Jim Balsillie
speaker
218 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jim Balsillie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And then because of that, all Canada has to do is take its hands off everything forever and do nothing. And the smartest person in the room is the one that builds no capacity and doesn't do anything.
And that was Canada's economic orthodoxy.
And it's part of one leg. It's necessary, but not sufficient.
So then what happened was we had an economic thinking capacity in the country called an economic council, which was the equivalent of some of these sophisticated realms in the United States. These IP offices, they have trade advisory committee. You know, the U.S. has... 50-year-old, if you go to the U.S.
Trade Representative and search advisory committees, they have 26 advisory committees, 700 experts, been together for 50 years. Tremendous insertion of sophistication.
And we shut all that down in Canada. because you don't need to do anything. You don't need to know anything. You just have to cut taxes, cut regulations, get out of the way, which is the true efficient nature of leg one. But when you make yourself blind, you're not able to see this leg two come along because you're done.
Right, and it's leg two that happens to be kicking the hell out of us at the moment, say, in the last two months. Right. So what happened was, so this was around 92, we shut down our economic council to save money. So it's, yeah, it's getting- So now the people that- It's like taking the instruments off the airplane to save money. Right. Because you don't need instruments anymore.
And there's nothing- And there's no interest. There's no interest.
We have all the knowledge we ever need. Knowledge is over. Just get out of the way.
Yeah, well, okay, so let me put one more step into this and then I'll go to the Google part. And so what happens is in the production economy,
When you bring in a foreign branch plant, as I said a few minutes ago, you get management, technology, you get capital, you get skills upgrading of the workers, you get a supply chain in a factory of local vendors, and you get a tax base based on that activity. So you get a lot of positive what are called economic spillovers from the... Manufacturing branch plant.
When you go to an ideas economy, when you buy the company or come in, you exfiltrate the IP, you exfiltrate the data. All of the ownership is back at the headquarters. There is no...
management of any consequence in the in the in the when you sell your uh peterson academy into spain you don't set up a country president and a whole management team it's just you get somebody helping you sell and localize and then it's all run back wherever you run it and all the taxes and all the wealth effects happen at the home country spanish branch plant
Exactly, and you don't pay taxes in Spain and there's no wealth effect in Spain and there's no management transfer and all that. So the spillovers in the tech industry operate exactly opposite. Pretty much most of the time, not absolutely, To how they work in the production economy.
Disaster.
And the Canadian people are paid less. They tend to have ancillary roles. They're subsidized through tax credits. And yet all the true wealth effects, and if they're really strong and talented, they tend to get moved to the U.S. and never come back. So that's a hoovering structure there.
And so the thinking of the Google sidewalk was like setting up a pulp and paper mill in Northern Ontario, that this is great. Not understanding that they'll own all the IP, own all the data, have all the security benefits, have all the wealth effects, have all the control benefits. And Canada gets 1% and they get 99%.
And if you have that subordinate low value added position in technology, then you get a low GDP per capita and you can't pay for the country. And it gets a second leg to that. That you're not secure, which is what's happening in the contemporary leverage. And those of us that understand what prosperity and security looks like saying this is catastrophic.
This will be a step in the grave for the country.
And his leadership predated the knowledge economy.
Showing 61–80 of 218 · page 4 of 11
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