuts have me concerned that Canada’s business leaders haven’t fully grasped how all-encompassing a switch from free trade to economic nationalism needs to be to work.

My grading rubric

Here’s how I’ll be scoring today’s meeting. Internal trade barriers are the bare minimum and not enough for a pass. Calls for reduced taxes and merely trying to make Canada a more competitive investment environment through deregulation won’t cut it, for reasons mentioned above. I will know that they’re serious if they commit (or call for) real money to things like infrastructure, transportation (including high-speed rail), green technology (to reduce energy dependence), and education (including to poach US-based researchers being driven out of the country).

I will also be looking to see if they call for government to establish a Royal Commission on the future of the Canadian economy. A business- or university- or think-tank-led study won’t be enough. What we need is a whole-of-government, whole-of-society analysis of the threats and our options. Anything less risks partiality and incompleteness, and will lack the legitimacy needed to undertake huge structural change. And though the clock is ticking, sadly this is not something that we can bash out over a weekend.

I’ll also be looking to see if they commit to enforcing Canadian media ownership rules and regulating US-based social media.

Also important: I would like to hear an explanation of how they intend to deal with Trump’s ongoing threat, including an explanation of what they want to accomplish, and what they want Canada to look like in five-to-ten years. Canada has already made a mistake in paying a $1.5 billion policy bribe to keep Trump from imposing his illegal tariffs. What was that supposed to accomplish? How do we avoid being extorted the next time? And the next time?

And if they highlight the threat posed by US attacks on statistics and regulation, I’ll know that they truly understand what’s going on.

Here’s hoping they rise to meet the occasion.